Wednesday, October 16, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Fruit
Brothers and sisters, when you are guided by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law.
We sat, several of us in blue workshirts and denims, a few of us in polo shirts and chinos, and we talked about this. We all wanted to be guided by the Spirit. On the other hand, the law was close at hand.
To get into this group several of us had to show IDs, submit to shakedowns, file through seven or eight locked doors, and then walk through a grassy quad to a building with more locked doors, watched all the while by more than just an unarmed guard or two.
We met in the back of the chapel at Danville Correctional Center in Illinois. Most everyone there is doubled up in cells meant for one. We didn’t meet at Stateville, which is now closed. One time we met for these meetings at Menard, which besides Stateville in Joliet is the only other prison in Illinois where Death Row dominated the culture and the conversation, where just beyond those cells the gas chambers and electric chairs waited. Lurked. Skulked. Whispered. No telling what the condemned men and women heard late at night in their Death Row cells.
Now, however, Illinois has outlawed capital punishment, and the Old Death Row has been converted into something else – a laundry room maybe, or art school, or solitary confinement. You never know what you might in a prison system that would like to focus on restoration but mostly just keeps everyone alive one day at a time. This justice is mostly not laced with mercy.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
So as I was saying we sat around a table looking forward to Friday dinner and asked some simple questions. Like, what part of this fruit comes most easily to you, seems a more or less natural part of your life? And on the other hand, what part of this fruit comes only with effort, great effort even, and maybe only sometimes, or maybe never? What do you think? Tell us about your own self.
These guys, and the rest of us either, don’t think about this much. Who does? They (we) talk about it even less. Who does? Can you imagine sitting there, trying to decide what to say? Imagine some invisible Spirit, tickling your ears, touching your tongues, inviting you to spill beans that you might not even know were up there close inside of you?
I led some of those groups. With a bit of encouragement and courage, we mostly found something to share with each other. For me, I was grateful for peace, and lacking in gentleness. But there are nine sections of the fruit of the Spiri, and really, possessing none of them was up to me. We just don’t get very far with this on our own.
Which is why Paul said “FRUIT,” not “fruits.” This fruit is a gift of God, not even really definable by us finite humans. Paul wrote these words to the Galatians focusing on the Spirit. We ourselves  just aren’t capable of this FRUIT.
The works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, jealousy, range, selfishness, dissensions, drinking bouts, orgies and the like.
And there are many more. Sin abounds. Our world beckons us toward evil. This imbalance between good and evil has always existed, and for this reason God sent the flood, and the fire next time, and why Jesus talked about Gehenna, and he meant not just any old garbage pit but the eternal fires of what came to be called hell.
Except.
Those who belong to Jesus the Christ have crucified their flesh, with its passions and desires.
That is, the passion that builds inside into immorality, impurity and the like … has been crucified. I don’t always know what to think about Paul’s confidence, not in me I belong to Jesus, but I have not quite crucified my flesh.
He who follows you, Lord, is like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.
On the many good days, that’s how I feel and even see myself. I am so grateful for words to describe this joy. There are moments when I feel like “chaff driven away by the wind,” but even then the watches over me, while the way of the wicked vanishes.
I keep thinking about how the guys with us in the blue workshirts are going back to cells, and we’re going back to the Comfort Inn.
The Shepherd keeps on calling all of us around the table, just before Danville Correctional Center’s Friday dinner. The prison walls seem less thick. We learn together the elusive but compelling way of honesty and confession. We feel some satisfaction looking into each other’s faces. Tomorrow we will administer absolution to each other as we kneel one at a time before our neighbor.
“David, in the name of Jesus, all your sins are forgiven.” And I will stand and turn to my neighbor in the circle and say the words to him.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord. I know them, and they follow me.
 (Galatians 5, Psalm 1, John 10, Luke 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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