Retro Unrighteousness

Retro Unrighteousness

April 10, 2011

Fifth  Sunday Of Lent

Year A Romans 8.6-11

            Techies call them “skeumorphs” – useless but comforting visual cues bolted onto a new technology to keep users from losing their psychic footing in a shifting world. The word derives from two Greek terms, “tool” and “form,” so a skeumorph is something that takes on the appearance of a tool we no longer need except as a compass point on our emotional maps.

            You know the kind of thing: an angular slot in your Levis for the pocket watch you’ve never carried; the tiny picture of a garbage can at the bottom of your computer screen so you can throw things away, even though wastepaper basket and document both consist of nothing but ones and zeros; spoked wheels on your car though you’ve never piloted a horse-drawn carriage, and a certain level of horsepower under the hood though the relative strength of horses doesn’t come up much in your daily life.

            Paul challenges believers to cast off the skeumorphs of a sinful past and live conceptually in the new world Christ inaugurates. “Flesh” in this passage refers less to specific behaviors than to a general mindset. The old life offered certain tools we had to use to get by: acquisition, self-assertion, retaliation, things like that. “If you want to stay alive,” explains Holden Caulfield in “Cather in the Rye” as he admits to a gross insincerity, “you have to say stuff like that.”

            Paul contrasts that mentality with life “according to the Spirit,” which again has less to do with televangelists and healed gallstones than with an overall angle of attack on life. The Spirit is big in this passage. Of the twenty-one times Paul uses the word in Romans 8, one third of them are in this paragraph. “Life” marks another major concept: the term appears eight times in Romans 6-8, a quarter of them right here. “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit,” he writes: that’s Christianity 101. We all receive the Spirit upon salvation. The problem is that our radical conversion to the Kingdom of Heaven can assault our souls with vertigo as we lose our trusted fleshly landmarks. So we smuggle in the skeumorphs of the old life.

            The passage seems to say that we do not need to sidle into salvation with watch pockets that bulge with an emergency supply of sin or virtual containers of trashcan carnality that we hoard because they might come in handy. Instead, we surrender to the indwelling Spirit who blows away those inadequate crutches and replaces them with living limbs.

Time to Take Out the Trash,

Doug

Collect

Holy Spirit, you breathed life into the body of Adam in Eden, into the body of Jesus on Easter, and into the Body of Christ at Pentecost. Blow today through the bodies and souls of Your saints that we might cast off the anchors of sin that keep us temporarily safe but eternally stuck, and instead raise the sails of our souls to the prevailing wind of eternal life. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Blessing

May the Lord free your soul from the flesh,

            That you might lose all your former plans.

May the Lord fill your soul with the Spirit,

            That you might follow wherever He leads.

May the Lord fortify your soul with eternal life,

            That in the present moment you might find forever.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.