The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for June 24, 2007

Texts: Psalm 42/Galatians 3:23-29

Title: “Abraham’s Offspring”

              “Paul, many preachers like me have attempted to find a good way to introduce you and your writings, but I’m guessing that you can do a better job yourself.  “You are correct pastor, but remember, I enjoyed a great many more opportunities to introduce myself than the opportunities you have had to introduce me. Why, I remember one particular occasion when I was called upon to introduce myself.  The year was 55 or 56, as I recall.  I was writing to the church in Galatia.  Alerted ahead of time that their were some bad actors in that church, people who made light of the gospel I was proclaiming in my Lord Jesus’ name, I felt compelled to stress my credentials.

              If I had not been provoked I may have been a little less assertive, a little more conciliatory, but at the time I felt I needed to prove myself. I was younger then and brash, you understand. Anyway, these are the words of introduction I chose in writing to the folks in Galatia:  ‘You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism.  I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.  I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.  But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, [I went right to work].

              No Hebrew, not one, had better credentials to produce.  I was a Jew through and through.  But, pastor, there came a time in my life when the credentials I sported with such pride lost their meaning for me. Thereafter the only credential I cared about was that I faithfully served my Lord, Jesus the Christ. Here is how I eventually described the transformation that overtook my life, ‘I have suffered the loss of all things, and regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…’  Believe me when I tell you, I meant every word.

              Pastor, I lived my life, both of my lives, with integrity.  I did all I could as a Jew to live faithfully according to the tradition in which I was raised. In fact I excelled in comparison to my peers. Life owed me nothing. I was going along just fine.  It was, however, only when Christ entered my life that the profits and losses I had tallied in living were accurately displayed.  Those gains and accomplishments that I looked upon with such pride lost all meaning for me, representing nothing more than wasted time and effort.  My life’s mission only became clear to me when the risen Christ entered my life on the Damascus road. It was a mission I took up with zeal.”

              Zeal, friends, is the perfect adjective to use in describing Paul’s entire career as a disciple of Christ.  His zeal constantly rises to the surface throughout his letters, particularly when his ambition is to differentiate the freedom he enjoyed as a servant of Christ from the constraints imposed on his fellow Jews.

              Nowhere were those constraints more in evidence than in that church he addressed in Galatia, a province in modern day Turkey. The church in Galatia was a fractured community yet to find its bearings as a fellowship committed to Christ. After a brief salutation, Paul got right to business, “I am astonished [he writes] that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel---not that there is a different gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

              Agitators were insisting that those uniting with the church adhere to the Jewish law.  To be a Christian in good standing they meant that one also must be in good standing with the synagogue. Circumcision was a particularly controversial point.  The Galatian agitators insisted that males entering their fellowship be circumcised. Paul vehemently objected.   

              His objection was not against the practice itself.  Let the Jews follow the ancient practices and customs of their faith.  Paul, however, gave no quarter to Jewish converts to
Christ who insisted that obligations under the Jewish law could not be waived.

              No topic aroused Paul’s passion and stirred his theological imagination as much as the topic of law. Our Sunday school class upstairs has for the last several weeks been immersed in the subject as it is treated in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.  You might ask, as we did, why is the law such a hot topic for Paul? 

              When we think of religious law we think of the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  Scripture treats those commandments as God’s particular gift to a community set apart to bear his name. While the Jews established other laws themselves, the commandments and those other religious laws, represented a peoples’ attempt to establish order under the authority of God. 

              The apostle Paul, it must be stressed, had no quarrel with the law per se.  His issue with the law arose around its misuse.  The law, in effect, became for members of the Jewish community a litmus test.  Fulfill the demands of the law and be righteous.  The Apostle took vehement exception to that notion, and here Paul makes the most important and enduring claim of his ministry.  Not by works of the law, but by God’s grace we are saved.

              Adherence to the law conferred a false sense of security for those who by means of the law sought to prove themselves righteous.  The whole notion that one could earn admittance into God’s favor through such means was abhorrent to Paul.  

              Paul can ask, “Is the law then opposed to the promises of God?”  Paul quickly answers his own question with a decisive, “certainly not.”  The law itself did not present a problem for Paul; in fact it served a useful role as a disciplinarian.  No, the law was not the problem; sin was the problem, because sin found an opening in the law, manipulating the law to its own ends.  One commentator likens the law to which Paul referred to a puppet, sin inserting its hands into the puppet to direct it according to its dictates.     

                 It was Galatians’ misuse of the law that stirred Paul’s wrath. “You foolish Galatians!  Who has bewitched you? …Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?”   Paul already knew the answer to that question, because the Spirit of God was communicated through the gospel he had been given to proclaim.

              The Spirit, Paul declares, was not some new discovery he had been privileged to make. The Spirit was there from the beginning of time, the Spirit was there when God called Abraham to establish a nation. Abraham, patriarch, honored head of the Jewish family, had special standing for Paul as a Spirit-filled man.  His special standing is celebrated with this declaration we find in Paul’s letter to Rome: “For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendents through the law but through the righteousness of faith.”  Predating the giving of the law, Abraham pleased God and was rewarded for his faith in God. “Abraham believed God [Paul writes] and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 

              Faith, according to Paul, does what works of the law is incapable of doing.  Faith spares us the tedium and frustration of trying to earn sufficient credits to please God. If by faith we trust God, you see, God will personally handle the righteousness part himself.

              The Galatians, embroiled in controversy over the qualifications required to be a Christian, knew about works of the law.  Some of those same Galatians sternly opposed Paul when he confronted them on the issue of circumcision and other mandates of the law.  The law brought order and rationality to their lives. You can understand their impatience as Paul challenged them to rethink their base convictions.

              Faith is the key, Paul declared.  “You are justified [declared righteous] by your faith, not your works.” To those in his Galatian audience who knew nothing but works as a means to righteousness, faith must have presented itself as a challenging concept.

              Be assured that the questions they posed on the subject of faith bear close resemblance to the questions we ourselves pose when the subject arises.  Frankly, I doubt that Paul, converted in a life-changing revelation on the Damascus road, is the best person to talk about the challenges of faith.  Few of us come to the Lord by a decisive conversion as Paul did.  Be that as it may, Paul wants to stress that faith is not our work, but rather, our gift.  We apprehend God’s grace through the faith God himself supplies.

              Furthermore, Paul is writing here in very broad strokes, particularly for the time and the place in which his letter was written. He insists on the universality of faith, everyone qualifying to receive the gift, whether “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.” Paul declares that baptism dissolves all the differences that separates and factionalizes us, from the waters giving birth to a new community.         

              Bonded in this new fellowship instituted by Christ, sin, distorting the law for its own purposes, is powerless to undermine us, for we have become Abraham’s offspring by virtue of our faith.

              Abraham’s offspring, one united family in baptism. Sadly, the reality in which we find ourselves little resembles the vision Paul so passionately renders. Owing to cultural, historical, geographical, racial, socio-economic, and other factors the Apostle Paul could never have envisioned, the church has been sliced and diced into a proliferation of entities, denominations, supported by their individual traditions, theological emphases, and mission priorities.

              While the battles pitting law versus grace are largely behind us, we are a divided church sacramentally.  Accommodations across denominational lines have yet to be reached on baptism and Holy Communion. The ways in which we have chosen to worship, and our emphases in worship, separate us.  The ways in which we choose to govern ourselves separate us.  Class and race separate us.

              We may gather under the same cross, but if the outsider truly got to know us individually in our many churches, that outsider might well struggle to see how those of us who make up this vast church of ours could possibly be offspring of one parent, Abraham. The struggles to which we in our own denomination are subject might well make one doubt our common birthright.

              This past week a lengthy email went out to each of the presbyteries in our denomination. Contained in the email was a document entitled “The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ Her Lord,” which was prepared by the Office of Theology and Worship.  The email laid out the denomination’s base convictions on such topics as the Trinity, the authority of Scripture, “the singular saving Lordship of Jesus Christ,” and the qualifications for ordination in our denomination. 

              You might ask why was such an email was written.  It was written because there is an association of churches united in the belief that the denomination is failing to make a clear and unequivocal witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture. Differences on matters of faith do not get more basic than that.

              Paul addressed a problem in the Galatian church.  Some in that community wanted to mold the church into their own image, elevating second order considerations concerning the law to prominence over the first order issue of faith.  The temptation to vindicate our personal position on matters of faith is ever before us, tempting us to establish our own qualifications for those with whom we should fellowship in the church. How very difficult it is for us to surrender OUR image of what the church should be, and entrust its future to God. 

              The Church is in a period of profound transformation, a transformation that has impacted our own denomination with particular force.  What the transformation will bring we do not know.  Yet even as the debates continue to rage on issues of theology and mission, we know that God in Christ is working still, ever attempting to assure his stubborn children that we are all children of the promise, Abraham’s offspring.

PRAYER             

               O God, who out of nothing created all that is, we present ourselves before you this day grateful for the heritage we enjoy as Abraham’s offspring.  A community that is proud to honor its past, we give thanks for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs you chose to carry your name into the world.  We give thanks for the faith of Abraham whose trust in you was demonstrated by his willingness to sacrifice his son on your altar.  Having blessed him with a long and productive life, O God, he lived out his days honoring you.    

              May that which we do in worship this day, O Lord, likewise bring honor to your name. Given voices to sing, pray and praise you, may zeal for you flourish, not just in this assembly, but in our daily lives, at our work and in our leisure. Even as you have commended your holy word to us, so we would commend our works to you.  Use us as thy will requires, and where our particular gifts go undiscovered or unused, may your Holy Spirit direct us on the course you would have us follow.                   

              Teach us to love, O God, with the purity of Jesus’ love.  You call us to love our neighbor, but our criteria for loving expose the narrowness of our vision.  We are too busy and preoccupied to be neighborly. More often than not we want a break from our neighbor.  Slow us down, O Lord, that in our haste we not outpace life itself.  Even as we savor the divine qualities of a piece of music, a line of poetry, or some gift of nature, reveal your face in our neighbor.

              O Christ, our brother, founder of the church, you have called us to represent your creation to the world, but divisions undermine the unity you would have us establish.  Paul referred to the church as your body, O Christ, but we are a body in name only.  We have staked out our territories in denominations, doctrines, and traditions to which we give our allegiance, in the process forgoing opportunities to address the agendas you have placed before us. In your mercy, O Christ, deliver us from our errant ways, even as you mobilize us to be the church you intended.                   

              Living God, you are the author of life, but over centuries the passions of humanity have been harnessed to destroy life.  Hatred rages with war infesting civilization as a plague humans are incapable of disarming.  In your mercy, O God, rescue us from the continuing nightmare that stalks us.  Strength the resolve of nations to seek peace, even as you crush the villains who perpetuate the cycle of violence. 

              Abide, O God, with our city in these trying times.  Disaffection and discouragement are rampant, as confidence in our elected leadership erodes. Raise up leaders who are willing to challenge the status quo, people who will not condone cronyism and corruption, even as you mobilize individuals and communities to seek the welfare of the city.

              O God, we pray for those who have special needs this day, both those who are gathered here, and those in the broad circle of our relationships.  Bring relief to the grieving, consolation to the depressed, and confidence to those who have yet to find their way.  Grant us, O God, the courage of faith to entrust our lives, our futures, the future of this world, to you who are the fount of every blessing. 

              Hear our prayers, O God, for we pray