Sermon on Galatians 1:13-17; 2:11-21
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
May 9, 2021
You’re at the meeting. You didn't necessarily want to go to the meeting but it DID seem like the issues being discussed were bigger than could be handled over e-mail, so you went, making sure to take a good snack because it also seemed like it could be a long one.
It seems like days have passed but it’s probably only been a couple hours and everyone is packing up to go home. The group managed to work through some really difficult issues today. Questions about mission, values, how we define who we are as an organization, who can belong and what the requirements are for participating.
As you look around the room, people look tired - but it’s that good, satisfied kind of tired you feel when you know you’ve done some important work together.
A few days later you get the minutes from the meeting and glance at them. They seem to capture everything that was decided. You feel content, knowing the group made wise decisions together and go on about your work and life.
All’s well that ends well, right?
Well, not quite. Because it turns out, while everyone seemed to be on the same page at the meeting, NOW some people are just going off on their own and doing whatever they feel like. They aren’t sticking with what you all decided as a team during the meeting!
Do you:
Shrug your shoulders and mutter “People are just so peoply sometimes”?
Immediately text all your friends who were also at the meeting: “Can you believe what so-and-so is doing?”
OR
Write a (and this is a direct quote from my study bible) “bitterly polemical” letter expressing your outrage at what has transpired?
Well, the Apostle Paul went with option C and WELCOME TO THE BOOK OF GALATIANS! Now, this is one of those passages that probably made about 0% sense to you when we heard it a few moments ago, so I want to spend some time explaining what in the world is going on BECAUSE there is some holy-moly-wowsers Good News to be found in this text and I am really hoping you can receive it as a gift to your spirit today.
Galatians is one of Paul’s earliest letters. And Paul is HOT in this letter. So grumpy. It’s almost as if he had no idea this was going to be screenshotted and canonized as scripture and read by people all over the world for thousands of years. Whoops.
If you keep reading past where we stopped you’ll see some fun quotes in chapter 3 like “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Did you experience all this for nothing?”
So what’s he so mad about? Well, this is a continuation of the conflict we learned about last week when we studied the Council at Jerusalem in Acts 15. Remember that Jesus was Jewish and the earliest followers of Jesus were also Jewish. Those Jews who followed Jesus were known as The Way. But as stories about Jesus spread far and wide, many people who were NOT Jewish were also attracted to The Way. And so there were conflicts about whether these Gentiles could follow The Way without following all the same customs and religious laws that the Jewish followers did.
At the Council at Jerusalem (which definitely could NOT have been an e-mail and was most certainly longer than two hours), the leaders in Jerusalem determined that it was not necessary for Gentiles to be circumcised in order to belong. God’s spirit moving among them showed they already belonged, just as they were, and so they were exempt from this requirement.
The meeting ended and everyone went their merry way. Which means Paul went back to his mission - working among the Gentiles and inviting them to follow The Way of Jesus. EXCEPT….some people in Jerusalem didn’t get the notes from the meeting (or chose to ignore them) and came to the churches in Galatia and said, “Oh, no, no. You DO have to be circumcised to belong. Absolutely.”
And THIS is why Paul sounds so defensive and angry in this letter. He starts off listing all his credentials so the people in Galatia will believe him (and not these interlopers who have come from Jerusalem preaching the wrong message). And then he gets into some really intricate theological claims that have deeply shaped Christianity ever since.
The issue that Paul names is justification. How are we justified?
If you’ve ever studied print or digital media design, you’ll know that justification is a thing in typesetting. On most computers you can choose to have your text flush left, flush right, centered, or justified. Justified text is the one where the words get spread out so they go from margin to margin and there’s a clean, straight line down both sides because the text is flush from edge to edge. I like this connection because it gives me a visual for what being justified is like. Set right with God, everything in its place, tidy, and expansive - those beautiful letters taking up every bit of space they were created to take up so they shine in all their gorgeous glory.
Or another way to look at it: Biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore encourages us to use the word “belonging” when we see “justified” in this letter. “How do people know they belong? How do we know we belong to God? And if we do belong to God, how do others know?” [1]
Those are the issue at stake here. It’s big. Paul is so angry that Jews are showing up and telling Gentiles they have to follow the law that he says some things that Christians have used over the years to not only disparage the Torah but also harm Jewish people who keep the laws found there. I think when Christians read our holy texts it’s always important to name when they’ve been used to hurt and do violence to our Jewish kindred...and to repent of that wrongdoing and strive to do better.
When you really dig into what Paul is saying, he’s NOT saying there’s anything wrong about Jews following the laws they’ve always followed. And he’s NOT saying the Jewish people outside of The Way are somehow disconnected from God. Jews have already received the gift of God’s full grace and love long before Jesus came on the scene and Jesus doesn’t change that. Paul’s concern is only with the Gentile followers and he is 100% confident that those who follow Jesus experience justification - that sense of belonging - through that connection to Christ. Full stop. If Jewish members of The Way want to keep kosher, great. But Paul says justification - set right, everything in its place, fully expanded to the margins in love - that deep belonging that we find as Christians comes as a gift from God, through the faithfulness of Jesus.
And there’s a key verse here in chapter 2, verse 16. In some translations it says we are justified - find our belonging in God - through faith IN Jesus Christ. And in other translations it says we are justified - find our belonging in God - through the faith OF Jesus Christ.
Scholars say we really can’t know which one Paul meant, but a lot of his other writings make it clear that the real gift here is the faithfulness OF Jesus Christ. The way Jesus modeled God’s love while he walked on the earth, the way he stayed with that faithfulness even unto death, and the fact that even death could not take Christ’s love away from us....these are all signs of the faithfulness of Christ. And it is through Christ’s faithfulness, Paul says, that we are justified - set right, everything in its place, fully expanded to the margins in love, certain that we BELONG FULLY within God’s gracious love.
There is absolutely nothing we can do, Paul says, to earn this or get rid of it. It simply is. God loves us so recklessly, so wildly that the Christ-force is always pursuing us, cannot be separated from us, courses through and in and over and beyond and around us at all times, drawing us further and deeper with every breath into Love. We cannot run from it. We cannot earn it. And as Paul writes so beautifully in Romans 8, there is absolutely “nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
The freedom that we find if we allow ourselves to truly receive this truth is beyond what we can put into words. When we know, really KNOW, our belovedness….we are free. We don’t have to strive to know our worth. It is as close as our breath and as certain as the sun rising tomorrow morning.
But there’s even more….because when we know the source of our belonging is God and not anything we do, then we also realize that every single other person we encounter is justified in the same way. Every single person belongs within God’s love. We don’t have bragging rights just because we think we’re special, and we have no right to look down on anyone else. WE ALL BELONG. In a world where different groups of people are so often estranged and unable to see the image of God in one another, this is powerfully good news. No matter who we are, Paul says, our primary identity is as a beloved child of God. We are all justified - set right, set free, expanded to and beyond the margins in God’s gracious love. Forever.
Henri Nouwen says this gift of justification means we are a part of the household of God and that we find ourselves most fully in the “house of God’s love.” What a beautiful image. He writes:
When we enter into the household of God, we come to realize that the fragmentation of humanity and its agony grow from the false supposition that all human beings have to fight for the right to be appreciated and loved.
In the house of God’s love we come to see with new eyes and hear with new ears and thus recognize all people, whatever their ace, religion, sex, wealth, intelligence, and background, belong to that same house. God’s house has no dividing walls or closed doors. “I am the door,” Jesus says, “Anyone who enters through me will be safe” (John 10:9).
The more fully we enter into the house of love, the more clearly we see that we are there together with all humanity and that in and through Christ, we are [siblings], members of one family. [2]
May it be so. Amen.
NOTES:
[1]https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/living-by-faith/commentary-on-galatians-113-17-211-21
[2] Henri Nouwen, from Lifesigns. Quoted in You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living
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