Sermon preached at Evensong on the First Sunday after Trinity 2024

Integration is the watchword. Integration is the key. We know not only from the spiritual life, but through contemporary learnings in mental health more broadly, that a life which is harmonious with itself is not only likely to be more content, but will also become more fully alive. As a child, I remember an elderly member of my family saying that the highest compliment one could be paid, was that one was recognisably the same person in whatever company. For most of us, complete integration of our memories, our stories and our longings, our past hurts and delights, our professional interests and our personal priorities, is a lifetime’s work. The journey towards the truly whole self – one which is set before us in the Gospel and in the Christian tradition – is a demanding one, likely to require courage and tenacity, not to mention friendship, challenge and encouragement along the way.

The portion we heard read from Paul’s letter to the Romans in today’s second lesson is part of an extraordinary attempt at integration. Romans is Paul’s last surviving letter, a mature statement of so many of his themes, in which he still wrestles with some of the most demanding material of his apostleship. Near the heart of this is his relationship – and the relationship of the Christian believer – with the Jewish law. It’s worth remembering at this point that elsewhere Paul tells his readers and listeners that before his conversion he ‘excelled’ in his Judaism: he was a leading member of the religious elite, utterly focussed on the identity markers demanded by his religion, themselves signs of faithfulness to the Lord’s covenant. The law of which he writes – its texts and practices, its food laws and purification rituals – is a package for Jewish identity which is non-negotiable, having been given on Mount Sinai. It marks a community out amidst the wider context of a noisy and diverse ancient pagan world. The question which Paul pursues, and which is perhaps the single most essential and demanding debate in the earliest Church, is the extent to which followers of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah who died and has risen, needed to follow this law.

Today, we encounter Paul’s exegesis of the situation at a particular point. Earlier in Romans, he has come close to suggesting that the Law is sin, clearly an impossible position for a Jew to espouse. But by this point, he in unambiguous. The law cannot be sin, because it is a gift of God. The inward rebellion against God which is highlighted by the demands of the law, is not itself a fruit of the law. But it is complicated. Paul is not trying to write a systematic treatise on Jewish/Christian relations (as we would understand it) nor a modern manual of psychological analysis. His concern is religion, identity, and law. He uses rhetoric, and some quite complicated grammar to wrestle with issues which are clearly arising in and around the Christian communities who are his correspondents. The questions of identity and behaviour are not going away, and Paul resists oversimplifying what is clearly a very live conversation.

But that doesn’t stop him from making some quite direct and profound observations about human nature. Paul expresses with honesty and frustration his own struggle to act well, so that his actions reflect with integrity what he has learned of the profound depths of God’s love in Christ. ‘I do not understand my actions’ he writes, ‘I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate!’ Which of us does not recognise that mixture of frustration and struggle in our own lives? We work towards integration – perhaps even occasionally in the life of prayer, delighting ‘in the law of God in my inmost self’ as Paul puts it – and yet, so often, what we encounter in ourselves and in others is a dissonance between the people we long to be, and the people we are. Frequently, preachers and commentators describe this as a kind of battle between flesh and spirit, supposedly a dichotomy set up by Paul himself. But that is too binary, too easy, and (to be honest) too lazy. It is, after all, Jesus’s flesh, which redeems us, as Paul will go on to expound later in the letter. The Christian faith does not say flesh = bad, spirit = good; in fact, this approach has taken the Church of former centuries to some quite dark places. There remain echoes of this heresy with us today. Whilst the Law to which Paul refers was chiselled onto tablets of stone, the new law of love given to us in Christ is inscribed on his crucified and risen Body.  

So, the key is integration. Integration of our bodies and our spirit. Integration of our identities and desires, our fallenness and our freedom, our choices and our priorities. The practices which should mark out Christian identity are rooted in those virtues of love, peace, reconciliation and joy, which we know so deeply in our hearts, and yet are so difficult to live out. And the challenge remains in the Church of the 21^st century as much as in the 1^st, not to seek to do this in a vacuum, or in an attitude of proud heroism, but in communities of mutual support, friendship and forgiveness.

For Paul, faith in Christ is overwhelming. I don’t mean that primarily in an emotional sense. Rather, a more figurative one. Christ’s victory over sin and death has overwhelmed all other of our identity markers and boundaries. The Christ event – his incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection – offers the world a whole new set of coordinates and possibilities. So much so, that elsewhere in his writing, Paul speaks of Christ’s birth as happening ‘at the fullness of time’, consummating and overwhelming history, and interrogating everything else that we cling to in order to define ourselves.

As we approach elections this year in so many parts of our world, Christians have a particular opportunity to ponder what defines us. What are our identity markers, and how do we allow them to be integrated and overwhelmed by the creative love that we see flowing from the wounded and risen flesh of Jesus Christ? Because this is the flesh of our neighbour and our own flesh, in and through which we sense the fragile dignity of the reconciling law of Christ.

Integration – our dangerous age is in need of this watchword in its politics. Integration – our broken selves are in need of the wholeness of body and spirit which we see in Christ. All our identity markers and attempts at shoring up the show need to be subject to unique wholeness which we call holiness. Not a tub-thumping, angry, gauche, legalism. But a holiness which liberates and creates, which heals and opens a new kind of future for ourselves and one another in Christ, of which we have only begun to dream.