Galatians 5.1,13-25, Luke 9.51-end
The Second Sunday after Trinity, 26 June 2022, Austwick, Keasden
“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”
As you know, many preachers over the centuries have browbeaten their listeners with St Paul’s long explicit list of fleshly sins, and some seem to have relished particularly emphasising those which have something to do with sex and excessive partying. We might feel that these are easy targets, for of course such behaviour ought to be challenged and moderated by anyone of any faith or tradition seeking to live a modest, moral life.
But Paul is talking about something much more than that. He's talking about the 'desires of the flesh'. And the key word is desire. The crux of what St. Paul is trying to teach us about ourselves, when he talks about it as the flesh, is the desires of this world. [2]
What does Paul mean by desire? Is it like the woman watching all the TV commercials for beauty products, fashionable clothes, etc. When her husband turns the telly over to the sports channel, she turns around and says, "Now how will I know what I want?”.
The woman’s story reminds us that we get our desires by imitating one another. The adverts make her want to copy the glamorous women she sees on screen. What they want - the hair conditioner, the face cream - she wants. We copy each other's desires, or we wouldn't really know what to desire. Faced with a large supermarket shelf full of hair conditioners, how do we know what we want to buy? We buy the one we know from the telly, the one which Claudia Winkleman likes to use.
Now, that's the way we are made, so it's not bad in itself. God created good. In fact, we are created in God's image. In other words, we have the ability to copy, to imitate, to image God's desires. The problem is that instead of imaging God's desires, we image each other's desires.
And when we do that we end up desiring many of the same things. I want the car my brother's got. I want the marriage my sister's got. And when we end up desiring the same things, what happens to us? We compete with one another, we envy one another, and we can easily get caught in the conceit of thinking that we deserve what we desire more than the next person.
It's that old story about two children in a room full of lovely toys and which toy does the one child want? The one toy which the other child is playing with.
Or it’s that story about the man who has known a particular woman as a friend for a very long time, and never thought about her as anything else than a friend, until his best male friend starts a relationship with her, and then that first man starts to desire her: a classic love triangle like you see in the films all the time, and in real life.
So that's why verse 26 is important. ‘Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.’ St. Paul ends this chapter about freedom and love by telling us to watch out not to get caught up in comparing and competing and envying each other. He is telling us to watch out for desire, the desires of the flesh, the works of the flesh. [3]
Having recently reached my 60th birthday I now think that those desires of youth - the ones Paul lists as fornication, licentiousness, drunkenness - the sins of the party animals - have probably mostly passed me by by now, and in reality I was never much of a carouser anyway. But I know that I can still become consumed by wanting what other people have, desires which can get me into things like enmities and envy, anger and quarrels, dissensions and factions.
Notice that Paul also includes in his list idolatry and even sorcery, as if to underline that when we become consumed wanting what other people have, we stop desiring what God desires for us and start following other sorts of gods altogether.
In the deepest part of our souls, integral to that which is most truly us, we are able to copy, to imitate, to image God's desires. And whilst we’re drawn by strong temptations towards other kinds of desires, Paul is keen for us to know that Christ has set us free from all that into a life whose fruit is 'love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.'
'Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires,' Paul writes. 'If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’
It all boils down to the crucial choice that Paul lays out for us: either we desire God's desire, which is what he calls living in the Spirit, living by the commandment to love another as we love ourselves. Or we can live by the desires of other people, which Paul calls living by the flesh. [4]
How can we cultivate the desire to live by the Spirit so that our cravings for what other people want can fade and diminish?
There’s a discipline involved. It might be that we determine to spend less time with those things which feed our desires to have what others desire - in other words to fast-forward through Claudia Winkeman’s shampoo adverts, or to stop reading the new car reviews in the weekend supplements - and to use that time instead to reflect on people we admire for being good examples of living out those fruits of the Spirit Paul names: people who exude love, joy and peace; people who display patience, kindness and generosity; faithful, gentle, self-controlled folks. Using them as our models, we’re increasingly likely to share their desires to live in the Way of God.
I think old St Patrick also had a good strategy for keeping his desires aligned with God’s. In his beloved prayer known as St Patrick’s Breastplate he begins his day by saying - or singing -
I bind unto myself today / The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same / The Three in One and One in Three. [5]
Rather than being bound by what Paul would call worldly desires, this prayer of St Patrick looks to ‘the power of God to hold and lead, His eye to watch, His might to stay, His ear to hearken to my need. The wisdom of my God to teach, His hand to guide, His shield to ward; The Word of God to give me speech, His heavenly host to be my guard.’
What a way to start each day, and to walk through hour by hour: frequently reminding ourselves of the presence of Christ with us; Christ who in each moment is able to open our hearts and minds to discovering Godly desires in what we hear others say and see others do. This is the unceasing prayer of those who seek to live by the Spirit:
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. [6]
Notes
[1] A rewrite of Galatians 5, Luke 9: Family misfortunes - the difficulties of desire, preached in Croxteth, 2010.
[2] Paul J. Nuechterlein, Thinking We're Right: the Ultimate Conceit, delivered at Emmaus Lutheran, Racine, WI, June 27-28, 1998.
[3] Paul J. Nuechterlein, Thinking We're Right: the Ultimate Conceit.
[4] Paul J. Nuechterlein, Thinking We're Right: the Ultimate Conceit.
[5] Wikipedia: Saint Patrick’s Breastplate.
[6] This extract of Saint Patrick’s Breastplate is from the translation by Cecil Frances Alexander, 1889.
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