There is an RE teacher I know ...

I should explain that I am no longer church warden; I stepped down at Easter, handing over to a wonderful new team. I had to do it: over the next couple of years work will become very busy what with various commitments to an international scientific society, of which I have spoken before. But I will continue blogging here from time to time ...
And here is one of those occasional pieces. This is the concise version of a talk given on 30 June 2013, as given at the 1100, leaving out digressions about anti-semitism, testicular cancer (that was why this passage was so appropriate for me), the fact that I have barely begun to understand the implications of the Cross, and one or two other things.

HTC 0930 & 1100, 30 June 2013

Galatians 5:1,13-25

There is an RE teacher that I know, who quite often texts me at work. Last Monday, at 1pm, she sent me this, quite out of the blue:

I didn't see it when I looked: does it look like a good idea?

I pondered this for a while. What was “it”? Where had she been looking when she didn't see it? In what way might “it” look like either a good or a bad idea? Frankly, I hadn't a clue. I replied:

Does what look like a good idea?

In an almost immediate reply, my phone beeped its little beep:

Sorry? Wazzat?

Clearly we weren't communicating very well that day.

We figured it out in the end. Her phone had decided to repeat-send a random week-old text.

One of the secrets of good communication: try to bear in mind what has been said before, the direction from which people are coming.

St Paul's letters are a very particular form of communication. No mobile phones, no text messages. (We did try to summarize Galatians in 140 characters or less; our attempts weren't bad, but maybe they didn't capture absolutely all the fine detail.) Paul would have written a letter on a scroll, mostly by dictation, and persuaded a friend to take it by land or sea all the way to its destination. Then, as Amy told us, the letter would have been read out not just once, but again and again in all the church communities in the local area. It would have been a major operation. So Paul's letters were never just postcards (“Weather fine here in Thessalonica, wish you were here”); it's a good rule of thumb that you wouldn't be sent a letter from Paul unless you were in a rather sticky situation.

As all our preachers have noted, this is a forceful letter even for Paul – passionate, angry. Paul is at his wits' end about the situation in Galatia (Galatians 4:20), deeply worried. Beneath the anger there is a very close loving relationship between Paul and his correspondents (Galatians 4:15; also the tearful farewells in Acts 20:37-38). Paul is blunt and outspoken because he cares desperately.

Why is Paul so upset?

As Jeremy reminded us, the Jesus movement, the early church, started off entirely Jewish. Being a Christian flowed logically from being a Jew, one of God's people, and then seeing that the crucified Jesus was the promised One, the One raised up by God to be Lord of all. Paul, Peter, Barnabas, Stephen, observant traditional Jews all, saw Messiah Jesus as the fulfilment of their faith.

Then they found that Gentiles were coming to Jesus too. The book of Acts tells the story; how despite themselves they had to realize that God was doing a new thing. This wasn't just a matter of a few Gentiles hanging about the edges of Jewish fellowships; God's Holy Spirit was making it wonderfully and absolutely clear that these new Gentile Christians were to be brought straight in to the centre of the shared Christian life, not treated as second-class believers. In particular, the Gentile Christians were not to be required to fulfil entry requirements. Bluntly, Jewish Christians were all circumcised from birth, because that was the sign of belonging to God's chosen people, together with the whole paraphernalia of the Jewish Law. But Gentile Christians were Christians not because they'd passed through Jewish rites and traditions, but because they had responded to God's glorious message of grace and forgiveness – same message, same Lord, but different backgrounds.

As Nick told us (sermon notes not on web at time of writing!), Paul carefully works this all out earlier on in the letter. He shows that God's promise of grace was made to Abraham, long before the start of the Law, so that Abraham is the spiritual marker not just for Jews but for anyone who comes to the Lord Jesus Christ in faithful trust. Jesus gives everything for us, goes the whole distance, accepts shame and disgrace and death on an executioner's cross, so that we can be fully accepted and forgiven. As David Mayhew said, there's no room here for the difference between Jew and Gentile, or slave and free, or male and female, or gay and straight, or low-church protestant and anglo-catholic. All of us, altogether, find Amazing Grace at the foot of the cross.

And now Paul finds there are people who have come to these little Gentile Christian communities in Galatia, and these people are saying that Paul's brothers and sisters in Christ aren't yet good enough for God. These people are saying that the Lord Jesus Christ's death and resurrection are not enough to make Paul's loved ones fully children of God. These people are saying, on top of all of this it is necessary for these new Gentile Christians to jump through various ritualistic hoops in order to become proper fully-fledged Christians. They are undoing all the careful Spirit-led thinking and praying and discussions there had been about accepting Gentile Christians as equals in Christ (see Acts 15 for example). Angry? Paul was livid!

1: Galatians 5:1. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

So here, in Galatians 5:1, Paul is saying: don't be cowed by these bullies! Stand up as the free men and women in Christ that you really are! Christ has set us free, and if the Son of Man sets us free then we are free indeed! Don't let people lay heavy burdens on you and weigh you down with all sorts of do's and don't's. Pierre's moving testimony (end of David's talk) gets it absolutely right: my identity is in Christ and Christ alone. No-one other than God gets to tell me who I really am.

I think it is clear why this is important, as much for today as when this letter was written. It matters who we are. We need to know the truth, because the truth will set us free. To make it personal, let's consider my case. I'm a father, I'm an Englishman, I have Yorkshire roots and an Oxford accent. I do sums for relaxation (strange but true: if I'm silent for more than 2 minutes my children look at me accusingly and say, Dad, are you doing mathematics?). But none of these are at the heart of things. Even my ability to think could be taken from me some day. What matters in the end is that I am a forgiven sinner, deeply loved by my Father God, work-in-progress of his Holy Spirit. All else is fine in itself, but may not last. I have to build the house of my life on the solid rock of the love of Jesus Christ, not shifting sands.

2: Galatians 5:6. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. Paul goes on to warn his friends (verses 2-12), if they give way to these demands then they will lose much more than they might think. Circumcision, the main entry qualification, might seem to be just a minor if painful operation, one of these oddities that a religion accumulates. But if you are a Gentile Christian, and you think you should do this to become a complete Christian, then you are actually turning down the freedom offered by Christ; you are actually rejecting Christ. In Nick's phrase, it's the difference between an “Amazing Grace” faith and a “Trying Harder” faith. Pauls sums it up in an arresting phrase, “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Galatians 5:6).

I've been at Holy Trinity for nearly 25 years, and over that time you have taught me a great deal about this. Out of all the church communities I belonged to, you have taught me the most by accepting me as I am, by trusting me, listening to me, valuing me even when I am different from you. Don't worry, I'm not saying you are perfect! (not yet, anyway) but you have taught me much about the deep love of God the Father, always ready to meet the Prodigal half-way. We don't have to be all the same in order to be forgiven by the Father, loved by the Son, filled by the Holy Spirit.

3: Galatians 5:25. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.Paul's letters often follow the pattern, work out the underlying truth of the matter, then talk about how it plays in practice. Galatians certainly does this. After these inspiring words about freedom, telling us to stand firm, Paul gets practical.

The big question about freedom always is, freedom to do what? It's possible for Christians to use their freedom in difficult and self-destructive ways. Galatians 5:15: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other”. It is possible, for example, for Christians to make a fetish of always speaking their mind, without paying enough attention to the effects of their words. I have to say, as someone with Yorkshire cultural roots, I have to be particularly careful about that – there's a whole difficult cult of Yorkshire outspoken-ness.

For example, last Good Friday, I was deeply shocked. On two separate occasions, I had a conversation with someone, and then as I was walking away I realized that my closing words actually had been explicitly motivated by a mean and unkind attitude on my part. I don't mean to make a mountain out of a molehill; I am not sure it would have been obvious – actually I hope it wasn't – but I knew. As a Christian I am free to speak the truth, but I need to figure out ways to speak the loving truth, not an unkind and hurtful truth that breaks down rather than builds up. I've work to do on that. I need to get away from the bad list in Galatians 5:19-21, and move towards the fruitful list in Galatians 5:22.

Maybe you can think of other items on that list which I need to work on. May I suggest that if that is the case then you have a quiet word with my wife Catherine, who will probably agree with you.

It would be easy to turn this into a piece of “Trying Harder” faith, rather than “Amazing Grace” faith. But this isn't a matter of trying harder to please God; it's a case of wanting to be given the grace to live in a constructive not a destructive manner. Paul chooses his words here with particular care. The bad list arises as the “acts of a sinful nature”. The fruitful list is described as exactly that: fruit of the Spirit. Paul always teaches that the day-to-day Christian life is a battleground, as the old sinful nature struggles against the new life of the Spirit. So he implies, the key thing is actively to invite God's Holy Spirit to bear fruit in one's life. There's a dynamic available to us, if we commit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ then this releases the divine power of the Holy Spirit of Christ, who can heal and redeem our failures.

What does this mean, practically? For me: maybe it's time for me to be specific in my prayers that I want God's Holy Spirit to work on the motivations that from time to time poke above the surface when I speak. For you; well it may be something quite different. But let's not be discouraged; we are promised the help of the Holy Spirit, and He is easily big enough to take the job on. It may take a while, but then, that's the thing with fruit; you've got to wait patiently and make sure you keep feeding the tree good nutrients. As Paul himself said in another letter (2 Corinthians 12:9) “[The Lord] said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness"”.

Amen