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Proper 4C
29 May 2016
Galatians 1:1-12, Luke 7:1-10 (passim)
To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. . .
Now let’s get right to the point.
During the next several Sundays, we will hear serial readings from the Letter to the Galatians. It is unique among Paul’s letters in that it lacks the usual pleasantries that often preface his other letters. Those typical opening words celebrate the relationship in Christ that Paul and his readers share, and they commend the virtue or virtues of his readers that make the Good News of Christ shine especially brightly from them into the world. Galatians is a different sort of letter. There is a sense of urgency to it. “Dear Galatians, Greetings to you in the Lord. I have something that I need to tell you, so let’s get right to it.”
These are important people to Paul. He first met them when he came to their province, in the center of modern day Turkey, during his first missionary journey. They were among the first to hear and receive Paul’s message about the Good News of Jesus, and so he cares deeply that they will continue to grow in the grace of Christ.
The occasion for this letter is that Paul received news that after he moved on to other places in his missionary endeavors, he was followed by another group of missionaries who told this fledgling community of mostly Jewish-Christians, that Paul’s message of welcome and full inclusion of Gentiles was wrong.
The majority of the earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish or Gentile converts who had embraced Judaism as the path to God. Paul’s teaching that God’s grace in Christ was available equally to all, regardless of whether one identifies as Jew or Gentile, was a challenge to the early Christian community.
Many of the followers of Jesus, himself a Jew, believed that following Jesus as Messiah was just a particular way of being Jewish, and that to separate following Jesus from the practices of Judaism would be to cut themselves off
from their heritage, values, sources of guidance, and everything that gave them a sense of identity.
Paul, though was adamant in his contention, so much so that the opening of his letter to the Galatians
is an appeal to his source of authority to expound the Gospel in the way that he does. “I’m an apostle, one who is sent and commissioned by Jesus for the work of mission. I wasn’t commissioned by any human authority, but directly by Christ himself.” You will remember the story in Acts Chapter 9 of Paul’s dramatic Damascus road conversion in the blinding encounter with the Risen Christ. Paul’s contention is that his apostleship
lies in that encounter with Christ, just as surely as the original apostles received theirs from the risen Christ before his ascension.
The message that Paul proclaimed was probably as much of a surprise to him as to anyone. Have you ever determined that something which seems to you objectionable will never be part of your life, and then been surprised when it did? When I was younger and involved in Scouting, I came to learn that there is not always
a feeling of goodwill from the volunteer Scout leaders toward the professional Scouters in the council office.
Since I spent a lot more time around the volunteers than the council staff, I fell in line with that low opinion,
to the point of saying, “I’ll never work for the Council.” So, what did I do for the five years between college and seminary? I worked for the council as a district Scout executive, where I learned that the work of the professional Scouters in the council office is no less important to the mission of Scouting than the work of the volunteer leaders.
A few years later, what I learned about Louisiana from a fellow seminarian who is a native of Louisiana, made me say in my prayers, “Lord, I’ll go wherever you want me to, but please, let’s not put Louisiana on the list.” And what happened? Nine years in Louisiana, and it is a place where we have great memories, dear friends, and a Baton Rouge born daughter who graduated yesterday from Central High School, and who can outdo anyone here
when it comes to a crawfish boil. Surprises like that are just part of what convinces me that God has a keen sense of humor.
That divine sense of humor comes into play in the life of Paul, who would never in his life have guessed that he would be concerned about the spiritual well-being of the Christians in Galatia. When we first meet Paul in scripture he is Saul, a devout Jew, fervent in his faith, so fervent that he studied and trained to become a Pharisee,
a lay scholar and teacher of the Law of Moses.
The word ‘pharisee’ means ‘separated one,’ and the Pharisees were seen as a separate, higher echelon group within the Jewish community. They were known to be scrupulous about maintaining ritual purity and also known for their disagreement with the priestly Sadducees about belief in resurrection. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, while the Sadducees did not, which made them “Sad-you-See.”
So, Paul was part of this separated group of Jewish scholars called the Pharisees. Not only that, he was highly put off by the small group of Jews who insisted that Jesus was the Messiah, that he had been raised from the dead,
and seated at the right hand of God in the heavens. He was highly concerned at the growth of this sect, and he volunteered to do what he could to bring it down. Saul was like a Jewish bounty hunter, going from place to place to arrest the followers of Jesus and bring them back to Jerusalem to stand trial for their lives. That was his purpose for being on the road to Damascus on that day that changed his life and transformed him from Saul the Persecutor of Jesus into Paul the Apostle of Jesus. I just have to think that sometimes, when Paul lay down at night and drifted off to sleep, he had to be wondering, “Who would have thunk it!”
If I could summarize my understanding of Paul’s gospel, it goes something like this. Jesus loves you. He is reaching out to you in love. He died on the cross to set you free from the power of sin, which is the force at the heart of how things work in these messed up times. He was raised from death into resurrection life and he offers that new life to all who believe, who give their hearts in love to him. Your ethnicity doesn’t matter, nor your gender, nor your status in society, nor who your people are, nor your politics. None of the ways that people are divided up
and put into little stereotypical cubby holes matters. What matters is that Jesus loves you with all the love, and then some, that you can possibly imagine. He loves the person next to you the same way, and the next one, too,
and that extends all the way out to every single person on the planet, even that Roman centurion who sought him out that day in Capernaum. There is no, “you have to become this or that” in order to receive his grace, to be under his mercy. Who you are, as you are, you are loved.
Just to be clear, that does not imply that we will stay as we are when we allow the Lord into our lives. A huge transformation will begin, one in which we will be formed more perfectly into the mind of Christ,
and be brought to our full maturity in the likeness of Christ. But, that will happen in response to grace,
not to earn grace, as we grow more and more in our relationship with Christ the Lord. It is not something that needs to happen before we can receive God’s grace in Christ, and that is basically the problem that Paul had with those who came to Galatia after him and caused such confusion that he had to write, “I’m astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ,” in such a cranky tone.
And if you don’t want me to write an urgent letter to you in a cranky tone, then believe this. Jesus loves you.
Jesus frees you. Jesus gives you life. Jesus lives in you. No matter what little stereotypical cubby holes
you might fit into, Jesus loves you. May grace and peace fill your heart this day in the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
