The Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 8 - June 30, 2019

Third Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 8, Year C
June 30, 2019
The Rev’d Charles Everson
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

​The audio recording of this sermon can be found here.

When I lived in France working as a missionary, my boss and his wife were an American couple named Scott and Mentanna.  In one of our many discussions about the faith, the topic of “freedom” came up.  “For Freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul said to the Galatians in our epistle lesson.  What does this Christian freedom mean?  Doesn’t freedom mean that I get to do whatever I want to do? How can we be free and still have rules to follow?  Mentanna had a small dog named Gidget, and being Parisians who lived in a sixth-floor apartment, they had to walk Gidget around four times per day.  She liked to use Gidget as an analogy about Christian freedom.  “When we lived in Texas,” she said, “we had a back yard with a fence.  Gidget wanted badly to get beyond the fence, but clearly, we didn’t think that was best for her.  Was she truly free in the backyard being able to run and play and bark at dogs that pass by, or was the fence preventing her from being truly free?  The fact of the matter is this: she may have thought that removing the fence would make her truly free, but she would have run out into the street and been hit by a car in no time.  God’s freedom always involves boundaries for our own protection.”

My concept of Christian freedom was shaken a bit when we got our little 30 pound rescue dog named Jake.  We already had a doggy door into the back yard, but quickly became concerned when we’d heard Jake barking at passersby…from the front porch.  It turns out that Jake has absolutely no problem climbing metal fences. 

 We’ve had him for 6 years, and still can’t trust him in the back yard by himself.  I was reminded of the story of Gidget and the fence, and wondered if Jake’s jail-breaking activities made him any more free than Gidget was. 

“For Freedom, Christ has set us free.” What is Christian freedom?  Is it permission to do whatever we like?  From what is it that we are freed? 

St. Paul tells the Galatians to “Live by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”  He’s not using the term “flesh” throughout this passage in a negative way, as if the human body is inherently sinful or evil.  Rather, “flesh” is often Paul’s shorthand for self-centered living as opposed to God-centered living.[1]  He seems to be asking the impossible of us: to resist “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, and carousing”…and if that didn’t cover it, “and things like these.”  Works of the flesh aren’t just material things, they’re spiritual too: “idolatry and sorcery.” 

How in the world are we supposed to resist these and all the other self-centered behaviors?  How are we to instead bear the fruit of the Spirit which is love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?  Not by trying really hard, not by pulling ourselves up by our boot straps…but instead by relying on the Holy Spirit.

“Live by the Spirit,” Paul says, “and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”  Living by the spirit means recognizing that I’ve committed to a new way of life, living for the other rather than for myself.  Living by the Spirit means recognizing that I’ve committed to living a life of spiritual discipline that includes daily prayer, contemplation, serving others, receiving the Sacraments, and so on. This life of spiritual discipline is somewhat like training for a marathon.  You start out by running perhaps a mile each day, then two, then six, and then ultimately all 26 miles. The more and more we spiritually train, the more and more spiritual habits we form that ultimately change not only our behaviors, but our desires.

The desires of the flesh lead us to self-centered action.  Wanting sexual intimacy, we pursue fornication; wanting contact with God, we pursue idols; wanting joy, we party too hard.  The freedom we have in Christ should lead us to rely on the Holy Spirit who can help us train for the spiritual marathon that has been set before us.

So, to circle back, yes, in a sense, Christian freedom means we get to do whatever we want.  But by choosing to follow Christ and submitting to the Holy Spirit, what we want…changes.  Training for the spiritual marathon transforms our desires and we want something different.  It is as if God’s grace changes our taste buds.  The spiritual cravings we have are no longer for the selfish things on the Paul’s naughty list, but instead, we crave to love God and our neighbor.

Let’s talk about Paul’s naughty list.  There isn’t anything particularly special or serious about this list of sins, rather it’s a list representing the various sorts of selfish actions human beings are prone to do.  I’ve heard sermons that try to analyze this list of sinful activity and make arguments about what each one means, but that really isn’t a helpful exercise because it’s missing Paul’s point entirely.  This isn’t an exhaustive list of things to avoid, it’s simply a small portion of the self-centered things that human beings often do.

It is tempting to use our freedom in Christ as an excuse to self-indulge. Paul reminds the Galatians not to use their freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 

This is what it means to “live by the Spirit.”  Either you say yes to the desires of the flesh and exhibit selfish unrighteous behavior, or, by God’s grace, you say yes to the Holy Spirit and display loving, self-sacrificial righteous behavior.  This is a choice we have to make over and over again in our lives.  It’s a choice that we won’t escape, no matter how hard we try, until we die.  It’s the way of life we committed to at our baptism.  And despite our desires being changed over time as we form healthy spiritual habits, despite the fact that we desperately want to live by the Spirit…we will sometimes listen to that old menace, our Old Self, the one who had the selfish desires.  When we are hungry and presented with two pieces of fruit: one, a selfish desire of the flesh, and the other, a fruit of the Spirit, we will remember how good the first piece of fruit used to taste.  And we’ll eat it, despite knowing that it will make us sick, for the memory of the delicious taste sometimes seems overpowering.  When we do, until the day we die, there is always the opportunity to choose to live by the Spirit in the next moment, even if in the previous moment we’ve gratified the desires of the flesh.  For in the Lord there is mercy and forgiveness, and and despite the bump in the road in our spiritual training, we continue with perseverance running the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.[2] 

Friends, no matter what we’ve done in life, no matter how ashamed we are, no matter how tempting the first piece of fruit is, let us strive to live by the Spirit.  For we who belong to Jesus have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”  Let us exercise self-control and put the needs of others ahead of our own needs.  Let us do the training needed to run the spiritual marathon, spending time in prayer daily, reading the Scripture, serving those around us in need, and regularly receiving God’s grace in the Sacraments of the Church.  As St. Paul says, let us, through love, become slaves to one another.  For in so doing, we find the greatest freedom we will ever know.  Amen.

[1] David Lyon Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., Feasting on the Word. Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 187.

[2] Hebrews 12:1-2.

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