14th Sunday Homily: Life in the Spirit or in the Flesh?

How many of us listened to the 2nd reading?

How many of us who listened to the 2nd reading think Paul has some issues?

Well, he does, but not in the way we think.  

Life is about love, ergo life is about relationships and other people

People, full of life, live in true love for others.

This is a revelation of Jesus Christ, and the deep mystery of the Eucharist.

“Life in flesh” is not only what many of us think

“Life in the flesh” is about a self centered life; it is an ego based life

It is a life spend reacting to needs, wants, desires; living a pure emotional life.

Let’s be clear, our emotions are not bad.  Our Emotions are not sinful.  

So having anger, scare or sadness are not sin. Nor is having happiness.

Jesus clearly experienced all the human emotions that we experience.

Emotions are reactions to events that happen to us.

Here is the issue, or the sin, or what “living in the flesh” means.  It is when we base all our lives on those emotions.  When everything we do comes from those emotions, those reactions.

Living purely in the flesh, on the emotional level, keep us too self-centered, and being self centered keep us really from love.

And if we can’t love, then we are not really alive.

Hence St. Paul’s warning about lives of flesh,

God wants us to be truly, fully alive; which means experiencing our emotions, but not letting them control us.

Rather, like Jesus we use our emotions to build bridges to others, not to divide them

I’ll use anger as example; anger comes from an unrealized expectation;  we expect something and we don’t get it.  We want something, and we don’t get it.  

Nothing wrong with anger, not a sin.  Even Jesus got angry, and he is sinless, soooo

“Life in the flesh” means we keep that anger.  We are angry, not just have an anger, we become anger.  

We do not forgive, we want hurt that person we think caused the anger; we get all passive aggressive, we get actively aggressive, we unfriend them, unfollow them, we shut them out….  We go onto Twitter and tweet mean things about them...

Where is the love?

It goes deeper.  Those sins against Love, which we call racism, sexism, bigotry, these really are rooted in our gut reactions, to living in the flesh. I suspect fear.

We fear losing our perceived power, so we keep those who threaten it down, whether they are a different gender, race or whatever.

Where is the love?

Life in the Spirit means we use these God-given brains of ours and we THINK!

Life in the Spirit means we discern.

We pray, meditate and contemplate on our emotions are experiences and we let that Spirit of God go to those places in our minds and hearts; where there is anger, where there is sadness and fear, and we let God’s spirit guide us to the good action.

Life in the Spirit is about wanting ways to build up relationships and finding those ways to build up relationships

Life in the Spirit is about forgiving and asking forgiveness.

It is about having hope and faith when we seem to scared to act.

It is about belief when sadness seems to overwhelm us.

It is about about sharing when we are happy.

I say this, because I do not think we are good in this Spirit; we are not good in discernment.

We are better in the flesh.  It’s way easier, so we think, to just REACT

We react to the anger.  Think about that man who shot and killed that young high school graduate in a road rage incident.  Horrible!

We get all bent out of joint when our orders at restaurants aren’t perfect, when the person driving in front of us does not use their turn signal, when the world does not go our way.

And maybe even worse, is that we do not even react.

We just bury those emotions, the anger, the fear, the sadness and even the happiness deep inside.  Never thinking about them, never trying to make sense of them.  That becomes depression.

And whether we are reactionary or virtual depressives, for us adults, we just pass that right onto our children.

I hear them, they struggle with their emotions. Especially the teens, so many emotions and they do not know how to process them, make sense of them…. They look to us adults, and here we are yelling in anger, self-medicating in our sadness, going all quiet in our fears….   and that is what they learn too.

And so they do not live.  They falter in their relationships.

God wants us to be alive.

God’s will is for us to love.

Jesus shows us how to be alive, how to be HUMAN;

Its through forgiveness, hope, faith, through compassion, mercy and kindness.

He shows us the freedom that comes through not being dictated by our emotions.

There is that critical scene in the Garden...He was scared!  He says it.  He knew what he was about to endure, and he was scared and he was not sure he wanted to go through it.

Yet, in his prayer, he sorted through it.  He did not let his fears define him, but Love.

He trusted in the Father’s Love for him and from that he found the courage to endure, the courage to love:  he found life.

It is ours too.

When we open ourselves to the Spirit, and see beyond ourselves and our flesh, and see ourselves with and for all others.

Then we will have life.