Setting the Mind on the Spirit

Christopher H. Edmonston

Romans 8: 1 – 11

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church

July 10, 2005

 

I.

            The commercial from a couple of years ago tells a story:  a large, in fact, huge New Jerseyesque Italian contractor (you know, a great big guy with pizza stains on his shirt) speaking to a young couple in a kitchen that looks like it is falling to pieces.  He tells the young couple with their children running around – “OK here’s what we are going to do for your kitchen remodel – we are going to come in here and rip all this stuff out.  Counters, walls everything – then we’ll put up plastic over the big hole we are making to the outside.  Then next we are going to inexplicably disappear for four weeks – but don’t worry about it.  We’ll be back.”

            And then comes the tag line of the commercial – “Isn’t honesty refreshing?”

            Compare that “honest” approach with the commercial that lately has inundated our television at home.  The man is quizzing the service manager at a Midas brake shop.  The service manager is hooked up to a lie-detecting, polygraph, machine.  The man is listing all the services that he thinks he might need – brake job, transmission, air conditioner, tune up…on the list goes.  Right at the end he drops in “massage.”  The service manager says “yes” by mistake, and the look on his face is one of embarrassment.

            Midas then begins to pitch its brake job deal – lifetime guaranteed brakes for 39.95.  The driving theme of the advertisement is that Midas is so honest that even when they make a mistake – like telling someone that they give massages – they are true to their word.  And so the commercial ends with the customer getting a back massage in the Midas garage – he sings “Trust the Midas touch” the Midas jingle – and the 39.95 brake job number is on the screen.  30 seconds of story, promotion, and an idea that they are really, really honest all wrapped into one commercial.

            There is a problem though.  As the camera fades, in almost invisible type at the bottom of the screen are the phrases:  “Offer does not include ceramic brake pads,” and “Costs may be substantially more than advertised.”

II.

            Ah, the disclaimer.  Most commercials have them – car commercials, video game commercials, sweepstakes commercials, medicine commercials.  The first commercial I have just described actually makes fun of the second one in a way.  The character from New Jersey makes no disclaimers as he tells us the truth about the underperformance of so many of the items that we buy and sell.  Much of the time items do not live up to promised performance, and most of the time in our litigious society we need the disclaimers.

            After all, we live in the disclaimer world.  Who among us wouldn’t say that more often than not the costs far outrun the advertised prices?

            Today and next week I’ll be preaching from Romans 8 and I want us all to pay attention to how many disclaimers about God, Christ, and the overwhelming grace of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit that Romans and its author, the apostle Paul, actually make.

            I’ll give you hint as to how many there are – there are none.  Not one.  So I have a question, in a disclaimer world, a world in which we are used to amendments, exceptions, and conditions – in our world with our eyes and ears how do we hear and understand this text – this 8th Chapter of Romans?

            Martin Luther once said that to be a preacher was the most difficult of all tasks because the preacher was under constant assailment from the devil.  Or to put this another way (to lay a disclaimer on it if you will), the preacher is always being confronted with the sin and pain and personal failure of his or her own life, as well as the events of the historical moment.

III.

            It strikes me today as I stand here that I ought to make another disclaimer and tell you that, because of the sin of the world, the evil of the hearts of men this sermon has changed many times this week.  Terror raises its head in London, US soldiers die and are captured in Afghanistan, the world watches as diplomat after diplomat is kidnapped and executed by some group or another in Iraq….

            One of the things that I cannot do as your pastor, your preacher up here, is make disclaimers about that kind of sin.  I cannot passively explain away evil, I will not tell you that these are easy times in which to live.

            Of the oddities that strike me as worthy of mention is the oddity that is success of Joel Osteen – a man about my age, much better looking than I, and a very charismatic preacher.  If you do not know him yet you will.  Just tune into CNN or FOX News and you will see him eventually.  He is the pastor of the largest church in North America – in Houston TX claiming some 26,000 or so members.

            He is also the proprietor of the “feel good” and “faith as positive thinking” movement.  He sells books.  He is ubiquitous on the Christian lecture circuit – if you believe “it you can be it” he tells us.  If you can just be positive and let go your mistakes and put the sin of the world out of your mind you can be blessed – God will bless you when you do this.  That is his gospel.  And people, to the tune of bestsellers, and radio shows, and a single church membership which is larger than our whole town are eating it up. 

Perhaps in a world of negativity and pain, people are willing to grasp onto any word of hope that they can get?

IV.

            Now I don’t think that his message is heretical.  I don’t think he is a false preacher or some great evil voice in the nation.  I do think however, that his is not a gospel that lets the fullness of the story of Jesus or of the witness of Romans wash over the listener.  By denying suffering he denies a lot of the story of Jesus and he alienates many of us.  I wonder how he will explain away the bombs in London, or the best friend’s leukemia, or the loss of a husband and brand new father on a hillside half a planet away….    

In Romans 8 Paul sets up a disctinction that Elizabeth (2005 Howard Memorial Summer Seminary Intern) in her sermon last week alluded to.  The distinction is between body and spirit – or more completely the way of the world (body) and the way of God (spirit).  The world, Paul rightly points out, is ruled by the law of God and is rife with sin.  Imperfections, because of sin, happen.  We are all sinful and all finite -- bad things will occur from time to time despite our best efforts.  Suffering is real and not easily explained away or denied.

Writing in The Christian Century an author describes going to the Waterford Crystal Plant in Ireland.  A place where if only one imperfection is found in the final product the entire team is charged with the error – the packers, the shippers, the cutters, the fire stokers, the mold makers, everyone is charged and the whole team starts again.  They start over.

God (thankfully) does not deal that way or demand that kind of perfection – we don’t have to start over.  Rather God wants us, when we are sinful and short-sighted to be connected back to Him somehow.  The farther we get away the more God pulls us to return.

Thus Paul writes about God giving us the Spirit of Christ in order that we might have peace and life and be called away from a life full of sin and death.  To do this we must offer ourselves to God and in doing so keep our minds on the spirit.

“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace,” Paul states in Romans 8:6.

What a strong statement that is!   Keep our minds on the Spirit!

V.

Well, preacher, you ask, what does that mean?  It means that no matter how awesome the news cycle gets, we, as people of faith in God, Son, and Spirit, are to keep our gaze on God. To know somehow that good might yet come from some of this.

Naive? Perhaps -- especially if we deny the suffering and "don" rose-colored glasses in the face of real loss.

Faithful? Yes -- if trust God enough to allow a longer view of history to serve as a map. For the truth is none of us know how the events of today yet bear on tomorrow. We are far too finite to possess this power.

VI.

When I was a little younger, Dionne Warwick pitched her psychic friends and promised to discern the right way of life for her callers by interpreting persistent puzzles and divining the future. Where is she now? Well, no longer with her psychic friends. I wonder if any of them saw this future coming?  I guess the puzzle was just too hard….

My friends, there is a difference between a hoax and a faith - between a pyschic and a pastor - between a trust and wish.

Real faith means that we trust in God, our minds on the spirit, even when we would be tempted to embrace despair for the weight of the days. 
            Keeping our minds on the Holy Spirit, no matter what the footprint of history may look like, is the most basic and essential of all the tasks of faith.  When tested though, it is the first thing that we lose.  And there lies the tragic irony:  the mind of the Spirit is the thing that we most need to be able to survive the calamities of our lives.

VII.

One wonders of the state of faith in Alabama this morning as the storm bears its terrible weight upon them.  One wonders about those who lost loved ones in London on Thursday morning.  One wonders how we would do, how we have done, under similar circumstances…

The task you see is not to explain away evil.  Not to point fingers and give disclaimers about how justified we are and how evil others can be.  It is not to say that those who hurt us, those who fight wars against what we might stand for – that they are the ones who are sinful, of the flesh, of the world, as Romans might say.  And that we are sinless people of the Spirit always.  That is not the point.

The point I think is to proclaim the Spirit and its fruits – joy, love, peace, kindness – and call the church to live by them and for them as best we can.  After all, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

VIII.

One more point that needs to made this morning is a point that already has been made in our worship.  But at HMPC we are trying to do not less.  Yes, it might be a little melodramatic to say as much, or it may be too small to even be an historical footnote on the story of this tumultuous week in the news cycle.  But with more than 40 children registered for our Bible School, and nearly 30 adults from every walk of life in our church 19, 20, 23 year olds – and Albemarle residents too; and more 10 folks from our churches youth ministry going to work with the homeless and the underpriviledged children of Charlotte, we are making a witness to life and peace.

Small witness?  Maybe.  But it needs no disclaimer.  Our goodness, and our faith in God who is gracious even to a world that often forgets its way, needs no further explanation.

May God grant us faith and courage to keep our minds on the Holy Spirit, and in so doing proclaim the kingdom coming and faith everlasting.

Amen.