Picture this with me:  The young preacher has been attracting quite a following.  He and his pack of disciples have been travelling through the countryside.  Between sermons he’s been healing the sick, making paralyzed people walk again, and generally creating a buzz throughout the area.  The people he heals continue to follow him and want to hear more of his message.  This is his coming out party.  Previously he’d preached in local synagogues to small audiences of the faithful.  But this is the big time.  His miracles mean that a crowd has formed.  He’s not in a synagogue but out in the open air, on a mountainside, and this is his first major public address to the masses.

He sits down, as is the custom for preachers in those days.  He clears his throat.  The people lean forward in anticipation.  And then he says, “You’re lucky if you’re unemployed.  You’re lucky if you’re clueless and confused.  You’re lucky if your marriage is falling apart.  You’re lucky if you’re terminally ill.”

And everybody scratches their heads and wonders what sort of craziness this is.  This is the worst sermon ever.  They hear these words and they wonder, what are we supposed to do with this?

This is the set-up for the Sermon on the Mount.  The Sermon in Matthew is Jesus’ first recorded public teaching.  He begins with a section known as the Beatitudes.  The name comes from the Latin word for “blessing.”  The Beatitudes are right up there with the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments on the list of most highly regarded Scriptures.  They’re put on bookmarks, carved into plaques, and memorized by children, and rightly so.  I memorized them as a kid and my oldest daughter is memorizing them right now, every night.  They are so highly known and regarded partly because of their easily identifiable format but more so because they are essential to the ethical teaching of Jesus.

Let’s read them.  They’re found in Matthew 5 verses 1-12.  Follow along with me as I read.  (Read Matthew 5:1-12)

The word “blessed” used in these beatitudes does not refer to someone who God blesses but is probably better understood as referring to someone who is fortunate.  Literally, it means “to be on the right path.”  It is used of someone who is to be congratulated.  To put it in plain speech is to say, “Lucky.”  Lucky are the poor in spirit.  Lucky are those who mourn.  By any definition of any of those words we have what seems to be a contradiction.  To come across someone who is grieving because their dear friend just died and to say, “Oh your friend died?  Lucky!” would be considered a terrible thing to do.

So when Jesus begins his sermon with these words, more than a few eyebrows are sure to be raised.  I mentioned before that the initial audience might hear a sermon like this and walk away wondering, “What are we supposed to do with that?”  We might have the same response.  And that, I think, is precisely the problem.  We’re hearing the Beatitudes wrong if we think we’re supposed to do anything with them at all.  They are not intended as positive models for who we should be.  They are descriptions, not recommendations.

What I mean by that is that Jesus is not giving us this list so that we will say, “I need to be more like that.”  The Beatitudes are often interpreted as the picture of the ideal Christian.  This is who we should be: poor in spirit, meek, etc… Nothing could be further from the truth.  This misreading is a symptom of the poor approach we’ve developed to the Bible in the first place.  The way we often read the Bible is to think that Scripture is about what we are supposed to do instead of what it actually is about – who God is.  Scripture is first and foremost God’s revelation of Himself to us.  It tells us who God is.

The Beatitudes are not instructions on how we should try to be; they are revelation about who God is.  All Christian ethics begin with who God is and the way God is.  The first question should never be, “What should I be doing?” but rather, “Who is God?”  The Sermon on the Mount is the major ethical teaching of Jesus and he begins not with a list of rules to try to follow but rather a description of a God who makes the kingdom of heaven available to the very people the world seems to reject.  When we read this passage as anything else we quickly get off track and then the Beatitudes become a recipe for legalism, or a monument to works rather than grace, or one more reason to feel guilty for not stacking up to another set of religious requirements.

We get so turned around this way.  Take the first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Consider the context.  Jesus has just begun his ministry.  He begins it where?  Not in Rome.  Not in Jerusalem.  Not in the corridors of power.  He begins it among the oppressed, rejected, and especially, the suffering.  Look at the passages preceding the Beatitudes.  Start in chapter four, verse 23:

23Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.

Who is Jesus working among?  What sort of people make up the crowds that are following him and listening to him as he sets forth his ethical teaching?  It’s the outcasts.  It’s the sick and dying, the ones with chronic pain, the demon possessed and mentally ill, the epileptics, and the paraplegics.  It’s all the people who have been crushed on the wheels of life.  That is what the phrase “poor in spirit” means.  It refers to those who are out of options.

It’s not a good thing.  Nobody should want to be poor in spirit.  It would be like wishing you had inoperable late-stage cancer.  It is a miserable situation that we should rightly try to avoid.  But in an effort to make sense of the Beatitudes as instructions on how to be a good Christian, some people have turned the phrase “poor in spirit” into something praiseworthy as in “I just need to be poorer in spirit and then God will bless me.”  To be poor in spirit is not something anyone should aspire to be.  It means to be in dire straights, between a rock and a hard place.  It means to be beaten, in over your head, drowning in depression, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  The Message Bible translates the opening Beatitude as, “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.”

That is what poor in spirit means.  It means that you’re at your wit’s end.  It means that you are barely holding on.  This is not a condition anyone ought to aspire to.  It is, however, a condition that we all may find ourselves in from time to time.  It is the condition that a man suffering from uncontrollable seizures may be in during the time of Jesus.  He’s been to the priests; he’s been to the doctors; he has tried absolutely everything but the seizures keep coming.  He’s at the end of his rope.  It is the condition that a paralyzed woman may be in during the time of Jesus.  It is the condition that a sufferer of chronic migraines may find herself in during the time of Jesus.  They are at the end of their ropes.  This is an exact description of many people in the crowd who have followed Jesus and are now listening to this sermon.  They get what Jesus is saying.

All those people can count themselves lucky not because they are in that condition but because they have just met Jesus and he has shown them the kingdom of God.  It is theirs.  By a touch of his hand it has been revealed to them.  They get up and walk.  The seizures stop.  The chronic pain disappears.  To all of you who were just hanging on by a thread: This is your lucky day – the kingdom of heaven is yours.  This is what it’s like.

Consider further with me the context.  These are not the people who have it together – quite the opposite.  They are the dregs of society.1  So how do they acquire the kingdom?  Not by any means you might think.  These people have not dedicated themselves to holiness and Bible study.  They are not the ones who are highly educated or highly paid.  They don’t tithe or pray or go on short-term missions trips.  They can’t seem to get their act together to do any of those things.  They can’t, because life has thrown something at them that seems to completely dominate them and drown out all other concerns.  They can’t really make heads or tails of everything the Bible talks about or what preachers have to say and they don’t have the time or capacity right now to figure it out.  All they know is that Jesus touched them and the rule of heaven came down upon their broken lives and set them right again through their contact with Jesus.  This is the luckiest day of their lives.

The poor in spirit are blessed not because they are poor in spirit but rather they are blessed in spite of the fact they are poor in spirit because that’s just who God is.  They are not in an admirable state that anyone should want to be in but they are blessed anyway.  That’s what God does.  That’s why Jesus begins his sermon this way.  It begins in God’s grace, not man’s holiness.  When we are at our worst, God still opens the kingdom to us.

The key to understanding the Beatitudes is to stop taking them as recommendations.  No one is told to go out and try to be poor in spirit or to mourn or to be meek.  Jesus is saying instead that due to who God is and the nature of His kingdom it should come as no surprise that among those who follow are the so called “losers” at the game of life.  Counted among the fortunate are those who can’t quite seem to clean themselves up, put away the bottle, get over their issues, or put off their dysfunction.

To take a survey through the rest of the Beatitudes is to see the same dynamics in play.  They go from a description of a largely undesirable state to a fortunate state.  Follow along with me.  The second one is obvious.  Clearly being in a state of constant mourning can hardly be the point.  It would be foolish indeed to see the mourning Christian as the ideal Christian and that we should all try to be in mourning as often as possible.  Rather, the point is that God is a God who comforts mourners.  When we can’t see anything but our pain and loss – at times to the point of not even functioning – we are not excluded from the kingdom of all comfort.  The kingdom of God is always in contrast to the way of the world.  The world is not comfortable with mourning.  We don’t know what to do or say, and often those in extended periods of mourning are eventually shunned, or even worse, told that its time to get over it and move on with life.  But our God is not only comfort-able with mourners but also is comfort-ing to mourners.  To be in mourning is not desirable.  But God doesn’t need for us to get over it in order to come to Him.

Next come the meek.  To be meek is not a synonym for humble, and it’s not necessarily a virtue.  It essentially means those who will not or cannot assert themselves.  It is the shy and the intimidated.  The book of Numbers describes Moses as a meek man, more meek than all others.  It does not mean it as a compliment.  In the context it is used, it means to say that he is not able to stand up to his brother and sister when they undermine his leadership.  It’s a character flaw.  He is not able to take what is rightfully his – namely the leadership of God’s people which has been given him by God.  God has miraculously and directly called him to lead His people.  There’s nothing admirable about Moses’ inability to tell his sister and brother where they can go when they start undermining that authority.  He’s too meek to follow God’s call.

The world tends to chew up and spit out those types of people.  But our God is the sort of God who freely gives what cannot be forcefully taken.  To a person who cannot assert himself; to one who others tend to walk all over; the Lord gives the world to.  What they cannot earn they receive as an inheritance.  What they do not deserve they are given by divine proclamation.  They are truly fortunate.

And then there are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  This one, of course, can be seen as a virtue but the question remains, “What usually comes of a person who always desires to do the right thing or to see the right thing done?”  Do they tend to get the promotion, get the girl, and get ahead in life?  The Eastern religions teach karma but the Bible makes no such promises.  To say that virtue is its own reward is to admit that vice has a whole list of obvious rewards of its own.

In any case, I am not so sure this is to be seen as a virtue.  To be hungry and thirsty is never a good thing.  It means that you are unsatisfied.  The one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness is always aware of his own inadequacy.  They can never be satisfied with who they are; never feel loved and accepted.  They have failed too many times and want so badly to be someone they are not.  Or maybe the reason they care so much for righteousness is that they’ve been wronged.  They become consumed with a quest for justice.  They hurt so deeply inside that the need for things to be set right gnaws at them like hunger.  They are literally starving for things to be set right but are powerless to make it so.  Jesus says if that miserable state of being applies to you, today is your lucky day.  Apart from anything you can say or do, God will fill you.  Your hunger will be satiated.  It’s your lucky day.

And how about being merciful?  Is turning the other cheek really such a great strategy?  It tends to get you two black eyes instead of just one.  Isn’t the way of the world to press your advantage, to use every ounce of leverage you’ve got over another person?  Is mercy any way to run a business?  No, you need to get paid.  Be merciful and the world is sure to take advantage of you.  It’s a Wonderful Life is a wonderful fiction.  I cry every Christmas when I see that movie but it’s been my experience that life really isn’t that way.  The world just doesn’t repay mercy with mercy in the way it works out for George Bailey.  But for those who suffer through life for being too generous, too forgiving, too merciful – they will be given mercy in the kingdom of heaven where the world offers none.  They aren’t given mercy because of their own but surely because of their good fortune to have met Jesus.

Next are the pure in heart.  These are the perfectionists.  They want purity so badly.  They will not be satisfied with anything shy of perfection.  They will constantly evaluate and assess even their own motives.  They will pick apart your doctrine, your heart, and your attitude.  They’d be detestable if they didn’t also do it to themselves.  They are bothered by their own corruption and lack of holiness and are downright depressed when they glance around the church and see how tarnished the Bride of Christ really is.2

To be pure in heart sounds like something to desire, but to actually try to attain it results in misery.  Jeremiah knew this and lamented, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?”  (Jeremiah 17:9)  The pure in heart are to be pitied above all men.  They seek purity in an instrument they can’t even understand and which constantly lies and misdirects them.  And yet, even they will see God.  Our God is the sort of God who will give relief even to those who give themselves none.  What a stroke of luck for these people.

We can go on, but I think you get the point.  The Beatitudes are not instructions on how to be blessed.  They are not a list of the types of conditions that are pleasing to God.  We like to read them that way because we like to be in control.  We like law instead of grace and religion instead of relationship.  If the Beatitudes are just instructions on how to get blessed, they simply become another way of trying to earn salvation and blessing and are a recipe for frustration and failure.  Understood this way, they are anything but good news.

But conversely, if they are a glimpse of what God is like, then they are filled with radical hope and surprising joy.  And that’s just what they are.  Dallas Willard hits it right on the head when he writes, “The Beatitudes are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship with Jesus.  They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.”3

Picture that crowd again who originally hear this message.  What changed for those people who were formerly crippled, diseased, and spiritually oppressed?  Only one thing: They met Jesus.  The Beatitudes tell us, “This is what’s possible when you meet Jesus.”  Life is snatched from the jaws of death, hopeless situations are redeemed, mourning is turned to dancing, and beggars become rulers in a kingdom with no end.

The point is that no human condition excludes blessedness.  Before we set out to transform our lives, live in holiness, or purify our hearts, we must begin here.  It begins in grace.  It begins with allowing ourselves to be reminded yet again that our tendency toward religion and legalism always gets in the way of our relationship with Jesus.  Martin Luther read passages like these and decided never to develop a theology of sanctification or human holiness.  He thought any such thing would lead either to despair or pride.  He thought we should never aspire to be anything but a sinner, for Christ dwells in sinners.  Because of the all-surpassing grace of God we’re at our most fortunate when we’re at our worst.  We’re on the right path when we’ve finally come to the end of our road.

Now Luther may have gone too far, but not by much.  I believe in sanctification and holiness but grace to the sinner while he is yet in his sins comes first.  The Beatitudes scandalize us again with grace.  They insist we get over ourselves and come to know God as God truly is.  Before we undertake any sort of reclamation project upon ourselves we let God demonstrate His poor taste by loving us in our filthy condition.  The beginning of right living is to know God, not to know the rules for right living.

The Beatitudes are not a list of the types of people the Lord normally blesses.  They are not a strategy for achieving a better society.  They are an announcement of the covenant God has made with mankind.  In this covenant even the hopeless have hope.  The forgotten are remembered.  The lost are found.  Entrance to the kingdom of heaven does not depend on what you know, what you do, or who you are.  It depends exclusively on the nature and character of God.

The Beatitudes are good news.  “Congratulations”, they say, “today is your lucky day!  God heals the divide between you and Him and you are welcome into His kingdom.”  Everything that follows in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount – again, the bulk of Jesus’ ethical and moral teaching; the stuff we often use out of context to shame people into behaving better – can only be understood against the backdrop set out by the Beatitudes.  They tell us who God is.  Infinitely more than rules or laws, that is the basis for Christian morality.  C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you should ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’  To know God is to know our obedience is due Him.”4

That’s where Jesus starts his sermon.  God Is.  He starts with a relationship that is absolutely dependent upon God having incredibly low standards with regards to the people He is willing to be with.  That is good news for all of us.  That makes every one of us extremely lucky.  Let’s pray.

(Read Galatians 3:26-29)

In verses 24 and 25, which we talked about last week, we learned that the Law was given as a sort of guardian, or babysitter until Christ came.  We ended with Paul asserting that “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.” In other words, we’ve grown up.  Faith, that most child-like of entities, is the actually the sign of maturity, the sign that we no longer need a babysitter.  (NT Wright)

So now in verse 26 when Paul says that we are all “sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” I think it is important that we realize he means adult sons.  For their own good, small children have to be watched, constantly corrected, and supervised.  Adults are trusted by their parents.  They are given real responsibility – the responsibility to make their own decisions and hopefully in doing so they honor their parents.  Our responsibility; the trust God shows in us is that we will be people of faith. We will be people that respond to the trust shown in us by in turn trusting God and believing in His good news.  In Christ, God treats us like beloved grown-up children.

And I have a theory about this passage, and the use of the phrase, “clothed in Christ” that relates it to the famous verse that follows which instructs us that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul isn’t trying to say that every aspect of human identity is now irrelevant.  He doesn’t believe that.  He still very much sees himself as a Jewish Christian, and elsewhere he has separate instructions for men versus women in the church so obviously he believes they’re also still distinct, and he is still very aware of the culture of slavery and does not expressly try to abolish it.  When Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…” he doesn’t believe our human identities are irrelevant.  What he does believe is that within the family of God, within the grown-up children of God, within the sight of Father God Himself, old human distinctions of status become irrelevant.  Ethnic, gender, and socio-economic barriers are no barriers to the way God sees us.  And my theory is that by using the metaphor of clothing, he is telling us that we need to stop seeing ourselves primarily in these types of divisive human terms as well.

Clothing covers our nakedness.  (I don’t mean to shock anybody here, but underneath our clothes we’re all naked.  It’s true!) Those three examples he gives are most obvious and most easily determined when someone is not clothed.  The easiest way to tell a Jew from a Gentile is to inspect their anatomy.  The same can be said about male and female.  Furthermore, in the ancient world slaves were “branded” or marked on their body in ways that distinguished them from free men and women.  One result of the fall is that humans learned to be ashamed of their nakedness.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  But one reason to be ashamed of nakedness in Paul’s world is that people carried their cultural labels on their bodies, and learned to identify themselves in the same way that the world identifies them.  In that culture: “I’m a Jew,” “I’m a woman,” “I’m a slave.”  And in that Roman, male-dominated, hierarchical culture those are things they were taught to be ashamed of.  Their bodies bore the marks of their shame.

We too have been taught to be ashamed.  I’m poor.  I’m not attractive.  I’m not intelligent.  Paul might write to us, “There is neither rich nor poor, ugly nor beautiful, smart nor dumb, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  Again, this doesn’t mean that our finances, or our waist sizes, or our IQs magically become equal.  It’s just that there is no more shame or honor of one or the other in Christ.  To all of us who are ashamed of one supposed inferiority or another Jesus says, “I can cover your shame.  Those may be barriers to accepting yourself or being accepted in the world, but they are not barriers to full inclusion and acceptance in my family.  Clothe yourself in me.”  Find your identity in me.  We sang today, “No seam in this garment, all my rags to hide…”  We try to hide our shame in clothes of our own making.  We try to fix our inferiority or compensate for it, or hide it under any fancy dressing we can find.  But those clothes invariably are little more than rags and they fail to cover our shame.  Whatever’s underneath, whatever we bear on our bodies or put on to falsely try to be presentable, in the kingdom we’re covered by Jesus.  Paul says, “If you belong to Jesus, then you are Abraham’s seed [which he just defined in verse 16 as Jesus himself] and you are heirs of God.”  You are covered in Christ, so that when God sees you he sees only Jesus.  To God, you look like Jesus, and the way He feels about you is the same way he feels about Jesus.  When he looks at you, He sees only His beloved and perfect son.  You are a genuine adult children of God.

But not just adult children, we’re also heirs.  There’s an interesting word.  We’re fascinated by heirs.  The tabloids love heirs and heiresses.  They love them because they seem to have a freedom that others don’t.  Who’s the world’s most famous heiress?  It has to be Paris Hilton, heir to the hotel giant.  What is Paris Hilton?  She’s modeled, acted, recorded two albums, and starred in a reality TV show.  But she’s not a model, actress, or singer.  She’s just a celebrity.  And she’s a celebrity because she’s an heiress.  She dates rock stars.  She can party in Bora Bora and then take the private jet to a club opening in Hollywood.  But she doesn’t actually do anything.  She has no conceivable talent proportionate to her exposure level.  She has never earned anything in her life.  She just parties around the globe and poses for the paparazzi and lives a life almost free of consequences because her daddy is a mega-billionaire.

Ten years ago, nobody had ever heard of her.  Why is that?  It was because she was a child.  She didn’t have the freedom she has now.  She was still an heiress, but she was watched over by a babysitter or guardian of some kind, someone who likely protected her from herself, until she could become an adult.  With those images in mind, read with me Galatians 4:1-3.  (Read)

At some point, Paris became a grown-up, at least chronologically.  She was given her freedom.  When she was a child she was just as rich as she is now but was not as free as she is now.  And we can, of course, debate about how well she’s used her freedom.  We can debate about how well she’s accepted her grown-up responsibilities.  We can debate how well she’s honored her parents.  And we could also make the point that although she’s now 27, and legally a grown-up she still very much chooses to live the life of a child.  But if just for a moment we stopped looking at her as a celebrity and instead re-imagined her as a human, she becomes an object of sympathy because the world laughs at her and she’s powerless to stop the cult of celebrity and so with one sad incident after another she feeds the machinery she’s trapped in.  She chose to remain a child and her choice has enslaved her.

And that, of course, is precisely the point with us.  Paul is setting up a distinction here.  We’ve always been heirs of God.  God has always wanted and intended for us to be full and joyful participants in His richness and His abundant life, but what Paul wants to know is whether or not we are grown ups.  He wants to know if we even want to be grown-ups or have the imagination to see ourselves as grown-ups.  See, a child is subject to the tutors and teachers set before him.  Even though the child owns the whole estate, in reality, he’s little better than a slave.  When we are small children there are thousands, maybe millions of things that influence our impressionable young minds.  Some influence us for good, and some for bad.  Either way, as children, we have no power to resist.  The T.V. tells my daughter she likes Barbie so my daughter likes Barbie.  Chad tells her she should be a cheerleader so she runs around with pom-poms.  I’m confident she’ll outgrow both these tragedies, but there are other things she is learning now that will mark her in much deeper ways.  Children are slaves to a million different images and lessons that they are powerless to control or even to discern the helpful lessons from the harmful ones.  Paul calls these lessons they learn “the basic principles of the world.”

These principles become our masters.  And so we learn our lessons.  Some unfortunate kids learn that there is no love in the world.  Some kids learn that power and dominance is the only way to achieve anything in the world.  Some kids learn that faith is nice but less important than whatever they’ve been told or had modeled for them is real life.  Some kids learn that they are unlovable the way they are.  Some kids learn that if they act dumb nobody asks much of them.  Some kids learn that the way to feel safe is to never confront anything or anybody.  Some kids learn that following all the rules is the way to acceptance.  Most kids in America learn that the goal of life is to get the most stuff that makes you the most comfortable and secure.  All these lessons shape us into the people we become.  As children, we’re powerless to avoid the incessant, non-stop teaching of the world we live in.  We’re slaves to the basic principles of the world.

Paul is saying that some people never get over that.  In a sense, they stay as helpless as children.  And yes, some people know that they are children of God – they’ve been to church, prayed the prayer, and sang the songs – but still live in slavery to the principles of this world.  I dare say that’s true of all of us some of the time and most of us most of the time.  It was true of the Galatians.  So Paul wants to set the record straight.  He wants to invite people to understand what really happened in Christ, what freedom they really have been given.  He wants them to know that they have a choice.  Looks at verses 4-7.  (Read Galatians 4:4-7)

When the time had fully come, God sent His son.  He was one of us, born into the same world as us.  He was harassed and harried by the same principles of the world as we are.  Yet, he was no slave.  He was never a slave to them.  He refused and defied convention at every turn.  When he was 12, he nearly gave his parents a heart attack because even at that age he was no slave to the conventions and expectations of childhood.  “’Why were you searching for me?’ he asked.  ‘Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?’  But [his parents] did not understand what he was saying to them.” (Luke 2:49-50)  When he was 33 the principalities of this world, from whom the principals of this world descend, killed him.  Like his parents, they didn’t understand what he was saying to them.  He just never learned to fit in.  That’s because this world is under the condition of Sin; the principles of the world, no matter how benign or innocent they seem, are principles of death.  God intends for none of us to fit in.  Jesus showed us what it looks like.

By never being a slave, his death set the rest of us slaves free.  Every original hearer of this letter would have understood the word “redeem” that Paul uses.  It has a very specific meaning.  Sometimes, a very wealthy person would see a slave belonging to someone else that for whatever reason, he wanted to free.  That person would then go to the pagan temple or shrine and give the priests the required amount.  The priest would then deliver an oracle that said something along the lines of, “The god Apollo has purchased this slave and he is now free” and then the money would be passed along to the slave owner and the slave was free.  That’s what the word “redeem” meant to everyone who first received this letter.

Paul is saying that all of us slaves to the principles of this world have had our freedom purchased by Jesus.  This wasn’t some blanket, impersonal redemption, either.  God singled each one of us out and paid the price for our freedom.  And then God went one better.  He adopted us as sons, and gave us the full rights of sons.  Not only are we free, but we have become children of God, granted the right to be full heirs to His abundance.  The firstfruits of the abundance is the Holy Spirit.  Romans 8:23 says, “but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption [there’s that word again] of our bodies.” Galatians 4:6 says the Spirit within us cries out, Abba, Father.  It is there to constantly remind us we are the fully accepted child of God.  Not a slave, not a limited infant, but a fully grown, adult son of God.  And not some kind of second-class, mistreated, red-headed step-child either.  But a fully accepted and equal heir to the Father.

So, we’ve got a choice.  Our freedom was purchased.  We have the full rights of sons.  We can thank God for the redemption, but say that all things considered, even though we’re free, we’re more than happy to carry on the life of a slave.  We’re more than happy sticking to our principles, the principles the world taught us, and we’ll go ahead and do our own thing and try to make the best of it.  It’s the Peter Pan approach: I don’t want to grow up!  We’ll stitch together these rags and try to convince ourselves and everyone else that we’re really doing well now.  And as our rags get torn, we’ll continue to merely react to life, powerless and limited as a child.  Or, we’ll thank God for the redemption and express our gratitude at the adoption by living in the pleasure of our Father’s house.  We’ll live every moment in the freedom provided there.  We’ll live like Jesus, defying the rules and conventions and expectations of this world at every turn.  We’ll unlearn every principle of the world that we were ever taught and re-learn grace and love and hope. We’ll grow, and we’ll grow in faith, and we’ll grow up in faith.

And one way to re-learn, one gift to help us learn that we are free children of God is to eat at the Father’s Table.  Gilbert has told me a story about being a missionary in Africa.  A local man was hired to do the cooking for him.  The man would bring out his food and place it at the table and then would return to the kitchen to eat alone.  Gilbert would ask him to stay and eat with him; he would welcome him to eat at the table, but the man would refuse.  Although Gilbert never made any distinction between the cook and himself, the man never ceased to see himself as inferior and unworthy of sharing the table.

Paul says that God doesn’t make distinctions.  But we still do.  God calls you His son.  A son is always welcome at the table.  As one the Father has named an heir, the table is His as much as it is the Father’s.  The question is, do you see yourself as a slave, or a son?  I believe the truth comes out here, at this table.  For some, this table conjures up images of fear, anxiety, and unworthiness.  We wonder if we belong.  We’re children of God sure enough, but we don’t know if we belong at the grown up table.  Paul writes to say, “Every one of you is invited to sit in the most honored seat at this table.  Every one of you is expected to sit where the beloved son sits.”

Think about that.  Don’t hide out in the kitchen in your rags of shame.  You belong here.  Get dressed in your Jesus clothes, and come to dinner.  For I received from the Lord… (1 Cor. 7:23)

So we pick up the story in Galatians right where we left off.  And at this point in the letter the ideas and the themes are really building on each other so I would suggest that if you’ve missed the previous week that you find a copy and try to catch up because Paul kind of gets on a roll here and doesn’t really pause for a breath anytime in the near future. It’s complicated and the writing is dense so it’s not like there are clean breaks where one idea ends and another begins, so each week we’re just sort of putting in arbitrary breaks because none of us wants a seven hour sermon.  Not even me.  But it’s all part of the same line of thought, so what comes before matters absolutely, and no text can stand without the foundation of the previous one.  And in the text we studied last week Paul concluded by contrasting flesh with Spirit, Law with Faith, and blessing with curse.  For the record: He’s in favor of Spirit over flesh, faith over law, and yes, blessing over curse.  In fact, he wound up rolling all the negative parts of the equation together and saying that if in the flesh you are relying on the law then you are under a curse.  And the only way out from under that curse is Jesus.

So now, in chapter 3 verse 15, where we’ll pick it up this week, it’s almost as though Paul is writing this letter and hitting them with these contrasting terms, and maybe giving them too much to process all at once, so he’s picturing the confused looks on the Galatians’ faces (not unlike some of the looks I see here sometimes), and he takes another pass at it by making an analogy.  He pauses for an illustration from everyday life.  Let’s look at it.  (Read Galatians 3:15-18)

Let me start by saying a few things about the translation.  There is no perfect translation.  And sometimes the NIV (which we just read, and which is generally a good translation) tries to help us by making certain connections for us and assuming that we won’t understand analogies from a different culture so instead of just translating the language they also try to translate the culture.  Almost always when it does this, we lose something.  This is the case a few times in the verses we’ll read today.

What Paul’s talking about here when he says “human covenant” is a will.  That is the word here.  He’s talking about the last will and testament a person leaves so that everyone knows exactly what that person wants to happen after he dies.  That’s why he says that this is an example from everyday life.  We can all understand what is meant by a will.  “Human covenant” is a fancy, theological sounding term that is decidedly not used in everyday life.  Why the NIV uses it here is a mystery.  But we all know what a will is.

When someone dies and the ones left behind are deciding what to do with the body or the remaining property, or sometimes even what to do with surviving children, the trump card is always to say, “It’s what he would have wanted.”  But in some cases, there is pretty significant disagreement over what the deceased “would have wanted.”  That’s why we make wills.  When I die I want to be frozen and then placed in a wood chipper and sprayed out across a forest in the Canadian Rockies – but unless I put that in my will and have it notarized I’ll end up in a box in the ground.

If it really is my goal to be chipped (and I guess you’ll have to read my will to find out) then I have to document it and make it known.  Also, if I want my books to go to this person, and my golf clubs to go to this one, and my jean jacket to go to this one, I need to say so in a will.  And, providing the will is legal and feasible, no one can later change it by saying, “Oh, this is what he actually wanted.”  No, I said what I wanted.  It’s in my will.

So Paul’s argument here is that God’s promise to Abraham was God’s will and testament.  It was what God wanted – declared to Abraham directly by God.  The agitators in Galatia are arguing that God wants something else and because they’re experts in the Law, they claim to have the Law on their side, to which Paul says 430 years before the Law, God made His will known.  You can’t change it later.  Only God can.  The question is over what God wants.  While the agitators are saying, “Salvation by Law – It’s what God would have wanted…” Paul is saying, “We already have God’s will.”

And just like a legal document today uses careful language – that’s why we have lawyers draw them up for us – God’s will also uses careful language.  God’s promise isn’t concerning vague and general “offsprings,” meaning anyone at all – but rather “offspring,” meaning a specific someone and that specific someone is Jesus.  He is the Seed of Abraham.  He is the seal that ratifies the will.  Paul is saying that the Law may be a lot of things, but one thing it is not is a new will and testament that cancels out the original one.

It’s deep, I know.  But, if you’ve been following the long and winding argument Paul’s been making, there is only one logical question left: If all this is true, then what was the point of the law?  Paul knows that’s the appropriate question, and he knows he better answer it or else his opponents in Galatia will have a field day discrediting him and saying that he’s basically invalidating all known Scripture.  He’s basically discarding anything that happened after Abraham.  Paul isn’t doing that so as a pre-emptive strike in verse 19 he asks the question for them and proposes an answer in the next verses.  We took a crack at the question last week, but here Paul expands his analysis quite a bit.  Let’s read it.  (Read Galatians 3:19-20)

If I was going to summarize why God gave us the Law in one sweeping oversimplification it would be this: God gave us the Law because we’re failures and we can’t admit it.  What I mean by that is that there was a promise made to Abraham, and through him, to all mankind.  But there is a gap between the giving of the promise and the fulfillment of the promise.  Just like there is a gap between the writing of the will and the execution of the will after someone dies.  There’s still life to be lived in the meantime.  The promise is the blessing of all people.  It will be carried in Abraham and his children – the Jews – until it comes to fulfillment.  The fulfillment of the promise is Jesus.  The calling for the children of Abraham is to live by faith in the promise and the One who gave it until it is fulfilled.  It’s a simple calling.  It’s not easy, but it’s not complicated.  But we failed.

See verse 19: “[The law] was added [that is, given in addition to the original promise] because of transgressions [that is, failure to live by faith in the original promise] until the Seed [that is, Jesus] to whom the promise referred had come.”

Paul continues, squarely within traditional Jewish orthodox doctrine, by saying that the law was “put into effect through angels by a mediator.”  (Galatians 3:20)  Jewish belief at the time was that the Law was given to Moses by angels.  You might remember that when Stephen, a Jew by birth and the first person killed for being a Christian, gave his speech to the Sanhedrin he said, “And now you have betrayed and murdered [Jesus] – you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels…”  (Acts 7:53)

The Jewish belief is that Moses met with the angels on Sinai and brought the law to the people.  Moses was the mediator.  He was the middleman.  God gave a promise directly to Abraham.  The law comes to the people two steps removed from God.  The law came from angels through Moses.  He’s the mediator.  Moses represents both God and the people.  We need mediators when two parties in a relationship are separated.  The mediator is one who has both parties’ interests in mind.  This relationship is separated by the people’s failure.  Moses will mediate the separation.  But it’s a temporary mediation.  Moses is just a man.  And a man, no matter how good a mediator he is, can’t change God’s will.

But there’s another mediator coming.  There’s a mediator who not only represents both God and man, but through some divine mystery actually is both God and man.  That’s why Paul insists in 1^st Timothy, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus…” And here in Galatians, Paul insists that God is one and then swings the argument to Jesus in the next verses.

And again, he anticipates his opponent’s question.  If Paul, by being overly legal and speaking in lawyerese, has made his point that the later Law does not change the original will, then is he saying that the Law stands opposed to the original promise?  Is the Law an enemy of God’s will?  Did it not come from God?  Did the angels and Moses mess up?  Is it evil?  Like he did before, Paul anticipates that question.  Look at the next two verses.  (Read Galatians 3:21-22)

The law can’t annul the promises of God.  So is it against God’s will?  No.  Paul says, “Absolutely not!”  Why does it have to be black and white, either/or, all or nothing?  That’s nothing but a lazy failure of the imagination.  We’re dealing with two separate issues here.  The promise is about life.  The blessing is life, the curse is death.  The promise of God brings life.  If the law could do that it would have done it by now.  But sin is the curse.  Sin, the wages of which is death, still runs wild.  It enslaves the whole world, makes the whole world its prisoner, a prisoner to the powers death.  All creation dies or is dying.  Let’s be clear, sin isn’t just doing bad things.  That’s an overly personal simplification that doesn’t take into account the full measure of what the Bible says about the fall.  Sin is any missing of the mark, any aspect that falls short of the full and abundant life God has for us and all creation.  Sin is any conscious or unconscious choosing of death over life.  And sin is the present condition of the world.  We operate and live and worship and pray in a fallen world.  It is sin-soaked, sin-stained, sin-saturated, and must be one day re-created.  The Law insists that we recognize this.  The Law makes it obvious, by showing what real life looks like and asking us to compare the world we see with it, that we need God’s promises now more than ever.  The Law shows the futility of devising some sort of religious system to fix things when the only thing we can do is wait in active faith for the outworking of the promise.  The Law reveals sin, not just morality, but sin in the most inclusive and all-encompassing sense to us, in order that we might believe in grace.  The Law exposes death, so that we can meet it head on and choose life.

That’s deep.  Paul is dropping some deep theology.  What’s it all mean to us then?  We’re not Jews.  We’re not following some ancient code.  That’s true.  So it would be easy to say at this point that Paul has done some very interesting Old Testament exposition for us.  And let’s be real – by sifting through Paul’s awkward prose, our Pastor’s not to shabby at doing a little exposition of Paul’s words as well.  So now, we have some knowledge that we didn’t have before.  It’s nice to have someone make sense of the Bible for us.  But as important as theology and doctrine are, they are absolutely useless if they don’t lead to changed lives.  So is that it?  If it is, I think Paul would say, and I would join him, “Who cares?”  This isn’t about getting it, it’s about living it.  And while we may not follow the ancient Jewish laws, the point is the same.  We still need to recognize the magnitude of the fall in order to see that we need Jesus.  We need to learn to recognize our pre-condition of weakness.  We need to learn to admit our own failings.  We need to do so because until we do, we will rely on some form of human religious, moral, mental, or physical effort to try to find real life rather than grace.  We will stumble around prisoners to death and not even realize that true life awaits.

The law lets us look in the mirror and recognize our failure.  For Paul, failure is not something to be avoided.  Failure cannot be avoided.  We were born into a failed world.  Failure is something that is inevitable for all humans and so is to be faced and lived through (E. Peterson).  And the truth is that there is no more liberating realization in the world than to admit our ultimate failure.  We spend most of our lives denying failure.  I can do this.  I’m not hurt.  I don’t need help.  I don’t need pity.  I am strong.  I am a survivor.  I won’t take your handouts.  I’m in control of this situation.  We’re like the Monty Python black knight who loses a limb and insists that it’s merely a flesh wound.  And then when his legs get cut off, he screams that he’s still okay.  Come back here and fight like a man!  I’m invincible!  And it’s one thing to deny our failure to others – but we’re masters at doing it to ourselves.

I constantly try to prove to myself that I’m really not as weak as I am, so I set up elaborate tests and disciplines to avoid reality.  I’m really not that crazy – I’ll prove it by acting normal for two weeks.  That person didn’t really hurt me – I’ll prove it by toughing it out and by being extra nice to them.  I don’t really want that personal glory – I’ll prove it by lying to myself, and mocking others.  The truth is, I know it’s not right to be this way, but I really am that crazy, I really am that sensitive, and I really do want personal glory.  I just don’t want to admit it.  And we deny our failings and deny our failings and the sheer effort that takes to keep up, simply leads to more failure.  And that leads to more denial.  The Law came to set us free to fail.  To accept who we are, right now, in all our crumbling glory.  Because that’s how Jesus accepts us.  And that’s when grace arrives.

“Hi, my name’s Mike and I’m a sinner.  I need Jesus.”  That’s why I need the Law.  To teach me to form those words.  To speak them to myself.  And yes, even to speak them to others.  “Hi, my name’s Mike and with the rest of creation I’m failing to live a healthy, full life.  I keep trying to do it, and I keep failing.  This is me.”  To which Jesus says, “Hi Mike.  I accept you.  Stop trying to be someone else.  Accept yourself, failings and all.  Believe in me.  Believe in the promise.  You will be blessed.”  Among other things, the blessing is the power of Christ to actually be changed at the deepest point of need, right where your failures are birthed.

Now let me borrow a page from Paul’s book of asking pre-emptive questions and go even a step farther.  You may wonder, “So if you’re saying that the Law exists to prove to us we’re failures, then are you saying that God wants us to feel guilty so that we’ll turn to Him?  The Law is to make us feel bad?”  To quote Paul, absolutely not!  Guilt is never from God.  Paul insists that inasmuch as we have separated ourselves from God, we already do feel bad.  That’s why we try so hard to make ourselves better.  The Law isn’t intended to produce guilt; it simply recognizes that whether we admit it or not, we already feel guilty, incomplete, and separated from God and His life and so in a strange way, the Law is actually a means to joy by giving us the realistic starting place.

Let me give an example from everyday life. When a baby takes his first steps across a room, we don’t go, “Big deal… Anybody can walk.”  No, when a baby takes his first steps, we go crazy.  We clap, and shout, and encourage, and get the video camera out.  It’s a celebration.

We’ve been praying for our missionary friend Kathy Kroll who’s in the hospital here in Spokane after suffering brain damage.  Helen told me a few days ago that she tied he shoes.  I didn’t say, “Big deal.  I’ve been tying my shoes since I was four.  Normal people can all tie their shoes.”  No, I celebrated with Helen.  With children going through stages of development, and with sick people going through stages of recovery, all pretense is stripped away.  We see them right where they are and every step is cause for joy.

Sin is what prevents us from growing up into our full humanity.  Sin is a sickness that completely debilitates us.  Sin – not just meaning the bad things we do – but sin as the current condition of every created thing on earth renders us helpless as babies and powerless as invalids.  This must be recognized.  And the Law shows us this incapability to grow, to thrive. See, if I convince myself that I am only a change in attitude, discipline, or effort away from a perfectly healthy and full life, then when I fall short, as I will, I will always feel like a disappointment.  And even when I make small progress, because I have an all or nothing attitude – I’m either totally healthy or not healthy at all – I will never enjoy the journey.  But, if I can see myself clearly, with a freedom to fail, then every small success is a cause for celebration.  Every tiny step God’s grace enables us to take toward life is a cause for joy.  When we hear people talk about the “victorious Christian life” I think they must mean that we see ourselves clearly in our poverty so that we can join with the angels and our fellow Christians in celebrating every small progress.  I think while we’re often embarrassed by our miniscule gains, thinking “any normal person wouldn’t think this was a big deal,” the angels in heaven are clapping and getting out their video cameras.

Paul concludes with another illustration or two from everyday life.  Read the last three verses with me.  (Read Galatians 3:23-25)

We were locked up.  The law showed us to be failures.  And we were trapped, paralyzed, immobilized by our failure.  We tried to overcome them.  We tried to do better.  We tried to show no weakness.  But we were trapped.  But then faith was revealed.  There came a Light into the darkness of our failure.  And sin took its best shot at the Light, tried to imprison the Light, but could not overcome it.  Once we realized we were helpless prisoners, we also realized that our story doesn’t end there.  And here’s Paul’s final analogy for the Law.  He says that it was “put in charge” to lead us to Christ.  The Greek word he uses is paidagogos.

It’s another everyday word for his audience.  Greek families that were well off enough to have slaves, chose an old and trusted slave, to be in charge of their child from age six to sixteen.  The slave went to school with the child.  His job was to make sure no harm came to him.  He wasn’t the teacher.  He just led the child safely to the place he could learn.  There are other words that are more familiar to us for a similar sort of thing.  In England this person was a governess.  Here they might be called an au pair or a nanny.  It might even be best to call it a babysitter if we’re searching for the same sort of everyday word Paul wants.

The Law babysat us and took us safely to the place we could learn.  The Law was put in charge, by our Father, to lead us to Christ.  The law took us by the hand because we could not survive on our own and took us to the place where we learned life.  It pointed out and shielded us from danger on the way to life.  And now that life has come, we don’t need a babysitter.  We’re no longer under its supervision.  The Law isn’t evil.  It’s not in opposition to God.  It’s a tool.  It’s who our loving Father put in charge until we were reunited.  It’s a trusted slave.  We should never forget that.  The Law is a good slave but a terrible master.  (Peterson)

Just because God came to us, and we were re-united with our Father doesn’t mean we won’t keep failing.  We still live in a fallen and failing world.  Jesus showed us in living flesh what true life actually looks like.  Sin didn’t stain him.  All the forces of death in the universe teamed up against him and never stained him.  He showed us more plainly than the Law ever could what a life that triumphs over death at every turn actually looks like.  It looks like lepers being healed, blind men seeing, and cripples walking.  It looks like an empty tomb on Easter Sunday.  And this Jesus says that if we follow him we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).  That verse, like the Law can only mean one thing.  I will fail, but Jesus’ love won’t.  Life is about failure and faith, sin and forgiveness, struggle and mercy, corruption and grace, fall and redemption.  I only find the good stuff when I’m honest about the bad stuff.  The Law helps me see.  My name is Mike and I’m a sinner.  Let’s pray.

We pick up this week, right where we left off.  Paul is trying various ways to get through to the Galatians who are obviously confused – “bewitched” is the word Paul uses.  It’s as if someone put a spell on them.  That’s the only logical explanation for why their actions are so inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.  That’s the only way to explain why they would begin their journey through faith in Christ and now attempt to continue it through mutilating their flesh.  In ancient times they used words like “bewitched” and “hex.”  We have our more modern and clinical ways of saying the same thing.  One very modern way of describing what the Galatians are going through is to say that they are experiencing an identity crisis of sorts.  The term “identity crisis” was coined by a psychologist named Erik Erikson, who may have just been responding to the ridiculousness of his name, but who in the early 70’s said that an identity crisis occurs when people lose “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.”  They break from the past into an all-encompassing present with no stories, history, or experiences to tether them to reality.  In other words, they don’t know who they are because they don’t know who they were and therefore they don’t know who they will be.  There was an old SNL Deep Thought that said, “People having an identity crisis should just wise up and get with the program.”  That’s just the point: they don’t know what the program is, so they don’t know who they are. 

And in the section we studied last week, Paul interrogated the Galatians with five questions which taken together can be used to ask rhetorically, “Who do you think you are?”  And there are only two answers available to the Galatians.  Either they are part of the messiah-family of God, the people who belong in the kingdom and age began in Jesus – or – they are trying to become part of the physical family of Israel through law and circumcision.  Paul’s saying, “Don’t confuse the two.  They are not one and the same no matter what anyone tells you.” 

And in chapter 3, Paul gives two very good reasons for why they should supernaturally find their identity in Jesus and his family, rather than physically in circumcision and the people of Israel.  The first reason we learned last week.  Those first five verses state emphatically that God has given them His Spirit.  That’s reason one.  Before they were circumcised, before they learned which rules to follow, before they learned the secret handshake, they received God’s gift of Himself, the Holy Spirit.  Let’s be clear.  They didn’t believe and then earn the Holy Spirit.  Their belief was evidence of the Holy Spirit.  God had done something and their faith was the result.  Spirit is what enables belief.  They heard the gospel from Paul, and whenever the good news of Jesus is proclaimed, the Spirit is active.  Elsewhere Paul calls the gospel itself the “power of God” (Romans 1:16) to demonstrate the link between speaking the good news and the work of the Spirit.   

So now, in the verses we’re about to read, Paul gives his second reason for discovering your identity in God’s Spiritual family rather than Israel’s ethnic and physical family.  It’s this: If you believe the gospel, which is evidence of the Holy Spirit, then you are already a child of Abraham in every sense that matters.  (NT Wright)  See, the people whispering in the Galatians’ ears are essentially making the argument that because the Law of Moses came first, it supersedes the grace found at the cross.  To this Paul simply says, “Really?  Well if we’re going to go back and set precedents, why not go all the way back?  Why stop at Moses?  Let’s go back to where it all really began.  Let’s go back to Abraham.”  And in doing this, Paul “out-Hebrews” the Hebrews.  The notion that God has a people at all on this earth that can be considered His family predates Moses and the Law by hundreds of years.  It starts with Abraham.  God’s family begins with Abraham and not with Moses.  This is another way of saying that God’s family begins with faith and not with Law.  Let’s read chapter 3 verses 6-9.  (Read Galatians 3:6-9) 

Consider Abraham.  Think about it.  Find your identity in your history.  Remember the story.  In fact, Paul wants us to remember two specific moments in the story, moments found in Genesis 15 and Genesis 12.  The first quotes Genesis 15 verse 6 in its entirety: Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.  He believed God and that was the evidence that he was right with God.  In the story, God makes a promise to Abraham out of the blue.  Noah happened and then the Tower of Babel happened and God has been silent for generations because there were no people who recognize Him as their own.  So God decides to rectify that situation.  He chooses Abraham and makes him a promise.  Abraham is out in his fields, worshipping whatever tribal and local gods he pleases, when Yahweh shows up and begins a covenant with him.  He initiates a relationship.  He gives him good news – a gospel.  You will be mine; you will have a great family; you will inherit the land.  That’s all good news.  Abraham believes the promise.  Now again, that doesn’t mean his faith earned him the covenant, the relationship, the good news.  The promise was already made.  His faith, his willingness to believe the good news, was the mark of the covenant. 

Genesis 15 goes on to say that Abraham’s descendants would be “enslaved and mistreated for 400 years” in “a country not their own.”  After that – that’s when Moses comes in.  That’s when the Exodus happens.  That’s when the Law is given.  Abraham precedes Moses.  Faith precedes Law.  Faith is the plan from the beginning. 

The second specific moment of the Abraham story Paul calls our attention to is from chapter 12 and he quotes verse 3 directly: All nations will be blessed through you.  This is a promise repeated, in case we missed it, in Genesis 18 and 22 as well.  Again, all of this is before the law, before circumcision, before dietary restrictions and secret passwords and membership jackets.  So Paul says, “The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith” and that God announced “the gospel in advance to Abraham.”  See, the people causing trouble in Galatia were saying that the good news of Jesus was supposed to be received in light of the Law of Moses.  Paul is logically insisting that the good news of Jesus was announced to Abraham thousands of years before anyone had ever heard the name Jesus or even the term messiah.  So there is no need – there is never a need – to abandon simple faith as the mark of our relationship to God in favor of something more.  Faith is the mark of God’s people from the first one to the last one. 

But what about this law business?  Is Paul saying that we should just cut out a few thousand years of moral history?  Should we pretend it never happened?  By going back to Abraham, are we going over Moses’ head, cutting out the middle man so to speak?  If Paul had his way would there never have been a law in the first place?  Some people think so.  Those people are very wrong.  Let’s read verses 10-14.  (Read Galatians 3:10-14) 

Let’s look closely at what Paul is saying.  It starts in verse 10.  He says, “All who rely on observing the Law are under a curse…”  Notice this: He doesn’t say that everyone who obeys the law is cursed.  He doesn’t say that circumcision is evil, that Sabbath rest is a bad thing, that the Ten Commandments are nothing more than elaborate paperweights.  The issue isn’t obedience, it’s reliance.  What do you rely on?  What defines you?  Who do you think you are?  Where do you find your identity, your life?  Is it in the law?  In the stuff you do?  Or is it in faith in the grace of God?  When push comes to shove, from where do you draw confidence that you are loved and accepted as part of God’s family?  Do you point to what you have done for God?  Or is it from believing God’s promise to you?  That question and answer are exceedingly relevant to us today. 

Here’s the thing.  Paul’s not saying anything that denies any part of Scripture or Law that has gone before.  Within the Law itself is this mechanism for cursing.  He paraphrases Deuteronomy – a book of Law – Deuteronomy 27:26 when he writes in verse 11: Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.  Translation:  If you can’t keep up with every single law in this thing, the ball game is over.  99% is a failing grade.  Clearly that’s impossible.  If that’s what you rely on to sustain a relationship with God, then you will fail.  The Law itself, by making this impossible demand, speaks to its own limitations.   

Then what’s the point of the Law?  Why did God give it in the first place?  We’ll answer that in more detail next week, but for now, remember that the Law came after 400 years of slavery.  The Law came when the fledgling nation of Israel was undergoing an identity crisis of its own.  It knew itself only as slaves.  It had no history but slave history.  It had no stories of freedom, of life outside of Egypt.  It knew of its God only as one God among the many Egypt provided as alternatives.  It knew only one system of economy, defense, social definition, judicial system, politics, etiquette, healthcare – it all came from Egypt.  The Law came to distinguish them from Egypt so they could become the free people of God.  And as such, the Law came as a warning, not as a demand.  The Law is about survival, not ritual obedience.  It’s about a tiny nation not being swallowed up and assimilated and thus disappearing into the dozens of larger nations surrounding it.  For the promise to be true, they had to survive (be blessed) long enough to bless the nations. 

The word curse is in specific juxtaposition with the word blessing.  The covenant with Abraham was all about blessing.  You will be blessed, and must remain blessed in order for the rest of the world to be blessed.  The Law warns about blessing’s opposite – curse.  And both blessing and curse are not simply moral states or future cosmic destinations like heaven and hell – they’re what happen in history.  Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are historical events that point toward another actual event yet to come – the renewal of creation.  In the same way, the curse isn’t some other-worldly punishment.  It’s the natural result of not living as unique people in relationship with God.  For Israel, it takes the forms of military defeat, exile, and re-descending into slavery. 

The Law is a warning sign on the mountain highway that says, “Curve ahead – slow to 45 miles per hour.”  Don’t follow it and you’ll be cursed.  Not because the Highway Patrol shoots you, but because you’ll smash through the guardrail and land 200 feet in the canyon below.  Exile is the exact opposite of Abraham’s blessing.  The blessing says that from this land, Abraham’s faith will extend into other nations.  The curse of the exile means that other nations will take your land and impose themselves and their ways upon Israel. 

And sure enough, when Israel failed to heed the warnings, what happened?  Exile.  Israel blew it.  This isn’t some anti-Semitic interpretation to blame Israel for being stupid. This is what Israel’s own prophets, like Jeremiah, saw coming, and lived through, and recorded for history.  But those same prophets also saw something else coming.  In the midst of the curse, when things were darkest, they saw hope.  They saw redemption.  Paul quotes one of them, Jeremiah’s contemporary Habakkuk, who said, “The righteous will live by faith.”  (Habakkuk 2:4)   

The ones who are set back right with God will live by faith.  Spirit-given faith will be their defining mark – more so than law or circumcision, or anything they could do on their own.  The prophets saw that the Law was not heeded, could not be heeded, would not save them from disaster and exile and so turned to God to discover that faith could do what the Law could not.  Faith could do what the Law was never intended to do.  They turned to God and learned that the curse the law spoke to could be redeemed.  God Himself was coming to set His people free. 

So Paul writes in verse 13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, by becoming a curse for us…”  (Galatians 3:13)  See, it all comes back to Jesus.  It always comes back to Jesus.  He arrives on the scene precisely when the curse is most intolerable.  He arrives when the ethnic children of Abraham have returned to the land of Abraham but are under the cruel thumb of the Romans.  And he undertakes the worst the Romans can do.  The cross is the ultimate symbol of the curse.  It’s the reminder that Israel is fallen and living beneath the curse.  His mode of death is not unique.  Thousands of Jews have been crucified.  The cross is the curse writ large over the skyline of Jerusalem. 

Because it is the form of death that best symbolizes the curse, Jesus becomes the curse.  And in doing so, he redeems it.  In verse 14 Paul says, “He redeemed us in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.”  (Galatians 3:14)  It’s like pushing the reset button on your Nintendo.  Jesus returns us all to the original promise.  The blessing of Abraham falls on all nations.  The curse is redeemed. 

Now, again, our problem today is not so much with the Law as a set of rules and warnings written in stone thousands of years ago.  Our problem is that we don’t believe like Abraham.  We hear God’s good news.  We hear about life, and freedom, and joy, and grace, and blessing and we don’t trust the promise.  We silence the voice of the Spirit that wants to give us faith.  We still try to live in ways that we think will create our own righteousness.  We still try to do things that we think will set our lives right, make us happy, satisfy our souls.  We try to justify ourselves in our own eyes, and can’t even succeed at that.  We like having no identity because if we really got to know ourselves we’d be so terribly disappointed.  We try to be good enough to achieve our own blessing, the life we’ve always wanted.  These are acts of Law and not acts of Faith.  These are acts of flesh and not acts of Spirit.  And every time we embrace Law and Flesh over Faith and Spirit we willingly place ourselves under a curse. 

Paul is saying to us: There is a cross that redeemed the curse.  There is a Spirit that allows us to believe.  And there is a Promise that has not changed one iota since the day it was given to our spiritual father, Abraham.  Who do you think you are?  You’re a child of Abraham.  You’re a child of the Promise.  Let’s pray.

Before I left on vacation, we had worked our way through two chapters of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Maybe it’s time for a quick review. If you’ll remember, the letter started off with none of Paul’s usual pleasantries. He opened with fire, saying, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting what you know to be true and instead are embracing lies. That kind of gets your attention. The people in Galatia were giving up the freedom they had been given in Christ and instead thought it might be better to just follow a bunch of rules instead. Frankly, that shocks Paul and he tells them so. Then Paul told his own story, in part to demonstrate the workings of grace in his own life, and in part to defend himself against the false charges and accusations his opponents in Galatia were making against him. At the end of chapter two he concludes that story by telling about his confrontation with Peter in Antioch, a confrontation over whether or not the gospel was really about grace, or if grace was just a fancy word that covered up the fact that the way to God was really still about being good enough, or religious enough, or moral enough, or successful enough, or something enough to deserve to be part of the family.

All those “somethings” can be summed up in one tidy word – Law. And Paul concludes his argument in the last verse of chapter 2 by saying, “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.” And he kind of lets those words ring out for a moment. If it’s about doing something – the law – instead of receiving something – grace – then Jesus served no purpose. That last phrase puts a harpoon through the way almost all of us, in our hearts, still approach our faith. It’s brutally harsh. The way you try to be faithful, the way I was taught to be faithful, makes a mockery of the death of Jesus. It’s a stinging indictment of our religious activity.

It’s upsetting. Paul’s own words seem to make him even more upset that he’s previously shown. It’s like he read what he just wrote and it enraged him. If there was even a hint of defensiveness in Paul’s telling of his own story, it’s gone now as we enter chapter 3. The idea that his Lord and Savior’s, suffering and death is mocked by people whose very life is a result of that suffering and death is intolerable. Starting in chapter 3, Paul is on the offensive. He’s coming right after them. He first insults them, and then he interrogates them. In rapid succession he fires five, maybe six questions at them in a row. This is Paul putting them in the witness room, closing the blind, shining the light in their eyes, and getting out the phone books and rubber hoses. He wants answers and we can do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s every stereotypical cop show you’ve ever seen. Let’s read it – the first five verses of chapter 3. (Read Galatians 3:1-5.)

He calls them foolish. That’s no mild reproach. That’s a vicious slap in the face. Jesus once said that anyone who calls someone a fool is in danger of the fires of hell. So you know that it’s serious, and you know that Paul, of all people, would take Jesus’ warning to heart and doesn’t use the word lightly. But he does use it. It’s the equivalent of saying, “You stupid, stupid Galatians.” Annie will tell you those are bad words in our house. Calling someone foolish is a bad word in early church.

And then the interrogation begins. Question one: Who bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus was clearly portrayed as crucified? The emphasis of this question is on the second part, not the first. Paul knows who led them astray. He knows all about them and what they’ve been saying. But Paul, in fact, doesn’t care who led them astray. The issue here is that they had been taught clearly by Paul about the death of Jesus. In other words, “Who could say anything to this group of people, my friends, who had the message of Jesus practically plastered up before them on billboards? They had it drawn out for them, illustrated, modeled. Who could possibly cause them to forget?” You read the book, took the class, saw the movie, and owned the action figures. I don’t care who it was, how persuasive they were, and what fantastic stories they told, in light of the teaching you received from me there is no excuse other than your own stupidity for diminishing the death of Jesus.

This first question is all about perspective. Paul knows and teaches that the cross of Jesus Christ is the fulcrum on which all history rests. It’s been called the “overwhelming fact of history.” Nothing more significant has ever happened. No battle, no war, no discovery, no invention, no document, no artistic achievement, and no natural occurrence can ever compare. It is the center point of all existence. A Christians sees all that came before, right back to before Creation, in light of the cross. The lamb was slain from the creation of the world. (Rev. 13:8.) A Christian sees all that will ever come to pass, right through to the new creation, in light of the cross. Paul’s question indicates that once you have seen clearly the truth of the cross of Jesus, everything else is placed in perspective.

What the Galatians were doing was treating the cross as a secondary issue and circumcision as a primary issue, and in doing so their entire perspective on life was thrown into confusion. While we don’t get so hung up on circumcision anymore, it takes no great leap of interpretation to replace the issue of circumcision with anything else, good or bad, that pushes the cross out from the center of our vision. The list of possibilities is endless. Are you poor? Is that more significant to global history, salvation history, or even your personal history than the fact that Jesus died to rescue creation? Are you sick? Is that more significant to global history, salvation history, or even your personal history than the fact that Jesus died to rescue creation? Are you well liked? Is that more significant to global history, salvation history, or even your personal history than the fact that Jesus died to rescue creation? Are you angry, tempted, popular, hurt, scared, high, successful, twisted, sinful? Is any of that more significant to global history, salvation history, or even your personal history than the fact that Jesus died to rescue creation?

We say no. We’d be stupid and foolish to say otherwise. But the plain truth is that these things all creep into the center of our lives until they’re all we see. We still love Jesus & believe in the cross, but it becomes secondary to these other things and they become all that defines us and as a result, without fail, our lives are thrown into confusion. We lose all perspective. And then we often try to control and contain it. If the overwhelming fact of my life is this thing – maybe I can hide it, ignore it, let it lie dormant, pretend it doesn’t exist for a while, use it only certain times, and things will be all right. But what invariably happens is that once the cross no longer provides our perspective, the rest of our lives fall into a jumbled confusion as well. And so when that happens, even if we seek help, we often just try to deal with symptoms rather than the cause of our distress. Paul says that’s foolish. The only answer to which every human life is the question is Jesus Christ crucified. Everything else falls into proper perspective, and can even be dealt with, once the perspective from the cross is restored.

Then Paul asks his second question. He just wants to know one thing: “Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law or by believing what you heard?” What’s the Spirit? Put simply, its God sharing His life within ours. Spirit is the gift of God – the gift of Himself – into our experience. Paul’s second question is an appeal to experience. It’s a call to reflection.

People who are healthy and free are able to reflect on their lives. They can look back at the good, like the arrival of the Spirit, and they can look back on the bad. They’re able to see how their experiences shaped them into who they are. By reflection, they learn who they are. We all get angry, but how many of us are able to later reflect on why we are angry? We do ourselves a disservice when the only reason we give for our anger is to blame someone else. That requires only reaction and not reflection. But reflection opens the door to change. It opens a window to let the bad air out and the fresh wind of the Spirit in.

When we can’t or won’t freely reflect, we turn to something else to define and explain who we are. The Galatians turned to circumcision. This is how we will know who we are. This is the mark that defines us in God’s family. We do the same. In our culture, the people who are often considered successful are the ones who are able to constantly “re-invent” themselves. (The one everyone always cites is Madonna: She’s a pop star, a techno queen, a pornographer, an actress, a Kabbalist, etc…) The problem with that is that we were not invented in the first place. We were created. We were made. And we were made good, just as the creator intended. And then we were shaped by some pretty rough hands and forces that have disfigured or marred or hidden some of that goodness. The answer is not to re-invent ourselves. To go from a fat kid to a health nut, a city boy to a country bumpkin, good girl to a rebel, a Mormon to a Hell’s Angel. The answer is to return to the Creator. He’ll give you a real change, a restoration into who He first made you to be.

Paul appeals to their experience. Remember and reflect on how you first received God’s life into yours. Was it by faith or by following rules? Was it by receiving the gift of conversion or by suddenly re-inventing yourself into a religious person? Reflect on how you got here. Remember the simplicity of faith. Identify and name the things that shaped you and drew you away from simple faith into the slavery of trying to be the creator of your own life, a role you can never satisfactorily fulfill. I can’t lie about it – Reflection isn’t easy and it can be painful. But the alternative always more miserable. It’s a lifetime of re-invention but never really knowing who you are. It’s also unnecessary and foolish.

Paul says so in his next questions: “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” Paul hits here on a favorite topic of mine. Logic. Reason. Common sense. He asks, “Are you that dumb? You received the greatest gift imaginable – the gift of God Himself – by just accepting Him. And now you’re trying to invent some sort of next step that’s only available if you’re really good. Are you that dumb?” Paul’s suggesting that they’re dumb on two levels. First of all they’re dumb for thinking that that there is a next step. They received the life of God. There is nothing else. There is no next step. There is nothing bigger, better, or badder. There are not Christians and then Super-Christians. There is not eternal life and then eternal life plus an extra year. What part of eternal is confusing? God is the end goal. He is the beginning and the end. (Alpha & Omega.)

Secondly, they’re dumb because they think that whatever this imaginary goal is, they can achieve it through trying harder, when any progress they’ve made so far towards God has been the result of receiving instead of earning. The only word for what they’re doing is dumb. Paul is saying, “Give your head a shake!”

A few years ago I went to lend moral support to a friend in traffic court. He felt he was innocent and had taken pictures, compiled evidence and prepared a vigorous defense. The judge took a look at the ticket, saw a mistake in the paperwork and before my friend could say a thing, dismissed the whole case. He won. No ticket, no fine, no record of wrong in any way. The judge sent him on his merry way. But my friend stayed. He wanted to show the judge his pictures. He wanted to present his case. He’d worked hard, and wanted to be vindicated on the facts, not a technicality. He started to argue his case. The judge looked up at him like he was nuts. “Son, you won.”

“Yeah, but….”

“But nothing. You’ve already won. Go home.”

It’s just common sense. You don’t need to fight when you’ve already won. That’s the idea here. Paul says, “Because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, you’ve got everything already within you that could ever satisfy. What more are you fighting for?” It’s just plain logic. But when our perspective is off, and we refuse to reflect on our lives, you’d be surprised how quickly common sense abandons us. I have found that the most important part of pastoral counseling is nothing more than to help people see common sense.

It’s to hold the truth repeatedly before them until they can see it.

“Pastor help me, I’m irrationally afraid of dogs and I don’t know why.”

“Tell, me, how did you lose your arm?”

“A dog chewed it off when I was four.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re afraid of dogs now.”

“Oh no, there’s no connection.”

“When did you start being afraid of dogs?”

“When I was about four.”

“When did a dog chew off your arm?”

“When I was four.”

“And you don’t see a connection?”

“…you lost me.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but replace dogs and arms with, marriages, addictions, sin, grace, principalities and powers, and theology and that’s the conversation I’ve had dozens of times. (I don’t blame people for it. We’re all able to see common sense for someone else before we see it for ourselves.) But Paul’s a better counselor than me because he’s not as nice as me. “Are you nuts?” is no longer considered a polite question for pastors to ask, but that’s what Paul wants to know here. It’s an appeal to common sense. The paradox of our time is that people want to feel better, but won’t accept the things that can make them feel better. Faith is never an easy answer, but it is the only answer that makes sense. In an age that attempts to put faith and reason in opposite corners, the wisdom of the Bible says that faith is the one thing that is reasonable. It’s common sense.

And it leads to Paul’s fourth question: “Have you suffered so much for nothing – if it really was for nothing?” The word “suffered” there is a little misleading. The question is really one of experience. Paul is asking something akin to “Have you gone through your whole life, all the ups and downs, all the good and bad experiences for nothing?” Have you learned nothing from the arc of your life? Presumably he’s specifically referring to spiritual experiences. Hasn’t every genuine moment of grace in your life come as a gift? Those times when God was so real, so close, so loving to you – did they come as a result of your technique, your dedication, your achievement? Did you impress God enough to make Him appear to you? Really? Didn’t you learn anything from that? Was it all for nothing? Haven’t you found that God works best in our lives when we get out of His way and let Him loose? Surely looking back on your life, this becomes abundantly clear.

And that takes us to Paul’s final question: “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” In the end, as it was in the beginning of your walk with God, it is all about gift. God gives His Spirit. The question is of course, rhetorical. God doesn’t reward your efforts with His Spirit, he gives Himself as we believe. The word “give” here is kind of unique. It’s not the standard Greek word for give. The word Paul uses here is epichoregeo. The root word is “chorus” the Greek for dance.

There are two ways to look at God. One is through the Law, where His presence means we need to guard every thought, every moment, every action in order to be worthy. That leaves us tired, angry, bitter, and defeated. The other is through Grace where His presence means we’re free to live life as an elaborate and joyful dance. There’s a pattern to this dance, but there’s also freedom to move where the music takes you. God has thrown an extravagant dance in your honor, and the name of the dance is “Your Life.” Dancing is exhilarating and exhausting, and joyful and complicated, and we do it because something moves us to a rhythm that takes us away. We’d be crazy to hear God’s music and ignore the dance. We’d be stupid. Foolish.

There’s a Biblical word to describe everything Paul is getting at in this interrogation. The word is “discernment.” Discernment incorporates the key elements of all five of Paul’s questions: living through the perspective of the cross, reflecting on our lives, seeing reason and common sense, making sense of our experiences, and receiving the invitation to the dance. Discernment means seeing through all the subterfuge to the reality of God. There are precious few discerning people in the church these days. The thing about discerning people is that they tend to see important things as minor and minor things as important. GK Chesterton once said that a saint exaggerates what the world neglects. Implied here is that a saint receives and develops the gift of discernment. You tell them huge news and they shrug and say, “Huh.” You let a minor detail slip and they remember it forever or act like you’ve said something life changing. They just see the world differently. At times when everyone else sees triumph, success, and fun and everybody is encouraging you congratulating you and slapping you on the back they tend to see danger, and the slow outworking of the spirit of death. They can be real downers that way. But when those same people who were slapping you on the back suddenly see confusion, failure, and despair and they start avoiding you because you’re bringing them down, the discerning person often sees hope, Resurrection, and the dance of the Spirit of Life. They can be true live saver then. When you meet people who are discerning it’s tough to know what to do with them. Like Paul, they’re the ones who ask the tough questions. They’re the ones who shine a light into the places we’d just as soon be left darkened.

But they’re the ones who take us to the one who can set us free. Paul is calling for more of us to receive and develop the gift of discernment; for more of us to see clearly and lead people to freedom. The discerning person doesn’t have much to work with. Their only tools are truth, and gratitude. They speak truth, and they never cease to demonstrate that before it is anything else, life is a gift. That’s why we listen to Paul. 2000 years after he writes to the Galatians, we listen as if he’s writing to us because the need for discernment is just as great. Paul has the gift of discernment. And he’s sharing it with us. We’d be fools not to listen. Let’s pray.

When I was a kid I collected comic books.  I know – it’s incredibly nerdy.  But judging from the box office success of some of this summer’s movies, I’m not the only one who likes superheroes.  There’s just something cool about them.  And so some of my friends and I collected comics.  And I remember that my friend Billy had one comic that I really envied.  He had this story where Superman and Batman fought each other.  I mean, they’re both good guys, so for them to get in a fight was really something.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but there was a disagreement of some sort and the fate of the world hung in the balance so they didn’t have time to work it out as adults and found it necessary to engage in a little hand to hand combat.  And on the surface you think, Superman wins, right?  He’s an alien with real superpowers and Batman’s just a well trained rich guy with gadgets and a sidekick.  But not so fast.  Batman was trained by the world’s best martial artists, including people like Ra’s al Ghul, and has ways of using your own strength against you so he is largely able to nullify Superman’s advantage.  As I recall, Batman actually gets the upper hand.  Anyway, none is this is really pertinent today except to say that as a kid this stuff was fascinating: Two superheroes, both of whom are trying to do the right thing, going toe-to-toe, and we get to quietly observe by turning the pages of a comic book in the comfort of our own home.

There’s a similar feel to that going on in the second chapter of Galatians here.  We’re observing two legends, two uber-apostles, the two heavyweights of the early church in a public showdown.  Peter has come from Jerusalem to visit Paul and when some other men from Jerusalem arrive shortly thereafter, Peter completely changes his behavior by disassociating himself from the Gentiles in Antioch.  Paul calls him on it.  In front of the men from Jerusalem, in front of the church in Antioch, and by committing the event to paper and telling the story in this letter, also in front of us and the people in Galatia.  We get to sit on the edge of our seats and turn the pages in this particular clash of the titans.

Paul says to Peter, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew.”  That’s not an accusation.  That’s a statement of fact.  And it’s a fact that Paul approves of.  Paul’s whole point is that in God’s family, through Jesus something new has begun that eliminates distinctions like clean and unclean, pure and impure, Jew and Gentile.  Peter has been living as if he really believes God has created something new in the church.  He’s a Jew that lives as a Gentile because he recognizes that in Christ God makes no distinction, even if most men do.  Then Paul says, “How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?” In other words, “Why with the arrival of these guys from Jerusalem are you living as if there are distinctions again?  And not just distinctions but hierarchies and favoritism.  Why, by your actions, are you insisting to the Gentiles that they are second class citizens in God’s kingdom and will remain so unless they convert first to Judaism and then to Christianity?”

That’s obviously a rhetorical question because before Peter can attempt to answer, Paul launches into a speech.  Now, before we read it, it’s important to keep in mind that Paul is relaying the story of an argument that is several years old.  And he’s telling this story to the Galatians not for their entertainment but for a greater purpose.  So it’s difficult to tell here between what Paul actually said to Peter and what he may not have actually said but only had as part of his thought process which he wants to communicate to the Galatians.  It’s like having an argument at work and then telling your wife about it later at home.  The point is not to recapture every word said verbatim but to communicate the two positions and why you’re right.  When you tell the story later you’re no longer in the heat of the moment and so you’re more able to articulate your arguments and put a nice polish on things so that your wife will shake her head and say, “After all that Mr. Johnson wasn’t convinced?  Oh honey, you work with lunatics.”

Paul isn’t playing a tape recording – he’s remembering a conflict.  I mean it’s possible that all these many years later Paul remembers every word exactly as he spoke it that day, but it’s more likely that the story of the argument is used as an illustration to get a point across to the Galatians.  Paul’s words to Peter sound less like a heated confrontation and more like a pretty well thought out and dense theological reflection on the situation in the Galatian church.  It’s as if he’s saying to the people in Galatia, “This story is relevant to you because the same issue that was settled then is at stake here now in your church.”

So let’s read Paul’s speech:  (Read Galatians 2:15-21)

Like I said, it’s a pretty densely theological passage that sounds less like conversation, and more like teaching.  And this is probably one of those passages that if you’re reading through Galatians you’re likely to get lost in and just kind of breeze through looking ahead for something that’s easier to understand and instantly apply to your life.  That would be a mistake.  This is where Paul really begins to transition into the heart of his letter.  This is where he gets into his main arguments and assertions about freedom.  Instead of skipping the theology to get to the practical stuff, we need to realize that this is the practical stuff.  This is the stuff that is intended to shape our practices – the every definition of practical.  It’s intended to show us how to be in the world and therefore how to be free in the world.  It’s not easy, but it is rewarding.

So when we’re faced with a challenging passage like this, the best thing to do is to start by figuring out in general what it is that we’re talking about.  In this case, the basic issue here is one of identity.  We said last week that Peter has forgotten who he is.  He forgot his new life in Christ.  He was set free to live beyond cultural distinctions, and then forgot that he was enjoying living that way and so he regressed right back to former ways of living.  It’s what we do.  Lately, when I look around at our church it’s as if it’s on cue.  With this story fresh in mind, I see many of us in large and small ways ignoring how we’ve changed and reverting back to ways of looking at life that I thought we’d left behind.

Paul is insisting that there is a new people in Jesus.  There is a new family that has been created.  According to Jesus it is your primary family, even undoing the ties to your blood family if those ties are restricting you from free life in the kingdom.  And so, because it is a new family and a new world, you have to begin from scratch to learn who you are.  That’s why Jesus’ famous metaphor is so helpful.  He says it’s as though you have to be born again.  You are in a new family and a new reality.  You have to re-learn the way life works.  That’s hard, no one is denying that, but it’s not impossible.  People can do this.  People do things like this all the time.  Think of a refugee from a third-world country under an oppressive dictator who miraculously manages to make it to America.  They have to learn how to be here.  They have to figure out who they are in this strange country with its strange freedoms.  They need to learn that there’s no need to hoard food.  There’s no need to panic every time you see a policeman.  It takes time to learn how to be.  Think of an abused six year old removed from her hateful parents and adopted by a loving family.  She has to learn how to be in her new surroundings.  She has to learn who she is in this strange setting where love is freely given and pain at the hands of adults isn’t an everyday given occurrence.  She has to learn that human touch is a good thing, that her presence is actually appreciated.  It takes time for love to undo what hate instilled.  People can adapt.  Less positively, think of the 78 year old man whose wife of 56 years just passed away.  He has to figure out how to be in this suddenly lonely world.  He has to figure out who he is now that half of his life is gone and there is no one to cook, clean, talk to, and share life with.  He must begin the difficult task of starting over.  Some people can’t adapt to that situation, and their life quickly fades away.  But some people do.  None of these situations is easy, but people do adapt.  People do change.  People do re-learn how life works.  People do start over again from scratch and learn who they are.

The gospel insists on it.  “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone the new has come!”  (1 Cor. 5:17)  To be a Christian is to acknowledge that you have begun the process of starting over again.  And that’s what this difficult passage is about.  That’s the issue being dealt with here.  Identity.  And now that we’ve determined the issue, because the passage is still fairly dense, the next thing to do is break it down into phrases, because if we can understand the phrases, we can put them together and understand the whole.  (We’re following the approach of E. Peterson in Traveling Light here.)

The first phrase sets the audience.  Paul writes (or presumably says to Peter), “We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners…” Paul is addressing Peter, who was born Jewish, and through this story, really is addressing those Christians in the Galatian church who were also born Jewish.  The issue isn’t with the Gentiles.  It’s with the Jews who take the attitude that Gentiles are inferior, are in fact sinners, simply because they are not Jews.  This passage is addressed to people who have been born a certain way and think that way is sufficient and is in no need of conversion.  It’s addressed to those who like to think their way of looking at life and actually living is superior to a sinner’s – or at least those who they would define as sinners.

The second phrase sets the circumstance.  Paul says, “[We Jews] know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus.” The word justified is a fancy way of saying “made right” or “put back together the way we’re supposed to be.”  The Bible makes clear that we’re born into corruption.  The theologians call this “The Fall” which, among more cosmic concerns, also means that every one of us is fallen from who we are supposed to be.  Justification means that we are restored to who we are; who we were created to be.  And the fact that we were created means that there is a Creator who the Bible insists made us to be in communion with Him and with each other.

That happens by faith.  Faith is the ultimate expression of relationship.  Justification is not something we do for ourselves.  It is done for us and to us, but faith is our way of voluntarily participating in the process.  Justification does not happen against our will, so faith is a turning of our will back to God.  So the circumstance in this passage is that we are not made right by observing rules or outward distinctions; we are made right by faith.  Paul is saying this to the Jewish Christians and reminding them that they already know this, because in the very act of calling themselves Christians they have acknowledged faith.  He is saying that they know this better than anyone because they’ve tried it the other way.  They are a people who lived by the greatest system of rules for living that the world had ever seen or will ever see.  And the Jewish Christians he is addressing, from Peter on down to the Galatians, are the ones who realized that no person can ever justify himself by following this system of rules, no person can ever earn God’s approval through self-improvement, and no person can ever be converted by being good.  They know this because in the act of becoming Christians they rejected that approach in favor of faith in Jesus.  Christianity is both a rejection and an embrace.  It’s rejecting one way of being in order to embrace God’s way of being.  Some people think they can embrace God without rejecting anything, like God is just an add-on to their life, the cherry on top.  Paul is reminding these Jews that they rejected their former life because they recognized that no matter how hard they tried to justify themselves, none of them ever felt like they were living as the people they were made to be.  None of them knew who they really were, and just kept trying harder and harder to be someone they weren’t.  In Paul’s words, “no one” was ever made right.  If we don’t see a reflection of ourselves in this, we’re not being honest.

And that brings us to our third phrase which corrects the misconception.  Paul writes, “…it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners…” You think the Gentiles are sinners.  We are sinners in the exact same way.  We know the situation in Antioch.  Some people come from Jerusalem and think Paul and Peter are horrible sinners for eating with Gentiles.  And we can assume from what we know of the background in the Galatian church that Paul’s opponents are also whispering that Paul is a sinner who shouldn’t be trusted because his life doesn’t match their high standards.  But check Paul’s reaction to being called a sinner: “Uh…. Yeah.  Of course I’m a sinner.  Aren’t we all?”  There is no hint of embarrassment.  He says it’s evident; it’s obvious that he’s a sinner.  Paul takes a label that was meant as an attack and he wears it proudly.  He’s not proud of sin but it’s as if he’s saying that the difference between them and him is that he knows he’s a sinner and that’s why he lets everything hang on grace.

The only thing Paul takes exception to is the suggestion that some people are making that if Paul and Jesus are so tight, and Paul is obviously a sinner, then surely Jesus must be an accessory to sin.  Paul nips that in the bud real quick.  “Absolutely not!” It’s as if he’s saying, “Oh so you’ve noticed that I still sin even though I claim to be letting Jesus justify me?  And you think this somehow undermines my whole position?  It’s the opposite.  It confirms what I’ve been saying.  I’m not trying to fix my own life by being good, or acting better than I am.  I know I’m a sinner.  I’m relying on Jesus to change me.  He can only change me if he is without sin.”

Think about how free Paul is when he talks like this. He’s not trying to impress anybody.  He’s not trying to hide his past.  He can be completely open about who he is, what he’s done, the thoughts in his head, the feelings in his soul.  He doesn’t hide his dysfunction, doesn’t put on a show, doesn’t keep up appearances, doesn’t pretend to be healthier, more presentable, more “normal” than he is.  He has no one to blame, no excuses to give, no complaints of victimization.  He just says, “This is me.  I accept me.  Jesus accepts me.  You might not, but the people in Jesus’ kingdom will.  My new family will.  That’s part of faith.”

Faith isn’t just believing that Jesus died and rose again.  It’s the courage to live in the open.  It’s the courage to trust Jesus and the people in his family.  That takes guts.  But why should we trust other people who are obviously as frail as we are and just as likely to not accept us if we dared to let our guards down?  Well that brings us to the next phrase, a phrase that provides the way out and the way in.  Like Paul, the people in Christ’s family have been “crucified with Christ.”  If Christianity is a rejection and an embrace, there is only one way to reject the corrupted world.  There’s no other way of escaping this fallen world.  There’s no way out but one.  You have to die.  Paul says he is crucified with Christ, co-crucified alongside his maker, meaning he dies to the way of the world in order to be resurrected, re-created, born again and anew into another world of embrace.  He says, “I no longer live.” At the risk of stating the obvious, he means he is dead.  The guy that was born corrupted, fallen from who he was made to be, incapable of ever being truly free or happy – that guy is dead; imaginatively, symbolically, mysteriously, miraculously nailed to the cross with Jesus.  In his place is the resurrected Jesus.  “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Again, that means I let it all ride on Jesus.  I’m going to live by faith in Jesus.  I’m going to believe him when he tells me I’m loved.  I’m going to trust that there is a community of people who have also died and been resurrected in Christ who can accept me exactly for who I am.  I’m going to receive grace without obligation.  I’m going to count on forgiveness.  I’m going to choose to believe that in all my ugliness I will be embraced.  I’m a sinner.  I can do no other.

And that brings us to our final phrase, which defines the space in which we live.  It all happens within “the grace of God.”  Paul says, “I do not set aside the grace of God.”  Our new lives function within the realm of grace.  Grace means gift.  We learn to approach life not as those who earn, or worse, as those who take, but as those who receive.  The longer I serve the church the more I realize just how terrible we all are at receiving.  We don’t like to receive because it reminds us that we have needs we cannot meet on our own.  We would rather ignore our needs, not deal with them, pretend they don’t exist than admit that we are helplessly lost and cannot save ourselves.  So we set aside grace.  Paul takes the opposite approach.  He says, “I’m a sinner.  That means I am hopelessly lost with no chance of ever being made right again.  But that isn’t something to be hidden in shame.  It’s something to be embraced and claimed.”  This attitude of Paul’s exemplifies perfectly what Jesus was talking about when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)  This is the same Paul who elsewhere says, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” (2 Cor.11:30)

Paul’s free to show the world his cards, even when he’s holding a losing hand.  Why?  Because he lives in a world defined by the grace of God.  He has learned to receive.  He receives help.  He’s not ashamed of it.  His life comes as gift to him.  Why?  Because he’s died to it and received it back.  It’s no longer him that lives, it’s Jesus.  Otherwise, and don’t miss the shocking truth of this phrase, Christ died for nothing.  If Paul cannot admit his weakness then Jesus died for nothing.  If Paul continues to live in a world without grace then Christ died for nothing.  If there is any real and lasting benefit to pretending to the world that we are better than we are, inventing excuses and alibis, playing roles and putting on shows, striving to justify ourselves, not dealing in the truth about who we are, then Christ died for nothing.  That thought is unthinkable to Paul.

Paul is asking for these Jewish Christians to make the same rejection and embrace that he has made.  He is asking them to reject their old identity and put on their new one.  We Jews do not find our identity as God’s people through the things that mark us out as distinctive or exceptional; we find it in the crucified Christ.  We don’t find it through our family, our background, our history, our achievements, our resume, our likeability, our worthiness, our healthiness, or our strength.  We reject all of that as a means of becoming who we are.  We discover and remember who we are in the weakness required to accept the grace offered in the cross of Jesus.  And that sets us free.  That sets us free to be embraced by our maker.  That sets us free to be embraced by our new family.  And Paul says to Peter, to the Jews in Antioch, to the church in Galatia, and most certainly to you and me today, “Don’t go back… Don’t go back.  You’ve got so much to explore and learn here.  You’ve been born again.  Your life – your real life – is just beginning.  It’s undiscovered country.  Let’s explore it together.”  Let’s pray.

So far in this letter that Paul writes to his protégés in the Galatian churches he has greeted them, expressed his astonishment that they would trade in the good news he gave them for bad news somebody else gave them, and then he suddenly switched into storytelling mode. He started by telling them the story of his conversion and then in what we read last week he told them the story of how after fourteen years of preaching he went to Jerusalem to establish that his gospel to the Gentiles was one and the same as the Gospel the Jerusalem apostles were preaching to the Jews. He left Jerusalem with the understanding that they were all one church, with one gospel, and one purpose under Jesus.

And now we come to the next installment of the story. Let’s pick it up right where we left off and read Galatians 2:11-14. (Read)

After the Jerusalem trip Paul goes back to his home church in Antioch. We might need a little refresher in history here. You’ll remember that Antioch was a church started following the persecution in Jerusalem that was kicked off when Stephen was stoned to death. Paul was there at that stoning, at that time still acting as one of the conspirators against the church. As the members of the church fled Jerusalem, some of them settled in Antioch and told the people there about Jesus. Antioch was unique for a few reasons. First of all, it was the place where followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” Second, it was a place, maybe the first place, where Jews and Gentiles were all together in the same church. If Jerusalem could be seen as the mother church, Antioch could be seen as the model church. It showed far better than Jerusalem what the inclusive nature of God’s family would be.

When Antioch was first started the leaders in Jerusalem heard about this “Jews and Gentiles together thing” and sent Barnabas up there to check it all out. Barnabas took a look around, saw that God’s grace was at work, and then thought, “By the grace of God these people have started this incredible grassroots movement of Jesus here. I don’t want to mess it up. They need leaders and teachers, but not from Jerusalem. There’s something special going on here and we don’t want to turn it into a cookie cutter Jerusalem church. We need someone from the outside.” And then he thinks of Paul. Paul’s an outsider. He’s not completely trusted by Jerusalem, mostly because they remember him as Saul, the persecutor of the Jerusalem church. So Barnabas goes and finds Paul in Tarsus and brings him back to Antioch to give him his first teaching gig. This is all water under the bridge that Paul doesn’t get into in his letter to the Galatians. It’s the very start of Paul’s ministry. The point is that Antioch became Paul’s home church and the staging ground for his missionary journeys. This is the church that sent him out as an apostle to the Gentiles. This is the church that sent him off to the province of Galatia in the first place. So in our story as told to the Galatians, this is the church that Paul and Barnabas and presumably Titus return to after the Jerusalem visit we read about last week. They go back to their home church after receiving the right hand of fellowship from Jerusalem.

And then one day Peter comes for a visit. Peter and Paul know each other well by now. As we read in chapter one, before Paul ever started preaching, likely before Barnabas even brought him to Antioch, he visited with Peter and they swapped stories and shot the breeze. He’s just been with Peter in Jerusalem under more official conditions, and Peter and the others gave him the right hand of fellowship and heartily endorsed Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles. So it’s only natural that Peter takes a little vacation to Antioch to hang with his old buddy Paul.

And it goes great. They all hang out, fellowshipping, worshipping, eating together. The stories fly around and a good time is had by all. And then one day these other guys from Jerusalem show up. It says that came from James, but that doesn’t mean he sent them. It could be like if you went to visit another church in our conference and the pastors there were like, “They’re from Brose’s church.” You could act like total jerks and I suppose it would reflect on me, but it’s another matter to assume that I sent you there to act that way.

These are guys that are from James’ circle and if they’re the same guys James refers to in Acts 15, they went out without authorization. James seems to regret the unfortunate association they have with him. But in any case, Peter sees these guys and the party ends. All of a sudden he’s a different guy. He pulls back from the Gentiles. He won’t eat with them even though he had been previously. And then the other Jews start noticing Peter’s behavior. And they figure since Peter is universally seen as one of the leaders, if not the leader in the church, then he must be on to something and so they start distancing themselves. Even Barnabas, who’s been a fixture in Antioch for some time, pulls back from the Gentiles. In Antioch, where they’ve always just assumed that it was normal and natural to be part of one big happy family gathered around the dinner table, suddenly there are two separate tables.

Imagine a high school with no cliques or social distinctions. In the cafeteria nerds eat with jocks. Stoners eat with band geeks. And then one day an all-district quarterback transfers to this school. Everybody knows he’s special, and his talent has people whispering about a state championship. He walks in to the cafeteria and sneers at the freshman from the drama club who has his retainer sitting beside the fruit snacks on his tray. The freshman scurries off and the QB sits down. Pretty soon a running back comes and sits beside him. A sophomore from the audio visual club joins them and then a linebacker comes up behind him and informs him that this seat is taken and unless you want to spend third period stuffed in a locker you’ll have to sit over there. Football players only. Meanwhile the captain of the cheerleading squad notices this rapidly developing social order and thinks, “Hey, it’s not just the football players that are special. We’re special too. Pretty girls shouldn’t have to sit with the plain ones.” And so she begins her own table. And so it goes, and you can see how one person of influence can radically de-construct a community that was previously functioning just fine. In high school it always plays out around the table or in the cafeteria, because it’s the place where you’re most free. You can’t always choose your classmates or your lab partner, but you can always choose who to eat lunch with and so the pretty girl who just flirted so she could cheat off the geek in chemistry class won’t even look at him in the lunchroom. Meals are socially defining.

Now, once we get out of high school it’s not quite the same so it’s hard for us to grasp how serious a matter table-fellowship was in the early church. That’s because the way we eat has changed so radically. Our modern approach to meals is more mechanical than social. We tend to view them as necessary and functional. In Bible times, they were social and political – like in high school. In those days there was no such thing as fast food or “convenience” stores. Meals were always inconvenient in that they took time and therefore they took on significance and purpose. Meals needed to be prepared, shared over conversation, and cleaned up communally. That’s not longer the case. We live in an age when meals are often pre-prepared; less than a third of all meals in the home are made from scratch. I’m convinced that nobody has ever shared a meaningful conversation over a Hot Pocket. And that’s if we even eat at home. Nineteen percent of all food eaten in America is consumed in a car. Back at home the number of meals eaten in front of a television is shocking, and the number of families who share meals around a table is shrinking every year. The link between the breakdown of the family and of communities to the breakdown in the significance of meals and of table-fellowship is astoundingly clear and direct. Sociologists, nutritionists, anthropologists, and anyone else who cares to look into these things are almost in universal agreement on this. There may be no better way for Christians today to become counter-cultural than recovering the practice of table-fellowship. We forget that every major Christian holiday began as a feast. There may be no more holy and subversive act for a Christian family today than to say, “We don’t care what practices, classes, or events are scheduled, we are sitting down around this table and sharing a meal together.” Intentional meals bind us together, and in ancient times even more so. They were wild acts of rebellion against the dominant culture and social order.

So who you ate with was everything. Nearly every gospel story of Jesus where people were scandalized by his behavior revolves around a meal. The parables and stories he told that troubled people the most involved meals. The best and clearest way Jesus could show the world that he was inaugurating a new kind of kingdom, a new social, political, and spiritual order was to subvert the way in which people ate their meals. Following his lead, the early church found that the very place to define who they were was around a table. They conceived of Agape Meals or Love Feasts because they knew that nothing could make a finer statement to the world that “this is who we are” than the sharing of a meal between people who ordinarily would not be seated across a table from one another. We eat with one another because we love one another. So what Peter is doing here is not just rude and annoyingly inconsistent- it cuts to the very heart of the gospel. In Paul’s words, “he was clearly in the wrong.” Also in Paul’s words, “they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel.” The gospel says that you are free to just be; to love, to be part of a family, a social order that is new and inclusive and based upon grace and love. Saying, “I’m not eating with you” is not true to that.

Now this little story brings up a lot of questions in my mind. The first and most obvious question is, “Why is Peter such a schmuck?” This is Peter – the Rock that Jesus said he would build his church upon. As we review the book of Acts we remember that this is the guy who fearlessly preached the first Christian sermon at Pentecost to thousands of people. This is the guy who was dragged before the Sanhedrin and dazzled them with his courage even in the face of prison or bodily harm. This is the guy who oversaw the punishment for Ananias and Sapphira – for what? For being insincere and acting as though they were something they weren’t. What does Paul accuse him of? Being insincere and acting like something he isn’t. Clearly he knows better.

Most pertinently to this situation, this is Peter, the guy who received a vision from God which led him to believe that nothing God made could be considered unclean. This vision led him to the house of Cornelius the Gentile, where he witnessed the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the uncircumcised. When he gets back to Jerusalem, the first question the church asks him is, “What are you doing in the home of a Gentile, and why would you eat with him?” Peter is the guy who first boldly said to the church, “God wants Gentiles in his family and who am I to oppose?”

So why now, after all of that, does he fear these men from James? The only answer I can come up with is this: Even leaders forget who they are sometimes. We all do. Peter has spent his whole life believing Jews are from Mars and Gentiles are from Venus. There is just nothing the two have in common. He was raised to disregard, distrust, and dislike Gentiles. Even the name Gentile speaks to the Jewish attitude. The word just means “nations” as in, there are Jews and then there are the nations, or everybody else. What they are doesn’t matter – that they’re not Jews is all we care about. When it comes to Gentiles, his world has conditioned him to feel, think, and react in a certain way, and that way is revulsion and withdrawal. Like the cheerleader being asked to the prom by a Goth kid in eyeliner and a trench coat. They just don’t associate.

But Peter had a conversion experience in which he learned to start seeing the world in a different way. It started when he met Jesus but it didn’t end there. He continued to be converted and even after Jesus had ascended the process went on. And so when he has his moment of epiphany about clean and unclean it is revolutionary to him. And he didn’t just believe it in his head, he acted on it. He ate with Cornelius, and the meal certainly wasn’t kosher. And then flush with the exhilaration of a new worldview, he stood up for what he now knew as the truth. He led others into the truth. But here’s the problem: Peter’s life changed. The world didn’t. And Peter’s world was still one which emphasized at every turn that Jews and Gentiles could not co-exist as equals. Peter’s world was still one which told him at every turn that right and wrong, in and out, good and bad, the Sharks and the Jets the Montagues and the Capulets was based upon human circumstance and behavior rather than the grace and love of God. Jesus called Peter to live in the kingdom while the rest of the world still lived in the world, and didn’t believe in the kingdom. He did so and he was genuinely changed – it’s just that the way of Jesus is so countercultural that to truly be in Christ is to be constantly swimming upstream against the cultural currents. And the minute we rely on human effort rather than grace we’re in trouble. Those currents are powerful – Paul calls them “the principalities and powers of this dark world” – and they sweep us away back into the mainstream and we forget who we are in Christ.

It happens when we least expect it. It happens in moments of surprise, or tension, or potential embarrassment. It happens when things are going well and when we’re barely scraping by. These guys showed up just as Peter was sitting at the table with a bunch of Gentiles. He was laughing and joking around and he just about to plop a nice juicy bit of ham into his mouth when suddenly the table got real quiet. He looked up and saw three old-school, ultra-conservative, dyed-in-the-wool disciples of James who were horrified at what they saw. And suddenly Peter felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar ten minutes before dinner.

Suddenly he forgot all about the fellowship and community he had been experiencing and grew instantly self-conscious and insecure instead. Self-consciousness and insecurity have always been Peter’s problems. This was the guy who kept his eyes on Jesus and walked on water till he started thinking about the wind and the personal danger and started to sink. He started thinking, “Wait a minute. I’m like everybody else. I can’t walk on water. It doesn’t matter that Jesus says I can. It doesn’t matter that I actually have done it and am currently doing it. Humans can’t walk on water.” And so he sank.

And in Antioch he sinks back into hardened, pre-conversion categories. He gives up his freedom. It happened the minute he grew self-conscious instead of God conscious and insecure instead of secure in grace. And that’s how it happens for all of us. Before we even know its happening, we trade in our grace given freedom for a way of looking at the world we know is inferior and incomplete. One person looks at us funny, one comment is relayed to us, one eyebrow is raised and we forget who we and what we’ve done and what has been done for us to grant us a new life in a new world. Instead we just fall back and accept the world we’ve always known.

And where does it show up? At the table. That’s where Peter drew his line in the sand. It was at the table. All our insecurities show up at the table. And as this table, the one we call The Lord’s Table, is one of the few intentional meals we have left to us, it is here that our insecurities arise and must be met and dealt with by grace. Unfortunately, we were taught certain table manners and it sure is tough to get past them. We were taught to “examine ourselves” at this table and we’ve misunderstood that to mean that this is a time for extreme self-consciousness. But it’s not. The table is the place for extreme Christ-consciousness. It’s the time for kingdom consciousness. It’s the time for family consciousness. Participating in this meal is a social, political, spiritual act that cannot be done alone and will not stand for any division, separation, or falsehood.

This meal tells us forgetful people exactly who we are. It says: You are Christians. You were first called that at Antioch where God’s family dared to come together in a way the world could not previously imagine. And when somebody, even somebody as great at Peter, thought that a meal for God’s people was subject to the rules of the world, he was clearly judged to be in the wrong. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t eat in an unworthy manner that puts the focus on yourself, or on what others are thinking, or on how you stack up, or on anything but the love of Jesus. Remember who you are. You’re chosen to be part of God’s beloved family. You’re chosen to be part of His kingdom. You have been converted. You are being converted. You are citizens of a kingdom that is beyond what the world knows. The world cannot imagine that everyone in this room is equal, worthy, made holy, pure and right in the deepest places of their hearts. This meal imagines we are. The world cannot imagine that a group this large can truly accept one another, love one another, and genuinely care for one another. This meal imagines we can. The world cannot imagine a setting where people are valued just for being human, instead of for their functions or virtues. This meal imagines that its table is just such a setting. This meal imagines that this table is a vast banquet that stretches back to before time began and beyond time’s end and that all are welcome, fed, and honored here by our host.

Anything less is clearly in the wrong. Anything less is not in line with the truth of the gospel. Let’s pray.

We’re in our fourth week of Galatians, so how about a quick review of the facts?

Fact: Paul is writing a letter to the churches in Galatia because they are willingly giving up the freedom they were given in Jesus.  Paul knows they were given this freedom because it was Paul himself who shared this good news with them.

Fact: There are people whispering in the Galatians’ ear that they are not free to change and that they never should have listened to Paul in the first place because he is a second-rate apostle who has second-hand knowledge of what the Gospel is all about.

Fact: Paul insists that human beings are always free to change and to keep changing because the grace that is the agent for real change comes from Jesus and is therefore outside the closed systems of this world and is preparing us for another world now available through Christ.  The capacity for radical change is an ongoing process of grace known as conversion.

Fact: So far in this letter Paul lays out his case for conversion by telling the Galatians his personal story which includes receiving first-hand the good news directly by revelation from Jesus.

Fact: We heard the first part of Paul’s story last week.  So now we’ll read the second part.  (Read Galatians 2:1-5)

Fourteen years have passed.  Where we stopped last week, Paul was saying that he was off to tell God’s story and that people seemed to respond to the changes in his life by praising God.  And now fourteen years have passed. Fourteen years of preaching and living the good news that Jesus can make us fit for a completely other world than the one we have always known.

And after fourteen years suddenly Paul decides – or rather responds to a revelation of some sort – that he should head back to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus.  He says he goes to “set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles.”  This is good stuff.  Paul’s been doing his thing for fourteen years and then decides, seemingly on a whim, to go see if the boys downtown are okay with it.  He says that he does it privately, “with those who seemed to be leaders,” essentially because he’s afraid they’re going to tell him he’s been wasting his time.  He’s afraid that he’s going to say, “Look, this is what I’ve been saying, and this is who I’ve been saying it to” and they’re going to look at him and absolutely freak out, so he’d just as soon avoid a public scene.  He’s afraid that the last fourteen years of his life are going to evaluated and rejected.  His life and his work are so intertwined that the rejection of one is surely the rejection of the other.  His whole being is about to be put on trial.

This is what he’s up against.  So you’d think that he would be awful careful about how he presents himself.  You’d think that he’d put his best foot forward; he’d take precautions to make sure that he accentuated the positive and downplayed those things that might be found controversial.  The stakes are that high for him.

But with everything on the line, he takes Titus with him.  Now Titus is a good kid; he means well and we all accept him for who he is – he’s just not exactly the guy you want to take with you to Jerusalem when your whole ministry is on the line.  He’s a Greek, a Gentile.  See, the issue is that Paul has gone and taken the Gospel to the Gentiles.  Nobody’s ever done that.  Nobody’s even sure that’s okay.  Most of these people he’s going to see wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a Gentile, let alone worshipping, praying, and eating with one.  And now here Paul is, in the heart of Jewish territory – in Jerusalem itself – trying to explain his actions and standing right beside him is a man who almost nobody else in the room would even share a sandwich with.  It’s scandalous.  It’s shockingly in your face.  It’s like going to a job interview and lighting up a doobie – not likely to make a good impression.

But let’s not forget that Paul isn’t some billiard ball of a man who gets bounced around by circumstance and let’s life dictate his decisions for him.  Paul knows what he’s doing.  This isn’t an oversight or some tactical error.  Paul admits it here – it’s a calculated move.  Paul is defiant.  He acknowledges what is on the line and says in spite of all that – the word he uses is “yet” – yet even with everything at stake Titus is with him in all his uncircumcised Gentile glory.  See, Paul isn’t going there to seek advice or try to square his version of the gospel up with theirs.  He’s beyond that.  He’s fourteen years too late for that.  He’s saying, “Here it is.  Love it or leave it.  Either accept it as the same gospel that’s coming out of Jerusalem or reject it – in either case it is what it is and it came from the God who says I AM THAT I AM, and I ain’t changing a word of it.”

He’s gonna stare them down and see who blinks.  And as he writes this story to the Galatians, Paul gets emotional here.  The writing here is messy and grammatically poor – quite unlike the Paul we’re used to.  Sentences trail off and you get the feeling he’s remembering this story and writing as fast as he can but his emotions and his stream of consciousness outrun his pen or maybe his scribe.  If you look in your Bible you can see that the first few words of verse four – “this matter arose” – are in parentheses and that’s because they’re not actually there.  In the Greek the previous sentence just trails off and the next sentence sort of begins with these radical accusations of false brothers and espionage so the translators decided to make an editorial decision to help us make sense of the passage.  And again, like most editorializing of the Bible, it’s not helpful.  This passage is much more raw than we’re allowed to experience it in the NIV.  It’s unchecked passion that Paul shows here.

We tend to forget the humanity of the Bible.  Paul is like a jilted lover writing an angry letter to his ex he still loves: “He’s no good for you baby!”  So let me try to communicate the tone of these verses:  The Galatians believe these people who tell them that non-Jews need to be circumcised if they want to be part of God’s family.  That makes Paul mad.  Because Paul is saying that nobody in leadership in Jerusalem required Titus to be circumcised even though he’s not a Jew… (dot dot dot, angry pause, maybe a growl) Grrrr… but these bogus brothers, these pseudo-Christians, these fake-believers, these religious posers, snuck in the back door like a bunch of peeping Tom, lookie-loo, nosey-Parkers, just because they wanted to sneer at our Jesus-given freedom and send us all back to slavery.  (Spit on the ground at the very mention of it.)

So listen up, Galatians.  In that setting, under attack and with everything on the line, we didn’t give them the time of day, because we were thinking of you.  Oh sure, we hadn’t met yet.  But right then and there it was about truth or lies.  If ever there was a decisive moment for the unadulterated truth of the good news – that was it.  We risked everything to stand for the truth, so that people like you could be set free by it.

So you see, Galatians, Crosswalkers, it is a particularly big deal to me that you have decided to reject the very freedom I risked everything to bring you and have instead embraced a false gospel given to you by a bunch of fakers and phonies who want nothing more than to put you in religious leg irons and ship you to the colonies.  Get it?

He’s angry.  I hope I’m conveying some of Paul’s righteous indignation here.  He has blustered his way through to make two points clear to the Galatians.

Point one:  He didn’t go to Jerusalem to learn the Gospel; he already knew it.  He didn’t receive it from any man.  He went because through a revelation God told him to, presumably to establish and maintain the continuity and unity of the gospel he preached and the gospel they preached as one and the same.  So those people in Galatia who are convinced he’s a second-rate apostle with a second-hand gospel can go take a hike.

Point two: The apostles in Jerusalem were in agreement with him and did not require or “compel” Titus to be circumcised, but some people, who in Paul’s opinion are not even real Christians, decided to make an issue of it.  And Paul told them to go take a hike because if Jesus is Lord of All then all are welcome regardless of race or nationality, and you would think that since the issue was settled once and for all back then, the Galatians wouldn’t be struggling so much with it today.

And not just the Galatians, but us as well.  Now, for the most part, our issues here aren’t ones of race or nationality.  Sure, I’d like to see some more color around here, but I don’t think anyone here is actively trying to keep us monochromatic.  But at its heart the issue is one of pre-conditions and expectations.  Paul wants the Galatians to realize the good news that they are free from pre-conditions and expectations.  And pre-conditions and expectations are two things that have certainly been known to rear their un-gospelized heads around here.

Let’s deal with pre-conditions first.  See, Titus was a Christian, or so he thought.  He heard the good news that God loved him from before he was born, and loved him today just as he is.  He was saved, set free by Jesus.  He was set free from feeling inferior, set free from the guilt of sin, set free from feeling incomplete, inadequate, unworthy.  He was free from having to justify himself, set free from trying to make something of himself, set free from a sense of not belonging, rootlessness, and homelessness.  In other words, he was converted from another nameless and worthless human trying to make a name for himself into Titus, a beloved part of God’s family.

And then he got to Jerusalem and some people said, “Uh son, there’s something more foundational than God’s love for you.  There’s something more basic than salvation and grace.”

“Huh?  What could it be?”

“Circumcision.  Yeah, we’ve been doing it for a few thousand years now.  It proves that you’re serious about faith.  It’s tried and true.  We’re afraid God won’t accept you without it.  Sure He loves you; sure Jesus saves you; but don’t get ahead of yourself – you’re not really accepted until you start where we started, and that’s with circumcision.”

Circumcision was their pre-condition.  It was step one in a program literally set in stone that stood for no substitutions or divergence from the formula.  It took precedence over God’s love.  It took priority over God’s embrace and acceptance, which by the way, Paul said exist for each of us individually before we are born.  They disagreed.  We still do that today.  We still partially accept people who haven’t met our pre-conditions.  It’s not generally circumcision anymore, but we’ve invented a million others.  Have you been baptized the right way?  Have you given up drinking?  You’re not one of those deviants are you?  You know what I’m talking about.  Have you learned this, memorized that, behaved this way, accomplished that, achieved this, stopped doing that, because until you do you’re not fully accepted here.

Listen:  There is nothing more foundational than God’s love.  No ritual, no morality, no code of conduct, no belief.  There is no pre-condition to God’s acceptance of you as a member of his family in good standing.  The good news of the gospel is that it is the reverse of the way the rest of life operates.  “The Gospel begins with acceptance, then, with that rush of freedom into the soul that that brings, the spiritual, moral, responsible life develops.”  (E. Peterson, emphasis mine.) No pre-requisites, no conditions, no hoops to jump through.

You are free to just be.  And to find your being in Jesus.  You will be changed if you live in Christ because to live in Christ is to open your life to grace, and grace is always transformative.  The gospel begins with grace.  And in addition to having no pre-conditions, that also frees you to resist expectations.  Think of Paul.  What on earth is he doing preaching to Gentiles in the first place?  He’s more Jewish than anyone in Jerusalem.  He was a Pharisee.  By his own account earlier in this story, he was “advancing in Judaism beyond” others his own age.  It’s a safe bet that at this time there is nobody in the church with better formal rabbinic training than Paul.  Doesn’t it make far more sense for Paul to stop fooling around with the Gentiles and put his training to work making inroads with the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem?  Shouldn’t he stick with his area of expertise?

That makes the most sense.  The council in Jerusalem surely must have considered this.  And don’t we still have similar expectations today?  We like to pigeonhole people in the church.  We look down on someone not living up to their potential, by which we mean using their education, their contacts, or their skills within a previously established and mandated form of service.  We don’t like entrepreneurs in church.  We like conformists.  Everybody does.  There is a tremendous amount of pressure on us to conform, isn’t there?  Everybody has an opinion of who we should be, what we should be doing with our lives.  I used to joke with people, “God loves you and I have a wonderful plan for your life.”  It’s true isn’t it?  Everybody knows what we should be doing.  Our parents have expectations of us.  Our spouse has expectations of us.  Our society has expectations of us.  Our friends have expectations of us.  Our church has expectations of us.

Paul says, “Tell you what I’m going to do… I’m going to go ahead and follow Jesus.  I may disappoint a lot of people along the way, and I may not achieve the success you all have mapped out for me, but one of the ways in which I’ve been set free is to disregard everyone’s expectations, to disregard what seems to be common sense, and to find my purpose in Jesus and only in Jesus.”

See, this little story of the Jerusalem trip is establishing for all of us that freedom in Christ is, among other things, freedom from pre-conditions and freedom from expectations.  You know, if we just really grasped those two things, our lives would be radically different.  The freedom to make choices that are unexpected, risky, and exhilarating would open up to us in phenomenal ways.  We’d stop hiding who we really are and stop living for somebody else and start living out in the open and for God.  And the crazy thing about God is that when we live for Him, he gives us back abundant life, not fearful, restricted, deficient existence.

Let’s see how Paul wraps up this section.  (Read Galatians 2:6-10)

Here Paul’s gotten over his indignation and the lets his pragmatic side take over again.  He’s passionate but he’s also intensely practical and he wants to address the nuts and bolts of the situation on the ground in the Galatian churches.  Based upon what we just read, Paul’s not real impressed with appearances, but he does respect authority and so he kind of walks a tightrope here.  He’s dismissive of titles and position, yet he also knows that his appeal to the Galatians is based upon their respect for his authority and his position.  So in this last section he reminds me of a tightrope walker (a funambulist!) because he keeps tottering back from one side to another trying to find the right balance between an abused freedom that suggests anything goes and a rigid structure that insists on all the things he’s railing against.

If he steps too far to the right and leans too much on the Jerusalem sanctioned approval of his message he gives his opponents the chance to say, “See… He’s a second-rate apostle.  He’s in Jerusalem’s pocket.”  If he steps too far left and leans too much on an “anything goes” attitude he undermines the very real unity with Jerusalem he’s trying to foster.  He wants one church, but only if it’s free to build its foundation on Jesus and the grace found in him.

So he talks about the apostles as those “who seemed to be important” almost casually tossing a “whatever!” in there.  He insists that they added nothing new to his 14 years of preaching.  (He’s leaning to the left.)  But he’s also quick to point that they approved of his message.  (Back to the right.)  He names the big three by name and I think somewhat sarcastically refers to them as “those reputed to be pillars” (back to the left) but then is quick to point out that they gave them the right hand of fellowship, and they recognized the grace given to Paul, and officially signed off on Paul’s continued ministry to Gentiles. (Back to the right.)  Finally he says they wanted him to continue to remember the poor, by which they certainly meant collecting tithes from the Gentiles to send back to the poor Jews in Jerusalem (leaning further right) but then he’s quick to point out that, “Hey, that’s exactly what I wanted to do anyway” (which pulls him back to the left and into balance.)  He’s not their yes man, but he also makes it clear that he’s got their backing and support and there is only one church with only one gospel.

He walks that tightrope to reassure his followers and to cut the legs out from his attackers.  And through it all, he beats that drum of freedom.  He shows that nothing man made, not even the structure of a church will be allowed to put the clamps on the freedom he knows in Christ.  He’s more than happy to serve the church, but Christ is the head of the church, not some board or bishop or other human idea.  And neither is he going to serve convention, common sense, or tradition.  Neither will he be a slave to criticism, intimidation, expectations, or anything that sets up pre-conditions to receiving the loving embrace of Jesus Christ.  And his simple message, his gospel, his good news is that you don’t have to either.  You’re free because Jesus says you are, and his words have spoken worlds into being.  Paul was willing to bet his life on it.  Let’s pray.

In the book of John when Jesus stands before Pilate he tells him, “My kingdom is not of this world” and then again that “my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36) and Pilate has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.  But Paul understood.  The last two verses we read in Galatians last week said, “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”

By this, he’s saying, among other things, that because the good news Paul received is not of this world, then it has the power to change this world from outside the systems of this world.  If the good news comes not from man but from the maker of this world – the one who spoke this world into being – then the good news He speaks now can bring other new and good things into being.  The gospel is about change.  It’s about transformation.  It’s about taking the people that are of this world and having them willingly acted upon by someone that is of another world.  And that process, also known as “conversion,” is what makes them fit for life in that other world, also know as “the kingdom.” The great scandal of the gospel is that Jesus claims the kingdom is available to live in here and now and that the change happens not at death but in the flesh and blood of this world.

Paul has been saying that he introduced the Galatians to the one who can set them free.  He introduced them to the one who can bring about real change in their lives.  And now, to show them that they’re truly free to change and to be changed, he tells them a story.  He doesn’t give them a formula.  He doesn’t give them instructions.  He doesn’t draw them a map.  He tells them a story.

Specifically, he tells them his story.  He shows them why he knows they can be changed by the good news.  It’s because he was changed by the good news.  He says… (Read Galatians 1:13-24)

Paul’s talking about change, or as Christians know it, conversion.  We are converted from being fit only for this world, and made fit for another one.  Though we often treat it as a single event, the process of conversion Paul describes can be broken down into five stages. Stage one is what he calls his “previous way of life.”  We’ve all got a life before Jesus shows up.  Even those of us born into Christian homes who go to church our entire lives have a time before Jesus really gets hold of us and changes us from the inside out.  And during that time, the time we might call our previous way of life, we do what everyone does: we try to find our way in the world and make the best of whatever situation we were born into.  Some of us are born into poverty; some of us are born into wealth; most of us are born somewhere in between.  Some of us are born into loving, stable, two parent families; some of us are born into selfish, broken, dysfunctional families; and most of us are born somewhere in between into some unique combination of people that has both its strengths and its weaknesses.  It doesn’t matter.  Whoever we are, and whatever circumstances we’re born into, we learn how to make the best of it.

In other words, we learn how to exist in the world that we find ourselves in. We learn the arts of self-protection.  It’s different for all of us, but we develop defense mechanisms that help keep us sane.  We learn the arts of self-preservation.  Again it’s different for all of us, but as we grow older we develop ways of providing ourselves with food, clothes, and shelter.  We all learn how to be in the world.  And while some do it better than others, most of us start to learn how to get ahead in that world.  Again, it’s different for all of us.  Some take to education, some rely on natural talents, some get ahead by force or violence, some by social networking, some by criminal activities, but we all try to carve out the best possible life for ourselves in the world as it’s presented to us.  Along the way we might even meet a boy or a girl, we might marry that someone, and we might even go ahead and have kids.  We’re all just doing the things that people do as they put together a man made life in the world that man made.

For Paul it was faith and education.  He was born in a Jewish family.  He was educated under the famous rabbi Gamaliel.  He was smart, talented and driven.  He climbed the ladder of success.  His parents hung his diplomas on the wall and his mom bragged to all the ladies in her sewing circle about her son the scholar.  He was good at what he did.  But it wasn’t enough to just be talented and smart.  If he really wanted to climb the ladder of success and be that self-made man we all want to be he had to rise above his contemporaries and impress the powers that be.  He had to build a resume and a reputation.  And what did they care about?  Well they were Pharisees just like him so they cared about two things: morality and order.

And if there was one group of people who seemed anything but moral and anything but orderly it was these new types of Jews who were calling themselves “the church.”  Morality?  They didn’t even follow the law!  They blasphemed and said that their dead rabbi was the Son of God!  And order?  They were throwing the people into confusion.  They were meeting here and there and thought that whenever or wherever two or three of them were gathered they could have a worship service.  They relied on something as ethereal as God’s Holy Spirit rather than the bedrock solidity of God’s Law.  No, to Paul, the church was evil through and through and he could see no other option for an honest young man than to try to destroy it.  He would force them to be good and to follow the rules of order, and if he couldn’t he would eliminate them.  It didn’t hurt that he was also advancing his own career by doing the dirty work the others weren’t willing or even able to do.  It was how he made it in the world he found himself in.  Again, he was a self made man in a world made by men.

And we can hardly blame him.  We would all do the same.  We have all done the same.  You take what life throws at you and you make the best of it.  Paul took his abilities, his heritage or what he called the traditions of his fathers, got the best education or training around, and set out to advance in this world and make a life for himself.  That’s what we all did or are all currently doing.  We take what nature gave us and what the environment we live in nurtured in us and we do the best we can.  Because that’s what amounts to a life.  It’s how we make a life.

And then one day Jesus comes calling: But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me… Stage two: One day Jesus calls us.  And everything changes.  Here was Paul, well on his way to a stellar career.  He was gifted, talented, confident, and everybody just knew he was going to do great things.  He was the pride of his family, the smartest guy in the room, and others either admired or envied him.  He was special because he figured it out, was good at his job, and he was a winner at the game of life.  But then Jesus showed up.  And everything turns around.

Suddenly the goals and priorities of his life are turned upside down.  Success is no longer about status, or money, or the two car garage with the picket fence and the trophy wife and the two point five children.  Suddenly all those things that he was told amounted to a life, are really no life at all anymore.  And the irony is that they never really were.  They were just things that he’d been taught he was supposed to want and would make him happy.  But they were man-made; of this world.  And Jesus called him with news of another world.  See, the more and more successful he grew, the more driven to the next level of success he became because with each rung of the ladder he climbed he grew less and less satisfied.  The dream life turned out to be just that – an illusion.  It became something that was always elusive and it trapped him in a way of being that could never satisfy.  The number of people who sweat and pray for their dream job and then get it and are miserable is incredible.  The number of lottery winners who curse the day they ever bought that ticket is insane.  The number of fairy-tale weddings that end in misery is heartbreaking.  Paul is living the dream and is completely unsatisfied.

And Paul nails the reason why.  It’s because he was never meant for that.  None of us are.  He says that he was “set apart from birth” for something else.  That might sound familiar.  Who else came to that realization?  Oh yeah.  He borrows the phrase from Jeremiah who learned from God that “before you were born I set you apart.”  (Jer. 1:5)  God set these men apart for a purpose that’s beyond the rat race, beyond trying to play the game well enough to be a winner, and beyond the conventions that their societies promised them amounted to success.  But here’s a secret.  They’re not special in this regard.  What Jeremiah and Paul learned is true of every human being who ever lived.

God has set us apart from what amounts to a man-made life in order to give us real life that is from another place.  None of us “just happened.”  None of us are mere products of our environment. (Frankl)  None of us are meant to just get by, to scrabble together a life based on our wits.  All of us are chosen, pre-loved, set apart by God, put together by God for a genuine purpose that is truly beyond anything this world can imagine or concoct.

And by that I don’t mean those purposes within the life we all consider normal.  I’m convinced we limit our sense of purpose by fitting it into the constraints of this man-made world.  We spend so much time obsessing over career and relationships and decision after decision and ask “What is God’s purpose for me?”  What we’re really asking is “within the constraints that I’ve allowed to be imposed on me, what is Gods’ purpose for me?”  Well, what if God’s purpose is above all those things?  What if God’s purpose is beyond all those things?  What if God’s purpose is from another place, beyond the man-made construction of this world?  God didn’t set me apart before birth so I could be a pastor, or you could be a teacher, or a doctor.  That’s too small.  God set us apart before birth so that you and I could be His.  Our choice of career matters far less to God than we could ever dare to imagine.  Because we’re led to believe that it’s one of the most important decisions we can make in our life we assume that God’s purpose is found for us there.  We make the same mistake with relationships.  The sum total amount of time, worry and energy Christians spend trying to discern God’s perfect mate for them is astronomical and completely Biblically unprecedented.  But again, we’re told that it’s the most important decision in this world.  But God’s purpose is not of this world.  His purpose is that in whatever we turn our hand to, we will first turn our heart to Him.  God’s purpose is that with whomever we make a life with, we will first turn our heart to Him.  Education, career, marriage – None of those things are bad.  But none of them are life either.  God doesn’t care how much you make, how talented you are, or how successful you are in the world’s eyes.  The things that make us well adjusted to this life are often the very things that make us ill-suited for the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus was an unemployed, homeless, confirmed bachelor who was set apart at birth, like you and me, for God’s purposes which are of a whole other world.  You tell me if he was successful.  He certainly wasn’t thought of in that way in his day.

There’s a great C.S. Lewis line about Jesus that says, “He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”  (The Four Loves)  When Jesus came calling Paul the questions of career, marriage, education, family, and success all became secondary because Paul saw that they were all part of this world and he was set apart for more.

So what did he do?  He needed space to think.  He went to Arabia.  He says, “I did not consult any man… but went immediately to Arabia…” Arabia is stage three. Paul takes time for reflection.  Here’s the thing:  None of us are really used to living with God at the center of our lives.  None of us are really accustomed to grace because we live in a world that says to us at every turn: prove it; earn it.  We’ve bought into the lie that we’re not really worth much in and of ourselves so we have to go out and make something of our lives.  (Peterson)

When Jesus calls us he says, you have been loved before you had consciousness.  Before you draw a breath, you are worth the world to me.  I made you and there is nothing more for you to make of yourself than to rest in that love.  These words smash through every single thing we have ever been taught from the earliest age.  They are contrary to what we have thought to be true.  They are a shock to our system.  They are words that need time to seep into our lives.  They are words that need space to be meditated upon, prayed through, and incorporated into our consciousness.  Paul went to Arabia to re-learn how to be human.

If we’re going to begin to learn the art of freedom, we will need to withdraw from life as we know it.  Christians are in need of retreat and reflection.  Maybe we can’t all spend three years in a desert or on a mountaintop.  But we all need Arabia.  We need days of solitude.  We need hours of meditation.  We need to stop what we’re doing and simply let God love us.  We need spaces that are cleared for grace to be all and in all.  We need room to just be and realize that our being is in Christ.  I go on at least one or two solo retreats a year.  Once a year I lead our leadership team on another.  I don’t know how to be a Christian without that.  I don’t know how others do without.  I don’t know if others actually do without.  We all need Arabia so that the rhythms of grace can sink into our lives.

My mentor in these things, my Arabian ambassador if you will, is an old monk from Kentucky named Thomas Merton.  He dropped out from a promising life and into a monastery and then literally wrote the book on solitude and contemplation.  Listen to what he says is the connection between freedom and solitude: The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living… If a man is… locked out of his own spiritual solitude he ceases to be a true person.  He no longer lives as a man.  He is not even a healthy animal… He no longer makes decisions for himself, he lets them be made for him.  He no longer acts upon the outside world, but lets it act upon him… His is no longer the life of a human being, but the existence of a sentient billiard ball, a being without purpose and without any deeply valid response to reality.

To avoid being trapped and bounced around by life, Paul heads to Arabia.  We can too.  A worship service can be a mini-Arabia.  The time of silence within the service can be another.  A few God-focused hours on a walk can be Arabia.  A quiet hour with your Bible can take you to Arabia.  A weekend in the woods or at a retreat center can change the shape of your life.  When Jesus called him, Paul didn’t get right to work, merely shifting the focus of his efforts from the Law to Jesus.  Instead he retreated, reflected and let God change him in solitude.  Some would say he wasted three years where he could have been productive.  They would see ministry as just another form of a man-made life.  Others would say he needed to detoxify from the poisons the world put in him and that those three years prepared him for the kingdom kind of life, the eternal kind of life.

And so, we come to stage four.  When the process was given time to shape Paul into a new creation – then he returned to the fold.  He went up to Jerusalem to see Peter.  Our translation says he was there fifteen days to “get acquainted” with him.  The word there is historeo – the same word we get the English word history from.  In the Greek it’s a laid back term.  This isn’t a formal summit meeting or interview.  It means to shoot the breeze, colloquially, to sit around and swap stories.  Paul told Peter his road to Damascus story and Peter chuckles and says, “That’s a good one.  I was out fishing and this guy shows up and starts giving me tips about where to put down my nets…”

Christians need to share the stories of their ongoing conversion.  We’ve all got a history.  In telling our stories we learn that we’re all different and yet we’re all the same.  Peter was a rough around the edges, calloused, brawler of a fisherman.  Paul was a sophisticated, arrogant, bookworm.  The salty seadog and the genuine nerd both met Jesus and were changed into something better than what their previous lives promised them.  One story is not better than another.  And we need to both tell them and hear them to know we’re all in this adventure called discipleship together.  There are few more holy and enjoyable acts for the church to participate than in telling stories.  And I’m not talking about the formal, staged, “This is my testimony” time in church.  I’m talking about shooting the breeze.  Conversation.  Laughing and crying and shaking our heads in wonder at each other and who we are and where we’ve been.  That’s how we know it’s real.  That’s how we find out just how legitimate it all is.

And then stage five.  Once he told his story and heard Peter’s story, finally he went out and told God’s story.  He says, “I went to Syria and Cilicia” to preach to Gentiles.  Nobody knew him personally.  He had made no name for himself in the church.  They all just knew that this was the guy who was persecuting the church and is now preaching the very faith he tried to destroy.  Everything had come full circle.  He truly was a brand new man, a brand new creation.  Did it happen in one instant, as we’re sometimes tempted to believe?  No.  Regardless of how dramatic his meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road was, it was not an instant transformation.  To hear Paul tell it, it began before he was born.  And when the decisive moment came, it still took him three years to process and think through.  Then it took some storytelling and some story listening, and finally he was as prepared as he ever would be to preach the gospel and literally change the world.

Sometimes I’m asked for help in teaching people to be better at personal evangelism, or at preaching, or at sharing Jesus with their friends.  Usually people are looking for pointers and for a good technique.  I admire their desire to serve God in this way.  But the real question they need to ask themselves is, “Have I been set free?”  Have they really been set free from the life that’s expected of them and received the good news that let them live in God’s unexpected kingdom?  If so, have they developed the interior life that processes this overwhelming freedom?  Have they journeyed to Arabia and withdrawn from the former life, withdrawn even from the future life, to simply be with God and be loved and surrounded by His grace?  Have they been plunged into community?  Have they swapped stories and laughed and cried and been dazzled by the wonder of it all?

You don’t learn that stuff in class.  That’s the stuff of conversion.  That’s the stuff of being on the way.  Do you have to wait for it to be finished before you begin?  No, because we’re never finished.  But to convert others we must be sure we’re being converted ourselves.  We’re all somewhere in that mix.  Some of us are still in the former way of life, trapped by expectations, unwilling to be set truly free.  Some of us have begun to be set free but have no idea how to process it, how to get it into our souls and set our hearts free from within, and are unwilling to put in the time in Arabia it takes.  Some of us never learned to tell a story and never learned to care for the stories of others.  We don’t have much time for conversation.

And so, our conversion is stunted.  We had that moment but it was just that – a moment and not the start of a process.  And so in spite of all the technique in the world, all we have to offer the world is this same stunted conversion.  We have little that’s transformative because we just take the stuff that’s of this world and add religion to it.  It’s the man-made religious life.  But a life that’s truly changed, and continues to truly be changed, has been changed from somewhere that is not of this world and therefore has an irresistible freedom from this world to it that can’t help but be contagious.  As we’ll see, nothing can stand in the way of such a life telling God’s story to the world.  It is an eternal kind of life.

But for now Paul wants us to know that of all the freedoms in this world, the one that is ever present is the freedom to change.  The gospel brings with it the freedom of conversion – of stepping out of a man-made existence and into a world charged with the glory of God.  And notice that Paul says almost nothing of the “big moment.”  He says nothing of the Damascus road experience we know of from the book of Acts.  (But that was his moment of conversion!)  For Paul, his change and conversion was a long process, one we haven’t even come to the end of yet.  His story is still going and we’ll pick it up next week.  The point is that he changed, and his conversion was about as unlikely as anyone’s.  Nobody had more to lose than the guy on the fast track to success.  But who’s success?  Paul was going to be a spectacular self-made man in a man made world.  But then it was revealed to him that he was already made, and he was made for another world – an eternal world and that freedom meant living an eternal kind of life.  May we all be so converted.  Let’s pray.