I don’t have a lot of fancy words today, miraculous insights, or inspiring stories in this sermon. But, I do have a lot of hope – a realistic yet unshakable gospel belief that we can, by the power of the Spirit, experience transformation and God’s kingdom in this life. That’s the message today – that you can be the Spirit-gift God made you to be for the world. The true test of Christianity, if not every religion, rests upon two unshakable features. 1) We must be able to tell the whole truth about ourselves – be honest, realistic and authentic, about the human condition. Any version of Christianity that doesn’t help you tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is not worth practicing. 2) We must be able to be transformed, to become more of what we were made to be and experience that freedom in this life. I’m not saying that all of that can happen or will happen all at once but if your beliefs are only skin deep, if they don’t tug you into new ways of living, if they don’t often bear sweet fruit worth eating and sharing then, once again, you should ditch those beliefs. So with those two elements in our head and hearts. Let’s begin.
You must grow but YOU don’t grow anything., vss. 16-18
Paul’s charge to “live by the Spirit” is not simply nice spiritual talk but the deep recognition that we need to unselfed and decentered. It’s the reality that the only true starting point of transformation is the experience of our own powerlessness. If it is grace alone that saves us then spirituality can’t be done by gritting our teeth harder, flogging ourselves more, or beating ourselves up. In fact the “flesh” or ego or self loves any option that has us either cannibalizing ourselves or imagining that we are the greatest (in both the self remains the center). Importantly, Paul will offer no techniques for our transformation and emphasize this well in another letter to the Church at Colossae where he is also discussing the freedom we are to have as believers. He calls believers not to submit to rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” These rules . . . are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have a show of wisdom in will-worship . . .” (Col. 2:20-23) The term “will-worship” is from the compound Greek word ethelothreskeia, which has two roots, ethelo, “to will,” and threskeia, which has to do with “religious worship.” It is such “will-worship” that might be the biggest hindrance to the spiritual life that the Spirit seeks to save us from. If the engine of our transformation is about our “wills” we will always turn Christianity into a “worthy” contest and a devout belief that “the one with the most willpower wins.”
No, to live by the Spirit or be “led by the Spirit” is the gracious surrender that happens when we say to God, “I need help. I can’t do it on my own. You are the source of my very being and the engine of my transformation.” It’s waking up every morning with the simple, honest declaration: “I am frail and fragile. All who I meet today are frail and fragile.” It’s the humble recognition that a gardener does not actually grow plants. A gardener practices certain gardening skills that cultivate growth that is beyond their direct control. And so being led by the Spirit is not a technique, but a skill of graciously placing one’s self every day into the hands of God so that God can grow God’s fruit in our lives.
This is Jesus’ point found in Mark 4:26-28: “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.”
The moral life is the fruit of a life transformed by the grace of God through the Holy Spirit. We are being saved by the indwelling energies of divine Grace from sin, from our attachments and addictions to death-dealing and other-harming ways.
So when we see an abundance of poison fruit growing in our lives, we have to ask ourselves how or why we are resisting that grace. We examine ourselves by the fruit that grows and this indicates which kingdom we’ve planted ourselves in. And that leads me to my second point.
The Kingdom is present fruit-bearing in the broken., vss. 19-23
There has developed in Evangelicalism a dangerous notion that salvation is only about when we die determined by a decision that we supposedly make only once. We have falsely understood the “inheritance” that Paul speaks of as solely personal salvation occurring at our death rather than at the death of Jesus and his resurrection. This has made us fashion more of a fire-insurance spirituality that cares only about our end rather than a fruit-bearing one that cares about our lives in the present.
“Inheriting the kingdom” here is not first of all about whether I will go to heaven when I die. The question is which kingdom I am participating in and experiencing through my surrender to Christ or defiance to him (c.f. 1 Cor. 4:20). So how should we read the “acts of the flesh” in vss. 19-21?
Watch what Paul is up to here. He’s talking to Christians. He does the same thing in Romans 1-2, by the way. He starts with outrageous pagan activities that initially hook them into their self-righteous judgments. Naming things such as sexual exploitation like prostitution [porneia], idol-worship, sorcery . . . Yeah, Paul! Get those supposedly sudisgusting pagans with their hideous practices like murder and orgies.
But then look what he squeezes into the middle of his list of kingdom-denying stuff: hostility, jealousy, angry outbursts, rivalry, dissension and factions. Who’s he talking about? He’s nailing the Galatian Christians! And he’s saying, “If we’re going to talk about bad fruit, let’s look at ourselves first, let’s salt ourselves with fire, because if we don’t, we’re really not living in, entering or experiencing the kingdom of love, joy, peace, etc. The fruit of the Spirit IS the kingdom. But we will only cultivate it when we are painfully aware of our shortcomings and pray, “Lord have mercy, return us to the soil in which we were meant to live.”
In the end, rather than appealing to some binary vision of virtues – good or bad, evil or godly, right or wrong, Paul seems to want us to acknowledge a deep awareness that as kingdom people we are both. We are, in the words of Martin Luther, simul justus et peccator [simultaneously sinner and saint or justified and sinful]; that’s how we know we are experiencing kingdom. We don’t always bear the fruit we should but we always tell the truth about it.
You are the plant and you are the fertilizer., vss. 24-26.
Paul has been telling us that you cannot grow yourself. You cannot will yourself one-inch higher, one-fruit bigger, one-leaf brighter. The only way for this plant to grow truly – as it was designed – as Jesus showed us – is for us to surrender to the Spirit and die. We need a power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity. We are not self-propelled, will-worshipers, but Spirit-grown and transformed through the deathly recognition that we are fragile human beings, sinners and saints, grace-infused trees bearing the fruit of God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. Now – all of that is difficult – at times excruciating – there is a reason and it’s more than metaphor that Paul refers to this process as “crucifixion.” But Paul is not calling us to more work but to death. And from that death, from that decentering, from that deep recognition that we are, all of us, God’s house plants, God’s orchard, God’s vineyard, we actually thrive. We fertilize our spirituality when we die to the notion that anything spiritual is ever earned.
The way to die – is to pray. Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a deep, grace-filled awareness that God doesn’t know how to be absent and is everywhere and at all times wooing us with love regardless of what we do. And the longstanding way to experience that love is through some form of contemplative prayer practice – silently consenting to the presence and action of a God who is as close as our breath. A regular practice of silent prayer is the only thing that will kill your short-sighted will-worship, your self-serving ego, your self centered desires, and self-attached anxieties. The origin of contemplate (see the word “temple”; the word literally means to be together (with the Holy in marked out, sacred space) is to recognize that we are the sacred ground in which God inhabits, graciously, lovingly. Seen from this angle – everyone you meet was built to be a church in which God reigns, everywhere you go you have access, you carry God’s Spirit within. You are sacred space.
The ego will always love work more than death. That’s not to say that we aren’t called to pursue holy things in our world. Through activism we confront toxicity in our world; through contemplation we confront it in ourselves. And we will never be able to pursue the change of the world without a change in ourselves.
Contemplation is what Simone Weil describes as a form of attention, paying attention to something that’s not us. This form of attention can be learning to be present to God or learning to be present to our suffering neighbor without trying to turn them into ourselves in some way. This is a gift from the Holy Spirit and a spirituality that unravels all our work so that we might become the fruit of God to a hungry world. When you recognize that – you are sacred space that God inhabits, where God’s kingdom resides, and where God is at work growing fruit – graciously, lovingly – your self will not be able to remain in the center. When you discover and contemplate that that is who you are and how you are loved – the self will graciously, lovingly, die.
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