This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 07/19/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Genesis 28:10-19a & Romans 8:12-25.
Yesterday, the Day One Taskforce had our quarterly retreat here at the meetinghouse, and towards the end of our time together, we were talking about how we’d like to see a little more biblical teaching as part of our community practice. And I was sharing with folks about how I feel constrained as a preacher, because I see my role in the Quaker meeting for worship primarily as a prophetic one. We hope and expect that the person who speaks out of the silence during open worship is led immediately by the Spirit of God to deliver a message that the congregation needs to hear at that particular time and place. In the same way, when I prepare a sermon, I’m listening for that inner voice. I’m attempting to communicate the message that I hear God speaking to our community in the context of some chosen scripture.
So while my sermons are always rooted in scripture, and represent an engagement with the Bible as one very important way that God communicates with us, I wouldn’t call what I do in most of my sermons as “Bible teaching.” I try to give you enough context to understand what the scriptures are saying to us today, so that we can hear God’s message to us in scripture. But once I’ve accomplished that, I tend to move on to the more immediate word that I sense God giving me, and hopefully all of us, through the scripture readings for the day.
I mention all this because, as if on cue, I chose to preach on a section of Romans that I find very hard to simply “give a little context” on and move on. Paul is a very complex thinker, and most of his writing requires a fair amount of study and interpretation. Romans in particular is a very thorny text, and requires a great deal of study. Even after much study, there are many schools of thought on Romans, and this epistle has been the source of great debate throughout the history of the church.
So in preparing my sermon for this morning, I realized at a certain point that the best way to engage with this text would be to go line by line and explore it together with you. So, starting with verse 12, let’s step through this text together. I hope that in this process we’ll gain not only a bit of biblical knowledge, but also a real sense of how the Holy Spirit is speaking to our community this morning.
Exposition of Romans 8:12-25
12-13: So then, brothers and sisters, we are obligated, 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.
These first two verses really tripped me up when I started studying this passage. Here, and in a few other places in his letters, Paul is really into using this “spirit” vs “flesh” language, and frankly it weirds me out. Reading the English translation plainly, I get really strong gnostic vibes from these lines.
As a reminder, gnosticism is the idea that the material world is bad, and that the way to salvation is renouncing the earth and the physical body and becoming entirely spiritual. Gnosticism is harmful, because it creates a false dichotomy between two inextricable parts of ourselves, our physical reality and our spiritual one.
Traditional Christianity teaches that both the physical and spiritual are equally important and real; they’re two sides of the same coin. It teaches that God created both the physical and spiritual parts of our existence, and that both are created good. This is one of the reasons why the resurrection – first of Jesus, and later of us – is so important. God is not satisfied to transfer us into some purely “spiritual” realm in an invisible afterlife. God intends to restore the entire creation – body, soul, and spirit – just as he intended us to exist in the beginning.
So I felt confident reading lines 12 and 13, that Paul couldn’t possibly be espousing a gnostic viewpoint here – if for no other reason that gnosticism wasn’t a fully articulated philosophy in Paul’s time. So I dug into the original Greek text and took a look at what the key words here mean. Our English translation of the Bible is not the source text, and all translations are imperfect approximations of the original authors’ intent.
When Paul talks about “spirit” and “flesh”, the two works he’s using in Koine Greek are sarx and pneuma. When Paul uses the word sarx – translated into English as “flesh” – he’s employing a shorthand for the world of rebellion that we live in, the world that we inhabit after the Fall from grace in the garden of Eden. He’s all of those egocentric and self-protecting instincts that cause us to prioritize our own pleasure and priorities over the well-being of others and the movement of the Spirit.
Sarx is the part of us that rejects the way of Jesus because it is too costly. Sarx is the part of us that would rather hide from our neighbors than love them. Sarx is the zero-sum, survival-of-the-fittest culture that we see in so many areas of our society. In short, sarx is the unredeemed human nature that gives rise to war, famine, vast wealth inequality, and violence.
The good news is that we have another nature. Paul observes that most of the world, most of the time, is living in sarx, but those of us who are following Jesus can live in pneuma. Paul says that we are in the pneuma, because the Pneuma of God dwells in us. So we have a choice to make: Living according to sarx – the fallen nature – leads to death, but following the way of the Spirit is life itself.
Again, this isn’t gnosticism. This is not anti-body (soma). In the portion of the letter just before this, in verse 11, Paul writes: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” It would be a strange sort of gnosticism that saw the outcome of the spiritual life as the redemption of our mortal bodies!
I’ve heard someone quip that, if Paul had realized that he was writing the Bible, he would have been lot more careful. Paul wrote many things that seem problematic to us in retrospect, but Paul was writing to particular communities in particular contexts. He couldn’t have known the kind of misuse his writings could be put to one hundred or one thousand years later. We don’t see Paul being careful to strictly rule out gnosticism here, because Paul is writing before it was a major issue. Paul takes the goodness of creation for granted. The reality of the bodily resurrection is assumed; it doesn’t need to be asserted.
14: For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.
Being led by God means being children of God – and vice versa. Obedience to and spiritual unity with God are the same. This is why we are freed from the law: Law is an external constraint on those who would otherwise be rebellious, but when we are living in the Spirit we are out of the rebellion and into unity with God without requiring an external rule.
15-17: For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a 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 and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
The Spirit of God that we have received is one of adoption into God’s family. We are joint heirs with Christ. I think this is something the church skips over too often, probably because it feels too big. When we are filled by the Spirit of God, we become Jesus’ brothers and sisters. We participate in the resurrection. Jesus’ life becomes visible in our own lives as we are infused with the same Spirit that he walked in.
18: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.
There is suffering. Sometimes a lot of it. Even as children of God, we are not exempt. This world is immersed in suffering. That’s the nature of the sarx-world, the world that rebels against God and our created nature, the world that wants to put self at the center rather than walking in the Spirit.
Even as we put on the Spirit and walk in the way of Jesus, our world is still immersed in the sarx nature. We are caught up in that world like an otherwise healthy fish in a polluted stream. We can’t expect be unaffected.
But this is the way of Jesus, and this is what it means to be co-heirs with him. Jesus entered a world of absolute darkness and brought light. Thanks to him, we enter a much more hopeful world – a world where the power of goodness and love is on the move. In spite of all the darkness and suffering, we can perceive that dawn is coming. There are pockets of light everywhere.
Thanks to Jesus being God’s catalyst in the world, and thanks to the millions of everyday saints who have walked in the power of the Spirit over the last two thousand years, the world is in the process of being restored. We’re not there yet, and we don’t know when or how the decisive moment of redemption will come, but we can sense it.
19-21: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
We are not alone. It’s not just human beings who are sensing the coming dawn. The whole creation is watching and waiting, yearning to see who we will become and what we will do.
Human beings are the crown of God’s creation. God invented the human species to sit on the divine council as sons and daughters of God. Our job, our purpose in this cosmos, is to care for the whole of creation and to reign over it. So when human beings chose to rebel against God, the entire creation was caught up in the Fall. Just like children can’t avoid being impacted by the mistakes of the people who care for them, the creation was broken by our fall from grace.
The good news here is that creation has been waiting for people just like us to wake up, cast off the sarx life, and embrace the way of the Spirit. The creation is eagerly longing for our transformation, for us to be revealed as the children of God, so that in our transformation, the whole cosmos will be restored.
That healing looks like freedom for all of us. Freedom from death and diminishment. Freedom to experience God’s glory. Freedom to become the people we were always meant to be.
22-23: We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
Waiting is hard. Paul says that “the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor.” Creation suffers with us as we human beings struggle through the process of redemption. It’s a lot like childbirth, both in the disorientation and pain, but also in the joy that comes with the arrival of new life.
We who are alive in Jesus, we who can sense the dawning light of God’s kingdom, we groan inwardly while we wait for redemption, the redemption of our bodies.
24-25: For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
I’ve never given birth to a child, but I’ve been present and supported my wife through four births. I can tell you that bearing a child is one of the most intense experiences that a person can go through. It’s a good metaphor for the resurrection. Because a woman has to go through a process of both intense physical pain and, ultimately, surrender, to allow a new life to be born into the world.
Childbirth, despite all the pain and struggle, is a beautiful process, because of how it ends. That’s what redeems the agony – the beloved child who we meet at the end of the process. Knowing that this new little person is coming into the world colors the whole process. It gives meaning to the suffering, even before the baby has arrived.
Without the baby, without the new life coming, there would be nothing but pain. But because we know what is coming, because we have hope for where this process is headed, we can endure much more than we ever imagined.
This is what Paul is talking about when he speaks of the importance of hope in our walk with God. Though we journey together through a world that is still dark and full of suffering, we have hope in the new life of the kingdom that God has promised us. We see signs of this new life already, and we have hope to wait for the fullness of that life with patience, knowing that our struggle is bringing this life to every single person, and indeed the whole cosmos.
Conclusion
Having read through this passage of Romans together, we get a picture of our existence as a part of a grand cosmic drama of struggle and transformation. Simply put, the universe is vast beyond our comprehension, and yet our lives are incredibly important – central to God’s plan for the cosmos.
We are part of a bigger story than we can imagine. Just like Jacob, with his vision of innumerable angels ascending and descending, we are astonished to find that God’s dwelling is with human beings. God’s power and majesty permeates the creation. God’s Spirit dwells within us. We don’t need to fully understand – the finite cannot fully grasp the infinite – but we draw courage from the knowledge that our lives are hugely important to God. We have a crucial role to play in God’s kingdom and God’s story.
Our hope is in that story, giving us patient endurance to keep pushing even when it feels like we’re out of energy. Because new life is coming. We see partially now, but God’s cosmos is a wondrous place. We’re not just going to survive; God promises us that, when the dawn comes, we will be fulfilled.
Through Jesus, God is drawing us deeper into this dawning life. He’s at work within us, pulling us out of sarx and into the life of the Spirit. He’s transforming us so that we can take up our created purpose as his sons and daughters. He is lifting us up to sit on the divine council, reigning with Christ and caring for the creation.