Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
23^rd of July 2023

Romans 8:12-25

“All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God”.

A fortnight ago I said of the Apostle Paul that sometimes he seems to just get it, and all that I can say when I read him is ‘Yes!’ That was about his confession of his human sinfulness: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’. I still want to say ‘Yes!’ to Paul, today, but I may need to take some time to explain why.

Paul’s language as he shares his understanding of the gospel with the church in Rome is easy for us to misinterpret. As we listen to today’s reading, for instance, we need to be careful about how we hear the word ‘flesh’. Paul contrasts flesh and Spirit: ‘So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’ It is tempting to translate ‘flesh’ simply as ‘body’ and ‘Spirit’ as ‘soul’, and thus to argue that our bodies are bad and our souls good. Throughout history there have been varieties of Christianity that have done that, and Christians who have mistreated their bodies to get closer to God. This misreading of ‘flesh’ is dangerous. We live in a society that frequently tells us that our bodies are wrong, and need to be controlled and disciplined; a society of obesity and eating disorders; a society in which even children talk about being ‘bad’ because they indulge in a particular food. Behind all these problems is the idea that our bodies are not really ‘us,’ that there is an ‘I,’ mind or soul or spirit, which is housed in a body, but that that body is somehow separate from ‘the real me’. This is not the way Christianity understands humanity. Our bodies are so much ‘us’ that in Jesus God became incarnate in a real, flesh and blood, human body. Today’s reading in fact includes Paul telling us that we are waiting for ‘the redemption of our bodies’.

So when Paul says that ‘if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live,’ he is not saying that God wants us to ignore, punish, or reject the bodies that God created. He is telling us to turn away from ‘the flesh,’ from everything that separates us from God. What are we then to turn towards? To a brand-new status. In today’s reading, Paul gives us a new description of our relationship with God; for the first time in this Letter Paul refers to Christian believers as the children of God. The spirit that we believers have received is not one of slavery, he says, but one of adoption. In the Spirit, we can cry out Abba, Father, to God.

Becoming children of God was occasionally mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures as a privilege enjoyed by Israel, an expression of the intimacy and closeness to God experienced by that one nation alone. By arguing that everyone who has received the Spirit is a child of God, Paul is telling the Christians in Rome that the privileges that were previously considered to belong to Israel alone have now been extended to Gentiles as well as Jews. All of us are the children of God, adopted in our baptism.

Paul then moves from our adoption as children to our status as heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ. That is a phenomenal thing to think about. We are not just children of God; we are co-heirs with Jesus. Everything that is his is ours. We could not be more important or have a higher status in the world than this. Wealth, race, gender, class, sexuality, intellect, employment – in comparison none of these matter. And our status as God’s heirs is widely shared. The poorest child living in a slum in the developing world has the same intrinsic worth as the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury. We are all children of God and co-heirs with Christ.

Our status as co-heirs with Christ is not a simple matter, though; both glory and suffering are involved in our inheritance. Glory makes sense; in Christ God was glorified, and in the resurrection and ascension God glorified Christ. But why is there still suffering in this post-resurrection world? If God has defeated the powers of sin and death, why is life not perfect? Paul now needs to explain why, with all he has said about Christ and the Spirit, human life is still so painful. So, Paul looks at suffering in an eschatological light, in light of the end that God is going to bring about for all creation, and finds it godly.

‘I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,’ writes Paul. Not only are these sufferings not worth comparing to the coming glory, as his argument unfolds Paul claims that they are evidence for that glory. The present suffering of believers is a sharing in the suffering and death of Christ. In his letters Paul always talks about his own suffering as him sharing in the sufferings of Christ; here he expands that idea to include the sufferings of all believers. Suffering is a sign of identification with Christ, he argues, and so it is a necessary stage of our journey to the eternal glory that Christ now experiences. The comparison of the suffering of the righteous with the future glorious vindication was well established in pre-Pauline Jewish thought. Jewish apocalypticism believed that the final vindication and salvation of the elect was to be preceded by a time of greatly increased suffering. As Paul has done throughout his Letter to the Romans, here he is taking a Jewish theme and extending it to include Gentiles.

In talking about suffering as an ordinary part of Christian life, Paul was also responding to the ‘prosperity theologians’ of his time. The false apostles argued that Paul could not be a true apostle because he experienced adversity. Like today’s prosperity theologians, who tell us that God wants us to be healthy and wealthy and so if we are sick and poor we must have done something wrong, Paul faced ‘super apostles’ who argued that because Paul experienced ‘weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities’ God could not be with him. (2 Corinthians 12) Paul would be appalled by today’s prosperity theologians who argue that once you ‘have Jesus’ everything will go right. I have occasionally had people, only a few of them but enough, tell me that if only I had enough faith I would not be mentally ill. If I were ever tempted to believe such people, Paul’s teachings about suffering would remind me how wrong they are. Paul is convinced that even in the worst suffering we experience God is with us, and that our suffering is not a punishment from God but something that can unite us with Christ. We may not always be able to patiently wait in hope for the glory to come, but Paul assures us that suffering is never a sign that we have been rejected by God.

It is not just humanity that still suffers in this post-resurrection world, it is all of creation, and so the entire creation is waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. According to Paul the non-human creation is so closely connected to human beings that we are all going to be saved and brought into glory together. Throughout the Bible we see the non-human creation acting as part of the community that worships God; my favourite version of this is the beginning of Psalm 19, ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork’. We are being reminded that we human beings cannot be saved apart from the rest of creation. Just as we are not saved from our bodies, but in them, so we are not saved from the world, but with it. As I have said before, our universe is almost unspeakably old; almost incomprehensibly vast; amazingly dynamic; unfathomably organic. As Christians, we also believe that it has been, and is still being, created by God who loves it and intends it to be good. As we wait with hope for the glory to come, we are to care for the non-human creation that is waiting with us, because it too is beloved of God.

This is why I say ‘Yes!’ to Paul, despite his difficult use of ‘the flesh’. In today’s short passage we have been told that we are all children of God and heirs of Christ; that suffering does not separate us from God, and most certainly is not a punishment from God; and that the non-human creation is just as important to the Creator as the human creation, and will one day ‘obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ together with us. Paul may sometimes have descended into the sexism of the society that surrounded him, and told women to be silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:34) but I am still a huge fan. Paul offers us encouragement as we live in the ‘in-between time’, the time between the resurrection of Christ and his return. In Christ we have seen what God’s new world will look like when it comes, a world of love, freedom, and life over death. Knowing that this is what is coming, we groan inwardly when love is absent, freedom is taken away, and life is shortened. But as the children of God we can follow the example of Christ our elder brother in sharing love, freedom, and life with the whole creation, as we look forward in hope for the glory about to be revealed to us.

And in next week’s reading Paul will further reassure us that while we wait nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.