In Step with the Spirit

 Galatians 5:13-25

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When my children were little, we read a lot, and I do mean a lot, of Curious George stories.  William had his moment of months and months of Curious George at bedtime and as soon as he moved on to something else Alice started her moment with the little monkey.  One of the classic Curious George stories I remember is Curious George and the Dump Truck. It started with George playing on the living room floor of the house where he lived with the man with the yellow.  He heard a funny sound that sounded like “Quack”.  He of course got curious and looked out the window to see a duck and then he heard several more “Quack’s”.  It was a mother duck with five small ducklings in line behind her.  Where were they waddling off to?  George was curious and the next thing we know George is waddling right along in behind them, one of the family.  They crossed streets and waddled their way to the big pond in the city park where children were flying kites and men were planting trees.  And then…George saw something he had never seen before: a great big, huge dump truck.  George forgot about the ducks and climbed into the cab of the truck.  But he couldn’t see out so he stepped on some levers that made the truck dump its load of dirt into the pond; the dirt that the city workers were using for planting the trees and making flowerbeds. Oops!  Then George heard the ducks again and it seemed they really enjoyed this new island in the city pond.  The workers came and George felt really sorry, but they weren’t mad.  They were making the park more enjoyable for people, but it seems George had made the park a better place for ducks.  The ducks now had a happy home in the park too.

Curious George, something always seems to pique his curiosity and he follows it and somehow he always manages to make a mess of things, but in the end, everything works out.  In the book, I like the illustration of George getting in step with the mother duck and her ducklings.  He’s obviously squatting trying to do the duck walk.  And he’s made his arms into little triangular wings.  He’s just happily following along even through dangerous places like roads.  In George’s world, if you’re curious about something, become like it.  So, if you’re going to become a duck, act like a duck.

Looking at our reading from Galatians, this walk like a duck thing of Curious George’s is a fitting example.  This is kind of what Paul means when he says “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.”  Sometimes translations don’t quite capture the imagery of the Greek.  That’s the case here.  If I were to take a stab at it, I would say, “If we are alive in the Spirit, get in step, get in line with the Spirit just like Curious George did when he tried to be a duck.”  But that would be adding to the text. But still, the message is simple.  Since we have been given new life in Christ by the presence of the Holy Spirit in and among us, then we must get in behind the Spirit and walk like the Holy Spirit wherever the Spirit leads.  

This simple message was one the Galatians had a hard time grasping and we do too.  When Paul first came to the area of Galatia, he was quite afflicted with some sort of eye ailment that was difficult to look at.  They could have called him cursed by the gods and refused to take him in.  But instead, they showed him compassion.  They took Paul in, a stranger, and treated his ailment.  They restored his health instead of shaming him.  They didn’t know that in welcoming this particular stranger they were welcoming a new reality indwelt by a God who loved them and was intervening in their lives in a totally “ungodlike” way.

 The Galatians were people who worshipped other gods through strange rituals and superstitions. Religion in the ancient world was very transactional: Do thus and such to the “T”, and this particular god will do thus and that if the god is in a good mood and it serves their narcissistic purposes.  Personal interaction with the gods was unheard of.  Interaction with the gods was through priests and rituals.  That a god would love humans or even mingle his or her self with a human was preposterously ridiculous.  

While he was healing, Paul began to tell them about how his God was utterly unlike those gods.  He told them the Good News of the Son of God becoming human as Jesus the Jew of Nazareth and how Jesus was crucified and died and then God in the power of the Holy Spirit raised him from death.  He told them of how in that act of incarnation, death, and resurrection God was destroying death and the disease of sin that affects the whole Creation and was setting in motion the healing and recreation of his broken and hurting Creation.  Finally, to those who will give their allegiance to Jesus God is giving a taste of this new creation life by the gift of the presence of the Holy Spirit and by that gift God adopts us to be his own beloved children.  Well, we don’t know the details, but apparently as Paul told this Good News to the Galatians the Holy Spirit came to them to dwell in them each and also among them giving them a taste of this new life in Christ that is characterised by a profoundly real experience of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  This totally freed them from obligations to gods who could care less about them.

Unfortunately, after Paul moved on from the Galatian communities some strangers came to them who were associated with the Jesus people mainly located around Jerusalem where it all began.  They taught that you weren’t a real follower of Jesus unless you become a Law-of-Moses-abiding Jew as Jesus was.  They were demanding even that men get circumcised.  The Galatians believed them and were beginning to take on the strenuous demands of following the Law of Moses.  So, Paul angrily wrote to the Galatians “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law or by hearing the Good news.”  Had they received this new life indwelt by the presence of God by observing rules and rituals in the way they used to worship their former gods.  No, they had simply received it when the heard the Message.  Paul said, “The Law is summed up in one commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself” which they had so obviously done when they cared for Paul in his sickness.  It was just so very foolish of them to fall under that burden of keeping the Law.  God had made them his people, his own beloved children by giving them his very self, the Holy Spirit, as the result of what Jesus, the Son of God had done.  Keeping the Law could in no way add anything to the new life they now had in the Spirit of Christ.

So, Paul tells them that since God had made them alive by and in the gift of the Holy Spirit, they needed to live according to the Spirit not the Law.  The Spirit’s way is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Therefore, empowered, driven, compelled by the Spirit they must get in step with the Spirit and follow the Spirit implanted desires of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Like Curious George’s mother duck leading her ducklings to the happy place of the pond in the park, the Holy Spirit leads us through the normalcy of the events of daily life by prompting us to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.

All that said, in North American Christianity we tend to be like the Galatian Christians who were deceived to believe they had to keep laws and rules in order to be Christian.  Rather than just accept God’s free gift of the Holy Spirit and let the new life of Christ flow through us, we have a simple belief in God practised in conducting moral duties.  This devotion to duty keeps us from understanding that we are Holy Spirit-filled, love-filled communities of brothers and sisters in Christ who know themselves to be beloved children of God.  We think there is more to being faithful than being prompted through life by that sense of Belovedness to act accordingly.  We have eclipsed our sense of belovedness behind moral duty or just being good people so much so that talk of being made alive by the Spirit and being guided by the Spirit sounds weird to us if not scary.

So, if reality is that we are alive by and in the Spirit, how do we recognize this and get in step with it?  Well, a prayer life is essential here.  That goes without saying.  As does the daily reading of Scripture and participation in Christian fellowship.  But, those are things we can also get legalistic about and turn into duties as opposed to their being cherished acts of devotion in the context of a relationship of beloved people with their beloved God.  We must search for this sense of mutual belovedness: mutual meaning God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for one another.  When we take time for devotions (and may our devoted time grow to encapsulate all day) we need to approach it with the awareness that the Holy Spirit is present with us and knowing that prayer, Scripture reading, and Christian fellowship are the practice of a relationship with our God who is genuinely with us.  I like the idea of sitting with an empty chair next to me to give a sense of place for God to be.

Here's something else.  Something else that gets eclipsed behind duty is beauty.  We don’t talk enough if at all about the role of beauty in our relationship to God.  The Russian author Dostoyevsky once said, “Beauty will save the world.” I think he was on to something.  Where beauty is, God is not far from it.  On the seventh day of creation after calling his creation very good – or Beautiful – God rested, God reposed and enjoyed it.  When we take time to repose and appreciate the beauty that is everywhere around us, it has the effect of giving us rest and with that rest comes joy and with joy comes a sense of adoration for something other than self.  This is Creation’s song of praise to God.  When we rightly locate ourselves in the worship that undergirds creation, the one whom creation adores will soon reveal his self – present but absent.  When you find God or God finds you, be honest.  You have nothing to fear.  You are God’s Beloved child.  God is for you.  Amen.

            

Freedom in the Spirit

Galatians 5:1,13-25

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There was an elderly gentleman that I once knew.  He was a Centenarian and lived a very full life; a life which he very much lived “his way” in the Sinatra sense.  He was a veteran of WWII and a successful entrepreneur.  He liked to talk as long as you agreed with him and even at his age his mind was a sharp as ever on the opinions that he held.  Whenever he and I had a chat he usually picked the topic and as I was a minister he liked to talk about religious matters.  Unfortunately, his knowledge of the topic did not venture past his childhood.  He had more than a couple of stories to tell about growing up in a strict Baptist home; stories that were mostly about things you weren’t supposed to do on Sunday which he would sneak off and do.  When he became an adult he went to war, went to work, and went to the clubhouse, but never to church.  He could never get past the legalism and moralism of the Christian religion that he had forced upon him growing up. 

The first few times I had the opportunity to chat with him on the matter I tried to nudge him past his opinions which he formed in response to his strict religious upbringing.  On one of those occasions he asked me what I believed happened to us when we die.  I told him that all of that high-handed Heaven and Hell stuff he was threatened with when he was young just isn’t really in the Bible in that bully-pulpit kind of way.  The Bible really doesn’t say much about either.  I went on to tell him that I really couldn’t say much about what to expect other than when we die we will come face to face with the greatest sense of being Loved that we have ever known and my basis for that is the way I have glimpsed an experience or two of God in my life in the here and now.  Needless to say, the subject got changed.

Speaking for myself, I have to say that this man’s story breaks my heart.  The Christian “religion” that he was bullied with as a child is not what following Jesus is about.  Following Jesus is not about a bunch of rules of conduct that you have to obey for fear of a wrathful God sentencing you to Hell if you should walk in the way of the wicked or if you failed to believe that Jesus’ death was your Get-Out-of-Hell-Free card.  The Christian faith is about being set free from all that religious legalistic and moralistic hub-bub in order to live a new life led by the Spirit of God who lives in us and transforms us.  It breaks my heart that this man had his faith destroyed by being spiritually bullied with a yoke of law when he could have known love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  He could have been raised to want to know God and the love of God more fully, but all he got was spiritually bullied.

Paul writes, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”  The freedom he refers to is freedom from an old existence that is ruled by sin and is undergirded by fear and leads to death – that twisted old existence where good becomes evil and evil seems so good.  Free from that old existence we are now free to live in a new existence that Paul normally refers to as “ in Christ”.

At the end of chapter 2 of Galatians Paul writes: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  For us, this entails that we too have been crucified with Christ Jesus and it is no longer we ourselves who live but Christ Jesus living in and through us.  We have a new existence in Jesus Christ that leads to new life, a new life that is ruled by him and made real in us by the Holy Spirit living in us and leading us to faithfulness.  This new life doesn’t look like religious moralism.  Rather, it shows itself as faithfulness working through love – love for one another and love for our neighbours.  The Holy Spirit points us to Christ Jesus and compels us to love as he has loved us.  The freedom for which Christ has set us free becomes reality in loving service to others.

As we give heed to the voice of the Holy Spirit, who from deep within us compels us to love, to reconcile, to pray, to read the Scriptures regularly and to meditate on them we find our new existence in Christ.  We find ourselves being transformed, being made new in that we become more and more compassionate, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and more in control of ourselves – and that, my friends, is true freedom.  It is like God is overwriting our old hard drive with the new programming of the new human existence that is in Christ Jesus.  True freedom is found in heeding the voice of the Holy Spirit who compels us to love.  Amen.

In Step with the Spirit

1 Kings 19:15-21, Luke 9:51-62, Galatians 5:13-25

So, it’s a good time to be in agriculture.  The government, the king, is behind the family farm.  With the people being established on the land now, he sees agriculture as being important.  Israel doesn’t need to worship that war God Yahweh anymore who brought them out of Egypt. Ahab worships the god Baal who brings the rain.  He’s also gone as far as to marry a princess of Sidon, Jezebel who has set up temples and shrines all over the place to worship her fertility goddess Asherah who makes the crops grow.  Yes, that prophet of Yahweh, Elijah just killed all the prophets of Baal trying to get people to go back to Yahweh.  But, what do you expect?  Ahab and Jezebel will soon have their way with him.

Well, your family farm is doing pretty good.  You’ve got about 200,000 acres of good land and twelve tractors to work it.  Your son, Elisha, manages the workers and drives the twelfth tractor himself.  He’s a hard-working young man, interested in learning the family business; so interested that you’ve already turned the business over to him and put the land in his name.  You’re retired. 

But, one day the prophet Elijah comes to Elisha, walks up to him and throws his cloak on him.  The next thing you know Elisha dismantles all the farm equipment and sells them for parts and gives the money to the workers and starts following Elijah to become his successor as the prophet of Yahweh.  You didn’t see that coming?

You’re sitting on the roadside outside a village in Samaria.  Jesus and his disciples are leaving the city.  You’re neighbours are yelling insults at them.  Usually, Samaritans got along okay with Jesus because he often preached on the hypocrisy going on in Jerusalem.  As a Samaritan you were often looked down upon by the Jerusalem crowd because they didn’t think your bloodline was Hebrew enough.  But today it seemed he had only come to town for some food to eat and maybe a place to sleep.  He was headed to Jerusalem for something obviously more important than hanging out with some “half-bloods”.  You think to yourself.  He’s not a Messiah for the Samaritans.  It’s all about Jerusalem.

But you keep watching.  His followers are quite upset.  Two of his more important acting “servants” must be thinking they are a couple of little Elijah’s or something because they said to him, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them.”   You don’t know if they’re serious or just trying banter back to the crowd.  Doesn’t matter.  Whatever the reason, Jesus lit into them.  “Calling down fire from heaven” on people who don’t accept him just isn’t his way.

Here comes Jesus and his band of followers.  You’re sympathetic to his cause.  He heals people.  Casts out demons.  Preaches against religious hypocrites.  Like Elijah throwing his mantle onto Elisha something comes over you.  You get up and go to Jesus and you say, “I will follow you wherever you go.”  He looks at you and points out that foxes and birds have it better than he does.  Is that the sort of life you want?  Do you really want to live by faith, hand-to-mouth at the hand of God?  Do you really want the way of life that leads to Jerusalem’s cross?

You’re sitting on a rock overlooking the road to Jerusalem.  Thinking.  Praying.  You’re father just died.  The family and the family business are now your responsibility, but you feel like there is something else you should be doing.  You’ve a lot on your mind.  Here comes a small crowd.  It’s Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of God.  He’s coming up to you.   He seems pretty urgent.  What’s he going to do?  Does he know your father has died and wants to come and raise him?  That would solve a lot of problems.  “Follow me,” he says.  It’s not a raising of the dead kind of thing, but it’s a way out.  Feeling like the recipient of Elijah’s mantle you agree, but it would be proper for you to at least first bury your father.  He says, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”  Do your family obligations not matter?

Here comes Jesus and his followers heading for Jerusalem.  For some reason you want to join with them, but you need to say good-bye to your family because that would be proper.  After all, you love them.  You run up to Jesus.  “Lord, I will follow you…but first let me go say goodbye to my family and explain what I’m doing.”  Jesus says to you, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.”  You get it.  Looking back instead of straight ahead when you’re ploughing makes your rows crooked and you waste land.  You have to go back, fix it, and plough again.  But, seriously is commitment to Jesus and his Kingdom more important than commitment to family?

I think it would be safe to say that for the majority of us our lives are “family focused”.  With respect tot he Christian faith we teach that being committed to "family" and being “good” families are at the heart of being “good” Christians.  Jesus and church are things we fit into our family lives for the benefit of a strong family.  But, to be honest we should admit that our commitment to Jesus is still only second seat to family cohesiveness.  We’ll put our hands to the plough as long as it’s ploughing in the family field.   

It is very hard to read these passages and not hear Jesus saying that commitment to him must supersede even the commitment to family.  Speaking from my own warped and jaded perspective, I know what it feels like to have your parents and siblings think I’ve gone crazy because something like Elijah’s cloak had fallen on me and began to rearrange my priorities around Jesus and following him.  I really got some looks when the ministry became my career path.  I know what it feels like to have a wife of ten years divorce me and the final reason being she didn’t want to be a minister’s wife.  I know what its like to have people treat me different not because I’m me and I’m strange but because I’m a minister. 

God has been good to me.  Now I have an understanding wife (she’s a minister too) and two kids.  Things are different now that I have a family.  I was talking to a man several weeks ago, the son of a prominent Presbyterian Church in Canada minister.  If you go to the national office in Toronto you will see his father’s name on plaques and pictures.  This man was quite embittered with his father and the church.  He said, “My father did a lot of good for the church, but he was never there for us.”  I don’t ever want my kids to feel that way about me, Jesus, or his church.  Yet, that day will come…and all the while I won’t get paid the overtime hours it took to write this sermon that was written at the expense of time with my family.  Poor, pitiful me.  Ministers have an idol that we dutifully serve and it’s obviously not family.  It’s the church.

Church members tend to put family needs before the church.  Ministers tend to put church needs before their families.  There’s something wrong with this picture.  That something wrong is that we tend to equate following Jesus with participation in the church as an institution that is a core element of a society.  This is not what following Jesus is.

One message that is clear in the New Testament that Paul spells out very adamantly in Galatians is that following Jesus does mean following him into a cultural, ethnic expression of a religion.  In our case, it is cultural Christianity as an institution with its buildings, paid leaders, and club-like patterns of behaviours.  Following Jesus is the expression of a new form of human existence – new life in Christ – where everything about the old life is dead and we are dead to it.  Yet, God has raised us in Christ by the Holy Spirit coming to live in us that we may live as a new humanity.  Everything about the old life is dead including “family values” and “institutional” church.

Paul says in Galatians 2:19-20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith/faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Jesus has clothed us with Elijah’s mantle, which is a metaphor of the Holy Spirit.  We like Paul are dead, crucified with Christ.  The lives we now live, we must yield to Jesus living through us because the Holy Spirit has bonded us to him.

Paul says “If we live by the Spirit…” Live means whatever it is that gives us biological life, consciousness, relationships, and a relationship to God.  If we live by the Spirit, then human life in its totality now is by and in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the very life of God in Christ.  “If we live by the Spirit, let us get in step with the Spirit.”  The fruit of the Spirit will naturally grow from us the closer we draw to Jesus and yield our lives to him – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  When we seek to follow our Holy Spirit instinct to love our neighbours as ourselves rather than “call down fire from heaven” in judgement upon them, we are walking in step with Jesus.

The Greek word for “in step” (guided –NRSV) means “get in a row with” like ducks in a row.  There’s a true story of a tractor-trailer on the 401 in Toronto just creeping along at an absolute snail’s pace.  Drivers in their cars were zipping by it only to receive what would probably be the greatest surprise of their lives.  This ginormous eighteen-wheeler was giving protection to a mother duck and her line of ducklings that for some bizarre reason thought the 401 was en route to their pond. The New Life in Christ, life by the Spirit is like that.  Those baby ducks followed their mother instinctively and because of the love of that truck driver they will grow up to be just like her.  So we must remember that our call to follow Jesus is not the call to family values or the institution of the church.  It is to follow Jesus and our Holy Spirit given inward instinct to become like him.  That task surpasses any other even being good family people and good church members.  Amen.