Sermon: "On Commitment, or, Why God Always Loses at Fantasy Football"

"On Commitment, or, Why God Always Loses at Fantasy Football"

Preached at South Wedge Mission

Rochester, New York

8 September 2013

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Text: Luke 14.25-33

~

-It’s fantasy football season again.  Despite telling myself I would retire after winning my league last year, I’ve let myself get roped in yet again.  It’s a tradition, after all.  One of the ways I stay in touch with my divinity school friends.  I’m committed. 

-It’s also a great place to witness ministers behaving badly.  There’s swearing and mocking, smack-talk and sarcasm.  But even worse, there’s bunk trade proposals.  Now, if you’ve ever played fantasy sports, you know what I’m talking about.  The owner of Team A, who is known for his track record of success, makes an offer to Team B, staffed by a new-comer or someone who just doesn’t care.  Team A says, “hey, if you give me your three best players, I will offer you these three guys I just grabbed off the waiver wire!  It’s a great deal!”  Of course, if Team A has to explain that its a great deal, you know its a crap one.

-And yet, the worst crap deal I can think of pales in comparison to what Jesus seems to be offering his would-be disciples.  In today’s Gospel from Luke, Team Jesus makes this proposal to Team Disciples: “You follow me to Jerusalem.  And in return, you get to a) hate your family, b) give up all your possessions, and c) get crucified.”  

-Say what?  I cannot think of a rational human being who would willingly commit to such an offer.  Even if, as many commentators suggest, that Jesus is using hyperbole to scare away any posers on the bandwagon to his final confrontation with the authorities in the Capital, this is a pretty insane sales’ pitch.  No wonder Jesus compares the hearers to a king who sees his army overwhelmingly outmatched and so sues for peace.  

-And it feels like sometimes, that that’s how our culture - and probably many of us here - view commitment in general.  I feel like my whole life, I’ve relished having tons of choices and lots of options.  Commitment - limiting ourselves for just “one thing?” - closing the door on a possibility? - saying no to anything better that might come along? - requires something of us.  Sometimes, a downright sacrifice.  And there’s no guarantee it’ll pay off in the end.  

-I feel like such a powerful request request for deep commitment like Jesus’ can often feel almost incomprehensible in our postmodern day and age.  Forget that the commitment of marriage has become seriously terrifying in a world saturated with divorce and heart break.  Take something simpler, like Facebook.  Friendships develop far too quickly on facebook, and disappear just as quickly as a new fast friendship moves in.  I can pretend like I deeply cared about your three-year old’s ballet concert without having to suffer through the video - a simple “like,” and voila, instant connection minus commitment!  We may click “join” or “yes” to an event invitation, but if you’re like me, I’ve also clicked “join” to several other events, and often have moved on to something even more novel and immediate by the time the big day rolls along.  It’s not that I don’t have good intentions about going.  It’s just easier to keep my options open.  Right?

-The reality might be this: that most of us are probably better at committing to a week of watching the complete series of LOST or Doctor Who (for the third time), or to the World of Warcraft, or to our fantasy football teams, then we are to the things and the people that actually most give us life.  

-And for me, oneof the saddest parts of such a commitment-phobic society is, frankly, that we also struggle to ask for commitments from others.  Growing up, when I still had a land line and AOL Instant Messenger was the latest rage, I’d actually have to call folks on the phone.  And I’d have to ask them directly, and personally: “will you come to my party this Saturday?”  And often, they’d have to say yes or no.  I asked for an RSVP.  I wanted to be prepared.  Didn’t want to be a second choice.

-Now, I feel like people say, “yeah, I’m having this event; you should come if you want.”  I haven’t actually been invited.  It’s like they don’t care or expect me to come.  Like they don’t want to commit to me, or ask me to commit to them.  Like it’s padding against disappointment.  Like the real world is becoming more like the facebook one.   

-Or maybe, we’ve just lost the knack for commitment.  For keeping our word.  Maybe we’re addicted to novelty.  Maybe we’re afraid that we’ll be let down.    Maybe we’re afraid of who we’ll become if we just stay put.  Maybe we’ve just jacked up our expectations for others, and for ourselves, to unreasonable, uber-romanticized levels.  Maybe we don’t even know what reasonable expectations are.  As satirist Charlie Brooker once noted, “no one writes love songs about just-settling.” 

-And see, that’s where I think Jesus’ request isn’t so crazy.  Because as a God who has seen His people Israel make commitment after commitment, only to worship other gods over and over, Jesus knows what it is to be heart-broken.  God’s created the church, only to see us take the Gospel of grace, and make it about anything but, time and time again.  God’s been committed to God’s people almost to the point of unhealthiness.  And God keeps that commitment - that covenant God has made with God’s world - even unto death.  Being executed as a Betrayer, as Unfaithful, by an unfaithful and uncommitted people.  

-See, in Christ, God remains committed to us.  And God sacrifices for it.  The cross is proof.  Even though Jesus knows most of us will never hate our family or sell all our stuff, God loves us far too much to leave this marriage up to us.  At the end of the day, the trade God offers is actually a crap deal...for God.  Because Team Jesus gets killed.  And Team Humanity gets salvation, divinity, redemption, and everlasting life.  We end up the champions of the season.  And it’s no fantasy.

-But see, we’re worth the deal to God too.  Worth the commitment.  We are worth the rejection.  There is no better option coming along.  No passive invitation.  We’re it.  We’re enough.  Because Christ is headed for Jerusalem, regardless of whether we accept his invitation to come along.  He seems to think that such commitment will lead to something more important than even death.  So whatever he’s “just settling” for - it must be really worth it.  

-It struck me, re-reading this passage, that Jesus’ willingness to ask us for a commitment sounds an awful lot like a proposal.  Maybe even a marriage proposal.  Like he’s not just saying, “give up all you have to die,” but also, “take everything I have to give you, and live!”  Often at weddings, the story from the Book of Ruth is read, where the widowed Ruth tells her mother-in-law Naomi, “Where you go, I will go, and your people shall be my people.”  There’s deep fidelity there.  You lose a lot of possibilities.  But you gain the reality of rootedness, intimacy, love.  

-As Leah can tell you, I struggled with the decision to get married all the way up until our wedding day.  I’ve never pinned down an exact reason.  Maybe I was afraid of losing the possibility of someone more...ideal?  More like me?  Less eager to challenge me?  Maybe I just couldn’t let go of my addiction to novelty, to possibility.  Maybe I was just afraid, because I was heaping far too many expectations on marriage, on her, and on myself.  

-I was really helped by the words of one of my seminary mentors, Stanley Hauerwas.  The first time I met him, he told me Hauerwas’ Law: you always marry the wrong person. Now that was some cynicism around marriage I could wrap my Lutheran mind around!  It was liberating to realize that the covenant to one another is what makes marriage work - not feelings, failures, expectations, or everlasting newness.  The willingness to stick around, to forgive and ask forgiveness - and to know and be known intimately.  What a gift!  Sure, our marriage will never be perfect.  But it is very good.  And if I could, I’d go back and knock some sense into me!  

-I’ve kind of felt the same way about church.  There are so many other things I’d love to commit my time to.  Maybe you’ve been there too.  Why not leave the God-question open?  Why commit to this community of failures - of people who are not cool, who will not always act as we want them too, who will promise to go to the cross with us...and then deny us?  Why get married to a religion, or a church, when simple spirituality is so open-ended and commitment free?  

-But then, I’ve had to wonder: has anything else in my life that I’ve committed and sacrificed for really given me what Jesus is offering?  Not just happiness, and wisdom, and fulfillment.  But deep and lasting intimacy.  Freedom to be myself.  Forgiveness for my failures.  Abundant life that is not perfect, but is very good?  Why wouldn’t I give up everything, and take up the revolutionary cross, and follow this man to the end, just as he has followed me to mine?  

-I think it’s worth considering.  Because the commitment of church - of following the Way of Jesus in community - is not a commitment to perfection. It’s not a fantasy.  Or a facebook friendship.  It is a commitment to the promises of God.  And when we say “I do” with all of ourselves that we are able to muster, I wonder if we will like who we become.  My guess is we will.  Because God does.  

-Because, after all, even God follows Hauerwas’ Law.  God always marries the wrong person.  And it’s definitely not perfect.  But it’s very, very good.  

-Amen.

#IAMGEORGEZIMMERMAN

#IAMGEORGEZIMMERMAN

Before reading this, please read this article "An Open Letter to Whites about the Black Community and the Trayvon Martin Case." 

"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begin with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for the brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that he not only gives us his word but also lends us his ear. So it is his work that we do for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

~

“If you did not mention #trayvonmartin in your sermon, you should rethink your vocation.”

This sage advice, and other such pearls, proliferated across social media this past Sunday, along with white pastors’ profile pictures mysteriously morphing into the silhouette of a young black man in a hoodie who was murdered in Florida.  Clearly, we clergy do not want to be found on the wrong side of history on this one.  And of course, our colleagues and congregations and readers should feel as earnestly as we do.  

And yet, for me, this grand (and I am sure, earnest) gesture strikes with all the force of a Princeton student sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt.   But also, because to me, this kind of posturing is everything that is wrong with the church and social media - precisely at a time when the church cannot afford to dabble in trivialities and mere sincerity of emotion. 

One prominent blogger who posted this statement gave as reasoning that a majority of “nones” interviewed stated “the church has nothing to do with the world I live in.”  As a mission developer in one of the least religious cities in America, I sympathize with the desire to want to put forth a different face.  But is putting forth the face of a black youth, and trying to take on the voice of the black community, when I am clearly not of the same hue, really what “nones” need to see of the church?  Is Trayvon Martin now about being relevant?

Putting on this face feels like a mask.  A mask that covers the inescapable fact of our Whiteness.  A mask that hides the disturbing fear within me that, as a white male pastor who looks more like George Zimmerman than Trayvon Martin, I have no clue what to think or what to feel, or what to say, or what to do.  Because had I grown up in George Zimmerman’s shoes, I am not sure I would have thought, felt, said, or done any differently than he did.

Because, as much as I want to put forth the social media mask of sincerity and outrage, the truth is, my first reaction to the rage of white people was to say, “yes, but the court decided.  We can’t just act like children who, playing a game and seeing their opponent gain the upper hand, flip over the table. take their boards, and go home.”  The system worked after all.  The operators of the system - that’s another story.   

But if I’m honest, my outrage is first at myself for not being outraged.  My outrage could recognize that this, as a blogger quoted, “is the most significant civil rights moment” of our time.  And I want to join the picket lines and the sit-ins and the online throwing of stones.  I want to react.  But I cannot.  Because I am a white person.  Of privilege.  I am part of the problem.  I depend on the game board and the rules and the system and the guns.

And besides - did we honestly think we'd receive any other verdict?  I wonder if the reactivity and outrage is a result of faith misplaced - in a justice controlled by just us, and in human progress.  Which has always been the gated community of paler skin.  And our justification of ourself by our works.     

If I were to have preached a sermon on Sunday (I was enjoying a week off), and was given the text of the Good Samaritan, it would have broken my heart.  Because while I would want to call my people to take up the mantle of the Good Samaritan and to wrap the bloody body of the Trayvons and the Alifahs and the Patricks and the Isatahs and the women raped in India and the North Koreans escaping to freedom on the Chinese Underground Railroad - it’s a prophets mantle that is not mine to give or take.  

Because as people of privilege, and as a willing participant in Whiteness, I am not a Samaritan.  I am not an outsider.  On countless occasions, on countless days, in my own neighborhood, on my own block, where cameras and presidents and tweeters do not walk, I pass the victims of our violence.  And I do nothing.  I live in a city where the school system is broken, segregation is rampant, child poverty is out of control - and most of the white people cluster in the paradise of a single quadrant where the hipster can lie down with the boomer, volunteer once in awhile, and feel content that the peaceable kingdom has arrived.   

Every day, here in my own context, Trayvon Martin is branded, and stalked, and ignored, and beaten, and often killed, by police, and gang members, and businesses seeking to “clean up the area,” and by people like me who choose the safety of a blog over the dangers of walking with another human being.  The most significant human rights issue of our day is not Trayvon Martin.  It is the persistent success of the idolatry of the racial caste system of Whiteness to dominate our imaginations, and leaving a Sherman-like trail of destruction and segregation in its well-intentioned, pseudo-progressive wake. 

Because the awful truth is this.  We are not the Samaritan.  We are the bandits who leap out of the shadows to plunder the passerby.  We are the clerics who bustle busily by, worried about our own holiness and self-righteousness and being on the “right side of history,” while passing by the side where the blood and dirt and the truth about ourselves is to be found.  We are not Trayvon Martin, and probably should never sport the hashtag or the profile photo.

For me, the only acceptable hashtag I can post, and the only one white people, however sincerely earnest they may feel, should most, is #IamGeorgeZimmerman.  

If you don't believe me, go out tonight after dark.  Go somewhere where you know you'll run into black folk.  When someone different than you walks by you in the shadows between street lights, see if you can walk by without feeling fear inside.  Without wondering if you're going to be mugged.  Go for it.  Can you be free from fear?  I cannot.  

Because like Mr. Zimmerman, we are safe behind the gated (largely white and privileged) online and ecclesial communities and our pulpits, wielding the fire arms of prophetic fervor, believing we are called to take up an office for which we are not qualified.  Like GZ, we stalk whatever innocents wander this hellish racially charged world, greedily chewing them up in our need to be relevant, to be perceived as part of the solution, to be on the right side of history, to put forward the right face to the world.  And like George Zimmerman, as white folk, we are acquitted.  We get off, literally and figuratively, again and again and again.  With impunity.  The world is on our side.    

#IamGeorgeZimmerman.  And like him, I too am bloodied, I sport wounds from my actions.  My forehead bears the overhyped dramatic scars of having been involved in the scuffle for human rights - except that, in trying to do so, I am only making it worse.  Because at the end of the day, I am free to walk into a coffee shop to write a blog like this, and no one in that shop will look at me with fear because of the color of my skin.  I am free to be afraid of black people and not be seen as culturally aberrant.  I am free to have an opinion on this horrible tragedy, while ignoring the bloody traveler in our neighborhood, and the blood on our own hands.  And so I too am scarred.

But there is truth in the blood.  Because in many ways, I am also the mangled traveler on the ground.  Because our self-righteousness, our need to judge and divide the church because they do not react and feel and blog as earnestly as we do, our need to take on the mask of Trayvon as if we were the black community rather than listening to the laments and the cries and the outrage of that community - this leaves us all chained, and wounded, and immobile, and self-deceived, and helpless, slaves to Whiteness and race.

And as the bloodied traveler, we need a Samaritan to save us.  Satan cannot cast out Satan, as Jesus proclaimed, and Whiteness cannot mask Whiteness.  We need Trayvon, and the black community, to remind us who we are in this battle - we are George Zimmerman too.  And it is time for us to stop trolling the social media world with our judgements and our reactivity and our sincerity, and to shut up.  To start sitting still.  To lay down our weapons.  To be a different kind of leader.  To listen.  

To stop being like Martha, indignant that others are not doing the hard work no one ever asked us to do.  And perhaps, like Mary, to sit where the voice of Christ can be found.  Outside of us.  Challenging us.  For the truth of a power that can cause a revolution of our hearts.  And so, give us a true justice and love - gifts that can never be taken away.  

And let’s start listening.  For once, wordlessness is acceptable.  I have never been the father of a black teenage son who was murdered by a white man.  I have never been a black teenager.  I have much to learn, and I do not yet know how to feel this.  I am helpless and have nothing to say.  And, I pray, that this is the beginning of recovery.  I am as helpless as the man beaten on the road.  And I need to let the Samaritan teach me how to be well.  And, I pray and pray, that this will teach me to repent.  To take off my mask.  To have truth about the way things are.  And so, to learn from others and from the God of the Cross, what it means to be a neighbor.  

Relevant religion begins, not with social media, but with repentance.  If our communities do not start there, then perhaps we should rethink whether Christianity has ever really been relevant.   

We are George Zimmerman.  Let’s stop insulting insulting Trayvon Martin, his family, his community, and the cross, by pretending otherwise.  

St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians - The Complete Sermon Series

This past Sunday, we at South Wedge Mission finished our six-week long trek through St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, following the revised common lectionary's given readings with some modifications.  I've included the complete six sermons below in case you missed one or are interested in checking them out.  Included Part 2 on Codependent Peter, which has languished in the editorial stack for weeks and finally sees the light of the blogosphere:)

Thanks for reading/listening/taking the Gospel back with you wherever you may go!


6/2 - Gal. 1.1-24 - "Story, Gospel, Art, Mission: Introducing St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians"

6/9 - Gal. 1.10-12, 2.1-16 - "Chameleons and Mockingjays: The Case of Codependent Peter"

6/16 - Gal 2.15-3.5 - "Justification...on a SPACESHIP! or St. Paul Comes to Call"

6/23 - Gal 3.5-29 - "Notes from Underground (Railroad), or, How Slaves Taught us Freedom from Inclusivity"

6/30 - Gal 5.1, 13-25 - "SARX WARS, or, How the Apocalypse Stole My Fruits"

7/2 - Gal 6.1-16 - "Magna Carta Holy Grail (of Christian Freedom), or, Reborn on the Fourth of July"

Sermon: "Mockingjays and Chameleons, or, the Case of Codependent Peter" (St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians Part 2/6)

"Mockingjays and Chameleons, or, the Case of Codependent Peter" (St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians Part 2/6)

Preached at South Wedge Mission

Rochester, New York

9 June 2013

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Text: Galatians 1.10-12, 2.1-16

~

-Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ. (Gal 1.10)

-Ever since I was a little kid, my mom often told me that I was a “chameleon.”  And not just because of that phase when I bought baggy shorts and started wearing long sleeve t-shirts under short-sleeved ones like all the skater kids – despite not actually owning a skateboard!  Or when, after college I made the horrible mistake germane to young white activist types of trying to dreadlock my hair. 

-No, see, I’ve always been good - am still good - at assimilating the styles of those around me (even if someone else’s cool wallet chain looked ridiculous with my Abercrombie and Fitch khakis!).  On the postivie note, I think I am deeply atuned to particular nuances and stylistic and tonal particularities, which enables some great impressions, creative musical improvisation, and is a virtue when it comes to reading and interpreting texts.  It’s served me well as I’ve always had a diverse group of friends, and can adapt to a number of circumstances and situations.  As St. Paul says elsewhere, “I become all things to all people.”  Being a chameleon is a major asset for ministry.

 

-And also a major curse.  Because if there’s one thing every pastor knows, if only secretly in their heart, it’s that one of the main incentives for taking on such a challenging and otherwise borderline insane calling is our almost universal need for three things: admiration, affirmation and approval.  Being able to change colors to fit the color scheme at hand is also convenient for giving people what they want to hear – though not always what they need.

-And it’s hard to remember who you are after so many changes.  Redefining myself to achieve other people’s ever-shifting standards of approval ultimately means that I am always allowing myself to be re-defined by what I think are their standards.  The message my life speaks, then, is not something distinctly me – not what God gifted to me in my creation.  I am like that Mockingjay bird in the Hunger Games – a mutation of separate creatures spliced together, able to imitate, but ultimately, easily employable and influenced by the deceptive and destructive forces of the Capital.  I’m still a slave to power outside of myself.

-I share all this because if I’m honest, I really feel for St. Peter in today’s reading from Galatians.  Peter, Jesus’ number one discipline, his right-hand man, the person many believe was commissioned by Christ to be the universal head of the new church movement and beyond – he hasn’t really changed much.  Because in so many ways, it feels like he is a fellow chameleon too.

-Because after being called by Jesus, witnessing the life death and resurrection of Jesus, and performing miracles and preaching in Jesus’ Name, Peter is still, after all that, struggling with his need for approval.  He’s a biblical poster-child for codependency.

-Just look at his bio.  When Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, Peter’s the first to have the right answer – “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!”  A few verses later, when Jesus is talking about being crucified, Peter speaks the group’s (understandable) trepidation at being mutilated and killed, only to be called “Satan.”  He’s ready to walk on water to Jesus, but he freaks out when he sees the waves, and calls out to Jesus for help.  At the Last Supper, when Jesus corrects him for trying to avoid having his feet washed, Jesus promptly rebukes him, leading Peter to request a full body washing!  The man can’t hold his own to save his life.

-And then, of course, who could forget Peter’s big low – denying Jesus three times on the night of his darkest trial, because he was afraid of what the guards and servant girls might think about him?  Or, as he and John walk along the seashore with the resurrected Jesus, and Peter is told he will be crucified one day, and Peter promptly asks, “well, what about the other guy?”

-This is the same Peter – the already saint still sinner Peter – we meet in Antioch, who is also the brunt of a major butt-whooping by a very unhappy St. Paul.  Because now, after having approved of Paul’s somewhat unorthodox ministry to the Gentiles (read: non-Jews), a ministry Jesus himself gave and the “watchdogs” at Jerusalem approved, Peter’s at it again.  He’s in Galatia, and instead of backing Paul – instead of making a powerful statement, as the head of the church, of Gospel inclusion, Peter’s decided that it’s best for him to eat with the Jews – the other circumcised folks.  They DO have the power, after all.  And after a lifetime of fearing other people, why should he let go of his codependency now?

-And I wonder – are any of us really that different than Peter?  Have we desired approval and security and a sense of self so badly that we’ve allowed ourselves to be defined, not only by other problematic folks, but also, at the expense of those who are already on the ropes?  Whether in the high school locker room, or in the pseudo-safety of facebook and blog comments, or in our work environments or our families, have you, like Peter and me, betrayed your deepest beliefs and convictions of what you know is just and right…because you were afraid of losing approval?

-And see, I wonder why we really desire approval so much at all.  Aside from the whole being-included-with-the-winning-or-the-cool-side of things,, or the desperate need to be known and accepted and understood, or just the desire to get ahead and find security and safety, I think it gets down to something more.  I think we seek the approval of others because, secretly, we don’t really approve of ourselves.  We deny approval to others as well – get mad when others don’t meet our standards, want to be like us, give us their approval – because, honestly, we are as harsh on ourselves as others are.  Tied to their conditional love, we practice conditional love against ourselves.  And then, turn that on others.

-And it’s because, I think, we forget the Gospel.  That simple, yet profound truth, that we are not justified by any works of the Law or anything we can be or do on our own.  But are claimed by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and given an unshakeable identity, because in through the lens of the cross, we are able to see ourselves for who we truly are: God’s beloved.  God’s always-already claimed children.   Defined by God alone, and God’s work in Jesus Christ.

-Jesus, the one who came, not seeking our approval, but seeking to give us the approval we could never find from one another.  Who was disapproved by us – rejected, because he forced to play our idolatrous codependency games, and placed in a position of utter disregard and scorn: crucified, outside the city walls, in the place of a criminal, a traitor, an outcast.  Jesus, who offered to us and proved to us the original approval, the “it was good!” of God’s original creation.  Jesus, who by the cross, crucified codependency, and gave us back ourselves.

-Jesus was the ultimate chameleon - taking on our humanity and everything with it, and giving to us God's divinity, and everything with it.  Death and disapproval and destitution and codependency - for grace, truth, joy, peace and love.  

-See, that’s why I think it’s so crucial that, as we learned last week, Paul leads with his own story.  Paul has no delusions about needing approval from the Galatians like Peter does.  Because Paul is unafraid to tell his own death and resurrection story.  To share how the Gospel has worked in his life.  He has no secrets, has no qualms, and so, is able, with brutal honesty and seeking reconciliation and restoration, to confront Peter.  And to confront him publicly, in order to restore him to the truth of how reality really is.

-Because in Christ is revealed the true nature of the world.  That we were made for relationship, with God, and with one another.  Not to be chameleons, always changing along with everyone else’s changes.  But resting in the unchanging, always and forever love of God for God’s creation.  Not seeking approval from others, or seeking to give our own fickle approval to those seeking it from us – but, having known ourselves as definitely approved by God – a deal signed in the blood of the cross – we are free to simply share with others the Gospel that they too are claimed by God.

-And we are given freedom. Freedom to eat with Gentiles, and enemies, and outsiders, and unexpected guests, and the weak, and the absolutely worthless in others’ eyes.  Free from using church as a vehicle for political causes, or denominational battles – all of which, in the end, are also covert battles for approval and acceptance in culture and in halls of power.   Free to stop trying to fit people into an unstable system of our own devising – and instead, to discover, with wonder, uncertainty, risk and delight, how each of us, as unique and unrepeatable manifestations of the creative love of God – fit into the story, God’s story.  The story of reality.  Whether we approve it or not. 

-And we’re free to confront one another in love too.  Free to tell the Peters and Matthews and chameleons and mockingjays in our communities that we are backsliding.  That we are falling under the spell of the lie.  That the way we are living is proclaiming, not a world approved by God, but a God approved by the world, and a sense of self utterly at the whim of the crashing waves and driving currents of turbulent waters on which we should be walking freely, rather than sinking desperately.

-The Gospel gives us a true sense of who we are in God.  It gives the gift of boldness.  Of a willingness to be radically honest.  To stand up for those who are disapproved, regardless of whether we are approved of or not.  We need to hear it again and again.  Because all of us are, in a certain sense, mockingjays and chameleons.  We are made in the image of God, and so, are called to reflect God’s colors.  Called to sing the songs of humanity back to one another in such a way as to sing them in the key of grace. 

-We can do so, bringing others with us as together we strive for freedom, because we know ourselves in Christ.  As approved, accepted, affirmed, and admired by the one who alone needs no approval from anyone.  But delights in sharing it with everyone.  With you.  With me.  With all. 

-In Jesus’ Name, Amen.  

Sermon: "Magna Carta Holy Grail (of Christian Freedom)" (St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians 6/6)

"Magna Carta Holy Grail (of Christian Freedom)"

Preached at South Wedge Mission

Rochester, New York

7 July 2013

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Text: Galatians 6.1-10, 14-16

~

You get to feel so guilty, got so much for so little

That you find that feeling just won't go away

You're holding on to every little thing so tightly

Till there's nothing left for you anyway...

You hurt yourself, you hurt your lover

than you discover

What you thought was freedom is just greed...

-U2, "Gone"

-We’ve reached the end of Galatians, the letter that Martin Luther once called the “magna carta of Christian freedom” (he'd add "holy grail" if he'd been around to rap with Jay-Z).  Last week, we heard Paul proclaim that “it was for freedom Christ has set us free,” and then, looked at two apocalyptic visions, one of slavery to the Sarx (flesh), and one of the liberty of the Spirit’s fruits flowering in us.  

-But as we conclude, we still haven’t really answered a pressing question: what, in simple, human, 21st century terms, exactly is Christian freedom?  What are we freed from? What are we freed for? And, just as important, how do we live this freedom?  

-Thankfully, for once, Paul makes it pretty clear here in chapter six, just as he’s wrapping up his letter.  He seems to lay out three basic recommendations for what Peterson’s Message translation calls “living creatively:"

1) Be a community that restores one another and bears one another’s burdens with gentleness

2) Focus on your own load, rather than another’s

3) Boast in nothing but the cross of Christ, which has won us a new creation

-In many ways, that’s the ethical distillation of the entire letter.  All that discernment of Idols and Gospels, of Sarx and Spirit, of Includers and the Included, Jews and Gentiles...it all comes down to this way of being community - an Israel of faith - with God, and with neighbor.  

-But if Paul has taught us anything, it’s that even Gospel community - especially Gospel community, can be used for slavery if it falls into the wrong hands.  Enter me.  On the Fourth of July.  A perfect time to reflect on freedom.  

-See, every year around the Fourth, we join Leah’s family up on Lake Ontario at the Lighthouse Christian Camp for a week-long family camp.  The setting is beautiful, with tiny cottages nestled right along the shore of the lake.  The sunsets make your heart sing.  There’s space to talk, to pray, to recharge, and to skip stones.  Lots of stones.  Family stories are shared and remembered as families work together to remember and grow in the story of our faith.

-And, for this community, a big part of both family and faith stories is the story of America.  On the Fourth, there’s a huge worship service in the tabernacle.  Red white and blue balloons line the aisles.  Giant flags are projected behind the praise lyrics.  Veterans and parents of soldiers are venerated and thanked.  As I walked by, I heard a soloist practicing a song with the lyrics “one nation under God.”

-Except this Fourth, I was walking away from it.  See, Leah’s cousin Matt and me, being the enlightened progressive Christian pacifists that we are, have made a tradition of holding a prayer service before the tabernacle service, to pray for America’s enemies.  Then we skip the service.  Our way of saying that we belong to the Kingdom first, and only then, to this country, and her history of genocide, pillaging and war.

-As I made my way past the sights and sounds of passionate patriotism, I felt the sweet sensation of self-righteousness swell within me.  Surely, this was a community of Christians in need of being restored, in line with Paul's Point One.  Surely, with my advanced sense of the Gospel and my keen eye for Idolatry, we could free them from nationalism and unwrap the Bible from the flag.  Help them find the Truth.  

-Which is just about when the Truth found me.  Because I realized: I was the one in need of restoration.  Because, like the Judaizers requiring circumcision of the Galatian converts, I was making my acceptance of my fellow Christians - albeit distant cousins - conditional of them meeting my standards of progressivism.  And, in the end, I was isolating myself from community.  And ultimately, was no more free from sin than anyone at the camp.

-See, Paul’s first recommendation says that we ought to restore one another with gentleness, and that we should bear each other’s burdens.  Instead, I took out my Hipster glasses and switched on the ‘ol Flaw-O-Matic my generation has ingrained in me.  And I started to critique and judge.  Outraged by a nation built on warfare, I was unwittingly, hypocritically, and not at all gently, waging war on my own family.

-And that’s where I was hit by Paul’s second recommendation - namely, verse 3: if someone thinks we he is something when he is nothing, he is deceived...but let each test his own work.  Or, in psycho-babble terms: stop codependently trying to control and manipulate others, and focus on your own s-h-i-t.

-For me, maybe it meant just going to my own prayer meeting and doing my best to do what I felt called to do: pray for enemies - not praying against others.  It also meant, I think, focusing on the warfare in my own heart.  The ways that, through violent speech, and selfish thinking, and neglect of my own spiritual life, I tried to isolate myself from God, from accountability, and so make myself god over other people.

-In reality, I couldn't go in that service, not because of any moral outrage or zeal of the Kingdom, but because I couldn't stand to experience my own resentment and critical judgement.  I wonder what would have happened had I walked up to the pastor, took responsibility for my own struggle, admitting "I struggle with solely focusing on patriotism - could we also pray for our enemies?"  Who knows?  Maybe the whole camp would have ended up praying.  And I might have been humbled more gently too.  

-But see, if you’re like me, then even on the short walk to church today, you’ve probably slipped into the whole god-complex in any number of ways.  Perhaps it’s indulging in the fleeting and ironic joy of using the Flaw-o-Matic to make critical remarks of others.  Maybe there’s a person in your life you desperately want to fix, and you think about fixing them all the time.  Maybe you are feeling trapped and enslaved by someone else’s manipulations, and are stockpiling nuclear weapons in the silo of your heart.  And it feels like slavery.   

-And if you’re like me, you are being called out of slavery for Gospel freedom.  Freedom from the need to always critique.  From the need to fix others.  From the need to manipulate or control circumstances other than your own.  From the impulse to react, to pray or preach or do anything good AT people, rather than FOR them.  From the quiet desperation of needing to be god, or ending up as nothing.  

-And, you are also being called to Gospel freedom FOR something.  FOR right relationships.  With God.  With your neighbors.  And with yourself.  FOR the wholeness, the peace, the Shalom described in those fruits of the Spirit.  FOR what Paul calls the “new creation.”  

-Now, like me, maybe you’re wondering: how am I supposed to focus on my own load AND carry my neighbor’s burden?  Doesn’t that seem a bit contradictory?  

-Seems? Yes.  Actually? Not so sure.

-See, Paul’s first two steps are not in opposition.  I think they’re two sides of the same coin.  See, the Greek word for “burdens,” those that we must help our neighbors with, this word denotes something really oppressive.  Usually, a set of requirements laid down by others that weigh on one’s soul.  It's something take cuts one off from community.  And drains away life.    

-The word for “loads,” on the other hand, is the same word that Jesus uses in the Gospel of Matthew when he says, “my yoke is easy and my load is light.”  It’s still very difficult stuff.  It’s hard work.  But it's work that gives us life.  That is us acting out of our Spirit center.  And, as Jesus notes, like oxen, we are not yoked alone.  In fact, we are able to do this work only because Christ has bound Himself to our very hearts, and so animates us with his grace and love.

-The end goal of each work is different.  One, "burdens," oppresses; the other, our "load," enlivens.

-So what I hear Paul saying is this: the first task of our Christian community is to restore one another when we have fallen into the grip of sin and death.  Which means, not punishing or guilting or controlling or fixing.  But speaking the truth of who we are in Christ.  Literally re-clothing our brother or sister with the garment of Christ Jesus, and with it, the promise of the Gospel that they are no one’s slave, and so, do not need to carry oppressive requirements, or guilt, or expectations, or anything else that is not God.  This is always gentle, because it must reflect Jesus’ own gentleness.  How we restore will be part of the reminder of what we are restoring them to!

-But to be the kind of community that can heal with the soothing balm of the Gospel, we also need to carry our own loads.  Do our own work.  Not work that seeks to earn the free gift of salvation.  But the work of growing in intimacy with Jesus, the one who has joined Himself to our hearts.  We cannot simply know the Gospel with our heads.  We must work so that it can sink into our hearts.  It must become a part of us.  The soil must be prepared so that the seeds of the Spirit fruits may grow.

-So, in some ways, our load is very personal.  It might mean recommitting to a discipline of regular prayer and of listening to the Scriptures.  It might mean letting God reveal our idols, so that God can cleanse us from the works of the Sarx, and make us open to be channels of the Spirit.  It also might mean taking time to delight in God, to be in God’s world, and among God’s people, being refreshed through worship, and play, and celebration.  But point is, it’s a relationship.  Christ has set us free for relationship.  And the ultimate freedom of a relationship comes in the discipline of commitment.

-So as we grow more deeply in our love with God, we will be given the freedom from self to love and restore and support our brothers and sisters.  Growing in the knowledge of how much God loves us and has forgiven us feeds us so that we can extend this restorative love to others.  And, in being a community that openly shares our struggles, and practices gentle Gospel healing and restoration, will ultimately provide a safe and nurturing space, a greenhouse, if you will, in which the fruits of the Spirit can flourish.  In which the New Creation is incubated.  In which we can fully live and grow together.  

-Which is why I think Paul ends with his powerful third recommendation: “But for my part, may I never boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ - for nothing else matters, except the new creation it’s given us!" We are given the freedom to be a community with a singleness of purpose - to be known by God deeply and intimately, and so to know one another deeply and intimately, and then, healed by the Gospel, to offer that Gospel to the still enslaved and suffering.  We do not need to affiliate with any political party.  We do not need to solve the deep issues of the day.  In many ways, we do not need to worry what America is doing, or what the Jews are doing, or what the Evangelicals are doing, or what anyone else is doing.  It’s not about them.  It’s not about us.  It’s about God.  

-We are called to boast only in the cross of Christ.  The proclamation of the Crucified God.  Who brings healing to the broken.  Who brings love the excluded.  Who brings freedom to the slaves.  Who brings an end to death, and begins the new creation.  Nothing else matters.  Everything else is just our practice of bearing the burdens of others, and so fulfilling our mission as a church - the mission of telling the story of the Good News of what God has done for us in Christ Jesus.  That God forgives us.  That God has liberated us.  That God is for us, with us, and loves us.  And God wants so much more for God’s children then we ever imagined.

-I have another Fourth of July story I'd like to leave you with as we leave Galatians together.  Later that day, Matt's wife Jess suggested a practice for us.  She recommended we take a bucket of stones.  That we go to the waters' edge.  And we cast them into the deep.  And for each one thrown away, we shoudl name out loud a barrier that kept us from God.  A kind of dramatic form of confession.

-As I listened to Leah throw her stones, and then had to name and throw my own, I was struck.  The things I was naming, they could have been written on the stones I threw at the patriotic tabernacle service.  The things I most hated in myself, the chains of my slavery, were the demons I tried to cast into others.  And instead of making them weapons, they became instruments.  Not just of confession.  But also, of play.  Skipping them off into the distance, to sink into oblivion, where God will remember them no more.  It's setting down a heavy burden.  And freeing the hands to carry a load.   

-And I think that's Paul's message of grace in Galatians.  I'm thankful to him for having lived it and passed it on to us.  Thankful for you, walking and stumbling with me through this series.  Thankful that we at the South Wedge Mission have been given this work to do - this Mission of bearing burdens and carrying loads.  And we've been given the Gospel - and the God - to take our place in the new creation.  Praise be to God.  That's all.  That's everything.

-Amen.     

Sermon: "SARX WARS, or, How the Apocalypse Stole My Fruits" (St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians 5/6)

"SARX WARS, or, How the Apocalypse Stole My Fruits of the Spirit" (St. Paul and the Very Foolish Galatians 5/6)

Preached at South Wedge Mission
Rochester, New York
30 June 2013
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Text: Galatians 5.1, 13-25 (NRSV, Message)

Click here to listen to "Guided by the Spirit," a simple song I wrote for worship, inspired by the work of Organic Faith's "Devotion" service.

~

-So, after four weeks of theology and idolatry and time-traveling apostles, we seem to arrived at something that feels a lot more...practical.  In today’s reading from Galatians, we’re given two lists: works of the flesh, and the fruits of the Spirit.  FINALLY!  Clear.  Simple.  Practical.  God bless lists.    

-And of, if only the preacher would just focus on what to avoid so we don’t do wrong, and what to do so we can do good!  Kindness, patience, gentleness, joy, peace, generosity, and love!  You can’t go wrong with that!  And Paul says there’s now Law against these things!  So can’t we just get down to the business of talking about living the faith, about what we need to do?

-Of course...not!  And, lest you string me up and run me out of church, please allow me to blame it on St. Paul.  No, seriously, it is all Paul’s fault.   With a little assistance from our good old friend, the old self/idol-maker, the Ego.  Because, see, Paul isn’t ready to give us the to-do’s yet.  (That’s next week, I promise!)  But where a book of the Bible holds out a list, the Ego in us is ready to be be taken in, like a toddler running full speed at a clear glass door.  The ensuing result can be pretty hilarious - but also, is a case in missing the point!

-Because, see, Paul is still telling the story.  The same story he’s been telling this whole letter.  The Gospel of Freedom.  The Good News about how Christ has come to set us free.  Free from all the ways in which we ourselves, and others, try to define who we are by standards other than God’s promises, and how Christ comes to reclaim us from deception for Himself.  It’s important enough to him to tell it one more time.  Except, this time, on a massive, epic, even COSMIC scale.  

-But first, let’s recap.  See, Paul started out with the story of the Gospel.  The cross.  Then showed how it changed his own story.  Then how it challenged the story of the early church, particularly between codependent Peter and Paul.  And then, he showed how it changes each of our stories, as Christ comes to dwell supernaturally in our hearts.  THEN, he showed how all of our stories are part of Israel’s story - the story of an exodus from slavery into freedom.  And now, for the grand finale, the final cosmic confrontation.  The Last Battle.  The End of Time. (WARNING: Excessive Sci-fi referencing ahead)  

-Now, you might be wondering, if it’s all so cosmic, then where exactly are all the, you know, cosmic thingies?  Shouldn’t there be X-Wings and Death Stars, or Cybernetic Archangels and Demon Hunters and Klingons and Daleks and the like?  

-Well, there is.  Not Daleks, sadly.  But believe it or not, Paul finally peels back the curtain of the present moment to reveal the greater drama going on, in, behind and through every day events.  What we call “apocalyptic,” which is just Greek for a “revealing.”  He’s just waited all this time, because he wanted us to make sure we understood the stakes in our own lives and the work of Christ, before rocketing us into the next realm.  Cause frankly, if he led with Daleks, I would have been just fine staying there.

-The cosmic battle is against something far more insidious.  It’s called “the Flesh.”  Or, in Greek, the “Sarx.”  Throughout much of the history of Christianity, it’s been common to identify the Sarx with the body.  Or, rather, for people who have it in for the body to identify them.  Particularly when people dislike or want to control the particular color, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity of that particular body.  Or, just want to make it seem like Christianity hates bodily things.    

-Which is just plain nonsense in light of Christ’s Incarnation.  Jesus takes ON flesh - not Sarx with a capital S, but actual flesh and bone and muscle.  Jesus becomes human, thereby redeeming and transfiguring material reality.  So even if unhealthy humans have often been rather masochistic towards their bodies, it’s not something that came from the God who shaped bodies from dust, kissed them with the breath of life, and called them Good.  

-En contraire, for Paul, Sarx is something quite different.  Sarx is more like a kind of cosmic power, an entity, a disembodied shadow thing that is everywhere present and nowhere visible in itself.  The Sarx is a kind of Matrix, that human beings have created, continue to fuel, and cannot control.  It is a power that is fundamentally opposed to God.  

-But it’s not a demon or a Satan or the Dark Side.  More like a Frankenstein monster, or a Terminator, or Neo’s machines.  That’s key.  Its the collective consciousness of our self-focused, self-made, self-perpetuating works.  It is an idol.  The Idol.  And it is an Idol that has stolen a life of its own.  From our lives.  Stolen power.  Out of the ruins of our freely surrendered freedom.  Assimilated us into the Borg collective.  Turned us into Darth Vaders.  Half-human; half-machine.  Fully enslaved.     

-We know it is there, claims Paul, because its works are evident.  And I think that the Eugene Peterson Message translation really captures this poignantly.  Let’s hear it again: 

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;  20 trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits;  21 the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

-We know it is there, in other words, because it pretty much describes the broken world that we all live in.  The broken world that we ourselves have made in our own image.  The broken world in which power is about competing and controlling one another.  The world that seems so real and immediate, and yet, feels so fake, and so fleeting, so unfulfilling.  The world that is a mirror of our own darkness.  

-Sort of like a prison.  Or a Matrix.  The Sarx is what happens when we take the image of God in us - the capacity for limitless and bountiful creation in community - and we turn it to our own devices.  When we make reality all about us, when we create idols and then believe their promises.  It’s a prison.  And in trying to make each other into each other’s slaves, we all end up slaves of the Sarx.

-And the Sarx grows and becomes more its own entity because it feeds on our actions.  It can only exist, in fact, by the unrestrained actions of self-serving human will.  If we all suddenly stopped being selfish, it would vanish.  It would be powerless.  But we cannot stop.  And the more we struggle to overcome it by trying to be “good,” the more we create its power.  And with it, its systems of oppression, and of slavery, of abuse, and of destruction.  We are the human batteries that keep the Matrix turned on.  

-Pretty bleak, right?  But see how it’s cosmic?  How Sarx and Sin are so much more than simply character defects that keep us from being existentially fulfilled?  The power of the Ego, of Idolatry, and of Sin, it spoils the story.  From the most personal life to the farthest-reaching corners of the cosmos.  It takes good things, good gifts, like sex, and food, and beverages, and words, and relationships, and joy, and celebration, and community - and twists them all into chains of shame and self-seeking.  It takes life, and turns it into a desert of isolation and loneliness.  

-Paul puts it quite bluntly: if we bite and ravage one another, in no time we will annihilate one another. Consume each other.  Exterminate one another.  I’d definitely take the Daleks over that.  

-But see, I wonder if there’s another reason Paul has held off on the whole cosmic Sarx thing until now.  Because, see, if all along we could just blame some cosmic baddie like the Sarx for all of our problems, we probably wouldn’t have listened to the other stuff.  About salvation.  And our desperate need for it.   

-I wonder if Paul wanted to help us see how we were powerless first.  On our own, ordinary, every day terms.  That our lives are unmanageable, our anti-creations beyond our control.  And the story of the Sarx, portrayed here - it’s like that scene in a sci-fi movie when a character gets a glimpse of the ravaged future.  “This is where your will takes you” says the guide or mentor.  This is the end.  You live in the moment before the end.  But this desolation - that’s the result.  It’s where we’re headed.  

-Because with Sin and Ego, with Sarx and Self, we are playing with power we do not understand.  Our actions have consequences and responsibilities to them far beyond the scope of our comprehension.  Like bad karma channelled into a dark crystal and then placed in the heart of a chaos bomb that will consume individuals, friendships, communities, histories, ecosystems, worlds, the entire cosmos.  And what we thought was freedom to do what we wanted "as long as it doesn't hurt others" - that's the Sarx too.  Playing us with the song of self that we first sang.  A song that has become a dirge.  

-But that’s not all that Paul has given us.  Because he’s also given us the story of the resistance.  The way out.  The story of God’s very nature in Christ Jesus, coming to dwell supernaturally within us.  Paul’s given us the Gospel, the story of how when we were powerless - not powerful - Christ came to set us free.  And with Christ, the Sarx has been crucified and defeated.   

-The battle cry.  “For freedom,” he declares, “Christ has set us free!  So do not submit!  Do not give back your power and your lives and your freedom to the Sarx!  If you haven’t gotten it by now, then look at this final, apocalyptic vision, and take the better path.  The path, not of Self and Ego.  But of Love.  And Faith.  And Joy.  And Patience.  And Gentleness.  And Kindness.  And Generosity.  Take the path that I am giving to you.  The path that leads to the fruits of the Spirit."   

-For freedom Christ has set us free!  And along with a vision of armageddon, Paul also paints a more powerful portrait of freedom, of a kind of Eden, in which human beings follow the Law of Love, and so, share the Fruits of the Tree of Life and of Knowledge.  The Fruits of the Spirit.  The practices of community with God and neighbor.

-And see, that list of “fruits of the Spirit” - it’s not just a check list of how to be a good person.  Even if it were, the Sarx would just find a way to use it to compare, and to hold power over others.  “Well, if HE really believed in God, then he’d show more patience,” or, “look at how I’ve collected seven of nine fruits!  Can’t wait to complete my full set!”  As I hope we’ve learned by now, Paul is far too clever for that.  Besides, it’s not exactly a revelation to be “kind,” right?

-Rather, I think the Fruits of the Spirit, as a kind of vision of paradise, are there as enticements.  As sweet temptations.  As a lover’s promises, set before us like a dream just about to come true.  They are what God is making us into.  Because they are, first and foremost, not about us.  They are not the Fruits of Good Deeds and Devotion.  They are the Fruits of the Spirit.  Rooted in the very character of God, shared with humanity.  

-Because it is first God who is love, love without end.  It is first God who takes joy in God’s creation and beloved children.  God who is patient and gentle and kind to us, even as we are impatient and violent and towards him, repaying God’s generosity with a cross and a collection of idols.  And, in Christ, it is God who is peace, and has given us peace, and desires peace for all.  This is the character of God, revealed in the Incarnate flesh of Jesus.  And shared with us in our hearts and lives by the gift of the Spirit.  

-It’s a picture of who God is making us.  A promise of what we will be.  Hear the Message again: 

He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments,  23 not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

-And it’s also a pathway.  To follow in the footsteps of the Lover.  Or, if you like, a collection of clues, foretastes, bread crumbs.  Eucharist crumbs.  Hints of heaven.  Fruit snacks.  So that it’s not so much “did I achieve kindness today,” as it is, “I seemed to be able to exhibit kindness to the guy who was pissing me off, a kindness far beyond my ability.  I wonder where that came from?  I’ll follow where it leads.”

-As you may have heard, fruit grows from seeds.  And see, in giving us the Spirit, God has planted, not so much full-grown fruits, as tiny seeds.  Or, in a way, a Holy Kudzu, Benign Viruses or White Blood Cells, that are slowly but surely eating away at the cancerous chains of the Sarx’s slavery.  Grace is downloaded into our Sarx-systems and, day by day, step by step, and failure by failure, is transforming us.  Making us free.  Making us God.

-And that’s where the sailboat analogy comes back.  Us positioning our sails to catch it.  Because it’s not just a vision already achieved.  It’s also a present work.  Hard work.  But it’s not a chore.  Not something we should see as a tedious struggle of achievement.  Granted, it will be challenging.  As Rilke once wrote, nothing of value is without challenge.  It's learning to see the Sarx for the Matrix it is.  It's also discovering the true beauty of embodied reality, as if for the first time.  And it's a hell of a ride.  

-Like early sobriety, as addicts can tell you.  The fruits of the Spirit are the steps we take towards spiritual recovery and sobriety.  Towards a new freedom and a new happiness.  They are what is given us when we finally come to see that we are powerless to overcome this anti-creation we have spawned, this Sarx.  When we cease struggling.  And start letting God do what we cannot do for ourselves.  Then, we are given the power to take up the promises of God, and to embrace the discipline of becoming who we really are.

-And it is a discipline.  But not like punishment, which is fear-driven.  It is a discipline that leads to freedom.  That leads to fruits.  A training.  A commitment.  Just as daily weeding and watering leads to a fruitful harvest, so in our lives, the journey of commitment, into community with God and one another - of risking gentleness and generosity, faithfulness and self-control, and believing that joy can come where power is abandoned - these disciplines give us freedom to live freely, animated, guided by the Spirit of Life itself.  Commitment and submission to God and one another in prayer, worship, community, and service - that’s the freedom of love.  

-And we will find that, in fact, the whole thing is not a cosmic battle after all.  Because God is peace.  And rather than eradicate the Sarx, God is actually seeking to reclaim from the Sarx the goodness of creation.  Starting with you.  And with me.  And then, our gifts and talents and joys.  And yes, sex, and celebration, and especially, a family.  A community grown from the compost of our Sarx.  Pulling from the fertile soil of failure the blessings of the body.  Our bodies.  Our world.  And offering them back.  As gifts.  So that we may be gifts to one another.  

-So, in many ways, I can think of nothing more practical than Sarx and Spirit.  Because it is the story of us all.  Reminds us that slavery really is slavery, however good it feels in the moment.  That we really were slaves of our own making.  And that Christ truly has set us free.  Placed us on a different path.  That Christ is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  It’s less a check-list of to-do’s.  More of a promise of the Power by which we can actually do good things.  The Power that makes us good.

-And that's why we cannot make this part of Galatians into a list.  Because God is not giving us the fruits of the Spirit so we can be better than others.  God is giving them to us so we can be more like God.  And so, better for others.   

-So do not submit!  Do not obey the Sarx.  Do not return to slavery.  Live free, guided by the Spirit.  Because once we have tasted life - true, abundant, completely free life - then believe me, nothing else will ever be the same again.     

-Amen.