Self Control and Freedom
By Charles Rush
March 19, 2000
Galatians 5: 8-13
st week, I preached on humility. The next morning, I was
standing in the driveway quite early, perusing the Wall Street Journal,
when, to my delighted surprise, I noticed that they published my
'Letter to the Editor' on John McCain and Pat Robertson. As soon as I
got to work, I e-mailed everyone I have ever met and told them to read
the Journal for that day.
Chris Rupkey e-mail's me back: "Chuck, I read your letter, which
broke up a day of sliding equities. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
That must have been difficult for you to do the day after preaching on
humility."
This week, I'm preaching on temperance. Just before Church someone
says, "The toga party still on for tomorrow?" Again, I do not claim
personal knowledge of this virtue but I've been told about it.
In the comic strip "The Wizard of Id" the Minister is waxing
eloquent on the great virtue of moderation. He exclaims, "Moderation
is the key to living. Follow the golden eat. Eat moderation, drink
moderation, sleep moderation, work moderation, play moderation, live
moderation." On and on he went. After the service the King greets him
at the back of the church, shakes his hand and says, "I think you
overdid it."
Temperance has a bad name. When you think of temperance, you think
of a nice elderly lady like Aunt Bea from Mayberry or Minnie Pearl,
driving down the road, the price tag still on her hat, with a MADD
bumper-sticker on her car, and a long train of cars behind her.
Temperance might have to be tolerated out of politeness but it is
nothing to long for night and day.
Certainly as a child this is what we were taught to assume about
the spiritual life. It was not only temperate, it was abstemious. I
had a Sunday school teacher that summed up the moral teaching of the
Bible this way. "Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew. Don't
go with girls who do." The problem was these were the only girls we
wanted to be with. It produced a conflict for us boys in the South.
We knew we didn't want to go to Hell but if Heaven was only populated
with straight-laced teetotalers, who don't dance, we weren't sure we
wanted to go there either.
First of all, let's get rid of the word temperance. It is a bad
translation. Let's call it self-control. When the Greeks wanted to
illustrate the virtue of self-control, they built a statue of a man or
a woman in perfect proportion. Think of the statue of the spear
thrower that everyone sees slides of in Art History 101 in college. In
fact, all around Athens you could find statues of men in perfect
athletic proportion- arms strong but not weighty, legs powerful but
graceful, fat nowhere, tone everywhere, cheeks high with gaze upward,
the grip of the hands sure and supple- almost gentle and artistic. All
parts were properly balanced and there was a harmony to the piece. It
was this kind of balance that the Greeks thought of as self-controlled.
Self-control is the proper ordering and balancing of the individual,
even as Justice is a proper ordering and balancing of powers in
society.
Aristotle used to say that the self-controlled man was neither
cowardly, nor foolhardy but courageous. He was neither gluttonous, nor
fasting, but healthy in diet. She is neither ignorant, nor a bookworm,
but learned. He is neither a drunkard, nor abstemious, but social.
This is what self-control looks like.
Plato said that self-control was the rational ordering of the soul
that kept it free. Our animal urges, what we might call our natural
vitalities, must be governed, he said, or else they will produce "a
feverish state in the soul, a city of pigs" which knows no limits. The
ungoverned soul, he said is like the State being ruled by cooks,
bakers, tap dancers, and flute-girls."(... Something is lost in the
translation there, isn't it? You always read about these flute girls
in the ancient world in this context. They must have been fun). Many
of us know friends and family members who have vividly illustrated this
chaos in their personal lives- I just think of the combination of
cocaine and alcohol that makes a wreck of the personal life of even the
most successful, driven, and organized person.
Aristotle and Plato put a lot of stock in the importance of forming
good habits for the development of self-control. They thought that
self-control was largely imprinted upon us before we were old enough to
know better. Their neighbors in Sparta made child development a
rigorous formation of character and paid attention to minute details.
One thing is clear is that a childhood that is surrounded by chaos, a
lack of boundaries or controls, a childhood led by parents that lack
self-control, is doomed. This we have seen time and time again.
Children have a difficult time making the transition from immediate
gratification to delayed gratification. Sigmund Freud called it the
transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle.
Delayed gratification has to be learned by good habits and it is not
easy because children are born with a strong desire for immediate
gratification.
When one of my kids was one or maybe two, they loved ice cream, really
loved ice cream. So at their birthday party, we served cake and
chocolate ice cream. I love that age because they just dig in with
such joyful relish, frosting smeared all over the face and hair. About
mid-way through the feast, this child burst into tears. Turns out, she
filled her mouth with so much ice cream that it hurt from the cold.
But she wouldn't open her mouth to spit out the ice cream either.
Kids are like that. They want immediate gratification. Parents
have to structure that for them don't they? I suppose every parent in
Summit has to sneak in their child's room the day after Halloween and
empty half to three-quarters of
the bag after they have gone to sleep. It would make them ill.
The vast majority of kids don't even notice it gone because candy is
fun for a day or two and then they need another entertainment.
Aristotle used to say that the goal for the development of
self-control was to feel the right amount of pleasure at the right
things to the right degree. That is the challenge of raising children
with good habits. The problems arise when they desire too much
pleasure, pleasure at the wrong things, or when they have no fear of
pain.
Too much pleasure is obvious enough. Pleasure at the wrong things
I fear is going to be a bigger challenge for us in the coming
generation. We are blessed with many choices in our world and that
will also be our challenge. We now have a world of so many options
that we will have to be more intentional about the reality and
self-controls we construct for ourselves. We will have to choose the
world that we want to inhabit.
I mention only new challenge for the coming generation: Pornography.
Porno is widely accessible and accessibility is growing. For my
generation, pornography could be found but you had to work at it and
the vast majority of pornography was Playboy magazine, not much more
lurid than the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue. The Internet has
rapidly changed not only the availability of porno; there is also truly
weird stuff that is presented routinely. At present, it accounts for
some huge percentage of Internet sales (I believe around half), not to
mention how much is out there you don't have to pay for.
Add to this a general social climate that sensationalizes sexuality.
Sexual scenes are simply regular fare for nearly every movie; casual
sexual encounters the regular subject of sitcoms. And then there is
the Howard Stern phenomenon, who figured out that bored commuters will
tune in to soft porn on the radio. In the process, he is living proof
that it is possible to grow older every year and stay sexually fixated
in a thirteen-year-old mindset. Then there is the talk show
phenomenon. Jerry Springer "I'm sleeping with my boyfriends Father"
that is shown, conveniently right after school is out. The line
between sexuality, eroticism, and pornography will continue to blur.
Avoiding the rocks in the midst of this Whitewater will be shoot our
kids all have to paddle. My worry is that my generation has made is
harder for your generation to connect sexuality with intimacy, we have
made it harder for you to find sexual expression in the service of
love.
In every generation, the challenge to connect the heart with the
hips is as profound as it is important. It is profound because, as the
Bible teaches us, sex needs to be in support of, and an expression of,
our love. Sexuality is fundamentally spiritual... and also playful,
fun, also a comfort in the midst of anxiety, and a lot of other things.
I want to remind you that having a healthy sexual ethic is important
because it is one of the pillars for solid families.
Our young teenagers have an increasingly difficult challenge. It
is hard enough to learn how to become intimate and loving, left to
ourselves. Now we introduce the sheer titillation of pornography, the
fact that it is anonymous, the fact that it presents sexuality without
the problems relationship, and instantly gratifying. It is easy to
have pleasure associated with pornography in an unhealthy way, at this
vulnerable, impressionable time of life. It is a time of life when you
lack confidence in yourself to begin with, and intimacy is a challenge
at that age even if you are confident. How tempting it is to box off
sexuality over in one psychic quadrant (this is what I do over here for
my own personal pleasure) and not have it connected to the quest for
intimacy, relationship, love.
My prediction, and I hope I'm wrong, is that pornography will
become for the rising generation what Turkish delight was for Edmund in
The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe
.
The Witch used to give young Edmund his favorite candy, Turkish
delight. But the more he ate, the more he wanted, until it became a
craving, then a compulsion. But there is far more at stake with our
sexual integration than there is with candy and you can be weaned from
candy but pornographic images get imprinted in a deep way that are very
hard to write over, at some point impossible to write over or erase.
Pornography certainly has the potential to be compulsive, not only in
terms of frequency, but also in the sense that purience requires
kinkier and kinkier images to get the same effect, so it also tends to
pull you in deeper and deeper, changing your character as you evolve
with it. It is volatile. It is dangerous. And our culture is
increasingly acting as though it is innocuous.
People asked Plato and Aristotle, why people choose pleasurable
things that are bad for them. Why is it that they continue down a path
they know is going to hurt them, even if it is momentarily
intoxicating? They both had the same answer. They said it was because
people didn't understand the nature of the Good Life or we might say
the Life Well Lived. This is why philosophy is so important. It gives
you a chance to reflect on the well-ordered life and then to use reason
to properly develop the right habits to attain the right goals.
The answer is inadequate. Our problem is not simply a rational
one. It is not simply a case of not knowing. Likewise, while
knowledge and education have their place, they are not simply enough on
their own right. Christians understand that the problem is spiritual.
It involves not only the rational faculty but also the will, our
character.
Plato said that when we are not self-controlled, our life is like a
pigsty. We are out of control. The Bible has a little different
answer. You may be interested to know that the word for demons in the
bible, daemonia, means 'to be controlled by another'. That is not a
bad description of compulsions. In the ancient world, people assumed
that there was an individual spirit that attended every temptation to
indulge in pleasure, so they tended to see demonic possession in a lot
of forms. We no longer believe that but their insight was right about
the transcendent spiritual dimension to cravings that become
compulsions. At some point in that migration, they begin to control
us. At some point, our character becomes misshaped and misaligned in
order adjust itself to increasing demands our compulsions put on us.
We are no longer free, but are driven by our compulsions. The Biblical
insight is right that these forces become bigger than us, which is why
we need to be intentional about them. Proverbs 25:2
Jesus understood the need for a positive orientation towards God.
He said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God... and all these things
will be added unto you" (Mt. 6:33). He also said, "no one can serve
two masters" (Mt. 6:24). What does that mean for sexuality?
Negatively, it means you don't follow your sexual drives down every
path. Positively, it means that you keep focused on love, on intimate,
vulnerable relationships of love. First God, second love of others,
third sex in pursuit of love. In our passage this morning St. Paul
says that the Spirit of God produces wholeness, and that this Spirit
brings self-control. In our passage, Paul says that when we are
walking in the Spirit, we have a well-ordered soul, an ego oriented
towards wholeness, a person organized for love. Evidences of this
grace are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. Spiritually speaking that is what it
means to be in good shape. Spiritually speaking, that is good
proportio
He has this curious phrase that follows this list. He says,
"Against such, there is no law" (v. 23). He means that these
qualities of character can't really be enforced by a set of rules. You
can't make somebody be kind. They either want to do that themselves or
they don't. They open themselves to becoming kind or they don't.
These are the higher spiritual characteristics for which we live.
No one would ever outlaw gentleness. You want to encourage that
wherever you can, whenever you can. The bible says that in a very
tangible way, we can't even exactly generate these virtues. In some
ways, they have to be bestowed upon us by God. They come to us as a
grace.
On the other hand, a large part of what it means to be a church, is
to come together and practice these things together: Grace, love,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness- These can't be done alone.
You have to have community to develop these virtues. Christianity is
relational. The church is a place where we come to form relationships
with other people in the hope that we might become authentically
human. We encourage one another to live out of our more noble selves
in the awareness that there are powerful forces all around us in our
world, which would make us inauthentic to ourselves and manipulative of
one another. We heal one another from the mangled images that we have
absorbed and grown into in the past and we help one another to start
over in grace and to become stronger.
Self-control is like that as well. It is something that we
practice individually. But it is not something we develop in
isolation. We actually become properly attuned by opening ourselves to
other people that are trying to become properly attuned. We become
part of a community whose ethic encourages self-control, not in some
legalistic way. That is just what we want to be when we are with these
people. It is a grace. It is a grace to be found by God. It is a
grace to be loved by others. Sexual expression in that context is a
grace too. Fragile, beautiful, gracious. And that is what we hope for
you. Keep focused on the most important things.
Amen.
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