First Presbyterian Church, Cottonwood Falls, KS

Called to Freedom:  Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Rev. Patricia Ireland, Pastor

June 27, 2010

The church in Galatia was divided and fighting.  Paul had founded the congregation on a message of Christ crucified, and raised as the first born of the Kingdom of God on earth as in heaven.    Paul taught:  Jesus is Lord of the coming kingdom of God and what you need to do to be part of that kingdom is to believe and follow him.

Other evangelists insisted that one had to be circumcised to become a part of God’s kingdom, one of God’s chosen people.  When Paul heard about it he was indignant, and wrote a letter in response.  This morning’s lesson is taken from the climax of that letter.  Listen for God’s word for you.

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

5 1For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery…

13For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  15If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.  16Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.  18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 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.  I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control.  There is no law against such things. 24And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

Presbyterians are a by-the-book people.  In fact we have 3 books:  the Bible, the Book of Order and the Book of Confessions. . There is security in a book, clarity in black and white.  Our 219th General Assembly convenes in Minneapolis on Saturday to consider, amid a host of other overtures, proposed changes to the Book of Order and an addition to the Book of Confessions.

Like the church in Galatia, we’ll argue and debate about this “new stuff.”  And like the church in Galatia we will struggle with what it means to be free in Christ while bound to one another in his love.

Let us Pray:  Eternal, living Word guide the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts that we might freely love and live in you.  Amen

If there was ever anyone invested in rules, it was Saul.  Rabbi Saul had followed the rules all his life.  A member of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, a Pharisee, ‘righteous under the law, and blameless,’ Phil 3:5-6  Paul was zealous for the traditions of his ancestors and advanced in Judaism far beyond others of his age. Gal 1:13-14  He was so zealous, that he exposed and persecuted the blasphemers who claimed the crucified Jesus was raised by God establishing a new covenant with God’s people.  According to Luke, Rabbi Saul assisted in the killing of Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr.

One day, on the trip to Damascus to hunt for heretics, Saul heard the voice of the Risen Jesus and was struck blind by a vision of his glory.  When he regained his sight he became as passionate about Jesus he had been about the Law and, like a reformed drunk, he set out to tell the world about Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

Thus Saul, the fanatic for the law, became Paul the fanatic for Jesus.  No longer bound by the constant need to obey every detail of the ancient law, Paul proclaimed freedom in Christ, and exclaimed, “For Freedom Christ has set us free!”

He’s been arguing his point for four chapters by the time he makes this bold statement.  I confess his arguments aren’t always convincing to the Western mind, but his point is clear.  Through Christ, God offers a relationship without preconditions except that one remain in that relationship with Jesus.  For Paul, to say we believe in Jesus was not to assent to a theological proposition or moral code but to know the living presence of Jesus/God/Holy Spirit in you and in the world; or to use John’s terminology, ‘to abide in Christ as Christ abides in God.’1Jn 4:16b

If, as John writes, ‘God is love’ we cannot be in relationship with God and/or Jesus without love.  John declares: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God.” 1Jn 4:7-8  Similarly, Paul writes: 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

You can follow the argument from there.  Paul preaches Jesus; saying the whole law is summed up in the great commandment:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might and your neighbor a yourself.”  To be in relationship with God through Jesus is to be in relationship with your neighbor.  Paul declares, with his usual passion, “through love become slaves to one another.”

Christ sets us free to love and love binds us to one another, seeking the other’s welfare as our own.  Paul says it more dramatically, not through obligation but “through love become slaves to one another.”  This slavery is not a control relationship but one of mutual support.  You know, we joke a lot about being a slave to a spouse, but really that’s a pretty good model of what Paul is talking about; slaves to one another in love.  Paul’s vision presses beyond a pair to a community!  You can see why this is hard.

Paul has been playing with the concepts of freedom and slavery and now he turns the table calling us to be slaves to one another.   He is not suggesting a one-sided relationship where one does all the giving or receiving.  Paul is calling us to mutual service where all give and all receive.

Having turned around the opposition of freedom and slavery, Paul turns to another opposition to prove his point:  Flesh and Spirit.  Be careful here.  Paul is not denying the flesh!  After all the very foundation of faith is that God become flesh and blood and died and rose again.  If in-flesh-ment, incarnation is good enough for God, it has to be good for us.  So, how are we to understand this flesh/spirit dualism that Paul is setting up.

Jesus said you cannot serve two masters and He called them God and wealth.  Matt 6:24  Paul says you can’t have it both ways and calls them flesh and spirit.  Flesh is Paul’s shorthand for self-centered living and Spirit is short-hand for God-centered living.    Remember the quarrel is whether baptism (a sign of the Spirit) is sufficient for membership- for salvation- or whether circumcision (a sign of the flesh) is also necessary.

Of course, this flesh/spirit dualism clear back to the creation story.  Mortals were made from mud, Adam, the earth and then God breathed spirit into them.  We are both flesh and spirit, humans and made in God’s image.  Thus there is always a tension in our lives, the struggle between human nature and divine nature.  There are lots of ways to say it, but it all boils down to choice.  How will we choose to live, to ourselves or to God; in the kingdom of Caesar or the Kingdom of God?

There’s an old story that illustrates this well.

There was a Grandfather. His little grandson often came in the evenings to sit at his knee and ask the many questions that children ask.  One day the grandson came to Grandfather with a look of anger on his face.

Grandfather said, "Come, sit, tell me what has happened today."

The child sat and leaned his chin on Grandfather's knee.  Looking up into the wrinkled, nut brown face and the kind dark eyes, the child's anger turned to quiet tears as he began his tale by saying, "I went to the town today with Father to trade the furs he has collected over the past several months.  I was happy to go, because father said that since I had helped him with the trapping, I could get something for me.... something that I wanted.

"I was so excited to be in the trading post.  I have not been there before.  I looked at many things and finally found a metal knife!  It was small, but good size for me, so father got it for me."

Here the boy laid his head against Grandfather's knee and became silent.  Grandfather softly placed his hand on the boy's raven hair and said, "And then what happened?"

Without lifting his head, the boy said, "I went outside to wait for Father, and to admire my new knife in the sunlight.  Some town boys came by and saw me.  They got all around me and started saying bad things.  They called me dirty and stupid and said that I should not have such a fine knife.  The largest of these boys pushed me back and I fell over one of the other boys.  I dropped my knife and one of them snatched it up and they all ran away laughing."   Here, the boy's anger returned, "I hate them.  I hate them all!"

Grandfather, with eyes that have seen too much, lifted his grandson's face so his eyes looked into the boy's.  Grandfather said, "Let me tell you a story.  I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.  But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy.  It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die.

"I have struggled with these feelings many times.  It is as if there are two wolves inside me, one is white and one is black.  The White Wolf is good and does no harm.  He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended.  It will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

"But the Black Wolf is full of anger.  The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper.  He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason.  He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great.  It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.  Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

Grandfather smiled and said, "The one I feed."

Which will you feed; flesh or spirit? law or love? bondage or freedom?  In order to answer that question let’s be more concrete.

Paul gives us list of behaviors that result when we feed the flesh: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.”  It’s probably like other lists of the time.  It starts with sex.  What do we always start there?   Then it moves quickly into the really hard stuff like anger, quarrels, jealousy and envy.

Have you ever felt controlled by those emotions?  Paul calls it bondage to the flesh.  20th century terminology would say addicted.   The 21st century is quickly turning into an era of factions, dissension and strife.  We are losing the art of civil discourse.  We are in bondage to sound bites, labels and easy answers.   We mandate classes for anger-management and sensitivity training.

I’ll bet you can list other forms of bondage.  How about economic bondage:  debt or the constant struggle to be financially secure so that you don’t have to rely on anyone – even God?  Or the need to be productive, to do something that the world values.  Or how about spiritual bondage the need to be “good enough,” to justify yourself to God and neighbor? Religion can damage people, you know.  That’s why Paul is so passionate in his argument against a fundamentalist understanding of the law as opposed to the love and grace of God in Jesus.

On the other hand there is spirit, freedom, love.  Paul gives us a list of those fruits or indicators: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Then he quips, there is no law against such things.

Stop and think of how you feel when you are engaging in or expressing these qualities to another: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Remember of how you felt when another was loving, patient, kind, generous, faithful, or gentle toward you.    Think of how you feel when another restrains their anger towards you.

We talk a lot about discernment these days.  That’s a fancy word for recognizing God with us, guiding us.  I’m confident that whenever you are aware of sharing or receiving love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control you have discerned God in our midst.

hat’s why we get such a good feeling and name it as a spirit sighting when we see the children embracing or helping one another.   The question is: why is it so much easier to see it in children than in our own lives?

(Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me .” Matt 18:3-5  But, that’s another sermon! )

For today it is probably sufficient to say God gave us free will.  Our lives are filled with choices and in a simple world the choice fall clearly into black or white, bondage or freedom , flesh or spirit.   We don’t really live in a simple world and it is not always easy to discern the good.  It takes intention and it takes prayer.  Our biggest challenge is to see that the big choice is always before us in a million little choices.  Which will we feed:  flesh or Spirit, bondage or freedom, apathy or love?

Here’s the Good News.  God loved us enough to become flesh and blood and invites us into that incarnation.  In Jesus we are free to love and to make mistakes and to try again, and again, and again.  Hallelujah.  Amen.