Well that Sounds Easy Enough

This morning’s scripture reading is Galatians 5: 13-26.
I invite you to listen for the word of God.
You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
-The Word of the Lord
-Thanks be to God.
Sermon
In this passage of scripture Paul once again calls us to the freedom that Christ Jesus has brought us. He claims that the entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself;” and that if you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer slaves to the law.” Paul claims that freedom has come, just as freedom came to many on July 4th, 1776, and then to many more nearly one hundred years after that.
In the year 1863 as the Civil War raged on President Lincoln by virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation legally freed all slaves. But where the abolition of slavery brought freedom once the strength of Lincoln’s Proclamation came to fruition, it was not long before the powers of evil made slavery real once again through low wage jobs, denial of the opportunity for land ownership, and denial of the right to vote, not to mention the reality of the constant menace of racism most dangerously incarnate in the form of the KKK.
It is the gift of freedom that Paul asks us to remember for according to this example we must remember how easily freedom may turn back into slavery.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that the entire law is summed up in one command and it is one that is easy to remember: Love your neighbor as yourself. One command then, some might say, that sounds easy enough.
That we are to avoid things like sexual immorality, debauchery, and hatred, striving for things like love, joy and peace – yes, all of this may sound easy enough
That we are called to freedom, that we are to no longer be slaves to our sinful nature, and that we are to be led by the Spirit – that too may sound easy enough.
Paul, in this letter to the Galatians, calls us to something that may seem obviously attractive and blatantly simple. He calls us to freedom, to avoid many things that the vast majority of people know will not make anyone happy, and to strive for those things that will.
But most importantly it seems, Paul calls us to be free – but those of us who know our humanity well will remember how President Lincoln’s words set men and women free in one sense, while slavery reared its ugly head once again. Those of us who know our humanity well know that freedom is rarely simple, and that freedom from one thing so often too easily becomes nothing more than a transfer from one form of slavery to another.[1]
Paul issues these warnings for Paul knows that freedom is dangerous - that a society that attempts to exist without Laws faces chaos. For the Hebrew Laws that Paul seems to fight against offer a life that seems far from chaos. A life regimented by dietary codes, laws concerning clothing, laws concerning farming, codes of conduct, all of which can still be found in the first five books of our Bible, and all of which, for Paul, can be represented by circumcision – his main subject in this book called Galatians.
Given the importance of these laws and all laws, critics of Paul simply need to ask: and where would the Galatians be if all of these laws were abolished? If the freedom that you speak of were truly granted?
So Paul warns: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.”
In this phrase we may once again see the limits of our English language, for according to Bible scholar Dr. Charles Cousar this sentence might more appropriately be translated as “do not allow your freedom to become a beachhead for sin.” This past 4th of July many of us may have been reminded of what a beachhead is and how during WWII our freedom was threatened once again by a strong enemy. Just Monday the man who delivers our trash bags and toilet paper told me all about the day his platoon stormed the beach at Normandy. He said it was a day that he will never forget – his voice held the importance of that day’s victory. That success on that beachhead meant that the enemy was on their way to defeat –that the tide had changed – and Paul uses this kind of imagery to emphasize the importance of not allowing freedom to indulge the sinful nature.
For the fact is, freedom must be defended – and the defense of freedom takes constant discipline, for once you give in just a little, once the enemy storms the beach and establishes a beachhead the war is that much harder to win.
I thank God that our veterans won that day, but Paul urges us to not let sin sneak into our lives that same way for freedom must be defended.
Today new enemies creep once again into our midst. Our military is fighting a new war – but there is also a spiritual war raging in our society. The battle between right and wrong – the standards set by our for-parents seem to be slipping away for it seems as though the world is about to erupt into chaos and lawlessness. So many believe that we must fight once again, but I am not sure it is just that easy.
We live in a world in need of change – a world steeped in injustice – a world that once again must defend freedom.
But while we need freedom it is something that we also fear for we fear that lawlessness is the only force that will fill the void when the Laws are overturned – when the traditions of old are threatened as Paul claimed that the truth of Christ demands that we challenge those laws that we have always held so dear. But Paul does not advocate lawlessness – no – he advocates for freedom – and he calls us to remember that freedom must not turn into slavery once again.
He calls us to reform our society through the lens of the one law that completes all laws: that “The entire law is brought to completion or perfection when the single command: Love your neighbor as yourself” is applied for our freedom is threatened when our law does not enable us to do so.
Some would say that in this past week our laws have been threatened.
Scooter Libby, a man charged with lying on four different occasions – four lies that may have helped stop end an effort to discredit the Vice-President and President and their case for war in Iraq - a man charged with 2 and a half years in prison.
This week his sentence was commuted – and as I read this passage in Galatians I realize why it was.
Because in his case the law could not be blind, for in Scooter Libby the President saw his neighbor. He saw someone like him, someone from the same background, someone from the same class; someone like him and so the law had to be reformed.
But there is a woman at the Metro State Women’s prison who will not be so lucky. She murdered her husband – she was tried and convicted and because she is on death row when she walks through the prison compound everyone must stand 10 feet away from her as much of her right to basic human contact has been taken away.
But would the law not have been different if her judge could have loved this woman as himself – if her judge was a battered woman, and how different would her sentence be if the law was reformed so that we all could love this woman as we love ourselves?
How different our legal system would be if all people were tried by someone who could empathize, someone who could “love their neighbor as him or her self” as seems to be the case with Scooter Libby. How different would this woman’s sentence be if she were tried by someone who knew what it was like to have an abusive husband, who knew what it was like to fear for your life?
In some ways we are like her, we are not really as free as Paul would have us be. We are slaves to the law still, and so we are not always able to love our neighbors as ourselves.
So freedom must be defended once again.
May God open our eyes to the truth – that the world is made up of only our brothers and sisters in Christ. May you see your own face in every person that you meet.
-Amen
[1] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 485.