Here and Now
I had a couple of requests for a copy of my sermon from July 26, Trinity VIII, so I’m providing it here in case anyone finds it helpful. It’s based on the following text from the Gospel for Trinity VIII, Romans 8:
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
We tend to divide reality up into sections in order to make life more manageable. We speak, for example, of secular and sacred, of physical and spiritual, of a heaven that is very far away and of a here-and-now that is very close. In St. Paul’s writing to the Romans, the only distinction is between those who respond to God and receive his grace and those who do not. There is no sacred and no secular. There is no ordinary part of life and no religious part of life: life is one, and it is either lived in oneness and communion with God, or in communion with death.
St. Paul uses the terms “flesh” and “spirit” to describe these opposing principles. He says that if we live after the flesh, we shall die, but if we through the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live. These are the very terms used by Our Lord when he says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (Jn 3:6).
We are, of course, beings made up of flesh and spirit, and while Our Lord and St. Paul use the word “flesh” to refer physical bodies, it has a wider meaning that is signaled by putting it in opposition to “spirit”. In these instances, what is meant is that there is a spiritual principle at work which is focused on things apart from God. The “deeds of the body”, then, which we are to mortify are not physical actions, things we do with our bodies, as if our bodies were evil. The “deeds of the body” describes a life lived unfocused upon God; it describes a life in which the soul is locked within the mind and the imagination as much as in the physical appetites.
Look at some of the things that result from a fleshly orientation and you’ll see that this is true: pride, wrathfulness, and envy are problems which are shared by fallen angels, who have no physical bodies. And our Lord makes clear that sins we commit with our bodies have their origin in our intellects and in our wills, and that the sin actually is committed there before our bodies ever undertake to follow through. This is the cause of much of the intense unhappiness in which mankind finds himself. He is designed to live his life fully and intensely in the freedom of the sons of God, but instead is chained within his own mind, his own imagination, a slave to his own appetites, ideas, and fantasies.
To get some more insight into all, I think it's useful to look at my text today in light of another Pauline quotation. In Acts 17 Paul is witnessing to the philosophers of Athens, and tells them that in God "we live, and move, and have our being". This quotation is often ascribed to the Greek philosopher Epimenides, and it describes the totality of all that we are and all that we do as beginning, continuing, and ending in God.
At the most basic level, all creatures are passively dependent upon God for their very being. As humans, we are both material and immaterial, visible and invisible, body and soul. And while we can distinguish the two for purposes of illustration or discussion, the physical life is utterly dependent upon the spiritual. There is no life in the human body without a soul -- without its marriage to the soul, the body does not hold together; it loses its life; it dies. In fact, though the material world and our material bodies are shot through with divine sustaining energy, one of the effects of the Fall is that we are blind to this relationship without the aid of grace. St. Paul was reminding the thinkers of Athens that our being derives from God and is utterly dependent upon him, even though we can remain blind to this fact.
The next level of relation to God is to live in him. “Life” in The New Testament rarely means simple being, but an awakening to the presence of God, and a humble response of openness to that presence. This grace of life comes to us in Baptism, after which we are equipped by God for a relationship with him. Prayer and the Sacraments feed and nourish this life within us.
Only those who have being may live, and only those who live may move. Movement doesn't mean only motion through space, but also refers to desires, appetites, and passions: these are the things that move us, that motivate us. God designed us so that the movements of our bodies and souls would be motivated by love for him and by desire for communion with him. The fall, and our participation in it in our own lives, means that it usually works the other way around: we are moved by our desires, appetites, and passions. They control us; the Scriptures tell us that apart from grace, we are in fact enslaved to them.
To move or walk in the Spirit, then, is to be utterly subject, in every aspect of soul and body, to the demands of our relationship with God, motivated primarily by the life of Christ within us, and to place everything else within and without us at his disposal and command in a relationship of love and service. And this is freedom.
Our movement toward God, our walk in the Spirit, is in fact the single goal of our life and our being, in which all that comes before is raised to the level of beauty and of love by the power of God in us. We don’t live in the physical world and aspire to the spiritual world. For most of us, that’s not a very motivational. thought anyway. What we call the physical world holds all sorts of legitimate attractions, and what we think of as the spiritual world is bound to seem pasty and unattractive by comparison. For many people, the message of Christianity is “the check is in the mail”: everything good is deferred to another world, and this other world is not usually described in any attractive way. Why walk in the Spirit now with all of the self-denial and hard work that’s involved if all you get is a harp and a cloud? Or perhaps the Faith is an insurance policy, and we may be able to rely on it later, in another life, but all we do in this life is pay in. Doesn’t sound very enthralling.
But the fact is that we do not live in a two-story universe in which the spiritual is “up there” and we are “down here”, or in which all the good things are deferred. We live and move and have our being utterly in both modes here and now. We have available to us in the Sacraments the very life of Christ, and not in a kind of “introductory offer” way that requires the paid upgrade of death in order to get full functionality. We can live the life of heaven now; we can live in deep, supernatural joy now. It is our neglect of this fact that robs our religion of its ability to attract and convert. It’s not easy, but then most of the heavy lifting is done by Christ and not by us.
When we are led by the Spirit, when we live and move and have our being in him, we become the sons of God. Then, to use the terms of St. Maximos the Confessor, we move from being to well-being. We’re used to hearing in the Last Gospel that “as many as believed on him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God”. To be led by the Spirit is to live here and now in the power of God. We may be powerless; we may be weak; we may be tangled in our sins, pressed down by the weight of worldly affairs. But we have the very power of God, because we have God.
God is with us now. We often speak and act as if God were somewhere in the distance. We think of the God who is upstairs, came downstairs for a while, and then went back upstairs. but God is with us now, and Our Lord tells us that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, that it is with us here and now. It is fitting to be reminded of this at the celebration of the Eucharist: at the Altar, we are reminded that heaven and earth are mingled - there are angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven. We are with them and they are with us because God is with us, and with them, especially at the Altar, but also always and everywhere.
