1 March, 2020, Rooke Chapel, Bucknell University
Galatians 5:13-18, 22-25
We are together here at the end of Black history month and at the beginning of Women’s history month. In this space and at this time, I feel compelled to call some names of folks who have gone on to be saints, to be our cherished ancestors. Nanny of the Maroons. Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman. Yaa Asantewaa. Ida B. Wells. Rosa Parks. Fannie Lou Hamer. June Jordan. Audre Lorde. Shirley Chisolm. Toni Morrison. Carmen Gillespie. We are blessed that they are our ancestors.
Let us pray. Oh God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Strength and our Redeemer. And those gathered who could said, Amen.
I was excited to learn that the theme of contemplation this semester is “Fruit of the Spirit.” Nothing is quite as illustrative of new weather, new possibilities, of alchemy, magic, growth, change, transformation as fruit. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about transformation. I’m interested in transforming spaces and relationships, economies of power and privilege, experiences and contexts of marginality and oppression, gluten-free flours into fluffy croissant… For me the process of transformation is at once magical and adventurous, filled with imagination, grounded by a belief in someones, somethings, some ways, sometimes… better.
The Galatians weren’t eating well. And as a result, they weren’t getting the essential vitamins and minerals that they needed for a healthy body. Paul was trying to deal with this in his letter.
In the end of the verses read for today, Paul teaches that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” The FRUIT, he says. Singular. Not “fruits” and then this list, but fruiT. We have to ask – or at least I do – how big is it? Is it like a grapefruit? A cantaloupe? A pumpkin? I mean, what kind of fruit is all of those things at once? But then, maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe we should be thinking about something else. So let’s meditate together this morning on the question, “What is the seed of the fruit of the Spirit?” Now, in the style of black church, of call and response traditions, I want you to turn to your neighbor and say, “neighbor,” “what is the seed,” “of the fruit of the Spirit?” And turn to another neighbor and say, “I don’t know but it must be huge.” Just kidding.
Now, I’m from two places that pride themselves on fruit. First, as half South Carolina-born African American, I know what it is like for people to be proud of peaches. And please, don’t let the Georgia campaigns on peaches miseducate you. South Carolina is the real peach state. Each year, the landscape in the upstate becomes a beautiful hue of orange-pinks when the peaches ripen, filling the air with a sweet musk that makes me think at once of cobbler, cookouts, and calls to be home before that street light comes on. The presence of the fruit transforms – reconstitutes – and shifts the space, the sounds, the smells… the land. And the other part of me, the Jamaican half, knows the work that mango season can do. It has people call ‘pon de man dem, sellin’ mango ‘pon de side of de road. Folks traveling back and forth across the Caribbean Sea carry bags filled with mangos. They bring with them the scent of ocean breeze and afternoon drinks, the sound of calypso outdone eventually by the heavy dub base of the dancehall. Grandmothers with juices almost too think to swallow, and warm mornings met with rainy afternoons… Yes, these are the fruits in their fullness. These are the manifestations of plants grown, of seeds sown, with roots deeper than many of us can know.
Paul knows about these kinds of fruits. He knows what can flourish from good seeds, and he’s trying to get the folks in Galatia to recognize that the fruits, the transformational outcomes of the SPIRIT are WONDERFUL. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness…THIS, he reminds them is the fruit they ought to enjoy, IF they lean into the spirit. The Spirit is oriented towards righteousness, community, collective well-being, and he puts it opposition to the flesh, which is turned towards self-indulgence and is still bound by the Law. Now, folks usually focus on Paul’s distinction between spirit and flesh here. Paul does offer a bit of a rough read of the flesh and the body. Flesh bad, spirit good. Flesh focused on debased things, spirit on the highest ideals and so on. We – womanists, feminists, queer and liberation theologians and ethicists – have been trying to redeem the flesh, the material of God’s good creation, from some of the more damaging teachings for a long time….
But what I think Paul is trying to do, albeit a touch clumsily, is show folks that the fruit of the flesh is wrapped up in the Law. Now remember, this community in Galatia is a cultural mix. It’s not altogether unlike Bucknell. It is, at least geographically speaking, kind of out of the way. North Central Asia Minor – not quite here, not quite there. It is, like Bucknell, centrally isolated, in a region that is somewhere between things more recognizable, attracting people from all over, who speak different languages, have different customs, know different ways of being in community. Galatia is a space trying to have an identity. And Galatians, are trying to figure out who they are in the context of new knowledge, new connections, and new trajectories for the future. Each one of the folks in the faith community is a convert to a new spirituality, a new spiritual understanding, AND all of them are trying to figure out what this means culturally. They’re asking: are we all supposed to adhere to the same rituals? Do we have to dress alike, eat the same things, follow the same rules, pay the same taxes, make the same sacrifices and offerings? Or…take the same classes? Do similar internships, pledge or rush the same fraternities and sororities? Do we have to do the same things we did before we gained some consciousness? Do we have to do the same things that we did before we learned the good news of Christ? And for the Galatians, these questions are especially timely and urgent, since as soon as Paul left – after having told them they were freed from the law, that Christ abolished it – some other preachers of a different gospel came behind him and confused the people, putting them right back in deep connection to the law. “Yes,” those others said, “you need to adhere to the law. It is what binds us in community; it is the culture of our people.”
But Paul is trying to remind them otherwise. He needs them to remember that they are a new community driven by different, more liberating forces. And, let’s be clear: Paul is a little irritated at having to repeat himself. He had already done this work when he was IN Galatia, and now he has to take time from his ministry, his campaign, and the donkey-riding across Asia to restate what he thought was a very clear message.
I have to admit that whenever I real Paul’s letter to the Galatians, I read it in a voice of black women in my life – my mother, all of my aunties, my grandma… ushers at church. The whole letter sounds in my head like an extended I done told y’all, mixed with I don’t know why you don’t listen. In my family these were tones saved for when we had gotten on someone’s last nerves, when we had exhausted the grace of I’m gon’ tell you one mo’ time. Paul is exasperated with his people because he has to tell them – yet again – that in the new community, they have a remarkable opportunity to choose fresh, satisfying, beautiful, tasty, thirst-quenching fruits from the Spirit. That the teachings he shared with them about Christ, that his own transformation—after what must have been a trippy experience on his journey to Damascus—gives them access to a new life, new possibilities, new community grounded in the Spirit.
“You’ve been called to freedom!” he says. I can imagine the ALL CAPS and exclamation points if Paul was sending a message in a GroupMe chat or a tweet. “You don’t have to do the same things that you used to do. There’s a whole new world out here for us!” He has to explain again in his most rudimentary, repetitive, speaking-slowly-so-they-can-get-it-this-time voice that Christ brought them freedom, that they are called to a state of liberty, and that within this calling is their release from the captivity to the old ways of being, freedom from relations built on exchange, obligation, and obedience.
And Paul is frustrated because – and this would be true for me – it’s hard to understand why people aren’t listening, why they might rather be bound to law and dominant culture than free through the spirit.
But we all know what it’s like to be a Galatian. We know how foreign and far away freedom can seem when your world has been shaped by bondage and servitude, capture, and obligation. Sometimes we are so acclimated to our own oppression or so used to the benefit of an oppressive system that someone has to unlock our chains over and over again. Sometimes we don’t know that there’s no lid over us, or when the glass ceiling has been shattered, the door has been open, when the curtains have been pulled back, when the light is shining…. Some of us haven’t been acclimated to what the sun feels like against our skin because we’ve been told that our melanin, our darkness, our freedom to be sun-kissed is a source of shame that should be repaid with bondage – or death. Or perhaps it’s the case that we don’t know how to DO freedom – as a collective at least. Perhaps we don’t know how to reconcile the possibility of freedom with the choices we make to keep a sense of community. We want to reduce our energy output but keep our office heaters running a bit longer than we should. We want to create safe and inclusive spaces but still secretly laugh at racist and sexist and homophobic jokes. We want people to have equitable and safe working conditions but still buy clothes from companies that exploit human labor. We want an educated society but inadequately and unequally resource public schools. We want a land of freedom but incarcerate about 7% of our population. We want the liberty and fruit of the spirit, but we are caught up in the culture and fruit of the law!
So I’m not surprised that the Galatians have to be reminded over and over again what freedom is. I’m not surprised that they can’t recognize that the fruit of the Spirit, that the love and joy and kindness and gentleness are products of the freedom that Christ planted. That the root to the new community, the seedling of beloved possibility is freedom… Because one: change is hard. And two, messages about the law are confusing. They give some of us a lot of protection and others of us almost guaranteed destruction. After all, the law supported colonists’ occupation of lands, genocide of entire peoples, erasure of Indigenous folks’ language and history and food supplies and clean water. The law supported the transportation of Africans to this land to provide unpaid labor in violent circumstances, the separation of black mothers from their children, the hanging and burning of flesh as punishment for social misconduct. The law sanctioned the internment of Japanese families and a denial of a reparative response to that internment. And right now, it allows for the detention of children at the nation’s borders. Paul knows like we do that the law ain’t friendly to all of us. The law and culture can be dangerous and perilous. And he wants us to let it go.
But the metaphor is hard. Fruit hasn’t always been the safest bet for all of us in this whole faith story, has it? It was pretty dangerous when we first encountered it. I mean, there’s a whole element in the history of Abrahamic faiths in which the fruit had a really strong impact on the way we understand gender. Allegations of deception and gullibility according to gender had severe implications for moral systems. In fact, that bruhaha with partaking of fruit in a garden led to a need to repair the whole world… It does make you wonder then why fruit is such an important symbol and metaphor in the New Testament writings. You will know them by their fruit, Jesus teaches his disciples in Matthew 7, warning them against false prophets….
Still, what are the seeds? What is the seed? Freedom. Freedom through the good news of a God who is breaks the barrier of time and space and life and death to join in with creation. Freedom through the embodied message of sanctified social and political revolution. Paul wants the Galatians to know that they can have community. They can have celebrations and rituals. The seeds have been planted for their collective delight. They simply have to harvest the fruits.
AND, they mustn’t let
them rot. Let me tell you a quick story. I was watching an episode of Hoarders
a few years ago (Don’t judge me!), and there was a woman on the show who
hoarded food. In one scene during the episode, the cameras follower her and the
doctor into the kitchen and pan over to one of the cleaners – in full HAZMAT –
throwing away food. The cleaner picks up a giant rotted fruit. Something that
used to be a pumpkin. It was HUGE. It was also significantly decomposed, folded
in on itself, with growths of mold and every gross thing one could imagine.
That cleaner is holding it with tongs. The woman stops the cleaner just before
the pumpkin goes into the trash. “Wait,” she says and sticks her bare hands into the center of the
pumpkin, “this was a beautiful piece of fruit. It was a huge and gorgeous
pumpkin. I HAVE TO save the seeds.”
The fruit might have taken a turn for the sour, seeming less valuable by the
second. And she was at the end of her rope, but she knew that the seeds were
worth it. The seeds of a magnificent fruit were worth saving because, after
all, they could be replanted.
We might not always be able to live into good community together. We might not always nurture what we grow or plant. It will be hard sometimes to get used to one another’s ways and customs, foods and dialects. In community here or with our families or as a country facing a new political cycle, it might be hard to access and nurture the love, and joy and kindness and self-control – the fruit of freedom through divine grace. But we should remember that freedom is not just something that is available to us. It is more than that. It is the foundation to our ability to do moral reasoning, to have moral agency. We cannot make justice-oriented decisions, or choose righteousness unless we unbind ourselves from old ways of thinking and feeling and acting and behaving in relation to one another. The shackles of old systems will not work in the new community that we want to create. The bondage of oppressive regimes and marginalizing or exclusive language will not serve us as we strive for the beloved community of belonging.
Like my ancestors did, we have to throw off the yoke that binds our thinking and our hopes. We have to let go of the laws that limit our imagination. This is how they dreamed us into existence. This is how they manifested something they didn’t see was possible. This is why we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
The gospel message for the day, the good news from the messiah, comes through Paul’s simple message. We are called to freedom. If we live into it, we can enjoy what it grows. Look back at what our sacred ancestors planted and grew. Nanny of the Maroons, the practice of community organizing and using the natural landscape to create one’s freedom space. Sojourner Truth, the notion that slavery by way of gender and sex was wrong and worth fighting together. Harriet Tubman, the liberation of our people is as important as liberation for ourselves. Yaa Asantewaa, the practice of resisting colonization of body mind and resources at any cost. Ida B. Wells, the active enforcement that black lives matter and that we all have the right to live. Rosa Parks, that “no” is a complete sentence and that justice means saying no to inequality. Fannie Lou Hamer, that black women’s voices and vote on the social and political stage can transform communities. June Jordan, that telling the truth is both poetic and political. Audre Lorde, that our silence will not protect us and that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Shirley Chisolm, that the cost of freedom is often our willingness to be leaders and advocates of revolutions. Toni Morrison, that sometimes we have to write our own stories, to write ourselves into history and existence. Carmen Gillespie, that hope is a powerful force and that Bucknell can be better and more than we ever imagined. Again, we are blessed that they are our ancestors, that they planted the seed of our freedom so that we too can enjoy its fruit. Amen.