This week we have been working through and meditating on the Fruits of the Spirit set out in the Letter to the Galatians. And we have arrived finally, at this great celebration of Easter, to consider the last of these fruits, self-control. And, frankly, that feels like a rather disappointing place to arrive at. Self-control feels very, well… Lenten. Shouldn’t we be throwing off the self-denial of the last forty days to celebrate the Easter feast?!  

Well, I don’t think the self-control that’s talked about here is quite as dreary and austere as it might sound. Consider the opposite, indeed we see the opposite everywhere: lives that are out of control. Lives out of control through addiction and unhealthy dependency. Lives out of control through submission to technology and the duplicitous manipulation of corporate and political interests. Lives out of control through debt and economic pressures. 

Christian life doesn’t inoculate you from these things. Christians suffer from addictions and distractions and the pressures of the world just like everyone else. The Gospel isn’t a uniquely effective wellbeing strategy. 

But the framework of Christian life, which includes both discipline and liberation (or even discipline as liberation), gives us a rhythm and a story that provides us with the crucial aspect of self-control, which is knowing who we are and what we are for. 

The world in which we live is full of confused and confusing information. Most of it is superficial and inconsequential, playing on our basic desires for stimulation and connection, but offering very little in the way of meaning and truth. Think of how our culture understands Easter itself. The shops are full of chocolate eggs, and bunnies, and pastel-coloured spring-themed merchandise designed to evoke warm feelings, consumer contentment and vague culturally resonant ideas of new life. But none of it really means anything at all. 

You, however, who are presenting yourselves for baptism and confirmation tonight, you who have come to church to worship Almighty God, have heard the truth through the idle tales of the world. You have heard and believe that Jesus has risen from the dead. 

That’s what the women going to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week heard from the two men in dazzling clothes. Then they remembered that they had heard it from Jesus himself who told them that he would be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. The male disciples then hear it from the women, but they are slow to recognise that it is not just more of the world’s idle tales. They get there in the end. 

This revelation of the truth is for all these people a turning point. From the confusion and chaos they have been living since Jesus’ arrest, in some ways the confusion and chaos that has characterised their journey with Jesus, they start to take control. They take control of their fear, coming out from hiding to proclaim this truth through the world. They take control of their community, expanding it with men and women, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free. They take control of their future, knowing that whatever persecution they suffer, their future is for God’s glory. 

And what is this truth? What has God done in raising Jesus from the dead? He has brought control to the world. It is not out-of-control to the meaningless forces of death and nihilism. It is not out of control amid the cacophony of idle tales that convey no meaning. It is under the control of God, for God’s loving purposes of glory, delight and life in all its fullness. 

If you are a gardener, the task of this Easter bank holiday may well be getting the garden under control. Another way of thinking about control is the imposition of order over chaos. That’s what spring gardening is about: putting your borders and your trellising and your soil composition in good order to allow for a fruitful growth season. This is what God has been doing since the beginning of creation, as we heard in the readings at the start of this service, imposing order on the chaos such that by Genesis 2 his creation is described as a garden. And so it’s not for nothing that the resurrection of Jesus takes place in a garden. It is where order is restored, where God (to use a somewhat tainted phrase) takes back control. 

Self-control, as a fruit of the Spirit, is about receiving this gift of meaning and hope and purpose that flows from the truth of the Gospel, and allowing it to shape our lives through prayer and worship, study of the Bible and participation in the life of the Christian community. It is about allowing God to impose some order on our lives, not to oppress and restrict us, but in order that our lives might bear the fruit of the Spirit and be a blessing to the world. So as we renew our baptismal vows tonight, own them in confirmation, or joyfully make them for the first time, let us rejoice that, despite the chaos we see around us, the world is not out of control. And that control is a gift to us, the life-giving truth in which we share.