One in the Spirit.

Galatians 5.2-26

I.

            Paul talks here about freedom.  Freedom is one of the big themes of this book and his whole ministry.  But he does not mean what we usually think of as freedom, which is the liberty to do whatever we want.  That’s sort of our American view at its worst, that freedom has to do with the satisfaction of our personal desires without constriction by some other authority.

            The apostle Paul’s understanding is rather different.  He sees it as freedom from, on the one hand the unjust restrictions of laws imposed by some violent, conquering, exploitative, extractive elite, in his experience, Rome, and on the other hand freedom is the removal of the ego-centric habits and self-centered desires that restrict us within.  This is where we get beneath the political resistance to the Emperor that Paul is constantly alluding to, and which you may be tired of hearing about.  Here he is going deeper and referencing the roots of our political and social violence and slavery in our own minds and hearts.  Because if we humans are prone to give our bodies over to emperors and bosses, our Owners and Masters in the world, it is because of our propensity to surrender our souls to the domination of one part of us, within us.

            Paul writes, “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don't let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love.  All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself.”  So, Paul explicitly says that indulging our selfish impulses is not freedom.  Rather, he recognizes that this interior force, here called “selfish impulses,” represent a kind of interior, spiritual bondage.  Older translations call it “the flesh,” which was a bit misleading because that caused people to reduce it to just physical pleasure.  There is that element, of course, but what he means is the power within us that strives both to incite and relieve our anger, fear, and shame.  He means what psychologists later came to call our “ego.”

            If we look at the list of vices in verses 19 through 21, they are not all about satisfying physical desire.  They reach into our emotional and mental urges, reactions, insecurities, in relationships, communities, and so forth.  They are all about self-preservation and self-gratification, extended into the different layers of our identity.  First, they are about placating the felt needs of the individual, and then they extend to appeasing the individual’s immediate support groups in concentric circles of family, clan and tribe.  But most importantly for Paul, they are manifestations of disunity, division, dissension, enmity, competition, and separation.

            Paul is saying that the same oppressive violence the Emperor perpetrates in our larger, global world is happening in our smaller worlds, right down to the world inside us.  And we are chronically and unconsciously cooperative in this whole slave regime beginning with the way our hearts and minds are enslaved by our “selfish impulses.”   

II.

            Paul believes that the key to freedom is to live by the Spirit.  “I say be guided by the Spirit and you won't carry out your selfish desires.  A person's selfish desires are set against the Spirit, and the Spirit is set against one's selfish desires.”  He lists the “fruits of the Spirit,” that is, the values, attitudes, and practices we have when we are guided by the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

            The question is, How do we make the transition from existing as people enslaved by our selfish impulses and desires, to living as people guided by God’s Spirit? 

            The usual answer we are given is law.  We use law this way even now, of course.  We Presbyterians are infamous for this: we face a problem in the church and our response is to develop a policy and procedure to keep it from happening again.  Maybe we even amend the Book of Order.  Then, when someone breaks the rule, we have a procedure to use, or not, to rectify the situation.  But mainly we have a rule and we expect people to keep it.

            And society does the same thing.  We make a law against certain behaviors, or we make a law requiring certain other behaviors.  We might decide that the things Paul criticizes are against the law, and we arrest and punish people who do them.  I don’t need to read the whole list again from verse 19-21: but it includes drug use, casting spells, gossiping, fornication, drunkenness, and partying.  We can ban those behaviors. 

            Paul has noted repeatedly in this book that using law to make people good hasn’t worked.  It has actually made things worse.  People, especially the rich and powerful, have figured out how to game the system, so that it is possible to piously and self-righteously keep the letter of the law, while shattering its spirit and doing evil.  For Paul law is no solution; it is barely better than the survival and domination of the most violent, as in primitive anarchy.

            In the church we have seen that the legalistic approach, while it has certainly prevented some abuses, has also stifled creativity and flexibility, so that in avoiding bad things we have also stopped some good things from happening.

            Law is just about coercion, violence, threats, fear, guilt, shame, and anger.  It is about using evil to prevent evil.  But it doesn’t change the human heart.  It doesn’t inspire the fruits of the Spirit.  The most you get out of law is a kind of resentful, fearful, grudging, maybe dutiful, compliance.

            Law does not give us the Spirit of the living God.  There must be another way to make the transition from people enslaved by our selfish impulses and desires, to living as people guided by God’s Spirit.

III.

            Paul realizes that this other way is accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross.  There, he suffers the full extent of the law.  The law punishes and kills him.  He endures the horror and the terror of laws written and enforced to keep people in line and compliant to Rome and to other human authorities.  He even dies rejected and cursed by his own people’s law, the Jewish Torah that is supposed to be the recipe for freedom. 

            And if he were just another one of the countless people whom Rome sacrificed to maintain its ruthless grip over conquered peoples – and in a sense he is – he would have been forgotten.  Just another failed Jewish Messiah.  Just another dissenter whom the government labeled as a terrorist and killed.  Just another hopeless loser.  We would remain in hopeless despair.

            But the thing is, Jesus, as I keep saying, doesn’t stay dead.  He keeps showing up after his death.  He is still alive, and his Spirit, his breath, still moves among and within his disciples, leading them and guiding them.  He receives from God a new life… a new kind of life, a life that cannot be extinguished, and therefore cannot be limited by the fear of losing it, since it cannot be lost.  It cannot be lost because it is already here within us.  All of us already have it.  We just don’t know it or how to activate it.  A life beyond the power of death and murder and execution.  A life he calls “the Kingdom of God.”

            In other words, the Spirit opens the minds and hearts of the disciples so that they begin to realize that it doesn’t have to be the way it has always seemed to be.  All the propaganda that their egos and their leaders have been feeding them their whole lives is wrong.  We do not have to live in bondage to fear, anger, and shame.  We do not have to commit the resulting sins, like greed, gluttony, envy, lying, and stealing.  We do not have to sink into the disgraceful and violent behaviors listed in verses 19-21.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Indeed, this way isn’t real at all.

            Jesus’ resurrection shows us that there is another way, different from the false way of division, enmity, competition, inequality, and selfishness.  It is the way of truth and life where all the dividing walls have been broken down, and our separation into categories like Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female is a lie! 

            And if we belong to him, if we trust in him, and follow him, we see and come into what is true and real.  We are able to give up – Paul even uses the word “crucify” – our old existence in which we were enslaved by our individual egos, our selfish impulses.  And Jesus Christ’s new life emerges within us, even on this side of physical death.  And we live by the Spirit, not by the law which only fortified our selfish impulses.

IV.  

            Jesus’ Spirit leads his people.  Discipleship means our awakening to the truth of the presence among and within us of the Kingdom of God, this new life.  

            “If we live by the Spirit,” Paul writes, “let's follow the Spirit.  Let's not become arrogant, make each other angry, or be jealous of each other.”  Living by the Spirit happens in community.  It happens in a gathering of people on this journey of awakening.

            Living by the Spirit means embracing each other in mutual service and compassion, starting in the gathering of disciples, and extending into our neighborhoods and the whole world.  Instead of serving ourselves as isolated, independent individuals, the Spirit leads us to “serve each other through love.”  Love unites.  And by the Spirit we see that we are all one, and I am not essentially separate from anyone else, especially our suffering neighbors. 

            Paul states that, “All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself.”  If we love each other as ourselves it means we erase the differences between us and we realize our essential unity and oneness in Jesus Christ.  In him God takes on our life, which means we need to take on each other’s lives, and in so doing we take on the life of God. 

            That oneness is realized, embodied, and witnessed to in the gathering of disciples, but it is true for all people, and even all creation.  When we minister in compassion to people in need we are witnessing to this truth that Jesus Christ’s death was for all, and the life he reveals beyond the power of death is also for all.

            And the place where we come to cultivate and train ourselves in producing the fruit of the Spirit is here.  The gathering of disciples.  The local church.  This is where we learn love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  This is where we learn to serve each other in love, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  This is where we learn that the separation that seems to exist between us and our neighbors is unreal.  That in truth we are all sharing together in one reality, one world, one interlocking, interwoven field of relationships.

            And the freedom Paul mentions is the freedom from these debilitating divisions.  It is the freedom we have when, as we say, “it all comes together.”  Every part is working with every other part in unity and coordination, integration and coherence.  Every member is serving and holding every other member in trust and love.

 

V.

            In the summer we sang every Sunday part of the hymn, “We Are One in the Spirit.”  I learned that song in youth group years ago.  Paul would love it.  And he would understand that it refers to the circle of believers, yes; and through them by the Spirit it also refers to the whole world and all creation.  It is the basic message of Galatians.  And the reason Paul is so frantic and assertive and uncompromising in his writing to them is that his opponents in these churches he started were threatening the truth of the good news expressed in this song.

“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;

we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;

and we pray that all unity may one day be restored;

and they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love,

yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

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