sermon thoughts for today

Romans 8 , it can be argues, is the climax of Paul's theology. He has spent the previous seven chapters of the book, and remember Romans is much more pure theology that his other letters, expounding this new covenant which God has established in Christ. In the first few verses of chapter 8 it becomes his task to nail this down quite firmly - before he moves to the more famous end of the chapter  - which if you do not know I would suggest you read.
Life, for Paul, quite clearly is in Christ and in life in Christ. However, the way he seems to set up a duality between flesh (sarx) and spirit has been misinterpreted over the years. Heresies soon sprung up claiming that you could do what you like with your body so long as you were alright with God on an ethereal sort of level - nothing would touch that....but Paul is not setting up any such excuse for bad behaviour, for him, sarx is that which is not of God - and we are called to be of God - in other words, of the Spirit.
The Parable of the Sower - our other reading today - is clear that that which is of God will bear fruit. I think, too often, this parable leave many people worrying whether they are the right sort of seed in the right sort of soil or whether their faith will get blown off course or ravaged by life. Into this context we might inject the confidence which Paul offers so freely, we are both good soil and good seed - we are those who are living in Christ and that is our underlying character. Of course there are challenges and of course there is sin but we are, at root, those who live in the Spirit and are of God.
We are also, as I have hinted, both seed and soil. Whilst the traditional interpretation of the parable is to ask where we are planted, and the answer is in the rich soil of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we also should consider that we are planted in - we are both those who receive the word of God and those who share it - our harvest reflects this.
But back, with this weeks news, to the idea that some things are of God and some things are not. Two big news stories have caught our attention - the first being the scandal around News International. This is a very political subject at heart but I will go so far as to say that when a human being denigrates another human being in any way, it is not of God.
The other story has been the famine in East Africa, something which I think many of us had hoped we would not have to witness again - and suffering on a scale which I do not believe is of God.
When the Millenium Development Goals made their pledges in 2000 many people sighed with relief - finally the governments of the world had something to aim for. A 50% reduction in world poverty was not to be sneezed at. Now, as we approach the end of the 15 year project we have to ask serious questions. Christian Aid commissioned a report which concluded that, whilst the MDGs had achieved a great deal, they were falling short in key areas of empowerment and overcoming prejudice. The poverty gap still grows between rich and poor and the measures which the goals use to assess their effectiveness are flawed as they take little account of the very extreme poverty which many are left in. It is much easier to get a person earning a 96c a day up to the dollar goal than someone earning 20c a day - and these very poor folk often remain very poor.
God expects so much more of us. The New Testament does not offer us an extant social theology - we can see seeds - we can see that we should be heading in the direction of equal sharing and fair distribution. But the image of God is still distorted in many people by famine and poverty and this is just not good enough.
There is no easy blueprint for easing the pain of the global economy but there is something we can and should be doing and that is opening our eyes to the problems and educating ourselves in the facts. This will cause us to have to examine and perhaps reject some of the things which we now hold as normative and even that we see as rights. Often these things are not rights, they are habits, things which make out lives better and easier - we are complicated, but what is simple is and equation which says I am only free inasmuch as my freedom does not impinge upon the freedom and human rights of another.
I am free in Christ but that freedom calls me to examine closely the freedom of others and the restrictions placed on them by the prevalence and priviledge of our own society.
What is of God in all this is to grasp that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God - what is sarx is simply to maintain comfort here, and to accept the status quo.