Romans 8:1-11
I am an avid listener to the CBC radio show Quirks and Quarks. This past week they ran a rerun of an interview that Bob MacDonald did with a women who wanted to smell like a dog. She didn’t want to literally smell like a dog. She just wanted to be able to experience the world of smell the way dogs do. A dog’s reality is oriented to smell probably more acutely than our reality is oriented to vision. Dogs have twenty times more scent organ than humans. Their brains are roughly a third the size of ours, but they have more area in their brains devoted to processing smells that we do. Their memory is cued by smell. We know our way home by visual cues. Dogs smell their way home. A dog with its nose to the ground is in a world we can’t see, but it is a world as vivid to them as the world we see.
One blogger writes about what a dog smells when smelling a hamburger. “Where we might say, ‘Mmmmm, burgers!’ a dog would say, ‘Mmmmm, fried ground cow muscle, gristle, and fat; soy extender; imitation American cheese made with vegetable oil and dry milk; wheat bun, toasted; a dozen sesame seeds; one leaf day-old lettuce; raw, partly green tomato slice; vinegar and spices in a tomato-based sauce, all touched by the hands of a human that I know and who will give me some if I make a big enough pest of myself!’ Dogs smell in minute detail.”
A dog’s life is oriented to smell. A dog sets its mind on smells and orients its life accordingly. It follows what it smells. If you took away a dog’s sense of smell, it could no longer function. It could not make sense of its reality. Taking a dog on a walk and not giving it time to sniff and follow it’s nose is a violation of its nature, a crime against dog-anity.
Looking at our reading from Romans 8, if Paul would have given space to a dog’s smell-based reality and how dogs will follow their noses, he would have called it the law of snout. A dog’s world is smell and their existence is oriented to that sense and it wilfully lives accordingly. T follows its nose. Similarly and going a bit deeper, Paul says that our reality as humans operates according to the law of sin and death.
About sin, in both the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek the predominant word we translate as “sin” means “to miss” or “to miss the mark”. The Greek word comes from archery and describes missing the target. Sin is that we miss the target of what God created us to be.
A long time ago the church had question and answer learning tools called catechisms that people had to memorize to become members of the church. In our tradition the Westminster Catechism is the main one and its first question and answer gives us our target. It reads: “What is the chief and highest end of man? Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.” Sin is that we are unable to do that. Our instincts are misdirected away from God. We are unable of our own accord to know God and so we create and serve our own gods that we make in our own image. We literally follow our noses.
A hound is happiest when its nose is to the ground and blindly following a scent. So also, God created us to be happy when we are living fully in relationship with him. But, sin makes it so we can’t get God’s scent no matter what we try and instead we can only smell our own upper lips and grope about accordingly. As a result we die and not just a physical death, but more so a death of “being”. We do not know what it is to truly live the life God meant us to live in the first place. And, not knowing better, we are wilful participants in this misguided reality. Just like a dog will follow its nose to the carcass of a dead animal and roll in it revelling in the stench only to make itself odious to its human who loves it, such are we. Our mindset our orientation is to follow our sin twisted “flesh” to our own inevitable demise.
Now here’s the Good News. Paul says that since Jesus there is a new law at play now in our reality, in our existence – “the law of the Spirit who gives life and who has set us free from the law of sin and death”. When God the Son took on physical matter and became human flesh under the law of sin and death and lived faithfully in that flesh and died in that flesh, he condemned sin and punished it with the penalty of death. People say “God is dead.” No, sin is dead. The evidence of this is Jesus’ was raised from the dead and lives and so will we because of the Holy Spirit living in us. It’s the law.
I want you to be sure of something and hear me on this. Paul is not saying that what is different now is that we can believe in Jesus and provided we live good lives, we can go to Heaven when we die. Paul is saying that created reality, created existence, and in particular human existence is now different because of the incarnation of God the Son as Jesus and his death and resurrection.
The scientist in the Quirks and Quarks interview I started out talking about took a day where she followed her dogs around sniffing what they sniffed. People thought she had lost it; even the dogs thought she was acting weird. She discovered that with practice she could develop her sense of smell and make it better. Nevertheless, she could still never smell like a dog. What Paul is saying here in is the equivalent of saying now we can live in the smell-oriented world of dogs smelling like they do.
Prior to Jesus, humanity had a sin-disabled sense of God and everything died. As and since Jesus, God has given humanity a revelation of himself that can be experienced as the Holy Spirit. God’s revealing himself in, through, and as Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit has indeed changed the way things are. There is a new “law” at play in God’s good creation that leads to life and ultimately to resurrection.
Therefore, our work is to set our minds on the Spirit rather than on the flesh for when we set our minds on the Spirit we begin to live – to glorify God and fully enjoy him. Just like the laws of physics involved in flight, if you have a wing, as long as there is enough speed to counter the weight of the wing that wing will fly. It’s the law. When we set our minds on the Spirit, which means prioritizing our devotional lives, pray and study the Bibles together, worship and fellowship together we will live in Christ. It’s the law. Spirituality outside of Christ is like following a dog around trying to smell as good as it does. Spirituality in Christ is soaring on the wings of an eagle in new life. It’s the law of the Spirit who gives life.
Participation in church is more than a duty good people do to keep their moral compasses tuned. Churches that thrive have a high commitment to discipleship. Discipleship means following Jesus and in so doing come to know life as he has it to give because the Holy Spirit, his Spirit, lives in us. We can smell like Jesus. Paul says as much at 2 Corinthians 2:14: “But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere.” We smell like Jesus.
If you want to know God and know life, set your mind on the Spirit. Attend together to your relationship with Jesus. Addicts don’t know sobriety because they go to meetings and hear about someone else being sober for them. They get sober because they work the program and in working that program somehow, mysteriously God sets them free. He takes away the compulsion to use. Likewise, focus on your relationship to Jesus together and together submit to his Lordship and somehow, mysteriously because of the Holy Spirit you will discover life in him together. It’s the law. Amen.
