This morning's reading from Paul's Letter to the Romans is part of the lectionary for Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when the Christian Church celebrates its historic understanding of God as we sang in our opening hymn: "God in three persons, blessed trinity." On other Trinity Sundays I have said that the Church's theological understanding of a trinitarian God is not a matter of mathematics, but rather a matter of experience and faith. I refer anyone who wants to explore that aspect of our tradition to Daniel Migliore's excellent and readable book Faith Seeking Understanding.
As I read the Trinity Sunday text from Romans, I was struck by a couple of things Paul says in this paragraph, which is part of the letter he sent on ahead as he made plans to visit the growing community of Christians in Rome, the capital city of the empire. More than in any other part of his correspondence, in his Letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul attempted to lay out a systematic statement of his faith, which included belief as well as practice. Much of what he wrote is of lasting value, of relevance in the twenty-first century as well as in the first century of the Common Era.
It is in Romans that Paul says "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ," and that is good news, especially if we interpret "in Christ" in an inclusive rather than exclusive way. It is in Romans that Paul says "nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God, which we know in Jesus Christ." [free translation]
In the verses I just read, Paul says to the Roman Christians, "We are debtors, not to the flesh." He breaks off his thought there and doesn't say specifically to what or to whom we Christians are debtors. Paul often writes that way. He was so eager to say we are not debtors to what he calls "the flesh" that he forgets to finish his thought and say what it is we are indebted to. More about that in a few moments.
Paul goes on to say that if you live according to the flesh, you will die. And he contrasts living according to the flesh with being led by the Spirit. He says that living by the Spirit will enable Christians to "put to death the deeds of the body" and thereby live.
Over the centuries commentators have struggled to help people understand what Paul meant when he wrote so negatively about "the flesh and its appetites." Paul's negative view of "the flesh" was instrumental in leading Augustine to conclude that the enjoyment of the body, especially in sex, was bad and should be tightly controlled or even repressed. That line of thinking contributed to the early monastic movement in the Christian Church, when people came to believe that the highest form of discipleship was repudiation of life in the ordinary human community and withdrawal to an ascetic life of prayer and physical denial. The Protestant Reformers disagreed, thank God.
The more objectionable interpretations of Paul's understanding of "the flesh" try to make the point that humanity is a fallen version of what God made good in creation and the bodily aspects of our humanity are hindrances to our spiritual maturity and obstacles to authentic faith.
For me the less objectionable interpretations of Paul's understanding of "the flesh" come to the conclusion that bodily appetites are morally neutral and they become harmful or sinful, to use a word I try to avoid, when we give them free reign without any control or restraint.
That's probably close to what Paul meant. I think it's helpful to remember that Paul never married and that he advocated sexual abstinence as the highest expression of Christian behavior. Paul's defenders say he was expecting Jesus to return almost immediately. But I don't buy that as an excuse for his negativity toward things physical, especially sex. After all, he could have said, "Jesus is coming soon. Drink some good wine; eat some satisfying food; and enjoy some sexual activity—all in moderation, of course—but be open to the desires of your body. God made you the way you are. Express your physicality as well as your spirituality, and don't become enslaved to your passions. Know how, when, and with whom to enjoy them. But don't label them as bad, dirty, or sinful." Paul didn't say that, which is really too bad.
Elsewhere in the Bible the Greek word sarx, translated as flesh, is used in a way that is not negative. Both Matthew and Mark in their Gospels say that in marriage two people become one flesh. And in the fourth Gospel's poetic discussion of the Christmas event, the author says, "The word was with God and the word was God. The word became flesh (sarx) and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth." In other words, Jesus took on our human condition, our flesh, and didn't deprecate it. On the contrary, he infused it with enjoyment, with light, and with love. I sometimes wish Luke or Peter had written about our physical nature. It might have been a healthy balance to what Paul wrote.
Much of what Paul wrote, as I have said, is of lasting value. Some of it, especially what he wrote about "the flesh," reflects a view that is no longer helpful. Paul is very helpful when he says we have not been given a spirit of slavery that leads to fear, but rather we have been given the spirit of adoption as God's children. That got me thinking about the kinds of slavery that still exist in our world. It's easy, and somewhat naïve, to believe that slavery ended in this country with the Emancipation Proclamation or with the Thirteenth Amendment. But of course it didn't. Racial prejudice is a continuing legacy of a practice that had legal sanction for far more than a century. From time to time there will be a newspaper article on the enslavement of people lured to our nation by the promise of money and a better life who end up in physical or financial bondage to the people who enticed them to our shores.
There are also more subtle and more pervasive forms of slavery. Some of them are mentioned in this morning's Prayer of Confession. In my ministry I continue to run into people who are enslaved by fear—fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of intimacy, fear of sickness, fear of death. I spend time, meaningful time, talking with people who are enslaved by guilt and shame, often originating in previous experiences as members of churches or faith communities with outdated and hurtful views of sexuality, especially sexual orientation.
Most of us know people or know about people who are enslaved by various addictive substances like tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. Whereas many churches used to issue blanket condemnations of any use of alcohol, mainline Protestant churches no longer do that, but they don't know how to talk about addiction as a disease, and they aren't very good about offering constructive help to people who want it and ask for it. Many churches that have twelve-step meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon in their basements or fellowship halls don't list those meetings as part of their weekly activities.
A healthy church is one where people can talk about their struggles as well as their achievements, their failures as well as their successes. For people to feel safe sharing their vulnerability would require a church environment where there was no gossip or behind-the-back criticism, where people worked at clear and honest communication. Most churches need to be intentional about becoming that kind of community. It doesn't happen automatically or easily.
I began by quoting Paul as saying Christians are not indebted to the flesh. The rest of his eighth chapter makes it clear that Christians are indebted to something else. The eighteenth century hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" says it this way:
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, Call for songs of loudest praise.
O to grace how great a debtor Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Those words remind us that grace is God's defining quality, and grace is freely-given love. Paul tells us we need not be slaves to anything or anyone, because God has adopted us as children and heirs of all that is God's. That is the starting point for our desire to do away with slavery in the human community in so far as we can do that. God's grace is our Good News, and it is the reason for our commitment to peace with justice for all people.
As human beings we are not destined for slavery of any kind. We are destined to live as the well-loved children of God. Paul got that part right anyway.