Proper 10, Year A: Romans 8:1-11
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
July 28, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 19:10 in, in case the link doesn’t drop you in the right place).
“…you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” – Romans 8:9
I have terrible eyesight. Without correction, I’m so nearsighted that I can only see clearly when something is no further two inches in front of my eyeball. I spent most of my life wearing glasses or contacts, with my frequent new prescriptions always resulting in a fresh batch of headaches and a warped sense of depth perception as I adjusted to the increasingly distorted angles of the surfaces around me. My refraction was so extreme that light sources would frequently split into their three primary colors. I was in my thirties when I had the opportunity to look into LASIK, and thanks to having “remarkably thick corneas,” I was able to undergo the surgery. Although fading a bit with age, my eyesight is still quite good without additional correction today.
After LASIK, I began to discover new aspects of the world around me and enjoy life experiences I had missed or avoided for more than three decades. It was exciting to wake up in the middle of the night and read my alarm clock clearly. I loved that my vision didn’t fog over for several minutes every time the humidity changed. And since I didn’t need to worry about losing my glasses or contacts, I became far less afraid of water activities and readily joined my friends on sailing and rafting trips. With my corrected vision, I found freedom to explore new aspects of the world around me.
But after a while, I discovered that in gaining everyday clarity, I had lost some uncommon ways of seeing the world. I had loved macro photography, in part because it allowed me to expose others to the level of detail I could see when I looked at something close up without my glasses. After surgery, and without that super-nearsightedness, the tiny things that had fascinated me were now too far away for me to pick up the details that made them so interesting in the first place. And Christmas lights were a huge disappointment. As a child, I had always taken off my glasses while my parents drove us around to see the decorations in different parts of our town. Because of my poor eyesight, even a pinpoint of light would appear as a huge orb, and I loved the way the colors would overlap and dance in relation to each other. Without access to those light orbs, I also discovered that clear sighted people couldn’t examine the reflections of the blood vessel patterns hidden in the back of their eyes.
Strange as it may sound, I really miss those things—the seemingly insignificant parts of my life that had shaped my world without my awareness of their uniqueness. And although having clearer vision has definitely been a plus overall, sometimes I still regret having the surgery.
I think that when we approach the Scriptures, we often forget that similar things are happening.
In seminary we discussed becoming aware of the “lenses” through which we read the Bible. We start with our life experiences—the everyday events that have shaped our understanding and approach to reality. We could compare those to the basic shape of our eyeball and how that physical form can result in nearsightedness or farsightedness. The roundness or flatness of an eye changes both what and how we see, influencing the way each of us responds to various stimuli and affecting our way of interpreting the world at its most basic level.
On top of that, many of us have different types of astigmatism caused by variations in other parts of our eyes, like our corneas or lenses. Think of those like the dynamics in our childhood families, the normative expectations of the culture into which we’re born, the education we receive—that sort of thing. Those affect the details of what we see, influencing what becomes important to us over time and how we interpret or think about the world around us. Certain visual information becomes significantly more noticeable while we may become blind to things others readily see.
And then come other deposits and disorders. Cataracts and glaucoma often develop or grow worse as we age, coloring and blurring our vision or eventually even taking it away. We become so locked into our expectations that without medical intervention, we literally can no longer see the world as it is, and many of us prefer to maintain our independence by living according to the memory of our old perceptions or the limited things we still can see.
The way we see things is how we see them. There’s no moral issue in the shape of our eyes or the dips in our corneas or even the inevitable buildup on our lenses. Those things simply are. They shape our worldview and reactions, but since they’re normal to us, we often don’t even realize there are things we can’t see. As we become aware of our natural deficits, our inherent “lenses,” we turn to others to help us see more clearly. That’s where the moral aspect of things begins to reveal itself.
I think of an elderly member of our extended family. She was around ninety when she finally went to a specialist and had her decades-long vision problems corrected. However, instead of being delighted at rediscovering the details and wonders of the world around her, she chose to rage at the doctor for making her face look wrinkled with age. She then refused to wear her new glasses, rejecting reality—and her own safety—for the last years of her life in order to nurse her own distorted vanity. Or it could be like one of my favorite bosses. He dismissed any mention about changing the color of our website because it was so beautiful. Coming back in after cataract surgery, he was shocked to discover his “beautiful” tone was, in truth, the revolting puke green the rest of us hated. Once he could see the situation clearly, he apologized and had us update the site right away.
There was nothing good or bad in the way the person was seeing: they saw what they could see. But their character emerged in their responses.
Coming back to Scripture, it’s important to remember that we’re reading through our personal lenses. Our culture, denominational setting, and individual experiences each alter how and what we can see. Even with extensive education and practice in self-awareness—essentially the fitting of corrective lenses—we forget there are additional layers to consider as well. We aren’t the only set of eyes in the room: we’re looking through the translator’s lenses as well. Hard as a person may try to be neutral, they’ll always see the text through their own traditions and theology. On top of that, there’s the original author’s viewpoint to consider. They were no more a blank slate than we are. They were expressing their understanding of and experience with God through their own assumptions of what was “normal.” So we’re really looking through two to three layers of lenses as we read.
That’s a lot of potential for misunderstanding! As we become more aware of these “lenses,” we begin to realize how much our own viewpoint may be distorted. Hopefully that leads us to give others space in their own interpretations.
Overall, the point of a wisdom text—and all Scripture, regardless of its literary genre, is inherently bent toward wisdom—is to guide its readers along a general pathway through life. It warns of common pitfalls and points out landmarks we might encounter along the route. It directs our focus to particular details while simultaneously expanding our viewpoint, increasing awareness of our own peripheral vision, so to speak. Just as it encourages us to pay attention to where we are at the present moment, it also reminds us that there’s more to come, and we need to keep moving. Because of that, our modern blend of strictly literal and overly spiritualized readings often leaves us blind to the more important aspects of what the author is trying to show us.
Regarding Paul’s use of “flesh” and “spirit,” the truth is that we don’t know precisely what Paul means. No one else had used a “flesh” metaphor in the way he does here, and lacking an in-depth explanation, no one can be sure what exactly he’s talking about. The word itself simply refers to uncooked soft body tissue—anything that can be scraped off a bone. We can interpret this metaphor however we want, but the truth is that we’re all making assumptions and therefore need to be generous with one another in our disagreements and speculations. My personal guess is that he’s trying to evoke imagery of Creation.
If you turn to Genesis 2 you’ll read how, in the beginning, God made Adam, essentially as a lump of clay. There was nothing wrong about this creation. The human body was built just the way God wanted it to be. But at first there wasn’t anything important about this creation, either: it was more or less a sack of meat and bones lying on the ground. And as such, the first human did exactly what raw meat always does: it started to decay. There was nothing moral about the decomposition; that’s just how inert organic material works. I think that natural, amoral state of entropy is what Paul is trying to reference with “flesh.”
However, God breathed into the body—sharing God’s own breath, God’s Spirit—and Adam “became a living soul.” Suddenly Adam wasn’t just flesh subject to decay. He had been bound to life, made capable of choice and action. He became a body that could slow or even reverse its own decay, automatically repairing and renewing itself on a microscopic level.
We all come to Christ influenced by our own unique prescriptions and lenses. We each have our own viewpoint with its strengths and weaknesses. But in Christ, we are also part of a broader, living body, different members of a united whole. In the Church, the way of the flesh often looks like isolation. Entropy is natural; we have an innate tendency to grow apart. This happens when we become so sure that our way of seeing is the reality of the whole situation that we reject the input of other parts of the body or even cut them off. This is the path of sin and death.
The way of the Spirit, then, is to do the hard work of being a cell within the body, to accept the input of others and seriously consider whether what they are seeing or experiencing is more pressing or urgent than our own perspective and desires. It is to share in the energy, resources, and wisdom of the broader whole, working to repair our own internal damages—in part by attaining awareness of the lenses through which we experience the world—while continuing to reconcile with the cells around us so we as a body can continue on our journey as a healthy whole. The drive for humility and unity is the path of the Spirit. That is our way of life.
“…you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”