A sermon on Galatians 5:1, 13-25 by Nathan Nettleton

One of you contacted me this week to say that there was a problem with the sermons page on our website and when you tried to listen to last Sunday’s sermon, you got the previous Sunday’s instead. And when I couldn’t initially reproduce the problem, I briefly wondered whether it was just that the last two weeks’ sermons had been so similar in their main point that they were being mistaken for each other. Turns out there really was a technical problem, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you preach for several weeks in a row from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, you are likely to end up making the same point over and over. And tonight will continue the trend, although I think it will be a bit more different than the last two. In case you missed the last two, I’ve been following Paul’s emphasis on being free from having our lives dictated by law, and I’ve sought to show how Paul is telling us that if we just focus on what Jesus calls us to do, to love God and to love others, friend and enemy alike, then we won’t have to worry about any religious laws that tell us not to do various other things, because those other things are all things that you wouldn’t even think of doing, let alone be able to do, if you are busying yourself with loving everybody. And in tonight’s extract, that message is clearly there again, and it even includes Paul restating his conviction that “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’” And of course that statement brings back to mind the fact that when Jesus said that, and someone responded by asking who he was to regard as his neighbour, he replied with a story that essentially said that you are to regard everyone as your neighbour, including foreigners and your enemies.

But so as not to be too repetitive, I want to focus tonight on a new point that the Apostle emphasises in tonight’s extract as he tries to warn us against disastrous misunderstandings of what it means to be free. “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence,” he says. “Live by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

I said last week that the main reason that churches continue to want strict religious laws that most people will be too afraid to break is that we are afraid of what people might do if they felt they could get away with anything. We are afraid that if people stop thinking God will punish them, then they would use their freedom to indulge their every animal instinct and appetite and all hell would break loose. Well, in tonight’s passage, the Apostle Paul is acknowledging exactly that fear. He is not willing to resort back to a law code and a punishing God, but he recognises the danger. “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.” Paul is recognising that freedom can be misused. If you tell people they are absolutely free, and so they can now become as spectacularly loving and gracious and creative and admirable as they could possibly imagine, some of them may respond by instead claiming the freedom to be as spectacularly nasty and greedy and hostile and self-indulgent as they can imagine. And so Paul wants to warn us not to misunderstand and misuse our freedom.

This was a pretty important point for Paul, even in the specific debate he was locked into with the hardline Jewish Christians who wanted to reimpose the whole Jewish law on the new non-Jewish converts. Because, you see, religious Jews mostly did not, and still do not, see the law as an unreasonable restriction of their freedom. They see living by the law as the thing that safeguards them against being swept into the pagan lifestyles they fear and hope to avoid. It is the thing that protects their freedom to be good and healthy and responsible and faithful. They think of the law a bit like the way most Australians think of seatbelt laws and helmet laws or even gun laws. Most of us don’t need the laws, because we wouldn’t dream of riding a motorbike without a helmet or filling our houses with guns, but we’re still glad the laws are there to help stop idiots from taking risks that the rest of us are likely to end up having to pay for. So for most of us, it wouldn’t make any difference if they repealed the laws and said that anyone who was stupid enough to ride a motorbike without a helmet was now free to do so. But Paul seems to be acknowledging that there are some who will respond with the kind of attitude I encountered in some motorbike riders in the USA, who oppose helmet laws on the grounds that it infringes their freedom and who therefore choose to ride without helmets as a kind of symbolic flaunting of their freedom. Now when a petty freedom like that become more important to you than the survival of your skull, than your own life, then freedom has become an idol, an idol that is clung to to your own detriment. Freedom has become an end in itself, rather than a gateway to fullness of life. And that is exactly what the Judaisers were afraid of when Paul said compliance with the law was no longer the focus of the godly life. And Paul can see that their is some validity to their fear.

“Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.” He is saying, Yes, freedom does theoretically mean that you are free to be utterly stupid and self-destructive. It does theoretically mean that you are free to jump off the Westgate Bridge. It does mean theoretically that you are free to walk straight back into the dungeons and live as though you had never been released, even though the doors are open. This is the same danger that occurs every time an offender is released from prison after serving their sentence. They are free to go and live well and build decent honest lives for themselves. But they are also now free to go straight out and reoffend, to indulge in behaviours that will quickly cost them their freedom and see them locked back up again. In other words, you can use your freedom in a way that sabotages itself. And that is not just because the law might come down on your head and lock you up. The Apostle is warning us that lots of the behaviours that we could be tempted to use our freedom to indulge are actually inherently destructive and enslaving and diminishing. The more we indulge them, the more we lose the capacity to freely live our own lives; the more pathetic and constricted and compulsed our lives become. Such ways of exercising our freedom erodes our freedom and reduces us back to mere animals, driven by nothing more than base instinct and appetite. And, as Paul points out, not only do such things diminish your humanity, but they contribute to the destructive chaos that threatens us all. “Watch out,” says Paul, for “if you act like wild animals, hurting and harming each other, you will completely destroy one another.”

You see, the way we react to freedom often depends on the wisdom and maturity of how we think about it. If your focus is on the good that you are liberated for, then you won’t even have cause to think about limits. They are off somewhere in an area that doesn’t interest you. But if you are so childishly jealous and protective of every inch of freedom that you spend all your energy in defining and protecting its outer edges, then all your focus ends up on the thin dividing line between what you can and can’t do. And so you end up like those insane helmetless motorbike riders. Instead of rejoicing in the freedom to ride your bike with a relatively safe head, you see helmets only as an invasive limitation of your freedom. And instead of being free to become someone who generously and creatively makes the world a more gracious and beautiful place, you waste your whole life jealously and aggressively trying to claw back territory that is not even worth occupying. The warning that Paul is issuing is most needing to be heard by those kinds of people. Because it is really only those who have been resentfully preoccupied with the limits of their freedom who are likely to react to the message of absolute freedom by throwing their helmets away and charging off into territory that nobody in their right mind would actually want to enter.

So Paul says, “Live by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh.” Although it can sound like it, this is not some repressive anti physical body rant by Paul. He is not saying that bodies are all bad and we have to escape our physicality for some kind of disembodied spiritual nirvana. You only have to read how strongly Paul defends the physical bodily nature of the resurrection to know that he sees human bodies as something created by God and lovingly redeemed by God. But he often uses the word “flesh” to speak of our base animal nature, the competitive, survival driven, dog eat dog instincts that still exist within us and often conflict with our better natures. This animal nature and the culture around us, which so often glories in that animal nature, both inflame selfish and destructive tendencies that lead us into vicious cycles that end up destroying us and our freedom. The law had always sought to constrain that, by putting limits on our worst behaviours, but Paul is now recognising that as a failure. It did sometimes succeed in limiting our worst, but it did so at the cost of making us mistakenly imagine God to be some kind of officious celestial policeman whose prime concern was detecting our wrong-doings, and that in turn made us lose our focus on what we should be doing and focus instead on what we shouldn’t be doing, with tragic consequences.

Even where the law managed to limit our worst instincts by, for example, limiting retaliation to the strictly proportional – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – it still isn’t creating any real freedom. You could call it the “freedom” to retaliate, but retaliation is never really a form of freedom because it always means you are stuck with reacting to the actions of others. There is always someone else pulling your chain, and retaliation nearly always creates its own feedback loop and we become prisoners to the never ending cycle. The gospel, the way of Jesus, seeks to liberate us from those cycles and set us free to be different. The way of Jesus sets us free to be what we could never otherwise manage to be, people who graciously and courageously rise above the base reciprocation of everyone else’s behaviours. The Apostle describes the contrasting results as the works of the flesh and fruits of the Spirit. That language is instructive in itself. They are not both works or both fruits. It is the works of the flesh and fruits of the Spirit. The works of the flesh are little more than outcomes. They are works that simply grind on and on, reproducing themselves slavishly. But the fruits of the Spirit are things which are cultivated and which grow and flourish. They are things of beauty and individuality, things that nourish and bless. The works of flesh fuel envy and competitive desire and hostility and so they end up undermining and eroding our freedom. The fruits of the Spirit break the cycles and enable new responses of grace and hospitality and love which are radically free.

The choice is before us. God takes the risk of telling us we are free, knowing that some will be tempted to abuse it, but God takes that risk because God is not interested in controlling us and forcing us to conform to expectations, however good. God is interested in loving us and being loved by us, in sharing a radically open and mutual relationship with us. God wants to see us freely embrace the possibilities before us, to grow and flourish and become the truly wondrous people we were created to be. And to awaken us to such possibilities, God has to take the risk of letting us know that there are no shackles, there are no lines which if stepped across will cause God to stop loving you and begin angrily punishing you. There are certainly lines which if stepped across will cause God’s heart to break as only a lover’s heart can, but the love will not be the least diminished. God’s great desire is that we embrace our freedom wisely, creatively and joyously, not foolishly rushing towards those destructive behaviours we might have previously felt were prohibited to us, but finding ourselves free from the baggage that has previously stifled our capacity to love and be loved. God longs for us to see what we are set free for instead of being preoccupied with what we were set free from. “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit,” says Paul. Guided by the Spirit into love and reconciliation and joy. Not guided by the old fences to merely stay away from things. The choice is before us. Therefore, as God’s beloved children, set free from all that would weigh us down, let us use our freedom to enter the divine life of boundless love and joyously be all we were created to be, to the glory of God.