Frank Baker - "Are You Dead or Alive?" (November 28, 1965)
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| - | Let us pray. | 0:08 |
| May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts, | 0:12 | |
| be acceptable in thy sight, | 0:18 | |
| oh Lord our strength and our redeemer, amen. | 0:21 | |
| A paradox, | 0:31 | |
| a paradox, | 0:33 | |
| a most ingenious paradox. | 0:35 | |
| So they sing in Gilbert and Sullivan "Pirates Of Penzance". | 0:39 | |
| Saint Paul loved a paradox, | 0:44 | |
| almost as much as he loved taking people | 0:47 | |
| by the scruff of their neck and forcing them to face up | 0:50 | |
| to the contrasting realities of human experience, | 0:54 | |
| sin and salvation, heaven and hell, | 0:58 | |
| soul and body, life and death. | 1:02 | |
| In his letter to the Romans 11:11, | 1:06 | |
| Paul is at his paradoxical best | 1:10 | |
| striking to the heart of our human problem | 1:14 | |
| and enabling us not only to discover what is wrong with us, | 1:18 | |
| but how it can be put right. | 1:22 | |
| The King James version translates him thus, | 1:25 | |
| "To be carnally minded is death, | 1:29 | |
| but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." | 1:34 | |
| To some of us, these are old familiar words | 1:39 | |
| and therefore do not stir a thought. | 1:43 | |
| For others, thought is inhibited by the prejudice aroused, | 1:46 | |
| either by the repellent earthiness of the word carnal | 1:51 | |
| or by the heavenly piety of spiritual. | 1:57 | |
| We may easily reject his words for their pessimism | 2:02 | |
| or their puritanism when we should welcome them | 2:07 | |
| for their realism. | 2:11 | |
| Perhaps a literal translation will help us | 2:14 | |
| to appreciate this most ingenious paradox a little better. | 2:16 | |
| "The mind of the body is death, | 2:22 | |
| but the mind of the spirit is life." | 2:26 | |
| Surely, Paul has his human algebra wrong, we think. | 2:31 | |
| The usually accepted formula runs, | 2:35 | |
| mind plus body equals life, | 2:38 | |
| but he seems to be reversing this | 2:43 | |
| and saying mind plus body equals death. | 2:44 | |
| Even though the second half of his sentence | 2:49 | |
| shows that he speaks of the body only as opposed | 2:51 | |
| to the third element of the human trinity, spirit. | 2:55 | |
| Notice Paul make obvious sense | 3:01 | |
| if we stress the prepositions. | 3:04 | |
| The mind of the body is death, | 3:06 | |
| but the mind of the spirit is life. | 3:09 | |
| For surely mind is not a function of the body | 3:13 | |
| as opposed to the spirit, | 3:16 | |
| nor of the spirit as opposed to the body, | 3:18 | |
| nor of each working distinctly from the other. | 3:21 | |
| Mind is a function of the total human personality. | 3:25 | |
| What in fact does Paul mean? | 3:31 | |
| Actually he does not use the ordinary word for mind, | 3:36 | |
| (speaking foreign language) | 3:39 | |
| On this occasion he uses | 3:40 | |
| (speaking foreign language) | ||
| that is, mind in the sense of purpose or intention. | 3:43 | |
| The contents of the mind, the bent of the mind. | 3:49 | |
| This is why the Revised Standard Version | 3:53 | |
| translates this passage, "To set the mind on the flesh | 3:55 | |
| is death, but to set the mind on the spirit | 3:59 | |
| is life and peace." | 4:04 | |
| And this is why the New English Bible, | 4:06 | |
| renders it still differently. | 4:08 | |
| "Those who live on the level of our lower nature | 4:11 | |
| have their outlook formed by it and that spells death, | 4:15 | |
| but those who live on the level of the spirit | 4:20 | |
| have the spiritual outlook and that is life and peace." | 4:23 | |
| The paradox is thus resolved into an epigram | 4:30 | |
| that is just as applicable and as important today | 4:35 | |
| as it was near 2,000 years ago. | 4:40 | |
| Indeed, in this age when marvelous physical achievements | 4:44 | |
| so engross our attention that we are on the verge | 4:48 | |
| of spiritual suicide, this challenge is even more necessary. | 4:53 | |
| Jesus, who's coming we remember | 5:00 | |
| on this first Sunday in advent, made the same point. | 5:04 | |
| A man's life does not consist in the abundance | 5:10 | |
| of his possessions. | 5:14 | |
| No, a man's life consists in fulfilling the purposes | 5:16 | |
| for which he was created. | 5:22 | |
| Paul insists that these purposes are spiritual | 5:25 | |
| and God centered, not material and self-centered. | 5:30 | |
| And the test of our living is not to be found | 5:38 | |
| in moments of great heroism or supreme self sacrifice, | 5:41 | |
| but in the daily set of our minds, | 5:47 | |
| which may be either towards the things of the spirit, | 5:51 | |
| or the things of the flesh. | 5:55 | |
| How we face the humdrum, | 5:59 | |
| determines whether we are really alive or dead. | 6:02 | |
| Let us examine Paul's claim a little more carefully. | 6:09 | |
| For our purposes, it may be helpful | 6:14 | |
| to reverse the order of his statements | 6:15 | |
| and to look at life before we consider death. | 6:18 | |
| This will serve to soften the shock | 6:22 | |
| of being told that we are probably dead, | 6:24 | |
| until we have had a chance to fortify ourselves | 6:27 | |
| by a consideration of what we mean by being alive. | 6:30 | |
| Paul of course had no intention at all | 6:34 | |
| of softening the blow. | 6:36 | |
| What is life? | 6:38 | |
| The ancient Hebrews portrayed it | 6:41 | |
| in that wonderful parable in poetry, | 6:43 | |
| the opening chapters of Genesis. | 6:45 | |
| "God made the body of a man." | 6:48 | |
| "It was intricate in internal design, | 6:51 | |
| impressive in outward shape, | 6:55 | |
| directly tinted by the hand of its creator, | 6:58 | |
| fearfully and wonderfully made, but it was lifeless." | 7:02 | |
| "God breathed into that body and Adam became a living soul." | 7:07 | |
| So far so good. | 7:14 | |
| But Paul following his master Christ, | 7:16 | |
| knew that this coming of life into a human body | 7:20 | |
| could and should be followed | 7:23 | |
| by a second in-breathing by God, before it lived fully. | 7:26 | |
| Our Lord had similarly spoken about the need | 7:33 | |
| for the second birth, | 7:36 | |
| to the puzzlement of Nicodemus and later generations. | 7:38 | |
| "How can a man be born when he is old?" | 7:42 | |
| "Can he enter a second time | 7:45 | |
| into his mother's womb and be born?" | 7:47 | |
| Jesus pointed out that this second birth | 7:51 | |
| was to the full life of the spirit. | 7:54 | |
| This life was THE eternal life. | 7:58 | |
| Eternal, referring to quality | 8:02 | |
| rather than to quantity or length. | 8:05 | |
| The life of eternity, the life of the spirit | 8:09 | |
| is made available to all men here and now | 8:14 | |
| who by faith in Christ become children of God, | 8:18 | |
| rather than creatures of God. | 8:23 | |
| The entrance to this life of the spirit | 8:28 | |
| is by being spiritually minded. | 8:31 | |
| Having our minds set on spiritual things. | 8:33 | |
| The mind of the spirit is life. | 8:38 | |
| Paul is telling us that we cannot fully live | 8:42 | |
| unless our mind is set on spiritual things. | 8:46 | |
| Don't let us get Paul wrong, however, | 8:52 | |
| he did not mean that we should live on our knees, | 8:55 | |
| our hands folded in prayer. | 9:00 | |
| This life of the spirit is not simply piety in worship, | 9:03 | |
| whether in the form of silent meditation, | 9:09 | |
| enthusiastic spiritual song, all the devout following | 9:11 | |
| of a chaste and beautiful liturgy, | 9:15 | |
| nor is it the same as goodness in conduct, | 9:19 | |
| the honest and kindly virtues of the respectable life. | 9:23 | |
| Nor yet does it consist in a flawless theology, | 9:27 | |
| a carefully formulated creed firmly held | 9:32 | |
| and enthusiastically defended. | 9:35 | |
| These things usually form parts of the life of the spirit, | 9:37 | |
| but they remain things that you can do, or be, or know. | 9:42 | |
| There are many other things | 9:48 | |
| which form parts of the life of the spirit. | 9:49 | |
| Things such as politics and football, hairdos and barbecues, | 9:53 | |
| music and moneymaking, laughter and love. | 10:00 | |
| All these can be either carnal or spiritual occupations, | 10:05 | |
| depending on the general set of our minds. | 10:13 | |
| A genuine spiritual life of which Jesus and Paul speak | 10:18 | |
| is something above and beyond and beneath | 10:22 | |
| and within all such activities. | 10:25 | |
| It is an interpenetration of the whole personality | 10:29 | |
| by the spirit of God. | 10:34 | |
| Just so the air we breath penetrates every part of us | 10:37 | |
| and is the condition of our physical existence. | 10:42 | |
| We may as well pretend that air is for the lungs only | 10:48 | |
| as religion is for Sundays only. | 10:53 | |
| The lungs form the body's clearing . | 10:57 | |
| Here each corpusal carrier picks up its load of oxygen | 10:59 | |
| and carries it swiftly along the bloodstream | 11:03 | |
| to every cell of the body, | 11:06 | |
| where it is built into the living fabric. | 11:07 | |
| Our body lives because we breath air, | 11:10 | |
| our spirit lives because we breath God. | 11:15 | |
| We have to breath or die. | 11:20 | |
| And the death of the spirit is just as calamitous | 11:24 | |
| as the death of the body though admittedly, | 11:28 | |
| nothing like so obvious. | 11:31 | |
| Note that Paul does not say that the spiritually minded man | 11:34 | |
| will live either here or here after, | 11:38 | |
| nor even that he will live longer or better than the man | 11:43 | |
| whose mind is set on bodily things. | 11:46 | |
| To be spiritually minded, God centered, God controlled, | 11:50 | |
| he claims is life. | 11:54 | |
| It is thus and thus only that our piety | 11:58 | |
| becomes not a defense nor a pretense, | 12:02 | |
| but a means of finding God. | 12:07 | |
| If we really live spiritually, | 12:09 | |
| our goodness is not something carried out | 12:12 | |
| with the idea of serving man or earning his praise, | 12:14 | |
| but is a part of the normal processes of honoring God. | 12:18 | |
| Similarly, our theology, our deep thoughts about God, | 12:23 | |
| are developed not because of the intellectual stimulus | 12:28 | |
| provided by such exotic but harmless studies, | 12:31 | |
| nor even that we may know more about God really, | 12:35 | |
| but simply that we may know Him better. | 12:40 | |
| The breath of the life of God is in all the things we do, | 12:45 | |
| even in those things | 12:49 | |
| which we so shortsightedly call secular, | 12:50 | |
| George Herbert was in true Pauline succession | 12:54 | |
| when he wrote, "Teach me, my God and King, | 12:57 | |
| in all things Thee to see." | 13:01 | |
| "And what I do in anything, to do it as for Thee." | 13:05 | |
| Just as the man whose mind is set | 13:12 | |
| on spiritual things is truly alive, | 13:14 | |
| so the man whose mind is set on fleshly things | 13:19 | |
| is truly dead. | 13:23 | |
| A specimen of Homosapiens | 13:27 | |
| in whom the spirit remains unawakened, is not truly alive. | 13:30 | |
| At least not truly human. | 13:37 | |
| He may be a living animal or he may be a lifeless sham, | 13:40 | |
| but he is not a complete human being. | 13:46 | |
| I remember vividly my first visit to Madame Tussauds, | 13:50 | |
| that famous Waxworks in London. | 13:53 | |
| I walked up the central staircase | 13:57 | |
| uncertain whether to turn left or right. | 13:59 | |
| Fortunately, there was a uniformed attendant on duty | 14:03 | |
| at the head of the first flight of stairs. | 14:06 | |
| I asked him for directions and was a little puzzled | 14:08 | |
| when he didn't reply. | 14:12 | |
| Then my face became very red, for he was a waxwork model. | 14:14 | |
| He looked alive, but he had no soul. | 14:19 | |
| He was set there as a deliberate trap | 14:23 | |
| for those simpletons like myself, | 14:25 | |
| who could not distinguish between the seeming and the real. | 14:28 | |
| Many such booby traps await those who attempt | 14:33 | |
| to distinguish between life and death. | 14:38 | |
| Even of the human body. | 14:41 | |
| There are some people who have been alive, | 14:45 | |
| but now are half dead, | 14:48 | |
| they're truly human spirit quenched. | 14:51 | |
| The person who was body moves, but who soul is stagnant, | 14:55 | |
| is little more than a robot. | 15:02 | |
| Even though he may be a brilliant scientist | 15:05 | |
| or she may be glamorously fashioned like a bikini machine. | 15:09 | |
| Death according to Paul, | 15:16 | |
| consists in the separation from the body | 15:19 | |
| of the spiritual principle which should animate it, | 15:23 | |
| which some of us call the soul. | 15:26 | |
| Sometimes there is no difference to the human eye, | 15:29 | |
| yet death has occurred. | 15:34 | |
| A body can be embalmed and made to resemble life | 15:37 | |
| for many centuries, but it is nevertheless dead. | 15:39 | |
| In the process of pulling down an old Methodist church | 15:45 | |
| in my hometown of Hull, Yorkshire, England, | 15:47 | |
| two brass coffins were discovered in which were the bodies | 15:51 | |
| of two Germans who had died 100 years earlier. | 15:55 | |
| They had not been embalmed, yet were perfectly preserved. | 15:58 | |
| A few minutes after the coffins were opened, | 16:03 | |
| they crumbled to dust. | 16:06 | |
| Once the spirit has left the body, death has taken place. | 16:09 | |
| Even though this fact may for a long time | 16:13 | |
| be disguised by outward appearances. | 16:16 | |
| All this is equally true of the life of the spirit, | 16:21 | |
| the full maturity of the human personality. | 16:24 | |
| Many people never reach it | 16:30 | |
| and remain little more than animals all their days. | 16:33 | |
| Then there are those sad creatures | 16:38 | |
| whose minds and personalities have decayed, | 16:41 | |
| but whose bodily functions remain active. | 16:46 | |
| These are among the world's most tragic objects. | 16:50 | |
| Neither animal nor human, | 16:55 | |
| spiritual skeletons from which the living soul has departed. | 16:58 | |
| But, it is possible for death to have touched the spirit | 17:04 | |
| long before the decay either of body or mind. | 17:08 | |
| Far too many people cease to live in the spirit, | 17:15 | |
| have no urge towards God, | 17:19 | |
| even as He is revealed in their fellow men. | 17:21 | |
| They themselves are the center and circumference | 17:24 | |
| of their own lives, | 17:28 | |
| and the space between is a rioting mass of tentacles, | 17:29 | |
| seeking comfort or wealth or pleasure for self. | 17:32 | |
| Constantly multiplying and gradually strangling | 17:37 | |
| and crowding out the faint flickers of spiritual life. | 17:41 | |
| In his "Inphigenia In Tauris", Goethe says, | 17:46 | |
| "A useless life is an early death." | 17:52 | |
| Maybe we ourselves have said of someone unable | 17:57 | |
| or unwilling to communicate with his fellows, | 17:59 | |
| he might as well be dead. | 18:03 | |
| Perhaps we should say the same of the person | 18:06 | |
| with no purpose in life outside of himself. | 18:08 | |
| Paul goes farther, claiming that such a man | 18:14 | |
| is not fulfilling the conditions of full human life | 18:18 | |
| as it comes from the hand of God. | 18:22 | |
| He does not only say that the mind of the flesh | 18:26 | |
| brings death, though he had seen many lives shortened | 18:29 | |
| by gluttony, drunkenness, lechery | 18:34 | |
| as well as lives immobilized by pride, hatred and jealousy. | 18:38 | |
| But Paul claims that the person | 18:45 | |
| whose mind is set on material things alone is dead. | 18:48 | |
| And so Paul would have us realize that spirituality | 18:56 | |
| is not something for our spare time, | 19:00 | |
| something to make life sweeter or more useful, | 19:03 | |
| spirituality is life itself. | 19:08 | |
| The only genuine and lasting life. | 19:13 | |
| While we exist on this earth | 19:18 | |
| or for that matter on the moon, | 19:20 | |
| none of us can escape from the body. | 19:22 | |
| But so long as our attention is chained to its demands, | 19:26 | |
| we are enslaved, we are not truly alive. | 19:30 | |
| Jesus himself said, "What shall it profit a man | 19:34 | |
| if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?" | 19:39 | |
| And here he certainly means life | 19:46 | |
| in the full spiritual sense, not merely animal existence. | 19:48 | |
| Only as we fix our attention upon God and His purposes | 19:54 | |
| as revealed and fulfilled in Christ, do we really live. | 19:57 | |
| To this, thousands have testified. | 20:02 | |
| Saint Paul said, "I live yet not I but Christ lives in me." | 20:04 | |
| And again, "To me to live is Christ, to die is gain." | 20:12 | |
| Moving through the centuries, this latter phrase | 20:18 | |
| was the favorite text of the Reverend William Grimshaw, | 20:20 | |
| predecessor of Patrick Bronte in the Parsonage of Haworth. | 20:24 | |
| Grimshaw had thought that he was really seeing life | 20:29 | |
| as a white string undergraduate at Cambridge University, | 20:33 | |
| or as a pleasure seeking clergyman at Todmorden. | 20:37 | |
| Yet always, there was something empty in his pleasures | 20:40 | |
| and he knew it. | 20:43 | |
| Only when at Haworth, he gave himself fully | 20:45 | |
| to God's purposes in Christ, did he really begin to live. | 20:48 | |
| Receiving such spiritual power | 20:53 | |
| that he left his mark on the thousands, | 20:55 | |
| both in his own day and later, including the Bronte sisters. | 20:57 | |
| Now, was it only by a dent of his famous horse whip | 21:02 | |
| that he drove his parishioners to church? | 21:05 | |
| It was his powerful prayers, his infectious joy. | 21:08 | |
| People knew that Christ had made | 21:13 | |
| all the difference in his life, | 21:14 | |
| and so wherever you went in Haworth, | 21:17 | |
| you saw Grimshaw's favorite text. | 21:19 | |
| On the slab commemorating his enlargement of the church | 21:22 | |
| in 1755 to accommodate the overflowing crowds, | 21:25 | |
| was chiseled, "For to me to live is Christ, to die is gain." | 21:30 | |
| The same words are still to be found over the windows | 21:36 | |
| of the chapel which he built in 1758 for the Methodists. | 21:39 | |
| They were inscribed on the brass plate on his coffin lid | 21:43 | |
| and formed the text at his own desire, | 21:47 | |
| for the funeral sermons preached by his friends. | 21:50 | |
| All avowed that in him was a real zest for living | 21:54 | |
| and that this sprang from a knowledge of Christ within. | 21:59 | |
| William Grimshaw had set his mind on spiritual things | 22:05 | |
| and this had been to him life and peace. | 22:10 | |
| And, peace. | 22:15 | |
| This brings us to one last consideration. | 22:17 | |
| Paul's phrases here are not quite symmetrical. | 22:20 | |
| "The flesh is death," he says, | 22:24 | |
| "But the spirit is life and peace." | 22:27 | |
| Paul was trained in rhetoric and this interference | 22:33 | |
| with the balanced phrase was deliberate | 22:37 | |
| and therefore significant. | 22:40 | |
| Surely his point here is that once we have realized | 22:42 | |
| and accepted where the bent of our minds should be, | 22:45 | |
| our worst problems in life are over so that we know | 22:49 | |
| a peace that was before impossible. | 22:52 | |
| We shall still have our battles, | 22:56 | |
| but we are assured of eventual victory | 22:58 | |
| and thus know a deep inner calm, | 23:01 | |
| even though the surface of our lives is tossed by the wind. | 23:04 | |
| At a church garden party in Humberstone | 23:10 | |
| in Wesley's county of Lincolnshire, | 23:12 | |
| one of the activities was bowling to a target | 23:15 | |
| of concentric circles with the hope of getting | 23:18 | |
| into the middle circle three times and winning a prize. | 23:22 | |
| This was played of course, with English wooden bowls | 23:25 | |
| or woods, having a leaden weight inserted in one side | 23:29 | |
| to make the wood follow a curved path | 23:34 | |
| and curl around opposing woods. | 23:36 | |
| But on this occasion, there was a serious problem. | 23:39 | |
| The ancient woods that had spots knocked off them, | 23:43 | |
| not only chips of wood, but the ivory disks | 23:46 | |
| marking the side where the bias lay. | 23:51 | |
| This was disconcerting, for if you didn't know | 23:53 | |
| which side was weighted, | 23:56 | |
| you might bowl expecting it to turn around to the left | 23:58 | |
| and it headed it to the right | 24:00 | |
| and then it ended up many yards from the target. | 24:02 | |
| Then someone had the bright idea of sticking bits of paper | 24:06 | |
| on the sides where experiment proved the bias to be. | 24:09 | |
| Then the wasteful tension eased and you were at peace. | 24:13 | |
| Granted, you might not hit the center every time, | 24:18 | |
| but what a tremendous difference it made | 24:22 | |
| to know that you'd got your bias right. | 24:24 | |
| This then of which Paul speaks is the secret | 24:28 | |
| not only of life but of peace. | 24:32 | |
| To set the mind on the flesh is death | 24:35 | |
| but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. | 24:41 | |
| What about you and me? | 24:48 | |
| Are we really dead or alive? | 24:53 | |
| We'll have no peace until we know. | 24:59 | |
| Let us pray. | 25:03 | |
| Oh, holy Christ, who did come to this world | 25:08 | |
| to reveal the true life of man | 25:12 | |
| and to make it possible for all, | 25:15 | |
| take up thy home in our hearts | 25:17 | |
| that we also may truly live. | 25:19 | |
| Oh spirit of God, sanctify us wholly | 25:22 | |
| that in spirit, soul and body, we may become thy temple. | 25:26 | |
| Oh God our father in heaven thou hast made us | 25:31 | |
| and we are the children, | 25:34 | |
| teach us how to live continuously in thy presence | 25:37 | |
| and for thy purposes. | 25:41 | |
| God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost | 25:44 | |
| bless, preserve and keep you. | 25:50 | |
| The Lord mercifully with His favor look upon you | 25:53 | |
| and so fill you with all spiritual benediction and grace | 25:57 | |
| that you may so live in this life, | 26:01 | |
| that in the world or come you may have life everlasting. | 26:04 | |
| Amen. | 26:09 | |
| (bells ringing) | 26:13 | |
| (gentle piano music) | 26:29 |