Hilton Head Island, SC – February 23, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Galatians 5:1-5;6-15
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. – Galatians 5:1 (RSV)
The apostle Paul was a man who had a definite tendency toward extremism. When he was younger, he was the Super-Jew. In today’s terminology, that means he would be one of the most ultra-Orthodox of ultra-Orthodox Jews. After his experience on the road to Damascus, he became the Super-Christian. In today’s terminology, that means he would make the most enthusiastic of evangelicals look like wishy-washy backsliders. From the beginning of the Christian Church, which Paul of Tarsus did more to establish than any other figure in all of history, including Jesus of Nazareth, there is no one who was more devoted to the elevation of Jesus among Christian believers as the primary factor of faith, than Paul.
In his early life, Paul believed that the essence of a proper life was to follow every single requirement written in the law of Moses, which means all the religious laws found in the first five books of the Bible. In his later life, however, Paul threw that idea entirely out the window, and proclaimed instead that faith in Jesus Christ was the essence of a proper life. And to Paul, “having faith” meant having the kind of faith Paul had. It was not sufficient merely to be a believer; one had also to subscribe to the right beliefs.
In his missionary journeys, Paul visited the Christians who live in Galatia. Galatia was a section of what we know as Asia Minor, or Anatolia. The capital city of Turkey, Ankara, is located near what was the province of Galatia in New Testament times.
Initially, Paul went primarily to synagogues in the eastern Mediterranean world to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Fairly soon, however, the very first Christians decided he should preach among the Gentiles, not among the Jews. After all, Paul had persecuted the first Christians, nearly all of whom were Jews, and the Jewish Christians were not about to forget that. In the first two chapters of his letter to the Galatians, Paul described in veiled terms how it was decided that he should become the apostle to the Gentiles, while Peter, James, and John would be the apostles to the Jews. I suspect that Paul was given an ultimatum, and that he had no choice in the matter. So he became the apostle to Gentiles.
Why was the decision made to have Paul go to the Gentiles and the others would go to the Jews? It is never clearly spelled out anywhere in the New Testament, but here is why I think the decision was made: The remaining eleven disciples of Jesus and the other Early Church leaders didn’t trust Paul. For a few years he was trying to quell or perhaps even to kill them, and now he wanted to become one of their leaders, if not The Leader. Implicit in this crucial decision may have been the notion that Gentile Christians didn’t matter as much as Jewish Christians, since Gentiles were pagans anyway. This is never stated anywhere in the Bible, but reading between the lines perhaps it can be legitimately inferred.
There was a particular controversy which brought this whole issue to a head. The Galatian Christians presumably were all Gentiles. None of them had been born as Jews. But an unnamed someone, probably a Jewish Christian, had convinced them that in order for Galatian Gentiles to become Christians, they first had to become full-fledged Jews. That meant they had to follow all the laws of the Torah, the law code of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But that further meant that male Galatians had to become circumcised.
Paul pitched a pluperfect fit about that idea. As someone who had lived by all the biblical laws of the Torah for the first half of his life, he knew that Gentiles would have an almost impossible task first of all to learn and secondly to observe all of the 600+ laws enumerated in the Torah. But there was a far greater impediment than just that for all male Galatian Gentiles. They, as adults, would have to be circumcised. Without bothering to explain exactly why that would be a major obstacle, let us all agree that it would have a definite discouraging effect on finding new male recruits for Christianity in central Anatolia.
This, then, is the background of why Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians. He did not begin it as he began all his other epistles. Instead of taking many verses to commend his readers for this and that, and saying nice things about this person or that person, right away Paul lit into the Galatians like a hungry lion in an old-folks home for elderly and infirm gazelles. Paul had previously preached to the Galatians, and it was as though they heard nothing of what he had said. Referring to himself in the third person, which Paul did elsewhere on several occasions, he wrote, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to different gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:6).
Christian people, you need to understand that Paul is addressing a crucial issue for what Christianity is and should be. It is not a religion based on religious laws, but rather on faith in God as He is made known to us through Jesus Christ. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mt. 5:17). The spirit of the law gives life to us; it results in an ethic of love. The letter of the law results in a deadening of life, and turns human existence into an enormous and lethal list of do’s and don’t’s. Legalism destroys what the laws of the Bible are intended to nourish. Having personally been so adversely affected by this is his early years, Paul ferociously attacked in his later years the very foundation of legalism when he wrote to the Galatians.
Having gone through a lengthy and very thickly involved process of reasoning, which Paul frequently did to a fine fare-thee-well, he began the conclusion of his letter with these ever-memorable words: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 6:1). For freedom Christ has set us free! Now we can live with a new kind of ethic, an ethic which seeks to understand what is the good and kind and loving thing to do, and not simply the thing which we feel obligated to do by what the biblical law insists we must do. One of the commandments says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Ex. 20:16). But what if your neighbor is giving medical marijuana to people with cancer to ease their pain, or to children with epilepsy to ease their seizures? Do you tell the truth to the authorities, and thus turn her in, or do you lie, and save her? “You shall not steal,” we are told by one of the Ten Commandments. But what if you’re Jean Valjean, and your family is starving, and the only way you can feed them is to steal a loaf of bread. Do you do it, or do you let them starve? For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Do the loving thing, and not mindlessly what the law says you must do.
For us, however, freedom from blind obedience to laws does not refer mainly to religious laws but to civil laws. If we truly believe that for freedom Christ has set us free, it means we will govern our lives not by what we perceive others expect of us, but rather by what we expect of ourselves. For example, in the 1950s and 60s, there were laws in the South which prevented blacks from drinking from fountains reserved for whites only or eating in sections of restaurants reserved for white patrons or staying overnight in hotels or motels which catered only to whites. Was it wrong for blacks and concerned whites to resist those laws and deliberately to break them? Is it wrong for protesters to climb the fences of nuclear weapons sites to express disapproval of our nation’s military policies? Is it wrong publicly to say that it is a wrong interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution that people can openly carry firearms anywhere they want, including public places, as the Governor of South Carolina and many other Second Amendment fanatics proclaim?
School shootings continue to occur, despite the furor caused by Columbine and Sandy Hook and scores of other schools. In 2010, a third of the nation’s public schools had armed guards on duty. Now it is almost up to 50%. The state of Texas is considering a law to require teachers to carry firearms in the classroom. A Forth Worth businessman has offered to supply schools with bulletproof vests for children and to pay unemployed people to be trained as armed guards. Here’s an alternative idea: Outlaw all handguns and all automatic weapons except for the police and the military. The answer to gun violence is not to give more guns to more citizens. We all should feel free to speak up on behalf of sanity, but we should especially feel free to vote against politicians who support loosely-regulated ownership of firearms or no regulations at all.
For freedom Christ has set us free! We are not obligated to do what we think others demand of us; we are free to do what we think God demands of us!
To be free means we are free to fight what we think are unjust laws or unjust social practices or unjust financial dealings. The 1% are spending billions of dollars to insure that they stay on top, and the 99% are too meekly acquiescing in their efforts. Whomever the Koch brothers and the other minions of monetary manipulation support in elections the 99% should oppose. The ethic of Christian freedom not only allows us to combat injustice, but it actively encourages us to combat injustice.
A man named Craig Cobb was wanted in Canada by the legal authorities for inciting hatred as a white supremacist. So he moved to a hamlet in North Dakota which has almost shriveled into oblivion. There were just 24 residents of Leith, North Dakota when Craig Cobb arrived there. He began buying up lots, intending to give them to other white supremacists, upon which they could build homes. He bought a milk factory which had long been closed, giving it to a neo-Nazi organization for their use.
Surprisingly, Leith has one black resident, who happens to live next door to Mr. Cobb. The other residents of Leith are concerned for his well-being, as well as their own. Christian freedom means being free to fight the likes of Craig Cobb, tooth and claw if need be.
But to be free also means we are free to fail, and sometimes we shall fail. To oppose government policies when they work against the poor and dispossessed does not mean the opposers shall always win. In fact, far too often they lose, because rich possessers usually manage to thwart the poor and dispossessed, not necessarily because they are fundamentally mean-spirited or greedy, but because they truly believe that everyone is capable of emerging from poverty. It is a belief unrelated to reality. Nevertheless, they use their wealth to guarantee that everyone must make the effort, and that government must not provide assistance to the underprivileged, because they are convinced it erodes the noble American work ethic.
A young boy was standing outside a grocery store, waiting for his mother to come out. A man asked him, “Where is the post office?” The intelligent boy confidently answered, “Go down that way, and take the third street to the left. It will be on your right as soon as you turn the corner.” The man told the boy, “Thank you very much. You’re a fine boy. I’m the new minister in town. I want you to come to church next Sunday, and I’ll tell you how to get to heaven.” “You’re kidding me, right?” said the boy. “You don’t even know how to get to the post office!”
That minister probably failed to win over that smart child by what, in all evangelical innocence, he said. But God will forgive him, because God made him free to fail.
Christians are also free to flee, if they so choose. A while back a Sunday School teacher named Ed Bolian and two companions set out from New York City for Los Angeles in a powerful Mercedes. Twenty-eight hours and fifty minutes later, they arrived at a marina on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles. By means of a bedpan, a radar detector, and very few fuel stops because of an extra gas tank in the trunk, they averaged 98 MPH in their dash across the continent. They established a new record in this zany and dangerous game. They were free to do it, but should they have done it? I know what I think. What do you think? Being free to flee in that manner doesn’t mean we should flee.
On the other hand, we are free to flee from our own mistakes, when we come to realize that they truly are mistakes. A couple of weeks ago I referred to a column in Christian Century by Brian Doyle, the editor of Portland Magazine. Last week he had another column. It was called A Fool’s Awakening. He told of a time many years ago when he was eight years old or so. His parents announced to his sister and him that their cousins were coming for a visit. He complained that he didn’t want them to come. Then Brian Doyle wrote, “My father said something calm and reasonable, as still is his wont. I said something rude. My mother remonstrated quietly but sharply, as still is her wont. I said something breathtakingly selfish.” Before the situation got out of hand, Brian – quote – “realized I was being a fool. It wasn’t an epiphany or trumpet blast or anything epic….It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, though I was embarrassed, later. It was more like for a second I saw who I actually was rather than who I thought I was, or wanted to be, or wanted other people to think I was. I understood, dimly, for an instant – I believe for the first time in my life – that I was being a fool.”
Being free to flee means we can flee from our bad choices or our bad behavior, not because we must, but because we can. We do not feel compelled by religious laws to change, but by a desire to please God and other people around us. We are not obligated to follow God’s laws, but by our faith in Jesus Christ we are liberated to choose to follow them. Biblical laws are good, but they are not the essence of who we are or what we believe. We must not allow them by themselves to govern what we do.
As Christians, we are free to fail, free to fight, and free to flee. Such freedom offers a wonderful emancipation, but it also requires major reasoned and reasonable participation.
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.