Galatians 5:1, 13-25
In today’s scripture Paul is writing advice to the churches across Galatia, an area now part of Turkey. He and his helpers had talked about Jesus and started house churches across this area, and now he was adding to their knowledge of what it means to be a community of Jesus-followers. This is practical advice about how to think about their priorities, interact in relationship with others and become a living example of the “reign of God” Jesus invited people to experience. Paul frames this advice under the umbrella offreedom. If you want to be free, this is how you live.
Freedom in the first century Roman Empire meant something quite different than the word means to us. We think of freedom as self-determination, the ability to do whatever we choose. No one can tell us what to do. In the Roman Empire, very few people had that kind of freedom. It’s quite likely that many of these people were enslaved and almost all of them were peasants who worked for someone else. Their daily lives would have been controlled by those with more wealth and power. But their minds and hearts were their own, so Paul talks about how they think about community and how they treat one another to the extent that those things are under their control.
Notice what’s not allowed – selfishness, actions which take advantage of others, anything which is cruel or unloving. And what’s encouraged – love, joy, peace, patience, endurance, compassion. “A conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people.”
Paul is quick to point out that these aren’t rules. They aren’t the Ten Commandments posted in classrooms or courtrooms to make people behave. Even then Paul knew that you couldn’t legislate goodness; it comes from the heart as a way of being. Religion sometimes tells us that if we keep the “rules” of the Bible, then we’ll be rewarded with heaven when we die. Jesus and then Paul were telling people that if you become a godly person, then your life is already heaven each day. When they created communities of people who lived by Jesus’ example – with love, compassion, and respect – they became the reign of God. The reward was in the living out of a better way.
Sometimes we’re tempted to take the lists of good qualities from scripture and make them a behavioral checklist. Like the part of your elementary report card where you get + or – for “plays well with others” or “completes work on time.” It’s more complicated than that. You know I’ve been calling Washington, DC every day, encouraging legislators to vote for the right things. I realized after a while, that what I’m really asking is that they BE the right people to lead us. It’s not just a list of legislation to support with their vote. We want our leaders to embody the principles that make for godly community. I want them to value and respect people, to treat everyone with dignity, to care that everyone eats, has a home, learns a skill or two, can raise a family to be healthy and happy. Martin Luther King, Jr. called that the “beloved community.” Others have built on his teachings to call us together to become the community we want to live in.
We have much more freedom than first century folk. We can set our own course, live and work almost anywhere we choose, join or leave any number of groups. That freedom doesn’t bring us into the beloved community unless we choose to BE the kind of people that community describes. Across the centuries, Paul is telling us, “If you want to be truly free, then pattern your life on the example of Jesus. Love one another.”
We have the freedom to speak out about the principles that make life truly good. We see them as religious principles, but they are also the values of basic human decency. We pattern our community after Jesus, but other prophets and faith leaders called for the same values. It’s a community that includes all that is good and welcomes everyone, regardless of their starting places. We can use our freedom to say “no” to those things which don’t build people up and “yes” to those things that make life better for everyone. Is there a simple list of what to do? No, but it’s true that we “know it when we see it.”
We live in times which can be discouraging. Each time we think nothing else about our government can break, they prove us wrong. It’s hard to focus or to know what to try to fix first. Remember the first century folk who had no chance of fixing their wider world and let’s do what they did: start with themselves. Yes, we need to keep weighing in on better ways to treat people and work together, but first we can commit to living as the beloved community. We can commit to being the kind of people who love neighbors and practice kindness. We can be generous and gracious and hopeful. When we change ourselves, we change our immediate neighborhood. A country full of changed neighborhoods, changes.
Our second reading calls us to that work, gently and with hope:
Please by Rosemerry Trommer
If you are one who has practice meeting
the pain of the world,
we need you. Right now we need you
to remind us we can be furious and scared
and near feral over injustice and still thrill at the taste
of a strawberry, ripe and sweet,
can still meet a stranger and shake
their hand, believing in their humanness.
We need you to show us how
we, too, can fall into the darkest,
unplumbed pit and learn there
a courage and beauty
we could never learn from the light.
If you have drowned in sorrow
and still have somehow found
a way to breathe, please, lead us.
You are the one with the crumbs
we need, the ones we will us to find
our way back to the home of our hearts.
Friends, for over 2000 years the ones who follow Jesus have believed that his way of living together, caring for each other and the world, is the reign of God. They did that, imperfectly, because they chose to come as close as they could to being the way he invited them to be. We are in good company. Let us be kind. Let us be hopeful. Let us share jokes and good food and help friends and strangers the best that we can. Let us be brave in speaking freely against injustice and steadfast in loving even those who ignore our words. Let us be the beloved community, the presence of God in this time and place. Today. Tomorrow. For as long as we can.