John 3:1-17; Romans 8: 14

Human spirit and Holy Spirit

Our two lectionary texts for today address the call to the spiritual life.  We read the words of Jesus and the words of the Apostle Paul.  These words are spoken to the people of a specific time and place.  Jesus speaks to a Pharisee who is fascinated by Jesus; Paul speaks to the Roman Christians, a new, often oppressed minority in the heart of the Roman Empire.  Both Jesus and Paul call people to spiritual transformation.  Nicodemus the Pharisee has to be “ born form above” in the words of Jesus and Paul’s audience in Rome is called not be “slaves to the flesh,” meaning they must rise above materialism and physical gratification.   So on the one hand we have people trying to live within the bounds of their cultural contexts and on the other we have the power of the spiritual that must transform them.   So here we see the human spirit meet the Holy Spirit.  How does that work and can that really be done? 

Friends, below the questions of the Pharisee and the new Roman Christians there is a deep question of human existence.  It is simply: are we okay?  Are we okay the way we are? In other words are we spiritually acceptable?  The answer might be:”Not quite yet. The fact that you ask this question is a good sign, but you have a lot of work to do.”

The series Mad Men (AMC) has just ended.  The fact that it was ending intrigued me enough that I watched a number of old episodes just to see what I had been missing all these years.  If you disregard all the affairs, the pillow talk and moments of drunken stupor that kept popping up, you see people honestly struggling with the meaning of their lives and with truth and untruth.   At one point Don Draper, and interestingly enough this isn’t really his real name, explains to Lucky Strike executives what the advertising strategy should be. They believe the ad should attack the medical report that smoking is dangerous.  Draper disagrees. He says:” what the consumers want to know is that with Lucky Strike they will be ok.”

“Am I okay and will I be okay?”  That is the nagging question we have.  We live in a society where people believe and don’t believe at the same time.  So we are kind of in tension, torn: “ If it is true, are we going to be okay?” If it isn’t: what on earth is going to happen to us?”  And we can’t have a strategy to cover all bases: we have to choose: have faith or not have faith. Within our culture we all do things to be accepted and to be okay:the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the neighborhoods we live in, the kind of tattoos and the size of our hubcaps.  There are all these signs that say:” I want to be okay in this culture. I want my people to say I fit in.”  But all of that is constantly changing.  Talking about ads, there is a commercial where company executives are standing in an elevator with cool bicycle messengers.  One of them asks the other:”man, are you on woo-woo?” and the other says:”Yeah, man, everybody’s on woo-woo.”  The idea is that woo-woo is like face book or Instagram.  So the executive run onto into their offices and call out:” Everybody, we’re on woowooo.?  the next scene the same bicycle messengers are alone in the elevator and the same asks: “Hey, man, are you on woo-woo. He anwers: “No, man, my mom is on woo-woo.”  It’s hard keeping up with the culture, friends. It’s hard to be okay.  We are all in the culture. So here comes Jesus calling us to be transformed spiritually and Paul who tells us not to be a slave to all that stuff.   Now there us a lot that humans do that make the world better through our culture.  I don’t believe the world is necessarily at war with culture as a lot of Christians think. We are moving to more inclusiveness and diversity and eradication of illnesses slowly but surely.  We are more diverse in our thinking.  Just look at the Miss Universe election in Japan the other day, when a hafu woman won the title.  But all that is not enough if it does not go together with us becoming spiritual and constantly trying to transform ourselves.  All those attempts to change the culture have to have their roots in a spiritual kind of compassion.  Otherwise they will not last. They will just be trends.  This means moving away from the desire to get accepted by our culture to being pleasing in the eye of God.  This means moving away from ego and power and fame .  Last week we saw this Swiss potentate named Sepp Blatter who heads the FIFA organization hold on to power because of shameless ego that uses bribery and corruption.  In his desire to be loved by the world he sells his soul.  What a terrible example to set for the world’s young people.  It is the opposite of what Jesus and Paul are talking about.  Friends, as we try to transform our culture through compassion, may we seek to be spiritual transformed , not focusing on the recognition of society, but on the desire to be who God wishes to be. After all our culture ad our world will not always like us and approve of us, but God will always love us. Thanks be to God.