Sermon Rom 8-1-11
O God, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that we may hear what you are saying to us today. Amen.
When I was about eight years old, I played road hockey a couple of times a week during the winter with the same group of boys. We would meet just after supper on Snider Street just outside of our house. There, under the dim glow of a few lonely street lights, which never seemed to cast quite enough light to illuminate a table top let alone our rink, we jostled and stick handled up and down the frozen street, imagining that we were pros of the original six NHL teams. The longer we played together the more rules we made up. We had rules for everything, when you could slap shot, what was an offside and what was an illegal body check into the snowdrift. I remember once when I was playing in goal, someone yelled “Car”! I thought it was coming up the street behind me, so I moved out of the net and Tommy who was playing for the other team promptly took a shot and scored. We lost the game because we were in the last five minutes of a tied game and the rule was “next goal wins”. I was madder then heck because the car was way up the street beyond the point that we all agreed to yell “CAR”. A bloody row broke but the goal stood and we lost the game. About two months later, the game just died, the boys stopped coming out, one at a time.
Looking back on it, I wonder if the fine print of all those rules spoiled the game. They became an end in themselves. We argued about the letter of the rules so much, that we suffocated the Spirit of the game. I think we forgot that we started playing simply because we loved hockey. In our epistle reading for today, Paul is writing to the Church in Rome about cultural fine print that threatens to suffocate the Spirit of life.
I see Paul in my mind’s eye, wincing with some memory of regret as he sits at the table before him to write this letter. He remembers that he did not always believe in the Spirit of Life. He was the perfect Pharisee in his pre-Christian days. He was consumed with obeying the fine print of the Mosaic law codes. These religious laws were not bad in and of themselves. They were meant to be an outward sign of a faithful Hebrew’s obedience to God. So, Paul ate only the right kinds of food and he purified his eating utensils.
However, the fine print of the law became an ingrained cultural rule used by a few powerful people to exclude people from the love of God. Paul’s past life was a ritual of obeying and living the fine print of the law codes irrespective of their consequences on others. He deliberately excluded the possibility of friendship with all those people that the fine print considered outcasts of society. These were the unclean, those who could not or would not keep the food rituals, the Gentiles, and the sick that suffered from many types of diseases and were considered unclean. Yes, Paul followed the fine print of the law to the letter; we are told in Acts, that he watched Stephen die in the stoning pit, with a self-righteous vindication that the law demanded Stephen’s death. For Paul, it was as if heaven became the prime real estate on the monopoly board between Parkplace and Broadway, and he needed to earn enough money to buy the entire block around salvation.
Why did Paul lose perspective between the Spirit and the law? Paul kept all the rules because he thought God would not accept him if he did not follow the fine print to the letter. What Paul forgot was that God had only two requests of him- to Love God, and to love each other. It was ironic that the cultural rules of Paul’s life, became interpreted to mean that one could not be loved by God unless one avoided most of the rest of society. It is like saying you want to love others except you cannot stand being around people. The fine print threatened to suffocate the Spirit of Life in Paul.
It occurs to me that the fine print of cultural values we learn as kids, have more damaging consequences for our lives when we do not know they are Spirit destroying or worse, when we deliberately set our minds to use the fine print at the expense of others.
Our consumer culture often sets its mind to take advantage of our fears of being unloved by creating more fine print to fill the fear. It seems there is much money to be made from telling healthy people they are sick. I read that some drug companies disease monger in a bid to sell healthy consumers pills for a range of problems such as shyness. Shyness… I do not know if you have noticed, I am not shy but I do have freckles, many freckles. Yes…, you guessed it, freckles, along with boredom, bags under your eyes, big ears, and ugliness top the list of so-called diseases that doctors say people are now bringing to them. Some doctors are even using the term “non-disease” as a medical condition for a classification of disease for people who do not have any disease!
It is funny, except when you read about fear that expands so quickly it presses out the will to live in some people. A Toronto hospital reported that almost forty percent of young teenage girls it treated for attempted suicide, wanted to end their lives because they could not live up to the perceived expectations that our culture places on them. Were they supposed to be independent and career minded or family-oriented or should they be both? Self-esteem is a fragile treasure for people, easily lost if one receives repeated messages that they are someone unworthy of love and acceptance. What cultural fine print is working here that would cause these young people to set their minds on suicide as the only option for life?
The North American business world is abuzz this past week with the lack of integrity displayed by Worldcom telecommunications. Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, life savings and pensions when it went bankrupt. It is just another in a series of spectacular corporate scandals that caused President Bush to announce he was going to get tough on corporations and executives that have been fudging their books for so long that no one thought anything was wrong with the practice.
Somewhere, individuals set their minds and rationalized their actions that what they were doing was not wrong and then entire corporations of individuals set their collective minds and colluded in the self-deception that it was okay to falsify statements, and it was okay to mislead investors. And Investors place enormous and sometimes unrealistic expectations on these companies to make them rich. At some level, the fine print is working. Fine print that says we measure success by money or power, if we want to be loved, respected, or even feared by others. The fine print says go after the whole monopoly board if you want to be happy, even at the expense of others.
As in Paul’s dilemma with the religious law, our lives are subject to making choices every day amid the minefield of fine print. We are also aware of how our deep longing for the Spirit of Life is compromised by the fine print. We may wonder whether we are capable of being a good spouse; can we live up to the expectations of our signifigant other. Or, we may wonder as teenagers whether we can ever be as good at something as our peers seem to be. At these discouraging times, our Spirit may shrivel and become feeble like those lights on Snider Street.
Paul reminds the Roman church that one cannot write or enforce a rule on love, truth, and compassion. It is like trying to smile when you do not feel happy inside. You can force the muscles around your mouth to curl upwards but your heart betrays the Spirit of your sadness. Paul knows these feelings well. Yet, after decades of witnessing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, through shipwreck, beatings, numerous imprisonments, hunger, rejection by some of his churches, and isolation from many in his Jewish community, Paul chose to set his mind on Jesus and keep the fine print in perspective.
I picture him, hunched now over a small table dimly lit by a single oil lamp, perhaps again, in a prison some place. He is searching for the right words to convince the Roman church that they can live day by day with the assurance of God’s Spirit; they do not have to buy up the monopoly board to be loved by God. The darkness and the light in the room, a precarious standoff: the light presses out the darkness around that small table, the darkness presses back, threatening to devour the soft dome of yellow light flickering from a fragile wick. Paul sits undistracted in this light in darkness, darkness in light, anticipating the words that flow from his heart to his mind, waiting for them to coalesce in sentences of logic and passion for Jesus Christ. Tentatively, he presses his pen against the parchment and begins to write the portion of the letter we have read:
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ”.
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, he writes on, out of jumbled thoughts spring sudden clarity. Words captured forever as the ink dries on the parchment laid flat beneath the frail light of a single candle, a gift of faith to the Roman church and to us.
Paul carries on, because the Spirit of Christ dwells in him. He not only endures, he presses on, a steady, small light of faith against the darkness. He presses on even in old age so people will know that Jesus Christ is the Spirit of life that presses out the darkness in life. It is the Spirit of Christ in Paul that provides him with compassion to forgive himself for his past sins, to resist evil in the temptations of daily living, and to persevere in the expectation of a joyful future. This is Paul’s reason and strength for getting up in the morning to face his day without always looking back over his shoulder. The fine print will not wear him down. He sets his mind on God and the love of others because the Spirit of life in him will never be snuffed out, no matter how dark the room is around him.
It is tempting to set our minds in discouragement mired in cultural fine print that consistently tells us that there is a cure for freckles or that we must choose between job and family at all costs, if we want to make it in this world. The Spirit of life reminds us that God loves our freckles, encourages us through the entirety of our lives and helps us to keep the fine print in perspective. The Spirit gives us the resilience and courage to stretch ourselves, to set our minds on living our relationships with others generously in truth and compassion. We are quietly being encouraged by the Spirit of life as we help with those small things that build community: washing dishes downstairs, teaching Sunday school, maintaining this building, sitting on the various boards or just coming to worship and passing the peace, these are signifigant and steady lights of expressed faith that keeps our community alive in the Spirit.
There is a chest of drawers inside our bedroom closet at home. The bottom drawer contains some of my old, worn clothes that no longer fit. For some reason, I have not thrown them out. Occasionally I pull them out. They remind me of the past failures of life. Things I cannot change or will not let go. Then, I see my shirts hanging up, neatly pressed, and ready to wear. They are in good order, fresh and clean. They remind me of all my blessings in the present for which I am thankful. I scan along the rail and notice an empty space beside my shirts. It is waiting to be filled with some new bit of clothing. I am not sure what may go here in the future but neither am I worried about it.
It occurs to me that my past, present, and future converge into an eternal moment in my closet, unfettered by the abstractions of the fine print of life that tend to suffocate the Spirit. God’s love for us is eternal. God loved us in the past, loves us now, and loves us in the future. We may live through joyous and painful experiences that seem to repeat themselves. Yet, the Spirit of life is guiding us straight as an arrow along the Divine trajectory of time. Nothing will alter God’s course of love for us. The Holy Spirit, the same Spirit of life that Paul wrote about, offers us new hope and new opportunities at any point along God’s trajectory of life. When we begin to sense this, when the light of Christ that has always been burning in us, flames, we begin to experience the true meaning of freedom to live in compassion for each other. We can set our minds on this truth: the Spirit of life bonds us with God. The Spirit of life invites us into God’s radiant light and sets us on the path to compassionate living with our fellow human beings. Thanks be to God. Amen.