Summer vacation time’s here and I know sometimes when we go away, we actually don’t take our cell phones or computers. We don’t listen to TV or radio and we don’t look at newspapers. So, in a sense, we have the opportunity to create, temporarily, an idyllic world…Hopefully it has beautiful scenery, perfect weather, people we enjoy, great food, interesting things to do, and time to really rest.
But then when we come home and pick up a New York Times or Berkshire Eagle, turn on NPR, and get reconnected to the internet, the non-idyllic underbelly of our world, nation, and community come back in focus abruptly. It’s all too real.
Being in touch with the “real world” helps me understand why Paul might have written the Letter to the Galatians. Paul says, “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: Fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.”
Images of these come alive in the news every day. We don’t have to go far from home (Maybe we don’t even have to leave home?) for the reality of these “Works of the Flesh” to come alive. The human underbelly is alive and well, and it’s an ugly, mangled form of what God intends human life to be. This human underbelly is the reason God gave God’s people the Law in the first place: To protect us from ourselves, from our human willfulness, from our lower natures.
But in the Letter to the Galatians, Paul says “Freedom in Christ has set us free. . . If you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the Law.” In other words, in Christ we are free to do as we please because in Christ we are led by the Spirit of Love—not by the desires of the flesh, the world.
Now it can be easy for us to misunderstand this and to conclude things like: The body and the spirit/soul can be separated. The body is bad and the spirit is good. Or our fleshy/earthy nature is somehow not as good as or is less important than our spiritual life. This is a way of thinking that many Christians have adopted over the centuries. But it is not correct. It is not what St. Paul or Jesus had in mind. This way of thinking, is called “dualism.” It came from the earlier, pagan, Greek, Gnostic thought and was in fact declared a heresy by the early Christian Church. (A heresy is thinking and teaching that is not consistent with right thought/orthodoxy.) Dualism is especially contradictory thought for Christians because of the fact that God gave us our fleshy natures in the first place and called them “good”. God also honored our physicality in an ultimate way: God came in Jesus as one of us…Human, fleshy, knowing the joys, pains and desires of the body. If God had not thought our bodies were very important, we might have been made differently. Perhaps we would have just roamed the universe as disembodied souls! But we’re not disembodied souls. We are fleshy people who have minds and souls enlivened by God’s Spirit.
Nevertheless, this kind of dualistic thought has persisted throughout the ages in Christianity. And in spite of our media, which spare us no explicit details about the human body and what it can do…in spite of that, in a complicated and confused form, this dualistic idea still persists today. Today dualistic thinking brings us “wisdom” like, “Sex is dirty. Save it for someone you love” and “Sex is beautiful, don’t talk about it.” No wonder we’re confused about our bodies!
Paul’s letter to the Galatians, however, can go a long way towards clearing our thoughts. Paul says, “We are called to freedom; 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.”
It’s the Spirit-of-Love Paul is talking about not the-Spirit-as-opposed-to-the- Flesh, as if they’re two separate and contradictory things. The Flesh Paul is talking about is the lower part of our natures that’s not governed by love. To Paul “the flesh” is the kind of self-centered things one might see in the tabloids at the grocery check-out or on the evening news. The Flesh Paul is talking about is not a put-down of the fact we have BODIES that feel, need and desire, because God gave us our bodies and celebrates and blesses them through Jesus’ life on earth. The Flesh Paul is talking about is more like the powers and principalities…Things human beings do without regard for Love. These are the things we renounce at our baptisms.
Remember, it’s the Spirit of Love that Paul is holding up. The Spirit of Love, the Gospel, is what sets us free. This Gospel freedom is countercultural because it is in direct opposition to all those things our culture seduces us to become addicted to and idolize. Our Bishop said the other day about Gospel freedom: “You know you are free when your neighbors feel loved!” Paul puts it another way…He says we know the Spirit of Love is present, we know there is true Gospel freedom, when we experience “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” These are the “Fruits of the Spirit”, and I think they can help us know when what we are doing or what someone else is doing is of Love. Think about it in your relationships. Think about it when you listen to the news, go to work, or go to church meetings. I actually have a bracelet that has those fruits of the spirit on it. I often use it when I’m sitting in a meeting to help me discern if what’s happening in the room is in the Spirit of Love or something else. If there is a scarcity of these things—love, joy, peace, patience, etc.—then I think we are living in the Flesh.
Let us pray today and always for the SPIRIT OF LOVE to enfold us and guide us so we know that Gospel freedom, and so our neighbors feel loved.
Amen.
