Romans 8:12-17

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. 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 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.

Sermon Text

We worship a God of liberation. Every act of God is a act that brings freedom to the soul, freedom from the captivity of Sin and Death, and freedom for the joyful obedience that defines a life of faith. Christ described our entry into this new reality as a “new birth,” a transformation of who we are into who we can be. The New Birth is rarely given those exact terms, Christ uses it when he speaks to Nicodemus and scarcely elsewhere, yet the concept is discussed in a few different terms throughout scripture. For Paul, the author or Romans whom we read from this morning, the concept of New Birth is described in terms of our “adoption,” into Christ’s family.

For Paul the transformation that comes in the life of a Christian begins with our receiving the Holy Spirit and that reception is the moment of our “adoption,” or our “birth.” Here’s a question for those gathered here though… When is it that a person receives the Holy Spirit and is born again? What signs are there that this transformative process has begun?

Some people are likely to say “Baptism!” This moment where water is poured on the head or immersed around us, is a declaration of faith overseen by a minister of the Church, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and in this sacrament we join the Church and are given a special dose of God’s grace… Yet this is not the moment of the New Birth. We baptize infants after all, and baptism as an infant does not guarantee a life of faith – although it is an important start to one.

Other people expect some outward and physical sign of the Spirit’s reception. For those who have had exposure to the Pentecostal movement they look for “glossolalia,” an outpouring of seemingly nonsensical speech. Others, again tied to holiness churches, may look for fits of dancing, or spontaneous singing, or shaking! All of these could be a sign of the Spirit, I will not deny that they could be, but unless more lasting signs remain with them, they are just for show.

The Spirit arrives on its own time and in its own terms and so there is no rubric we can write to define when exactly the Spirit will arrive or how exactly it will manifest. Some people will have the Spirit come to them before they are baptized with water, other people the moment the water touches them, and still others years and years after they have found themselves in the Church. There are, however, only three definite things that define someone who has experienced the New Birth, and I admit wholeheartedly that I am taking these categories from a sermon by John Wesley – he just said it best, and who am I to perfect on perfection?[1] The three things that define a person who is born again are the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

Faith is the thing that undergirds our entire lives. In Greek the word for “faith,” (πιστις,) means “to be convinced.” We are convinced that God is good and active and present in our life and from that convincement we go forward to let ever aspect of our life be colored by our understanding of who God is. Yet, faith is not just saying you believe in all the right things in all the right ways, it is a change in the deepest parts of our soul and a reworking of our minds. Faith changes our mindset and allows us to see that God follows through on God’s promises – that the grace that has transformed other people’s lives is for us too! We can be free and we will be free!

Free from what though? Well, from sin and death! The hardest call in the Christian life is to abandon sin and to chase after righteousness. Again, this is a place we try hard to come up with lists of specific actions that define what is sinful and what is good. While there are obvious candidates – murder is bad and feeding people is good – there is a better way to address this. When we grow in faith, we grow in all virtues alongside them. Sin are those things motivated by anger and fear, by greed and lust, by cruelty and apathy. We know that we are being transformed by God’s grace when we are no longer acting based on these instincts, but on the greater virtues of humanity – love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We do not need long rubrics of dos and do nots, we only need to know if we are acting on one instinct or the other.

The second sign of the New Birth is Hope. Hope is a hard thing to hold in our hearts. Emily Dickinson gives my favorite definition of Hope, “Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all…”[2] Hope has been described in similar terms throughout history, something that is frail and that is always in danger of being snuffed out – but that does, and must persist. Hope for the person of faith carries a more definite form – we are hopeful because we have faith, and that faith feeds the fires of Hope. To go back to Dickinson, we truly believe that Hope never stops singing in our hearts, and we get better and better at listening to its song in the midst of life’s troubles.

The final sign of the New Birth is love – an authentic outpouring of care for those around us. It shouldn’t surprise us that the crowning virtue of all virtues comes from our acceptance of the others. As we grow in faith and escape the cycle of our own selfish sin because of it, we naturally grow better at caring for others. As we grow in hope, we do not give into the cynical dismissals of our fellow human beings and instead reach out to them with more and more love in our hearts. This love should not just be doing things for people, but actually changing how we see each other. In his Sermon, “On a Catholic Spirit,” Wesley put it this way,

“Love me… with the love that is long-suffering and kind; that is patient, –if I am ignorant or out of the way, bearing and not increasing my burden; and is tender, soft, and compassionate still; that envieth not, if at any time it please God to prosper me in his work even more than thee. Love me with the love that is not provoked, either at my follies or infirmities; or even at my acting (if it should sometimes so appear to thee) not according to the will of God. Love me so as to think no evil of me; to put away all jealousy and evil-surmising. Love me with the love that covereth all things; that never reveals either my faults or infirmities, –that believeth all things; is always willing to think the best, to put the fairest construction on all my words and actions, –that hopeth all things; either that the thing related was never done; or not done with such circumstances as are related; or, at least, that it was done with a good-intention, or in a sudden stress of temptation.”[3]

Love is something that is above all and through all, it is something we cannot escape in any interaction we have with one another. Love should be more than just something we say or do, it must be something that transforms us in our deepest parts. I am someone for whom love comes easily, I do not need much reason to care for another human beings, and for that I am thankful. Yet, I am also someone for whom faith is a hard won reality, and so someone for whom hope can sometimes feel quite fleeting… What I hope we can understand is that none of these three fruits are always one giving birth to the other in a straight line, nor are they constant.

We have peaks and valleys in our faith and sometimes the difference between one and the other can be extreme. Our hope in life is that we are constantly closing the gap between our highest highs and our lowest lows, constantly moving upward toward something better. Yet, the reality is sometimes we are hit by something that can demolish everything we thought we knew about God and about life… In those times it is hard to build back without a lot of help.

Yet, we worship a God who never stops moving and is always willing to build us back up. You may find yourself today in a place where you feel like you’ve never really known faith, hope, and love like the Spirit brings, or you may feel like it has been a long time since the Spirit worked all of them in you. There is good news for all of us… The God who gives the Spirit of Adoption, the New Birth that transforms us, gives it freely and fully. If we have cast off that gift, let us receive it once again. Let us chase forward to the goal, and find ourselves transformed by the work of the Spirit. – Amen.

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[1] This sermon is an adaptation of John Wesley’s Sermon 18 – the Marks of the New Birth. Available at: https://www.resourceumc.org/en/content/sermon-18-the-marks-of-the-new-birth

[2] Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Tomas H. Johnson. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachucetts. 1951) Available at: https://poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314

[3] John Wesley. “Sermon 39 – On a Catholic Spirit” available at: https://www.resourceumc.org/en/content/sermon-39-catholic-spirit