24^th May 2010

Rev Dr Max Champion at St John's UCA Mt Waverley

Lessons -- Psalm 104:24-34; Romans 8:12-27; John 15:26,27

'For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.' (Romans 8:26)

At times we can express our faith in words. At times our experience of beauty, love and suffering makes us speechless. Some things are 'too deep for words' and can't be expressed in empty chatter or eloquent language.  Other things can't be expressed because they are so 'unspeakably' awful. Our experiences of illness, affliction, barbarity, decay, disappointment and death raise such painful questions about the purpose of our lives that we find it impossible to say anything to others or God.

And so, distraught at terrible things that have befallen people we love and aghast at the terror inflicted by so-called 'human beings' on their brothers and sisters, we 'don't know how to pray as we ought'. Before God we are 'inarticulate'. We don't know what to say!

This isn't what we might have expected -- especially on Pentecost Sunday when we think of the power of the Spirit. Because the 'power of prayer' has long been put forward as the solution to our problems, the means to achieve spiritual, moral and social results and proof of real faith, we are baffled by this strange word that, before God, we are 'dumb'! On the basis of Jesus invitation to 'Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you' (Luke 11:9,10), many of us think that we can ask for whatever we need, forgetting that our requests must be consistent with 'asking for the Holy Spirit'. (Luke 11:13)

So hard it is to pray that we need 'the Spirit to intercede for us with sighs too deep for words'. We know so little of our own real needs to be able to pray properly. We can't articulate our deepest fears and hopes in a world of such miserable realities and such glorious prospects. That is why we need the help of the Spirit.

But what a strange form of help! Instead of giving us the right words and techniques or the strength to 'think positively' and to 'look on the bright side', the Spirit 'groans' with us. This 'sighing' of the Spirit 'for us' and 'in us' is the work of God moving the 'saints' (Romans 8:27) to do the will of Christ in the world with all their heart and soul and mind and strength.

Specifically, this means living by hope in the midst of a suffering world. In Romans 8 it is not only the Spirit who 'groans' but the 'whole creation has been groaning until now' (v22). There is no place in the universe where affliction, sin and death have not scarred the beauty of the earth or the grandeur of human existence. The universe has not yet reached fulfilment.

The Christian community isn't spared suffering. For 'not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we await adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies' (v23). The whole creation, the Christian community and the Spirit all 'sigh' as we experience suffering and look forward in hope.

No wonder we don't know how to 'pray' as we should! It isn't natural to share the sufferings of the world as a sign of hope. Yet it is the Church's calling to do God's will in a world where hope is thought of as the absence of suffering and suffering as the absence of hope and prayer is regarded as the means to overcome suffering and make things better.

This is the opposite of what we usually think about 'spirituality'. We want the Spirit to meet our needs and give us inner peace. There's no shortage of advice on how to meditate to achieve harmony with oneself and the cosmos by escaping suffering. Nowhere is it said that, together, hope and shared-suffering are signs of God's love for the 'whole creation'.

For Paul, however, suffering love is the product of a lively hope that springs from knowing that the crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead. Because goodness has triumphed -- despite the dreadful power of evil and death that caused the death of the One who embodied the being of God and our humanity -- we may live by hope. In his risen body, we have been given a 'taste' of life that is God's will for 'everybody'.

Because of what God has done in him, we are called to live in 'glorious freedom' characterised by the absence of fear and despair. Such living springs from knowing that we are 'children of God' and 'fellow heirs with Christ'. Because we can't live in this way in our own strength, the Spirit opens our hearts, minds and wills to the wonder of God's grace for us in Christ (v16), enabling us to live by hope in the midst of the 'real world' marked by affliction, sin and death (v26).

The Spirit frees us so that we may be vulnerable to the 'groaning of the creation' and empathise with those whose lives are scarred by assaults on their dignity. Genuine hope -- the fruit of the Spirit -- should draw us into deeper solidarity with our brothers and sisters who suffer and a greater openness to the will of God.

Hope and vulnerability are gifts of the Spirit which have nothing to do with what we usually think of as 'spiritual' things. Paul doesn't speak of the 'freedom of the soul' but of 'the redemption of our bodies' (v23). Our hope is in God's renewal of the whole material creation, including our flesh and blood humanity. Therefore we are called to be in solidarity with those who abuse their own bodies or whose bodies are abused, afflicted, disabled or dying.

It is no accident that, in Jesus Christ, the Church acknowledges that 'the Word was made flesh' -- not 'soul/spirit'. That is why the creeds affirm that the body of Christ was incarnate, crucified and raised from the dead as the sign of hope for the material world and every person. That is why the Prayer of Humble Access in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper speaks very concretely about the 'body and blood of Christ' -- not about Jesus' philosophy, principles or spirituality -- being given for us.

What is at stake is the Gospel itself! Our understanding of the scope of our hope in God's future and the extent of our solidarity with others would be diminished if we were to think of the 'Spirit' apart from Christ's body.

Against a growing tendency to 'spiritualise' the Gospel, Paul insists that the Spirit intercedes in our prayers so that our deepest unspoken longing for the redemption of our physical, relational and personal lives can be expressed to God the Father. It is good to know that the Spirit 'helps us in our weakness' and enables us to hope for the redemption of our bodies even while we suffer with those whose bodies are abused, by others or by themselves.

To 'live in the Spirit' is to be prepared to defend the 'life of the body' and to protest against its abuse and misuse. It means that in our permissive society -- where the body is idolised and mistreated -- Christians must respond to the great ethical issues of the day in the light of the hope which has been embodied for 'everybody' in Christ.

The way in which we treat our bodies is of utmost importance for those who are 'led by the Spirit'. We mustn't separate 'spirit' and 'body' when it comes to issues like abortion, euthanasia, genocide, sexuality, racism or disability. We can't ignore recent data from Belgium that 30 percent of people who die from euthanasia did not give consent or recent data in Victoria recording a 600 percent increase in 'socially convenient' late- term abortions since the passing of legislation in 2009 or the cases of those who committed atrocities in the name of ethnic cleansing.

The ways in which we use our bodies are not matters of indifference. They must not be treated as unimportant 'physical matters' not worthy of a truly 'spiritual' faith.

The Spirit still groans at how so many of us suffer because we abuse our own bodies or the bodies of others. But the same Spirit also enables us to speak a word of mercy and hope to everybody -- including those / us who have abused the body. For it is God's will that, at last, our bodies shall be freed from the bondage of sin, affliction and death, in a form that we can scarcely imagine.

Who of us can fully understand such a bodily hope or adequately respond to this calling now? Nobody! That is why we need the Spirit's help. For the Spirit takes up our deepest longings for the world and enables us to know what it means to be vulnerable to others, to suffer for the Gospel of the crucified and risen Lord and, therefore, to be filled with hope.

So may we pray, with longing and confidence, 'Come Creator Spirit!'

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Rev Dr Max Champion is minister in the St John's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia. Dr Champion is Chair of the Assembly of Confessing Congregations within the UCA.