Remember Who and Whose You Are
Scripture Reading: Romans 8:12-17
During my first year of seminary, I, and pretty much every other student in my class of approximately one hundred, was required to take Old Testament in the fall semester. While Princeton gives you a lot of leeway to choose from all sorts of electives, most every student takes Old Testament in the fall and then New Testament in the spring. It’s a rite of passage.
The Old Testament course at Princeton Seminary is like boot camp for seminarians. It’s rigorous. It’s challenging. And it builds camaraderie through shared suffering. To give you some insight into the exacting standards, virtually everyone receives the same grade on their first paper: rewrite. A rewrite means that your paper was below B level. It’s the seminary’s way of saying, “Welcome to graduate school! This isn’t freshman composition.” The highest grade you can earn on the rewrite is a B. And for a bunch of high achievers, which describes pretty much everyone at Princeton, a B is akin to failure.
The midterm exam is legendary. Students begin stressing about it weeks beforehand. They form study groups, obtain copies of old exams from upperclassmen, and do their best to memorize outlines of entire books of the Old Testament, which is quite a challenge for books like Genesis, which has 50 chapters. The Black student group even hosts a prayer breakfast the morning of the exam.
On the day of the midterm, just minutes before class was to begin, like a lot of other students I was pouring over my notes trying to cram one last data point into my brain. (Was that 1 Kings or 2 Kings? Elijah or Elisha?) Some students were still milling about in the hallway while others were taking their seats. That’s when I saw a woman who was not in the class—she was a second-year student—enter the classroom and walk up to the chalkboard. She proceeded to write, “Remember who you are and whose you are.” Then she left as inconspicuously as she had entered.
My first thought upon seeing her message was, “That’s a bit much. It’s just an exam.” But the truth is, like so many students, I did feel pressure to prove myself, perhaps more than most, because as an older student (I was thirty-nine), I hadn’t taken an exam in almost 20 years. To do poorly on the midterm after having had to rewrite my first paper would have caused me to question whether I belonged in seminary.
Remember who you are and whose you are. That’s the message that Paul conveys in today’s passage from Romans. It’s a matter of identity. Our fundamental identity, according to Paul, is that we are children of God the Father and heirs with Christ the Son through the witness of the Holy Spirit.
If all that sounds rather Trinitarian, then award yourself a point because today is Trinity Sunday. I always feel the need to explain Trinity Sunday. Unlike most other special days of the Christian calendar, Trinity Sunday doesn’t celebrate a particular event in the life of Jesus or the church, like Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost. In fact, the word “Trinity” never even appears in the Bible. However, while the word itself may not be there, the concept certainly is. We see it in passages like this one from Romans 8 where Paul talks about God as three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain the Trinity. Many have tried and failed. A metaphor that can adequately convey the mystery of the Trinity does not exist. Not H2O as solid, liquid, and gas. Not a three-leaf clover. The Trinity is and ought to be a mystery because it concerns the very nature of God, which is something that the human mind cannot fully comprehend.
John Calvin, our 16th-century Presbyterian forbear, described the Bible as God’s baby talk to human beings. By that he meant that in order to be understood by humans, God had to lower himself to our level by using human language, even though human language can only grasp at divine truths.
What Calvin said of the Bible applies equally as well to the Trinity. Have you ever made baby talk to an infant—those exaggerated babbling and cooing sounds that mimic the sounds a baby makes? In the same way that we make nonsense words to babies that they nevertheless intuitively understand, so God uses human language to speak to us of a divine mystery.
As Trinity, God is three persons, but God is also one substance, as the theologians say. Both are true at the same time. We must hold the two ideas together in tension.
This is hardly the only example of such a tension of opposites in Christianity. While the Trinity concerns the nature of God, there’s also the nature of the second person of the Trinity. We believe that Jesus is fully human, and we believe that Jesus is fully divine. Both are true at the same time.
How about one more? The kingdom of God is already and not yet. Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God as something that is already present and also as something that is not yet fully present.
Three and one, fully human and fully divine, already and not yet. To be a Christian is to be intellectually ambidextrous. But our focus today is the Trinity, an idea that Paul alludes to by first talking about “the flesh.” He writes, “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh, you will die.”
By “flesh,” Paul doesn’t mean the human body. He’s not talking about so-called “sins of the flesh” as being morally worse than any other type of sin. The key to understanding what Paul’s getting at is this word “debtors.” “We are debtors, not to the flesh,” he writes.
If you’re like me, you’re waiting for Paul to complete the thought. “We are debtors, not to the flesh but to….” What? What is it? Don’t leave me hanging! To whom are we in debt?
One of the challenging things about reading Paul is that he doesn’t always think in a straight line. He begins with one idea, which leads to another, and then still another, sometimes all in the same sentence, which is what we see here. Paul begins by saying we are debtors (that’s one idea), but not to the flesh, and if you live according to the flesh you will die (flesh = death, that’s the second idea), and then finally he says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body we will live (Spirit = life, that’s the third idea).
So, to sum it up: (1) We are debtors; (2) flesh = death; and (3) the Spirit = life. For Paul, this is literally a matter of life or death. What he’s talking about is the nature of our relationship with God. To live according to the flesh is to labor under the expectation that we can climb our way up to God by doing things that God approves of. That includes both works of personal piety like reading the Bible, praying, and giving to the church, as well as works of social righteousness like serving the poor and welcoming the stranger.
That’s not the way to God, Paul is saying. It’s the way to death! Flesh equals death. “If you live according to the flesh, you will die.”
To live according to the flesh is to labor under the expectation that we can climb our way up to God by doing things that God approves of.
This kind of bottom-up theology, in which we try to climb our way to God by our own effort, is what most other religions espouse. But not Christianity. The gospel is not bottom-up but top-down. We don’t need to make our way to God because God, in Jesus Christ, has made his way to us. The Father sent the Son into the world, the Son redeemed the world, and the Spirit makes this truth known to us. God has taken all the initiative and done all the work, which explains why we are debtors.
But we are more than debtors, Paul goes on, we are children of God. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God,” he writes. “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” A spirit of slavery says, “I must always be working, always be doing something to prove my worth to God.” There is no let-up. No rest. Yesterday’s effort may have been enough for yesterday, but today is a new day.
Contrast that with the spirit of adoption that enables us to call God “Abba, Father.” If God adopts us as his own, that means that God is not some distant deity far removed from human cares and concerns. It means that God is not an angry tyrant whose wrath must be appeased. It means that you belong to God. It means that you are not a stranger or a servant but a child of God whose relationship with the creator of the universe and the God of Israel is such that you can call upon him as Father.
I’m going to end with a brief story. I started by talking about the rigors of the Old Testament course I took in seminary. Another course I took in my third and final year was much more chill. For one, it was for two credits rather than the standard three. And it was offered pass/fail, so we didn’t have to worry about grades. There were no exams, and I don’t remember if we even had to write any papers. The course was Piety in the Reformed Tradition. Without getting too much into the weeds, the Reformed tradition is the branch of Protestantism that Presbyterians belong to.
Basically, we read about the spiritual practices of some (sort-of) well known Presbyterians, mostly from the 17th century. These were not exactly books that you’d bring with you to the beach. But because there were only a handful of students in the course—maybe ten—the course was set up more as a conversation than a lecture, which was a real privilege, because Professor McCormack was a world-renowned scholar. Not only were we able to pick his brain, he’d even sometimes let his professorial guard down and share something personal.
For example, he told us there was a particular guitar note in the song “Tangerine” by Led Zeppelin that he found deeply moving at a spiritual level. I instantly pulled out my phone and called up the song on YouTube. “What part?” I asked, as I pressed play. He waited for it and then pointed with a smile, “There!”
Another time, a student asked him something along the lines of, “What is the basis of your faith?” I don’t remember the exact wording, but I remember his response. Ever the theologian, he referred to a theological document, something called the Heidelberg Catechism. It dates to the 16th century and is a series of 129 questions and answers. Professor McCormack proceeded to recite the very first question and its answer from memory.
Question: What is your only comfort in life and in death?
Answer: That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
On this Trinity Sunday, like Professor McCormack, let’s remember who we are and whose we are.