CALL TO WORSHIP | Psalm 84
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the Valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob! Behold our shield, O God; look on the face of your anointed! For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you!
Song #1 - Only Ever by Cory Asbury
Song #2 - Jesus the Lord My Savior Is by Sandra McCracken
Dismiss Kids
INTRO| Simple Saints
Who are we? According to our faith family’s founders, we are saints. Saints are those set apart by God, whose person and purposes—who we are and what we are for—cannot be accurately or aptly described or known apart from God's intentions for us and His persistent attention to us. We are "anointed ones," covered in the life of God in Christ.
This name is "both a gift and a task,” our “mandate and [our] goal, or telos” as God’s community, present and future. We are, paraphrasing the apostle Paul’s greeting to the faith family of Corinth, “ones made into saints in Christ Jesus and called to become saints, together in Christ Jesus our Lord."
So what we are after in looking at our name, Saint, as the series title says, is simplicity. When we say something or someone is simple, we are not saying they are unlearned, shallow, or even easy to understand. Rather, as we have discussed, to say God is simple, and so to say we are simple, is to describe the existence of a complex harmony of the whole self. Harmony, not identity, but of all that is our identity in harmony.
In other words, to be simple is to be,
"…saintified completely... your whole spirit and soul and body... kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, he will surely do it." (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24)
This harmony in the holiness of our whole being we persist in through the simple, unadorned practices, habits, and dispositions that have formed us and continue to shape us as a faith family. To be whole in spirit and soul (as we’ve discussed) and in body (as we will discuss today). To be already “saintified” and becoming holy, sainted, complete, together.
With our aim aligned, will you pray with me as we enter into dialogue with God through the Scriptures, history, and the Spirit?
PRE-SERMON READING | 2 Corinthians 6:11 – 7:1
We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
SERMON | Holy Body
Over the last few weeks, we have, echoing Paul, described the complete human as one who is “spirit, soul, and body.” This threefold vision of the human person, often referred to as trichotomism, was also articulated by one of the earliest shapers of Christian orthodoxy, St. Irenaeus of Lyon:
"Just as the animated body is not itself the soul, but partakes of the soul as long as God wills, so the soul is not life, but partakes of the life God gives it [i.e., spirit]. That is why the prophetic word says of the first man: 'He was made a living soul' (Gen. 2:7).
This teaches us that it is by participation in life that the soul is made alive; in other words, the soul and the life that is in it [spirit] are to be seen as two separate things...
The soul (psyche) and the spirit (pneuma) may be part of man, but they are certainly not the man. The complete man is a mixture and union: the soul, which has received the Spirit of the Father, mixed with the flesh fashioned in the image of God... when this Spirit is blended with the soul and united to the shaped clay, the result, thanks to the outpouring of the Spirit, is a spiritual and complete man, and it is this, the complete man, who is made in the image and likeness of God...
…the complete man is made up of three things--flesh, soul, and Spirit. One of these saves and forms, namely the Spirit; another is saved and formed, namely the flesh; another finds itself between the other two, namely the soul...” (St. Irenaeus)
We are, as Saint Paul and Saint Irenaeus have contended, “a mixture in union,” simple but not uncomplex beings made up of the relation of Spirit
"Spirit is the thing in man that is essentially more than man, something which does not 'rise from below' but 'comes down from above.'" It is the very life, or breath, of God that begins us, persists us, and through which we are born again.
to soul
That three-part self: Mind (discernment or reason), Heart (desire), Will (devotion). The soul is the place or part of us where we are most uniquely ourselves; it makes up the inner person and is therefore also where we experience the rest (satisfaction) of sharing in life with God and the unrest (dissatisfaction) of life apart from God most acutely.
Our soul is the inner self that, by the spirit, allows us to partake of the life that is and is not yet, and is that which we should pay close attention to as we experience day-to-day existence through our…)
body.
Unlike the first two “parts” of us, I do not think we need to demonstrate, historically and philosophically, what the body is. We know it intimately and commonsensically, as Aristotle noted; trying to prove that nature (natural things) exists is an absurd exercise. It is a self-evident truth that you exist as an embodied thing.
Nevertheless, it might be helpful to briefly state some truths about what the body is and is not.
First, as we saw last week,
“Though our outer self is wasting away…” (2 Corinthians 4:16)
Indeed, the older one gets, the more acutely aware one is of this fact, that the body is temporal. Or as Paul says,
“the things that are seen are transient” (2 Corinthians 4:18)
Our bodies [and “natural” things] are “transient,” or passing through existence. This leads us to the second point about the body that we need to note: it will be resurrected,
“knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.” (2 Corinthians 4:14)
The reality that our bodies will one day be resurrected is why Irenaeus said that what is “saved and formed, [is] namely the flesh…” Because our bodies are passing through death into life, we, as Paul would say, can experience a bit of the future now. After all, our family name says we are “the people of the coming age, who will reign with God...”
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-11)
So the body feels the stings of death, yes. And it is the place where we will experience the end of sin. But that does not make the body the seat of sin or the flesh a thing of evil. Rather, as Paul described, because the body dies, so too can sin be put to death (share in the death of Jesus) in our bodies. Thus the body is saved and formed both temporally (transiently) and eternally. The body indeed is the mode by which we experience both dying and rising -- physically, spiritually, and psychologically (souly) -- now and someday fully.
This is why Paul can say, as _____ read for us earlier, that we, our individual body, and our collective body, “are the temple of God” (2 Cor. 6:16). So let’s look at 2 Corinthians 6 a little more closely to see how this body, along with our spirit and soul, might be “kept blameless… saintified completely… at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections.
Something restricts or makes life less than it should be, but it is not the gospel. Not a life of faith. Rather, they and we are restricted by our loves (desires, their souls). Here is how Saint Augustine describes the wonder, tension, and resolve of living eternally in a transient existence:
“Turn us toward yourself, O God of Hosts, show us your face and we shall be saved; for wheresoever a human soul turns, it can but cling to what brings sorrow unless it turns to you, cling though it may to beautiful things outside of you and outside itself.
Yet were these beautiful things not from you, none of them would be at all. They arise and sink; in their rising they begin to exist and grow toward their perfection, but once perfect they grow old and perish; or, if not all reach old age, yet certainly all perish.
So then, even as they arise and stretch out toward existence, the more quickly they grow and strive to be, the more swiftly they are hastening toward extinction. This is the law of their nature.
You have endowed them so richly because they belong to a society of things that do not all exist at once, but in their passing away and succession together form a whole, of which the several creatures are parts…
Let my soul use these things to praise you,
O God, creator of them all,
but let it not be glued fast to them by sensual love,
for they are going whither they were always destined to go,
toward extinction;
and they rend my soul with death-dealing desires,
for it too longs to be, and loves to rest in what it loves.
But in them it finds no place to rest,
because they do not stand firm;
they are transient, and who can follow them with the senses
of the body?
Or who can seize them, even near at hand?
Tardy is carnal perception, because it is carnal;
such is the law of its nature.
Sufficient it is for another purpose, for which it was made,
but insufficient to catch the fleeting things,
that rush past from their appointed beginning
to their appointed end.
In your Word, through whom they are created,
they hear your command,
‘From here begin, and thus far you shall go.’” (St. Augustine)
It is our soul (our affections, loves, desires) that restricts us by making us cling to transient things (even, and most especially, the good things). This is a matter of maturity, of growing into who we are and will be, as Paul contends:
In return (I speak as to children), widen your hearts also. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
Yoked should sound familiar to us; it is the way of working (living) we share (we take upon ourselves with another) to make a life, in which we will find rest for our souls (Matthew 11:25-30), or not. After all, as Psalm 1 contends, how could “those who walk in the counsel of the ungodly” share a path with those who do not know God, who IS truth, goodness, and beauty, lead us to anything good, true, or beautiful?
So, this is not about marriage per se (though it certainly pertains to it), but about a mode of participating in, of how we partake of life. As Paul thus explains.
For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship [participation] has light with darkness? What accord [harmony] has Christ with Belial [Satan]? Or what portion [part of the whole] does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement [covenant or marriage] has the temple of God with idols?
So, the issue is practical and participatory: how we relate to life through our bodies. A living that is not merely bodily, but the whole of us – spirit, soul, and body. How we go about our daily activities is a matter of worship or participation; it is a partaking, not merely existing. Therefore, as complete humans,
For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”
Our distinctiveness is a way of participating and practicing in our daily living. And so, because we are spirited souls experiencing death and resurrection in our bodies now (and one day fully),
Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.” (2 Corinthians 6:11 – 7:1)
Our day-to-day practice of making a life is saving and forming us, whether we see it as such or not. We are being saved and formed in our bodies through how we participate in Life. Therefore, to be kept blameless in body, "bring holiness to completion in the fear of God" (7:1); we offer our embodied selves (outer and inner persons) as a living sacrifice,
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present [offer] your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship [your rational service].” (Romans 12:1)
How are we Simple Saints?
We do this by:
How we Work
Habit of Offering
Holiness of Habits
Whole Body Worship
Through these simple graces, we are made saintly, and our bodies are kept blameless at the coming of the Lord.
Pray with me before we take a few moments to reflect and consider, then confess and receive all that we need for our souls to rest.
REFLECTION |
REFLECT & CONSIDER
Where, when, and in what circumstances have you experienced an alignment of your complete self: spirit, soul & body?
What practices are "defiling" your body and spirit? How might you "cleanse" yourself from them today, and tomorrow?
CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION |
Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid:
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name;
through Christ our Lord whose Life has and is becoming our lives.
Gracious Father,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word and deed,
by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
you have shown us mercy and forgiveness,
that we may be blameless,
called and becoming saints,
set apart for You,
loved by You,
completed in You.
Amen.
Song #3 - In the Name of God the Father by Ironsides
Song #4 - Christ is Lower Still by Porter’s Gate
BENEDICTION | Romans 8:27-28
As we rest in the day made for us, we prepare to enter into the work for which we are made [LIGHT THE CANDLE], remembering to…
And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for the good, for those who are called according to his purpose.