Spirit and freedom – 24 June 2016

If the lectionary Epistle (Galatians 5: 1-25) is read in church next Sunday, and of course if you remember to listen to it, you will hear phrases like these:

For freedom Christ has set us free…

You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters…

Through love become slaves to one another…

Live by the Spirit…

If you are led by the Spirit you are not subject to the law…

The works of the flesh are obvious…

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…

Living in freedom and by the Spirit sounds strange and dangerous, even irresponsible, some would say scary – except that the Spirit Paul is writing about is the Spirit of Jesus.  The Spirit’s “fruits”, he says, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

The freedom he is writing about is being freed to live that way.  Paul sees it as freedom from the law.  He does not mean the law of the land, of course – he means the constraints and expectations imposed on us all the time by our cultural, tribal or religious norms.  He had just had news that in the Galatian church a group of Jewish Christians had started to reinstate circumcision of new converts, and Paul is enraged.  In Christ we are free of all such obligations and expectations.  We are set free by the Spirit of Christ, to live by the Spirit.  It is a new kind of journeying.  Indeed, it is a grown-up life. 

The life that is ruled by conformity and self is what Paul calls “flesh”, the opposite of Spirit.  I think this is a puzzle to many sincere Christians.  The more so when Paul lists what he calls “the obvious works of the flesh”…  but if we bear in mind things we hear daily these days, Paul’s list may seem uncomfortably familiar:  …fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.  The reaction is, well, I don’t live that way and I am unlikely to.   But it tends that way, says Paul.  What Paul calls “flesh”, contemporary spiritual teaching and psychology calls ego, and in Christian spiritual understanding the problem is that we place ego/self where God belongs -- the most common of all forms of idolatry.

We are invited to journey on another road.  Of course we obey the law – Paul makes that very clear in his Letter to the Romans.  But rather than being slaves to convention, to trendiness, to family or tribal requirements, or to the strident demands of ego/self, we are free in Christ to (as Paul puts it) be slaves to one another.  In our contemplative experience, self becomes more and more negotiable.  We are free to know we were wrong.  We are free to change.  We are free of the need to save face, let alone the need to dine out for ever on having been injured.  We are free from the fear of mortality.  In this lovely process, all our fears in life come up for review.  Even ageing can be fun, occasionally.   Paul finds an exhilaration of freedom in Christ.  At basis it is a matter of being made free to receive love and to give love.  And among the many components of this freedom are prayerful silence, stillness and consent.