Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
July 1, 2007
The Reverend Andrew Davison
1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21
Psalm 16
Galatians 5:1, 13-24
Luke 9:51-62

   

     + In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

     Let me take my text from Galatians, not the most appealing part of our reading, but the least:  do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh. We couldn’t say that these words chime with the exuberance of last Sunday. They’re not an obvious choice for the weekend when Peter and David, your dear friends and mine, arrive back from their marriage in Canada.

     Be that as it may, we do well to tackle the things we find most awkward, and the theologian in me finds this seemingly savage reading from Galatians too provocative to pass up. At first sight it might look repressive and about keeping people down, but in fact it’s radical, revolutionary, all part of Paul’s plan to turn the world upside down for the sake of Christ; this is more a Holy Apostles’ passage than one for the White House.

     In a nutshell, Paul’s concern here is with distraction – he doesn’t want anything to get in the way of the great work of reconciliation. He uses each of these two words, ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’, to stand in for a whole world of ideas. ‘Flesh’ and ‘spirit’ are ciphers, or shorthand, representing contrasting ways of life. Roughly speaking, when Paul writes ‘flesh’, he doesn’t primarily mean the physical body. By ‘flesh’ he means a life of rebellion and mistaken priorities. And when he writes ‘spirit’ he means life lived with God in mind, with our priorities right. It’s not that material things are evil and immaterial things are good – that, in fact, would be heresy. No, even here Paul doesn’t deny that the body can be ‘spiritual’, when it’s devoted to the right things, and the mind can be evil or ‘fleshy’, for instance if it were preoccupied with money or cruelty.

     Pointing this out partly resolves our concern with this passage, but Paul’s choice of words does seem still to give the flesh a bad rap, and that should seem odd. After all, Christianity is supremely a religion of the flesh: of God made flesh and saving us in and through the flesh. Our faith has great warmth towards flesh and blood – which is why, after all, Christ teaches us to feed the hungry, as you do here – even if it’s not always lived up to this standard.

     So why does Paul use these particular words? Why make ‘flesh’ refer to rebellion against God? Here’s what I think he’s saying: the world and the senses are great, but they can also be a distraction – and Paul is all for urgency and action. If we simply went after everything we might immediately want, without any discipline, we’d be knocked off course and forget what’s most important and most worth living for. Goals such as justice and community and fellowship with God can get sidelined if we chase only after what seems most obvious.

     It’s easy to suppose that Paul is mainly concerned here with food and drink and sex, but the domain of ‘the flesh’ reaches much further. Our desire for security would also be a particularly striking example, and a contemporary one. Security is a natural, human goal. But if we’re not careful we allow our natural desire for security to deflect us from weightier concerns. My government, and yours, plays on this desire of the flesh for security all the time. Year by year they tell us we should sacrifice justice and humane-values for the sake of safety. It seems that Herman Göring knew a thing about the flesh when he commented towards the end of his life that persuading the populous to back a war is easy:

All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism … It works the same in any country.

This is a perfect example of what Paul calls ‘the flesh’ – a human concern, legitimate in itself, which can oppose ‘the spirit’ when unrestrained by reference to weightier goals.

     Christianity isn’t at all down on flesh, blood and desire, but it does warn us against ill-discipline and comfortable apathy and selfishness. Which means, in a way, that these words of St Paul are perfect for a day when we celebrate commitment and marriage. In commitment to another person we don’t renounce desire or passion, far from it, but we hone it and concentrate it. Peter and David, we celebrate thirty years with you, year of dedication of all that you are, flesh and spirit, to one anther and through each other to God. You set us an example of radical commitment. Thank you.

     We can also be glad that the State of Canada has opened up this way of total commitment to all its citizens. Civil partnerships were introduced to the United Kingdom a year and a half ago, with all the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, and it’s been an important move in the life of our country. You know that I am with you as you campaign for full recognition in the US too.

     The message of Jesus in the Gospel is in fact very close to what we have read in Paul. If anything it is a call to an even more all-consuming commitment:

 “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” … [and to another] “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

With Jesus as our Lord, even family, even our most cherished relationships are set in a bigger context: that of participating in Christ’s kingdom of justice and peace. Jesus warns us that we must not turn family life into an idol, or, for that matter, into a battering ram. But embraced properly, love and desire are part of the solution, not part of the problem. With these words today, Jesus stressed the absolute urgency of the hour: to adopt Paul’s useful summary, we need a greater love and a more profound sense of who our neighbour might be. And what better place to start than with total commitment to our friends or to one other person?

     Jesus teaches the disciples an important lesson in the Gospels: the Samaritans are their neighbours too. Their religion is different; they’re not hospitable to Jesus and his band this time, but they’re still neighbours. The disciples ask “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he rebukes them, as if to say: love your neighbour as yourself, and these are your neighbours too.

     Our foreign policy, my country’s and yours, fails against a Christian standard because it doesn’t see that people who seem different from us are in fact our neighbours. Rather than begin from that position of solidarity, our response is to call down fire from heaven to destroy them. To be on the receiving end of an air-strike pretty much exactly what James and John had in mind. And with fire from heaven we pretend to bring peace and, of course, ‘security’ – thereby pandering to the desires of ‘the flesh’ rather than living ‘by the spirit’.

     For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

It’s interesting that Paul, and Jesus before him, and Leviticus before him, says ‘neighbour’. The point we have become used to is that anyone and everyone is our neighbour. Jesus teaches us to see a wider and wider circle of people as neighbours: not just our friends and people who are like us, but unfamiliar people, and even our enemies. But that insight shouldn’t undo the more basic sense of the word: a neighbour is someone who is close to hand. You feed the person who turns up at the door of your church; you visit the old women who lives in your block; you care for those whose lives are intertwined with yours. In the tradition this idea goes by the name of the ordo amoris, the order of love. Passionate concern for one other person isn’t the fulfilment of the whole command to love, neither is care for a handful of friends, but it’s the best possible place to start. It’s there, perhaps, that we learn about love: that it demands sacrifice, but that it’s a joyful sacrifice. The reading about Elisha says it all. He recognises the urgency of his call, takes what belonged to the old order of his life – the equipment of his trade, the oxen and the plough – and burns them. But it becomes not only an offering to God, but also the basis of a public celebration and entrance into a new community: the band of prophets. The call to follow in God’s ways demands everything of us, but in a cheerful, communal way, marked by a kind of reckless excess. We discipline our desires only so that we, and the world, may draw nearer to God, the true object of all desire.