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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