seventh sunday of pentecost
romans 8:12-25
preached for St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square
digital service, July 19, 2020
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In this passage, Paul sets up two dualities – flesh and Spirit, and fear and adoption, with an exploration into hope. When we hear flesh and Spirit, we might think about a mind-body dualism – that the body and soul are distinct. In this passage, this false binary between flesh and Spirit has historically led to a devaluing of our bodies and the wisdom they carry. It has led to devaluing care for our physical world in favor of spiritual focus, a physical world which not only includes the water we drink and the soil we grow our food in, but the material, systemic realities of class, race, gender, and ability. Yet God came to us in a body – in the body of Jesus Christ. A body that breathed, and ate, and walked, and was wounded. Our bodies are holy, and it is important to name the way this passage in particular has been used to harm whole groups of people, and our planetary home, and how it seems to set up a false competition between our material reality and our connection to the Divine.
But when we go a little deeper, the Greek word for Spirit is the same as the Spirit of God, that which moved over the waters of Creation, from which each living thing has its breath. And flesh, as Pastor Erin preached over the past two weeks, is connected to the indwelling of sin that we all experience. Imagine flesh closer to an inward focus; short-term gratification, indwelling sin. Imagine Spirit as of God; an outward, interconnected focus; balance. We all have flesh and we all have Spirit, intertwined, and what matters is which aspect we lean into. The Reverend Doctor Monya Stubbs, an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and professor at Austin Seminary, writes about it as two types of mindsets. She says: “These two mindsets are not parallel opposites. Functioning out of a flesh-centered mindset always promotes the ‘self’ at the expense or disregard of others. A mindset defined by mutual edification/indebted love, however, does not deny the ‘self’ and only considers others. Rather, a mindset defined by mutual edification/indebted love is one of radical reciprocity….[those who live this way] take into account their own gifts, talents, ideas, concerns, and needs in relation to others.”
So when we lean into the Spirit, that is a space of mutuality, of interconnectedness, of interdependence. Mutual aid organizations are of the Spirit. Prioritizing rest over productivity is of the Spirit. Resisting the injustices our neighbors are enduring, that we are enduring, is of the Spirit. In many ways, my experience as someone who grew up in the United States, in a predominantly white community, has been an experience of the flesh-mindset. An experience that centers competition and scarcity, which is in direct conflict with the abundant life God dreams for all of creation. This experience of leaning into flesh, into promoting the ‘self’ at all costs, at the cost of genuine relationship and mutuality, can be linked to distorted fear.
Fear is rooted in reaction, in conflict, in messiness. It is biological, and it can be healthy. Healthy fear creates caution, helping our bodies and minds react when we encounter danger. Fear can be a result of experiencing trauma, or a reaction to oppression and violence. But the fear Paul is writing about is a distorted fear – the type of fear that feeds white supremacy, that encourages tactics of oppression and control and abuse. Something I work on noticing in myself is the difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling afraid – because those are not the same things, and many of the times I react in fear, it is actually a reaction to discomfort, not a legitimate threat or trauma. And that type of distorted fear keeps me, keeps us, from the mutuality of the Spirit. That distorted fear keeps us from fully living into our vocations as children of God, connected to each other and to the wider creation. I wonder about the ways I have been taught to live in fear – fearing the other, the unknown, change. Which often results in a fear of people different than myself.
Paul offers adoption by God as a counterbalance to this type of fear. In response to our distorted fear, God reveals Godself and says – be with me, as I am with you. Be enfolded into, adopted into, my love for you, and for all of Creation. Do not be afraid, but be freed to dwell in Me.
God is for our liberation. Liberation from distorted fear. Liberation into radical mutuality. Liberation for a redeemed world – a redeemed Creation. Paul writes: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?”
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I struggle to hope, for exactly the reason Paul states – hope in God’s redemptive and liberating love is hope towards something we have only glimpsed. It is the Kin-dom of God. A world in right relationship. It is something yet-to-be and already-happening.
And dreaming towards this liberation? This redemptive love of God for all of Creation? It is risky. Dreaming of liberation is risky, because failure is possible. When we hope towards a world freed through God’s love, the Spirit, and our relationships, there is so much room for disappointment when we still experience a world that is structured around the flesh – structured around competition and scarcity. All of Creation is in the midst of labor pains, and the future is unknown. In this passage Paul is asking us to engage in tenderhearted, vulnerable work – the work of hope, and is assuring us that we do that work with God.
Staying connected and grounded enough that we can dream of liberation.
Letting go of distorted fear, and the comfort of despair – it is much more challenging to hope.
Knowing that this work involves labor pains, and patience.
Recently, there has been an expanded conversation around the idea of prison abolition, from Teen Vogue to the New York Times, to dinner table conversations. To me, this feels like the result of generations of people dreaming towards liberation. Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore cofounded Critical Resistance in 1997, an organization that “seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. [They] believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure.” This organization based their work on lived experience and abolitionist texts from the 1970’s. And tracing this movement back even further, to the book of Isaiah, where it is written: “The Lord God’s spirit is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners.”
When folks do name the dreams and hopes they have for a liberated world, such as prison abolition, they are often dismissed as idealistic. And somehow, that idealism is considered a bad thing, instead of a position that holds so much hope and risk and should be celebrated and honored. Imagine – regardless of someone’s productivity, that they have enough to eat, clean water to drink, a safe roof over their heads, and opportunities to grow. Imagine – a world where humankind is not in constant battle with the earth that nourishes us, where we learn from the patterns of Creation. Imagine – a world where a mental health crisis doesn’t mean sending someone with a gun, but someone trained in de-escalation skills. The Kin-dom of God is revealed in these dreams. Movements for liberation often experience a slow burn. The work of this transformation seems impossible, until it’s not. Just as a seed planted in the soil waits and grows and changes and puts out roots before breaking through the dirt, movements for liberation that might seem new to some of us have long histories and deep roots.
Paul was writing to communities with the belief that the Kin-dom of God was not generations off, but was hours, or weeks off, and so patience feels like an odd translation choice to me at the end of this passage. Steadfastness, endurance – these are closer to the energy of Paul’s writing. So when Paul writes: “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience”, it is not an excuse for those in positions of power to ignore cries for justice, to dismiss that pain by telling people to “wait” for their identity as children of God to be honored. Patience, endurance, is the duality of holding onto hope that things will change in our lifetimes, that we need to be ready for when the fuse ignites, and knowing that God’s transformative work requires labor pains, and spans generations.
Even as we might be exhausted, or afraid of how rapidly things are changing, or overwhelmed with the realities and suffering of the pandemic, systemic racism, and climate change, on the verge of, or past the point of, burning out, this passage is asking us and challenging us to trust that God is being revealed in the world, always. God, as they enfold us in love and support, calls us to dwell in the risk of hoping for a freedom that is still becoming, still being birthed. We are co-creators, strengthened and guided by God in this work of risky, liberative hope. We are bound together in community, even as God releases us from bindings and structures that harm. We are held in a spirit of adoption by God into the collective, creative, messy, project of liberation for all of Creation. Dreaming of freedom is risky and holy work, and we are given the challenging task of living into those dreams.
Reed Fowler 