June 29, 2025

When I was a kid, my mother had an enormous garden each year.  Because she was a teacher, she had plenty of time over the summer to weed it and tend to the things it needed.  And when it was time to harvest, she’d spend hours gathering in the crop and canning until the shelves in our basement were filled with jars of tomatoes and green beans and corn and all sorts of other vegetables.

There isn’t a lot gardeners like my mom can do to make things grow.  The best we can do is to weed and use things like water and fertilizer to create the ideal conditions for growth.  And Paul seems to be thinking along these same lines as he writes to the Galatian church.

If you know anything about Paul, you know that he doesn’t just write letters for the heck of it.  He’s inevitably addressing some sort of issue.  To make a long story short, the issue here – and Paul is pretty angry about it – is that a group of missionaries have come with a message for the Galatian church that contradicts Paul’s teaching.  These missionaries are telling the Galatians – who are Gentiles – that they need to follow the Jewish Law in every respect if they want to be saved by a Jewish Messiah.  And so the question becomes: is Paul’s teaching that all we need to be saved is faith in what God has done through Jesus, or is something else required?

Now, we don’t know anything else about these missionaries except for what we read in this letter.  But I think we can understand their impulse to follow the Law.  All of us understand the importance rules have in any society.  Children, for example, struggle when we set rules and then fail to enforce them consistently.  Without a consistent set of rules, it’s difficult – if not impossible – to know whether our actions are “right” or “wrong”.  It’s confusing and frightening when we don’t know where the boundaries are.  The missionaries’ argument seems to be: if we don’t have the Law to regulate our shared life, then we’re adrift on a sea of moral confusion.  So we need the Law to provide guidance and keep us from going astray into sin.

Paul, though, is having none of this.  He’s let go of that rigid understanding he once had of the Law when he was a Pharisee.  He’s seen through how the Pharisees have used the law to differentiate between who’s “in” and who’s “out”.  He’s seen through how people exploit the law with loopholes or twist its meaning through some unbelievable reading of it.  But especially, he’s seen through how people love the control it promises – and how deeply that’s at odds with the reality of who God is.  The Law itself is not a bad thing.  The problem is how humans misuse it. 

Because, you see, our flawed human nature – the “flesh”, in Paul’s language – tempts us to believe that if we just follow the Law down to the letter, we can control the world around us.  We can manipulate God into giving us the results we want.  The false promise is that through our own efforts we can we can save ourselves and bring about God’s kingdom.

But make no mistake.  If we agree with the missionaries’ Law-following obsession – with their insistence that faith in what God has done through Jesus is not enough to be saved – then all we will find is despair.  Because Law-following by itself will never be enough.  And in our despair in not being able to build that perfect life through our own efforts, we find ourselves trapped in community-destroying forces Paul names: such as jealousy, strife, and anger.

What Paul argues instead is that Christians must be led by the Spirit – that weird, wild third Person of the Trinity.  It’s only through the Spirit’s guidance, Paul says, that we can truly bring about the outcome the Law intends – not by focusing on the actions it commands or prohibits, but instead by following Jesus’ teaching – that the entire Law is summed up in that commandment from Leviticus 19:18 – “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”.  Paul’s counsel is a daring summons – urging the church to trust that it can live without being subject to the Law of Moses as long as the Spirit guides and shapes our community.

As Western Christians who operate in a culture thoroughly infused with modernism, we struggle to understand this unmeasurable Spirit.  And so that’s why this portion of Paul’s letter to the Galatians is so important for us today.  Because it gives us the insight we need – that the Spirit is at work is us when our actions reflect the peaceful and community-building character of the Spirit’s work – as manifested through qualities like love, peace, patience, kindness, and generosity.

Paul’s list isn’t exhaustive.  And he isn’t telling the Galatians that they need to cultivate these qualities.  Because they can’t.  We can’t.  We can’t create peace or faithfulness any more than we can force an apple tree or a cornstalk to grow.  These are things that can only grow organically – where God gives the growth through the life-giving energy of the Spirit.

What Paul is calling us to do today is the same thing every gardener is called to do.  To set aside our impulses to force our will upon the world -- to control ourselves and others. 

Instead, we’re called to create, as best we can, the conditions for the Spirit to grow these fruits in our community’s life, by living out the rule of love.  To trust that the Spirit will work in our lives.  And we do this by following in Jesus’ footsteps – by becoming slaves to one another, just as Christ became a slave for our sake.  By conforming our hearts to Jesus’ agape love – the love where the True North of our moral compass is desiring more than anything else the good of the Other.

Make no mistake, living by this rule of love is not easy.  It’s not even easy for those of us who are clergy.  I was at a gathering of clergy not long ago, and when the question “what’s the most challenging thing about ordained ministry” came up, almost all of us said: “we have to love everybody”.  It’s hard work to prepare the ground for living by the rule of love.

But who knows?  When we open our hearts to the rule of love and allow the Spirit to work in, with, and through us, we may just encounter the Lord who offers the generosity of grace.  In our harvest of the Spirit’s fruits, we may just encounter a Father who, in the words of our burial service, welcomes into arms of mercy sinners of his own redeeming.  Amen.