romans 8:12-17
for “preaching the plenary” at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, November 2018.
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I have been deeply impacted by the latest climate report. In it, I learned that at the rate corporations and privileged countries are moving, we only have about a ten-year window to dramatically slow climate change, and a twenty-year window from now until catastrophic potential. The vast majority of environmental degradation comes from a small number of companies, so individual choices will help, but not save us. There needs to be massive policy and practice shifts that prioritize the health of the planet over human progress. I am overwhelmed, having a lot of panic symptoms, and am terrified because, collectively, I don’t know if we can let go of fear enough for structural change to happen in time. That is the lens I witnessed this whole week through.
This report isn’t surprising, not really. Exponential curves of progress and growth have costs, and they have natural plateaus. Sometimes advancing actually means slowing down, reassessing, re-centering. Coming to seminary, for me, often feels like a plateau, a pause in forward momentum. And that’s not a bad thing, often, it’s the sustainable thing. I’m reminded of the Jubilee for the earth in the Hebrew Bible – a year of rest for the land, where it is allowed to re-wild and renew. This was a sacred and aspirational practice. God took a Sabbath after days of creation. The consistent expectation of upward progress, without assessing costs or taking time to recover, feels unnatural to my body.
Paul’s epistles serve as instructions – best practices for specific, dispersed, Christian communities to live as Christ did. In his letter to the Romans, he is writing to a church that is a mix of Jewish and Gentile members, and historians suggest that there were multiple churches in Rome at the time, so this letter was written across congregational differences. This excerpt from his letter to the Romans sets up a duality of flesh and spirit.
The push for progress at the cost of our home feels very fleshy, in the Pauline sense. Flesh is meant as aspects of the body; short-term gratification; an inward focus. Spirit is meant as of God; an outward, spiritual focus; balance. Paul is not using these terms as a Greek mind-body separation, as two distinct parts of one person, but instead as two types of people. We all have flesh and we all have spirit, intertwined, and what matters is which aspect we lean into.
I want to reiterate that Paul is writing about where we put our energy. It is impossible to separate flesh from spirit, and God coming to us in a body, in Christ, points to a centrality of the flesh, in a physical sense. But flesh can also be linked to bondage and fear.
Fear keeps us from fully living into our vocations as children of God, connected to wider creation. It is rooted in reaction, in conflict, in messiness. It is biological, and can be healthy. Healthy fear creates caution, helping us react when we encounter danger. However healthy fear is not what Paul is associating with flesh, but instead a distorted fear. It sometimes feels like our bodies haven’t caught up to society – we fear the other, the unknown, change, because we are wired to perceive threats, and those threats have shifted. We haven’t been careful to draw lines between feeling uncomfortable and feeling afraid.
Being uncomfortable is a common middle space between the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-could-be. Discomfort can bind us to structures and thought patterns that aren’t healthy for us, and that distance us from God. The bondage fear creates keeps us in patterns that aren’t working. It locks us into survival mode.
And survival mode makes it really challenging to find good news. It is hard to center the good in creation when there’s a countdown clock constantly ticking in the background. So we need to shift and explore the other side of Paul’s duality – the spirit. We have desires that connect us to the larger scope of God’s creation, trusting that we are moving towards God’s Kin-dom, where fear is no longer the dominant emotion. Both God’s Spirit and our spirit in this passage are of the same origin word in Greek. Breath, wind, the same breath that moved over the earth at the dawn of time.
I notice my breath when I am afraid, or anxious – my chest tightens, and it takes effort to breathe fully. I notice it when I am exhausted, and breath is labored. When I am in a construction zone, and the air is noticeably polluted. When I am sick, and my asthma flares up. When I am praying, or meditating, and breath becomes my focus.
Prayerful moments hold a joyful recognition. It is spirit calling to spirit, and the response is, “Abba! God!” In those moments we feel, from the top of our head through our whole body, our spirit connected with God’s spirit. Prayerful moments of the spirit can happen during meditation, during choir, during a 2am conversation with a friend, in the witness of a plant putting forth new leaves. Those moments of recognition are vital to hold onto a spirit of adoption, and can act as a counter-balance to fear. This connection is what our bodies are made for, an embodiment of God in the world, children of the Kin-dom – a world of abundance where fear no longer underpins all interactions and choices.
There’s another duality Paul places alongside flesh and spirit is death and life. Leaning into flesh, into fear, leads to a spiritual death. But “putting to death the deeds of the body” leads to life. Paul is calling us to let go of fear for life, to unbind ourselves and each other in order to move closer to God. He uses strong language, death language, and that points to how hard this task is. It isn’t as simple as choosing to lean into our spirit, when the structures we have designed and entrenched want us to focus on the flesh. We need to put to death the desires that are not part of the Kin-dom. The desires that alienate us from each other, from God. And doing that work sometimes feels like taking steps backwards. It will mean slowing down, not relying on constant progress to distract us from where we hurt, and where we hurt each other. It will feel dangerous to the world-as-it-is. It will mean both individual and structural change. And change is terrifying, because it signals the unknown. And our bodies go into fight-or-flight.
But God wants to be near us. God wants to be so close to us that God sent their heart, Jesus the Christ, to be with us, to model the work. Jesus did not have an easy time in the flesh. He suffered persecution, disbelief, mockery, and ultimately, execution by the state. Paul calls us heirs with Christ – to suffer with Christ so that we can live with Christ. This isn’t suffering for the sake of suffering, but suffering as in birthing pains. The suffering of letting go of what feels gratifying for what is actually gratifying for our spirits. Christ transforms suffering into resurrection, and this transformative power is what God’s spirit has gifted us with.
Death is inevitable. But we can put our energy towards enacting a world where we live abundantly in the spirit, and not cling to fear, because fear results in a second death-on-earth. So if that is possible, why have we shifted so far into the flesh? We are not ‘glorified with Christ’ by hoarding wealth. By ignoring the real ways that creation is crying out. By dismissing the margins and acting with an inward, limited focus.
We are ‘glorified with Christ’ when we lean deeply into the spirit. Into the moments of recognition where our breath is God’s breath. When we put fear to death, even when it is uncomfortable, and unknown. When we take seriously God’s adoption of us as children, trusting that God wants us to live into our potential for change. God as parent deeply knows the physical symptoms of fear and suffering, and wants us to let go of the structures and habits that perpetuate them.
Most of the forces that are degrading our planet are built on a conceptual model of scarcity. We do not have enough. We aren’t enough. So we need to buy, and consume, and advance at all costs. A contrasting concept in many therapy practices is that ‘you already have what you need’. God has graced us with a spirit of recognition. It’s a radical notion to name and uproot fear-based practices, and it is what we’re called to do in our faith communities. We already have the tools we need to live abundantly. To put to death limitations of fear and the flesh while holding our bodies as holy. To live into a world where all of God’s creation cries out ‘Abba’ in witness and recognition. Where being heirs to God means a sacred responsibility to follow Christ.
Reed Fowler 