Proper 8 (June 26-July 2)
Texts: Galatians 6:1-16;
Luke 9:51-62; 1 Kings 19
YouTube video: https://youtu.be/PiXO7c9nOwM
FLESH OR SPIRIT: CULTURES OF DEATH OR THE CULTURE OF LIFE
Our Gospel Reading sets the tone for the wider theme of our worship today, the theme of discipleship. But I would like to focus on Paul’s ending to his letter to the Galatians, which elaborates on the challenges of discipleship — beginning with this verse:
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.
What does Paul mean by the terms “flesh” and “Spirit”? That’s what we’re going to wrestle with for a few minutes not only this morning but next week, too. Paul ends his letter to the Galatians using the terms flesh and Spirit as a short-hand way of naming nothing less important than life and death. Living in the flesh is the way of death. Living in the Spirit is the way to life. He’s talking about the secret of life, so to speak. That’s important to know about, right?
Let me start by letting you in on a more mundane secret. We switched the order of the readings between this week and next. We read Galatians 6 this week, and we’re reading Galatians 5 next week. Why? Because in Galatians 5 Paul uses the terms flesh and Spirit even more, and not just as the secret to life and death, but also as the secret to freedom vs. slavery. We have a set of readings we like to use on the 4th of July weekend to talk about freedom, and Galatians 5 is one of those texts.
So let’s get things started in this two-week journey into flesh vs. Spirit by saying what Paul doesn’t mean by them. When we over emphasize the afterlife in our Christian teaching, we fall into thinking in terms of our earthly life vs our afterlife in heaven. So we might think that Paul is naming the difference between the earthly life and afterlife with the terms flesh and Spirit, respectively. We live our earthly lives in the flesh and our afterlives in the Spirit.
But clearly this isn’t right. When we read Galatians 5-6 together, it’s clear that Paul is talking about two ways of living in this life. Yes, Paul talks about “eternal life” in the verse we started with this morning — that when we sow to the Spirit, we reap eternal life. But I’ve talked before about how “eternal life” is not a good translation of what Paul is talking about. A better way of thinking about this might be your local all-you-can-eat buffet line. What’s that mean? Your “unlimited” or “bottomless” or “endless” buffet, right? That’s what Paul is talking about here, endless life in the sense that we can finally live our lives full tilt, as if death weren’t a thing. All-you-can-eat buffet is akin to all-you-can-live life. So we might say that flesh and Spirit are about living this life with death as your horizon or with life as your horizon. Which would you rather sow and reap?
So we’ve ruled out what Paul isn’t talking about. He’s not talking about this-life vs the afterlife. He’s talking about two different ways of living this-life. Let’s bring up one more caution about how not to think about these terms. We live in a time of rampant Individualism. We should not think about these terms in the light — or darkness, really — of individualism. Paul isn’t thinking about these terms as the secret of life for individuals to win the game of life against other individuals. In fact, if Paul could think individualistically as easily and drastically as we do, he would tell us that our Individualism in the modern age is already far down the road of flesh rather than Spirit. Our modern form of Individualism is a symptom of living in the flesh. It doesn’t lead to a more fulfilled life to see ourselves as individuals over against other individuals. No, life in the Spirit is about the successful way to life with other people. It is the path of life which leads to a more fulfilled life of living in community with other people.
Now, Paul in the first century wouldn’t even have been able to think as individualistically as we are prone to do. Being individuals who need to live with others in community was a given for him. So, in terms of flesh and Spirit, flesh names for Paul a deadly way to live with others in community, and Spirit names a fulfilling way to live with others in community.
Let’s jump what might seem a strange place, the place of modern team sports, as a helpful analogy for using the terms flesh and Spirit. My favorite teams, the Detroit Lions and Tigers, have done a lot of losing through the years. But to my delight they are currently doing a lot of winning. As I hear sports commentators talking about the difference, I hear them saying things like, “They now are building a winning culture, in which they are learning how to truly play as a team.” As opposed, of course, to the many years of having a “losing culture,” when they failed to play good team ball. To the sports fans out there, you have a feel for talk like this, right?
We’ve even begun to use this “culture” language in the workplace. Our company, or our organization, needs to build a culture of success. When it’s an auto company, presumably that means learning how to build better cars together. If you work for a health care group, presumably that means learning how to better care for people’s health and well-being. And we can tell the difference, right? As consumers of cars and hospitals. Some hospitals do truly care more effectively for your health, and when you’re there it’s easy to tell the difference. And it’s usually not an accident. My wife Ellen worked for a health care group which talked a lot about their culture of caring. And it made a real difference. Hospitals that focus on their culture for caring generally end up doing a better job of it.
Well, for Paul’s use of flesh and Spirit we’re talking about something similar. He’s using the terms flesh and Spirit to name what we’re talking about when we talk about different cultures. We can perhaps hear in that first analogy to team sports from our reading this morning. For example, not seeing yourself as superior to others. And taking care to do your job well. Those are good teamwork habits, too, right? That the superstar doesn’t act like a spoiled superstar, and that everyone works together by doing their job. For Paul, Flesh names a way of doing culture with its horizon in death. Spirit names a way of doing culture with its horizon in life. Similar to how sports teams talk about winning cultures and losing cultures, flesh names death-dealing cultures and Spirit names life-giving cultures. And you reap what you sow. Will it be death or life, Paul wants the Galatians, and us, to know.
We’re going to finish this conversation next week, when our reading from Galatians 5 also frames this all in terms of freedom vs slavery. Flesh names enslaving cultures, and Spirit names liberating culture. Let me wrap things up for this morning by hypothesizing with you why Paul might want to use the terms flesh and Spirit. I believe that Paul uses the term flesh to name how human cultures have evolved so far in human history. All human cultures thus far have been sinful. They have been death-dealing. They have been formed in Us-vs-Them thinking that sets communities of human beings against one another. They are what we’ve been naming this past year as nationalistic. The human family is perpetually divided against itself, leading to a tragic history of seeking to deal death to the others. These are the cultures with which human beings thus far have evolved. We have been trapped in these seemingly cycles of bloodshed and suffering. We have been living in the flesh.
But now that Jesus the Messiah has come and unleashed a different Spirit, a Holy Spirit, we can now live in the Spirit. God, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, is creating a new culture named by Spirit in which we are becoming one new humanity in place of the two (Eph 2:15), in place of all our ways of being divided. This morning we’re commemorating what has been purported to be the first time LGBTQ people raised their voices in protest (Stonewall), and they were put down with violence. Spirit is a culture based on love not hate, genuine affection not fear.
Spirit is not a culture of law which divides us into law-abiders and law-breakers. It is a culture in which we do as Paul says in the first verses of today’s reading. If anyone breaks the law, he says, those in the Spirit act to help restore them. Not punish them; restore them. Spirit culture is about restorative justice more than punitive justice. Would you say that our current court and prison system is more about punitive justice or restorative justice? Clearly punitive, right? And incarcerating law abiding, contributing migrants as we’re currently doing, doesn’t that smack of moving in the opposite direction of Spirit culture? In other words, our legal system is of the age-old flesh cultures in which we’ve evolved. And we seem to be devolving even more. What would it take to begin to have a legal system more towards the Spirit culture of restoration? To begin with, it would mean those of us living in the Spirit need to advocate for something different. We need to raise our voices, as LGBTQ people have learned that they needed to raise theirs, even in a climate of continuing hate and violence. Living in the Spirit, we want to learn to raise our voices with those whom the cultures of flesh are trying to silence.
To sum things up, Paul even makes up a new term, the “law of Christ,” the law of the Messiah. And how do we live according to this law of the Messiah? We don’t seek to make each others burdens worse, like mass incarceration of migrants. We don’t seek to shift our burdens onto others, like racism. No, we seek to bear one another’s burdens. We practice this here, right? We strive to be a church community of bearing one another’s burdens? And, in the Spirit, we strive to extend that caring to others, as well. Those who continue to be beaten down in our death-dealing cultures of the flesh. This is the new law of the Messiah. Not just for the afterlife, mind you. No, it’s a law, a culture, which can begin to set us on the path to life. As Jesus himself says in today’s Gospel, being a follower of his begins right now! Drop everything and follow me. And as Paul says: “A new creation is everything!” When we are followers of Jesus living in the Spirit, new creation begins now. And it changes everything. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, June 29, 2025
YouTube video: https://youtu.be/PiXO7c9nOwM
