8th Sunday after Pentecost 26.7.09 The Spirit of adoption
The last two Sundays we have been hearing from St Paul in the letter to the Romans; that in Baptism we have died to sin, and that the wages of sin are death. The message is that we have been set free from sin, and just as a prisoner who walks free would not return to the jail, nor should we return to the captivity of sin.
To sin is foolish as well as being bad. Today’s epistle reading continues the same thought. Nature no longer has any claim on us. From now on we live a spiritual life. We have been adopted by God the Father to be His own children. And He has empowered us to live accordingly.
We are inclined to think of the moral demands of our Christian lives as being a heavy burden. This is because we are still thinking as creatures of the flesh. We are thinking from a worldly point of view and looking at the spiritual message as though it were a message from Mars, something alien and outside of our world.
St Paul is telling us that we can understand the moral demands only if we realize we have become different people through our spiritual adoption. We are actually changed by receiving the Holy Spirit. You are a new person; you have been transformed. You would no longer even want to do the sinful thing. It is not a burden to be good anymore than it is a burden to eat or breathe; it becomes the natural thing to do.
We tend to reduce Jesus’ teaching to ‘have a nice day’, something manageable. Instead of saying it is too hard, we say OK the bar is higher but with His Spirit within us we can jump higher.
It is possible because He makes it possible. We are now creatures of the spirit. So a large part of overcoming sin is simply understanding that we have been changed.
Still we might say: Granted I am a new creature etc, but I am still trapped in the flesh. We need the Spirit to work on us at the level of understanding. He can provide that service too. He can help us to think like new people. Lord, make us see, understand, so that we can make the leap; the ‘leap’ of recognition that enables us to leave the old ways behind.
Bring what is buried within us to the surface so that we can claim the power that You want us to have. And thus to live holy lives.
It is so easy just to muddle along.
Consider perfectionism: everyone has some hobby or area where perfection is sought.
Clothes, house, stamp collection, pet dog... Everyone has something. So do the same for your spiritual life. Redirect the energy. Let God be the focus. Seek goodness.
How good can we be? How far can we go? We hear people advocating positive thinking, as though we can be anything we want if we just set our minds to it. I could be an astronaut, or Prime Minister etc... Not necessarily, because some things are just not meant to be. But we are all meant to be good, to live in union with God. We can all achieve that; and we can all make continual progress to better and better.
It is not such an effort required to be good. Not ‘effort’ as in rowing a boat. More like getting on the high powered vehicle; a speed boat not a rowing boat. The effort is required in just getting into the right groove.
From the Gospel of the crafty steward: the worldly wise show more enterprise in being crooked than we do in being good. At least we should work as hard to be good as others do to be bad!
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