“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 enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, 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. For 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. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, 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, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:1, 13-25)

Prayer: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

”There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place, and I know that it’s the Spirit of the Lord.“ I want to thank Sean for picking that good old hymn and getting us started on our Spirit-filled worship. We had quite a Spirit-filled Pentecost three weeks ago, didn’t we?  with streamers floating above our heads and everyone dressed in red. But it’s still Pentecost, which is a season and not just a day, a season to explore with some of the implications of being a Spirit-filled people. More particularly I want to explore with you the idea of being guided by the Spirit in our lives.

But before I do that, I want to acknowledge the reality that both the world and our country are broken, and that brokenness weighs heavy on my heart. There’s a lament in both Psalm 42 and 43 that has preoccupied me lately: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” (Psalm 42:11).

I acknowledge that the world is always broken, but it seems to me that we have entered an especially dark and dangerous time, with wars and rumors of war. I usually resist binaries, but I do feel that the forces of freedom and democracy around the world are in a contest with the forces of oppression and autocracy.

And since this is a spiritual contest, I’ve been wondering what spiritual resources we have as a church that can help us break through from our lament, leading us from sadness to joy, from fear to faith, from complacency to hope.

And our reading from Galatians 5 contains a beautiful list of resource under the title “the fruit of the Spirit.” I love the idea of fruit, because fruit is not something we can make, but only receive. You can’t manufacture fruit like you can a shirt or a pair of pants. Fruit grows. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,

Fruit is always the miraculous, the created; it is never the result of willing, but always a growth. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift of God, and only God can produce it. They who bear it know as little about it as the tree knows of its fruit. They know only the power of the One on whom their life depends”

Fruit is always a growth.

Did you ever notice how many of our good words begin with G. Remember Sesame Street had programs sponsored by a letter from the alphabet? So, today’s sermon is brought to you by the letter G! So many good G words: such as good, or grow, or for that matter, God. There’s also great, gift, gratitude, gentleness, group, not to mention guitar and guacamole.

So, fruit grows and we receive it, and it both pleases our sense and nourishes us.

Now Paul did see the world as a binary. For Paul, Jesus was the pivot from the old age of the world and the flesh, to the new world of the kingdom of God and the Spirit. The new age (the Greek word is aeon) has begun in Jesus, but has not been fully realized, so Christians straddle the two worlds. We call this “the already and the not yet” of God’s realm.

As Christians, we feel this tension between the two worlds, the pull of the flesh and the desire to follow the Spirit. Paul himself describes this internal struggle in Romans 7:19, where he says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” This is the reality of living in a broken world—we are constantly choosing between the desires of the flesh and the leading of the Spirit.

Paul contrasts what he calls “the works of the flesh” with the fruit of the Spirit. By flesh Paul means humanity, as in “Let all Mortal Flesh keep Silence” or as in Handel’s Messiah “for the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” which is my favorite chorus from Messiah.

So, for Paul, Christians don’t have to create these wonderful attributes, they are provided freely to us by the Holy Spirit of God, the same Spirit that came to the first disciples on Pentecost and who comes to us two thousand years later here in Stockbridge.

And I would suggest that one of the ways to live in the old world, the broken world of humanity, is to accept the gifts the Spirit provides. Let us take a look at the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

It’s a great list. And I appreciate that Paul uses the singular Fruit rather than Fruits. This suggests to me that they are not a bunch of items from which to pick and choose, but a singular package that the Spirit bestows to us to help us do our work of discipleship.

And the other thing that’s important to keep in mind is that Paul is addressing the whole Galatian congregation as church and not just solitary individuals. Because Paul knew something that many Americans forget, that faith is a team sport. There are no solitary Christians. That’s part of the reason we gather together to worship. We help each other, we support each other, we lean on each other. As Paul said in a different letter “we weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.”

With the guidance (another good G word) with the guidance of the Spirit we can navigate our way through this broken world. In Romans 12;2 Paul admonishes “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Another way to put it is Jesus’s telling his disciples to “be in the world, but not of the world.”

While we acknowledge that our world is broken, we do not accept that it has to stay that way, or that we can do nothing about. Consider the way of Jesus: he fed the hungry, and healed the sick, and befriended the loveless. And he told us to pray to his Father “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Make our world more like the kingdom.

So, Jesus followers are called to bridge the gap between the two kingdoms, or ages.

And how do we do that? By feeding the hungry with our pop-up pantry and at the Cathedral of the Beloved. By taking a meal to a sick friend. Or by going to court to stand up for an immigrant. Or by accepting someone who is not like you. By being kind to a stranger.

The ways are countless and Jesus is the template for how the kingdom works. And all this lovely Fruit gifted to us by the Spirit are the resources by which we can carry out the mission and ministries to which we have been called.

Yes, there is certainly a time and a place for our lament. A time to cry out, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” (Psalm 42:11). But let us not linger there. We have been freely bestowed by God’s good Spirit with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And for that we are grateful, our final G word of the day! Amen.

( I preached this sermon on June 29, 2025 at The First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For a YouTube video of the service go here: