The Memorial of Saint Callistus I
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the deeds of the flesh are obvious, which are: adultery, sexual immorality, uncleanness, lustfulness, Idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, divisions, heresies, Envy, murders, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these; of which I forewarn you, even as I also forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit God's Kingdom.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, Gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts.
If we live by the Spirit, let's also walk by the Spirit.
Blessed is the man who doesn't walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand on the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers; But his delight is in the Lord's law. On his law he meditates day and night.
He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, That produces its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper.
The wicked are not so, But are like the chaff which the wind drives away.
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, But the way of the wicked shall perish.
But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, but you bypass justice and God's love. You ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone. Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seats in the synagogues and the greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like hidden graves, and the men who walk over them don't know it."
One of the lawyers answered him, "Teacher, in saying this you insult us also."
He said, "Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens that are difficult to carry, and you yourselves won't even lift one finger to help carry those burdens.
We begin with a saint who knew something about the weight of leadership. Callistus I was a third-century pope who had lived a complicated life — including time as a slave and a prisoner — before rising to lead the Church in Rome, where he was eventually martyred for the faith. His story reminds us that holiness is rarely a straight line.
And that complexity fits perfectly with what Paul lays out for us in Galatians. Notice how he doesn't just list the fruits of the Spirit as a nice aspirational checklist — he frames them against the very real pull of the flesh. Jealousy, rivalry, division, anger. These aren't exotic sins. These are Tuesday morning sins. The kind that show up in our inboxes, at our family dinner tables, in the quiet resentment we carry toward someone who got something we wanted.
The tension here is between two kinds of living that are available to us every single day. One is reactive, ego-driven, anxious. The other is rooted — like that tree in the psalm, planted near water, drawing life from something deeper than circumstances.
Then Jesus turns to the Pharisees, and what he's really naming is the gap between performance and transformation. They're meticulous about the small things and blind to the large ones. Consider how easy it is to do the same — to keep the visible obligations while quietly bypassing the harder work of justice, mercy, and genuine love for the person in front of us.
What Callistus, Paul, and Luke all point toward is the same invitation: let the Spirit do the work that willpower alone cannot. Not rules from the outside in, but fruit growing from the inside out.
Here are a few questions to sit with today:
Where might the appearance of faithfulness be substituting for its substance in our lives right now? What fruit has the Spirit been quietly growing in us that we haven't yet noticed or named? And what burden are we carrying — or refusing to help carry — that deserves a second look?