Sermon-of-the-Month for July, 2007
FRUITS AND FREEDOM
Text: Galatians 5:1, 13-25
1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
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13 For 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. 14 For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 15 If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
6 Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For 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. 18 But 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.
Gal. 5:22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 24 And 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.
"Few more horrific human warehouses ever existed than the Insane Asylum at the Illinois State Hospital at Jacksonville, circa 1860. With screams punctuating the night, the smell of human waste overwhelming, and abuse of patients a daily occurrence, any poor soul who chanced to enter sane did not stay so for long.
Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard might have thought twice before defying her husband had she imagined what lay in her future. When, after 21 years of marriage to the Rev. Theophilus Packard, Ms. Packard had the temerity to publicly question her husband's repressive Calvinist doctrine by offering some heretical ideas of her own, and then to suggest that she change her religious affiliation to Methodist, the consequence was three years in this hellhole.
'You may think your own thoughts when you are thinking right,' the sanctimonious Reverend Packard said as he moved to have his wife - the mother of their six children, ranging from 18 years to 18 months - incarcerated. 'Once you're thinking right, you may return home.'"
These words, from a New York Times review of Emily Mann's highly acclaimed drama, "Mrs. Packard," that premiered at McCarter Theater last month, speak of an extreme example of the way that the Christian gospel, given to set men and women free, can become the oppressive prisoner of the human spirit. Here, a free-spirited woman who cannot accede to a legalistic version of Calvinism (all too common in that era), finds herself physically confined though spiritually free. It is her husband, a Presbyterian minister in Kankakee County, Illinois, who is more essentially the enslaved one, and sadly his enslavement to a need to have absolute control over people in his life leads to tragic consequences for the one who is truly free though bodily subjugated. Even after Elizabeth is finally released from the asylum, she is kept a virtual prisoner at home, without access to her children - all perfectly legal.
We know that this particular kind of miscarriage of justice doesn't occur today, at least not in our land, but we also know that Paul's words to the Galatians about the freedom the gospel brings and his warnings about not submitting to a yoke of slavery again, are still relevant in a culture in which all-too-easily the Christian faith gets used to justify things that oppress rather than things that liberate.
For Paul's audience, the Galatian Christians, the temptation was to give up the freedom that Jesus Christ brought to all of God's people and to fall back into the old restraints and restrictions of a legalistic religion. There were some Jewish Christians who were saying to the Gentile Galatians, "Now wait a minute. This freedom in Christ doesn't release you from the requirements of the Jewish law. You must first become Jewish in order to be Christian - be circumcised and follow the strict dietary laws. "No," writes Paul, "if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law." The letter to the Galatians is a treatise on Christian freedom: "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore , and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." So whether it's the Judaizers slavery to the old constricted Jewish laws...or Reverend Packard's slavery to an oppressive Calvinism, the message is one of liberation. Surely one of the saddest things to see is a Christian living a faith that intimidates, oppresses, and squashes the joy of the gospel in the name of righteousness, turning law into legalism and morality into moralism.
But maybe neither excessive Calvinism nor religious legalism is our temptation to slavery. No matter, there are many other yokes that call to us: "Put me on."
+ Many Christians still have the psychological need to control another's life...enslaved to dominance. And in an echo of the Packard's sad story, much domestic violence today stems from the need of one spouse - nearly always the male - to maintain power and control over the other. Wives cannot be locked away in insane asylums today in our society, but sadly,there is an ever-present need for women's shelters, such as Womanspace in our area, to offer a safe place for women of spouses enslaved to violence out of an obsessive need to control.
+ We surely know of the enslavement of addiction in all its many varieties: chemical, alcohol, sexual, and all the compulsions that drive people to bizarre self-destructive behavior. We have also learned that the release from such captivity comes not from moralistic exhortation, but when addictions are understood as diseases to be treated rather than moral failings to be condemned.
+ Some enslavements wear gentler faces but still wreak havoc on our lives. Perfectionism seduces us into thinking we've failed in the eyes of the world including especially our parents, dead or alive, if we haven't pulled it off without a hitch or a glitch. "If you can't do it right, don't do it at all." But where would the world be without the progress of partial achievement that provides a base to build on, not in anxious fear but in confident freedom. God save us from the perfectionists of life, and especially when that perfectionist is our very self.
+ Another great gift that can become an enslaving yoke is family - becoming so wrapped up in the needs and activities of our immediate family that we forget that God has claimed us as part of a wider family. One of the prayer petitions of the Presbyterian marriage service is this: "Give them such fulfillment of their mutual love that that may reach out in concern for others." True love empowers expansively rather than restricting love to a very small circle called "my family." And it's paradoxical that though we are easily seduced into thinking we honor our family by elevating family above all else, family life is much healthier, spiritually and emotionally, when it takes it proper place in God's scheme of things, not as an enslaving idol to be worshiped but a treasured gift of God's love to be celebrated.
Now let's jump back to Paul, penning his angry, passionate letter to the Galatians. He doesn't want them to fall for the false security of submitting to the yoke of the Jewish law - that's not what the gospel is about. But Paul is fighting a battle on two fronts: there were the Judaizers who insisted the law must be kept to the letter, but there were also Christian libertarians who said that "Anything goes!" Yes, we're free...completely free to do whatever our hearts desire, to go wherever our fancy leads us." These Christian are sometimes called "antinomians," which means "against the law," for their belief that not only should Christians not be enslaved to the law, they should disregard it entirely. "Follow your bliss" might be a contemporary expression of freedom so self-centered it becomes another idolatry: the idolatry of the first person, singular.
So Paul has more to say: "...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. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" By becoming "slaves to one another" Paul is not speaking of that unhealthy co-dependency in which one life finds its identity in an obsessive, dependent relationship upon another. He is writing of life oriented to service, to a recognition of that wider family we are called upon to love.
Paul then enumerates some of the enslavements people can fall into when freedom in Christ becomes idolatry of the self; he calls them "desires of the flesh," which means not just licentious pursuits, but desires that are driven by self-centeredness rather than God-centeredness: including idolatry, jealously, anger, strife, envy, dissensions, enmities, sorcery, as well as drunkenness, carousing, fornication, and such. Whatever turns freedom into complete license for the gratification of the self.
In contrast, he goes on to list some of the qualities that spring from freedom in the Spirit of Christ; these he calls "the fruit of the Spirit" : love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Notice they all have to do with our life in community, in relationship to others, not to the isolated self. Neither legalistic, moralistic religion nor unbridled, self-driven license is able to give birth and nurture to these gifts...fruit of the Spirit. "If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit," he concludes.
That advice is no less relevant today than it was in Galatia in the year 50 A.D., in Kankakee County, Illinois in the 1860's, or in Mercer or Middlesex Counties, New Jersey, in this Year of our Lord, 2007.
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