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The Fourth Sunday In Lent (Laetare)
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which giveth life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Fourth Sunday In Lent (Laetare)
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Scripture citation(s): Romans 8:11-25
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Romans 8:11-25
✛
Our Inner Trials
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In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
For several weeks the Church has had us reading from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as the second lesson for Sunday Evensongs. This great epistle, written by the Apostle to the church or churches in the capital of the Roman Empire where he himself and Saint Peter not many years hence would be martyred, is Paul’s most complete and least occasional letter. In other words, it is a full consideration of what Paul has been teaching for his whole career as an apostle, and it doesn’t address a particular problem in a local church – as, for example, Paul addresses in his letters to the Corinthians or the Galatians.
In the chapters we are considering Paul has been dealing with interior spiritual struggles most Christians experience. A chapter back before our reading this evening, Paul laments that the good which he wants to do, he does not do; and that the evil he wants to avoid doing, he does. He finds that while he himself consents to and delights in the law of God, he at the same time discovers another “law” or principle at work within his “members,” warring against the law of his mind and bringing him into captivity to sin.[1] Some have abused this argument by saying, “The devil made me do it.” But this is not what Paul is saying; he is describing our universal fallen condition of being in bondage to sin, a struggle which continues until death, even after one has experienced salvation in Christ, including the grace of Baptism and the Eucharist. Paul, exclaiming, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” answers his own cry: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
So then the Lord himself is our righteousness. And today, Paul shows that by the Resurrection of Jesus, the good has won; and those who flee to Jesus for refuge will share in his victory over sin and death. But the question remains: How then are we to live in the meantime? Our inner struggles, as Paul so honestly describes them, must be understood as the dynamic of “dying to sin” with Jesus in his death, and “rising to life” with Jesus in his Resurrection from the dead. Life henceforth is a matter of what Paul calls “walking by the Spirit.”
In order to walk by the Spirit, we are to give no room, to die, to the things of the flesh that distract us. The works of the flesh are all too familiar. Paul has a long list of them: sexual immorality, drunkenness, dissensions, envy, rivalries, divisions, envy, idolatry, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger. By contrast, the fruits of walking by the Spirit are love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control.[2]
The choice to walk by the Spirit brings rewards. First of all we know we have peace with God through his Son. More than that, we rejoice in our struggle against sin, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because it is grounded in God’s Son and Holy Spirit.[3]
In Christ we are God’s adopted children. His Father is our Father. That is why in the Eucharist the Lord’s Prayer is introduced with the words, “we are bold to say, Our Father.” Just as the Spirit enables us to walk in love, joy and peace, so also the Spirit moves our spirits, as adopted children in Christ, to say, as Jesus said, “Abba, Father.”
In words that The Book of Common Prayer recommends for funerals, Paul goes on to say that the sufferings of the present time, including our struggles against the power of sin, are nothing when compared to the glory that shall be revealed to us and in us. What we feel in these struggles are the “birth pangs” of full redemption, to be realized in fullness only on the other side of death.
There is more still. Our personal struggles are part of something going on in the whole creation. Paul says there are cosmic birth pangs. The whole creation, as we heard this evening, is in groaning and travailing, aching, for the redemption of the body – not just our individual mortal bodies on the day of Resurrection, but the whole body of creation, looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth in which we shall share. This is what we have to look forward to when we place our wills in the peace of God’s will, when we are one with our Lord Jesus.
There is nothing to fear. We have Jesus, and he has us, bonded by the Spirit. Nothing can separate us from that almighty Love – not death or anything else in all creation.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
_______________
[1] Romans 7:14-25
[2] Galatians 5:19-24
[3] See Romans 5:1-5.
