Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Walk in the Spirit”
“Walk in the Spirit”, Paul bids us. “How do you read the Law?” Jesus asks before responding to the rhetorical question, “and who is my neighbour?” with the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Spirit and Flesh, Law and Grace. In the Epistle, Paul notes the opposition between the Spirit and the Flesh. In the Gospel, there is the contrast between Law and Grace. What does it all come down to? To the grace of God which causes the fruits of the Spirit to be manifest in our lives. To the grace of God which allows us to go and do as the Samaritan has done, for love is the fulfilling of the Law.
Paul elaborates on the opposition between Spirit and Flesh. It is important, I think, to be clear about what he is saying. He is not saying that the flesh, meaning the body or physical material reality, is evil. It can’t be in a Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding since creation and everything in creation is by definition “good” and the whole of it “very good”. This is the fundamental perspective granted to us in The Book of Genesis and one which has profound consequences for how we think about good and evil.
What he teaches here is the ancient wisdom shared by Greeks, Jews, Christians and Muslims, among other religious traditions, which recognizes that the problem is about our attachments to things. This is heightened in the Christian view by seeing evil as really being about our wills, what Paul calls here “the desire of the flesh”. He provides a list of “the works of the flesh”. In every case it is about our relation to the body, to the world, and to one another, all of which involve a denial of our primary relation to God. In short, the problem is not the world or the flesh per se but our willful attachment and obsessions with the world and the flesh. From adultery to idolatry to witchcraft to wrath to drunkenness, each of the works of the flesh reveals a disordered relationship to the things of creation and, particularly, to one another, and, of course, to God. Ultimately, Paul’s list here will be given a more systematic expression in the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.
