The Reverend Kirk T. Berlenbach

Proper 9, Year C

July 4, 2010

Once there was a Native American boy who was nearing manhood. As he prepared for his coming of age ceremony he became more and more troubled. He couldn’t sleep. He barely ate and he became more and more withdrawn. Finally his parents asked him what was the matter but the boy refused to say. In desperation they sent him to speak to the shaman. For a long time they sat in silence until finally the boy began to speak… “I feel as if there are two wolves living inside me and they are constantly fighting and I do not know how to stop them.”The shaman replied, "My son, the wolves inside you fight inside us all. The one wolf is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, depression, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The young man thought about it for a while and then asked, “But which wolf will win?’ The shaman looked at him and said, “Whichever one you feed more."

It is exactly this sort of internal struggle that Paul lays out in today’s reading from Galatians. He makes it clear that as we, like the Native American boy, must also learn how to cope with the battle that rages in our own hearts. The conflict between our capacity for sin and our desire to do good is not only real, it never ends. We must constantly choose which side we will feed… the Flesh or the Spirit. Before we continue I want to revisit last week’s sermon in order to clarify what Paul means when he uses the term “the flesh.” It is not the body or our physical desires. No, for Paul the flesh is the distortion and perversion of our bodily appetites. It is what occurs when we allow food or sex or any other aspect of our material existence to become an idol and so to usurp the supremacy that is reserved for G-D alone.

Now that we’ve clarified the meaning of Paul’s language, we need to consider just how significant his statement truly is. We already know, from firsthand experience, what it means to wrestle within our hearts between our impulse to do evil and our desire to do good. What is not as clear is the magnitude and consequences of our choices. Paul tells us that if we put our energy and effort into indulging our sinful desires and our selfish wants then we will reap the evil that comes from it. But, if we concentrate on the spirit… on serving others and on drawing closer to G-D then we will grow spiritually as a result. In other words, whichever one we feed the more will win out.

Unfortunately this battle is never truly over. The unpleasant truth is that we must constantly choose between the flesh and the spirit…. We must always face the struggle between good and evil. If we go back to the wolf analogy then we never reach the point where the one wolf is completely dead- no matter how consistently or conscientiously we might work to feed only the one, the other is always there, waiting, lurking. While this offers hope to even the most irredeemable sinner, it also serves as an unpleasant reminder for those of us who strive to lead godly lives. When it comes to our goal of living righteous lives our work is never done. It all comes down to our basic decisions- ultimately whether we lead good or evil lives comes down not to some momentous conversion but to the cumulative effect of thousands of little decisions.

That perhaps is the hardest thing to accept… We have all faced times where we just want the conflict to be over, where what we truly desire is to be able to rest, to stop fighting and to be able to end the struggle and win a decisive victory in the battle against the wolf in our souls that Paul calls the “flesh.”

How many times have you wished that our battle against our selfishness and greed and ego might all be ended by a single choice… by one monumental victory? might be decided once and for all by a single powerful experience… be it our baptism or confirmation or being born again at an altar call. Unfortunately for us, it just doesn’t work like that. Once we find such a victory or have such a powerful experience, it is natural for us to then let our guard down, to stop trying so hard. We can become lax and when we do the results are always the same, we slip.

So long as we live, we must struggle to overcome the evil that would claim our very selves and souls. We may not be able to win decisively but we can at least work to do better… to make sure we are doing our best to feed the good wolf and starve the evil one. The key to making this work is momentum. It is like riding a bike up an endless hill… something most of us who live around here have seen or perhaps even attempted. In order to do the good we want to do we must work against sin and evil which, like gravity, constantly tries to pull us back down. If we want to keep moving forward we must build up and maintain momentum. The more we overcome our selfishness and the more we act to serve others and focus our minds on G-D, the more we build up speed and climbing that hill gets just a little easier. But the moment we slip… the moment we give into pride or wrath we lose that momentum and if we lose enough of it we can event start to slip back down. And the longer we sin, the further we slide. Eventually we stop ourselves and try to start climbing the hill again but as anyone who has ridden a bike around here can tell you, the hardest part is getting going again… the effort it takes to start moving ourselves back up that hill is enormous and the more ground we lose the more tempting it is to give up altogether.

It is the same for the spiritual battle within us. The more we feed the evil wolf, it grows stronger and the more demanding and urgent it becomes. As a result, the good wolf finds it that much harder reasserting itself in the struggle for supremacy. If we truly wish to grow spiritually… if we wish to keep on drawing closer to G-D then we must accept that every choice that we make has an impact. Nothing is neutral, nothing is without consequence. Each act, no matter how small or inconsequential it might seem, winds up feeding one side or the other.

Anyone who has battled addiction or compulsive behavior knows exactly what I am talking about. Even the smallest slip can undo months or even years of effort. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that it’s only a little indulgence and so it doesn’t matter… sneaking a smoke or a drink when we’re trying to quit, letting ourselves meander over to websites that we know we should avoid, making a phone call or starting an email chat with someone we know we should be avoiding… we know where these things lead and yet we do them anyway. And every time we do it feeds the evil wolf, making it that much stronger and thus that much harder to overcome. It is so much easier never to start down that path than it is to try and turn ourselves around once we are caught up in it….

Of course even though we know better we all still fail. We all make choice that undermine our spiritual progress and cause us to slide backwards. The key is to not let one mistake, not matter how significant it may seem, to cause us to give up on our quest to climb the hill and draw closer to G-D. For just as one good decision cannot secure our success, one bad decision, or even many bad decisions do not have to doom us. We can always choose, always act to stop feeding the selfishness and evil inside us and instead to start feeding the good and noble. And each time we decide to exercise some self-control rather than indulge, each time we choose to give rather than take, each time we place another’s needs ahead of our own, each time we forgive instead of holding a grudge we strengthen the good in us and draw a little closer to G-D.

As you leave here and to your holiday celebrations you will face frustration, temptation and anxiety. You will deal with traffic jams, crowds, picnics, relatives and sweltering heat. And you will have to make choices. But choosing where you will spend the holiday or what you will say to the people you see there, beyond deciding what you will eat or how much you will drink, you will also have to choose which wolf in you will feed. By themselves, they may not seem like all that much, but collectively they decide the quality of your life and the fate of your soul.