Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, January 31, 2010, Solemn Evensong, by the Reverend Stephen Gerth

Year 2: Isaiah 51:9-16; Galatians 5:13-25; Micah 6:6-8

Some of you may remember when David Souter was being interviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1990 as a nominee for the Supreme Court, he suddenly remembered an encounter with a woman contemplating an abortion – and suddenly he began to speak of that very difficult issue in more than legal terms.

I remember Justice Souter’s confirmation myself because very early on as a priest, I heard the confession of a woman that changed how I have thought and spoken about a very difficult issue ever since. I have no idea who she was. I think if I had heard her voice again in those early years I would have been able to identify her; but I never did. The pain and ambiguity of her decision – and the burden she carried and I knew would continue carry – changed something inside me.

A few years later I found myself in the pulpit with a gospel about divorce and remarriage. There were more than a few remarried persons in the room. My own parents by that point had made better second marriages than their first marriage had been. There were people in the congregation that day who lived together without benefit of marriage. There were some couples in that congregation who still almost everywhere can live faithfully with each other but not be afforded the civil protections of marriage. There were even single people in church who seemed to have an active and normal social life. Perhaps because of my own anxiety about getting it right, I sensed that people were waiting for me to speak.

In a moment, that I hope was honest if not graced, I acknowledged what a difficult subject it was, how I had little experience of relationship, but I could say that I was on the side of love, real genuine love wherever it occurred – and that I thought God was too.

In tonight’s passage from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, Paul writes forcefully and directly – even perhaps in anger [1]– about many things that for me are far from simple. The Galatians are having a big fight about the role of Jewish law, in particular, circumcision. One might say, that in Paul’s thinking the law and the flesh share the same problem: They are both the source of an unending unrighteousness; faith alone can save men and women.

Paul, near the end of this Letter to the Galatians writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”[2] What seems to me to be missing from this list is the role of love, the effects of love in the living out of the mysterious gift of God that we call life.

The eighteenth century English cleric William Law is known mostly for his spiritual writing. In 1729, he published A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. It’s available online. My memory of reading through this years ago, is that the title is more useful than the content. It might be more than a little useful for me to look at it again. But my memory is that for the Reverend Mr. Law, love was too close to lust and to self-centeredness to be trusted. For myself, “a serious call to a devout and holy Christian life” necessarily includes not only an awareness of love, but a desire to let it shape how we encounter those things which Paul would have us dismiss with a kind of unreality.

Anger – it’s very hard for me simply to ignore the injustice I see in this world or simply pretend it doesn’t make me mad. Strife, may be a good thing, not a bad thing, when cruelty and evil are abroad.

Fornication and impurity – it depends on what you mean. Biology and theology can certainly be in conflict, but any narrow definition of how biology can be right with theology seems to me to be the plaything of people who speak too quickly, too glibly.

Drunkenness and carousing – Part of me certainly hopes Paul sometimes had a little too much wine, made some mistakes. Yet I’m sure alcohol in the ancient world was a source of great disability that in a real sense punished people beyond what they could control. Life is not simple.

I get hung up on all of these, but I remind you what else we heard in this passage, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness . . . ”[3]

I would like it very much if I worried more, if Christian tradition worried more about these things than about those things which are so very hard.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.