Day 587 - Coming Home, a Fool's Hope

A sermon presented at Mowbray Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN July 20, 2014

OT Reading: Genesis 28:10-19

Epistle Reading: Romans 8:12-25

In the Genesis passage the Lord restates his promise to Abraham to keep him and to preserve the Promised Land for him. This passage describes the basis of quintessential hope of the Hebrews. Paul talks of slavery, flesh and spirit of hope and flesh, but the words sounds removed to us and perhaps imply something different to our modern ears than to Paul’s, yet Paul too describes the quintessential hope of a Christian, there is  a home.

As far as slavery is concerned, most of us today would agree the USA represents the antithesis of slavery. We are free to make of our lives anything we can, buy what we can afford, go where we want, say what we feel, resist any effort of others to oppress us. Frankly we are free to choose pretty much anything that we want. At times this blessing of freedom leads us astray. The things of the world rather than the God’s spirit captivate us. Paul says it makes us slaves of the flesh and fear.

Paul reminds us however that Christians are “slaves of the Spirit of hope” who rejoice in their future adoption at their resurrection when they will call the Lord, “Abba” as Jesus did. This one simple word, Abba, or daddy is the intimate word that Jesus used to name God. It defines our fundamental kinship with Jesus as adopted children of God who inherit his blessings. We rejoice because Jesus guarantees our hope in God’s promise of our own resurrection that brings us home to Him. The world calls our hope for that home after death a fool’s errand. But we know that our hope in the resurrection is certain and it enslaves each of us to live as the child of God that we are. A child of God strives to live life as Jesus did.

Paul tells us we will be a slave of the spirit of hope or slave of the flesh means we have to serve somebody, the flesh or the spirit.

First we have to understand three of Paul’s words, hope, flesh and body. Hope doesn’t mean a wish, such as “Oh I hope I win the lottery Tuesday.” Or “I hope it rains tomorrow.” In the case of the lottery, hope is really not involved, there is a finite, though very small probability that I will win the lottery so it is not totally unreasonable to wish it comes true. There is also a finite chance it will rain tomorrow. The weather man says 30%. It all depends on the physics of the atmosphere and where I am standing.

True hope is an expectation of something when there is absolutely no possible justification it can happen. It is an expectation of an event that every shred of logical experience says is foolish. When Paul talks about the spirit of hope, he means the hope in the unimaginable, resurrection of our body.

What about flesh? To Paul, flesh is every part of our physical reality, not the desire for physical satisfaction, or the actual blood and skin of our bodies. We cannot escape flesh, it is our physical, bodily reality of living in the world. We can’t escape the temptation of our desires for forbidden fruit. The reality of this flesh is the whole basis of sin and the Law. We are all sinners who feel the pressure of the world and face the damnation that comes from our inability to live by the Law. This reality causes pain because it seeks to separate us from God.

Let me use an example. If we are fortunate to have a job, we work to achieve a desired standard of living to buy and drive a car, own or rent a home, have a TV, cell phone and/or computer plus internet, cable and video games, maybe a tractor to plow a garden on the piece of property we own. We want to afford the doctor we want, buy clothes for our children and ourselves, donate money to the politician of our choice, and be free to ignore or vote against those whose ideas we reject, to go fish on Sunday, or buy something at Wal-Mart. The list goes on.

Sometimes a cloud passes over that world of flesh and causes pain. Say, you have worked for a company for twenty years and are expert in your job and maybe not ready to learn a new job. The boss comes in and says, “I’m sorry but I need you to work the weekends on a new job after we give you a few weeks of training. I know you are active in your church and this will mess it all up, but we lost the employee who had the job and we want to give you the chance to take it.

You may say, “Well it is an inconvenience but I guess I can do it until you hire someone for that position.”  The boss then says, “Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t make it clear, we aren’t hiring a new person, I’m asking you to take the new job permanently. We are eliminating your old position and I’m giving you the chance to take this job rather than let you go.”

Then the pain begins. You think about the mortgage of your home and that garden in the backyard, the car payment, the utilities, the operation your spouse needs, the college cost for your child who is graduating high school next May, not to mention the loss of Sunday fellowship (because worship is a community experience) as you consider taking the new job because family and all related to it are too important or choosing to quit and look for a new job in loyalty to the spirit because the Sunday morning fellowship and worship of the Lord are so important.

You will suffer the hardship to your family if you refuse the new job. You will suffer from loss of Sunday morning fellowship, and even perhaps slowly drift away from worship if you do take the job. We cannot escape the reality of the world: we have to serve somebody, and it will cause us pain either way. Even in our Land of the Free in 2014, it doesn’t take long to see what Paul means by slavery of the flesh.

(Of course I paint this picture in extreme to make the point. It is still inconvenient, but you can find avenues for worship with your congregation on other days and while you work the new job undertake a search for a new job.)

But the question remains, if good Christians are a slave to the spirit but not the flesh, why does life so often still hurt? Why is it that even if we ensure our spiritual heath there is no guarantee life will be pain-free?

It is because we are a human body and the world drives a wedge between God and us. That battle to separate us from God runs very deep. It wants to convince us the finality of our life span is a cruel act by God. We read Psalm 8 where the psalmist says God created us just a little less than Him and it makes us angry not to be in control rather than feel blessed to be alive. It is so painful we try every avenue of distraction by the allure of the world to drown our awareness of our end. Even the penitent may fall victim to it. (mother’s death)

The idea of spirit and body and this world of flesh bring Paul’s message home. Many of us intellectualize our resurrection as a preservation of our spirit that frees us from the pain of the body, as if our body dies and only our spirit goes to Heaven. This is called a dualism.

It is a dangerous, if not heretical idea that causes us to devalue our bodily life as a community of fellow travelers (neighbors) and to focus only on self. A Christian who carries it to its ultimate end leads the selfish life of the isolated monastic hermit. It can lead the non-believer to think, “I only have a body, so I better enjoy it as I go down the path to total moral dissolution.”

Paul, the self-avowed Jew’s Jew, forcefully rejects the idea of dualism of body and spirit. He reads in Genesis 2:7 that God formed Adam from the dust and “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.” Paul knows Adam (the Hebrew word for dust or earth) and all humans are dust into which the Lord has breathed the breath of life. Paul tells us this body of dust is all we have. We often use the word expire to mean die. Expire means the Lord’s breath returns to the Lord. This is why Job laments in Job 14:7-9,12:  “For there is hope for a tree if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant…but mortals lie down and do not rise again; they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep even until the heavens are no more.” In Job’s world we are conscious robots but when the battery runs down we are done.

Paul tells the Corinthians (See Day 433 - Living in the City of God)  who are sophisticated people wise by the human standards of the world that they think that way. The empty cross is foolishness. When we die it is over. Paul tells us only those who aren’t smart and wealthy by the world’s standards, those who are weak (and the reality of sin is that we are all weak) understand the empty cross is not foolishness but surety. They know the Lord asked a man of dust named Jesus to give up his Divine strength and embrace human weakness, to be humiliated on the cross by the world of flesh in order to defeat death through his own bodily resurrection. 

The human life of Jesus and His resurrection fractured this world of flesh and gave birth to the hope of life of the Spirit. Indeed, Paul says the world groans as a woman in the pain of childbirth who is at the same time waiting with great hope for her new child. The old world groans in pain until this new life of the spirit finally reaches fulfillment. Then the old world of pain is wiped away by Christ’s return. That is when those who are sleeping will arise and come home to Abba along with those who are alive.

The reason the dilemma of the new job hurts even if we are spiritual is because we still live in that old groaning world of possessions and necessities that is not going down without a fight. The world shapes and pains us, gives us fleeting joy and separates us from God. It is natural that the world pains the penitent as much as it pained Jesus who defeated death and made Job’s hope for resurrection a reality.

It is important that Paul used Jesus’ word Abba. It means we inherit by adoption the same relationship to God that Jesus has. We may suffer now, but we children of God living in the spirit will be adopted and glorified, made whole when He returns and we are resurrected. We are going home to Abba.

We are Easter People. We are slaves of the Spirit of hope in an outlandish certainty, the resurrection of our body.  We have been blessed by the Lord through Jesus, we are guaranteed the hope for home just as the Lord blessed the Hebrews living as aliens in Egypt with the hope for the Promised Land. We will be adopted children of God and are coming home to Abba.

This inheritance means we are Christ’s presence in the world. As a consequence, we must strive to live as Jesus lived, suffering the pain of the world knowing that we shall share the joy of inheriting the glory of our resurrection as Jesus did. Children of God must choose to live, grow in faith and serve the Lord our father as Jesus did, always making time for God in our world of flesh.

Paul says being a slave of hope isn’t easy. He uses the image of training for a long distance race. Every day we stumble and steadily work to become better Christians walking in the world as Christ walked. We do this because we know Christ is arisen and gone to Abba who will call us home. Friends, there is a home.