“Holy Fruits”

Galatians 5: 1, 13-25

6/27/04

Elizabeth Macaulay

Annie Minenko, Terry Bumgarner and I will be taking ten of our confirmation students on retreat for three days. We'll leave Monday and get back on Wednesday.

While we are gone, we will swim a lot and sing a lot and eat a lot and hopefully sleep some. And we will do a lot of talking about this:

What about this man Jesus? What is it about the man and his teaching that is so compelling that his movement exists thousands of years later?

And why might we want to follow his teachings? Confirmation is a time when we ask our youth to claim for themselves the promises their parents made on their behalf when they were baptized. Confirmation is a time for them to answer for themselves: are they willing to follow Jesus, put their trust in him, resist evil and injustice and oppression, and share the gift of who they are with their church and their world? We hope that they will be able do the kind of learning through confirmation that will help them say "yes" to those questions.

One of the things they will think about on their way to confirming their faith is a question each one of us needs to own as our own.

What about this man Jesus? What was it that he came to do? What does all of this mean for us each as individuals? And, what does it mean to us as a group of people called the church.

The apostle Paul deals with those questions in his letter to the Galatians. He addresses a controversy going on regarding what it is that makes for relationship with God. There have been people interacting with the new church communities there who are teaching a kind of hybrid Jewish and Christian message Paul argues against. Paul wants the readers of his letter to know in the marrow of their bones that it is the cross, not the Law, that is the basis for our relationship with God.

Because of the gift of Jesus, Paul wants the church in Galatia to know, we are reconciled to God and to each other throughout time, and we are gifted with Spirit power we cannot even imagine. And because of the gift of Jesus, we are empowered and able to cultivate the delicious and holy fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

We are created to be free in Christ. To remember and to celebrate and to wonder at the hugeness of being a claimed and beloved creature of God. Each one of us.

There is a story told of a three year old girl. (Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity 113) She was the firstborn and only child in her family, but now her mother was pregnant again, and the little girl was very excited about having a new brother or sister. Within a few hours of the parents bringing a new baby boy home from the hospital, the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut made her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby's arrival, so they realized they could let their daughter do this, and if they heart the slightest indication that anything strange was happening, they could be in the baby's room in an instant.

So they let the little girl go into the baby's room, shut the door, and raced to the intercom listening station. They heard their daughter's footsteps moving across the baby's room, imagined her standing over the baby's crib, and they heard her saying to her three-day-old brother,

"Tell me about God - I've almost forgotten".

Paul has a message for all of us who have forgotten. We are God kissed beloveds. Created to be free through the gift of Christ Jesus, the gift of the cross.

This freedom is meant to be celebrated by each. We pray that our Confirmands and every youth in this church comes to know this God-kissedness is theirs to embrace and celebrate.

And, we hope that they learn too that this Christ sparked freedom is meant to be lived out in the ways we are intentional about living well together, in community.

Paul tells the Galatians that because they are free, they are to be servants, one to the other, using the gift of God's grace to love each other well, without biting or devouring.

He lists works of the flesh we Jesus followers are called to avoid. I am going to list them again, and I want for us to listen closely to the fact that the majority of these fleshly snares are NOT snares that snag the individual. We hear snares of the flesh and we zip right away to matters of individual transgression. As I read the list, I ask you to notice how many of the snares are those that can afflict community:

Fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealously, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing.and things like these.

Paul knew well that in his day, living together in Christian community was a counter cultural endeavor.

We know well that in our day, living together in Christian community is a counter cultural endeavor. What are we teaching our youth by the ways we live church in this place?

Are we modeling Christian community as a place of enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy?

Or, do they experience through this church of Christ the holy Spirit fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control?

You know I ask because during these days of transition, we have to be aware of what we proclaim through our actions. Are we a people who believe in the power of the Spirit, or are we a people who are claimed by the power of the fleshly temptations to muck about?

I want to leave you with a vision of how it is one community lives into grace. I pray it is a vision made flesh in the ways we love each other into servant ministry.

There is a village in Africa that has carried on a powerful practice for generations.

When someone offends the teachings of the village. Whether they have broken a law or transgressed the sense of the community in some other way, a village meeting is called.

All of the members of the village attend that meeting. They know full well the importance of each member of the community and the ways that each person matters there. Young and old, they all gather in the center of the village.

The transgressor is brought out into their midst. The villagers form a circle. In the middle of the circle they place the person who has offended. They instruct him to listen well to the voices of his community.

And then, all of the members of the village take turns speaking.

This is what they share.

One by one, they tell the person every good thing they see in him. They share their vision for the potentials for good that live in him. They lift before him his talents and his blessings and his goodness. They remind him of the promise he is capable of living.

In such a way, the person is brought back to life within the community. Not through public humiliation and punishment, not by making laws that become more important than the grace they can offer. They bring about healing by sharing the vision of goodness the community is willing to help him live into.