Sticks and Stones

Galatians 5:13-21

September 20, 2015 • Mount Pleasant UMC

VIDEO CLIP: “Seabiscuit”

Sermon Study Guide

I love the line in that video clip about the horse who will be known as Seabiscuit: “They’ve got him so screwed up running in a circle he’s forgotten what he was born to do.” I feel like that sometimes, and I bet you do, too. We get so busy doing things the world around us tells us are important, we run here and there and everywhere, that it feels like we’re running in circles, not getting much done. I can relate to Seabiscuit sometimes, and the whole point of that scene, where they just let him run until he stops, is to help him remember he’s a horse. Out of that moment, out of that turning point, Seabiscuit goes on to become a champion thoroughbred racehorse, an “unlikely champion” it’s been said. All because he was able to get out of running in circles and remember who he was.

Part of why we come here every week is to break out of the circles we run in and remember who we are. And more than that, we come here to remember why we were made, the purpose our lives have. Worship not only renews us, it reorients us and reminds us of our freedom in Christ. Freedom is one of the great promises of the Christian life, and it’s one of the ways the apostle Paul describe the Christian life. Freedom. Freedom from the law. Freedom from legalism. Freedom from the burden of having to follow all the rules. Freedom to live the way God wants us to live. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it: freedom. We picture it like that scene from the movie: Seabiscuit running full out, with obvious joy and abandon. Freedom is a hallmark of the Christian life.

But it’s not just freedom to live any way we like. Paul says we have been called to freedom for a purpose. Freedom not just from certain things, but freedom for other things. It’s that idea we want to think about for the next three weeks as we embark on this series called “Three Simple Rules.” Now, wait a minute, you may be saying. Just a minute ago you were talking about freedom and now you’re talking about rules. Which is it? And to that I would respond, “Yes. It’s both.” Christian freedom is not a freedom that allows us to do whatever we want. It is a freedom that allows us to joyfully serve God, freedom guided (just as Seabiscuit was guided by a rider) by the Holy Spirit.

In 1872, John Wesley was well into his ministry and had the Methodist movement well established as a renewal movement within the larger church, but people were asking (as some might today), “What does it mean to be a Methodist?” There were people who were using the name in a derogatory manner, and so Wesley set out to write a little booklet called “The Character of a Methodist.” In the introduction to that book, he basically says, “If you’re going to use the name to describe someone, you ought to at least use it right. You ought to know what we’re about.” And in that little booklet, Wesley describes the way all Methodists should conduct themselves. In many ways, that little booklet was an explanation of an earlier writing called the “General Rules of our United Societies.” The General Rules numbered three: three rules that were meant to govern the lives of those early Methodists. More recently, Bishop Rueben Job, who went home to be with Jesus earlier this year, paraphrased Wesley’s work into today’s language. Both Wesley and Job were basically echoing Paul in his writing to the Galatians, reminding Christians that while we are free from the law, we are not free to live any way we want. We must use our freedom to remember who we are and live as we were born to live.

Paul, writing to Christians in what today is the nation of Turkey, has been arguing through this letter that the old law, the laws handed down from Moses, aren’t binding on those who believe in Jesus. He was up against some strong opponents in that area, people who were called “Judaizers” at least by later generations, and these folks believed that if you were going to be a Christian, you had to first follow all the laws Moses had handed down. That began with circumcision and continued by obeying every one of the 613 commandments found in the Old Testament. Now, Paul knew all about those commandments. He knew them inside and out. When he writes to the Philippians, Paul says this: “If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh [that’s the way he describes all our effort to earn our own salvation, ‘the flesh’], I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Philippians 3:4-6). Now, it sounds like Paul’s bragging here, but he’s not. What he’s saying is, quite simply, “no brag, just fact.” Paul was a super-religious Jew. He was determined to live correctly, to follow all 613 commandments, to do everything right. Paul was a bit of a perfectionist, I would imagine. And a legalist. He even went so far as to try to wipe out this dangerous group of Jews who were saying that Jesus was the Savior and that he had risen from the dead. Paul was passionate, sold out to his mission—until Jesus got ahold of him and literally knocked him off his horse. Jesus confronted Paul on the road to Damascus in a vision that left him blind for three days and forever changed. He took that passion he once had for the law and devoted it to telling others about Jesus. So Paul knows about the law, and he knows (more than anyone else) that there is no life found there, no freedom found there. He knows (more than anyone else) that you cannot possibly keep all of the laws all of the time. Can you imagine spending every moment of every day wondering if you had broken just one of those 613 laws? Because to break one is to break all (cf. James 2:10). I don’t know that I could even remember them all! Paul knows that the law is not a path to freedom; it is a curse (cf. McKnight, NIV Application Commentary: Galatians, pg. 263).

But complete freedom is not the answer, either. Complete freedom leads to other sorts of problems, the sorts of things he describes in verses 19-21. He calls them “acts of the flesh,” and by that he doesn’t mean simply things we do in or with our bodies. For Paul, “flesh” is anything that’s opposed to God, opposed to things of the Spirit. And this is not meant to be a complete list; these are things that concerned Paul particularly in Galatia. Had he written to us today, he probably would have included other things in the list. However, we can sort of collect his list into four types of brokenness that result in living in what the world thinks is “complete freedom.” One type is sexual sin: “immorality, impurity and debauchery” (5:19). The words used here were, in other places in the first century world, used to describe the pus of an untreated wound, an unpruned tree or material that has been unsifted (Barclay, The Letters to Galatians and Ephesians, pgs. 46-47). In other words, broken and what would have been considered “unclean” things, things we do to or with our body that are not healthy or in line with what God desires. Then he moves to religious sins: “idolatry and witchcraft.” “Religious sins” sort of sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But we can passionately worship things that are not god just as easily as we can come here and energetically sing worship songs on Sunday morning. Paul is challenging our focus. What takes most of your attention? We can make idols out of our jobs, our money, our children, our position—most anything. Those idols can quickly get in the way of our relationship with the one true God, sometimes without even our realizing it (cf. Barclay 47).

The fourth area Paul gets at (and I haven’t forgotten the third, I’m coming back to it) are addiction sins: “drunkenness, orgies and the like.” These problems persist to today and don’t need a lot of explanation, except to note that the more we supposedly “grow up” as a culture, the more we seem to stay the same. The biggest group of “fleshly acts,” though, according to Paul are social sins. And these are the ones we want to focus on as we consider this first simple rule. Paul describes these social sins this way: “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy” (5:20-21). We could spend a lot of time looking at each one of those, but for the most part I think they’re pretty self-explanatory. We know what each of those looks like. We can boil it down to this: living out of our “fleshly nature,” we will destroy fellowship, unity and holiness—three things Jesus desires for his church. This describes the person or persons who stand apart, who believe they don’t want to work together or cooperate for the greater mission of the church but instead have their own goals, desires and ambitions (cf. Barclay 48). Paul even goes so far as to say, “Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God” (5:21). In other words, living in the flesh does not lead to life because, ultimately, this so-called “complete freedom” results in hurt and harm to others. It’s a selfish way to live, and that’s not the way Jesus calls us to live. Remember what we talked about a few weeks ago: Jesus calls us to live by what our friend James called the “royal law:” “Love your neighbor as yourself” (James 2:8). Paul repeats that law here, in verse 14, saying the whole law, everything in those 613 commandments, can be summed up in that single statement: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If so-called “complete freedom” results in harm to others, then we can’t live that way. We can’t live in such a way that whatever we want to do is okay no matter how it affects others because that destroys the “royal law.”

And so Paul lays out another path to true freedom, a path he calls “being led by the Spirit” (5:18). When we are so led, Paul says, we are not under the law anymore. We don’t have to worry about those 613 commandments, because the Spirit will always lead us into ways that please God and honor Jesus. The path to freedom is to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit who will always lead us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And that’s why the first simple rule is “do no harm.”

Now, this rule, at a surface level, seems so simple as to be ridiculous to even talk about. Do no harm. It’s not only the first “simple rule” of Methodism; it’s also the first thing healthcare workers are taught and the creed they try to live by. It’s simple to understand—whatever we do, we seek not to harm someone else. But it’s not so easy to live out, is it? If it were, if it came naturally especially to those who seek to follow Jesus, Paul wouldn’t have to tell this church in Galatia to stop biting and devouring one another. In verse 15, Paul says, “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” As kids, we learn to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but word will never hurt me.” Then as we grow up, we learn that’s not true. The most hurtful things are the things that are said to us or about us. The deepest wounds most often come from the words of a friend. “Do no harm” may be easy to understand, but it’s increasingly difficult to practice.

Now, let’s acknowledge that both Wesley and Paul lived in different times than we do. Paul, as we’ve seen, was focused on the sins of Galatia, and Wesley was focused on the things he understood to be destroying 18th century England. So when Wesley goes on to describe harm or “the evil which is most generally practiced,” he lists some things that we don’t think of as a big deal today—things like wearing gold and costly apparel. Most of us in here have broken that guideline just by wearing a wedding ring made of gold. Wesley also condemned “softness and needless self-indulgence,” and of course in 21st century American society we’re all about the comfort and our scale of “needless self-indulgence” slides depending on what we’re indulging ourselves in. He also condemns slaveholding, drunkenness, working on the Lord’s day and taking God’s name in vain, among many other things. I especially like his guidance that we should not engage in “speaking evil of magistrates or of ministers.” Especially that last part, the “ministers” part! In a year leading up to an election, though, it’s hard not to “speak evil” of leaders as you’re trying to get your candidate elected, so maybe I don’t even like that part.

But Wesley’s larger point is this: how do the things we say or do impact others? His concern with economics had to do with the way wealth was achieved in his day affected the poor’s ability to even have a minimum standard of living. He was also concerned about how the Methodists were becoming more wealthy—middle class we would say—and how that would affect their ability to trust in God. If they had lots of money stored up, would they trust the money or would they trust God? That’s still a real concern for us in wealthy America. Some of his other concerns carry over into today, as well, especially, I think, this one: “fighting, quarreling, brawling, brother going to law with brother; returning evil for evil, or railing for railing…”

We seem to live in a time when the most harmful weapon we have is our words, and we focused a few weeks ago on taming our tongues, a very difficult discipline. But we live in a day when words can so easily be repeated and re-tweeted and misinterpreted, so that sometimes you just wonder why you say anything at all. I even worry about putting my stuff out on the internet, for fear that some of it might come back to haunt me someday! Now, granted, we seem to live in an over-sensitive time, where the smallest thing can offend someone and where one or two people can cause a great uproar. But you can almost understand that happening out there, where folks are living according to “the flesh.” What concerns Paul, and Wesley, and me is when it happens in the church, among God’s people. When we “bite and devour” brothers and sisters—sometimes just because we can. When we focus on such small things to be upset about rather than the larger mission of the church. When we forsake fellowship for fighting, holiness for hollering and unity for upset stomachs.

A few weeks ago, I heard Jim Ozier, a church growth coach from the North Texas Conference, speak about the hurdles for large churches such as ours, and he reminded us that the number one reason people leave churches today is conflict. Now, different studies will list different things as number one, but my experience is that Ozier is probably correct. People feel like they have enough conflict in their workplaces; they don’t want to live through it at church, too, so when a conflict starts, some folks will just go elsewhere. Of course, the problem is that when they arrive at a new church, they eventually learn there is conflict there, too, because every church is made up of human beings! Conflict in the church begins when we begin picking at small things, small irritations that bother us. It may be the pastor. It might be the band. It might be the music. It might be the seats. We begin picking at small things—nitpicking, some call it. Funny, though, that the things that bother us at church don’t bother us elsewhere. A friend of mine sent me this graphic over Facebook this week, not knowing what I was preaching on. It’s titled, “12 Reasons I Have Decided to Quit Attending Sporting Events.”

1. The coach never came to visit me.
2. Every time I went, they asked for money.
3. The people sitting in my row didn’t seem very friendly.
4. The seats were very hard.
5. The referees made a decision I didn’t agree with.
6. I was sitting with hypocrites—they only came to see what others were wearing!
7. Some games went into overtime and I was late getting home.
8. The band played some songs I’d never heard before.
9. The games were scheduled on my only day to sleep in and run errands.
10. My parents took me to too many games when I was growing up.
11. Since I read a book on sports, I feel like I know more than the coaches, anyway.
12. I don’t want to take my children because I want them to decide for themselves what sport they like best.

Funny, maybe, because it’s so true. We pick, pick, pick and do harm in the process to others who are also part of the body of Christ. Jim Ozier says when people pick at the little things, before they know it the big things they love will be gone.

Bishop Job suggests that, if we live by this little rule of “do no harm,” several things will happen. First of all, we would examine the way we live and practice our faith (Job, Three Simple Rules, pg. 30). The rule of “do no harm” is “a proactive response to all that is evil.” In other words, it’s a call for us to actually think before we speak or act. Our world today is made up of folks who speak or act before we think. Several years ago, I came across this definition of “think.” I believe it was first printed in The Upper Room, but wherever it originally came from, it’s an excellent guide for us. Five questions we should ask especially before we speak: Is it TRUE? It is HELPFUL? Is it INSPIRING? Is it NECESSARY? And is it KIND? T-H-I-N-K. This last week, the social media world was all abuzz about the negative things a host of The View said about nurses, and rightly so. The words were ill-conceived and obviously spoken without thinking, but so are a lot of our words. We speak discouragingly or even disparagingly about someone else. We manipulate the facts so that the story favors us. We diminish those who disagree with us, and we gossip about them. Doing no harm calls us to examine our faith and our actions and see that the two line up. True, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind.

As we engage in an honest examination of the way we practice our faith, we will become more and more on guard so that all our actions and even our silence will not add injury to another of God’s children (Job 31). Our goal will become a life that is focused on healing instead of hurt, wholeness instead of division, harmony with the ways of Jesus rather than the ways of the world. That’s what Paul calls a “life of the Spirit” rather than a “life of the flesh.” Sometimes that means a prayerful refocus, asking God where your place should be. To quote one of my favorite theologians, Rick Swan, “When you're rowing the boat, you're not rocking it.” So true! I think the question we have to answer at this point is this: how can I help the body of Christ rather than harm it? What is my calling to “do no harm” mean in this situation? And then act on God’s leading.

And then, finally, as we seek to do no harm, we will live more and more like Jesus did, following the leading of the Spirit (5:18). That’s what Paul desires for the Galatians and for us. You see, the Spirit will never lead us to do anything that is contrary to the Scriptures, hurtful to another or damaging to the body of Christ, the church. The Spirit’s job, Jesus said, is to help us remember what he taught and lead us to bring glory and honor to Jesus (cf. John 14:26). So we seek to live in the way Jesus taught and the way Jesus showed us. I love the image Isaiah gives of Jesus, and I think it’s an appropriate image for us as his followers. The Messiah, Isaiah (the Old Testament prophet) said, would be one who would not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick (42:3). Matthew quotes Isaiah and applies those words directly to Jesus (12:20). Jesus lived in such a way that even those who were most beat up by the world, those whose strength was about to give out, those who couldn’t imagine that they could go on or even stand up straight, those folks were loved and welcomed and cared for. They didn’t have sticks and stones or even unkind words hurled at them. They were cared for in such a way that the bruised reed would be strengthened and the flame would burn bright once again on that smoldering wick. Jesus sought to bring healing and hope and resurrection to the world. And he calls his followers to live that way as well as we seek to follow the leading of the Spirit and do no harm.

This past week, I was privileged to attend the dedication and ribbon-cutting for the new Wabash Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center, and to hear those gathered there talk about not only the usual things folks talk about—excitement about a new location, the building cost and such—but more importantly, their desire to be a witness for Christ in downtown Terre Haute and on the edge of the Indiana State campus. As the name implies, those who come there are usually in a “crisis” as they deal with an unplanned or unexpected pregnancy, and they are in a very vulnerable place. They are bruised reeds and smoldering wicks. A push in the wrong way could cause their light to go out, their heart to break. CPC is there to do no harm, to bind up the brokenhearted and proclaim hope and freedom to those who are hurting (cf. Isaiah 61:1). There are other fantastic organizations in our community doing the same thing, and I’m only beginning to learn of more and more of them. 14th and Chestnut Center comes to mind, of course, as they reach out to bind up those who are broken. When I was there several weeks ago, I could sense the joy in Bill Felts’ heart as he talked about the “kids” who had come out of there and were rising above their circumstances, being able to begin to carve out a better life for themselves and their families. All because someone—several someones—set out intentionally to do no harm. To bind up the brokenhearted. To offer the grace of God to those in need.

You see, when we, individually, seek to do no harm, when we seek to stop “biting and devouring” each other, not only will that change the quality of our lives. It will transform the world. And that’s what we’re all about anyway: making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. I mean, can you imagine a world where everyone is seeking to do no harm? A world where we are seeking to be led by the Spirit into a life that is in step with Jesus? A world where, in everything we say or do we are seeking to keep only one command, only one law: love your neighbor as yourself. That, my friends, is true freedom: the freedom to love, and to do no harm.

It’s just one simple rule, one small step day by day that just might have the capacity to change the world. Are you ready? Are you willing to commit to doing no harm? Let’s pray.