Tossing out the Rulebook – The Testimony of Paul

Tina Abramson

June 20, 2004

Galations 1:11-24

I have a bit of a phobia about titles for things – I was terrible about giving my papers titles in college, and I can never think of a sermon title until long after the bulletin is printed and copied. So ignore the title in your bulletin, the title of this sermon is “Tossing out the Rulebook: the Testimony of Paul.”

This sermon is the second in a series of sermons on the letter of Paul to the churches in Galatia. Pastor Earl gave some background last week, explaining that Paul had returned from his first missionary journey but later heard that the members of the churches he had helped to begin among the Gentiles there were now being told, by those who came to be called “Judaizers,” that in order to promote unity in the fledgling church, and demonstrate their commitment to Christ, they would need to follow certain aspects of the law, like becoming circumcised. As Pastor Earl preached last week, Chapter One opens with warm greetings to the churches, but quickly moves to express Paul’s outrage that Gentiles were being converted to the law instead of to the gospel.

In the second half of Chapter one, as we read today, Paul reminds the brothers in the church of how they praised God because of Paul’s conversion and ministry and how he is the primary example of one who has been set free from the law by God. In verses 11 and 12, Paul writes “I want you to know brothers that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, rather I received it from revelation from Jesus Christ.”

Paul bases his ability to speak authoritatively about the gospel on fact that he is a disciple of Jesus. He did not make up the gospel he is preaching, he wasn’t taught it, he didn’t read it, he didn’t conjure it – He received it directly from God and it is not subject to revision. To receive is a passive verb – it was done TO HIM, not his choice, not by his efforts, nor by his plan, but only by God’s grace. Paul is adamant that there is nothing that he did to earn this revelation or his salvation.

In fact, Paul’s actions were quite to the contrary. In verses 13-17 he goes back over the story of how well learned he was in the Jewish law, how zealous he was in the persecution of Christians, and how determined he was to wipe out this threat to Jewish faith and law. Paul tells his story here, at the beginning of laying out a fully articulated argument for Christian freedom from the law, in order to demonstrate the power and grace of God. Paul’s about face, his total transformation, is to be wholly attributed to God – not to Paul at all, who was headed in exactly the opposite direction. Paul is using his story as a foundation stone on which to build his passionate defense of Christian liberty and argue to the Galatians that they do not need to impose certain aspects of the law on themselves.

We need to stop here to understand where Paul and the Judaizers were coming from. From birth they had been taught to believe that the law came from God, not man. And it is the law that God, the very same God who died on the cross for us and for our salvation, commanded them to obey in order to demonstrate to the whole world that they were the chosen ones and had a special relationship with God. Suddenly Christ has come and thrown the law out the window (not to abolish it but to fulfill it in fact, but having the effect of making it irrelevant to the new church).

Also keep in mind that Jews were trained from birth to stay away from the pagans, from the gentiles. They were considered unclean and dangerous. It must have been terribly uncomfortable to be around people so different than they are. We in the church today may not fully realize the extent to which these two cultures clashed, though we are not unfamiliar with the discomfort of difference. We are uncomfortable around those who believe or worship or act differently than we do – and we seek to de-emphasize the differences in both subtle and unsubtle ways – in order to promote a sense of belonging and common experience. This is not a wrong impulse. It was a legitimate struggle in the early church to figure out how Jews and Gentiles were going to worship and create a church community together.

What many in the beginnings of the church did not fully understand yet was that the law that Jews had been trained to follow was a temporary band aid on the problem that is sin. It did not exist in the beginning of time, when God made his foundational promise to Abraham and counted him as righteous because of his faith. Through faith in Christ we too inherit the promise of Abraham, that through our belief in Jesus we will be made rightly related to God. Through our belief ALONE. IN the letter to the Galations, Paul is reminding us that we are the inheritors of the promise of Abraham, not of the temporary legacy of the law.

God gave the law to the Jews to distinguish them from their pagan neighbors and to convict them of their sin. The law established a relationship between the people and God but did not bridge the gap between the people and God. In the temple there always hung the curtain behind which no one could go – the people were not fully rightly related to God through the law. The remainder of the Old Testament tells over and over the sad saga of the people’s inability to follow the law and of the prophets efforts to call the people back into relationship with God through obedience to the law - as well as to predict the coming of the Messiah and the people’s ultimate freedom from the law.

The law was difficult to follow and revealed a lot about the Holy character of God, his complete otherness from the world. The people’s attempts to follow the law were the best means available to them to know God. In some ways though, the law was more about the world than about God. It gave instructions in detail about how to live in the world without being contaminated by the world – what to eat, how to dress, where to live, how to worship. The law was a way of managing the worldliness around them.

The majority of Paul’s converts were pagans. They had not grown up within the culture of the Jewish law and had not been bound by it. In fact, they were used to being part of the dominant culture and within it could pretty much do as they pleased. When they became Christians, they were looking for a way to demonstrate the profound change that had overcome them, and were susceptible to the suggestion that they could make a personal sacrifice for Christ and demonstrate their faith by becoming circumcised.

Paul’s “testimony” at the beginning of his letter is so important because he is reminding the gentiles that he is an example of what God can do when you throw away the rulebook. Paul is the ultimate example of God’s mercy. His sin against God was greater than most, but God’s grace was given to him freely and his assent to faith in God resulted in a complete transformation, a 180 degree turn, an about face. Paul goes from bitter enemy of the faith to champion of the faith. Initially the church recognized the extraordinary transformation and responded appropriately – by praising God. If Paul – of all people - could be transformed though his belief in the risen Christ and can immediately go out to the world preaching the gospel and winning people to the faith – without having to be tested, or trained, or perform acts of confession or repentance, or without having to demonstrate the authenticity of his faith other than through his sincere belief in Christ, than no one else should have to any of this stuff either.

To us it seems so obvious that one would not need to become Jewish in order to become Christian. Like the Gentiles, most of us have grown up pretty comfortable as Christians, which is, at least at some level, the dominant cultural group in this country. Our practices are so embedded into the cultural fabric that we take our freedom to follow them for granted – we are free to attend church on Sunday, we can buy books and music, we can gather together for pray and fellowship, we can put bumper stickers on our car, we can vote one way or another according to our faith informed conscience. We often forget that while there are not church laws governing this behavior, there are subconscious cultural rules that permit us to act in certain ways. We know this because when someone breaks these rules we get uncomfortable, and often push aside the person who is acting out of line.

My neighbor told me a story recently about the Priest at her church. He was attending Mass at the monastery once and saw some people who had never been there before. One of them was wearing a hat. At the end of the Mass he walked over to my neighbor and asked if she knew who they were and expressed his horror that they had been wearing a hat at Mass. In the middle of the Mass, he had gone over to them and asked the one to remove his hat. Soon after he did so this group of young people left the Mass and did not return. Of course they did not, and probably never will again. Apparently the “no wearing hats in church rule” was more important to this priest than the “Believe in me and you shall be saved” rule. I will go out on a limb with Luther and say that the Catholic Church has always struggled with the By Faith Alone concept, but we Protestants, though perhaps less structurally tied to certain rules, are no less susceptible to underlying cultural rules. For the Christian who does not conform to our particular church culture – either because they dress in a certain way, or they do not come to church all that often and do not take on the sorts of church responsibilities we expect of them, or they profess certain kinds of political beliefs – the faith of these folks is doubted, their sincerity is questioned, their salvation less than sure.

Paul reminds us that it doesn’t matter. Paul holds himself out as the ultimate example of how God can take you from one place and put you in an entirely different place. This is the essence of Christian liberty. We are free to have a relationship with God and we are free NOT to have a relationship with the world.

Here the part of the sermon where you can make neat notes, because I am going to say two things about what Christian liberty is, as revealed through Paul’s personal experience.

1. Our transformation is based entirely upon renewing our relationship with God through faith. This is foundational. Nothing new here. We believe and we are saved. Period. End of story. Our faith saves us, there is nothing else we can or should do to be in relationship with God. There are no other rules. We do not need to earn our justification with God and there are no rules about how we are to demonstrate our faith. What we do or do not do does not earn us favor with God. It also does not define us as Christians. Faith in Christ is the only thing that makes us Christian. We are free to vote for anyone, to express our joy and sense of fun in myriad ways. We are free to love our friends and neighbors and spouses, whoever they may be. How we dress, where we live, what we drive, what music we listen to makes us interesting, diverse human beings. Our faith is what makes us children of God.

2. Our transformation is aided by letting go of our relationship with the world. With faith as our new foundation, we CAN freely let go of our relationship with the world. I do not use the word MUST because this is not a rule. Do not hear me to say that the measure of our faith is seen in how much we dismiss the things of the world. I am simple saying that our faith can free us from being self motivated and changes us into people who are God oriented, just as he changed Paul from being law oriented to being grace oriented. Letting go of the world does not mean turning into a goody two shoes. In letting go of the world, we are not just to let go of those aspects of the world that are clearly destructive but we are also to let go of those subtle cultural rules that govern our behavior as Christians, even if those rules of behavior have legitimate purpose or mostly good consequences.

Heidi HP was telling me the other day about how uncomfortable she once was as a youth pastor because she didn’t fit the typical mold - she wasn’t male and she didn’t sport a goatee and didn’t play rocking guitar and didn’t command the kids’ attention by acting cool and full of personality. But what she did do was listen to who the kids were and what their deep questions were and tread lightly among them in love. Of course there is no rule that you have to have a goatee, but your faith requires you to love God and love your neighbor.

This isn’t to say that the goatee wearing guitar playing youth pastors are ineffective, many of them are quite effective, there are usually good reasons for some of our underlying cultural rules, just as there were good reasons for the rules laid down in the law that Paul was so passionate about. Letting go of the world does not mean that we reject some of the rules that are working for us, it is only to say that we are free from them because God might use us in entirely new ways. Our orientation is to be directed towards God and not towards self. Nothing can separate me from the love of Christ. In this freedom I can do a lot, I could dance on the tables at the local bar, I could wear black leather and ride a motorcycle through Weirs Beach, I could eat all the Big Macs I wanted and wash them down with chocolate shakes. In my freedom I could even wear myself out doing church work and end up sitting downstairs drinking coffee during worship and complaining about how much work I do. (I’ve been there!) I could do all this and I would still be saved, still be a child of God. Hopefully, God would give me reason to take a look at my motives in doing these, or other kinds of things. I might learn that the need to do some of this is coming from my need to fill my ego, or medicate my pain, or feed the holes in my heart. If I am oriented towards God, by faith, then I might find a way throw out the rulebook that says I have to do it this way, to free my self from those needs, and I then I might be released to better spend my time worshiping, praying, serving the poor, and loving my neighbors.

Through Paul, God is calling us to live lightly in this world, and not to hold too hard to our assumptions and our rules. Sometimes they serve a good purpose, as aspects of the law did. Sometimes we are to go in an entirely new direction, as Paul did. Our faith in the gospel frees us from any one way of doing things and destroys the limits we place on ourselves and others.

If you are a journaler, or just in your prayer time this week, try this. Go back over how God has acted in your life, just as Paul does in the beginning of his letter to the Galations, and look to see where God has freed you from jumping through hoops to prove your faith, or where God has freed you from living up to the expectations of others, or where God has even given you the freedom to act badly, to feel the consequences, and to still encourage your faith and your relationship with Him.

Next week, with the background of Paul’s good example, we will look more deeply at the reasons why we crave rules and structure, why we would want to crawl back to the prison of deeds instead of faith, why we live within self imposed limitations. We will talk about what we can do to claim the freedom that God gives us and why that living that freedom can reap great reward for ourselves, for the church, and for the world.