Crucified with Christ.

Galatians 2:1-21.

I.

            Paul continues to tell his faith story.  He says that, after working as a preacher in the Way of Jesus Christ in Antioch for 14 years, he had another revelation from God.  He was to go up to Jerusalem to confer with James, Peter, and John, the acknowledged “pillars” of the church.  He took Barnabas and Titus with him.  Titus was a Gentile convert who was not circumcised, and Paul brings him on purpose to make a point.

            Paul says he felt this meeting was necessary to make sure he and his friends in Antioch were “not running, or had not run, in vain”.  By this he means that he wanted to confer with other leaders in the Jesus movement about the practice of the church in Antioch of receiving Gentiles into their communion without requiring literal obedience to Jewish Law, which included the requirement of circumcision.  He wants to make sure that what they were doing was in line with what these apostles had also been teaching.

            The question had apparently been raised by people whom Paul refers to as “false believers,” who had been secretly watching the Christ-followers in Antioch, waiting for them to do something wrong.  They were spying on the freedom enjoyed by the Antioch church, with an intent to do nothing less than “enslave” them, Paul charges. 

            It turns out that the pillars had no problem with Titus.  And they agreed with Paul’s interpretation of things, and reaffirmed his call as apostle to the Gentiles.  So, everything seems cool until Peter comes to Antioch for a visit. 

            At first, Peter eats with the Gentiles, presumably meaning that he ate Gentile food.  But then some other more conservative believers showed up, and they put some pressure on Peter, causing him and the other Jews in the church to withdraw from eating with the Gentiles.  The compromise seems to be that Jews and Gentiles can eat together, but only if what they eat is suitable to the Jews, that is, kosher.

            The problem here, I think, is that there are at least three different understandings of mission.  Paul appears to think in terms of one mission with two directions, one to Jews and the other to Gentiles.  James and Peter appear to think of this as two separate but related missions.   And the extremists among the Jewish followers of Christ see it as one mission to Jews, and an auxiliary mission to Gentiles in which they have to become Jews.

            The compromise appears to be satisfactory even to Paul’s ally and friend, Barnabas.  But Paul objects strenuously.  And he goes so far as to break with the church in Antioch over it.  This enables his opponents to paint him as an unreasonable fanatic, more committed to his own idiosyncratic version of the gospel than to finding unity with the founders of the Way, the Jerusalem apostles, who knew Jesus.

II.

            This may seem like an arcane, technical theological argument, much ado about very little, and only important to specialists.  But for Paul it has to do with the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ.  So when he reports his admonition of Peter, he plows ahead immediately into his argument to the Galatians, so that we can’t even tell for sure where the quotation ends.

            He is still recounting what he said to Peter, and also now more pointedly he is speaking to his opponents in Galatia, when he says, “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’.”  And he says that, I think, with some irony.  The entire church in Galatia was Gentiles, and he subtly reminds them of what self-righteous Jews think of them. 

            Then he goes on to make the point he makes elsewhere that Jews who think they are made righteous because they keep to the letter of the law are really sinners too.  “We,” that is, Jews who now follow Jesus, “know that a person is made righteous not by the works of the Law but through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.”  This is something on which all followers of Jesus’ Way agree, even the ones who still want to require adherence to the Jewish laws. 

            They would have to agree on this for at least two reasons: Jesus was crucified, which means that according to the Law he is cursed.  So a person cannot consistently follow both the Law and Jesus.  In addition to this, Psalm 143, which Paul alludes to here, specifically says that no one living is righteous before God, which means that simply keeping the letter of the Law hasn’t made anyone, not even Jews, righteous.  Everyone in the Jesus movement agrees on this, even Paul’s opponents.

            But at the same time, they are apparently uncomfortable relying on Christ alone.  They think that Paul’s approach is too lax and unstructured.  It is an invitation to sin, they say.  They are rightly worried about what 19 centuries later Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call “cheap grace,” the idea that God’s love and grace and forgiveness are given to us unconditionally, no matter what, no strings attached.  They fear that not only does this give us no incentive to live any better, but it even provides an incentive to do evil.

            Think about it.  If following Jesus is all about receiving God’s grace and forgiveness, without any requirement to actually do anything, why would people bother to change their lives?

III.

            But Paul rejects the charge that he is allowing Christ to become an excuse to sin.  That charge against him is just an indication that his opponents simply do not get it.

            Paul says that it would be ridiculous for him to build up a new Law based on Christ, where he just tore down the old Law based on Moses.  What Paul opposes is the whole mindset that keeping an externally imposed law is the only way to righteousness.

            Paul says that his opponents are failing to perceive the magnitude of what God has done in Jesus Christ.  “Through the Law I died to the Law,” he says, meaning that his direct experience of Jesus Christ blew apart his ego, and his reliance on the Law, and woke him up to the Law’s futility in making anyone righteous.  The main effect of the Law was to make people separate from each other and allow some to believe they were better than everyone else, when really they weren’t.

            Not only had the Law become a dividing force separating Jew from Gentile, but it was used by both the religious establishment and the Empire, to keep people subservient, submissive, and suspicious of each other. 

            When Paul says he “died to the Law” it means that everything he once was sure of, everything he once thought was good, true, right, holy, beautiful, and eternal, everything upon which he based his whole life, came crashing down when Jesus Christ manifested himself in him.  The person he once was, died at that moment.  His ego, his personality, his identity, his self-worth was exploded. 

            Now he lives, not for something that merely points to God, but for God.  It is as if he says, “As far as the Law is concerned, I died, because the Law condemned and cursed me as it did Jesus Christ; but as far as God is concerned, I came alive, I woke up.”

            He goes so far as to say, “I have been crucified with Christ.”  This is an astounding statement.  We can’t take it literally, of course; his body hasn’t been nailed to a tree and left to rot.  It means that with Christ he has been cursed by the Law; with Christ he has been deemed blasphemous by his own religious establishment; with Christ he has been deemed seditious by the political establishment, the Empire.  He has been made an outlaw in every sense, which places him firmly with the Lord Jesus Christ.

IV.

            It is no longer his “I”, his ego, that lives.  Rather now it is Christ who appeared in him who now lives in him.  “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.”  His body, even the “flesh,” the mortal, physical, temporal dimension of his being, is guided and directed by his profound trust in the Son of God.

            “Son of God” was a loaded phrase in those days because it was one of the titles the Emperor gave to himself, but which Christians knew really belonged to this poor, good, holy man named Jesus whom the Emperor had crucified.  For Paul, as he goes on to say, “Son of God” is not a title indicating secular, coercive, military, or terroristic power, as it was for the Emperor.  No; for him it means the One who loved him and gave himself for him. 

            This is the 180 that Paul makes when he meets the living Lord Jesus in his heart.  He moves from a trust in law and coercion and force and personal striving, to a trust in the love he sees in the cross, where Jesus bears the full weight and consequences of law, and coercion, and force, and striving, and endures the murderous hostility of Roman terror.  He moves from trusting in the uniqueness and specialness of his beloved Judaism, to a realization that his nation is just another conquered, defeated, exploited, tortured people, no different from every other nation crushed by Rome.  He realizes there is no difference between Jew and Gentile in that sense. 

            Paul suddenly becomes aware of the fact that Jesus had been put to death by experts in the Law like him.  Instead of being a means of resistance to evil and empire, the leaders of his people had made a deal with Rome so that now even keeping the Jewish Law, originally a courageous expression of freedom, had degenerated into a way of showing deference, subservience, subjugation, and allegiance to the Emperor.  It put his own people, the nation formed by God in resistance to the power of centralized violence, in alliance with the worst tyrants the world had ever seen.  Instead of resisting the devil they made a deal with him to save their own skins.  Now circumcision was less an obedience to God than it was a small sacrifice of their own flesh to the Emperor.  It was now the price they paid in their own flesh and blood to get out of having to worship their oppressor.  But just paying that price was itself a form of worship.

            Once he meets the risen Jesus, his eyes are opened.  And he sees the truth and is able to turn away from this cynical abuse and coopting of his own traditions and theology, and turn instead to the fathomless love of God.  God used this degraded and depraved situation in which Israel had basically negotiated itself out of existence as a people loyal to God alone, and sent Jesus Christ, the real Son of God, the real Savior, the real Lord to bear the brunt of murderous violence pumped up from forces of evil of which the Emperor was only a puppet.  And he shows it to be empty, ineffective, and powerless.  Indeed, it just becomes the way God triumphs and reveals to the world its true nature in resurrection.

V.

            True freedom is never purchased from some earthly principalities and powers by our good behavior, loyalty, or enthusiastic participation in their systems of inequality, violence, and exploitation.  It is never something we earn or deserve according to the demands or expectations of human leaders.  It is never something we are paid for our keeping of rules and regulations.

            True freedom is a gift of the living God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  The glorious fact that he lives in us and in all things means that he, in his humility, poverty, generosity, gentleness, kindness, peace, and love, is the real and true power in our lives and in the whole universe.  It is his faithfulness in withstanding and absorbing the worst that our little systems can throw, and still emerging to call us home, that changes everything… or rather reveals everything to be very different from what we thought.

            It is when the powers of the world see us as dead, worthless, and defeated, that God sees us as we truly are: alive and blessed and good.  It is when we identify with Jesus Christ in his rejection and death, that his life is disclosed and unveiled within us.  It is when our egos are disarmed and put in their place, that Christ himself emerges with and within and among us.

+++++++

Into the Wilderness.

Galatians 1:13-24.

I.

            Paul proceeds in his letter to the church in Galatia, to give a very concise, selective, and pointed account of his life in the faith.  Probably he is responding to several charges made against him by his opponents in the Galatian churches.  We can infer what they were saying about him. 

            They said that, in the first place, Paul can’t be a real apostle because he never personally knew Jesus.  After persecuting the church at first, he had to learn the faith from the real apostles in Jerusalem.  Finally, he had a falling out with Peter in Antioch, because he was too radical even for that famously diverse and inclusive church.  He broke with them and went off to do his own thing.  So he was a kind of loose cannon, preaching an unauthorized version of the gospel.

            They apparently said that the real gospel, the one authorized by Peter, James, and John, the Jerusalem leaders, had to do with keeping the Law of Moses in its entirety, from food laws to circumcision.  They understood the mission of Jesus the Messiah to welcome Gentiles into Abraham’s family by making them observant Jews.

            Paul defends himself and his understanding of the gospel by basically telling his story.  First, he talks about his own Jewish heritage.  If it’s zeal for the Law and Jewish tradition they want, well, he has that in spades.  Few people of his generation knew the traditions better than he.  And because of his devotion to Judaism he was a virulent persecutor of the followers of Jesus.  By definition he would have to be, for their movement was inherently contrary to the Law, because they followed and even worshiped a man who had been crucified.  In Deuteronomy 21 it says that anyone convicted of a crime and hanged on a tree is cursed.  The idea that the Messiah would be a criminal, killed by being nailed to a wooden cross, was absurd and blasphemous to an observant Jew like Paul had been.  He had no choice but to do all in his power to stamp out this heresy undermining the unity and integrity of Judaism.

            One could not therefore follow a hanged man and be an observant Jew.  It was impossible and a contradiction.  Just following Jesus at all, was contrary to the Torah.  Period.

II.

            Then something happens to Paul that radically turns his life around.  He doesn’t go into great detail here.  He just says that “God… was pleased to reveal his Son to me.”  In Greek he says “in me,” meaning an interior revelation, a mystical experience.  In several other places Paul refers to this experience as an encounter with the risen and living Lord Jesus.

            So to the charge that Paul didn’t know the historical Jesus, he answers, “So what?  I know the real, risen, present Jesus Christ who emerged in my heart and inspired me with the truth.”  Paul strongly implies that this kind of knowledge is better than having known Jesus while he was alive in the flesh. 

            Actually, he doesn’t want to be distracted by facts about the historical Jesus, filtered through eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.  When Jesus appears to him, Paul does not immediately go to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles who knew Jesus.  He goes in exactly in the other direction, to Arabia, of all places.

            “Arabia” refers to the area east and southeast of the Jordan, which was and is mainly desert.  This practice of going into the wilderness for reflection and spiritual nourishment is very old in Israelite tradition, at least as far back as Moses and then Elijah, and includes of course Jesus himself, who went into the desert after his experience of God’s Voice and Spirit at his baptism. 

            When a person wants to clear their head and heart, and get closer to God, they go away from civilization, out to the wild places.  This continues to be true for the early church, and eventually becomes the monastic movement in the 2^nd century.

            It might not make any sense to us.  Having a life-transforming mystical experience might send us to, oh, a psychiatrist, or to the library or a school where we can study this phenomenon, or even to church or a religious community.  But for people steeped in the story of Israel’s God, the place to go is the desert.  That’s where you can get clear of all human junk.  A place with no bars, no wifi, no UPS or mail delivery, no cable, no phone, no roads.  A wild place of extremity.  That’s where to meet God.

            Paul knew that consulting the people about this would be useless.  He had to consult with God directly.  And he uses this strategy to validate his ministry and calling and gospel.  His point is that having a mystical experience and spending 3 years in the wilderness is actually more authentic than having learned the gospel from a book, or at a school, or from any people, even the apostles themselves.

            We have lost sight of how trusting in the living God of Israel means trusting in and encountering God in the wild.  We have lost sight of how radically wild God is.  Throughout the Scriptures the point is continually made that our God is not completely comfortable with civilization, or with urban/agricultural domesticated life. Civilization has been an unmitigated disaster for God’s creation.  It tends inevitably towards idolatry, empire, conquest, hierarchies, and kings, markets, money, debt, inequality, exploitation, slavery, injustice, and war. 

            If you want to see the stars you have to get away from the light pollution emitted from cities; so also, if you want to encounter the pure light of the living God the best place to do it is far away from places organized, rationalized, domesticated, and dominated by humans.

III.

            Paul does eventually go to Jerusalem and stays with Peter for 2 weeks, and also meets Jesus’ brother, James.  That must have been a remarkable visit.  Here is this man, whom Peter and James only know by his reputation as an educated and articulate persecutor of the church, who had a violent change of heart in Damascus, and then disappeared for 3 years.  When he finally emerges from the desert, he has this story about how God revealed Jesus, God’s Son, in and to  him, giving him this commission to proclaim him among the Gentiles.

            There is no sense that Peter and James tell him he’s nuts, or wrong, or insubordinate, or has a lot to learn, or is somehow inferior because he did not know Jesus in the flesh.  We don’t know how ringing an endorsement Paul got from Peter, but Peter doesn’t stop him from going out as a missionary to the Gentiles in Syria and Cilicia, where he was originally from.

            Paul would certainly have told Peter of his basic conversion from a follower of the Law to a follower of Jesus Christ.  He would certainly have told Peter what he realized about the cross.  That the cross had been the main thing that made him an opponent of the Way of Jesus Christ, because of that stipulation in the Law about being cursed if you’re hanged on a tree.  But when Jesus appears to him, he realizes that at least this part of the Law is no longer valid, and if one part can be no longer valid, then the whole edifice of the Law as a basis for religious life crumbles as well.

            Once he starts thinking outside the box of the Law and his own tradition, he begins to realize how irrelevant, and even counterproductive, that box is.

            When Paul finds Christ emerging within him, and when he then encounters the wildness of God in the wilderness, it must have struck him how the Law had become so domesticated and civilized, so enslaved to human powers and leaders, ideologies, philosophies, economics, and politics, as to become contrary to its original purpose.  Instead of freeing people to live according to God’s will, the Law was being used as a tool to keep people in bondage to the “Pharaohs” of what he calls “the present evil age”.  The Law, the Torah, the holy legal code of his people and faith, had been corrupted so thoroughly that it now was used to serve Caesar.

IV.

            So the good news, the gospel, that he brings back home to Cilicia and Syria is that the wild and free living God has broken into the world in Jesus Christ, a man who was executed for sedition by the Romans.  This man, who suffered the rejection of worldly powers and was even thereby cursed by Jewish Law, defeated both when God raised him from the dead.  His victory changes everything.  It means we are no longer in bondage to Roman power, which had corrupted even God’s Law.  Now it is by trusting in God’s smashing victory in Christ that we are free from fear and death, free from Rome and free from Rome’s strategy of dividing and conquering, into which the Law was made to play.

            For 14 years Paul preaches in the city of Antioch this revolutionary message of freedom and fearlessness in Christ, mainly to Gentiles.  They gain many adherents… but the message is very controversial. 

            In the first place, observant Jews saw how Paul’s gospel went against the Bible.  For at least 500 years, Judaism had been about literally keeping the laws of the Torah.  This is the way their ancestors kept their faith during the exile in Babylon.  This is how they kept the faith when the Maccabees rebelled against the Greeks.  This is how they maintained their distinct identity and avoided being assimilated into the Roman Empire, was the argument.  Judaism without the Law was not Judaism at all, they would say.

            But Paul sees that keeping the letter of the Law can ignore its Spirit and play directly into the hands of the Roman oppressors.  The Torah can be twisted into a divisive, exclusive, collaborationist, document that leaves people in bondage.

            In the second place, Paul’s message of radical equality and unity among all people was a threat to Rome’s hegemony, which depended on hierarchies and divisions, hostilities and classes, and mainly fear of their ruthless and murderous violence.  Worshiping a guy the Romans executed for sedition, and even giving him titles that applied to the Emperor, like “Savior”, “Lord”, and “Son of God”, is seen as the ultimate gesture of rebellion, disloyalty, and independence.

            Such behaviors can get you into deep trouble, as the church would soon discover.  But Paul’s view is that it is better to endure Rome’s hostility than to capitulate to Rome’s authority, especially since Jesus’ resurrection proves that not even death can separate us from God’s love. 

V.

            Two important things emerge for us from this passage.  First, the truest and most reliable experience of Jesus Christ happens to us within us.  No one comes to a mature faith by just reading and thinking.  And “within” does not mean merely in our minds.  True faith is not about what interests us or what our opinions are.  It is something we have to experience.   Within us has in some sense to do with our bodies.  It means really within us, down to our gut.  That’s the only thing that has the power to challenge and transform us down to our core, and send us to a new place.

            This means being open and listening to Christ within us, being ready to have our world shaken and overturned, being ready to respond with repentance:  a transformed mind and moving our lives in a different direction.

            Prayer, especially wordless meditation prepared for in praying the Psalms, is this kind of openness and listening, into which God can emerge within us.

            Secondly, the validation and continued development of this experience and its meaning for us happens best in the wild, undomesticated, uncivilized, natural places of our world.  For God is inherently wild, undomesticated, uncivilized, and natural.  We have to go to these places.  I mean that literally, as in putting our bodies into nature and wilderness.  And I also mean that figuratively, when we deliberately engage with ideas and practices that challenge our own domesticity, comfort, convenience, and complacency.

            What Paul experiences is unthinkable heresy to him.  I wonder if there aren’t some unthinkable heresies through which the presence of the Lord Jesus may challenge and shake and even break us open.  For God is wild, and none of our traditions and theologies encompass God either.

            For the one way we can reliably tell when we have had an encounter with the true and living God is that we find our securities, loyalties, habits, practices, identities, memories, hopes, and plans thoroughly and comprehensively wrecked.  For what God is always calling us to is not just outside the box, it is outside the very idea of the possibility of a box.  For God calls us to be emancipated and free from all boxes.  God would have us emerge together in unity as Gods children, equal, strong, and free.

+++++++    

Another Gospel?

Galatians 1:6-12.

I.

            In this letter, after the initial greeting, Paul gets right to the point.  In his other letters he usually butters up the recipients a bit, thanking God for them and their faith, and so on.  But here he skips all that.  He is angry, frustrated, and worried.  The churches he founded in Galatia are in danger of falling away from the good news of Jesus Christ, and embracing a less demanding, more conventional, watered-down version of the faith... which is part of the argument his rivals are making against him!

            Paul starts by saying, “I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ to follow another gospel.  It's not really another gospel, but certain people are confusing you and they want to change the gospel of Christ.”  The One who called the Galatians by the grace of Christ, of course, is God.  By following these other teachers, Paul says they are deserting God.  And he counters that it is these other teachers, not he, who are changing, distorting, and abandoning the original gospel.

            He insists that he and these other missionaries are not preaching the same gospel but just in a different way, or with a different emphasis.  He says they are preaching a completely different gospel, which is to say, not the real gospel at all but a false one.  Indeed, he would say that what these teachers are preaching is something diametrically opposed to the true gospel… which is one of the reasons he is so disappointed and surprised that the Galatians are falling for it.  It means maybe they didn’t fully understand what he was teaching them in the first place.

            What Paul is dealing with here is not like the difference between Presbyterians, Catholics, and Baptists.  All standard Christians today hold to the same basic essentials.  There are conservatives within every denomination who are more strict and limited about it.  But we are all Trinitarian Christians who follow the outline of the Nicene Creed. 

            I have breakfast every Thursday with a group of clergy, including a Methodist pastor from India, an Episcopal priest, two Presbyterian ministers, a Russian Orthodox priest, and a woman Charismatic Pentecostal preacher, but, as different as we are, we know we share the same gospel.  We have a kind of unity; but we also have, and often celebrate and learn from, our differences.

            But the teachers disturbing the Galatians in Paul’s time were delivering a different gospel, a different faith, something incompatible with what Paul had given them, something incompatible with what Jesus was really all about.  In a word, they were for maintaining the distinction and separateness of being Jewish, and still fearing, rejecting, despising others.  They understood unity as when everyone is like them.  Paul sees that this is a false unity that buys into the divisive competitiveness encouraged and fomented by Rome to keep its many conquered peoples in line.

II. 

            Why is this such a big deal for Paul?  Was it just an ego-centric resentment about some other teachers invading his turf?  Was it petulant puritanical rage about someone doing something different from his way?  Isn’t he overdoing some technical, theological distinctions that don’t really matter to the rest of us?  There were lots of preachers wandering around the area.  They all could not have had exactly the same message; there wasn’t even any New Testament yet, let alone precisely defined creeds and doctrine.  Why is Paul so upset about these particular teachers and their message?

            We will see that it is because the false gospel of these teachers was not radical, costly, or subversive enough, because it denied the central teaching of Paul in Galatians, and the whole meaning of the cross and resurrection, which is that: “We are all one in Christ Jesus.”  We may have our superficial differences, but in Christ Jesus there are no alien, enemy “others,” not even the Romans.  Christ, by his cross and resurrection, has broken down all those walls separating and alienating people.

            I need to say that there is something going on here that everyone involved at the time knew, but doesn’t actually show up in words in the letter.  Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire.  Because of some political negotiations a few decades earlier, Jews were the only people in the Empire who were exempt from having to worship the Emperor as a god.  All the other pagan religions simply included the Emperor as another god in their pantheons.  But Jews, being strictly monotheistic, were not required to do this.  So if you were not a Jew, and you still refused to worship the Emperor, you would be subject to the penalty for treason, which could be death. 

            So part of the argument used by Paul’s opponents in Galatia might have been that by getting circumcised the Galatian men could affirm and prove their new Jewish faith.  They could stick it to the man, the Emperor, whom everybody, especially Galatians, hated, and legally refuse to worship him.  And because of the legal exemption, they would therefore be safe from persecution by the Empire.  It seemed like a perfect solution, except for the part where you had to have part of your body cut off, of course.

            It was not like today where belonging to a particular religion means checking off a box on a form, or repeating some verbal forumla.  Being Jewish meant submitting to circumcision.  If the Galatians didn’t get circumcised and therefore couldn’t prove their Jewishness, and then didn’t worship the Emperor, they could be arrested for sedition.  So submitting to circumcision was not just about getting the Galatians to submit to Jewish law, it was also, and in my opinion more importantly, about submission to Roman law.

            Because even though the Emperor was granting this exemption, anyone who had themselves circumcised so they could get this exemption was still implicitly acknowledging the Emperor’s law and authority, and therefore the Emperor.  It was one way the Jewish law was misused to show allegiance to some power other than God.

III.

            This is Paul’s point.  How can you claim to be against the Empire when you allow your faith to be protected by the Empire’s law?  Paul’s conclusion is that if Gentile Christians were to submit to circumcision, they have thereby chosen to participate in “this present evil age” in which Rome rules.  They would be assenting to Rome’s way of dealing with things, which is to say, they would be tacitly making the confession that Caesar is Lord, which is a denial of the basic Christian affirmation that Jesus is Lord.  They would have chosen to work within the imperial system, the same system that nailed Jesus to a cross.  The whole liberating message of the gospel would be denied and lost.

            That’s why he is so urgent and unequivocal, as he goes on to say, “even if we ourselves or a heavenly angel should ever preach anything different from what we preached to you, they should be under a curse.  I'm repeating what we've said before: if anyone preaches something different from what you received, they should be under a curse!”

            Those are very strong words indicating what is at stake here.  The problem is not so much that the Galatians are choosing to become Jewish.  Jewish missionaries had been at work across the Empire for decades.  Neither is the problem that new Galatian Christians are choosing to become Jewish.  At this time what we know as Christianity did not exist.  The Galatians by responding to Paul’s ministry thought of themselves as having become Jews, by adoption into Abraham’s family.  The apostles were all Jews and they saw themselves advocating a reform movement within Judaism.  Neither Paul nor Jesus ever thought of themselves as no longer being Jewish.

            His opponents are upset with him because Paul lifts the requirement of circumcision, which they feel makes his evangelistic job a lot easier than theirs.  They are saying he is watering down the gospel, making it less demanding, just to please people, just to cater to their comfort.  They think he’s lowering the standards by telling Gentiles they can be Jewish without the bother, pain, and dangers of circumcision in an age when there was only rudimentary anesthesia and no antibiotics, or awareness of microbes, at all.

            Circumcision had been the brake on the spread of Judaism that the Romans counted on when they exempted Jews from having to worship the Emperor.  How much traction could a religion really get, if one of the requirements was to slice off part of your most intimate and sensitive organ?  But if Jews stopped requiring that, if somehow it became acceptable to be Jewish without it, then how would the Empire really be able to tell who is Jewish and therefore exempt from the law about worshiping the Emperor?  They could revoke the exemption entirely and that would place the whole Jewish faith in jeopardy!  Jews would then have to choose between faithfulness and death.  And they didn’t want to have to do that.

IV.

            Paul knows this… but he doesn’t care!  In fact, for him, it is a selling point.  Being Jewish means affirming with your whole being the one God whose main act is liberating the Israelites from the slavery of Pharaoh’s empire.  Judaism had been a notoriously anti-imperialistic faith for centuries.  And to become Jewish without submitting to circumcision, that is, without accepting the protection of Roman law, is a way to separate yourself from the whole idolatrous, imperial State, and this doomed “present evil age.”  That’s why he says his gospel is not of human origin: human political reasoning and logic has no place in his system.  It doesn’t make any normal sense to join a community that might instantly make you an enemy of the State. 

            Plus, if they are saying he’s watering down the gospel by not requiring circumcision, Paul’s response is that the true gospel he preaches is actually more demanding because it potentially places one’s whole body at risk, not just a tiny piece of it. 

            How can anybody possibly think he’s trying to “please people” with a gospel that basically, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, invites people “to come and die”?  How can it possibly be construed as “telling people what they want to hear” when Paul talks about a Messiah who was arrested by the Romans for sedition, convicted in the usual bogus trial, flogged and mocked by soldiers, who then nailed his body to two pieces of wood and stuck him out in the hot sun until he slowly died, suffocated by his own weight.  How can that be a Messiah, a Savior?  This is exactly what people did not want to hear, which is why the Romans continually reminded them that this is the consequence of opposing, even of not worshiping, the Emperor.

            Paul charges that it is not he, but his opponents who are really trying to “please people” and deliver a palatable, reasonable, safe, version of the gospel, one that doesn’t get them on the wrong side of the Romans.  Their version is safer because it maintains the divisions in society that were enforced between Jew and Gentile, or “Greek”.  At some point Paul realized that Jewish law, instead of being a way to maintain a faithful resistance to the Empire, as it had been in Babylon, had been twisted into a way to support and validate the laws of the Roman oppressors.  It had been coopted by Rome and had ironically become just another tool in the enslavement of people by the Empire.  Instead of setting them free as God intended, the Jewish law had become an instrument of their own enslavement.

V.

            People joined Paul’s gatherings not because he was the enemy of Rome, but because like Jesus he refused to have enemies at all.  He knows that Jesus Christ comes into the world to reconcile people to each other and to God.  But empires thrive by dividing and conquering, by playing groups off against each other, and by fomenting competition, hostility, and suspicion between different interests.  Not to mention sheer ruthless terroristic violence.  Empires need foreign enemies as a focus of the people’s fear, and they need to keep the various conquered peoples from ever uniting against them. It is Jesus’ refusal to have enemies that made him dangerous to Rome and made them kill him as an enemy.  Or if his attitude spread, the Empire could not stand.

            Paul’s calling is to make that attitude spread.

            That is our calling too.  We are to live without enemies in a world that demands that we have enemies.  We are to live in cooperation in a world that demands competition.  We are to live in forgiveness in a world that demands retribution and punishment.

            Such a deliberate stance contradicting common sense and going against the grain of society often makes those who follow Jesus outcast, branded as traitors, cowards, naïve, or foolish.  This kind of lifestyle could not be invented by humans because it goes against the grain of our deluded, sinful, nature.  Paul says this message and practice come from God.

            “Am I trying to win over human beings or God?” he writes.  “Or am I trying to please people?  If I were still trying to please people, I wouldn't be Christ's slave.”  That is, he would not be a slave to a Jewish man executed for sedition by the Romans.  It is inconceivable that this would please anybody.  As if people would say, “Oh yeah, let’s all go be slaves to this loser; that’ll sell.”  “Brothers and sisters,” he goes on, “I want you to know that the gospel I preached isn't human in origin.  I didn't receive it or learn it from a human.  It came through a revelation from Jesus Christ.”

            The man the Romans executed because he refused to have enemies did not stay dead.  He rose to new life, breathed his Spirit into his followers, and now leads them.  He frees us from the fear that would keep us enslaved.  And he empowers us to live in the world without enemies, at peace with all, working for justice and peace, inhabiting a new world that is coming.

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Real Liberation.

Galatians 1:1-5.

I.

            The Roman province of Galatia was in what is now central and northern Turkey.   The term “Galatian” though, in Roman literature, does not just refer to people from this particular province.  It also is used more generally to mean all members of a particular ethnic group: the Celtic peoples who inhabited Europe for hundreds of years prior to the northward advances of Rome.  So people in the tribes that had settled from Germany to Ireland and Spain were also called “Galatians.”  

            Some of these Celtic folks had settled on the southern shore of the Black Sea; their descendants made up the population of Galatia.  This is almost certainly where the churches were to which Paul is writing his letter.

            So the Galatians were not just an ordinary ethnic community like so many of the others Rome conquered.  They were a fierce, feared, and dangerous enemy to Rome, even conquering and burning the city of Rome about 300 years earlier.  The Romans considered them to be barbaric, uncivilized “others” over against whom they defined themselves as civilized and advanced.  And we know from many cultural artifacts that Romans still remembered the protracted conflicts with the Galatians.  The conquerors set up visible reminders of the Galatians’ subservient, defeated status. 

            So the Galatians would have been prime candidates to receive Paul’s good news, which was basically that the Romans crucified a Palestinian Jewish man named Jesus… but wonder of wonders, he didn’t stay dead!  God raised him to new life as the first act in a larger drama in which God’s Kingdom of love was on the verge of emerging and overcoming Caesar’s corrupt Empire of division and violence.

            Paul had brought this good news of salvation in Jesus Christ to some churches in the province of Galatia.  He had been on his way elsewhere, but stayed with them for a couple of years while he was recovering from some kind of illness.  Then, hoping to have left strong and self-sustaining communities of disciples of Jesus Christ, he moved on to the west to work in Macedonia and Achaia, what is now Greece.

            It is important to note that there were no Jews in Galatia, that we know of.  The churches founded by Paul were made up completely of Gentiles.  They were people who came to renounce the religion of the imperial State, and instead put their trust in someone the State had crucified as an enemy.

            Later, he finds out from messengers that the churches he established in Galatia are being troubled by emissaries purporting to be from Jerusalem, who are telling them that they can’t follow Jesus Christ unless they first become fully Jewish like Jesus, which means submitting to the ritual of circumcision.

            This upsets Paul greatly.  But he can’t just drop everything and run back over to Galatia.  So he sends the messengers back with this heart-felt, strongly-worded letter.

II.

            The first thing Paul reminds them of is his calling.  He is an “apostle,” a word meaning “one who is sent.”  But he says he is not sent by any human group or authority.  Here he is distinguishing himself from both the larger church and the Imperial regime.  He says he was not sent to them by any people, but “through Jesus Christ and Go the Father, who raised him from the dead.”

            It is an audacious claim.  We tend to look for a person’s credentials.  Where did they go to school?  What church ordained them?  What kind of references do they have?  If someone showed up and claimed to be ordained by God directly, we would be suspicious.

            But Paul is not a stranger to these people.  He lived and worked with them for a period of time.  He founded their churches.  They know his message and his gifts.  In a sense, they are themselves his letter of reference; they have experienced his ministry directly.

            Paul gets his authority from Jesus and God.  He is therefore unlike emissaries from the Emperor, who come bearing the Emperor’s authority and so have to be listened to with utmost seriousness and gravity, because of the immense power the Emperor has over them.  Paul does not appeal to the Galatians because of their fear of him.  He has no such power over them.  He cannot send a legion of soldiers to enforce his will.  His power, as our Book of Order says about all ecclesiastical power, is only “ministerial and declarative.”  He has only the power of persuading them by his words, in this case at a distance, on paper.  But he cannot force them.

            Neither is Paul like his competitors who showed up after he left, who claimed to trump him because they get their authority from the Mother Church in Jerusalem.  Their appeal is also to fear because the Galatians want to do this new Christian-thing the right way, the real way, the original way.  When these official missionaries appear and tell them Paul’s way is the wrong way, they get confused and worried.  They want to be part of this larger movement.  People in those days did not value independence and innovation.  So when they hear that Paul is not officially authorized by Jerusalem but is a rogue preacher, on his own, they become tempted to abandon him and his teaching for what they are being told is the right and approved, traditional way.

            Paul appeals to “Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.”  By mentioning the resurrection, he is reminding them of the basic truth of the gospel.  Jesus Christ is someone the Romans killed yet who was vindicated by God.  God overturned history in him.  God negated the same Roman power that defeated and massacred the Galatians’ ancestors and that is in their face every day.  In other words, he reiterates the original gospel that got their attention in the beginning.

III.

            The good news of Jesus Christ has to do with something that God does out of sovereign love and grace, bringing light into darkness and life out of death.  It is not something human beings dreamed up, or something humans can even do.  It is not based on keeping human laws, whether they be the oppressive laws of Rome, or the ceremonial laws of the Jews, which these Galatians probably didn’t know much about anyway.

            So the next word is part of what would become Paul’s regular formula in his letters: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Grace.  And peace.

            Grace is one of the most important words for Paul.  It describes God’s sovereign activity, again, apart from any human law, tradition, authority, or activity, in bringing people into what is to them a new creation where God is making things right.  God’s grace is the beginning of everything, and so it is at the beginning of all Paul’s letters.  That is especially the case with this letter, to a church that has gone off track.

            Grace is God’s free gift to those who trust in God.  It is not a reward for any action or behavior of ours.  Therefore, it is not coercive or manipulative.  It is not the carrot dangled in front of us to entice us to do what we are told or what a stronger power wants us to do.  God’s grace is simply there, all around us, if we would but turn our hearts to accept, receive, trust, and live into it.  Grace is God’s shining Presence everywhere, a world of abundance and goodness which we need only open our eyes and embrace.

            The Galatians know this grace.  They know it in the acceptance, welcome, love, and blessings they received from this Jewish stranger, who, unlike other Jews (if they had met any at all) did not keep to himself and and his own kind, observing practices that made them feel excluded.  Rather, he told them that God created the whole world in love and declared it very good. 

            And though this world now in their experience was a place of competition, greed, violence, and inequality, that was not God’s original intent.  That happened because of human sinfulness: our addiction to fear, anger, and shame, our blindness, ignorance, and violence, that spawned the broken world we live in, characterized by the injustice and depravity of Rome. 

            These same sins are what killed Jesus when God sends him into the world.  Jesus was crucified by Rome because his preaching and lifestyle threatened their order and power.  Jesus “gave himself for our sins,” and here Paul is probably quoting a common hymn or confession of the early church, an essential affirmation on which all followers of Jesus agreed.

 

IV.

            But instead of being, like so many people they knew, just another victim of Roman terror, this Jesus was not defeated.  He died… but then he rose from the dead!    He still lives!  And by trusting in him, they found themselves free from the effects of sin, free from sin itself, and free even from the power of death.  Roman threats therefore no longer have control over them.  Through Jesus Christ, by his Spirit, they find that they can now live together in freedom, hope, joy, and peace.

            These are not just words, to Paul.  This is not something these Galatians only have to say, and then they’re in, “saved.”  And then their lives go on basically as before.

            No.  Paul is talking about real liberation.  The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ means that people who trust in him are actually free from Rome’s power.  To prove it, he gathers a small community of people who learn to trust in this good news.  They meet weekly, on Saturday night, and they pray together, sing together, and hear together some words of the Hebrew Scriptures that Paul had taught them.  And they share in the ritual of bread and wine, representing Christ’s Body and Blood.

            And in this intimacy, honesty, sharing, acceptance, forgiveness, and love, they experience something new.  They become able to live together in a way that had been unimaginable before, free of the fear, anger, greed, selfishness, exploitation, inequality, and divisions that characterize Rome’s version of “peace.”  By trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, they begin to embody God’s real peace, God’s shalom and justice, in their own life together.

            This grace and peace of God that Paul declared to them were in stark contrast to the debilitating demands and requirements, threats and regulations, divisions and responsibilities, hierarchies and sacrifices of their daily existence under the empire.  That was the difference.  The empire bled them dry, but Jesus Christ fed them.  The empire threatened them and even crucified some of them, if they got out of line.  But Jesus Christ called them together in grace and forgiveness and love.

            This is the point Paul makes when he reminds the Galatians of why Jesus “gave himself for our sins.”  Jesus does this “to set us free from the present evil age.”  To set us free from this present evil age, an age characterized by the pervasive and intrusive, dominating power of Rome and Rome’s laws, values, rituals, taxes, regulations, and idolatrous State religion demanding complete and total allegiance to a deified Emperor, all of which was engineered to maintain and increase the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful at everyone else’s expense.  That’s the only reason any empire exists.

V.

            The “present evil age” that Paul identifies, still persists.  We are still living in it.  Human civilization continues to base itself on the same rancid values and the same ignorance and violence.  Greed, inequality, and injustice are still dominant; it’s just that today the scale is far wider and we have added a comprehensive, systematic, and inherently suicidal assault on the very planet that God created to give us life. 

            This means that the stakes are higher now than they were even in Paul’s time.  Back then empires just killed and enslaved a lot of people.  In our day these same powers of evil are exponentially more powerful.  They still kill and enslave people, of course.  In addition, now they threaten the very ability of the planet to sustain life as we have known it. 

            The Romans did not cause extinctions, they did not genetically modify food, their inequalities in the distribution of wealth were not as bad as ours, they did not poison the environment with radiation and toxic chemicals, and they did not kick the whole atmosphere out of balance.  They did not deplete, degrade, destroy, deface, defile, and debase the whole creation for the sake of making a few people wildly rich.  Those are things we have done in our part of the present evil age.

            The answer however remains the same: Jesus Christ.  It is still because of our sins that he gave himself.  He is still the One whom the empire killed… but who, doesn’t stay dead.  He lives!  And we are still the ones that he sets free by God’s grace, in forgiveness, liberation, and healing. 

            And people today have the same choice to make, whether to give our lives to feed the meatgrinder of this present evil age, or to trust in the grace of the God who created us and everything, and to follow Jesus Christ in his way of simplicity, justice, peace, and love.  Trusting and following him opens us up to a new age, the age to come, the Kingdom of God, which is already here, with and within us.  Because he lives, we live to glorify and enjoy the living God in God’s creation.

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