Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There are few things as potentially amusing and as potentially instructive as listening to a small child pray. It is typically a mix of both the amusingly selfish and the inspiringly selfless, expressing those two truths about all Christians (namely, our transformation into new people in Baptism and our constant struggle with our old, creaturely obsession with self) which we adults are usually too clever to make so obvious.

If you have a child in your life and you’ve not listened in on his or her prayers before bedtime (which I hope children still do) I would encourage you to do so. You’ll likely hear some rather selfish stuff—prayers for a new bicycle or a less irritating sibling—but you’ll likely also hear some rather moving examples of Christian charity: prayers for sick friends, for mom and dad, for that sibling (despite how irritating he might be), and so forth.

As I said, we adults are clever enough to monitor the prayers we give around others. But how often in our private conversations with God do we forget to ask ourselves if we’re really praying aright? There are two prayers from our Book of Common Prayer which are directed for use as concluding collects for the Prayers of the People which I think we are wise to think about. One asks God to “Accept and fulfill our petitions, we pray, not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [God] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son,” and the other asks God to “Help us to ask only what accords with [His] will; and those good things which we dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask, [to] grant us for the sake of [His] Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”

How often do we fail to consider the fact that God may know what’s best for His people? How often do we pray without reflection for personal benefits and even for the benefit of self at the expense of others?

About twenty years ago, a very popular book called The Prayer of Jabez came out. It was written by a fellow named Bruce Wilkinson, and he based the book on a rather obscure passage from 1 Chronicles. So popular was this volume that three versions for children of different ages were released in the years following its publication. And what did this book instruct its readers to do? To pray very specifically for personal benefits in the areas of finances, social influence, and the like. Throughout the volume is an unstated assumption that God ought to respond to man’s desires rather than the other way round. Sadly, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, the popularity of this book and of the “prosperity Gospel” more broadly suggests that it is very easy to pray for oneself unreflectively, to forget those bits from the prayerbook about our difficulty in praying aright.

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we are introduced to a figure better than most in regards to being reflective in prayer. At Gibeon the Lord seems to give Solomon a blank check, as it were: “Ask what I shall give you,” he says. God forbid that He should say the same thing to me. I’d probably ask for a trust fund and a vacation home. But Solomon responds, “Give thy servant therefore an understanding mind to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to govern this thy great people?” Solomon prays that he may have the gifts to serve God’s people, rather than for “long life, or riches, or the lives of [his] enemies,” and for this God grants Solomon’s request.

Of course, not all prayers for ourselves are selfish, and we don’t have to pray only for God to give us gifts to do His work (though, this is one thing we should always pray for). It is perfectly appropriate to cry out to God in our distress and ask for relief. When we are ill or sad or frightened, God is ready to hear us. The danger is when we cannot see past ourselves, past our own needs and desires, to see how God might be needed in the lives of others, and how we might, through prayer, be given strength to reach out to those in need of His Grace.

The difficult truth, though, is that we’ll never be so adept at discerning the complex motivations that do battle in our souls to become perfect in prayer. Unless you’re a lot more self-aware than I, prayer will always include at least a hint of self-interest. Does this mean it’s a losing battle, that we may as well not pray? By no means! We hear in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans the good news that we who have been redeemed, who have been regenerated in Baptism, have a prayer-partner who prays for us and in us and who finally perfects the complex, tortuous words we offer up to the Almighty:

[W]e do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Remain steadfast in prayer, then, with confidence that God will hear and answer us “not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [He] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” and that the Spirit which gives us the words we need has given us the strength to say those blessed words against which even the Gates of Hell cannot triumph: God the Father has made us His sons and daughters through Jesus Christ and loves us and listens to us as any father should: with compassion and understanding and an overwhelming desire that we should live in peace and felicity all the days of our lives and in eternity with the Triune God. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I spoke last week about some important distinctions one must make in order to understand Paul’s argument in the central chapters of Romans- namely the distinction between flesh and body and (σαρξ and σομα) and between mind and reason. As a reminder, Paul does not condemn the body, he does not encourage a denial of matter, space, time, the created order in favor of some airy fairy ghostly spiritualism. Rather he condemns the sin-nature, which he calls flesh, which has perverted the created order. Further, his reliance on the capability of mind is not a simple, blanket affirmation of cleverness, but something more specific, which I did not quite manage to define in last weeks sermon. Keep these distinctions in mind as we look at this week’s Epistle.

Paul writes that our flesh, our sinful nature, has so corrupted us that we are unable to be justified by works of the Law. Note that this is not an acknowledgment that the Law itself was somehow insufficient, which would suggest that God was involved in some sort of trial-and-error experiment with human salvation, but rather that Original Sin has made us unreliable partners in a Covenant which was good in itself. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it really has important implications with regard to both the perfection of God and what I call “theological anthropology”- the attempt to understand what it means to be human in light of our realization that we are creatures of a God who wants to be in a relationship of unity and love with his Creation.

A discomfort with our experience of evil in the world and our inability to square it with an orthodox account of God’s perfection has led to the rising popularity in some liberal protestant circles of something called “process theology”, which claims that God, rather than being the great “I AM” is, like humanity, in the process of becoming perfect in coöperation with us. This may seem appealing, and indeed I think we may be excused for holding such a view implicitly or subconsciously when going through difficulty. I often say at funerals that it’s okay to question God’s plan in the midst of tragedy. The effects of moral evil (like Auschwitz) or natural evil (like those who may have lost a great deal in this week’s flooding) are such that we may be forgiven for questioning God’s perfection in power and love. But, you see, that’s not the end point. The end point is a reaffirmation of God’s perfection in spite of it all. The project of process theology suggests that the beginning of that work is its end, that a sort of theology of protest and an assumption that the best we can do is help God in the process of getting better at doing his job. Questioning God is a perfectly natural response to trouble, but basing an entire worldview on it is the height of arrogance. Worse, it’s a craven rejection of human responsibility, cloaked in the disguise of so-called “high anthropology,” because it is fundamentally based on an assumption that Original Sin and free will, those two tricky but necessary elements of the Christian worldview, do not apply.

Whether we’re talking about the failure of the Law to produce righteousness as Paul does in Romans or about more modern debates regarding the problem of evil, the suggestion that the trouble lies with Almighty God can, I think, be countered pretty simply to my mind. Let’s make it as simple as possible, though. How many of you saw the Marvel Avenger’s film from about five years ago? If you haven’t, there’s a bit in the final battle between the world’s greatest heroes and the Norse god Loki and his forces. The Incredible Hulk – you know, the one whom you don’t want to make angry because he turns into a giant, green monster – beats the super-villain up and proclaims “puny god.”

If God is a God whom we are helping achieve perfection, it seems one would be better off reading a self-help book on a Sunday morning rather than gathering to worship him. No, the God whom we worship, Paul reminds us, is not a God of our own making. Instead, we are a people of God’s making whose pleasure, we are reminded, is effected by our regeneration in the Spirit, a Spirit which is alive in us by virtue of our Baptism, which has washed away the stain of Original Sin, replacing our fleshly natures with a spiritual one. Again, remember, it is not our bodies being counted or the rest of the material world being mere veils obscuring some ghostly realm, but our whole selves, body and soul, being spiritually animated, one might say, changing something essential about us and how we find our place in Creation by virtue of a new life given us now, just as we are, in preparation for the resurrection of those same mortal bodies on the Last Day.

And finally, Paul reminds us that having put away the flesh and become alive in the Spirit, we set our minds on things of the Spirit.  I read this week a discussion of this new reality by N.T. Wright, the former Bishop of Durham, whom some of you know is among my favorite contemporary Christian writers. As a side note, Wright has quite a diverse corpus of writings (dozens of books actually) and if you’re interested in reading an active theologian and biblical scholar and don’t know where to start, you’re in luck. If you’re a theological neophyte, I’m not kidding, start with the books on whose jackets he is credited as “Tom Wright” and then work your way up to the books where he is named “N.T. Wright.” The former are intentionally very accessible and the latter get in to more complex matters.

Anyway, the good bishop Wright writes that what Paul is describing here is more than just turning your attention to different matters; it is, rather, a complete transformation of the mind such that one experiences reality in a new way. Let me say again, it is not about ignoring the reality of matter and space and time, the stuff of Creation, in order to focus on abstractions or esoterica. Instead, it is a new way of perceiving ourselves, our fellows, and the world in which we live such that the light of Christ illumines all. A friend of mine used to refer to this as seeing the world through cruciform spectacles. I like to think of it, you may recall from other things you’ve heard me say in this pulpit and elsewhere, as an alternative epistemic mode. I’ve called this mode “self-possession” and Thomas Aquinas describes it as “an openness to other beings at the ontological level.” Put simply, it is more than simply focusing on higher things but is an wholly different way of coming to know anything. It is the sensate Spirit which we have, our minds having been renewed and freed from the flesh.

This new way of being in the world and knowing it, though, is more than just a means of understanding. It is the way to the kind of knowledge which produces life and peace. This is an interesting phrase Paul uses. He is here quoting directly from the Book of the Prophet Malachi, in which faithfulness to the Old Covenant, to the Law, is that which produces “life and peace.” Now Malachi was concerned with how that Covenant was not being observed, and specifically with moral and ritual laxity among the priests of the Jerusalem temple. Paul is concerned, instead, with the will to accept this new way of being, the New Covenant in its fullness.

So, I sometimes sound like a broken record, but it bears repeating: this New Covenant is in one sense easier and in another sense harder than the Old. Whereas obedience to precept upon precept may be onerous if one is not of a mind to be obedient, acceptance of the Grace of the New Covenant requires not merely a single choice to receive a boon from God, as some peculiar versions of Christianity might suggest, but an ongoing choice to accept it by one’s own free will and the difficult task of living up to the responsibilities implied by living the Risen Life. The demands of charity as determined by a good conscience require hard work, but the inspired mind of a child of God, freed from the flesh makes it possible, and, with some significant practice, even natural as the virtues are nurtured by prayer and the sacraments and the unflagging support and encouragement given us by a God who wants us to succeed in a life of holiness and devotion.

Life and peace are there for the taking. We’re given the tools thanks to a renewed and spiritual mind, a regenerate soul, a heart full of God’s love. Choose life and peace, cherish it for the gift it is, and pray for endurance that even in the midst of trials our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joy is to be found.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Back in the 70’s, comedian Flip Wilson popularized the now ubiquitous excuse “the devil made me do it.” The joke, of course, is that it’s a lame excuse. “The devil made me do it” will not hold up in court or in a meeting with your supervisor at work, and I’ve discovered that by the time I was in high school it no longer amused my parents, much less convince them that staying out past curfew could be excused.

A certain way of reading Paul in today’s epistle might, however, strike us as analogous to Wilson’s excuse. “It is no longer I that do it,” Paul says of his own disobedience, “but sin that dwells within me.” Far from being an excuse, however, St. Paul is presenting a rather subtle account of moral and immoral action. The passage is a bit confusing, because of the terms Paul uses: sin, law, flesh, mind. These are all terms with complex, nuanced definitions for Paul, and it will benefit us to spend a bit of time unpacking them. You will, I hope, excuse a bit of theologizing in today’s sermon. The matter at hand is more than academic; it ultimately gets at how we, as Christians, are called to make moral choices so it seems worth a bit of investigation.

First, the concept of law is important for Paul, and we can understand why. He was a Pharisee, and it was the job of Pharisees to be well-versed in the Torah, the law of God as presented in the first five books of the bible. That is to say, Paul’s whole business, his bread and butter, before he became a Christian was to know every obscure regulation from those bits of the Old Testament we hardly ever read in church. There are, in fact, 613 laws in those bits of the bible, and they cover everything from obvious moral imperatives (e.g. not to commit murder) to tax codes and regulations on how to worship in the temple. We know a few of them by common knowledge—like the prohibition against pork and shellfish—but the particulars really get very complex, and Pharisees were concerned with regulating behavior so that all were above reproach. This often meant making rules which might strike us as overly-conscientious to avoid even the possibility of offense. This tradition is, interestingly, alive and well in Orthodox Judaism today. I recall during college, for example, opening a Jewish friend’s umbrella one rainy Friday evening so that he could be certain not the violate the prohibition against building a shelter on the Sabbath.

All of this serves as background to Paul’s relationship to law. He is not what in fancy theological terms we call an antinomian. That is to say, he is not content to say that God’s Grace is such that it entirely exempts us from following certain laws. The law, including those 613 obscure regulations, was given by God and is, thus, good. This means we cannot simply reject the law, even the apparently weird laws we don’t follow like not eating lobster. We cannot say they were simply created by man in a benighted time who didn’t really get God. The law is from God, but our relationship to it is essentially different under the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. We have, in other words, a transformed relationship to the law.

Because we are human, because we are fallen, this new relationship to the law is in some sense affected by sin. Sin is another of those technical terms Paul uses, and it relates to the other two technical terms: flesh and mind. Sin, here, is actually the Greek word ͑αμαρτια, which literally means “missing the mark”. It is the word that the ancient Greeks would have used of an archer who couldn’t shoot the bullseye. But in today’s reading, Paul personifies sin. It is more than an occurrence of missing the mark; it is something which dwells within us, endowing us with an almost unavoidable tendency to err. It is not that “the devil makes us do it”, it is that our very nature is such that it leads us to mess up. It is this nature which Paul calls flesh.

We must be very careful with this term, though. It is flesh not body. For those interested in the Greek, it is σαρκς not σωμα. Our bodies are gifts from God, who made them perfect at Creation and who gave His son a real body not only when he was born but when he was raised from the dead. This is why John makes such a big deal of the resurrected Christ eating and drinking and being physically touched by Thomas. Such will be our state after the resurrection. As we say in the Apostles Creed “we believe in the resurrection of the body” not “in the resurrection of disembodied ghosts”.

Anyway, the biblical view is that bodies are good things. It is flesh, or the tendency to sin which is a bad thing. It is the flesh which Paul explains later in his letter to the Romans that demands the gratification of desires which have no bearing on our livelihood, inordinate desires which go well beyond the normal needs and creature-comforts by demanding that which benefits us to the detriment of others: that is, greed and lust and gluttony and pride. Ultimately, the law (all 613 regulations) was given as a means to avoid these fleshly desired.

The New Covenant is in some ways more difficult because in place of all these laws, a mere two are given to dissuade us from falling victim to the flesh: love God and love your neighbors. It is more difficult because instead of following a bunch of clear rules, we have to reckon how all the choices in our life meet or fail to meet these two commandments.

And that is where the mind comes in. Again, this is a technical term, and it does not mean reason. I have found in my own life that often reason leads to sin as much as being irrational. This might sound a bit counterintuitive, so let me explain. Reason is a gift from God, just like our bodies, but like our bodies it can be taken over by what Paul calls the flesh. Whereas the needs of the body can be perverted by the flesh into inordinate desires, as I’ve already mentioned, human reason can be perverted by the flesh to justify just about anything. This is what we call rationalization. Herman Melville, in his novella Billy Budd, wrote of “conscience being but the lawyer to [our] will.” How often do we knowingly do what we ought not to do after convincing ourselves that we are justified in the offense? In Paradise Lost, Milton goes so far as to suggest that Adam and Eve’s transgression may have come after such a rationalization, and takes us through several lines in which Eve convinces herself that God really meant for her to eat the fruit.

So, reason has the potential to lead us astray just as it has the potential to lead us down the right path. So what is the “law of the mind” which Paul says does battle with the “law of the flesh”. We find the answer when we look elsewhere in Paul’s writings. In First Corinthians, Paul explains that discerning God’s will in our lives is possible because “we have the mind of Christ.” In Philippians he urges his followers to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Later in Romans, Paul says, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Doing what God demands of us is dependent on us conforming our minds to that of Our Lord.

How in heavens name are we to do that? If I knew the answer entirely, I’d be a much less selfish, struggling person than I am. I believe, however, that I know how to start. It seems to me that we begin the process of “conforming our minds” and growing “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ,” as Paul put it to the Ephesians, through the hard work of authentic prayer. Prayer is nothing less than participating in the work of Christ which began on His sojourn in the wilderness and found its consummation in the prayer He offered on the cross for our salvation. It matters less how one prays (though the prayer book offers an excellent model for daily prayer). A daily practice of thanksgiving, praise, intercession, and bible study should be central; and our weekly observance of the Holy Communion serves to bind our lives even more closely to that of our Savior. Whatever the method, though, the practice of prayer has an evident impact on how we live and militates against the assault of “the world, the flesh, and the devil” (to take a phrase from the prayerbook). We will never reach perfection, which Paul knew painfully well. “[We] do not do what [we] want, but [we] do the very thing we hate”, and this will remain a constant struggle. But “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” that in spite of the fact that sometimes we err, God’s Grace is infinite and His forgiveness waits only upon our reception of the same.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.