Last week at St John’s four people were baptised during the Sunday eucharist: Gabriele, Glory, Alba and Gaia. Having baptisms during a regular Sunday service helps remind us of our own baptism, the fact that we are baptised. Baptism is a calling, a vocation, a way of life. Recalling that we are baptised reminds us that being a Christian is a way of life not just a way to spend Sunday mornings.

You can’t have a baptism without water, so water is blessed during the service with the priest saying the prayer of blessing over it. That prayer contains these words: ‘Through [water] we are reborn by the Holy Spirit’. There are many dimensions to baptism and its meaning but one is that it is rebirth, being born again by the divine power of the Holy Spirit. In some way, from top to toe we are remade by being baptised. As Jesus says to Nicodemus in John’s Gospel, ‘No one can enter the Kingdom of heaven unless they are born of water and the Spirit.’

St Paul, in the part of his Letter to the Christians in Rome which we heard this morning, focusses in on the Holy Spirit. He sets up a stark contrast between two ways of living: living according to the flesh and living according to the Spirit.

Let’s hear him:

• ‘(We) who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’.
• ‘To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.’
• ‘The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God … and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.’
• ‘But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.’

It is important to understand what Paul means by ‘flesh’ here. We might, quite naturally, think Paul is concentrating his attention on sexual sins, the ‘sins of the flesh’. We might even think that that he’s commending some sort of disembodied ‘spiritualised’ existence, ‘But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit’.

He cannot mean a spiritualised disembodied existence because at the end of the passage he says: he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.’ Paul consistently says that the Christian life is fully embodied. Bodies and what we do with them are important. At the resurrection we shall be embodied, newly embodied, yes, but certainly embodied.

Paul has in mind something negative when he uses this term ‘flesh’ here. It is opposed to the Spirit. But the works of the flesh are not just sexual sins or other misuses of the body. Listen to what he says in his Letter to the Galatian Christians:

’19 Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21 envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.

This list includes relational sins like quarrelling and also wrong attitudes of the mind: envy, and jealousy. ‘Flesh’ for Paul seems to include the whole range of human behaviour.

There is a Bible translation that uses the term ‘lower nature’ to translate Paul at this point. I think that captures it well. The Christian life to which we are called in baptism means that we are transferred to a new sphere of influence, the sphere of the Holy Spirit. As Paul says in our reading, ‘you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.’

Does this mean that we cannot sin or fall short of our calling. A moments reflection tells us otherwise. We live our lives subject to influences all around us and within us. Someone slights us and feelings of bitterness can overwhelm us. The culture around us can lure us into behaviour that appeals to our lower nature and we consent. To be human means that something is out of joint. Even being British means we are through our history heirs of the rapaciousness of colonialism. In particular, as we are learning more and more to our shame, the slave trade. To be human means that something is out of joint.

Being Christian, being baptised, does not mean that we simply escape this condition, this human heritage. It does mean that we can live and work with its discomforts and its shame in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not an easy calling, it is not an easy peace, but is is truthful, and life giving. At St John’s last week the whole congregation said to Gabriele, Glory, Alba and Gaia, ‘Fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ, against sin, the world and the devil, and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life.’

This is a call to struggle and perseverance, yes, but Christ has won the victory which is our inheritance. As Paul says at the end of our reading, ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.’ That life is given to us sacramentally, Sunday by Sunday, at every Eucharist here at the altar. It is the life-giving body and blood of the Lord.

Service: Canon Bill Croft. 16th July 2023. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)

Readings: Isaiah 55.10-13, Romans 8.1-11, Matthew 13.1-9 & 18-23