Walking in the Spirit,

Part 3

Easter 6                                          14 May 2007

As we talk about the way of life that characterizes the Christian, it is good to remember that what is distinctively Christian is not our ethics.  Jesus did not come to teach a new set of moral principles.  Almost every point in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, can be footnoted to an Old Testament passage.  The newness that Jesus brought is a changed relationship with God.  It is a new way of life, because it is a new experience of life, a life that doesn’t live by law any longer.  We no longer come to God from the outside, as it were.  We are accepted into the life of God and made his own sons and daughters in Jesus by the power of the Spirit.  The divine Mercy creates the possibility for a Spirit-motivated and -directed way of life which really moves beyond ethics and law. Those who are led by the Spirit don’t need a law any more than Jesus did—because they manifest the love of God freely. 

Still, the Christian way of life is a human life, in alignment with the best that other great human teachers have taught.  But once our human nature is brought into intimacy with the divine, there is a new consistency and direction to the moral life that comes from the fact that we are now children of our Father in heaven, with the ultimate criterion by which to judge the inevitable inconsistencies in all human ethical systems: the example and teaching of our Lord.  Laws and rules can still be of use, especially until we are fully formed by the Spirit, as ways of helping us to clarify where the Spirit is leading.  But the Christian no longer attempts to justify himself by legal correctness—righteousness according to the law.  That is the way of death—it kills the spirit in us and in those we relate to.  So, if we live by the Spirit, then let us walk by the Spirit.  This is the third sermon in my series on how to walk in the Spirit—we may not have a law but we do have a pattern, a general frame of reference. 

The first Sunday we spoke about the Seven-Fold Gift of the Spirit; last week we talked about the Theological Virtues.  Our subject matter this morning is the Cardinal Virtues.  Christians consider them part of our gracious baptismal inheritance.  But that does not mean that Christians invented them.  They are common to many cultures and civilizations.  The Cardinal Virtues answer to the steady observation down through the centuries of what constitutes human life lived at its best.  All of the admirable qualities of human character spring from these four cardinal virtues.  The Christian angle on them is not to make them other than they are but to direct them toward their true source: God the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit.  These virtues answer, then, to natural capacities we have because we are human, which are elevated by grace and directed towards obedience to the God who makes himself known in Jesus. They are the solid hinges upon which Christian character hangs.

There are four of them: justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence—and we begin with justice.  It is getting increasingly difficult for our society to talk about justice—what constitutes a just law, for example.  That is because, for many people in our world, there is no longer anything really and objectively true except their own feelings at the moment.  If nothing is true, then nothing can be really right.  Justice is the will to do right, to see that right is done, to give others their rights.  If nothing is really right, then we are only talking about power and the most powerful will make the laws to impose their will on those with less money and power than they have.  They speak of justice only to fool the unwary.  That this is the way things often work, I will not deny.  But I am not willing to accept it.  There is a justice which is based on the truth of things and is the love of right.  It is possible to be just and do justly. 

Justice has to do with rendering what is due, what is owed as a matter of principle.  For example, if we are creatures of God, then we owe him reverence and obedience.  This is not a gift we offer him, a gesture we make; it is a duty.  We owe our fellow creatures the things we promise them.  For example, if we are married we promised loyalty to our spouse.  She or he has a right to expect it.  It is simple justice.  Towards our fellow men and women in general we owe the respect due to those who are made in God’s image as we are.  This is not generosity or love on our part; it is an obligation.  Love and mercy do more than justice, but they cannot do less.  You may not even understand what loving someone requires if first you do not understand what justice requires.  One of our baptismal vows even makes the securing of justice a part of our covenant with God: “will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” 

What does it mean to be a just person?  It means to be a person who has an habitual will to see justice done in all his or her personal and communal relationships.  It means having a constant attention towards what other people have a right to expect from us and what we have an obligation to give them.  People have a right to be treated as ends in themselves and not as means to an end.  That translates into respecting the dignity of people, as our baptismal vows put it. 

And because we are all related to each other in a common human life, in communities, which are fundamental parts of our personal identity, we owe each other our individual contribution to the common life.  We can argue about how our community obligations are formulated and met; we can debate about how best to express those obligations in laws; we can struggle with balancing off the requirements of the common good and individual freedoms, but there is no denying that we have these obligations and that they are a matter of justice. 

It is also a matter of justice to treat people outside our own community with respect.  As our world becomes more inter-related and mutually implicated, economically especially, it can no longer be thought that what we do here has no effect on other people we may not even know.  Where do the food and the clothes and the other consumer goods we buy come from?  Under what conditions are they made so that we can buy them as cheaply as possible?  Is it just to be a price-conscious consumer and judge goods solely by what they cost us and not by what the cost may be for the people who produce them? 

If justice is the great virtue by which I regulate my conduct towards others and the society in which I live, Temperance is the virtue by which I order my own internal life, the way I control my passions and impulses and appetites.  It is the right governance of myself as I consider the use of created things and the pleasures that result from their use.  For anyone, temperance is self-mastery, self-control; but for the Christian its object is above all to render oneself open to the Spirit’s control.  A temperate or a moderate person regulates his or her appetites and desires in a reasonable way.  It is not always easy to discover what is most reasonable, but we are all created in the image of the divine Spirit of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, who makes the very Reason or Word of God actual in the hearts of those who belong to Him.  When Christians are truly led by the Spirit, they are of all people the most reasonable—though others may not see it!  Usually, temperance tries to maintain a balance between too little and too much.  Its job is to keep us away from excess.  When a desire or appetite becomes unbalanced or intemperate—that is, disordered or uncontrolled—the effects are a blunting of the moral sense, a loss of prudence and proportion, and inconstancy.

Most discussions of temperance talk mostly about sex and food and drink, but temperance is also an economic issue:  our desires for success, honour, achievement, mastery, power, and wealth, which are mostly matters of money in our society.  The temperate man or woman not only regulates his or her appetites for food and drink and sex, but also those desires to get ahead, to be well thought of, to have enough money, to be in control. 

So what is reasonable when it comes to sex and food and drink and success?  The old hard-liners used to say that anything more than you strictly need is wrong.  That seems pretty grim to me.  Take eating: we don’t really need new recipes and varied menus, but they certainly contribute to a sense of well-being.  There is such a thing as a rich life, and that is not only found in the life of the mind, even though that is the highest.  I think that intemperance has to do with harmfulness, and not just harm brought on the individual who overindulges, but to the community around him.  Especially on a day like today—Rogation Sunday—it seems obvious that temperance is an ecological virtue.  In my buying and consuming, what kind of impact am I having on the world in which I live?  Is it excessive?  Are my desires for things out of control?  Is my life-style reasonable, especially considering how people in many of the world’s poorest nations live?  Ecological questions are questions of justice, but also of temperance—since our consuming is constantly driven by appeals to our desires for more.

Fortitude is the third cardinal virtue and it refers to strength of character, the ability to restrain both fear and confidence within the bounds of reason.  In one sense, fortitude is involved in every virtue, because without strength to persevere and endure, no virtue can be developed.  But it is a virtue in its own right—the capacity to regulate our response to our environment.  Whenever we are presented with a threat, as we know, our body sets us up for “flight or fight.”  Fortitude is the mastery of this impulse in the service of virtue.  If we run into a situation in which we are challenged to back off from doing right because of some disability we may suffer, fortitude helps us master our fear and continue on the course of right.  It also restrains our tendency to lash out at things that stand in our way.  It is courage on the one hand and patience on the other. It is the ability to turn the other cheek when that is called for and resistance to evil when that is called for. 

The two opposites of fortitude are cowardice and recklessness.  Fortitude keeps us brave in the pursuit of good, but not reckless or careless in the chances we take.  If those are its opposite, there are two allied virtues which can help to develop fortitude: magnanimity and patience.  To be magnanimous is to have a large soul, which means a resolute aspiration after the best things, the determination to be content with nothing other than the highest.  The great-souled person not only is charitable and kind but pushes himself to enjoy and delight in the best things and encourages the best in others.  The highest thing of all, of course, is that deep openness to the Spirit.  We all know what patience is and that if we ask God to help us achieve it he will give us many opportunities to practice it. 

The final virtue of the four is Prudence.  Sometimes people react negatively against this word because it seems so compromising and sneaky.  There is a worldly prudence which is totally self-absorbed and merely clever, but the cardinal virtue ties the whole virtuous life together by a right judgement.  It is no good being courageous if you don’t know what a situation calls for.  Justice requires the application of broad principles to specific circumstances.  These things require prudence—the practical wisdom to tell what is called for.  The virtue of prudence depends on a knowledge of the good life.  In this it is much like conscience.  Your conscience tells you to do the best you know.  Prudence shows you how to do the best you know.  For the Christian prudence is directed towards obeying God’s will, which is the best we know.  The prudent person actually can answer the question of “What would Jesus do?” in a particular situation.  He or she has trained the moral sense to know what is called for in any situation.  As with all the virtues, we have the capacity for prudence, but will never be prudent without careful exercise.

The exercises which lead to prudence are not only regularity in prayer, meditation, and the other disciplines, however.  Prudence also depends upon life experience.  If we are determined to learn through our experience, if we are open to what more experienced people can teach us, if we can learn to rely upon the Spirit who dwells within us through everything we experience, and if we can be patient with others and with ourselves, we might end up with the practical wisdom of the prudent person.

So these are the four Cardinal Virtues, the normal shape of virtuous human life and the usual expression of the Christian’s character, which develop and give substance to the works of faith and hope and charity, about which we spoke last week.  Perhaps I should recall, in the midst of a sermon on the virtuous life, that we are saved by faith and not by works; we don’t earn God’s grace by our efforts.  But God gave us grace, that is, he bestowed on us his mercy, he brought us into communion with himself, so that we could become the creatures he created us to be.  He created us for the kind of fellowship with himself that depends on our reflecting his own character.  For if we are children of God, then we must be like him; if we are his children we will want to be like him.  To be like God is the promise written in the constitution of our nature, a promise fulfilled by grace, covenanted in our baptism, and set forth in a virtuous life—sanctification in the Holy Spirit.

Let us pray.  Almighty God, who sent your Holy Spirit to be the life and light of your Church; open our hearts to the riches of your grace, that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in love and joy and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.