Jack Hardaway
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Have you ever walked into the wrong house?
I did that once (that I remember).
It was at the beach. All the houses looked the same. I was having fun on the beach and walked back to the house. I just walked on in– to the wrong one. I was standing in a living room that just didn’t look right when I realized what I had done. Luckily no one was there. I skedaddled right quick!
The wrong house.
Sometimes we wander into the wrong house.
Sometimes we find ourselves in the house of Pharaoh. The House of bondage. How do we get back to the house of the Lord, the house of freedom?
The book of Exodus is a haunting book about moving from one house to another.
It is filled to the brim and overflowing with its own peculiar kind of Karma. In Exodus what goes around comes around.
To order the death of all male children is to have your own first born taken from you.
To oppress and exploit someone else is to have that same violence turned back on you.
To use overwhelming force on the weak is to have the overwhelming force of the ocean collapse upon you.
This happens over and over in Exodus.
God even forces the issue by hardening Pharaoh’s already stone cold heart.
There was no escape for Pharaoh. The words and the brutality that he instigated would crash down upon him.
Pharaoh becomes a tragic character and a warning to us all when we harden ourselves and take up the vocabulary and practices of the ruthless and the brutal.
The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, lest he repent. It is disturbing. There is no way around that.
By the end of the book we aren’t so much delighted in the freedom of the Israelites as we are preoccupied with our own ethical dilemmas. Anxious and jittery we look over our shoulders for the Karma of Exodus to catch up with us, the Passover Angel, sometimes called the angel of death, or simply the Destroyer.
Exodus is a haunting book.
It shows us what the house of bondage is like and what God does to it.
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All Spiritual awakenings work themselves out in relationships.
We see it today in the reading from Exodus with the deliverance from slavery.
We see it today in the reading from Romans with discerning the difference between life in the Spirit verses life in the Flesh, living in the day rather than the night.
Which house are we living in?
Scripture has different words to describe the two houses.
The Apostle Paul gets saddled with all sorts of baggage and we miss his huge overarching spiritual project that runs through almost all of his writings that answers two questions: “How do we know if we are living in the Spirit?” and “How do we live with the overwhelming diversity of gifts that comes from sharing in the Spirit together?”
That is what Paul is all about. Those two projects. To miss this is to completely miss out on the oldest writings at the heart of our faith. It is still the issue of our own time.
For Paul, living in the day, life in the Spirit, can be discerned by what it produces, outlooks and relationships that lift other people up and builds a community that serves the pain in the world, in love.
On the other hand, to live in the flesh, to live in the night, is to produce outlooks and relationships that are self-indulgent in anger, envy and divisiveness. The flesh uses others. It uses community as a dumping ground for personal gratification and frustration.
Paul is discerning the difference between self-indulgence and the freedom that is love.
To be clear the word Paul uses for Flesh, Sarx, is emphatically not a word of disdain for physical life, the Flesh is a spiritual outlook that is turned inward and stagnant, wrecked on the grudges of existence. Self-indulgence.
Paul uses a different word for the Body, Soma, meaning the fullness of God’s Spirit at work in the world made visible in the life of the church, the body of Christ, through an incredible diversity of gifts, attitudes, perceptions and people. The freedom that is love.
This is much like what Southern comedians have called the difference between “Naked, which is being in your birthday suit, and Nekked which is not having any clothes on and being up to no good.”
The diversity of the Spirit in the Body defies definition. There is only one way to live with that diversity: to give up on life in the flesh and its mockery of diversity and complexity and beauty. The flesh mocks what is different and strange. It fears it.
On the other hand, the Spirit rejoices at the different and the strange because it reveals the never-ending mystery of God’s presence in the world.
The genius of Anglicanism, in its original Elizabethan sense, is that the Church is where people happily disagree, and are still in fellowship and prayer with each other.
That is where we discover what it means to be truly Catholic, to find the holiness of God in the strangeness of the diversity of the body of believers.
Which house do we live in?
The diversity of the spirit isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. It is unpleasant. It is uncomfortable and mind bogglingly strange. It requires the grace of God to sustain it… which is the whole point.
That experience of the never-ending strangeness of life in the Spirit is how God is experienced, the God who is three yet one, who is infinitely diverse in beauty yet who is the communion of love that is singular and complete, the Threeness and the Oneness all at once.
How do we share in this life in the Spirit together?
Which house will we live in?
Have you ever walked into the– right house?
Have you found that freedom that sees the uncontained splendor of God in the unmitigated, and infuriating diversity of God’s people? The freedom that is love?
That is the house of freedom.
Just walk on in.