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Sunday, August 30, 2015

“Sow What?”

A Sermon Based Upon Galatians 6: 1-18, NRSV

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.  

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Pentecost 13,  August 30th, 2015

 

 

At a university over in Englanda psychology professor recently conducted a rather interesting sort of experiment. In the faculty lounge at that school they have coffee and other drinks available. But instead of having someone stationed there to collect the money for those beverages, they simply have a price list posted and a box sitting there for people to put their money into.

 

So here’s what that psychology professor did. Each week he would post a new price list. But the prices never changed. The only thing that changed was a small picture that he put at the top of the price list. Some weeks he would put a picture of some flowers on the price list. But other weeks he would put a picture of a pair of human eyes at the top of the price list. Well, guess what? On the weeks when those eyes were watching, the people using that break-room put nearly three times the money in the box.

 

We don’t always do what we’re expected to do, but we usually do what we’re inspected to do.  In other words, when we know that someone is watching and when we know that at some point someone is going to take a look at what we’ve done and pass judgment or that we’re going to have to face the consequences, we tend to make more of an effort to do the right thing  (From a sermon by C. Ed ward Bowen, entitled “Sow What?, 2010, at www.goodpreacher.com).

 

However you look at it, freedom is not free.  Freedom comes with a cost, with conditions, and with consequences.  Even as the Church was set free from having to live under the Law of Moses, this did not mean that now they could live without any rules whatsoever.  To receive and keep the gift of Christian freedom, those who follow Christ must now live under Christ’s own law. 

 

FREE TO BE RESPONSIBLE

In Paul’s concluding words about freedom, he wants the church to know that ‘freedom” is built upon two ‘pillars’ of human responsibility: caring and bearing.   As are set free by Christ’s love and forgiveness, we become responsible to ‘bear each other’s burdens’ just as we must continue to ‘carry our own’.   

 

The Christian life of freedom carries within itself the call of human ‘responsibility’ for the sake of others and for our own sake too.  Interestingly, the word ‘responsible’ has at its root the understanding that a person lives their whole life in ‘response’ to the grace God has given to us.  Paul’s words coincide precisely with Jesus great commandment that life is lived to return love to God and to give love to neighbor (Luke 10: 15ff) .   According to Luke’s gospel, Jesus then gave the story of the Good Samaritan to remind us that our ‘neighbor’ can be best imagined not just as helping another Christian, but even as finding a perfect stranger who is in need our compassion and care.  In John’s letter pastoral letter, our human responsibility to bear and to care is summed up in one single line:  “We love, because he first loved us.” (1 Jn. 4:19).

 

The aim of all this ‘caring’ and ‘bearing’ for the sake of ‘God’s love’ is the Christian message.  This is the ‘good news’ that we have to “be”, not just that we have to ‘share’ or ‘speak’:  My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression (or sin), you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness” (6.1).   Did you detect the heart of the Christian faith, when Paul writes about ‘you who have received the Spirit”?   Here is the most important part of our Christian responsibility.  We are to see to ‘restore’ those who have fallen into sin with a ‘spirit of gentleness’.  Our responsibility to ‘love our neighbor’ and to ‘treat our neighbor’ as we would treat ourselves is our work to bring the hope of restoration, redemption, and grace even into the worse of situations and to the most difficult of persons.

 

Recently, when the Boston Bomber suspect was on trial, the nun who became famous because of the movie “Dead Man Walking” (Sister Helen Prejean), visited the bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to give him a chance to repent.   It was of course, controversial, because most people think he doesn’t deserve even that.   But what Sister Helen Prejean said in response to the criticism of her is exactly what Paul is saying here, when she told CNN, “I don’t concern myself with a person’s guilt or innocence.  It’s easy to forgive the innocent, but it’s the guilty who test our morality. (http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/us/tsarnaev-dead-man-walking-nun/index.html).

 

I would say that Sister Helen’s primary concern is the concern of the apostle Paul.  The Christian faith and message rises and falls on how God and how we ‘treat the guilty’ because it is how the ‘guilty’ are treated that gives us all the hope of God’s restoring love.

 

FREEDOM HAS CONSEQUENCES

But don’t misunderstand the offer of God’s grace as an excuse to live without thought to the consequences.    Freedom also has consequences.  This is what Paul means when he says: “Don’t be deceived; God is not mocked for you reap whatever you sow.” Paul reminds us that the freedom we have is great, but it is not without limit or without boundary. 

 

As humans who live from the ‘garden’ of the earth, we are most familiar with this final line that says, “you reap whatever you sow.”   If you want beans, you must sow beans.  If you want corn, you must sow corn.  You cannot get beans from corn seeds and you can’t get corn from bean seeds.  This is something we all know to be obviously and absolutely true.  You only ‘reap whatever you sow’.  This is a fact of farming, a fact of gardening and a fact of life.   You can’t dispute it, but you can only learn it and know it and live it—if you want to eat and live. 

 

Why is Paul giving us this agricultural lesson?   Paul is a making for us a visual picture of the invisible, moral and spiritual world through the visible, natural and physical world.  He wants to reminds us about this ‘moral’ law of life because it is not always as evident.   While you can sow and grow a crop in one single season, the season for knowing the results of our moral and spiritual sowing are seldom so quick or fast.  There is a reason for this.  We call it ‘grace’.  God has built in room for change, for repentance, for turnarounds, for life-lessons, and for second chances—and more.  God is not a moral tyrant who zaps us from heaven when we make mistakes.  He loves, he forgives, he redeems and he wants to restore. 

 

I loved the news story from NBC on the last Sunday evening in May.  It told of a man who robbed a bank, but was given a second chance to change his life.  It seems the man was down on his luck, homeless, jobless, and in desperation,  he went out and robbed a bank of 1,000 dollars, handing the bank-teller a note demanding the cash all in small bills.  Then, he walked out of the bank, set down on the curb, and waited for the police to come an arrest him.  He told the judge,  “I’ve had to sleep in the woods before, and I just couldn’t do that again.  The thought of that made a jail cell look good.”  It was then that the judge set out an appeal in the papers that someone please give this man a job.  They did.  He was gifted at Welding and a Welding Company took a chance on him and gave him a chance.  The last scene of the news spot showed him welding and then they cut to him in an interview with him saying,  “I want to work for this company for the rest of my life….”  “I want to be loyal to them and give them everything I’ve got.”  That’s what it means to say that God’s moral laws cuts us all some needed and necessary slack. (http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=man+given+second+chance+after+robbing+bank+nbc&qpvt=man+given+second+chance+after+robbing+bank+nbc&FORM=VDRE#view=detail&mid=A423B29FB980F3903C12A423B29FB980F3903C12).

 

But here is the one ‘mistake’ we must not make.  We must not think that because God gives us leeway, breathing space and wiggle room with his moral and spiritual laws that he will change them just for us.  This is what Paul means when he says that “God is not mocked”.   We must not deceive ourselves in to mistaking God’s acts of grace, love and forgiveness to give us freedom from our sins as an excuse to misuse our freedom.   Even though we can have God’s forgiveness without conditions, this does not undo the consequences of how we have lived our lives.   The very serious words of Peter also reminds us of this, when he wrote:  “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.   BUT the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night…  (BUT)  …the heavens will pass away with a great noise…. (BUT)…the elements will melt with fire… BUT … the earth and everything done on it will be disclosed…  So, Peter concludes with a question that follows;  “What sort of persons ought you to be?”  (2 Pet. 3:9-11).   Just like the natural world has physical laws that govern the universe, so the spiritual world has moral laws that will govern the heart, the soul and our human destiny.   In giving us freedom, God has put ‘destiny’ into our own hands with only one control  which gives life its own potential.  God rule is this:  ‘You will reap what you sow’.

 
FREE TO FOLLOW CHRIST’S RULE

Of course, there is something ‘sobering’ about realizing that your life and your destiny is in your own hands.  Sometimes, in this world, when we are pushed and pulled from so many different directions, that we can feel like it is the opposite.  We can feel that we have no real choices.  We can feel that we can do nothing.  We can feel as if we have no power whatsoever to change anything.   We want to give up.

 

But Paul wants us to know that we do have power.  We do have influence.  Our choices do matter and they do make a difference, even if we don’t always see it in the very next moment.   Again, he wants us to visualize it like sowing seeds in the garden and waiting for the coming of the future “harvest time” (v. 9).  You will, when that time comes, eventually get what you sow.  If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit (v. 8).  His point is that our desires, our wills, our choices and our decisions which we make in life, will not always remain hidden or uneventful, but that every action points us in the direction of how things will actually turn out.   If we remain on the lower level of living, we will eventually ‘reap’ nothing but a life lived toward the ‘corruption’ or the ‘end of  our flesh’  which is lived one day and gone the next.  But if we live our lives on a higher, spiritual, enduring level, then we will ‘reap eternal life’ which only comes ‘from the Spirit’ (v. 8). 

 

Because Paul believes that you and I will ‘eventually’ reap what we sow,  he reminds us ‘not to grow weary in doing what is right’ and he also encourages us that ‘whenever we have an opportunity’ we should ‘work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith’ (v.10).   This is exactly who we are when we ‘sow to the Spirit’ the seeds of the Spirit, which bear the lasting, eternal, spiritual fruit of love, joy, peace, and so on.  We sow these kinds of ‘good works’ because we believe in the faithfulness of God and in the integrity God has established in this world and in life itself.  But to believe these kind of things, just like planting a garden, we must have faith and we must act upon that faith.

 

Last spring, when the young 26 year-old humanitarian relief worker from Arizona, Kayla Mueller, had her life end tragically in Syria last February, we did not and still do not, and may never know all the details.  We know that she was captured and held by the Islamic State of Iraq, ISIS.  We know that she had already worked in many dangerous places in other countries, like Africa and Tibet.   We know that she had a deep sense of justice and compassion for those suffering in the world.  We also know that it was claimed that her captures that she was held in a building hit by a Jordanian bombing raid.  But what we didn’t know until most recently, is that while some others working with Kayla, along with Kayla were given a chance to be release, Kayla refused because she would not leave her weak cellmate behind.  In the last hand-written note from Kayla to her parents she wrote: …I have a lot of fight left inside of me. I am not breaking down + I will not give in no matter how long it takes….'Please be patient, give your pain to God. I know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I am doing. Do not fear for me, continue to pray as will I + by God's will we will be together soon.”  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3095320/U-S-aid-worker-Kayla-Mueller-sacrificed-attempt-escape-ISIS-didn-t-want-leave-weak-cellmate-behind.html).    

 

Kayla’s life was an ‘act of faith’ that will not go unanswered forever.  Her seed will grow, in this life too, and not only in the life to come.  In that prison, and even in her mysterious death, she was free and set free in ways most of us have not yet experienced.  Acts of faith like this, based upon God’s love, resulting in deeds of love for others, is what it means to be free in Christ.   

 

This is the last thing Paul wants us to know, as he concludes his words about Christian Freedom.   Human acts of caring and bearing are the primary ‘works of faith’ that are display our true freedom as share in God’s love and trust in God’s faithfulness.   We are made free in Christ as we follow Christ’s law.  And in his letter to the Colossians, Paul explains that following Christ’s law is nothing more and nothing less than rightly responding to God’s eternal love as it is revealed on the cross (Col. 1.20).  Since Christ was in God when God created all things (Col 1.16) and that God was in Christ (2 Cor. 5: 19) when God reconciledto himself reconciled all things’ ( Col. 1: 20);  since it was only in Christ that ‘all the fullness of the God was pleased to dwell’ (1.19)  and it is in Christ  that ‘all things together “(1.17), then it follows that that there is only one true freedom: “If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” (Jn. 8.33).

 

I know that having Christ and his cross of love as the source of true freedom is not now obvious to everyone.   I know that not all know nor are yet able to follow his rule until it comes to this world fully and finally.  Only God’s love, justice and mercy can judge what happens to those live between the times or appear to ‘fall between the cracks’ of truth, before the truth is completely and fully known.  But none of this changes one iota Christ’s law of love nor does it change God’s moral law that ‘we reap what we sow.’  Everyone may not yet name the ‘only name that is above every name’  (Acts 4.12), but I must conclude as Paul concludes,  “As for those who will follow this rule—(the rule of God’s love through Jesus Christ), peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God….(Gal. 6.16).  Amen.

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