Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62
“Why Are We Like This?”
Preached Sunday, June 29, 2025
Here’s my Sunday morning confession to you: I don’t always talk to myself with kindness. As a pastor, and just as a friend, I often tell people to talk to themselves as they would a good friend or even a small child. Don't berate yourself. Give yourself grace. Negative self-talk does no good. We are commanded, after all, to love neighbor - as self. While we are going to talk about loving our neighbor this morning, sometimes we also have to start with loving ourselves.
And yet, and yet…almost all of us do it, negative self-talk, berating ourselves. I have a particularly infuriating habit of losing earbuds. I just can’t keep track of them. In the last week or two I’ve misplaced them so many times, I found myself in a spiral of negative self-talk. Including the lament, “Why am I like this???”
Which is also the sermon title I chose for this week - a lament against the state of humanity, found some 2000 years ago in our Scriptures and in the headlines and our lived reality today.
We start with the scene of Jesus rebuking his disciples.
“When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’ But he turned and rebuked them.”
Some people didn’t respond to Jesus the way they would have hoped - a rejection instead of acceptance. And James and John…they ask, “Should we kill them???” - or “Should we pray for God to kill them?”
I want to be flabbergasted at this. Like, “Excuse me, what?” But then I look at the course of human history and our world today - how quick and how often we rain fire down from the skies on each other. In addition to that, they were spurned by Samaritans - already the enemy. How quickly their disdain and hate for them bubbles to the surface in anger and violence at even the smallest slight. It is the same for us - how quick are we to call for the elimination of all who oppose us? Of those who don’t think like us? Of the “other”? So instead I sigh and ask, “Why are we like this?”
I wish the words of Jesus’s rebuke were written down in Scripture. I wish they had been transmitted through the ages down to us today. Although I can imagine what he said, especially when I look at today’s reading from Galatians:
“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.”
Maybe these words are an echo of Jesus’s rebuke. Something along the lines of: “What part of love your neighbor as yourself don’t you understand??? You are going to bite and devour one another and all of you will be consumed by violence, sin, and death.”
After Jesus’s rebuke we then have what seems like a slight change in topic in today’s Gospel lesson - but it is all related.
Jesus encounters some would-be disciples on his way:
“As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’
And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’
To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’
And Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’
Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’”
We don’t have the actual answers of these possible disciples. Did they heed Jesus’s words and leave everything to follow him…or did they get stuck in their “buts”?
I’d follow you…BUT that sounds too demanding.
I’d follow you….BUT let me bury my father.
I’d follow you….BUT let me say goodbye to my family.
But…wait, actually, don’t these sound more like good reasons to us rather than excuses to not follow Jesus?
Biblical scholar Chelsea Brooke Yarborough frames it like this:
“Now naturally, Jesus could let them do these things that feel so crucial and necessary. I would also want to bury my parent or tell my people at home that I was leaving. However, the reason these were recorded was to show that this following is costly and time-sensitive.
I don’t know that I would suggest we should not bury those we have lost in honor or take time to be with family and friends. Yet, thinking that following Jesus and living in a radically loving and wholly inclusive way won’t cost us something is misguided. Jesus is saying, ‘Do you truly want to follow me in practice, or do you want to be seen following me as perception?’”
Because the thing is - there will always be good reasons - or even bad reasons - excuses - as to why we should not follow Jesus. As to why we should not love our neighbor, even our enemies, as ourselves, as to why we should not make costly sacrifices or changes to our lives in order to follow Jesus.
A costly sacrifice like one that James and John may have been challenged to make - in order to follow Jesus, we have to let go of our sin. Our penchant towards violence. Our hate towards our enemy.
In Galatians , “the works of the flesh” that we are called to reject are offered up. “The works of the flesh” always sound so…well, “Biblical.” “Christian-ese.” What these really are, are the sin-sick condition of humanity.
“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.”
What struck me is the line “Now the works of the flesh are obvious…”
I want to ask - are they? Are they really? Were the works of the flesh obvious to James and John when they wanted God to reign down fire on their enemies? Were the works of the flesh obvious to those who made excuses to not follow Jesus? Are the works of the flesh obvious to us in our world today?
Here’s the thing…are they so obvious? Or do our excuses sound like pretty good, justified reasons? Well, that sounds reasonable to act this way…we can twist ourselves in knots to justify our sin - as individuals and a society - and then deny in the face of all the evidence that we are so contorted that we lose sight of which way is up. We hear things in this list from Scripture and like to focus on the sins that we think are the sins of “others” - well **I** don’t engage in debauchery...but what about strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, and factions…? Well…
I think it’s almost impossible for us, in this day and age, to be born into our world, and not only not engage with “the works of the flesh” but to even try and justify them. And so again, we may find ourselves asking, “Why are we like this?”
For some the answer is original sin or total depravity. That is the theological concept that every human is born sinful by our very nature, passed on through the seed of Adam, that inertly, we are totally depraved.
This is certainly one answer for “Why are we like this?” And we have Augustine to thank for that…and to be honest, it is not my favorite theological concept. Original Sin has so much baggage about how humans are made that I simply don’t think sin is something passed on like a gene. And total depravity ignores God’s statement when humanity was made, “and indeed, it was very good.”
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, offered up an alternative to “Original Sin” called “Inbeing Sin.” Basically that the world we are living in is so sick, so polluted with sin, that we can’t help being affected by it, made sick by it. Sin is simply in the air we breathe, the water we swim in. Now, I think it may be helpful to stop here and define sin. We have that list of things that are “works of the flesh” from Galatians and there are certainly other lists - the 10 Commandments and such in the Bible…but I think sin can all be summed up in understanding the Greek word used for it, hamartia. Which literally means, “missing the mark.” It’s used to describe when an archer fails to fit the bullseye target. Sin is missing the mark… What is the mark then? The two greatest commandments: loving God and loving neighbor as self. All else is interpretation.
Humanity is capable of great evil and selfishness, of being sin-sick…of so much we certainly deserve a rebuke from Jesus. The answer to “Why are we like this?” Is that we are sin-sick, and our sin-sickness, our missing the mark, our failure to love God and neighbor as self, our failure to love our enemies, our failure to follow Jesus…our inbeing sin - this is the answer to “Why are we like this?”
Except perhaps…perhaps it is not really the answer that we seek when we ask this question. Perhaps we don’t need the answer - we know why we are like this…what we need instead is the assurance that we don’t HAVE to be this way. We can change. We can be healed of sin-sickness. We can love God and neighbor as self. We can even love our enemies.
I am going to repeat this because I feel like at this point in the sermon, and at this time in our world, we need to hear the Good News of the Gospel. So here it is one more time: We don’t HAVE to be this way. We can change. We can be healed of sin-sickness. We can love God and neighbor as self. We can even love our enemies.
Humanity has a great capacity for evil, yes. And we have an amazing capacity for good as well. For love. For kindness and generosity - for getting it right. For hitting the mark. For following Jesus, the embodiment of the God who is Love.
And if we get ourselves so twisted, so contorted that we don’t know which way is up anymore, if we don’t know how to choose the good over the bad, if we are so sin-sick in our sin-sick world that we don’t know how to follow Jesus…what are we to do? Look to the fruit. This is what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.”
Our reading from Galatians offers important insight to what this good fruit is: “By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
It looks like loving God and loving neighbor as self. This love will bear that fruit.
The answer to our sin problem? The answer to “why are we like this?” The response we really need to hear is… There is a better way. We don’t have to be like this. So, stop making excuses - just follow Jesus. That means loving your neighbor as yourself, and yes, even your enemy is your neighbor.
We don’t need to be like this. Instead of being polluted by a sin-sick world, we can find a cure in the Spirit. Abide in the Spirit, spend time with God, worship God, let the Spirit shape and change you, even at great personal sacrifice, until you produce the fruit of the Spirit. Until our lives and our hearts look more like Jesus.
Instead of a world marked by biting and devouring one another, may our world be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
May it be so. Amen.
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