The Spirit and the New Self

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Trinity Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 3 June 2012 First in a series New Works of the Spirit Dallas, Texas The Spirit and the New Self Rom. 8:12-17; Jn. 3:1-10 Gruesome. Twenty-four-year old Aimee Copeland spoke for the first time this week after waking to the horror of losing her left leg, her right foot and both hands. Her limbs were amputated to save her life after she contracted a necrotizing fasciitis in plain language, a fleshing-eating bacteria. Aimee had cut her leg while playing on a homemade zip line at her Georgia home. The local hospital stapled up the cut, but it soon became infected with this rare bacteria. She s lucky to be alive, but the toll it has taken on her body is devastating. 1 A flesh-eating bacteria. What an interesting spiritual metaphor. The Apostle Paul uses the word flesh as if he s talking about a spiritual bacteria that eats away at our souls. We are to live by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the flesh so we will live. Spirit and flesh are often opposed in Christian thinking. And rightly so, when rightly 1 jun/01/us-flesh-eating-bacteria/ understood. But sometimes we oppose Spirit and flesh wrongly, and we need to make sure we know what to affirm and what to reject, lest we find ourselves dying for the wrong reason. Like the West Virginia mountain pastor Mack Wolford, who died of poisoning after being bit by a rattlesnake. The 44-year-old Wolford didn t just happen on to the snake in the woods; he deliberately picked it up in his small Pentecostal church in order to prove his faith. As he lay writhing in pain on the couch in his mother-in-law s trailer, the preacher refused to be taken to the hospital because he believed that Spirit is opposed to flesh and God would deliver him. God might have delivered him to glory, but the rattlesnake delivered him to the grave. But was it the rattlesnake or his strong but wrong faith? e/style/why-i-watched-a-snake-handlingpastor-die-for-hisfaith/2012/05/31/gjqa3frp5u_story.ht ml

2 That s not what Paul has in mind when he talks about Spirit being opposed to the flesh. In fact, we need to set all of this in a wider context this morning. Last week was Pentecost Sunday in the church year. On that day we remember God sending the Holy Spirit upon the church, thereby setting the Spirit loose in the world. Today is Trinity Sunday. Just as Christmas and Easter show us that God is not only the Father but also the Son, Pentecost teaches us that God is also the Spirit. We often end our prayers to the Father in some fashion such as in the name of Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three persons in one God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all, don t you know?! But what does the Holy Spirit do? We may think of the works of God the Father as creating the world and sustaining it by his sovereign power. We may think of the works of God the Son as uniting God to the world by his flesh and suffering and dying on our behalf in order to reconcile us to God by his grace. The works of the Holy Spirit that we will look at this week and the following two are works of newness: the new self, the new family, and the new world. The Holy Spirit is the agent of newness in the world. The Spirit makes all things new. The Spirit completes the works of the Son and the works of the Father, finishing Christ s work of salvation and liberation and completing the Father s new creation. We look this week at how the Spirit works in the life of individuals to create a new self that is less bound to the flesh and more alive to God. If the work of the Spirit is all about a new self, a new family, and a new world, then to live by the Spirit is to be freed from what is holding us back: the past, the old self, the shackles of sin: these are ways of being flesh and not Spirit. The future is God s preferred mode of being, and God is ever calling us there. But to answer that call requires that we get unhooked from the past being our preferred mode of being. Human beings share an instinct for survival with all the animal kingdom. We are programmed by the history of our ancestors. We tend to do whatever it takes to survive. That self of flesh is oriented toward repeating what we have inherited or what has 2

3 become habit to us. That s not always bad, but it can enslave us. We are all fragile selves. We feel threatened and anxious, fearful and worried at every turn. If we live out inherited ways of dealing with fear that involve escaping the pain of life by drinking or using drugs or running from conflict, we are living according to the flesh. If we deal with fear by confronting others with violence or abuse in order to protect ourselves, we are living according to the flesh. This instinct is known as flight or fight: it s a way of being that assumes that the only options for dealing with life are human. There s no place for divine action. This makes us children of flesh rather than children of God. I ve been reading a wonderful biography of Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad. Jackie was born in Cairo, Georgia, but reared in Pasadena, California, after his mother moved her children out of the South in hopes of a better life. Jackie s father had abandoned the family, leaving his children a legacy of dealing with responsibility irresponsibly. Jackie s mother, Mallie, was determined that her children deal with grinding racial prejudice with grace. It was never easy. Jackie hated injustice, and he had more than his share of it. When he became the first black to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, he was treated to cruel insults and demeaning offenses everywhere he went. But he drew upon deep convictions of who he really was that were drilled into him by his mother and reinforced by Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey. His mother told him: God will take care of you. You are a child of God, made in God s image. Because God is there, nothing can go wrong with you. You can allow yourself to take risks because you know that the Lord will not allow you to sink so far that you can t swim. 3 When Jackie played in the Negro League for the Kansas City Monarchs, his fellow players often indulged in loose moral behavior with liquor and women. His teammates were hard on him for his strong convictions. But as Rampersad puts it, [Jackie s] sense of self was tightly wound around core values of dignity and self-discipline, and he believed in God and the Bible. He drew a line in the dirt between himself and sin, and tried hard not to cross it. 4 3 Jackie Robinson: A Biography (Ballantine Books, 1997), p Ibid., p

4 When Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, there were other black players who might have been better ballplayers. Rickey knew he needed one who was a better man. As one Methodist Christian to another, Rickey gave Jackie a copy of Giovanni Papini s popular Life of Christ and pointed to a passage quoting the words of Jesus that Papini called the most stupefying of His revolutionary teachings : Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 5 Rickey knew that Jackie had the sense of self to react nonviolently to being mistreated. That sense of self is a new self, and it is a work of the Holy Spirit. For Jackie and for any of us, the work of the Spirit frees us from a self of flesh that is contrary to our being children of God. Our new self is rooted and grounded in God, so that we can cry, Abba, Father! as Paul says, because no matter what others say about us, we know who we are. We are children of God, and we share with Christ himself the 5 Ibid., p inheritance of God s children. We may suffer, but if we suffer as children of God, we will be glorified in the end. Paul uses the language of adoption to express how we gain this new identity. John s Gospel expresses the same thing in a different way when Jesus says you have to be born again, or born anew, or born from above. What is born of flesh is flesh, Jesus tells Nicodemus, and what is born of Spirit is spirit. We all must be born of water once and then again of Spirit. When we are born of the Holy Spirit, we come to know ourselves as new selves, as children of God. Baptism is a symbol of that new self that comes as the work of the Holy Spirit. John Buchanan recently retired as the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago after 48 years of ministry all told. He recalled a Sunday service in which he was baptizing a two-year-old boy. After the child had been baptized with water, John, following the directions of the Presbyterian prayer book, put his hand on the little boy s head and addressed him in Trinitarian language. He said, You are a child of God, sealed by the Spirit in your baptism, and you belong to Jesus 4

5 Christ forever. Unexpectedly, the little boy looked up and responded, Uh-oh. Reflecting on that amusing moment long ago, Buchanan called it... a stunning theological affirmation from the mouth of this child. That uh-oh was a recognition that everything had changed, that this boy would never be the same. He did not belong any more just to his biological family; he had now been born all over again, this time into God s Trinitarian family. Now he would be called to live out in the world the kind of love and self-giving that goes on among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He was being called in his baptism to live a different way in the world, God s way, a way that is sometimes met with rejection and scorn. No wonder he said, Uh oh. 6 Last weekend I was privileged to offer the opening prayer for the Memorial Day event Carry the Load. This second-annual event was conceived by Stephen Holley, who grew up in our church, and by his old comrade 6 Cited by Tom Long in the_start_of_the_trail, from John Buchanan, Beginnings and Endings, The Christian Century (Jan. 25, 2012) in the Navy SEALs, Clint Bruce. Each participant was invited to spend however much of 20 hours and 12 minutes walking the Katy Trail in memory of those who gave their lives in service to our country on the battlefield or in defense of our communities as police officers and firefighters. You could also walk in honor of those who serve still. The idea began three years ago when Clint put a pack on his back and walked on Memorial Day at White Rock Lake. He was working out some of his demons, trying to deal with his frustration over the barbeque mentality that has beset our commemoration of this national holiday. An old gentleman stopped him in stride and asked him, Hey, man, who re you carrying? Clint knew in that moment what he meant. And he reminded us all at the start that this is the essence of spiritual sacrifice, that we carry one another. He put it plainly: If you aren t carrying anyone but yourself, I ve got no time for you. We all have to carry someone the way others carry us. Our society is afflicted with a flesh-eating bacteria of selfishness that is killing our souls. But one by one, God s Spirit is at work to heal and 5

6 make us new. We have to yield ourselves to God. And when we do, we receive a new self that frees us to live for and give ourselves for others. If we carry no one but ourselves, we are children of flesh. If we carry one another, we are children of God. 6