What's a Body to Do?

Aging was not easy for my grandfather. He had always been a very active man and always liked to be on the go. That was always very unsettling to me when I was growing up. Whenever I went to visit him he would constantly be moving. To the golf course, to the cantaloupe patch, to some friend’s house in North Carolina. There was no sitting and be-ing with my grandfather. There were too many things to do.

One of his favorite activities was bird hunting. He worked for the Union Camp paper company, which meant that he knew where there were a lot of cutover fields, perfect for rustling up quail or grouse or better. I really knew that aging was an issue for him when I went to visit him with one of my college roommates during a school break and he took us hunting.

We set out on an overcast day with one of his favorite hunting buddies, Rennie. The really interesting part of the trip was that my grandfather and Rennie could not see. Both of them had rapidly declining eyesight at this point and it was annoying both of them to no end. When my roommate, Mike, and I went down there they saw a perfect opportunity. They would take the guns and we would be their eyes.

So we sat out there for the better part of an afternoon, sitting on a rough pile of leftover tree trunks, me by Granddaddy and Mike by Rennie. Then when the birds would flush we’d extend our arms toward them and yell, “Birds,” at which point they would sling their guns in the general direction of our outstretched arms and fire wildly. It was my one and only experience as a pointer.

I see more of my grandfather in myself all the time, especially his frustration at the perils of getting older. He knew that his life was changing but he didn’t know what to do with this body he found himself in. In his mind he could still drive straight through to Canada, hunt for two weeks eating salted meat, and come back none the worse for wear. But reality was taking its toll. What was he going to do with all of that youthful passion still stored up inside him? What purpose was he going to serve at this new age?

The biblical lesson that comes to us from Paul’s letter to the Romans today is one that is meant for Christians who are asking similar questions. It’s not a lesson for those who haven’t encountered Jesus; it’s a lesson for those who have had their lives turned upside down by Jesus and who now are left asking, “So now what?” As Christians we know that Jesus changes everything. Having come face to face with God’s love for us on the cross…a love that will go to death itself in order to reclaim us from sin…we know that we have been transformed. Our destination is clear. God’s intentions for us are clear. We have gone from death to life, but we still have these bodies and we still live in this world. Because of Jesus something must change about us, right?

But maybe you know this same dynamic in your life. I know that I have given myself to Jesus. I know that my identity has been founded upon this rock. I remember it every time I baptize someone in this water because I was baptized, too, in the name of the Trinity and I am now a child of God. But the older I get the more mystifying I become.

When I was younger I didn’t think so much about who this body was. When I was a teenager I knew that I was fighting temptations. I was working with what it meant to be an independent person, to be a responsible person, to be a sexual person, but there were hormones and social structures to blame for what the teenaged years are like. It was confusing, but I could see the point of the struggles.

Now I look within and I see a much richer and yet even more challenging set of questions. The passions which seemed so natural when I was young have changed but they now are directed in new ways. I have given this body over to Jesus, but what will Jesus do with all these parts of me now? What is it that I still strive for and desire? Whose purposes shall I serve?

Christians know, or at least we discover, that falling in love with Jesus doesn’t change the fact that we are still human. And Christians, more than any others, ought to look upon the frailties and failings of others with great compassion. We have no room to be judgmental because we know that sin ever present and giving ourselves to it is what we do as human beings. God may have claimed us from its clutches, but we keep giving ourselves back, even when we think we’ve rooted it out. The troubling thing for us is that even when have been transformed, we are always wondering in new and different ways, with each new and different life stage and life circumstance, “What’s a body to do?”

This was the challenge Paul was addressing with the Roman Christians in the passage we read this morning. Having just described for them how they had been transformed through baptism and how their old self had been put to death and their new self was found in being raised with Christ, Paul goes on to call them to a continuing life of rejecting sin and claiming God’s grace. “Don’t let sin reign in your body,” Paul says. “Don’t let it make you obey the body’s passions.”

What a strange way of putting things! Paul makes it sound like we humans are somehow disconnected from our bodies…as if there is a ‘you’ that stands apart from our bodies and can hand them over to this alien force of sin. And this alien force can make us do things we don’t really want to do if we didn’t have these passions.

Paul admits later on that this is a human way of talking. God sees us in a very different way. But it’s what it feels like sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel very disconnected from this body I’m in. And it’s not only because it is doing strange things now like refusing to grow hair in places where hair used to grow and growing hair in places where hair never grew before. It’s also because we are so frequently fighting against strongholds that lie within us. How do I overcome bad habits that have now become well-worn ruts of behavior? How do I struggle against my addictions? How can I live up to my best intentions? Why can’t I love others in the way I know that I can?

I was reading a novel recently called Lush Life and one of the characters is a man who has really never lived up to any of his potential. He has come to New York City as an aspiring actor and never made it. He is working as the manager at a restaurant and bar on the Lower East Side, skimming the tips from his waiters and busboys. But he is the witness to a shooting and breaks down and confesses to the murder, even though he didn’t do it, when he is interrogated by the police. Later, when the police have realized their mistake and he is helping them out after having realized how broken and empty his life is, he pulls one of the officers aside and tells her, “I’m so much better than anything I’ve ever done…I need you to know that…I need to know that.”[i] I hear in that the cry of every human being who longs to be whole. Confronted by the reality of sin and the goodness of God we want to say, “I need to know that I am so much better than anything I’ve ever done.”

That is the promise that God holds out to us in Jesus Christ. God knows that when we give ourselves over to the worst of our nature…when we let sin continue to break us apart so that we are separated from our truest selves…then we are always slaves…always beholden to what our passions want to do with us. But there is a different kind of service that is offered to us in God’s grace. God has done the heavy work and sin has no more power over those for whom Christ lived and died.

You might be tempted to think then, “Well, if sin has no more power then can I just follow my passions…do what I will since God has taken care of the consequences?” That apparently was what some early Christians thought. All the rules were out the door. It was party time all the time.

That was not what God intends, though. Anyone who has lived to excess knows that there are prices to pay for breaking the rules. In the end you end up with a lot of messes to clean up and a lot of things to atone for, if only to those who are hurt by your lifestyle. If you live like that, Paul says, you are still a slave because you have willingly given yourself up to a way of life whose end is death. But if you have really given yourself to Jesus, then you will serve a new way of life that really is life. The payoff of sin is always death, but the gift of God is life in Jesus. From our human viewpoint this seems like a loss, like something unnatural. But service to God ends up being the way to freedom.

I want to share with you a poem. You know that one of my recent discoveries is how much I love poetry. Back in April I was at a conference with Franz Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 with a collection called Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Wright is one of those people who know how closely demons can cling to us. He was diagnosed as a manic depressive at an early age and has struggled with alcohol and drugs throughout his life. He also has had prolonged periods of homelessness. Looking at him you can see the toll that his difficult life has taken on him.

But Franz Wright is in recovery now and Franz has converted to Christianity. At the Festival of Faith and Writing he talked about how he imagined that his baptism was going to change him completely. He even wrote about it in a poem called “Baptism” where he talked about drowning his old self so that it wouldn’t come back. “Look/ he has a new life/ a new name/ now/ which no one knows except/ the one who gave it.”[ii]

Of course his old self keeps threatening to come back, though. He has a new life and a new name in Jesus, but Wright has discovered what all of us who love God and remain in this life know – that while we’re walking this earthly journey we are engaged in a battle to the death with sin. So Franz Wright still contemplates death. He has struggled with suicidal thoughts and that theme still creeps into his poetry. But something else is there, too.

Here’s part of a poem he calls “Walden:”

...Then I saw again
the turtle

like a massive haunted head
lumbering after the egg laying toward
the water
and vanishing into the water, slowly
soaring
in that element half underworld, half sky.
There is a power that wants me to love.[iii]

It’s a scene prompted from an experience in the woods. A man contemplating a world in which there is death and pain and change sees a turtle lumbering into the water and is reminded that there is something stronger than inevitable death. Is it too much to wonder if Franz Wright sees his own baptism in the same way? As a movement into water and then slowly soaring in that element half underworld, half sky? As a realization that there is a power that wants me to love?

He’s right, you know. There is a power that wants you to live, that wants you to love. You, even you who have claimed to love Jesus, you have been held too long by passions that are not adequate to your soul. You are longing for things that are not worth your true self. You are being called to be possessed by a greater passion that tells you who you are and what you are meant for in this world. And when you listen for that voice, things will change. You will find life and wholeness and joy. You can’t spend one more day as a slave to sin. You can’t waste one more moment not serving the love that runs the universe. You are waiting to be found.

I never really appreciated it when my grandfather would wake me up early in the morning to go on some wild chase to find the perfect cantaloupe, a fruit I have never appreciated. But I pray that I may have inherited just a little bit of his drive to know what it is that is worth the striving for and who is it is that I must serve. Thanks be to God.

Romans 8:12-23
So, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey it in its passions. Neither give over your members to sin to be a tool of unrighteousness, but rather give yourselves over to God like dead people coming to life, and let your members be tools of righteousness for God. For sin will have no dominion over you because you are not under the law but under grace.

So what then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Of course not! Don't you know that if you give you give yourself over to be a slave and to obey, you are a slave to the one you obey - whether to sin, which leads to death, or to the obedience that leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, you were slaves to sin but you obeyed from the heart the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. Freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you gave your members over to impurity and to lawlessness upon lawlessness, so now you have given your members over to be slaves of righteousness unto sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin you were free with regard to righteousness. And what was the fruit of that period of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.

Now you are freed from sin and enslaved to God and you have the fruit of holiness and the end of this is eternal life. For the payoff of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[i] Richard Price, Lush Life, [Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, 2008], pp. 418-419.
[ii] Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, [Alfred A. Knopf:New York, 2003], p. 44.
[iii] Ibid., p. 70.