ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 4, 2010 HIGH MASS - A sermon preached by the Vicar, Fr Alan Moses

"For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5.1

As I was saying a couple of Sundays ago, the Letter to the Galatians shows us St. Paul in fighting mood. It can not have made comfortable listening when it was read out in the gathering of the church and it does not make for easy reading now. It is not easy reading for catholic Christians having been one of the texts which inspired the Reformation: one of Luther's most important works, "The Freedom of the Christian", was inspired by Paul's clarion call. But as members of the Church of England we are committed to being evangelical catholics, so however uncomfortable it might be we must give our attention to it.

Paul is concerned because, after he founded the churches in Galatia with their Gentile converts , others had arrived there who had told them that in order to be proper Christians they had to adopt the practices of the Jewish Law, those things which marked Jews off from everyone else. It is quite clear that he is extremely angry. Our passage this morning leaps over a discussion of circumcision in which Paul suggests that his opponents might as well submit to even more drastic surgery.

This is not just Paul quibbling about words or feeling his nose put out of joint by others meddling in his patch. For him to accept what these people were saying was to abandon the fundamental truth of the gospel; that it is God's will to save people, without regard to their ethnic origin or allegiance. It was to move back to reliance on a law which cannot save because we can never adequately fulfil its demands. It is to fall away from grace; from the only thing that counts which is "faith working through love". It is to say that Christ has died in vain.

But having issued this great summons to Christian freedom, Paul knew that his opponents would accuse him of preaching license not liberty; of not caring about morality. So he talks about the nature of this freedom in a way which seems paradoxical: "only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another." They are to replace the yoke of slavery to the law with that of slavery to each other. He even seems to speak affirmatively of the law : 'for the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbour as yourself."'

Luther would echo this by saying:

"A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all."

One of those sayings you have to keep going back to because you never quite exhaust its meaning.

It might seem that Paul switches into legalistic, or at least moralistic mode, with that list of the works of the flesh. But these are condemned because they are opposed to the Spirit by which we are to live. The works of the flesh operate to prevent us becoming what we are meant to be.

Now when we hear "the flesh", we tend almost automatically to think of certain categories of human behaviour, or misbehaviour, which Sunday newspapers and celebrity magazines delight in: lust, gluttony and the like; sins of the physical flesh. But Paul means something much wider. For him, "the flesh" means anything which opposed to the Spirit of God. So while the catalogue of "works of the flesh" does include the usual suspects, fornication and impurity, licentiousness, drunkenness and carousing, it also incorporates conduct which is mental or even spiritual: idolatry and sorcery (things we probably we feel far too mature to engage in, but we might ponder what gods of status and wealth we bow down before and how we use religion to manipulate God, which is what magic is about); enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy.

Paul contrasts these with "the fruit of the Spirit" which is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. " Now when we think of the spiritual there is a tendency to the unreal, the vague. But these things are not vague at all.

If it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, the hard and very real task is to use that freedom so that we do not become slaves to what freedom allows us to obtain; slaves to self-indulgence. The new freedom is one which affirms our pursuit, not just of anything, but of the good. We are to share in that good for the benefit of others.

So, we must ask what freedom is for as well as what freedom is from. We have to rediscover the freedom that disciplines and liberates us at the same time. We will have to make the distinction between false freedom, which Augustine describes as freedom from responsibility and accountability, an illusory freedom that gives us, in the list of Gandhi's seven social sins:

True freedom is that which enables us to pursue the good life. Christian liberty, St. Augustine teaches us, works to strengthen the will, for we are improved by the practice of improving habits; and even if we fail in this enterprise of true freedom, it is better to fail in what is worth pursuing than to succeed in what is not.

Thus our freedom, properly understood and rightly practiced, is a means not an end, for its end is goodness, its result is happiness, and its process is nothing less than the good life.

It is one thing to understand our ethical obligations, but it is quite another thing to live in accordance with what we understand. The great difficulty with the Law, for Paul, was that it could only point to righteousness, never actually produce it. There is a powerful and inexplicable "law of sin" at work in human hearts that constantly defeats our solemn intention to do good and to obey the will of God.

As T.S. Eliot put it in "The Hollow Men":

"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow."

Any of us who have made Lenten resolutions know what that means. One great interpretive tradition rooted in the Lutheran Reformation holds that Paul's answer to this human dilemma described in Galatians and Romans, is found in "justification by faith alone", understood as God's forgiveness of sinners.

Those who put their faith in Jesus Christ will find mercy despite their inability to do what God's law requires. The sinner who believes in Jesus remains "at the same time righteous and a sinner" (simul iustus et peccator). So Paul's gospel provides a solution to the problem of the terrified conscience, but it does not fundamentally alter the ethical predicament except by setting the individual free from paralyzing feelings of guilt.

The great strength of this tradition is its realism about human fallibility and its reverence for the radical grace of God. It honours Paul's "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3.23).

The danger is that the slogan underestimates the transformative power of God's grace and obscures Paul's moral vision. Paul does not just offer thanks for forgiveness, he celebrates liberation from bondage and paralysis that blocked obedience to the will of God. For Paul the Holy Spirit is a source of power enabling Christ's people to walk in a way that fulfils the real meaning of the Law. To be sure, this Spirit-empowered obedience remains subject to the present time of suffering and waiting; this is not a time of unambiguous triumph. Still, God is present in power in the church, changing lives and enabling an obedience that would otherwise be unattainable.

The Holy Spirit is not a theological abstraction but God's presence in the community, making everything new. Those who respond to the gospel have entered the sphere of the Spirit's power, where they find themselves changed and empowered for obedience.

The Spirit works through instruments and structures: scripture, Paul's own teaching, the emissaries that Paul sends back to his churches - and the Church's ministers, the community's worship and sacraments. But fundamental to them all is the power of the Spirit which animates the Church but which the Church cannot control. For Paul, the moral life can never be a matter of reason controlling the passion (as Greek philosophers in Paul's time and any number of self-help experts have taught since) or of any exercise of unaided human will or capacity. Obedience is possible only because God has broken the power of sin and begun the work of conforming believers to the image of Jesus Christ.

If we accept this gospel, then we discover that reality which we pray about at Morning Prayer each day: that service which is perfect freedom; freedom from sin, freedom for good. That is the Catholic gospel.