05/31/2026 - Galatians 5:13-16, 22-26, Trinity Sunday

We have reached the end of the Lord’s Prayer with the final request that Jesus tells us to make of God - “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

And most of the time we read this, I think we can interpret it as us needing to ask God to keep us from situations that might tempt us to sin. Those situations then being the “evil” we need to be delivered from. But while that is a fair interpretation, I think it’s too limiting. And I think it’s also worth talking about something else that’s implied here - there is something good that we gain when we avoid temptation and are delivered from evil.

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Scripture: Galatians 5:13-16, 22-26

You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love. All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour each other, be careful that you don’t get eaten up by each other!

I say be guided by the Spirit and you won’t carry out your selfish desires.

…The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against things like this. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the self with its passions and its desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let’s follow the Spirit. Let’s not become arrogant, make each other angry, or be jealous of each other.

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These verses come from one of Paul’s letters that we find in the New Testament, this one written to the church in Galatia. And most of the time when Paul writes a church, he starts his letters with how much he misses them, he greets his friends by name, and thanks God for the people in the congregation. This does not happen with the church in Galatia. Paul skips all of the hellos and thanksgiving and goes straight into yelling at them as loud as he can through the parchment.

Which we know because in Galatians 6:11, Paul says, “Look at the large letters I’m making with my own handwriting!”

In modern terms, he’s typing in all caps to get his anger across.

Paul’s angry because the church in Galatia has turned back to religious laws and practices that he’d thought he’d pulled them away from. But other religious leaders have come in and convinced the church that if they don’t go back to those old laws and practices, God wouldn’t love them anymore.

When Paul hears about this, he writes this letter to yell at the church for ignoring his teachings, and to remind them that them following the law to the letter does not lead to God’s love and freedom. Instead, God’s love has already been given to them freely, and that freedom is what allows them to share God’s love with others.

That’s why interwoven with all of Paul’s anger and disappointment and condemnation of this church, Galatians has some of the most beautiful verses about God’s love and the power of the Holy Spirit. Because the Spirit is ultimately what leads us away from the temptation to remain stuck in cycles that cause us and others more harm than good and keep us from living the good, full life that God wants for us to live.

And all of us have experienced these cycles, whether in our personal lives or in workplaces or schools or communities in which we live. We have experience either ourselves or people we love who continue to make bad decision after bad decision, seemingly expecting a different result, and we’re left to clean up the mess. We’ve had jobs in workplaces where stomping down on coworkers and subordinates is rewarded, and kindness is often taken advantage of. We’ve ended up in friend groups where instead of building each other up, we tear each other down and eat each other up in the name of making ourselves feel better.

Or like the church in Galatia, we’ve been in churches and faith institutions where we were given systems of belief and practice and told to follow them to the letter - or else. But as we went through the motions and recited the prayers and creeds, some of it - or all of it - didn’t feel quite right. Maybe it was because of the dissonance between the prayers and the teachings and the actions being taken by the people leading those prayers and teaching the lessons.

Or maybe it was because they just didn’t resonate with your soul anymore.

But it’s often easier, it’s less work, to go along with what we’ve always done before.

There’s a reason it’s more popular to hike along trails that have already been carved into mountainsides and cut through forests. They’re easier to hike on, and much safer to do so.

And let me be clear, I do not endorse going off of hiking trails, because that can cause serious damage to the environment and to plants and animals that need to be protected and cared for. So, not that anyone reading this would, but I’d better not hear any of you going off-trail in the open lands and blaming me for it.

But for the sake of this metaphor, it is true that in sticking to the trails already carved out for us, in making the same decisions we’ve already made, in doing the same things we’ve already done, we’re always going to arrive at the same destination. And even if it’s not necessarily the best destination, at this point it’s too comfortable to go anywhere else. We’re too tired to try and make new paths in the wilderness that lead us in the ways of the values and beliefs that we hold dear.

Friends, I believe this is one of the temptations that we’re asking God to not lead us towards in the Lord’s Prayer. We’re asking God to not lead us towards the systems and practices that we follow out of complacency. We’re asking to be delivered from the evil of the systems and practices that hurt and dehumanize our neighbors and ourselves. Especially when those are the same systems we’re tempted to stay in because it’s easier than trying to break free.

But Jesus wouldn’t tell us to pray for something that God was unwilling and unable to grant to us.

And the answer to prayer comes in the form of the Holy Spirit. Who was sent to lead us away from the paths that lead to pain for others and ourselves. Who was sent remind us of our collective humanity, and deliver us into better, fuller lives.

But if we’re so used to certain ways of doing things, how do we know we are following the Spirit in the way she’s trying to lead us?

In Matthew 7, Jesus gives us a hint as to what we could be looking for. In a section where he’s warning his followers about false prophets, he says one of the ways in which one can be identified is by their fruits, or the results of their actions. Verses 16-20 say that: “You will know them by their fruits. Do people gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a 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 is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

Paul seems to be working in a similar line when he names the fruits of the Spirit as what the church in Galatia should be striving to see in their lives. Not because following the religious law was a bad thing necessarily, but because the Spirit had come to lead them in ways that overflowed the law, went beyond the fulfillment of it.

And the Spirit is what still should be guiding us today.

And by following her, Paul says we should be seeing the growth of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in our relationships with our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and our wider communities.

And by cultivating those fruits, there will not be room left for jealousy, arrogance, selfishness, or the wish to infuriate each other in the name of getting back for something that upset us. There will be no room, because there’s already too much good fruit growing around us.

Growing up in Oregon, my family had a backyard garden where we grew and attempted to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables.

While the vegetables tended to do pretty well, most of our ventures into trying to grow fruit were not successful. Except for one, and that was strawberries.

And those strawberries, while they were mostly tiny, were abundant and delicious. They were one of our few crops that we kept year after year - even on the years we didn’t plant new strawberry plants, somehow, they still managed to show up. Eventually we just gave up on trying to keep strawberries out of our garden and just accepted that they were going to be there every summer. Even once my dad turned over the garden and decided not to plant it the following year, somehow, strawberry plants still poked their way up through the dirt as soon as summer rolled around.

And in some ways the fruits of the Spirit can be just like this. While we need to cultivate them and work to grow them in our lives and in our communities, we can also find them springing up from soil we thought was impossible for them to grow in. Growing up from seeds scattered long before we even stepped foot into the dirt.

So this summer we will be looking at stories in the Old Testament where we see the fruits of the Spirit growing in ways and places that seem so unlikely for them to flourish. Because even though we celebrate the Spirit coming to earth after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, the truth is the Spirit was already moving way before that point. We’ll be looking at how the fruits of the Spirit showed up in relationships and in communities and countries that were trapped in violence and conflict, that were facing impossible odds, and how they reached for love and joy and peace and so much more to make it through.

Because by searching out and cultivating the fruits of the Spirit, we will find that we are not led into the temptation to continue in ways that are easy, that continue to cause harm to ourselves and others. Instead the Spirit will deliver all of us from the subtle evil of living lives that are less than the full, good life that God wants every single person on this earth to have.