Flashes of Insight (even from the Apostle Paul)

Proper 8   June 26, 2016   Community Christian Church   

Roger Ray, pastor         “Flashes of Insight (surprisingly from St. Paul)” 

Galatians 5:1, 13-23    For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. ¹⁴For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ¹⁵If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.¹⁷For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. ¹⁸But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. ¹⁹Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, ²⁰idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, ²¹envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 

I cannot find the source so this may be apocryphal but no real preacher is ever constrained from using a good story by the fact that it may not have happened. What I think that I recall is that in a conversation between two ancient Greeks about forming an egalitarian democracy, an enthusiastic young philosopher was saying that there should be no differences between men and women, there should be no economic classes, but all should be entirely free to live their lives perusing their passions whether that be as a poet, a musician, a writer, an artist, or a philosopher.

His conversation partner asked, “But who will plow the fields?” And the philosopher seemed surprised by the question and replied, “Why, the slaves, of course.” Which can strike you as being funny in a sad way except for the fact that the much admired collection of white men who wrote our Declaration of Independence and our United States Constitution talked about freedom and liberty and justice while most of them were slave owners.

Twelve of our first 18 presidents owned slaves. And it is not that there was not considerable conversation about how wrong it was for one person to literally own another person during all of that first century of American history but even right up to the Civil War, people like Ulysses S. Grant, who was the general in charge of the Union armies, owned five slaves. George Washington owned more than 300 and Thomas Jefferson nearly 200. And these were our early, articulate, authors of American freedom…. Who kept a few hundred people chained up back at the house against their will.

Just within the past few years, the NAACP, which exists to promote civil rights for minorities, was officially opposed to same sex marriage right up until Vice President Joe Biden said that he was in favor of civil rights for gay people, which made President Barack Obama finally finish his “evolution” into affirming gay rights and once the president changed his tune, so did the NAACP and a whole string of Democratic politicians who had always hedged their bets on the matter right up until 2014 or 2015.

And here, men and women, is my philosophical issue:  there is a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom. The ethical facts around slavery were available to Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Johnson, and Grant, but the facts did not make them wise enough to live lives in which they personally liberated slaves.

The medical and psychological facts about sexual orientation have been readily available to anyone who had an opposable thumb and the ability to walk erect for the past 30 years, but wisdom has been a lot slower showing up in our culture than mere factual knowledge.

When I finished my graduate school education and moved to Louisville, KY to become the pastor of a church, I was a pipe smoker. In 1985, people smoked in college classrooms, in hospital rooms, restaurants and airplanes. There were only two places where smoking was not allowed: In church services and elevators.

Medical professionals had been warning us about the health hazards of tobacco since I was a baby but the information alone did not change our society. My favorite uncle was dying of emphysema and every time a doctor told him that smoking was killing him, he would find a new doctor.

I took my first flight to England in 1995 and was shocked to discover that smoking was still allowed on international flights. Rows 1 through 30 were non-smoking and rows 31-50 were smoking, as if smoke was not going to find its way from row 31 into the air around row 30.

Information about the hazards of smoking and of second hand smoke was a part of cultural knowledge for two generations before it became illegal to smoke virtually anywhere other than a tobacco shop or, for some reason, a casino.  How casino’s have managed to hang onto an exclusion is just so that we can demonstrate irrefutably how corrupt our legislative process can be. Smoking will kill you anywhere except for in a casino that makes large political donations to state legislators…there it is safe.

One of my favorite pet peeves is how dieticians are constantly labeling everything that I love as being a cancer-causing agent. Years ago we were told that coffee caused cancer but what researchers back then did not take into account was that what accompanied that first cup of coffee in most households was a morning cigarette. Coffee drinking and cigarette smoking were unconsciously paired for generations and so researchers noticed that coffee drinkers had a higher frequency of cancer without factoring in the dangers of cigarettes.

Now they tell us that coffee will actually prevent cancer as long as you don’t drink more than two cups a day. Knowing that not all of you drink coffee, as an act of charity, I drink two for my health, and then two more for your health, and two more for someone else’s health, until I can stamp cancer out entirely.

All of which is to point out that facts don’t equal wisdom. Knowledge may be a precursor to finally growing up and attaining wisdom but knowledge does not necessarily lead to wisdom. And it may be that what we call “intuition” may be when wisdom comes without knowledge, without facts.

Psychologists tell us that virtually every child abuser was abused as a child. They may have hated the experience as a child but they feel compelled to do the same thing when they are grown. Virtually everyone involved in domestic violence grew up in a home seeing domestic violence.

And yet, not everyone who was molested grows up to be a child molester. Not everyone who saw violence in their family of origin goes on to become a violent spouse or parent.

Whenever we see the cycle of abuse ending, someone was able to gain wisdom that transcended the information they had been given in childhood. Sometimes, someone is able to just feel their way out of a kind of cultural blindness to apprehend some more wise, more just, more fair vision of the world, even when such intuition is far from perfect.

We would not dismiss the whole of the work of early American leaders simply because they were horribly guilty of racial and gender discrimination…. Even when they had books on their own library shelves that argued against slavery and male dominance. We do not dismiss the whole of the life and teachings of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad, because he married a 9-year-old girl late in his life. There were lots of people who argued at the time that child brides were wrong… you see the debate even in the pages of Shakespeare, but, like slavery and gender discrimination, the availability of information did not change the social norms for centuries.

Thomas Jefferson was an inventor, an architect, an agricultural scientist, a statesman and a philosopher, and he also owned slaves, and fathered children with some of them. The former does not excuse the later but we can’t ignore the virtues because of the failings. We don’t dismiss the significant accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr. because he had affairs but the fact that he had many affairs does affect how we remember him.

John Kennedy navigated our nation through a time that seemed destined to end in nuclear war without ever turning the cold war into a nuclear disaster but his personal life was marked by despicable episodes of abuse of lovers. It has lately come to light that even Gandhi had moral failings late in life that would have made him spend his declining years in prison had much deserved criminal charges been brought, but even that does not erase what he accomplished in the liberation of the subcontinent of India.

All of that to say, that while most of us in the progressive universe of faith have more than a little misgivings about the Apostle Paul of New Testament fame, he, like Washington, Jefferson, King, Gandhi, and Muhammad, had insights that showed real wisdom even though he was not able to entirely break free of the prejudices of his age regarding gender and sexual orientation. As Carl Jung observed, “The brighter the halo, the smellier the feet.”

I agree with modern Biblical scholars and historians who think that Paul’s influence on the shape of early Christianity was much larger than he deserved. Paul never met Jesus and showed a remarkable lack of interest in what Jesus actually taught and stood for. Paul lived in an occupied land that was so full of violence and injustice that he could have focused on a thousand different demanding social needs but he virtually ignored them all to focus on personal piety and conformity of belief out of new converts so that they could leave this fallen world to spend eternity in a more perfect world.

It is easy for me to be angrily dismissive of spiritual leaders who ignore the injustice at the end of their noses and, rather than trying to create justice and mercy in the present moment, promise pie in the sky in the bye and bye. Paul was often guilty of exactly that failing.

But our wisdom lesson today is passage from Paul’s earliest known work, his letter to church in Galatia. Paul was the product of a toxic religion. Not that Judaism is toxic but, more specifically; Paul’s form of Judaism was toxic. And for the record, there was never a time in Paul’s life when he stopped being a Jew. He never said, “I was a Pharisee,” but rather he is quoted in Acts as saying repeatedly, “I am a Pharisee.”

Without many facts, without much known guidance, Paul was able to perceive that his religious world that literally encouraged him to persecute and even to murder Jews who were in the Jesus movement was dead wrong. Somehow, through some miracle or through internal examination that led to intuitive insight, he was able to reject the legalism, the judgment, the condemnation that had defined his religious life.

Like Washington and Jefferson, like Gandhi and King, he wanted to preach a message of liberation though his personal prejudices and habits often betrayed him. In this brief passage, we are overhearing a conversation he had with a church populated with people who had come, some from Jewish faith and some from the polytheistic superstitions of the region, into a new kind of faith community.

Evidently, the church in Galatia was Paul’s first solo act, the first church he had managed to birth on his own after two years of living with them. Then, a few weeks after he had moved on, he hears that the little church is divided against itself with some accusing other church members of immorality or of apostasy.

Though he often could not see his own wayward legalism, he could see it in them and he writes this sentence that is worthy of being carved in stone over every church altar: It is for freedom that you have been set free, do not then, accept any new form of bondage.

I am not interested in becoming an apologist for Paul. I’m pretty sore about some of the stuff that he just plain old got wrong and I resent how much influence he had on the way the Jesus message was preserved but in all fairness, we should applaud wisdom when we see it, even when it comes in an imperfect vessel.

I think that this passage shows an early point in his career when the light was dawning, when he realized that real faith was a matter of how we live and not in what we believe. And he was able to at least begin to see that the ways in which we have dismissed one another and discounted the value of others as being plain wrong.

I am not happy with how slow the pace of change was but I am glad that Democrats and the NAACP finally acknowledged the importance of the civil rights of gays and lesbians and I feel that we may be seeing the final days of formal Republican institutional prejudice on this front.

Last week our nation suffered through another horrible tragedy when a lone gunman killed nearly 50 gay people for no apparent reason other than that they were gay but when the police showed up in force, they showed up to defend the gay people in that club. 

Fifty years ago when the NYC police raided the Stonewall nightclub, it was to arrest gay people simply for being gay, setting off anti-police riots and giving birth to the gay rights movement.  It took a long time, but now when the police come to a gay bar, it is to protect the gay community and while it is a horror and a shame that they needed to be saved, we still have to mark the social progress that no longer turns a blind eye to mindless prejudice and violence.

It has taken a lot of work, protests, demonstrations, sermons, and speeches… and about 40 years, but gay rights are now so firmly rooted in society that we can claim victory, even if it is not yet fully realized, the fix is in.

But there are moral fights yet before us that may take even longer to change. You know, if only because you have heard me tell you about it, that there are people crowded into tiny jail cells just four miles from here where they are kept for years without the room to even walk for exercise… where they never taste fresh fruit or vegetables… where their contact with family and even spiritual support is tightly regulated of not absolutely obstructed, and when they get it they have to pay a price for it that is outrageous.

Our nation’s founders exploited Africans because of the color of their skin. Our own generation has discriminated against gay people because of who they loved.

Our present state and country governments, in many instances, our federal government, is treating human beings with less dignity than is afforded to dairy cattle. It is not only happening right under our noses, we are paying for it with our taxes and I am having a hard time getting the media, or city government, or the jailers themselves, to care.

There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. You can know facts without it changing how you live. Sometimes, you can just feel how wrong something is without even having all of the facts. But what can we say about a society that knows but does not care?  Does it have to be a hundred year project? Will it take two generations for knowledge to become wisdom? Or can people of faith move faster than that?

There are people who are incarcerated for false charges but they are being caged for months and years awaiting a trial, ignoring the fact that justice delayed for years is justice denied. There are people who are jailed who are old and sick and who pose no threat to society who could be on house arrest but they are being kept to generate income for the Sheriff’s office. There are hundreds of thousands if not a million people in jails and prisons for non-violent drug offenses for which they may have needed medication and counseling but who have no business being in jail.

All of these people are waiting for public knowledge to become a civilization’s wisdom.