Poolesville Presbyterian Church
06.03.12; Rev. David Williams
It’s been odd, watching that transition from the physical to the virtual. I’ve been there, and it’s been peculiar.
There was a time, not so long ago, when getting a video involved a physical trip to something called a video store. I know this might be hard to conceptualize, but let me attempt it. Ever seen one of those Redbox automated DVD rental kiosks, the ones that sit outside of grocery stores and pharmacies? Imagine one of those, only the size of a whole store, with a much better selection and actual human beings who know stuff about movies who can make recommendations and help you find things. It was like that.
But now? We just stream things, or get them on demand. We don’t need to go anywhere, or see anyone, or do anything other than point a remote at the screen. Every last part of the transaction is virtual, to the point at which we start feeling annoyed that we have to move to the microwave to get popcorn. Isn’t there some way to automate that, we think, as we noodle through the Netflix menu wasteland? Nope. Seen it. Nope. Seen it. Nope. Seen it. Oooh, look! Rutger Hauer in Hobo with a Shotgun! That looks perfect for family movie night.
That movement towards a disembodied reality has also played its way across the floor of my rec-room. Back when they were smaller pups, the kids accrued vast piles of plastic toys, to the point at which our basement looked like a Toys-R-Us right after it had been hit by an F3 Tornado. At some points, a tornado might actually have made it a bit cleaner, sort of like the “Voooom” at the end of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. I hope I’m not spoiling the ending of that classic for anyone.
There was a time when you couldn’t walk across a surface in my house without worrying about encountering some tiny plastic object, specifically the dreaded one by two standard thickness Lego brick. For years, these pernicious little critters seemed to be everywhere, or...to be more accurate, not everywhere. Just in the places you were stepping with your bare feet on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But then things began to shift. Instead of saving up their hard-won allowance to get things, the lads began to save for Dee El See, or downloadable content. The things they wanted weren’t real anymore, but were instead part of the virtual world. Slowly but surely, the material objects have begun to disappear, and more and more of life has become peculiarly intangible. Instead of toys, there were costumes and plugins for Little Big Planet. Instead of books crowding shelves, there was data that filled the drive of Kindles. Instead of piles of records or boxes of tapes or stacks of CDs, there came music that sits invisible in the cloud and on portable drives. And yet still the house seems cluttered.
Our movement away from meatspace reality and into the realm of the virtual has been remarkably abrupt, spanning half of a generation. But for all of that transition, for all of the shift we’ve made from things you own and can touch to things you own yet don’t materially exist, we still might have some trouble grasping just exactly what the Apostle Paul was talking about in this morning’s reading from the Letter to the church at Rome.
As we reach the middle of chapter eight of this highly complex letter, Paul has just finished giving us an explanation the role of the law and the role of faith in our salvation. Romans is the farthest thing from a soundbite letter. You can’t break Romans down into single verses or sections and be able to fully grasp its meaning, because that’s not how it was written. From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith. It’s a long and convoluted argument that he begins in chapter one, and that ends at the end of this chapter.
When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s interesting is the degree to which he managed to couch the end result of that struggle in terms that aren’t matter of fact. His writing here isn’t about the specifics. The struggle is deeply there, the groaning and the effort of faith, but the reward...well...Paul there gets a little coy.
He speaks about life governed by the Holy Spirit, but that’s in the now and not in the fulfillment of God’s time. He speaks about a glory to be revealed, but then he doesn’t actually reveal it. Paul speaks instead in soaring and rhythmic cadences, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty of what awaits us in glory...we don’t hear a whole bunch of details.
We do, however, hear that our lives must be lived in a particular way if our relationship with God is to be a healthy one. Paul says in verse 13 that “...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.” We hear that...but what does it mean? How can we do something, if we don’t do it with our bodies? Is Paul here somehow suggesting that any action of the body is wrong? Is Paul maybe saying that we’re to live out faith in such a way that it’s separate from our meatspace reality, as unconnected from real life as virtual space is from the flesh and bones of being?
No, of course not. What Paul is absolutely not suggesting is that faith is a disembodied thing, or something that exists separate from the way in which we live. Paul focuses a great deal on the manner in which Jesus followers are to spend their day-to-day lives. Our ethical and moral behavior...meaning the stuff we actually do with ourselves...matters tremendously to Paul. We need to pay attention to what we do with these bodies we seem to inhabit.
When Paul says that we should not “live according to the flesh,” and that we need to “put to death the deeds of the body,” he is talking about how we need to orient ourselves. Faith is the thing that defines the trajectory of our lives, and so the focus of disciples of Jesus can’t be themselves.
Our hungers, our wants, and all of the collateral yearnings of our physical and cultural selves cannot be the end towards which we focus and orient our being. This is Paul’s intent when he warns us not to live kata sarka, or according to the flesh. That manner of life is diametrically opposed to the ethic of self-giving love that defines both the teachings or Christ and the central ethical teachings of Paul himself.
Paradoxically, our culture’s move away from the physical and into the virtual hasn’t reduced our tendency to be self-oriented. If anything, we now face the challenge that our immediate desires can be met immediately, as the virtual world serves up exactly what we want to see and experience, right now...or at least as quickly as it takes us to punch in our credit card information. Living kata sarka can easily be done in the virtual world, because what we want is just an instant away, almost as close as the neurochemical twitch of a synapse. But that life is a life of isolation, in which we exist in a world filled with objects...real and virtual...instead of a world filled with other souls. In that world, there is no life. It’s a dead place, in which we ourselves die spiritually.
Instead, Paul asks us to reorient ourselves towards the Spirit, whose nature and highest gift to us is love. If we orient our being not towards our own hungers, but towards spirit-led relationships with those around us, then those basic hungers will not consume us. Governed by that as our defining value, our every action and every deed of our body, becomes a part of what Christ was working in the world. That is the very nature and purpose of faith.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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