renew | week 4

Week 4 | Sunday, June 26, 2022
Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Week 4 PDF version

1 | begin

Think of someone in your life you value and appreciate. Say or write their name and offer a word of thanks for them. This gratitude practice can be a meditation, a prayer, or a group activity.

Repeat this practice with something in your life you value. Say or write it and offer thanks.

Then do it a third time with some aspect of yourself you appreciate and offer thanks.

2 | explore

Journal on your own about your experiences or share your stories with a group:

Describe a time when you felt like you could be your authentic self around someone else.

Describe a time when you felt like you had to be a different person to be part of a group.

What prompted those feelings? How did you respond to those experiences?

3 | read

Read Galatians 5:1-26. Then read verses 13-26 a second time.

4 | engage

Promises of belonging can have a power unlike any other. They touch our fear of missing out, our longing to be accepted, our need for safety, and our vulnerability to being hurt by our fellow humans. When oppressive systems grip the landscape in which we try to build our lives, belonging with another person or a group can mean a better shot at getting by, or even thriving. The prospect of being marginalized or excluded can drive us to rush toward belonging, even at a great cost.

Becoming an insider, though, can be elusive. The target can keep moving. Or the gatekeepers change. Or yesterday’s sacrifices mean nothing today. The uphill climb can seem unending, even when others reassure you that you’re “in.”

The lectionary excerpt from Galatians taps into the struggle to belong. Paul’s letter suggests that his mostly gentile audience is having a hard time discerning how to be faithful to the God of Israel. Some of them seem to be seeking to adhere to Jewish laws, especially the law for male circumcision (Gal 3:2, 5:2). Paul’s response gets to the heart of their struggle. He insists that Jesus’s death and resurrection have made liberation from destructive powers in the world and new life in God’s Spirit available not just for Jewish people but for all. For Paul, this means that gentiles do not need to follow the Jewish law in order to be part of God’s liberation and life. They “belong to Christ” as gentiles (3:29, NRSVUE), and Jews like Paul belong as Jews. Paul says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek [. . .] for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28)—not to claim that everyone becomes the same, but, as biblical scholar William Campbell indicates, the exact opposite: togetherness in difference for Jews and gentiles. [1]

In Galatians 5, Paul provides a clearer portrait of what life together in the Spirit of God is to look like for his gentile audience. He sets up a contrast between “flesh” and “Spirit” that illuminates which ways of relating to one another do and do not accord with belonging in Christ. Though Paul’s words might sound like a call to suppress one’s body in order to live in spiritual community, “flesh” seems to have a different meaning here, as biblical scholars like Louis Martyn show. [2] A more helpful way of navigating Paul’s rhetoric may be to see “works of the flesh” and “fruit of the Spirit” (5:19, 22) as contrasting practices of belonging.

The “works of the flesh” that Paul names evoke exploitative and antagonistic practices—practices that his gentile audience may have understood all too well living in a world under imperial rule, ordered by oppression and gross disparity between the powerful few and the poor majority. The kind of belonging that such works may facilitate with certain people only comes at the expense of others. But the “fruit of the Spirit” that Paul identifies runs counter to this. When the Spirit gets to work among followers of Jesus, as Martyn notes, [3] “love,” “peace,” and “kindness” shape their relationships with one another (5:22). Exploitative, antagonistic practices can have no place here because this kind of belonging comes at no one’s expense. (Side note: This contrast also exposes the problems with Paul’s enslavement imagery in verse 13. The exploitative realities of slavery are antithetical to loving one another.)

For gentiles wrestling with how to belong to Christ as gentiles, Paul’s words may have been challenging. If letting go of exploitative practices of belonging potentially meant giving up opportunities to gain higher status or power in society, some of Paul’s audience may have perceived significant cost and risk in his call to “live by the Spirit” (5:16). Yet for anyone who could recognize the destructive fruit of exploitation and antagonism, the possibility of experiencing and embodying a different way of belonging may have sounded like liberation, like life-giving belonging.

When we face belonging struggles today, when promises fail and targets keep moving, what if we let the Spirit remind us that we have been given belonging in Christ? What if we let the Spirit reshape our practices of belonging with one another? What fruits might we taste and share?

5 | respond

Journal on your own or talk with a group about these questions:

1. Where do you see promises of belonging in the world today? What do these promises require of people?

2. What is belonging to Christ and to Christian community like for you? Risky? Freeing? Difficult? Fruitful?

3. What stands out to you in Galatians 5? What part of Paul’s instructions resonates most with you?

4. How might you let the Spirit shape or reshape your practices of belonging this week?

6 | practice

Take a few minutes this week to do one of these activities:

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References & Credits

1. See William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T & T Clark, 2008), 165.

2. For Martyn’s take on “flesh,” see J. Louis Martyn, “The Daily Life of the Church in the War Between the Spirit and Flesh,” in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (London: T & T Clark, 1997), 251-66, especially 258-61.

3. For Martyn’s take on the Spirit’s “activity,” see ibid.

Header image of “Open Doors” is by Phil at the Unsplash website

Image of “Colored Pencils” is by Ramakant Sharda at the Unsplash website

Image of “Coffee Cup” is by Jessica Lewis at the Unsplash website

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

The scripture reading comes from the Revised Common Lectionary lessons for the Third Sunday after Pentecost in Year C, which can be found at the Episcopal Church Lectionary Page here