August 23, 2009 Sermon

Walk by the Spirit
Galatians 5:16-26

My parents visited us this week. While here my dad told me a story. Some years ago he took his blind friend Larry fishing. They had a great time. Dad took our pontoon boat out on the big lake near where we lived and anchored in open water. Larry sat up front. They laughed because from there he could cast fearlessly in any direction—except towards my dad. But that was no problem because my father is a very loud man. At any rate, after they finished dad drove him home. A thunderstorm blew up. As they passed a utility substation, lightning struck a transformer. It produced an immense clap of thunder and a flash of intense white light. The light was so bright it compelled my dad to pull over and wait for his retinas to stop burning. Larry said, “I saw that.”

In his early years Larry could see. He graduated from college and became a researcher in the labs of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant. He gradually lost his sight at about the age of thirty. From that time until that lightning struck he had seen nothing. Later he joked about how he saw the light only once in his whole adult life. The Apostle Paul who wrote the letter to the Galatians from which we just read might reply that many people never see the light at all. We have nearly reached the end of Galatians. By this point the angry tone with which he started writing had mellowed. Yet Paul's impatience with the Galatians remains clear even in these latter verses. Some people just will not see the light. But to Paul's credit he did not give up on trying to show it to them. See the light and walk by the Spirit, he told those Galatians. Do we see the necessity of these words? See the Light. Walk by the Spirit.

Paul wrote to the Galatian Christians to explain the roles law and Spirit must play in the Christian life. The Bible contains many laws, many rules from God. Christians must try to obey these laws. But why? Do we obey in order to earn God's approval? Do we obey in order to be saved? Paul emphatically answered no. But so many Christians—in Galatia of old and around the world today—seem not to understand this. Last Wednesday I received a phone call from a local woman who wanted me to commit our church to participate in an event later this fall. The event will be a public demonstration of support for one side of a hot issue. I know Christians who support that side, and I know Christians who support the other side. Both can make persuasive cases from scripture for their positions. I noted this with the woman on the phone and stated that as a Presbyterian Church we do not presume to compel our members to follow a party line on such potentially divisive issues. For this reason I could not commit our church to participation, though I would gladly publicize it.

Our call did not end well. The woman became angry. She denied that a Christian could take a position on that issue that differed from hers. She severely criticized me for what she called waffling. Though I told her that speaking in such a judgmental way would earn her no converts, she persisted. She accused me of “breaking God's will”. I ended up hanging up on her as gently as I could.
Many people have experienced legalistic judgment from Christians. Many of them have left the church. They have hung up on us. We Christians can behave as though we do not trust God's grace. We can behave as though we believe that only strict obedience to God's laws—as we interpret them—will do. Paul had no use for such rubbish. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he wrote earlier in this letter. “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” He made it clear that the law can become that yoke of slavery. When we try to use obedience to the law to earn God's approval, when we try to use obedience to get saved, we miss the whole point of Christ Jesus. We sin. We cannot save ourselves. Jesus died to save us from our sins. We receive that salvation as a gift when we believe in Jesus, not when we obey God.

Once we grasp that God's grace saves us in Christ Jesus through faith, we can finally turn to obeying God's law for the right reason. Then, and only then, can we use the law as Paul wished: as a guide for our behavior. “Live by the Spirit,” he opened our passage, “and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.” “Desires of the flesh” is a biblical way of saying, “the destructive urges of our human nature”. Paul listed a bunch of these: fornication, jealousy, carousing and the like. His list would make the Church Lady (Dana Carvey's old Saturday Night Live Character) proud. From cover to cover the Bible makes it clear that human nature consists of a potent mixture of good and evil. Walk, therefore, by the Spirit. Let the Holy Spirit of God lead you to gratify the spiritual desires God has planted in you, not the sinful desires that we nurture.

George Orwell, the same man who wrote Animal Farm and 1984, authored Homage to Catalonia, a memoir of his volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s'. At the time openly a communist, Orwell traveled from his native England to report on the war. But once he arrived he was moved to join other communists, anarchists, trade union members and Spanish peasants against Francisco Franco and the Fascists. He felt it was a noble cause. Communism had not yet revealed its true nature, and Franco represented the same ruthless and evil system as the one in place in Italy under Mussolini and in Germany under Hitler. Still, the experience changed Orwell profoundly. It pounded all the idealism about human nature out of him. He described the horrifying actions of both sides in clinical detail. He was wounded in the arm by a sniper and sent to recuperate in a hospital in Barcelona, the nearest major city. The train trip there was gruesome; men died strapped to stretchers laid across seat backs and were left in place until the train reached the city because nobody would take responsibility for their bodies. The trip, over less than eighty miles as the crow flies, took parts of four days.

About two weeks later the war came to Barcelona. Men built barricades in the streets and shot at each other from roof tops and through windows. Orwell described a group of men known to him personally who took refuge in a movie theater with women and children. They kept their rifles stacked in an aisle but decided that, if possible, they would fight no more. A committee representing a rival faction, supposedly on the same side in the war, turned them in to the Fascists. Some of the men were, as they called it, “disappeared”. They were hauled away, propped up against a wall someplace, and shot. Some of the women and children had unspeakable things done to them. Their supposed allies turned them in so they would not become rivals for power after the war ended. Anybody who has fought in a war can (but usually won't) tell similar stories. Perhaps they never saw such betrayal with their own eyes. But fighting in a war erases trust in the goodness of human nature.

No honest person who has fought in a war, witnessed a food riot, or—for that matter—flipped through the cable channels can claim that human nature has no evil in it. The Apostle Paul suffered no such illusion. We cannot behave ourselves perfectly. We cannot save ourselves. Christ has died to bring us forgiveness from our sins and salvation from God. Now, we Christians must, without pride or judgment of others, do our best as forgiven, grateful sinners to obey God's laws. We must receive the power of the Holy Spirit and walk in the Light of Christ. We must seek to imitate Christ by living out the fruits of the Spirit Paul listed at the close of our passage. We must ask the Holy Spirit to work within us to promote love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Three weeks ago I preached on an earlier section of Galatians. For an illustration I used the case of a man whose wife has a wasting disease that threatens to eat away every penny they have, and more besides. A number of you expressed your sorrow for them and asked that I tell them we were thinking of them. One woman got up while I was preaching and walked away. She came back and started writing something, maybe her grocery list, I thought with irritation. But she was writing down every source of help for that couple she could imagine. She gave it to me and asked that I pass it along to them. That is love. That is generosity.

Our own youth group is experiencing a tremendous revival of the Holy Spirit. It started during the mission trip and gathered momentum during Challenge '09. They are praying with and for each other constantly. I see evidence of this every day on Facebook. That is joy. That is faithfulness.

We have a number of folks with disabilities who worship with us most Sundays. A couple of them suffer from profound physical problems that occasionally manifest themselves in loud cries. But our church has decided not to notice this. Their mother has said that one thing about our congregation that impressed her when they first started coming here was that a number of people touched her children and spoke directly with them. That is kindness. That is gentleness.

Our human nature is a mixture of good and evil. By the power of the Holy Spirit those parts of our human nature that reflect the glorious, purity of Christ can see the light of day. See that light. Walk by the Spirit. Re-read that list in Galatians 5:22. Focus on one or two of those fruits of the Spirit you feel you need to grow. Pray to God that the Holy Spirit might work this in your inner nature. Walk in that Spirit. Live in it. Then others, having experienced the unconditionally loving God through you, having known the endless patience of Christ through you, having watched you soothe your passions with (literally) inhuman self control can say: I saw that. I saw the light of Christ. I want to walk in it, too.