Romans 8.1-17
Earlier this summer, I counseled a young adult in the congregation.
Dane is twenty-two. He has autism. He told his mother he wanted to meet with me because he did not know what to do with his grief. His sister, only thirty years old, had suffered a stroke. Soon thereafter she died.
Thinking about how I might counsel a parishioner who is cognitively impaired, I realized the extent to which the church has psychologized pastoral care. Seeing no other choice, I determined not to be confused with a therapist. I decided to be a preacher. I sat at a ninety-degree angle from him to avoid the eye contact that discomforts him. And after listening to a few spare details about the Jordan he loved, I told Dane— I proclaimed to him.
“Jordan is dead, but Jordan is not gone,” I said to him.
“She’s not?” genuine astonishment creeping into his voice, “Where…?” and his voice trailed off.
“Her life is hidden with Christ in God,” I said.
“So she is gone.”
“No,” I said, “She’s in God and God is closer to you than you are to yourself— than I am to you right now. That means Jordan is nearer to you right now than I am close to you.”
He started to smile.
“And if your sister is hidden in God, then whenever you’re feeling sad— or just whenever you feel like it— you can talk to her while you talk to God.”
“I can talk to God?” the absurdity of the notion hit up against his literal mind.
“Sure you can! We call it prayer. And every time you do it, you can do it, knowing that Jordan’s listening too because she’s right there with him.”
“But how?” he asked me like I had just told him to free climb the Washington Monument.
“Start by calling out to him— just like Jesus prays, address him as “Father.””
“And he’ll hear me?” he asked, the incredulity rising in his throat.
I nodded.
“He’ll hear you as surely as he listens to his Son.”
“Can you,” he wasn’t sure if it was an appropriate request, “Can you teach me?”
“Nothing would make me happier,” I said.
And we prayed— and he prayed, talking to the Father and Jordan both— for twenty minutes. When we were done, he asked if I would teach him again in case he forgot how.
I started to stand and show him the way out of my office, but he remained fixed on the sofa, his astonishment turning to anxiety as he puzzled again over his question, “But how?”
I started to repeat myself but he shut his eyes against the tears and shook his head.
“But how do you know— how do you know she’s in God? How do you know she’s with Christ?”
“There is therefore now no condemnation…” but not for everyone. The absence of condemnation does not include all. Note the subordinate clause: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Just so, Dane’s own question lingers at the pivot point in Paul’s epistle.
How do you know?
How do you know if it applies to you?
How do you know if you are in Christ Jesus?
Thus far in the Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul has twice announced the turning of the aeons that has occurred as a result of Christ Jesus rescuing humanity from the clutches of Sin and Death. Now Paul shifts to the present tense in order to describe what God’s liberation looks like, first in the case of his auditors and second in a creation-wide, cosmic context. Whereas the Lord’s antagonist Sin has dominated the drama in the letter’s first seven chapters, with this shift in chapter eight God’s Enemy exits the stage. Paul scarcely mentions Sin in the remainder of his correspondence to the Romans. In Sin’s place, Paul now introduces a character only seldom mentioned heretofore, the Holy Spirit.
The consequence of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ is not simply exoneration but new creation, not merely “no condemnation” but “life in the Spirit.”
But again—
Pardon and the Spirit’s power are not the possessions of all creatures.
They redound only to those creatures who are new creations.
They are “for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
They are for those who have the Spirit.
How do you know?
Chapter eight not only marks a shift in tense and topic, it is also the Bible’s most sweeping apprehension of the Holy Spirit, gathering up all of the New Testament’s elements into a single argument about the new eschatological change wrought by Jesus Christ.
Previously, Paul wrote to the Romans about God’s love “poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Now, Paul depicts what it looks like when those who are in Christ Jesus receive the Holy Spirit.
Verse 6: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means life and peace.
Verse 7: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means that they please God (while those who are not cannot).
Verse 11: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means that just as the Spirit raised Jesus from the dead so too will the Spirit raise them from the dead.
Verse 14: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means they have a new name (“children of God”), and thus a unique status (brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus).
Verse 15: Those who are in Christ Jesus the Spirit adopts into the triune family such that we may address the Father of Jesus as our Father and enjoy as our own the inheritance the Father has destined for the Son.
Behind Paul’s exhaustive yet astonishing description of the radically altered situation of those who are in Christ Jesus lies an even more bewildering claim.
Verse 9: Those who are in Christ Jesus have the Holy Spirit of Jesus.
Indeed the language Paul uses for those who have the Spirit mirrors the language of possession (oikeo) that he used in chapter seven when recounting Sin’s occupation of the law. The Holy Spirit inhabits those who are in Christ Jesus. As Karl Barth observes in his commentary on the passage, to refer to those in Christ Jesus is to simultaneously refer to those in whom Jesus Christ dwells. This is so because the only gift the Spirit gives is himself. According to St. Augustine, since scripture always only speaks of the Holy Spirit as being given by the Father or the Son, “The Holy Spirt is God given by God.” Those who are in Christ Jesus, in other words, have God in them. Augustine merely echoed the assertion of the church fathers, such as Basil the Great: “The illumination the Holy Spirit bestows is himself.” Admitting that Paul’s epistle produces an “audacious doctrine,” Augustine writes, “The Holy Spirit’s gift is nothing other than the Holy Spirit…the love which is of God and which is God is specifically the Holy Spirit; by him God’s love is diffused in our hearts, and by this love the whole Trinity indwells us.”
But again—
By us Augustine does not mean all.
By us Augustine refers to those who are in Christ Jesus.
By us he means those who have the Spirit.
How do you know?
“There is therefore now no condemnation…”
As good as Paul’s gospel pivot sounds, the predominant theme of his argument is nonetheless that “the penultimate outcome of God’s act in Christ is the existence of two kinds of people, those still in the situation before the great change and those in the new situation, those who live “according to flesh” and those who live “according to the Spirit.””
In other words—
There is therefore now— still— condemnation for some.
How do you know?
Sometime in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, fellow authors took the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor to a dinner party in New York City. At some point in the meal, the table talk turned to the sacraments— Eucharist and Baptism. An avowed Christian, O’Connor later reported an incident from the dinner to her friend and correspondent Elizabeth Hester in a letter dated December 16, 1955.
O’Connor writes:
“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. . . . She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.
I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if [the sacraments are symbols, to hell with [them]."”
Reflecting on her retort, O’Connor wrote to her friend, “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about [the sacraments], outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
That is, all the rest of life is expendable if the water and loaf and the cup are not the center of existence.
“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have 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.”
Martin Luther writes that the cry “Abba! Father!” is the only sound God hears. “That cry rings out,” Luther says, “it pierces the clouds, fills heaven and earth, rings out so loudly that the angels when they hear it think they have never heard ought at all before, in fact that God Himself hears nought else in the whole world but this sound, “Abba! Father!”” But how do you know if you are one of the children to whom the Lord listens?
Notice— this is crucial.
When Paul addresses the Christians at Rome, he assumes that they already are in Christ and have the Holy Spirit of Jesus. This is an odd supposition. After all, the apostle neither planted the church nor met any of its members. They are all of them strangers to him. He knows only a handful of their names. He does not know anything about the character of any of them. He has not reviewed their resumes. Paul could not tell you who has taught Sunday School for twenty years or who manages the volunteers at the homeless shelter, who forgave her husband or who raises their hands high during worship. Paul could not distinguish between the church member who believes in her bones that Jesus lives with death behind him and the church member who shows up out of habit or as a hedge against loneliness. On what basis then can Paul presume that they are all already in Christ and have his Holy Spirit? It’s not as though it applies to everyone.
How does he know?
How can he so address them?
In the Book of Acts, well before he sails for Rome, Paul travels through the inland country of Asia Minor and arrives in Ephesus where he stumbles upon some self-identified disciples.
The first question in Paul’s interrogation of them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”
The would-be disciples reply, “No, we have not heard there is a Holy Spirit. Who is that?”
The second question in Paul’s interrogation, “Into what then were you baptized?”
And they answer that they were baptized into John the Baptist’s baptism of repentance. Paul responds by shaking his head, searching for some water, and baptizing them in the name of Jesus, but their baptism is not complete until Paul lays his hands on them and invokes the Holy Spirit to inhabit them.
That’s Acts 19.6.
Luke reports in verse seven that Paul baptized “about twelve of them in all.”
A dozen who now were in Christ Jesus.
A dozen who now had his Holy Spirit just as permanently as the dove that alighted upon Jesus in the Jordan River.
Remember— the epistle’s chapter divisions are misleading. Paul wrote one letter which he expected to be heard aloud in a single sitting. Paul did not number his sentences anymore than you number the lines in your emails. The chapter divisions in your New Testament were added by a lecturer at the University of Paris at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Paul did not write a “chapter seven” and a "chapter eight.” The chapters are not discrete units but component parts of a single argument. And this part of the argument does not begin in “Romans 8.1” but all the way back at the beginning of “chapter six.”
As my teacher Beverly Gaventa writes in her commentary, the locative sense of those who are in Christ Jesus originates in Romans 6.3:
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his [through baptism], we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him [through baptism] so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died [through baptism] is freed from sin.”
Thus, the liberation described in Romans 8 is the consequence of the baptism into Christ and his death described in Romans 6. That baptism is what accounts for the Roman Christians being in Christ and having the Spirit, and this explains why Paul says nothing at all in Romans 8 about faith as a condition.
You don’t believe your way into Christ Jesus.
You don’t get the Spirit because you got faith.
You are in him and have him because God baptized you.
Baptism makes a creature a child.
As Jesus himself says at the end of Mark’s Gospel, “Baptism saves.”
I was halfway between sitting and standing over my office chair.
His eyes still shut, Dane shook his head and repeated his question, “But how do you know? How do you know she’s with God? How do you know she’s in Christ?”
I sat down and crossed my leg, hoping the nonchalant body language would convey my certainty.
“Was Jordan baptized?” I asked him.
His head shaking turned to nodding.
“Well, there you go,” I said to him, “That’s how I know. At her baptism— whenever it was, wherever it was, however tiny or unbelieving she was— the Holy Spirit promised, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.”” And trust me, that dove has claws.”
After Jesus hijacked me as a soon-to-graduate high school student, I went to the pastor of the church where I worshipped— Woodlake United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia— and I told him that I wanted to respond to the faith Jesus had gifted me.
“I want to be baptized,” I told him.
He shifted in his leather arm chair, “Have you already been baptized?”
I nodded and told him how during the first week of Advent in 1977, two weeks after the theatrical release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a pastor from Immanuel Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod drove his way cautiously through an early winter blizzard to Lima Memorial Hospital in northwest Ohio.
Like Nicodemus, the pastor came in the dead of night.
In secret.
A small determined grandmother met the pastor at the elevator outside the maternity ward. Spying the clerical collar beneath his winter coat, she introduced herself and then led him back to the new mother’s room.
With a small, silver pitcher and a pink, plastic bedpan— he’d brought the one, a harried nurse had provided the other— he had prayed over the water before pouring it over the thin hair of my pink head.
“But I don’t remember it,” I argued when the pastor told me the church does not re-baptize.
“You think you need to remember it for God to have done it to you?” he parried, “Whether you remember it or not, God baptized you. You’ve been in Christ this whole time even if you only met him this year. So really all I can say to you is, “Welcome home.””
Sunday after next, Stephen and Lindy will bring their son, Lyle, to the font for God’s visible word of baptism, a promise God says that we can all see. And during the sacrament we will pray an invocation first uttered by the church father Hippolytus of Rome almost two thousand years ago:
“Almighty and everliving God, who have chosen to give new life to this your servant and to forgive all his sin, send your Holy Spirit— the Spirit of Jesus— upon him: The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and strength. The Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and of your holy fear. Mark him, O Lord, to be yours forever, in the power of your cross and resurrection.”
Therefore, there will be no condemnation for Lyle.
Not only will he have a permanent place in Christ Jesus, he will have the Holy Spirit. Or rather, the Holy Spirit will have him— and that dove has claws.
The promise is not too good to be true.
But it is too good to believe easily or reliably.
Therefore, come to the table.
God speaks another visible word.
With creatures of bread and wine, the Spirit of Jesus repeats what he said at your baptism, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.”
This Dove has Claws