We Are Both/And, Not Either/Or

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scriptures: Romans 8:1-11

A few weeks ago, Alicia, our seminarian and the mother of Julia, our baptismal candidate today, preached about Romans 6 and its use throughout history in justifying enslaving other human beings. How Augustine had said that it was better to be a slave to another person than to be a slave to lust.

That idea is echoed again two chapters later in the verses we heard from Romans 8.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law– indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

So, yeah, enslavers convinced themselves, using these very chapters, that they were doing the people they were enslaving a favor: they were helping them to keep their mind on the spirit, they told themselves, not on the flesh.

Never mind the material, fleshy, one might say lustful profits these enslavers enjoyed by not having to pay for the labor that was making their plantations so productive. Wherever our Christian faith has gone throughout history, there has also followed hypocrisy and opportunism.

But the enslavers got it wrong. That not what the Apostle Paul was going for when he wrote his letter to the Romans. In fact, this letter is his magnum opus, the one he wrote towards the end of his life to distill his theology into one crisp and concise picture. Okay, maybe not concise. Paul is not known for his brevity. But he is known for his sincerity, his conviction.

So I don’t think he meant any ill will when he wrote,

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

The interpretation of this that would have us spurn our flesh and live only for the Spirit comes from Genesis 3, when God punishes the serpent and Eve and Adam for their parts in disobeying God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the one tree. God curses the serpent and then tells Eve and Adam that their experience in this creation God gave them will be harder because of their eating of the fruit.

From this, some theologians throughout history have surmised, God has cursed the flesh. From this, Augustine invents the idea of “original sin.” But it is noteworthy that there is not one mention of the word sin in all of this creation story, and not one mention of some new chasm created between flesh and spirit.

In fact, in this same creation story, the Hebrew word for man is adam, from which we we get the name Adam, which derives from the word adamah, meaning soil or ground. It is God breathing into the soil, the stuff of this earth, that brings humanity into creation. There is no separating adam from adamah, no separating us humans from the soil, and there is no separating us from the breath of God.

We are not just hauling these skin sacks around trying constantly to tame their craven desires, so that in the end we’ll escape these sacks into the higher spiritual realm. No. Right now, in this world—God’s created realm— we are dirt that could not dance without God’s breath, and breath that would merely be wind without this dirt to give it form and function. We are both/and, not either/or.

And I‘m not sure Paul was trying to preach either/or. In fact, I think The Message interpretation of Romans, chapter 8, by Eugene Peterson gives us a clearer sense of Paul’s intention: He writes:

Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God.

Peterson is replacing the word flesh with self. He’s getting us away from this idea that our bodies are somehow inherently corrupt and moving us toward the idea that what is actually corrupting is focusing on the self above all other things, including God.

That’s where Adam and Eve went wrong: they believed the serpent when he told them they could put themselves above God.

Paul writes, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” To be in Christ means to be part of something much larger than our selves. As one commentary describes the flesh that Paul writes about, or the self as Eugene Peterson calls it, “our power is so bound by our capacities, so limited by our perspectives, so tied to our locale.” As individuals, we can only see what’s in front of us. We can only give the particular gifts God has given each of us. We can only understand the world through our own experiences. So to be focused only on the self is to vastly limit our capacity for wisdom, for joy, for love.

But to be in Christ means to be part of the Body of Christ, which means to bring our self into a larger whole. To join our gifts with other gifts of the Body. To pool our experiences together to create greater understanding. To see how essential different ways of being are to the health of the whole Body, which is to see how your way of seeing the world is essential to my well-being because it’s essential to the well-being of all of us.

“There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” To focus only on the self is a kind of self-condemnation to live in a tiny world of one’s own making, a world of scarcity and isolation and fear. That’s what Paul is talking about when he talks about being in the flesh. And that’s not what God wants for us. God wants for us to be in the Spirit, the invigorating energy of God in this world. To live in the Spirit is to be part of the Body of Christ, which is to have life and have it abundantly.

This is what we welcome Julia Ruth Johnson into today. To be baptized is to step into your part of the Body of Christ, to know that through God and through God’s community, the Church, you belong. You are essential. And you are called to create that belonging for others.

Now Julia is 17 months old, so she’s probably not going to have a deep understanding of all this quite yet. In the words of the parable of the sower we heard today, her soil is still shallow, still developing the nutrients she’ll need to embrace and understand that belonging.

That’s why we always baptize folks in community, beyond just the parents—a community made up of the godparent and all who bear witness. Today, we’ve all pledged to do all in our power to support Julia in her life in Christ, to nourish her soil so that when we teach her God’s love, when we show her how she belongs in the Body of Christ, it’ll root deeply. As she grows, she will know that she is never alone in her struggles, that she never needs to do it all herself, that the Body of Christ will always be there to love and support her, and that as she grows into the gifts that God has given her, she will be love and support to others.

May it be so.