One Great Chapter: Romans 8 and the Life of the Spirit

Romans 8:1-11 [NRSV]
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law -- indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.


I’m not sure what you’re used to in terms of congregational participation in preaching here. I know that this is a thoughtful church, a reflective church, and yet a very warm and expressive church, too. But whatever your inclination I want you to know that for today, you can take part in the sermon.

I don’t want to be preaching alone here. I want you to help me. I want you to feel free to say “Amen” if that feels right to you. I want you to say “Praise God” if that feels right to you. Or if you think I’m in trouble, you can borrow from our sisters and brothers in the black church tradition and say, “Help him, Lord!” and I’ll take that as a sign of support.

You know, there’s the story about the very staid Methodist church--very proper and orderly, high church as they call it--that was holding a Sunday morning worship service. A visitor came and was so moved by the sermon that she shouted out, “Amen!” The first time she did it, all the people in the pew in front of her shifted kind of uncomfortably. Then it happened again. She was moved to shout out, “Hallelujah!”. The folks in front of her turned around and glared, but they couldn’t repress the Spirit and a third time the visitor shout out, “Praise the Lord!”

So now an usher appears and goes down to the woman and says, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stop shouting.”

The woman says, “I can’t help it. I’ve got religion!”

To which the usher replies, “Well, you didn’t get it here!”

So whether you’re normally the quiet type of the vocal type, I hope you’ll feel comfortable if you feel the Spirit move you. And that’s important because the topic for this morning, if the title of the sermon can be trusted, is “One Great Chapter: Romans 8 and the Life of the Spirit.”

This chapter is, to me, one of the most beautiful and important in the whole Bible. I didn’t always feel that way. I used to think the Apostle Paul, who wrote this, was hard to understand, very convoluted, and not very liberating to read. But over time, I’ve come to love Paul with all of his quirks and tics. Paul was someone who had a firm grip on reality. He knew what the human experience was like but he also knew what God was like, how significant Christ was, and what a wonder life in the Holy Spirit was.

In chapter 7 of Romans Paul spends a lot of time reflecting on what it’s like to be a human being. He says what a lot of us say when we’re trying to face our own faults. He says, “I know what I need to do. I know what God wants me to do. But even though I know what I should do, my body betrays me. My will betrays me. The very thing I don’t want to do is the thing that I do.” And he ends that chapter in seeming despair. He feels captive to sin, which is distorting his life and he says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

In chapter 8 he begins to answer his own question and the answer is so deep and so wonderful that I want to take three Sundays to work through the message of this chapter. And the message is simple. It really comes down to one thing. And this is it: The real world, which is God’s world, is already here through the Holy Spirit. That’s it. So if you fall asleep or your mind wanders over the next two hours, just remember that: The real world, which is God’s world, is already here through the Holy Spirit.

You know, I have come to you after having been a college campus minister. I loved doing that. I loved spending my days and whole lot of nights with college students talking about life, the universe and everything. They were way ahead of me in lots of ways. I really believe that this is the brightest generation of college students we have ever produced. But one of the things I learned about in my seven years on campus was pop culture, which I had become disconnected from.

Now some aspects of that were good. There’s a lot of soul searching and God-searching going on in pop culture, whether the people searching know it or not. But there were also some strange things. You’ve seen it, too, I’m sure. Reality TV is one of those strange things.

American Idol is one version of that. Survivor is another where they take complete strangers and send them off to a South Pacific Island where they compete in games and eat rats and complain about one another. I’ve been in some churches that are like Survivor, but that’s another story. There’s Fear Factor and The Apprentice and all sorts of “reality-based programming.” And I can see how it can be addicting.

The oldest of these “reality” shows is on MTV. For years now they have been taking a group of young adults and putting them together in some cool city to live in a house together for a semester. There were a lot of students at UVA who treat this like a weekly soap opera. They know the people, discuss their problems, wonder how relationships will turn out. That show is called The Real World.

Well, as entertaining as those shows are, I have news for you, in case you needed to hear it from me: The Real World is not the real world. Most of us don’t have cameras running all the time in our lives. The settings are artificial. The people are chosen because they have some outrageous tendencies. It’s interesting, but it’s not the real world.

But these shows are popular, and not just for college student, because we have grown tired of all of our media coming to us prepackaged and slick. We feel like there must be something more to the world than well-rehearsed plays and beautiful images. Behind all of that there must be something real, something earthier--some place where people still struggle with one another and where the things that happen have some consequence. So we like to see these artificial worlds because there it seems like something is at stake--even if it’s only the money or the fame at the end of it.

There was a movie a few years back that gave us a glimpse of what was coming. In “The Truman Show” Jim Carrey played a man who has spent his whole life in a gigantic bubble filled with actors and special effects. His every move is filmed for the cameras but he doesn’t realize that his world is not real. Everyone is always smiling. Everything runs on time. People are well dressed and successful in their jobs. There are no crises. It’s like a never-ending Leave it to Beaver episode. Until finally Jim Carrey’s character begins to suspect that there is something wrong and he sails across an artificial lake to the far side of the bubble where he bumps into a concrete wall. That’s when he discovers that his world is not the real world.

Like the character in that movie, we’re very suspicious of utopias, artificial worlds where we can escape from it all. And we should be. When we try to make a world that doesn’t have problems or uncomfortable moment, we always fail. That’s not the real world either.

So what is the real world? It must be the lives we live, right? The life Paul talks about in chapter 7 of Romans? The world where the mortgage or the rent is due first of the month, whether our checkbooks are ready or not. The world where children face pressures and dangers that no child should have to face. The world where terrorist bombs wreak havoc in subways and buses without any warning. A world where abuse and injustice linger. A world where the elderly know the pain and devastation of loneliness and despair. A world where loved ones die and where grief tugs at our souls. A world where our schedules are full and hearts are empty. A world where oil prices are up and our moral standards are down. Anybody want to say, “Amen” yet?

This is what we call real life, isn’t it? This is the place where the rubber hit’s the road and there are no cameras around to record it for entertainment value. This is where there is no million-dollar prize for the survivor. This is where people leave the scene of a difficult relationship and there is real hurt. But I’ve got news for you. Paul’s got news for you: This is not the real world either!

Oh, we think it’s the real world, but what kind of reality is it that can only offer despair and ultimately death? Are you going to settle for a reality like that? Where is the hope and the promise that give meaning and purpose to life? Certainly not it that world. If that’s what it means when people tell us to “Get real” I’m not having it.

So where is the real world? Where is the world that we all sense and know there ought to be, but which we can never really find or create for ourselves? Where is the real world?

It’s in the Bible. Now, yes, there is some gritty, painful human stuff in here. There’s violence, lying, greed, adultery, broken relationships…all that stuff is in there. But even though all of those very “realistic” things about human beings are in this book, that’s not all that’s here.

What this book is really about is a God who sees us at our worst but who does not leave us alone and thanks be to God for that. This is a book about a God who knows the weaknesses and distortions we are prone to, the sin we are in slavery to. This is a God who knows what sin can do to us.

But God doesn’t tune us in on ABC at 8 o’clock on Thursday nights to see who’s left after this week’s tragedies. God came down to meddle in our affairs…to open our eyes. This is a book about a God who came down in Jesus Christ to say to us, “You think you have to live like this? Get real! Let me show you what the real world is all about!”

Jesus hints at what the real world is all about when he gives the so-called Great Commandment. Remember the question of that lawyer who came to Jesus? “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And Jesus responds by saying, “What does the law say?”

The lawyer says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself [Luke 10:25-27].” Sounds like a pretty good answer.

But it might leave us with the wrong impression. When we are commanded to love, it leaves the impression that it is something we can do on our own. After all, if it were really that easy to reform our lives and our society by our own willpower, surely someone would have figured it out by now. But you know and I know that we have an incredible tendency to mess things up. We can’t do it on our own. We inevitably fall and fail and find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We’re pretty human creatures after all.

The disciples realized how difficult this commandment business was. Jesus was teaching about the dangers of wealth. He had just told a rich young man to give up all of his possessions. Jesus said, “Truly, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

So the disciples say, “Well, then, who can be saved?” They recognize the dangers of trying to determine what it means to be rich and what it means to give up our possessions to follow Jesus.

So Jesus gives them the straight scoop: “For mortals, it is impossible to be saved.” There you have it. Jesus says it is impossible for us to be saved by our own efforts. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, “But for God all things are possible.” Want to say “Amen” again? That makes all the difference in the world. This is where that thing called grace enters in. It is not by our own powers and achievements that we find salvation…it is by grace.

So how does God do this? How does God bring about this salvation in us that moves us to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind? Well, first of all, God created us to do that. Remember that first line from our mission statement for Franktown Church: “The mission of this church is to glorify God.” That’s the mission of every one of us. We were created to glorify God. That’s reality. We get sidetracked from that end. We are really, really good at finding other things to glorify, from power to sex to wealth to our own abilities…even our own weaknesses, but “Get real!” The things we were meant to do, from the moment we were created in God’s image, is to love and glorify God.

How does God bring us to salvation? Well, first God gives us the capacity to love God, but more importantly, God gives us God’s very own self. Salvation is effected because God sent the Son, Jesus Christ, to be born, to suffer, to die and to be resurrected from the dead. It is in Jesus Christ that we meet God and it is through Jesus Christ that we are enabled to be people of true character and it is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we are invited to see the real world and to live in it.

Remember the Holy Spirit? I was going to preach a sermon about the Holy Spirit. Well, here it is. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes the power of the resurrected life available to us as a community and to each of us individually. Paul answers his own question of “Who will save me from this body of death?” by saying, in chapter 8, that God deals with the sin that has us in a stranglehold by coming in Christ and conquering sin through death on a cross. Paul does not say that God demanded blood to pay for the damage sin had done and so God takes the life of an innocent victim. Paul says God came in the Son and suffered as we do and made us realize what a lie sin is. And now we can find “real life” in Christ Jesus because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Now we can look forward to a new life because the Spirit, which raised Jesus from the dead, dwells in us and gives us the promise that the Spirit will also “give life to our mortal bodies.”

Why do we need the Holy Spirit? It’s such a difficult thing to get our minds around. But the Holy Spirit is important for us as Christians because this is the name by which we know God. Who is God? God is the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Who is the Holy Spirit? The Spirit is God.

But the particular work of the Holy Spirit, the office of the Spirit, as we might call it, is to witness to the mutual love of the Father and the Son and to make us witness to that love. I realize this is pretty cosmic stuff, but think about what the means--through the Holy Spirit we are invited to be a part of the most important love in the universe--a love so strong that it overflows and creates and welcomes all creation to celebrate. It’s like a huge wedding with the biggest invitation list you ever saw, and like every wedding it needs witnesses. Get real? This is real. We’re invited!

But how? We weren’t there at Calvary. We weren’t there to witness Jesus’ ministry in Palestine. We weren’t there to see his death on the cross. We weren’t there to see him laid in the tomb. We weren’t there to see it empty on that first Easter morning. The only way we can sing that Good Friday hymn, “Were You There?” with any conviction at all is because the Holy Spirit makes that long-ago event something eternally real. The Easter victory is never allowed to become a thing of the remote past. The Holy Spirit ensures that it is as real for us as it was for Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Peter and all of those astonished disciples. The Holy Spirit makes us real.

How does the Holy Spirit make it real? By reminding us of who we are and how we were made and who we were meant to be. By restoring to us the image of ourselves that we have lost. The Spirit allows Christ to live in us and to remake us in the image of God.

You know in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends are going through the dark forest on their way to confront the Wicked Witch of the West? The flying monkeys come and attack and kidnap Dorothy and Toto. Then there’s that sad sight of the scarecrow lying all over the ground. That scene used to scare me as a kid. And the scarecrow explains what happened, “Well, first they took my legs and they threw them over there. Then they took my chest and they threw it over there.” And the tin man says, “That’s you all over.”

Well, that’s us too! We were created with this great potential and this great destiny--to be children of God--and because of sin, we live scattered, broken lives. Our potential for love is squandered on material things and hurtful relationships and it lies somewhere over there. Our potential for giving ourselves to others is wasted in failed quests to be the greatest or most powerful and it lies somewhere over there. Our potential for living a life for God is confused into living a life for monetary gain and it lies somewhere over there. That’s what it’s like to be scattered. And what holds us together…what has the potential for holding us together…is Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit remakes us in the likeness of Christ. Or to put it another way, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is Christ in us, restoring the disfigured image of God.

This week was moving week for us. One of the big pieces of furniture that came with us was a piano that has been in Suzanne’s family for many years. It used to sit in the basement of her folks’ place and it was just an old, black, hulking piece of furniture. But as a gift to us, her parents had it redone and it turns out to be made of beautiful wood and to have an incredible sound. It was a treasure covered up by years of abuse and neglect.

Well, so are you. You are God’s treasure, meant for one thing, to love God and in loving God to love the world and the people God made. You are a child of God. But I’ll bet you don’t even realize what, by God’s grace you are. Too many years of dust and neglect and abuse have made you the great, hulking thing in the corner, rather than the instrument of God’s divine harmony.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” So says Paul at the beginning of this great chapter. That’s our promise through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And there’s more. Next week we’ll do some groaning and aspiring with the Spirit. But for now…know that God did not come to condemn the world, but to save it and you and me. Thanks be to God.