Sermon Archives

June 20, 2010
Pastor Jim Bangsund

"No Other Gospel: A Dangerous Foolishness"
Sermon Series on Galatians (3 of 5)
Galatians 3

The other day, I came across a fascinating time line from 1976.¹ Two entries in particular caught my attention:

March 1976: Steve Wozniak finishes work on the Apple I. He first asks his employer, Hewlett Packard, if they are interested in an $800 machine that runs BASIC. All departments at HP turn down his offer.
[Next entry, a few weeks later ...]
April 1, 1976: Apple Computer Company is founded by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ron Wayne.

Do you think HP may at times look back on that decision with regret? Oh, they've certainly rebounded from it, but ... wow. And yet, had they seized the opportunity, things still could have gone awry. I have this quirky vision of them accepting the Woz's offer, taking over the Apple I ... and then adding this and that and a little more of that and this and turning his $800 desktop into just another $80,000 main frame computer. And I imagine Woz, standing outside the board room door, excluded from the conversation, and yelling, "No, no! You just don't get it. The future in consumer computers is in traveling light. Lose the size and weight. Main frames were a start, and they got us to this point. But the times they are achangin'."

Well, of course, things didn't happen that way, and so today we have the iPad. But my fanciful imagining of how things might have gone wrong for Steve Wozniak and his Apple I is pretty close to what started to go wrong for the Apostle Paul and the Gospel. And you and I are here today - traveling light, instead of dragging around a ball and chain of rules about what we can and can't eat, how we should dress, how far we can travel on the Sabbath, and so on - because Paul started yelling outside the board room door. Well, not actually that. But he had moved on after planting the church in Galatia and could only respond from a distance when he heard that outsiders had come in and started tampering with the Gospel. So Paul did what he did best: he wrote a letter - a strong one.

If you've been here the past two weeks, you know we're looking at Paul's letter to the Galatians - a real letter, written to a group of new Christians in what is today central Turkey. Just like today, God was creating a community of faith, a family in which two things were happening. First, people learned how they could be made right with God, with all their sins, which stood like a wall between them and God, wiped out - not by their jumping through the hoops of religion but rather simply by believing God ... and trusting what he had done in Christ through cross and resurrection. That's the first thing that happened when the Gospel got legs. Second, this new community was also then freed from the burden of religious traditions and laws which so often separate us into in-groups and out-groups. And we're going to hear about that this morning as we listen to what Paul writes in Galatians chapter 3. That's page 1152 in your church Bible.

Paul has heard that a group of outsiders, Jewish Christians known as Judaizers, had been following him and, after he left a place, they would come in with false teachings. Indeed, they were bringing "another Gospel - which is really no Gospel at all," as Paul wrote earlier. Gospel means good news, but they were turning good news back into the same-old-same-old bad news of religious laws and hoops to jump through. They were telling the Galatians, non-Jews just like we are, that what God had done in Jesus was good stuff, but that to really become Christians the Galatians first had to keep the old Jewish law - especially circumcision. Sort of like my imagining the board of directors taking the Woz's Apple I and one of them saying, "Gentlemen, this Wozniak thing is great and imaginative, but it just lacks some substance. It needs weight, it needs gravitas, it needs ... it needs to have a main frame attached." No wonder Paul starts off in chapter 3:

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

You're about to lose the whole thing! Paul warns. In verses 2 through 5, he asks a series of questions that really come down to one question: "Think back," he says. "Something happened to you when you heard the Gospel. Your fear and uneasiness before God were suddenly lifted; you no longer felt alone in the world because God made you part of an encouraging family of faith. You were alive, traveling light, filled with hope and enthusiasm and optimism. Did you get that because of jumping through religious hoops or because God's Holy Spirit was within you?"

Good question. You know, we're a really diverse group of folks here at St Tim's. Some of you have become followers of Christ in recent years, and there's an infectious joy about you that just fun to see. Others have walked in faith for many years, but occasionally that walk becomes weary and timeworn as little by little you have taken back upon yourself bits and pieces and burdens that God never meant you to carry.

A farmer once came upon a man walking along the road with a heavy load on his back. He offered him a ride, which was gratefully accepted, but as they rode along, the farmer noticed that the fellow kept his baggage on his shoulders rather than placing it on the floor of the wagon. "Why don't you put that load down and give yourself a rest?" the farmer asked. To which the fellow responded, "Oh, that's all right. It's quite enough for you to give me a ride. You don't need to carry my baggage, too." Ever been there? Sometimes, you just get fixated on the immediate problem when God wants you to let go and enjoy the ride.

Here the Galatians were, slipping back into the monstrous challenge and burden of bearing that weight themselves, trying to keep up with the demands of the law of Moses, as we've mentioned the past two weeks.

So Paul trumps Moses with Abraham. The Judaizers prided themselves in being children of Abraham, after all. But Paul was an expert on the Old Testament, and, when his opponents started quoting Scripture, Paul was up to the challenge. In verses 6-7, he writes:

Consider Abraham: "He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham.

In other words, it's faith not your family that makes people children of Abraham - and that opens the door to Gentiles, too. Why does Paul say "consider Abraham"? Because, although God gave Israel the law through Moses, more than 4 centuries before that God had used Abraham to create Israel. Precedent. What God said to Abraham came first and trumps what God later said to Moses. And what did God say to Abraham? In verses 6-18 Paul notes, first, that God came to Abraham with a promise, not a law code - a promise that his descendants would become a great nation, and, second, when Abraham responded by believing God, God counted this belief, this trust, this faith, as "righteousness." Paul's point? This is how God worked from the beginning, folks; he gave promise before he gave law. And faith in that promise is what makes us God's children. In verse 17, Paul sums it up, this trumping of Moses by Abraham:

What I mean is this: The law, introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise.

So promise trumps law. God's first way of dealing with us was not by giving us a list of rules but by bringing us a promise - a promise to Abraham that ultimately led to Jesus. Well, if so - if promise trumps law - what, then, was the purpose of the law? Paul asks this in verse 19, and then goes on through verse 26 explaining that God gave us his law for two reasons: first to show us our sin - like a mirror that shows us the dirt on our face - and then to guide us to faith in Christ.

Here, Paul compares the law to the elderly slave, called a paidagogos, who took children to school and delivered them to their schoolmaster. Once the children were delivered, the slave's job was finished. And once the child grew up, he no longer needed a paidagogos. The law of Moses, was our paidagogos, Paul says. But now we have been brought to faith in Christ and we're no longer under the command of this stern guide. In verses 24-26, he writes:

So the law was put in charge [literally "was our paidagogos"] to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

So does this mean that anything goes? The law God gave through Moses no longer dominates us, so does this mean it doesn't matter how we then live? There were those who, whether mocking Paul or just confused, tried to say that. But in verse 27, Paul points out that

all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

Baptism, going down into the water and coming up again, gives an image of death and new life, the ending of an old toxic relationship and the beginning of a new life-giving one. Certain habits and qualities are set aside and new ones are taken on as we "clothe ourselves in Christ," as Paul says. You become part of a new community of faith. And what does that mean in your life? I could mention many things, but in Galatians Paul is particularly concerned about where we Gentiles fit in. And more. In the next verse, verse 28, we read:

There is [now] neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

In Christ - in this new community of faith - we now live thankful lives pleasing to God; and so there shouldn't be in-groups and out-groups. In Paul's day, a Jewish male regularly gave thanks to God that he had been created neither a Gentile nor a woman. Here, in one sweeping statement, Paul declares that when we are "in Christ" - when we are at our best as followers of Jesus - there is no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female; that is, no distinctions of race or class or gender.

Now, of those three, Paul only got around to really developing the first one completely: no Jew or Gentile. That was the burning issue of his day. Slave or free? Paul was only questioned once on how that should play out - in his letter to Philemon. Elsewhere he generally just gives traditional advice such as "slaves obey your masters." It took the church until the nineteenth century to really work out the implications of "no slave or free." And "no male or female"? Paul was never asked to develop that thought further, and elsewhere simply gives traditional advice. It took quite some time for the church to work on that one, and so finally here in the 20^th and 21^st centuries we're beginning to see gender equality in the work place - and in politics! - an equality first sketched out by Paul's clear hope and vision in Galatians 3:28.

I remember a day many years ago when our daughter, Naomi, was about two years old - a very early talker and a very keen observer of life. I was working on a project in the garage and after watching for a few minutes Naomi said, "Daddy's fix hard things." I was just about to give her a mini-lecture on the equality of women and their ability to handle difficult things, too, when she continued, " ... and Mommy's fix soft things." Ah, yes. Another fine example of the organizing principles of the two-year old mind. I fixed "hard" things made of wood and metal, and Judy tended to softer things like scraped arms and stuffed animals and tear-stained cheeks. And fathers sometimes have brusquer, keep-a-stiff-upper-lip relationships with their kids than do their mothers - especially with their sons. Truth be told, we probably need a bit of both.

Today is Father's Day. In Galatians, we hear the voice of a spiritual father: Paul, who is deeply concerned for his children in the faith. They've muddled things, wandering back into the maze of the law of Moses, and Paul delivers a bracing pull-up-your-socks lecture on Abraham, the priority of God's promise, and faith.

And how we, too, need to hear what Paul says! Because in this no-free-lunch Valley in which we live, the Gospel is such strange and unlikely good news. Even as church members - children of God and followers of Jesus Christ - we need to hear and be reaffirmed again and again in the counter-intuitive message of how God changed the world through promise and a cross. Because that sets us right with God himself - yes, certainly that - but also because it shows us how we should then walk with each other. In Christ - in this community of faith - things like where we were born, our social class, whether we are men or women, make no difference in God's eyes - and shouldn't in our eyes either.

Rather, made children of God through faith, and freed from the deadening weight of both religious laws and the walls that divide us, we can now travel light. Traveling light; think of the difference between a 1970s main frame and an iPad. For it's as you travel light - in Christ - that God is then best able to use you to make a difference here at St Tim's, in this Valley, and in the lives of those around you. Amen.

1. http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/history.html.