After reading the Epistle for this Sunday I decided on the title for this message. I’ll try and explain what I mean, but first here’s the Scripture —
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.
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
The acts of the flesh 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, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
Being Saved
Growing up, I was like most of my contemporaries in wondering how to respond to God. In particular, I wanted to know that I would somehow be “saved.” Although if you’d asked me what that meant I would probably have told you that I wanted to be sure that I would go to Heaven when I died.
Somewhere along the way I stumbled on the understanding that I would be justified not by what I did or didn’t do, but by what Christ had done on my behalf. Although I didn’t altogether understand what that meant, it is what we United Methodists call “justifying grace.” My concerns about the state of my soul in the first place were the result of what we call “prevenient grace” — the grace that goes “before.”
The moment I understood that God had done the heavy lifting of salvation . . . of restoring me to a state of righteousness . . . wasn’t ecstatic, euphoric or highly emotional, but more akin to Wesley’s experience of his heart being strangely warmed: I must have been meant to be Methodist.
Then the hard work began.
First, I had to understand what the goal was. Yes, Lord, I need you and my one defense, my righteousness, meant that I needed you even more.
The temptation for me was to place a check mark in the box called “saved” and move on. Sunday was for sanctification — but to quote Elton John, “Saturday night’s alright for fighting, get a little action in.” It’s not that I took this understanding as license to go crazy on Saturday nights (well, maybe that one night my sophomore year in college), it was that I misunderstood what salvation was about.
The desire to spend eternity with God is not a bad desire. It is the fruit of that grace that goes before. The problem comes when we use the grace extended by God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as freedom from bondage rather than the freedom to willingly bind ourselves to the way that Jesus taught.
Being Freed
The name of this site is The Unchained Soul. Inspired by Chapter Twelve, verses seven and eight and by Chapter Sixteen, verse Twenty-Six, in the Acts of the Apostles wherein St. Peter and St. Paul were freed from their respective confinements by Herod in Jerusalem and by the Magistrates in Philippi, which passages inspired Charles Wesley to compose the hymn And Can It Be, it celebrates the freedom that God’s grace bestows. As Paul wrote in verse one of chapter five of his letter to the Galatians, “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery.”
So hey, let’s move on to Saturday Night Life — eat, drink and be merry, right?
Janis Joplin sang that freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose. In other words, freedom from worry, from responsibility, from everything. Paul disagrees. He tells us we are “called” to freedom. But freedom to do what?
The answer: to be bound to our neighbors, to become slaves to one another, to trade the chains of the flesh for chains of the Spirit or, to use Paul’s language here, to put down the works of the flesh in exchange for the fruit of the Spirit.
Let’s stop for a second. Paul does not mean that the flesh is bad in and of itself. Jesus ate with his disciples — enjoyed life with his friends. Indeed, he was criticized by the religious authorities for doing so. By the same token, just because we pursue something that isn’t tangible or physical doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good.
Among the works of the flesh that Paul warned the Galatians against were factions (indeed, it was one of the main reasons for writing this letter as well as his letters to Corinth). The Greek word translated here as “factions” is hairesis from which we derive our word “heresies”. The word literally meant “choice.” So from “choosing” comes our concept of heresy.
Free to Choose
How could freedom to choose be a bad thing?
First, let’s look at a standard definition of “heresy.”
“Heresy” means any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs according to modern definitions — including in particular religious beliefs and customs. So, choosing the wrong belief gets you in trouble. Indeed, there have been times and there are still places even today, that adherence to a wrong belief can get you burned at the stake or worse.
In the movie Indiana Jones and Last Crusade, we get to the point where the bad guy chooses the wrong grail — the knight guarding the Holy Grail says, “He chose poorly,” as the bad guy ages in seconds and turns to dust. Actually, the bad guy didn’t choose the wrong grail — he accepted the wrong grail from Elsa whom we’re not sure of other than she seems to have aligned herself with the powers of this world rather than the spiritual and puts her selfish interests first. In accepting the cup from her, the evil villain did indeed “choose poorly.”
But again, in our society how could the concept of “choice” in and of itself be a bad thing: a work of the flesh to be avoided?
Let me stop here and say that when I began writing this several weeks ago after Corey Truett asked if I would bring the message on June 26th I didn’t know the U.S. Supreme Court would issue its decision overturning Roe v. Wade just a couple of days before hand.
Paul wasn’t talking about that freedom of choice anyway — at least not directly. We need to understand that in the world in which Paul was writing “choice” meant choosing factions. In that sense he would condemn the choices that both sides are making in today’s political environment. Both sides are choosing their sides not just to the exclusion of the other, but in fanaticism and even hatred.
Paul would say that we are “biting and devouring” one another — that we are “consuming” each other. Paul is telling us we’ve become a bunch of cannibals!
For a faith that calls for us to love God and love neighbor, choice that comes as a result of selfishness is heresy.
We avoid this aspect of choice by . . .
Well, by choosing another way.
Choose to be Free
Paul tells us that we should choose the fruit of the Spirit which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” against which there is no law. Note that he says “fruit” singular. You can’t choose faithfulness and ignore kindness. You can’t embrace joy without exercising self-control. You have to buy the whole package.
That’s not easy.
That’s not Saturday Night Life.
That is not cheap grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship wrote this about cheap grace:
The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?...
You can see that this can lead to the mistaken notion that because God, through Jesus, did the hard work, we can relax and coast along, enjoying Saturday Night Life as well as Sunday morning grace.
Bonhoeffer begs to differ, pointing out the fallacy of cheap grace:
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus makes the point that the grace he worked did not come cheap. When he set his face to Jerusalem — to his “exit” from this life — his disciples didn’t understand.
A bit ago we sang the words,
Where You go, I'll go
Where You stay, I'll stay
Just like the person who said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go” from today’s Gospel reading. To which Jesus replied that while foxes have dens and birds have nests, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head — in short, following Jesus may mean giving up the comfort and safety we take for granted.
Do we understand what he was saying? Do we understand what we were singing?
To follow Jesus involves “costly grace.”
It’s costly because it involves choice. Not the false choice of the serpent’s call, but the true choice to yield to the Master. Here’s Bonhoeffer one more time:
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.
The second part of today’s Gospel reading sounds jarring to our ears, accustomed as we are to think of “Jesus, meek and mild.” But he had to make his disciples understand. This wasn’t like Elijah telling Elisha to say goodbye to his family before following him. The disciples weren’t following a mortal; Elisha was — even though that mortal was a prophet. The disciples were following the son of the living God.
Jesus took them through Samaria to teach them. When rejected, they weren’t to call down fire and destroy, but to keep moving. Before and after this passage, he instructed them that they were to “shake the dust” from their feet, but leave judgment to God, while spreading the news that his Kingdom was at hand.
Jesus came to set us free from sin and to spread the Word of this “Good News” to the ends of the Earth.
Again, we have to understand that choice is heresy whenever choice involves base selfish motives instead of love.
Love God, Love Neighbor. So simple, yet so hard.
Free to Love
Do not choose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What that meant — what that means for us today — is that we don’t make the rules. God does.
We can’t make a world. God did.
We can’t bring someone back to life. God did.
But before he could be raised, Jesus had to die.
We choose poorly when we decide we know better than God and thereby shackle ourselves to an existence short of what our Creator intended. Yet God chooses to wipe clean the slate and break the bonds that keep us from living out our true destiny — to bind ourselves in love to God and others.
“What has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”
Salvation is not about simply checking a box called “I surrender” unless we really do surrender. It is not just about living with God after we die, it’s about choosing to live with God and love our neighbors NOW.
Yep. We are called to follow Jesus and to proclaim the Good News that the Kingdom of God is at hand. That is the seed we are compelled to sow — wrapping it in the sweet fruit of the of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
I didn’t choose to bring this message just days after the decision in the Dobbs case, but here’s what I think Paul would urge — Don’t engage in “heresy” by choosing factions. As tempting as it might be to take sides by being against those who are “Pro-Life” or “Pro-Choice, remember that following Jesus means we must first be “Pro-Love” and servants to one another. In other words, “choose wisely.”
[D]o not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”