ASM121 "The Children of God" (Sermon)

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you got questions he's got answers even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in [Music] well hello from california i'm here at my new house we just got here there is no furniture there is no internet so in a very primitive state and as i just settle into a new home i wanted to share with you a sermon i gave on my last day in tallahassee last week before driving all the way across the country i talk a little bit about what i think the church is at its best now i'll warn you it is preachy it's a sermon it's not a talk but i still thought it was something that might interest all of you so hopefully i'll be back next week with a normal episode maybe although i may just take a week off as i'm not entirely sure there will be anything to record with in my house a week from now but we'll see anyway here is the sermon i gave at good samaritan united methodist church in tallahassee florida on my last day in tallahassee you're listening to the sermon podcast feed of good samaritan united methodist church in tallahassee florida the ring today comes from the book of romans chapter 8 verse 12 to 25 so then brothers and sisters we are deaders not to the flesh to live according to the flesh for if you live according to the flesh you will die but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live 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 the spirit of adoption when we cry abba father it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of god and if children then heirs heirs of god enjoined heirs with christ if in fact we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him i consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us for the creation wait with eager longing for the revealing of the children of god for the creation was subjected to futility not of his own not result will but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from his bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of god we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now and not only the creation but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly while we wait for adoption the redemption of our bodies for in hope we were saved now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what is seen but if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it impatience the word of god for the people of god good morning good sam it's good to see you uh i am mike mccarth nolan corners the internet as science mike uh i write books i do some podcasts i fly a couple hundred thousand miles a year talking to people about science and faith and doubt and justice and really whatever people want to talk about that they have trouble finding a space in which to do so but this morning i'm not science mike i'm just mike uh because i'm home i'm a lifelong floridian a lifelong tallahassee boy and for the last few years my home and my family have been this church and it is an honor to be here with you this morning and to have the opportunity to talk to you about that lunatic we call paul it's really strange uh we we got the lectionary here for our messages and i was i was drawn to the pauline passage this morning uh and if you've ever stood in a pulpit before you before then you know the gospels are always a safe bet right like you get in those four books everybody knows them everybody loves them you can challenge people but not so much they're angry at lunch you can lift them up it's a really good scene whereas paul paul can't go two paragraphs without saying something inflammatory or that pushes our buttons and i think i understand why paul lived in an era in which all of the the well-known figures in the church all the church planners all the leaders had something in common they knew a man named jesus when he walked the earth can you imagine when they got together what they would talk about do you guys remember that time peter got out of the boat and walked over to jesus on water do you remember when we ran out of food he did the thing with the fishes and the loaves paul didn't have those experiences what did paul have a blinding light on the road to damascus that no one else saw so the rest of paul's life he's like no seriously i'm an apostle too he had such tension with the the main church the head church in those days in jerusalem he got a lot of license because he wanted to take the gospel to gentiles and the leaders in the church of jerusalem go oh gentiles huh have fun with that go plant your churches and it's only when he started to get the attention of jews throughout the diaspora in the mideast and across southern europe that they started to say wait a second paul what are you what are you talking about his his conflicts with some of the other disciples are legendary and romans is such a special book in the life of paul it's the last of the epistles that were quite certain that paul wrote and unlike his other epistles letters to churches that he helped start at the time he wrote romans probably in corinth he'd never been to the church of rome even though he was a roman citizen the point of his epistle was to announce a possible visit and in this opus of paul's he lays out what he understands to be the way to follow jesus christ a bizarre mix of mysticism and legalism which happened to become the most influential way to be a christian for the rest of human history you see romans is a book that's more formal than we typically see from paul because he's trying to define his spiritual and theological legacy so these are important words to wrestle with and believe me no one sees the irony more deeply of me covering paul i caused quite a stir on the internet once by saying in a particular interpretation of paul's writings i thought the mainstream view was correct i just thought paul himself was wrong so if you're not a bible nerd that's something we call heresy so i do love about this passage is paul's pontification of the flesh versus the spirit now if you've grown up in church at all this image of flesh and spirit is usually used to make you feel very guilty and to make you feel very ashamed and to say you should be more spiritual and less fleshly you should care more about the bible and less about pizza you should care more about prayer and less about sex your focus should be on these non-bodily things of god and you should rid yourself of this filth and can i be honest from that for many years of my life i carried an extreme amount of shame about my body and its sensations and its impulses i viewed my body as something separate from myself a divine spirit of god trapped in a corrupted container anybody else ever felt that zone somewhat common in the west but as crazy as the idea struck me for so long and i have spent several years trying to cast it off completely it turns out that paul's image here has tremendous scientific merit your brains developed in an environment where food was very scarce where competition was fierce and no one could be trusted and so your hind brain the most ancient parts of your brain small in volume sit very close to your spinal column they get first dibs on everything that comes from your senses only then do they get passed on to this forebrain that has altruism and poetry and art and compassion in the very structure of our brain we are set for paul's dilemma of spirit versus flesh to feel confused by our own actions sometimes i marvel when i eat that tenth donut why on earth did i do that i'm trying to lose weight surely eight donuts was sufficient this this divide shows us altruism versus serving the self socialization versus isolation working for tomorrow versus being obsessed with today and we have all kinds of strategies to try to cope with this personally i'm a spreadsheet guy uh we've been planning a move across the country for years and to make that smooth and effective and easy i make spreadsheets i have dozens and dozens of spreadsheets related to our move and i've planned for every possible contingency so that things will go smoothly my family will not feel stressed and most importantly never under any circumstances do i have to ask someone else for help because i got this i'm self-sufficient frankly i'm quite brilliant and yesterday morning despite all of my careful planning and beautiful spreadsheets cross-referenced with multiple sheets calcul calculations embedded in the cells single figures completely changing dynamic models of poetic mathematics i found an unplanned contingency furiously i searched through these files for one phrase movers don't show up here we were with over 200 boxes and furniture sitting in our living room a semi-trailer parked in front of the house and eight o'clock became nine o'clock and nine o'clock became ten o'clock and still no movers so i called them and said hey gentlemen we have a move today yes yes okay where are you i'm about two and a half hours away our truck broke down oh so see you in two and a half hours no uh we can't get there i hate calling people i don't like to ask for help so i called my dad i said dad i need you to come over and teach me and jenny and madison and macy how to pack a moving trailer so our stuff is not broken when we get to los angeles dad said no problem i'm on the way he understands dad doesn't call people for help either my wife however is not afflicted with this condition she called justin and other people and as i waited for dad to pull up cars kept showing up and people kept saying what can we do and i said i don't know this isn't in the spreadsheet so our friends took it upon themselves to devise a moving strategy for us and in stifling july tallahassee heat and humidity people gave from their scarce free time on a saturday to help us get moving i've counted in my life as maturity that i plan so well i've counted it in my life as something faithful to god to be a good steward of what i've been entrusted but i learned yesterday that sometimes what we believe is our maturity is a more elaborate ruse to dwell within our flesh and to keep it comfortable because my friends god created us to live in community and when i am too reticent to say i need help i say i need no one i stand above you all i learned yesterday that i don't and that's an essential thing to understand romans chapter 8 because as we talk about spirit versus flesh as we talk about being children of god children of god who cannot earn what they have already been given do you get that you can't earn god's approval because you already have it the the key that unlocks this entire phrase is there is no condemnation in christ those who follow the spirit are free it's the beginning of romans 8. this flesh versus spirit thing that seems so heavy-handed actually starts out with the most freeing idea that i can imagine there is no condemnation those who are in christ are free you see paul in his life wrestled to understand the essential truth of what jesus came to tell us something that the earliest followers of create christ called the way paul was smart enough and well-read enough and connected enough to the early church to know that jesus had provided a yoke to interpret the hebrew scriptures rabbis were people in that culture who helped interpret the law via something called a yoke so when jesus says my yoke is light what he means is my way of interpreting the torah is life-giving and what was that message it's so simple one love god with absolutely everything you have your heart your mind your soul and two to love your neighbor as yourself you've probably seen t-shirts that say love god love others there is no step three but that misses an important point because in the story where jesus explained his yoke some smart ass said oh yeah who's my neighbor and jesus brought the fire he told a story about a jewish man lying on the side of the road battered and bruised from assault and then he explained how the religious the civic and the economic elites walked by saying unclean and didn't render any aid and something you may mention in the parable of the good samaritan is that every one of those people was completely justified to do so it was a valid interpretation of the torah to say that man was unclean it was a valid understanding of property rights to say i have no obligation to help they had every right to walk along and then a good for nothing backwoods samaritan comes by if you understand the context of judea and samaria they weren't cozy maybe like tallahassee and gainesville but more intense but the samaritan pours oil and wine on the man's wounds the best antiseptic and soothing agents he had available he lifts him off the ground he carries him to an end and he says whatever expenses are required to care for this man put them on my tab i'll be back to pay he had no obligation to do so jesus sends the story so who was a neighbor to this man and they were shamed into silence there is no condemnation in christ i don't tell you about romans 8 to make you feel guilty about your flesh to tell you who you should be or who you could be but instead to tell you who you already are because a few years ago the religious elites saw me on the side of the road and they said that i was unclean my family found ourselves for the first time in my life spiritually homeless with nowhere to turn isolated afraid cynical embittered depressed but the good samaritan showed up and i came to this church and they said there is no condemnation for former atheists there is no condemnation for people who don't have their theology worked out yet there is no condemnation for author speaker podcasters who don't have a college degree and it was a miracle because that lack of condemnation my friends is how we escape the bonds of the flesh it is never through mastery it is never through effort it is through no condemnation in community when you are loved when you are safe when you are affirmed when you are told you are a child of god you cannot earn what you already have that is when we live in the spirit and you are masters at it because what's the big deal in offering no condemnation to an upper middle class straight white dude in america that's easy i don't care where you stand on any issue that's easy but the miracle of this body is when america is trying to tear itself apart this church keeps drawing itself together the miracle is not simply that you came at a moment my family needed it most not once but twice but also yesterday a room was packed full of people talking about the work of justice in our world people who say it's not enough to socialize it's not enough to come to worship how do we take this out to the streets how do we let the city of tallahassee know they are children of god where do we find more people on the side of the road today there's a hunger in this body that transcends politics and lines of race and lines of identity and opinions about things that we post on facebook in this church there is no condemnation a few weeks ago we listened as rika shared her story she came down stood right there and rika and betsy our woman pastor served each other communion a scandalous act in so much of this city and then what happened a single father and his son and a couple struggling with a new disability walked up and they served the eucharist the good gift to this body and there was no condemnation because a good sam there is no condemnation for trump voters or hillary voters or gary johnson voters at good sam there is no condemnation for straight people gay people trans people at good sam there is no condemnation if you are black white hispanic latino or any racial identity because in good sam those in christ are free and who are those in christ the children of god everyone they cannot earn what they have already been given my friends i don't tell you romans 8 so that you know who you should be or who you could be i tell you romans 8 so that you will remember who you already are and because this church is open so is our table and now we gather in a ritual that began 2 000 years ago when christ said to his followers this is my body broken for you this is my blood poured out for you remember in this moment that christ died but more importantly that christ conquered death for us so whether you're a christian not a christian a member not a member an atheist an evangelical you are welcome at this table we invite you to experience a risen christ in bread wine and a community of people who will never condemn you thanks for listening to our podcast if you'd like to join us in person good samaritan united methodist church is located on capitol circle southeast across from southwood in tallahassee florida