Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Romans 8:12-17
Summary: In Romans 8, Paul emphasizes how the Holy Spirit empowers us to do many things with God — work, live, breathe, suffer, etc. Though we in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition sometimes struggle to talk about the spirit, there are so many ways we already understand how God empowers us to heal and work together in the spirit.
Good morning everyone, so good to be together over an extended period at Highland this weekend!
I grew up coming here fairly frequently from Harrisonburg, for summer camp and to camp with my family, so I have a lot of positive memories here; it’s great to add some Daniel’s Run memories to those!
Today is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and it’s worth taking some time to reflect on Pentecost again — Pentecost is one of the most important church holidays, but it often gets a bit of short shift; we certainly don’t think of it in the same tier as Easter or Christmas.
Really, though we probably should think of it that way, particularly when we think of the church; Pentecost is one of the most definitive examples of what the church should be like; kicking off the book of Acts, Pentecost is the story of how the church really begins after Jesus ascension — and it all comes down to the holy spirit.
Now, part of our hesitancy to emphasize Pentecost I think comes back to some hesitancy around the Holy Spirit itself, which maybe makes sense — I definitely feel, of the three persons of the trinity, I spend the least time on the spirit; I have a better grasp of God the Creator, who we hear so much about in the Old Testament, and God the Son, Jesus, who is rightly the place we spend most our time. Compared to many very tangible stories of Creator God and Jesus, the spirit is a bit more ephemeral and tricky to understand.
Another part of our hesitancy with the Spirit may be because of how various Christian groups view the spirit so differently. There are still many groups that think receiving the spirit means speaking in tongues, fainting, and other actions some of us might see as a bit excessive; then, there are Christians who think that once we make a personal commitment to Christ and receive the spirit all temptations and struggles in our lives will fall away, which I also don’t think is quite right.
So, we’re kind of left asking after Pentecost: how should we view the spirit — if we aren’t expecting tongues of fire and miraculous healings, what are we expecting? How do we receive the spirit as part of the church today, and what does it empower us to do?
Before we get into some thoughts on this, I want to share a brief story of how conflicting views of the spirit sometimes cause confusion in our circles. When I was working on getting licensed for ministry, I had to fill out a pretty long form on the MCUSA website, listing places I see strengths and weaknesses in my own spiritual life and ministry. One question asked: “follows the guidance of the spirit in ministry.” Without thinking much of it, on a scale of one to five I marked this as a one — while I do pray every day, and try to watch out for God’s guidance in my life, compared to how I rely on scripture or community guidance, I felt fine about my answer.
But then, when I met with the VMC credentials committee, I was pretty surprised when the first questions, which we talked about for almost half our interview, was my view of the Holy Spirit! Luckily, since I work for VMC I knew the interviewers and it turned into a great discussion about how I think God impacts my life via the spirit — how small coincidences and nudges from God have led me to where I am; I don’t typically think of the spirit as dramatically intervening in my life like with tongues of fire, but in the words of Philip Yancey, when we start looking for marks of divine grace and guidance in our lives, we begin to see those marks; this week, I’ve been reflection on how accepting an invitation about a year ago from a pastor I hardly knew, named Tig, to come guest preach at a church two hours away has led me to this associate pastor role, and a new church family for which I’m so grateful. These types of movements, too, are clearly the work of the spirit.
Anyhow — today, in the spirit of Pentecost, we’re going to talk more about the Holy Spirit with the help of Paul’s reflections in Romans 8.
What I want to emphasize is that while Christians may not all exactly agree on how the spirit of God shows up, we know a lot about what the spirit of God is like; some we know very well, like the fruits of the spirit. Beyond those, today we’ll talk about three characteristics of the Holy Spirit that Paul emphasizes — the spirit of togetherness, a spirit of life, and a spirit of hope.
Let’s start with Togetherness:
Throughout scripture, so much of what God’s spirit is about is about bringing people together across social barriers — Pentecost, when the holy spirit descended on the apostles and they preached and were heard in dozens of languages simultaneously — is really this ultimate story of the spirit empowering the disciples to overcome the barriers that divide people: with God’s blessing, the regional differences of language and culture fell away for the apostles, and can fall away for us so that we can truly come together despite our differences.
But we don’t see the spirit bringing people together for the first time here at pentecost — the spirit is a spirit of togetherness and presence from the very beginning of the biblical story. In Genesis one, it says that the earth was formless and void, and God’s spirit hovered over the face of the deep — God’s spirit was together with creation, near to creation, from the beginning, not far removed from our world in another place. This is very different, we must remember from the creation stories of many other faiths — rather than God being some distant, immovable constant, God is immanent, close to creation, and sees creation as good.
Then, in the Genesis two creation story, God is even closer to humans than a hovering spirit — God walks in the garden with Adam and Eve; and, after forming humans from the earth God breathes into Adam’s nostrils, giving Adam, giving humanity, God’s spirit, God’s breathe, as its own.
Tig did a great job last week talking about how, in both Hebrew and Greek, spirit is synonymous with wind, and breathe — this reminds us that every time we breathe, we are breathing with God’s spirit of life — and what can be closer to us, what do all humans and even all animal life have more deeply in common than breathe?
Does anyone remember the Hebrew word for spirit that Tig taught last week? Ruach. Now, does anyone know the Greek word for the same concept? Pneuma — yeah, same root as pneumonia. We’ll have a bunch more greek in a second — so hold on to your hats.
Paul is laser-focused on the idea of togetherness as a part of what the spirit gives us in our passage today from Romans, particularly in the final two verses of the passage. Listen for how often we hear ‘with’ in these two verses: “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ–if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” This is using ‘togetherness’ four times in two verses!
One of the defining features of Christianity for Paul, and for us, is that the chasm between sinful humans and perfect God has been reconciled in Jesus via the holy spirit, so that God is now with us — and we are with God even as we continue to walk with God in a fallen world.
But it’s not just a passive understanding of togetherness — being with God is something active, something we’re compelled to; and even as we may steer clear of some of the most pentecostal understandings of the spirit, we remember that, in the words of Jesus, the wind of the spirit blows where it pleases, often taking us with God to new and unexpected places. We participate with God.
In Romans 8, Paul uses eight verbs with a prefix meaning ‘with.’ I love that Greek puts prefixes on verbs — we don’t do this too often in English, but imagine if we could say ‘co-run’ or ‘co-play’ rather than just running or playing together. The Greek prefix is S Y N, or S Y M — in Greek the M or N just changed based on the next letter of the word. We have lots of words with this greek root today — sympathy (feeling together), synchronize (time together), synonym (named together), synagogue (to gather together), and some more complex ones, like photosynthesis, to put together with light.
Anyhow — I want to read out these eight verbs, and translate them with another english prefix for together: “co.” These won’t be grammatically correct, but I think they will give us a good idea of how Paul believes the spirit brings us closer to God.
symmartyrei — co-witness; the spirit allows us to be co-witness to God with Jesus.
synkleronomoi — co-heirs; we are made to be co-heirs of Jesus legacy by the power of the spirit
sympaschomen — co-suffer; our suffering is linked to others in the church and to Jesus’s suffering on the cross.
syndoxasthomen — co-glorified; as we suffer with Jesus, so too will we be co-glorified with him.
systenazei — co-groan; when we suffer, when we observe suffering in the world and cry out, we are crying out together with God, who sees the suffering of the world and mourns with us.
synantilambanetai — co-take hold of; we and the spirit take hold of our problems together when we pray.
synergei — co-work; we are empowered by the spirit to work with God;
symmorphous — co-formed; the spirit doesn’t just empower us, but also forms us.
So, when Paul is talking about the spirit, he’s emphasizing that it lets us do things together with God — it brings us closer to God, so that we no longer live oriented towards worldly, temporary things, but towards God and towards each other; towards serving, towards healing, and towards living together in peace.
This understanding of the spirit being a spirit of togetherness fits our Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on community very well — when we come together as a faith community, we know there should be nothing dividing us; just as God bridged innumerable differences at Pentecost — we should learn to speak each other’s languages, literally and figuratively; we should seek to share as much of our lives in common as we can, as the early church did before and after pentecost; and we should seek to live lives together, where we know and can serve one another as God has invited us to do.
When we recognize God’s spirit in us, and begin to live as the Spirit of God leads us, we are called to put away the things of the flesh that divide us, and recognize the humanity of all around us. When we seek to be together, fully, with other people, as a community, we know God is there.
The second way I think we should view the Holy Spirit is as a spirit of life and healing.
We can learn so much about what God is like by looking at the goodness of creation, all around us here at Highland. Beyond creation, we can also look at what Jesus, the incarnation of God among us, was like. When we look at the attitude, or spirit, that Jesus had, we know more about God’s spirit, the holy spirit.
Of course, a big part of Jesus ministry was preaching — and we get a lot of Jesus preaching in John and Matthew. But in Mark, which we’ve spent a lot of time in as a church over the past year, we see Jesus primarily as a healer. Jesus’ preaching, Jesus’ healing, Jesus’ invitations to the crowds and disciples, these are all about physically and spiritually healing the people around him.
And of course it’s not just in the new testament we see God healing people and leading them towards life — Tig’s sermon last week on dry bones emphasizes how the biblical prophets often saw God promising, even in the darkest of circumstances, to breathe new life into places of emptiness, and brokenness, and pain. It’s once again the spirit of life that God breathed into us at the moment of creation — we were not just once created in the image of God, but God constantly breathes the same wind into our lungs; and now it’s our job to participate with God and advocate for the life and healing of others.
Today, it’s often the places of need and emptiness where we most often reach out to God. When we’re struggling with something and are in need, and God provides for that need, we know that that’s an answer to prayer.
A little while ago, Stephanie and I were talking about how often our prayer requests relate to physical health, or illness — and while I hope we can remember that we should pray more than just about physical illness, it’s good to remember that healing is one of the biggest aspects of the spirit, of God, working in both the miraculous and the mundane.
Of course, the ultimate form of healing and life we have in Christianity is the salvation God provides for us in life after death — but that doesn’t mean we don’t think about salvation in the here and now, too. We live after Jesus life and death and resurrection, after we met Jesus, but while we still struggle with living lives oriented towards the spirit — what does salvation mean for those who follow Jesus now? Paul is wrestling with this same question in Romans eight.
Methodist scholar Michael Gorman has this to say about Paul’s view of salvation: “we can [correctly] say…that the subject of Romans is salvation, but we must be careful to let Paul define for us what salvation means. It is much more than just the forgiveness of sins [or life after death]. Humans have turned from God and from others, and the result is a lack of righteousness and justice — [a unified concept in Greek] — and glory. Interestingly, these are both divine traits that can be shared with humans. For Paul, then, salvation is God’s restoration of righteousness/justice and glory to unrighteous, unjust, and glory-less humanity.”
For Paul, salvation isn’t just about forgiveness of sins — it about us coming closer to God, participating with Jesus, receiving healing and a full life both now and in the future, so that we are blessed with righteousness, justice, and glory, both for our own sake and for the sake of God.
The final facet of spirit I want to touch on is Hope:
When we think about healing and restoration, like with the valley of dry bones, we remember that our God is a God of hope — that no matter how deep the struggles of our lives, we should remember God is with us and provides hope.
As we heard from Paul earlier — the faithful will ‘co-suffer’ with God when the spirit pushes us to engage in the broken places in our world. Receiving the spirit doesn’t mean we won’t suffer — but it does mean we know that suffering has meaning, and that we do not suffer alone; Jesus suffers with us.
Now, there are many things to mourn and be fearful of today — wars, famines, floods, elections, accidents, and on and on. But it’s the hope that our actions, along with God, can make a difference that keeps us motivated and pressing forward in hope. With the help of the spirit, our small actions for good point towards and work towards a better future.
On the topic of the future — an interesting part of this passage is Paul’s discussion of adoption.
Last time I preached here at Daniel’s Run I talked a lot about Rome and Roman culture, and another way the Roman/Greek world differs from ours was their concept of adoption. Our understanding of adoption of children to raise as our own, but in Roman culture, it was very common for wealthy families to adopt gifted and talented fully grown adults and designate them as their heirs. This practice even went to the very top of Roman society, such that one Roman dynasty, that reigned for about a hundred years starting in 96 AD, is known as the adoptive dynasty — rather than having biological heirs, each emperor would adopt his chosen successor. While this may sound pretty ancient and different, a fairly similar system of adult adoption is common in the Japanese business world.
With this concept of adult adoption in mind, let’s again look at Romans 8: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
All of us — regardless of when we met Jesus, are now fully adopted as inheritors of God’s spirit of healing, of life, and of compassion and togetherness. We, though once far off, have been brought near to God through the spirit — and what greater hope is there than this?
Going on in the chapter, Paul continues working on this idea of adoption, emphasizing how the spirit gives us hope through every challenge and pain, empowering us to know that God will always be with us despite our human frailty; then, Paul closes the chapter with one of the most hopeful passages in the New Testament: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nothing can separate us from God’s spirit — the ruach that God breathed into humanity’s lungs from the beginning, the pneuma-wind of empowerment God provided the Church at pentecost, the healing spirit of Jesus that is always with us when we serve the needy and bind up the wounded, the spirit of hope that pushes us to be lights in the world — this is what the spirit should mean to us. We are, together, called to be God’s agents of life, of healing, and of hope in the world.
As we sing using God’s breathe in our lungs, and as we go, led by the power of the spirit, may we remember that we are loved, and called to love others.
May it be so.
