“THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT”

Mothers’ Day this year was significant for those who remembered our mothers now long gone. It is amazing to hear the stories from so many who felt their mothers still with them in spirit guiding or just being there for them in times of uncertainty and challenge.

Looking back, I would say, no matter what our age, we remain influenced and inspired by inner voices from our past representing the people now no longer with us. In an uncertain world with uncertain values and goals, we depend upon those influences to help see us do. It may be simplistic to discuss, “What would Jesus do?” when there are factors in what confronts us completely unknown in his time. Churches have held many councils to try to work out how best to follow the way of Jesus for the time.

That period between Easter Day and Pentecost is the time when the disciples of Jesus Christ accept that Good Friday was not the end of the story but that Jesus remains unconquered despite the worst that could be hurled at him and still can be hurled at his disciples, past and present.

First is the promise that although Jesus has left us in the flesh, we need not feel abandoned. The disciples had felt this on that Good Friday. We feel it today when a chapter in our lives slams shut when a loved one is taken forever from our midst. Where do we go from here? Time and time again, we have heard Jesus’ words about leaving his spirit, coming from God, with whoever loved and followed him, then and now, as a “paraclete”, one who comes alongside and even stays within. As a child remarked when taking Holy Communion, “We take a little piece of Jesus home within us.”

Jesus ascends to the Father, leaving his guarantee to us as his church. How do we know his spirit is alive and well within and among us? Paul wrote about this to the Galatians in chapter five. I won’t quote the verses leading up to verse 22 because I don’t have your mother’s permission to expose you to the bad things that were, and probably still are, got up to in a dreadful world. But these words in verses 22 and 23 have become for me the yardstick by which I measure Christ in me (and see where I have a long way to go).

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.”

These words returned to me recently when some of us farewelled a quiet and much beloved friend. I had found him the gentlest of men, embodying the fruit of the spirit left behind by Jesus Christ for us to live and show the world that such values are not only possible but so necessary if anything in this world is ever going to work. Our friend has gone but we can take on board the fruit of the Spirit now passed on to us to flourish in us.

This is why Jesus breathed on his first disciples to receive his spirit and those who lived this life of discipleship have left this spirit so that we who are still left may continue to let the fruit of the Spirit continue to flourish (even if I have mixed my metaphors again).

Now through science, we have access to know all about the molecules that came from the Big Bang, recycled through us, then on to eternity. But science steps back when it comes to defining how the fruits of the spirit came about. We know the fruits of the spirit are the ongoing creation by God through Jesus Christ to us and beyond.

When we turn on the news only to hear a further act of evil destroying so many innocent lives in Manchester and elsewhere, it so so easy to give into the fear and hate whipped up by populist demagogues. But Jesus never gave into evil as we well know. Paul describes his nature. The fruits of the spirit are the results of who Jesus was and what he did and these are what have now been passed to us to cherish and in our own time pass onto those who come after us.

Without the fruits of the spirit, nothing ever works. And this world we go out to and live in needs them right now. Go in the Spirit because the Spirit is among and within you!