"Walking in the Fire"

Text: Romans 8:5-11

At long last, Paul seems to have given us something to hang out hats on: "to set the mind on the things of the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." How do we find life? Peace? By the way we set our minds. Here, at last, is some fairly plain talk. These Lenten weeks with Paul there’s been all kinds of grand and glorious talk. Talk of sin reigning through Adam, grace prevailing in Christ; righteousness coming by faith, not works; God’s justification of the ungodly; the reconciling death of Jesus. With this kind of talk, maybe on Ash Wednesday we should have passed out theological dictionaries along with the ashes!

Romans is a cosmic letter. It plumbs the depths--the depths of the mess we and our world are in; the even greater depths of grace God shows us in Jesus. It spans the ages, from the person of Adam at creation’s dawning days, to the future glory that Jesus brings in. Romans majors in mystery, profundity, majesty--it’s a towering mountain on which handholds for the practical scaling of life can seem elusive. So we come to chapter 8 verse 6--"to set the mind on the things of the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace"--and we think, here is something I can grab onto.

That what our life becomes has to do with where set our mind seems good, common sense. Set your mind on the Spirit of God and you’ll get life, you’ll have peace. It’s good advice. Plenty of people who don’t give a lick about Paul give this counsel. The language might be different--something like, think positive thoughts and good things will come; focus on where you find life and you’ll find peace. Finding life, living in peace is about mindset.

Are you suspicious of this kind of talk? It sounds so simple--don’t focus on all those things of flesh that bring you down. Your failures, your struggles, a world that, some days, just seems stacked against you. Instead, set your mind on where you find life. It sounds like it might really work, but have you ever tried this? Most days I have no idea what my mind is really set on. Have you ever tried to figure out what you really think about all day? It’s not easy. The story of our days is of one thought being interrupted by another; a moment of peace doused by a flood of worry; consciousness of God one hour, obliviousness the next.

For centuries, people of faith have looked for how hold a mindset that stays on God, that abides in the Spirit, that results in fullness of life and lasing peace. Not long after the church’s birth, some thought they’d find it by running away. Waves of people fled the cities with all their distractions to find solace in the desert. We’ve come to call them the Desert Fathers, the Desert Mothers, men and women who ran from the world to set their minds on the Spirit because, in the words of one of them, "the world is a place where they make you do stupid things."

That’s a decent plain talk definition of what Paul means when he says "the flesh." The realm of "the flesh" is the world that is full of, that is ruled by, stupid things. "Stupid" at least in view of God’s blessed intentions for us. "The flesh" is the world of fear, sin, death, anxiety, the realm in which even our attempts at good can result in things getting all botched up. The things of the flesh--it’s all the stuff that, when we look at look at our lives and everything around us, causes us to say, "What in the world is going on? I’m sick of this!"

If you’re sick of a life that seems plain stupid, a life where, given the surroundings, it doesn’t seem things are going to get better soon, running away is an employable strategy. Go to the desert, away from the difficulties of jobs, other people, the bad news headlines. Go to a place without distraction, to a setting where you can dwell on the Spirit, find life, know peace.

So people have done this. Lots of people. And the consensus of those wise Desert Fathers and Mothers is the desert is full of stupid things too. It turns out the life of the flesh follows you. Even in the desert, you’re still stuck with yourself. You’ve still got your thoughts, your wandering mind. Plenty of people found this out and went back to their distracted city life for the same reason most of us would rather watch television than sit in an empty room for two hours, alone with our thoughts.

But some stuck it out in the desert. They stayed not as escapees, but as fighters. As people ready to be dealt with by God. As people ferociously hungry for the life and peace of the Spirit of Jesus. Some lived in solitude and others in community, but all the fourth and fifth century Desert Fathers and Mothers lived this question: what does it mean, in the midst of a life full of inescapable fleshy things, what does it mean to live setting the mind on the Spirit?

There’s a story from the desert about a younger monk who went to an older monk, his Abba. The younger monk said, "Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation, and quiet, and as far as I can, I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?" Then the hermit stood up and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten flames of fire, and he said, "If you will, you can become all flame."

The young monk came looking for something more to do. Perhaps in this way he’s a bit like us, ever in search of something to add to our life so we feel more alive, more full, more at peace. The older monk responded not with more to do, but with a vision of who he might become. It was said that the vocation of a monk was to become fire. That is, to embrace the fire of God living within them in the way Jesus did when the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness and sustained him in temptation.

Paul tells the Romans that the fire of God’s Spirit burns in them, bright and alive with the life of Jesus. "You are not in the flesh," says Paul. "You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. ...If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life...through his Spirit that dwells in you."

Paul’s key premise in Romans is that because of God’s work in Jesus, the cross and the resurrection, we have become entirely new. God has poured into us the fire of life, the Spirit of God, so life and peace are not for seeking out; they’re already there, in us, alive and burning. To set the mind on the Spirit is simply to recognize who God is in us, and what that means for our lives.

In the Greek "setting the mind" is mostly about knowing one’s orientation and goal, in a way a high diver falling toward the water knows which direction the water is. There’s no question she’s going to hit the water; the dive will end with splash down. It might not be pretty, but she’s going to make it. As she falls, whatever twists and turns happen along the way, she still has a sense of where the water is, it’s her orientation. She sets her mind on the water not to draw it to her, but because it’s where she’s going.

Life and peace are where we are going. Life and peace will be the end of all creation. It will be so because Jesus passed through fleshy realm of death, was raised by the Spirit, and reigns as Lord of life, Lord of peace. All the stupid things of the world, all our vain efforts at getting through life on our own, cannot get us a better end than the one we are falling into because the Spirit of God us pulling toward life, drawing us toward peace. Our lives and our world are not determined by the things of the flesh that are passing away, but by the work of the Spirit that endures forever. To recognize this is to know the peace of Christ.

Some thirty years back writer Annie Dillard was camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She spent her nights reading by candlelight and every night great, big moths attracted by the light would fly to the flame, then flutter off with singed wings. She tells this story:

"One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire, drooped abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a second." Dillard goes on to describe the whole process of incineration until, she says, "all that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax....

"And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. ...A saffron-yellow flame...robed her like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth’s head was fire."

Each of us is a wick for the Spirit of God. If you’ve ever stood before God and anyone else and said, Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, you have said it because there is fire in you, the Holy Spirit igniting Jesus in the marrow of your bones. "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire," John said of Jesus. You know how fire is--you can’t take your eyes off it. In the end, that’s what life and peace are about: keeping our eyes on that Holy Spirit God set in us, that fire burning hot with the life of Jesus. People of the Spirit don’t need to look hard for peace, don’t need to search far for life. We’re ablaze with it—Spirit! Life! Peace! It’s everywhere we’re going. We just walk in it.