Living Words

by William Klock

 

For us, a week has passed since we heard Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the visit by the shepherds.  But as we come to today’s Gospel, roughly two years have passed in the story of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.  For now, we’ll skip over Matthew’s account of the visit of the wisemen.  (That’s for this coming week as we celebrate the Epiphany.)  So today we pick up the story at Matthew 2:13, Matthew tells us that after the wisemen had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.  “Get up,” said the angel, “and take the child and his mother and hurry off to Egypt.”

 

I can only imagine what Joseph was thinking.  This is the second time an angel has come to him to tell him what to do.  Remember from last Sunday’s Gospel, Jospeh was thinking through how best to extricate himself from his upcoming marriage to Mary after he found out she was already pregnant.  The angel came to him in a dream.  “Don’t be afraid!”  The famous first words of every angel.  “Don’t be afraid.  Mary didn’t cheat on you.  She’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit and she’s going to have a son and you need to name him ‘Jesus’—which means 'Yahweh saves’—because he will save his people from their sins.”

 

So it’s not like Joseph didn’t know there was something special about Jesus.  Ditto for Mary.  Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s perspective.  Luke tells it from Mary’s.  Luke tells us about the visit she had from the angel and how the angel told her—also—to name the baby “Jesus”.  Why?  “Because he will be called the son of the Most High.  The Lord,” the angel said to her, “will give him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever.  His kingdom will never come to an end.”  That was all familiar messianic language to Mary.  There’s that song that popular Christmas song that asks over and over, “Mary did you know?”  Yes.  She did.  She even composed a song about it that she shared with her cousin Elizabeth—who, you remember—was pregnant with John, who would prepare the way for Jesus.  Mary knew what her baby meant.  Think of the words she sang out in praise:

 

My soul doth magnify the Lord…

He hath shewed strength with his arm, he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the might from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath send empty away.

That night that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph both knew with absolute certainty that in him the God of Israel was about to act and that the world would never be the sme.  And not that he was about to act in some unforeseen way that exploded into history totally unexpectedly.  No.  This was the fulfilment of prophecy.  This was the fulfilment of the Lord’s promises to his people.  The fact that shepherds came, having been told by angels; the fact that wisemen came, having been guided by a star—these were no mysteries to Mary and Joseph.  They knew from the beginning who Jesus was.  I’m sure they had lots of other questions: Why us?  How is this going to work?  But they knew from the beginning that this child would one day cast down the powers, the gods, the kings of the present evil age and set their world to rights.  That’s what Mary’s song is all about.

 

So they knew that Mary’s baby was a challenge to everything and everyone that stood in the way of God’s new age.  As much as scripture gives us every reason to think that they trusted the Lord, I have to think that if they’re anything like us, they still had their worries.  At the top of the list had to be King Herod.  And so, I suspect, Mary and Joseph probably didn’t go around town announcing any of this.  Surely word got around at least a bit.  There were, of course, the shepherds.  But I expect Mary and Jospeh kept what the angel had told them on the low down as much as they were able.  And then the magi—the wisemen from far away—no one could mistake them riding into town with their camels.  And to hear that they’d been to see Herod, to ask about the new-born King of the Jews.  That was not good news.  Not at all.  Because now Herod knew about Jesus and Herod was what people today might call a “psycho”.

 

Herod was an Idumean—today we’d call him an “Arab”.  His ancestors had been absorbed into Judaea, were circumcised and converted to Judaism—at least nominally.  Most people saw Herod as a pretender.  His decadent lifestyle was out of step with Judaism, but most of all, people hated him for the way he cozied up to the Romans and betrayed his people.  He had no right to call himself King of the Jews.  The Roman Senate had given him that title.  He was no descendant of David.  And all this made Herod more than a little insecure.  Deep down he knew he had no right to Israel’s throne and it made him paranoid.  He murdered his own family members—even his wife—because he thought they were scheming against him.  Just before he died, he ordered the leading citizens of Jericho to be killed so that the people would be weeping as his funeral procession passed through the city.

 

So Joseph and Mary had to be worried to hear that Herod had been told about this young “King of the Jews” in Bethlehem.  If Herod would murder his own family at a hint of sedition, what would he do to a new-born rival?  I expect Jospeh was already trying to think through their best course of action.  And then the angel came and said, “Get up and take the child and his mother and hurry off to Egypt.  Stay there until I tell you.  Herod is going to hunt for the child to kill him.”

 

Matthew says that Joseph wasted no time: “He got up and took the child and his mother by night, and went off to Egypt.  He stayed there until the death of Herod.”  And then Matthew adds a quote—just as we saw him do in Chapter One, last week, with that quote from the Prophet Isaiah about the virgin conceiving and bearing a son whose name means “God with us”.  Matthew does it again.  He does this all through is Gospel, but we have to know our Jewish scriptures to know who he’s quoting.  In this case it’s Hosea 11:1.  Matthew’s Jewish audience would have recognised it instantly and it’s an indictment against our poor knowledge of the Bible that we need a footnote in our Bibles to tell us.  Anyway, Matthew writes, “This happened to fulfil what the Lord said through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’”  We’ll come back to this in a bit.

 

Matthew then continues with the story.  You’ll remember that instead of reporting back to Herod about the child as he’d asked them to do, the wisemen—because of their own visit from the angel—they bypassed Herod on their way home.  So Matthew tells us that when Herod realised that he’d been tricked by the wisemen, he flew into a towering rage.  He dispatched men and killed all the boys in Bethlehem and in all its surrounding districts, from two years old and under, according to the time the wisemen had told him.”  And then another quote from the Prophets, this time from Jeremiah 31:15: “That was when the word that came through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:  There was heard a voice in Rama, crying and loud lamentation.  Rachel is weeping for her children, and will not let anyone comfort her, because they are no more.”

 

And then another visit by an angel.  Matthew writes in verse 19: “After the death of Herod, suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘and take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel.  Those who wanted to kill the child are dead.’  So he got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.  But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judaea instead of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there.  After being advised in a dream’—again—he went off to the region of Galilee.  When he got there, he settled in a town called Nazareth.  This was to fulfil what the prophet had spoken: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’”

 

Again, we sort of have this idyllic scene of Christmas in our heads: Jesus in a manger.  No crying he makes, of course.  The shepherds kneel adoringly.  Mary and Joseph sit there peacefully with their halos glowing.  Even the animals stifle all their natural noises and gather around to adore the baby.  “Silent night…all is calm…sleep in heavenly peace,” loops in our heads.

 

But when you read the actual story as Matthew tells it things aren’t nearly so peaceful.  Matthew tells us of the birth of Jesus at a time and a place of trouble, of violence, and of fear.  Jesus was born in a world of darkness, into a world controlled by powers and gods and kings who stood opposed to him.  Before he had learned to walk or to talk, the wrath of a psychotic king forced his family to flee to Egypt.  The shadow of the cross lies dead across the Christmas story.  And yet all this is in keeping with what Matthew told us last week.  If Jesus is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanuel—of God with us—we’d expect this.  God’s people longed for his presence, they longed for his deliverance, because the world was not as they knew it should be.  And so God came to them in the midst of the darkness, the brokenness, the evil, the pain—the violence and injustice—the sin and death.  God entered the world of a king who would murder dozens of innocent children just to keep his investment in the present evil age secure.  Think about the fact that on the three days after Christmas Day the Church commemorates St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents.  John was exiled to the island of Patmos for preaching the good news about Jesus.  Stephen—the first martyr—was stoned to death outside Jerusalem for preaching to the people that Jesus was the fulfilment of Israel’s story.  And the Holy Innocents—the collateral damage of the first attempt on Jesus’ life.  It’s a reminder that, yes, the light has come into the darkness, but that there are those who love the dark and there are those invested in it.

 

Brothers and Sisters, as much as the light has shined in the darkness and as much as the darkness has not overcome it—as St. John writes in the opening of his Gospel—the darkness still remains and the darkness still fights back.  Herod’s murder of the innocents of Bethlehem—probably a few dozen baby boys—pales in comparison to the millions of unborn children murdered in modern times in our once Christian nations.  The wars and violence of Herod’s or of Caesar’s day pale in comparison to the wars and violence of the last century—all too often perpetrated by supposedly Christian nations, kings, presidents, and prime ministers.  We see the light around us too often subverted by the darkness.  First by Modernists and now by Postmodernists, the gospel virtues that once transformed the West are plucked from the gospel tree, left to go feral, and fed back to our culture, twisted and abused—darkness masquerading as light.

 

It's easy to get discouraged, isn’t it.  Last year I read historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion.  It’s about how Christianity transformed the West.  The Gospel came into a world of Herods and Caesars and taught us things like mercy and grace that hadn’t been known before.  It transformed sexual ethics.  It gave status to women and children and to the poor.  It ended slavery.  And now you look at the world around us and everythings reverting back into the darkness.  Large segments of the church have or are selling out.  I look at the alumni page for my seminary on Facebook and it seems everyone is “deconstructing”—and it always ends the same way—with denying the exclusivity of Jesus and an embracing of Postmodernism and the twisted sexual ethics of our post-Christian culture.  I’ve listened to local pastors who spend their time apologising for the Bible, blurring the lines it makes clear, and walking their people through deconstructing their faith.  Others have sold out to the materialism of our secular culture and are preaching a crossless gospel of health and wealth.  The gospel—the real gospel—is the answer, but it seems like it falls on deaf ears these days and that the people lost in today’s darkness have become resistant to it.  It’s easy to lose hope.

 

But Brothers and Sisters, that’s when I think of Matthew as he drops his quotes from the Prophets through his telling of the good news.  Remember that I said last week that Matthew saw God’s promises down through the ages as lights in the darkness.  Last summer Veronica I did some railgrade riding on our bikes.  We rode through some tunnels—some of them long and windy enough that there was no light at the end—at least not at first—and so there were small lights at intervals, guiding the way, until you finally came around that final corner and daylight blazed into the tunnel.  I didn’t appreciate those lights until I rode through the Adra Tunnel in the mountains between Kelowna and Penticton.  It’s one of the longest rail tunnels in BC and it’s been closed since the 80s.  Volunteers have spent the last few years making repairs and it’s just about ready to be reopened.  At present the trail bypasses it and there are fences across the old railgrade to keep people out of the tunnel.  But when I got there, the fences were off to the side.  I took the turn and pretty soon found myself inside the tunnel.  It goes through something like a 270° turn and pretty soon I was in pitch dark, riding slowly, cold water dripping on me.  There are no little lights to light the way.  And I almost ran—smack!—into a grader that was parked in the dark.  I could just as easily have run off the grade and into a ditch or a wall.

 

Like the lights in those tunnels, God’s promises led his people through the darkness—around the corners, keeping them out of the ditch, keeping them from running—smack!—into obstacles sitting in the darkness—so that he could lead them out into the light.  At the time those little lights seemed like really big deals—those little lights like Passover and the Exodus, like the torah and the tabernacle, like King David and like the return from Exile.  They gave the people some bearings.  The lights gave them hope.  But what many didn’t realise at the time was that those lights were leading the people—preparing them—to understand how God works, to understand that he is faithful, so that when they finally came out into the bright light of Jesus, into the bright light of the gospel—they’d understand that this is where the story had been taking them all along.  This is what Matthew’s up to all through his Gospel.  Like we saw last Sunday with that bit of Isaiah and the baby, Immanuel, who served as the sign to accompany the Lord’s promise to deliver his people from Israel and Syria.  And here, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  At first it looks like Matthew is ignoring what that passage means in Hosea.  It’s not looking forward.  It’s looking back.  Israel was the Lord’s son whom he had called out of Egypt.  That meant—at the time, back in the dark days of Hosea—that the Lord would not abandon the people: Israel was his beloved son and he'd gone to great lengths to deliver Israel from Egypt.  And Matthew saw that little light back there in the darkness of Hosea’s day and it led him towards the light that had come in Jesus.  Jesus brings Israel’s story to completion.  He’s not just “God’s son” in the sense that he’s divine.  He’s “God’s son” in the sense that he is the embodiment of Israel.  Remember what I’ve said before: the King represents his people.  And so Jesus came to represent his people, to finally accomplish what they’d failed at all those centuries, and then to die on their behalf the death that they deserved.

 

Matthew does something similar with the prophecy spoken by Jeremiah.  He holds up Rachel weeping for her children as a backdrop to Herod’s murder of the baby boys of Bethlehem.  But when Jeremiah spoke those words, he was drawing on the imagery of Rachel to describe the pain of Israel’s exile to Babylon and to proclaim the hope of God’s promise to renew his covenant and to restore his people—to bring Israel back from her long exile.  The long darkness is full of weeping and mourning, but at the end is the Lord’s deliverance.

 

And then that bit of Isaiah 11 that Matthew quotes about Jesus being a Nazarene.  Isaiah uses the Hebrew word nazir.  It means “branch” and through Isaiah the Lord promises that he will be faithful to the promises he’d made to David and his descendants.  A branch will grow out of the stump of Jesse.  It’s about a new beginning for the royal line of David.  Matthew hinted at this already in Joseph’s genealogy.  The fact that the Old Testament nowhere mentions Nazareth, the fact that the Isaiah passage about the branch has nothing to do with Nazareth, that’s okay.  Matthew knew that the lights along the tunnel—even if it doesn’t look like it—they all lead to the same place.  Everything in Israel’s story was leading to Jesus and so he takes Isaiah’s prophecy of the nazir, the branch, and ties it to Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth.  Matthew’s sort of saying that we know Jesus is the promised branch because he came from “Branchville”.  Maybe it’s a more “creative” way of using the Old Testament than we’re comfortable with, but for Matthew it worked—again—because he knew that everything God said and everything God did—the whole story of the God of Israel and his people—was leading them through the darkness to Jesus and to the light of this new age, this new world, this new creation.

 

And Brothers and Sisters, that’s why as much as it’s tempting to lose hope as we look at the surrounding darkness and even as the darkness creeps in and takes ground that was once won by the gospel, I don’t lose hope.  Because the scriptures assure me of the faithfulness of God to his promises.  Because I know he has, in the birth, in the death, in the resurrection of Jesus done the hard part already.  Because he has poured out his Spirit.  And as surely as he called Abraham and his family and led them through the darkness—through slavery and through exile and everything in between—and then brought them finally out into the blazing glory of Jesus and the gospel, I know that God, who has established his church and has equipped us with his own Spirit to proclaim the good news—to carry his light into the darkness—will not fail to bring us eventually to that day when his glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, when every last enemy has been put under his feet, even death itself, when every tear is wiped away, and everything is once-and-for-all set to rights.

 

Matthew saw God’s promises fulfilled all through the story—even at its darkest.  As Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane he said, himself, “All this has taken place that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.”  God is sovereign and God is faithful, Brothers and Sisters.  Even as the darkness mustered its forces and rose to its full height to deal a death blow to Jesus, it was doing so as part of a plan orchestrated by the Lord.  Darkness, unwittingly, concentrating itself all in one place so that, through Jesus, it could be defeated when he rose, triumphant over sin and death.  And that is why I remain full of hope.  God’s faithfulness to his promises did not end in the First Century.  He remains faithful today.  If we will only walk with him in faith, his light—his gospel promises, his Spirit indwelling us—will lead us through today’s darkness.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word:  Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

The Prophet Isaiah made his way along the dusty track across the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem.  His young son walked beside him as they followed the Siloam Channel that carried water from an ancient rock-cut pool into to the city.  That’s where the Lord had told Isaiah he would meet the King, Ahaz.  He was to go there to declare the word of the Lord to the King and he was to take his young son with him, whom the Lord had told him to name Shear-jashub.  The name means “a remnant shall return”.  A way of saying that God would not let his people be obliterated by their enemies.  Isaiah’s son was, himself, part of the prophetic message.  And there was the King.  Ahaz was looking over the great stones, carved and set a thousand years before by the Canaanites who had founded Jerusalem.  It was the city’s water supply and Isaiah could see the concern on the King’s face.  Those were dark days.  Seven-hundred-and-thirty years before Jesus was born.  The Assyrian Empire to the east was the great power of the day and claimed the small western powers like Judah, Israel, and Syria as its own.  The King of Israel, in particular, was in a tough spot.  To pay the tribute he owed to the Assyrians he levied an enormous tax on the rich.  Rich people don’t like being heavily taxed and they were on the verge of revolt.  At the moment, the King of Assyria was busy fighting in the north, so the King of Israel made an alliance with the King of Syria and the two of them approached Ahaz.  They wanted Judah to join their alliance.  Together, maybe, they could throw off the heavy Assyrian yoke.  They’d done it a hundred years before.  Together, maybe, they could do it again.

 

But Ahaz was afraid.  He knew what would happen if they lost.  And so he refused to join the alliance.  But Israel and Syria wouldn’t take no for an answer.  They laid siege to Jerusalem.  If Ahaz wouldn’t join up with them, they would defeat him and put their own puppet king on the throne of Judah.  And so, that day, King Ahaz was out surveying Jerusalem’s water supply.  Would it survive the siege?  He was worried.  And that’s where Isaiah and Shear-jashub met him.  Isaiah was afraid, too.  Ahaz had a reputation.  Both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles tell us that he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  Instead of following in the footsteps of his “father” David, he walked in the ways of the evil kings of Israel.  He was a weak, fearful, and vacillating king.  Instead of trusting the Lord to deal with Israel and Syria, he aligned himself with Assyria.  A few years later, after visiting the temples of the Assyrian capital, he would remove various furnishings from the temple in Jerusalem in order to make room for a pagan altar like the ones he’d seen there.  He was a wicked king who would lead God’s people into idolatry.  Confronting a king with the word of the Lord is never an easy thing to do, but confronting an ungodly king with the word of the Lord was even more difficult.  Think of John the Baptist, seven hundred years later, landing in Herod’s prison for declaring the word of the Lord.  But unlike the King who trusted in horses and chariots and in foreign gods and kings more than he trusted in the Lord, Isaiah’s faith was unwavering.  And he met the King and, nervous as he surely was, he declared the word of the Lord with power and authority.  “Do not be afraid”.  This alliance of Israel and Syria and their siege, the Lord said: “It shall not stand”.  The Lord was urging the king to trust in him.  He also said, through Isaiah, “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.”

 

And to guarantee his promise to the King, the Lord gave Ahaz a sign.  Through Isaiah he said to him:

 

What the Lord was saying to Ahaz was, “Look.  Trust in me.  Don’t trust in horses, don’t trust in chariots, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in me and I will take care of you.  I am your God and you are my people.  I promised David that his descendants would sit on Judah’s throne forever and neither Israel, nor Syria, nor the Assyrians will undermine my promise.”  The Lord had Isaiah mention a young woman, a maiden.  We don’t know who this girl was, but it had to be someone known to the king.  Maybe the queen or one of the princesses in the court.  Whoever it was, Isaiah tells the king that she’s going to have a child and he is to be named Immanuel.  Immanuel means “God is with us”.  And the Lord tells the king that by the time this child is eating solid food, by the time he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil, he, the Lord himself, will put an end to the threat posed by the kings of Israel and Syria.  Again: Don’t trust in horses.  Don’t trust in chariots.  Don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in the Lord and walk with him.  He is with you.

 

But that wasn’t the end of it.  The Lord later sent Isaiah back to the king.  This time a woman referred to as “the prophetess”—probably Isaiah’s wife—had borne a son named Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means “the spoil speeds, the prey hastens”.  The Lord’s message was again for Ahaz to trust in him.  Before this child was old enough to say the words “father” and “mother” the Lord would deal with the threat of Israel and Syria.  Again, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods, trust in the Lord.  “God is with us,” declared Isaiah.  “The Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.  He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

 

Now, is the Lord faithful?  Does he do what he promises?  Of course.  What the Lord promised was exactly what happened.  In a short time the king of Assyria crushed Syria and Israel.  The northern Jewish kingdom was destroyed and the people scattered.  The Lord delivered the people of Judah.  Ahaz, not surprisingly being the wicked king he was, made an alliance with Assyria anyway and brought the worship of the Assyrian gods to Israel.  But his son, Hezekiah, saw what the Lord had done.  Hezekiah, when he succeeded his father, trusted the Lord and spent his reign trying to undo the evil his father had done.  When the Assyrians laid siege to Jerusalem thirty years later and the enemy soldiers taunted the Judahites to give up on their God and the enemy commander delivered a letter demanding Hezekiah’s surrender, Hezekiah took that letter to the temple and knelt in prayer before the Lord.  He entrusted himself and his people to the God he knew to be faithful.  And that night the Lord unleashed a plague on the Assyrian army that wiped them out.

 

More often than not, when the New Testament writers wanted to recall the Lord’s faithfulness or the Lord’s deliverance, they drew on the story of the Exodus.  It makes sense.  The Exodus was the great story of the Lord’s faithfulness to his promises and of his deliverance of his people.  It set the pattern.  But it wasn’t the only story in Israel’s history that puts the Lord’s faithfulness and deliverance on display.  As St. Matthew tells us about the birth of Jesus in today’s Gospel, he quotes from Isaiah’s prophesy to Ahaz in order to put Jesus in perspective.  Remember that Matthew was writing his Gospel for the benefit of his fellow Jews and so he regularly recalls their scriptures and their story to show that what the God of Israel was doing in Jesus was part of their story—in fact, that what God was doing in and through Jesus was the culmination of the story of Israel.

 

And so Matthew reminds the people that when Jesus was born, his people were living in dark days—not all that unlike the dark days of Isaiah and Ahaz.  They’d returned from exile in Babylon, but they were still ruled by foreign, pagan kings.  It was like the exile had never really ended.  Most notably, the Lord’s presence had never returned to the temple.  God was absent and the people longed for his return, not just because he would set everything to rights, but so that they could again live in his presence.  And so it should be no wonder that Matthew pulls this story about the baby, Immanuel, “God with us”, that he pulls it out from Israel’s past and into the present day.

 

So Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy of Joseph.  I used to read that genealogy as a kid, stumbling through all the names, and wondered why it was so important.  In part, Matthew wanted to show the kingly lineage of Joseph.  Even though he wasn’t an important man, he was a descendant of Abraham and of David.  But at least as important as that is the way Matthew selectively structures his genealogy.  As he says in verse 17: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen generations from David to the Exile, and fourteen generations from the Exile to the Messiah.  Seven symbolised completion, so six times seven and now, as the seventh seven is about to begin, Jesus is born—the climax of the whole list, the one whom Israel had awaited for two thousand years.  As Paul puts it in our Epistle from Galatians: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son.”

 

The Old Testament, Israel’s scriptures, over and over and over and over—above everything else—highlights the faithfulness of God to his promises.  There are all sorts of themes that run through the Old Testament, but above them all, pulling them all together, is the faithfulness of God.  Humans are fickle—the story also makes that clear—but God is faithful and worthy of our trust, worthy of our worship, worthy of our loyalty and allegiance.  And, after setting out Joseph’s divinely orchestrated genealogy, Matthew launches into the story itself in verse 18:

 

 

It’s not hard to imagine the disappointment, the embarrassment, even the shame that Joseph felt.  “It’s not another man,” Mary told him.  “I’m pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  That’s what the angel told me.  I don’t understand how it can be, but he told me that this child is the Messiah.”

 

Joseph knew where babies come from.  This was going to bring shame on him and so, Matthew says, Joseph made plans to quietly separate from Mary—to break off the engagement.  Hopefully he could distance himself from the whole fiasco, save some face, move on with life, and maybe find someone more respectable to marry.

 

But then the angel appeared to Joseph.  “Joseph, son of David!” the angel greeted him.  Joseph was a descendant of King David, but so were a lot of people.  This was the first time anyone had ever addressed Joseph as if he were a prince.  But the angel’s making a point: Joseph is part of the royal family—the family from which the Messiah would come.  “Joseph, don’t be afraid to follow through with this marriage to Mary.  She wasn’t lying when she told you she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  She’s not crazy.  A miracle has really happened.  She’s going to have a son.  And, listen, when he’s born, you are to name him ‘Jesus’.  Why?  Because he’s the one who will save his people from their sins.”

 

If we’re paying really close attention, we might notice that the way Matthew tells the story parallels the story of Isaiah going to meet King Ahaz—to declare the word of the Lord.  Matthew reminds us that Joseph is a descendant of that same royal family.  “Don’t be afraid” he declares.  A child is about to be born and you’re going to name him Jesus.  You’re going to name him “Yahweh saves”.  Maybe we miss the parallels.  As we say, “Explain it to me like I’m five years old.”  And so Matthew makes it very plain in verse 22:

 

He makes this connection explicitly clear, because as best we can tell, no one before Matthew had ever thought of Isaiah’s prophecy being fulfilled in the birth of the coming Messiah.  No one had ever made that connection, because everyone knew that Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in the days of King Ahaz.  Everyone knew that.  It was actually Matthew, knowing what Isaiah had said and the history that surrounded that prophecy, it was Matthew who saw there a sort of prefiguring of Jesus.  Paul wasn’t the only Jew who, when confronted with the risen Jesus, went back and rethought all of Israel’s story with him in mind.  Matthew did it too.

 

When people said to Matthew, “You fool!  Don’t you know where babies come from?  The Lord doesn’t work this way!”  Matthew pointed back to Isaiah and said, “You wanna bet?  The Lord does work this way.  In fact, he’s been working this way all through the history of our people.  Our story and all the little details that God has been working out were pointing to this, like little lights along a tunnel, and now those little lights have led us out in the blinding light of the sun—except the light is God and those little glimpses he's given of himself have finally led us to this place where—in Jesus—we see his glory blazing forth in all its brightness.  I can imagine Matthew, talking with his fellow Jews, and pointing them back to the characters and the stories they knew so well and showing how they were little lights, little bits of God’s glory revealed, leading them through the darkness to the glorious day of Jesus.  This story of Ahaz and Isaiah and the baby Immanuel pointing forward to the day when “God with us” wouldn’t just be the prophetic name of a royal baby boy, but when a royal baby boy would be born who would literally be “God with us”.  How the story of Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain to sacrifice him and the Lord providing a ram in Isaac’s place, how that story prefigured and prepared the people for the cross, where the Lord gave his only and beloved Son to die in the place of his sinful people.  How the giving of the law and the building of the tabernacle were but lights pointing forward to the day when the Lord would pour out his Spirit on his people.  How even the Exodus and the Passover—the great and defining events of Israel’s story—are now, in the light of Jesus, but little candles along the way, preparing the people for the day when the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus would deliver the people, not just from the oppression of a pagan king, but from the dominion of sin and death.

 

So Matthew’s point is this: We need to understand the story of Jesus—his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his lordship—everything we sum up in that acclamation during the Lord’s Supper when we say, “Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.”—Matthew wants us to know that this isn’t some new story that stands all by itself.  He wants us to know that it’s the continuation of the great story of the God of Israel and his people, the long story that goes all the way back to Abraham.  And not just that, but that it’s the culmination of that story.  Remember I said that the great overarching theme of that big story is the faithfulness of God.  Ever since Abraham, God has been calling people to trust him.  We live in a world broken by sin and death.  We all know it’s not supposed to be this way.  And so we try to fix it.  And there are all sorts of ideas out there about how to do that.  Pray to this god.  Follow that philosophy.  And into the midst of the darkness and the chaos the Lord reveals himself and says: Leave your idols and follow me.

 

But why would we?  What could ever inspire a person to abandon Zeus or Baal for the God of Israel?  What could ever inspire a person to give up the philosophy of Plato or Epicurus for the God of Israel?  What would inspire our ancestors to stop worshipping oak trees or ancestors?  Brothers and Sisters, it’s the story—the story that reminds us over and over and over and over that this Lord is faithful—that he does what he says.  And we see it first and foremost as it all comes together in Jesus.  In him we see the loving character of God as he gives himself to fulfil his promises for the sake of his people.  And in Jesus we see the Lord setting this word to rights.  The very thing that all the other gods and philosophies promise, but can never deliver—a new age, a new creation—Brothers and Sisters, the Lord has delivered it in the death and resurrection of Jesus: the defeat of sin and death and new life.  Immanuel—“God with us”.  For real.  Fulfilling his promises as he plunges us into the life of his Spirit in our baptism.  Showing he is worthy of our faith, our trust, our loyalty, our allegiance, our worship.  When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me,” he’s pointing back to that story of God’s faithfulness, back to all those lights along the way in the darkness that have led us to him—to the full brightness of God’s blazing glory and saying, “Trust me.”

 

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin:  Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honour and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

 

The days are short and the clouds are heavy.  I was walking home for lunch yesterday and thinking that it felt more like dusk than noon.  It seemed very appropriate for Advent.  These dark and dreary days build anticipation for Christmas, for the birth of Jesus—they’re very fitting.  Think of Israel two thousand years ago—in those days of Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and King Herod.  The world was dark.  The nations were enslaved to false gods and pagan kings.  Even little Israel, called to be the light of the world, lay in darkness.  The candlestick in the temple was kept lit, but the cloud of glory that had once filled the holy of holies, the very presence of God, had been absent for five-hundred years.  God’s people were ruled by pagans and pretenders.  But the people knew the words of the prophets, the promises of their God.  It would not be this way forever.  That’s the setting for today’s Gospel, which begins at John 1:19.  Here’s what John writes:

 

This is the testimony John [the Baptist] gave when the Jews sent priests and Levites to ask him, “Who are you?”  He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”  “What then?” they asked him, “Are you Elijah?” “I am not,” he replied.  “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.”  “Well, then who are you?” they said.  “We’ve got to take an answer back to those who sent us.  Who do you claim to be?”  He said, “I am ‘a voice calling in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord,’ just as the prophet Isaiah said.”  (John 1:19-28)

 

The priests were the spiritual gatekeepers of Israel and when they heard of this prophet, John, preaching and baptising, they sent their people to ask him what he was about—to see if he was legit.  People were talking about John like he was the Messiah.  You have to understand that everyone was eagerly waiting for the Messiah.  He would come to drive away the darkness and to set things to rights.  He would deal with the pagans and then sit on the throne of David to usher in a new age.  Was John the one?

 

So they ask, “Who are you?  Who do you claim to be? Elijah?”  Some people thought Elijah would come back as Messiah, kind of like King Arthur coming back in Britain’s darkest hour of need to save the nation.  Remember that Elijah never died.  He, the greatest of Israel’s prophets, was carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot.  Malachi had prophesied that he would return, writing:

 

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.  (Malachi 4:5)

 

But John says, “No.  I’m not Elijah.”  He hadn’t come to earth in a fiery chariot.  He was the son of Zechariah the priest and his wife, Elizabeth.

 

“Are you the prophet?” they asked.  In Deuteronomy 18 the Lord had promised that he would one day raise up a prophet like Moses, who would declare his words.  Many people thought this prophet would be the Messiah.  But again John answers, “No, I’m not the prophet either.”  We get a sense of the longing and expectation of the Jews in those dark days.  They were in an Advent season of their own.  Like a kid waking up every morning in December and asking his parents, “Is it Christmas yet?”  So the Jews waited expectantly for the Messiah to come and drive away the darkness: to vindicate their faithfulness, to end their long exile, to restore the presence of the Lord to his temple.  They knew the Lord had promised all of this long before and they knew from their own history that the Lord is faithful to fulfil his promises.  He would surely come and rescue them just as he’d rescued them from Egypt and just as he’d rescued them from Babylon.  So for five hundred years, they woke up each morning eagerly asking, “Is it today?  Will the Messiah finally come today?”

 

John says “No”, but in Matthew and Mark, Jesus affirms that John was fulfilling the prophecy of the return of Elijah.  I think John denied these things because he knew people associated the prophecies of Elijah and the Prophet with the Messiah.  John knew he wasn’t the Messiah; he was the Messiah’s herald.  And so when the priests finally let him speak for himself, he quotes Isaiah 40:3, and says, “I am ‘a voice calling in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.’”  In other words, John was indeed fulfilling prophecy—not as the Messiah, but as the one sent to prepare Israel to receive the Messiah.

 

They were surprised.  People in the past had claimed to be the Messiah.  No one claimed to be his herald.  That was weird.  So they dig deeper.  Look at 25-27:

 

 

Baptism was a symbol of cleansing and of ritual purity.  At this point the other gospel-writers are helpful as they expand on John’s answer.  Mark tells us that John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance—it was a preparatory act in light of the coming judgement the Messiah would bring.  And Matthew and Luke also report John continuing about this one who will come, this one greater than John: “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Matthew 3:11, Luke 3:16).  In other words, John is calling Israel to repentance in anticipation of the Messiah, who will fulfil the Lord’s promises to set Israel to rights by filling his people with his own Spirit.  The law written on stone tablets would be inscribed on the hearts of God’s people so that they could finally fulfil his law of love.  But the Messiah was also coming in judgement.  He would baptise the repentant with God’s own Spirit, but he would baptise unrepentant Israel with fire.

 

These are the two sides of the gospel coin.  You can’t have one without the other.  Jesus’ advent, on the one hand, brought mercy to the repentant, but on the other it also brought judgement on the unrepentant within Israel.  What’s important for us here, Brothers and Sisters, is that this exchange between John and the priests reminds us of the Messiah’s place in Israel’s story and of the faithfulness of God to his promises.  It is this manifestation of the Lord’s faithfulness (and of his goodness, mercy, grace, and wisdom) to Israel—something we see brought to its climax in the birth, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, that has drawn us—you and I—to the God of Israel and that, by faith, has incorporated us into the people of God.  Through our union with Jesus, through our incorporation into this people, through our being made adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, you and I have come to know God’s mercy and the life of the Spirit, too.  Because of the faithfulness of God, revealed in Jesus and in the power of the gospel, the darkness that Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, that deep, deep darkness full of false gods and wicked kings and demonic power has been driven away by the light.  The light has come into the darkness, his gospel has thrown those powers down and lit up the world.  And you and I have seen—we live in—the glory of that light.  And this is where our Epistle today takes off.  Brothers and Sisters, it means something that you and I have been incorporated into the people of God.  God has a purpose and a mission for his people—for us.  This is where our Epistle takes off.

 

Paul writes those wonderful and challenging words in Philippians 4:4:

 

 

What prompted Paul to write this?  Well, just two verses earlier, Paul exhorted two women, Euodia and Syntyche, to agree with each other.  They had once been fellow labourers with Paul, but they’d had some kind of falling out.  There’s something providential in the fact that Paul doesn’t give us the details, because with no details I think we all end up thinking of the fallings out we’ve had with our own brothers and sisters in the Lord.  This isn’t just about two women in Philippi.  It’s about each of us.  In response to that falling out, Paul calls the Philippian Christian to rejoice in the Lord.  Instead of a public display of disunity or resentment or anger—whatever it was that was going on between these two women, the Church was to put joy on display, to celebrate the life of God.  They were people of the light, but they were living in the dark.  It was imperative that they come back into the light.  Brothers and Sisters, the devils and the evil powers of this age want nothing more than to undermine our gospel witness in the world, to flip the switch and turn off our gospel light.  Don’t let that happen.  Jesus and the gospel should overcome and drown out the darkness whenever it tries to creep into our church family.  Here’s how it works.  Paul writes:

 

Let everyone know how gentle and gracious you are.  (Philippians 4:5a)

 

Gentle and gracious.  Paul uses the same description in 2 Corinthians 10 to describe the meekness of Jesus as a model for Christians.  This is gospel light lived out.  What Paul’s getting at is that Jesus is the King, but in him we see this amazing display of gracious gentleness.  This is the gentleness we see revealed as Jesus, the one to whom heaven and earth belong, humbled himself to be born one of us, to die on the cross, and to show mercy to his enemies.  This kind of meekness or gentleness is unique to Jesus, and yet Paul stresses that as his people, as stewards of the gospel, we’re called to witness this same gentleness amongst ourselves.  As it should be the resolution to so many disputes in the Church, it was the resolution to whatever had driven Euodia and Syntyche apart.

 

Brothers and Sisters, when we demand our rights, when we grasp for power, when we nurse grudges, we undermine our gospel witness—we put on display the very darkness from which we’ve been delivered by the one who is light.  In contrast Paul calls us to rejoice in the Lord and to manifest Jesus-like gentleness in our relationships.  Jesus’ gracious gentleness has forgiven and restored us and that same gracious gentleness ought to shine through us and through the life of the church.  Consider that every time we hold a grudge, allow a relationship to break down, or follow the world’s advice to cut those problem or negative people out of our lives, we undermine the Church’s witness to the world.  But that’s not all. Paul goes on:

 

There’s that Advent theme again: Jesus has given us a job to do.  He’s given us a gospel treasure to steward in his absence.  In the meantime, rather than being anxious, we should take our needs to God.  Jesus made the same point in the Sermon on the Mount.  The pagans worry about what they’ll eat, what they’ll wear, and where they’ll sleep.  God’s people should know better than to worry unduly about these things.  God will provide just as he always has.  He is faithful to his promises.  The story of his dealings with Israel is the proof and even more so, so is his gift of Jesus, who died and rose again to set us free from sin and death.  So go to the Lord with your needs and ask.  And while you’re at it, give thanks, because you know his faithfulness and his love.

 

This is part of the witness of the people of God—it’s how we are light in the darkness—and it ties back into rejoicing.  When Paul talks about rejoicing, at least part of what he’s got in mind is a public display or a public witness.  The pagan Greeks in Philippi regularly held public celebrations to honour their gods.  And yet the pagans, as Jesus said, were always anxious.  Why?  Because their gods never delivered.  Pagan religion was a non-stop game of trial and error, trying to guess what the gods wanted, trying to guess what you may have done wrong to offend them, and then guessing at what you might offer to appease their anger or to ingratiate them to you in order to get what you needed or wanted.  The pagan gods were silent and they were notoriously capricious and unreliable.  And in this context Paul exhorts the Philippian Christians: Rejoice yourselves.  Let the pagans see you celebrating the fact that the Creator of the universe has, through Jesus, made you his own and lives in your midst by his own Holy Spirit.  Let the pagans, who know only mean and capricious gods and who live in a dog-eat-dog world, let them see the gracious gentleness of God in you.  Live in such a way that they see in you the God who humbles himself to die for the sake of his enemies.  And let the pagans see you living in faith, praying in confident thankfulness to the God whose story reveals an unfailing pattern of promise and fulfilment.  Shine the light of Jesus into the darkness of the world.  And the result of all this?  Look at verse 7:

 

I think we tend to look at Paul’s exhortation here as something we should do in order to experience the peace of God ourselves, but given the context in Philippians, I think Paul’s point is actually more about our witness.  If we truly live as stewards of the good news about Jesus, if we truly live as people who know the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus and particularly in his death and resurrection, if we truly know the life of the Spirit, the peace of God—rather than the strife and anxiety of the world—will guard our hearts and minds in a way that will astound the pagans around us.

 

I said last Sunday that we are called both to proclaim and to live the gospel.  This is how we live it.  Put together with our proclamation, to truly live in light of Jesus and what he reveals about God, should cause the world to stand up and take note.  This is our way of being John the Baptist in our own age.  And as it did for John, for us—if we are faithful—it will result in many giving glory to God for his faithfulness and then coming to him in faith as we have.  But it will also threaten many who are invested in the pagan and sinful systems of the world.  Brothers and Sisters, we are now the voice calling in the wilderness: “Make straight the way of the Lord!”

 

So we need to ask: Does the world see our joy?  Are we the voice crying in the wilderness?  Are we the royal heralds the Lord has called us to be, summoning the word to let go of its false gods and to come to the Lord Jesus, calling the world away from sin and self and to come to the cross?  And we need to ask how the world is responding to us.  If we’re faithfully proclaiming the good news about Jesus, if we’re faithfully calling people to repent and to believe, if we’re faithfully proclaiming that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom has come—well—people will respond in one of two ways.  Either they’ll believe or they’ll get angry—as Herod got angry with John.  There’s some of both out there in the world, but overwhelmingly, when I look at how people respond to or think of the church these days in our part of the world, it’s often just indifference.  Why?

 

Because we have not been the witnesses God calls us to be.  We have been mealy-mouthed and, quite often, just plain silent in our proclamation, because we have too often sought to please people rather than God, and because we have been half-hearted and unfaithful in our gospel living.  Like old Israel, we pray to God, but we’ve failed to tear down the old altars to Baal and Asherah—or Mammon or Aphrodite or Caesar.  We name Jesus, but we deal dishonestly in business, we sell our souls to the commercialism that surrounds us, we look to politics or to science as our saviours, and we dabble in the sexual immorality of the age.  We’ve failed to proclaim the gospel and we justify it, saying that we’ll preach it with our lives.  But if we stop to ask what the world sees in our lives, is it really very different?  Does the world see us rejoicing in the Lord?  Does the world see us manifesting the gracious gentleness of Jesus?  Does the world see us living in faithful prayer and trusting in God, or does it see people just as anxious as everyone else?  Does it see enmity and strife and broken relationships or does it see a gospel people living out the healing and reconciling love of Jesus?  Does the world see the peace of God ruling our hearts and minds?  Does the world see us, holding high the gospel, as a challenge to its gods and its kings and its sins?  It should.  But sadly, I think that for the Western Church at large, the answer is often “no”.

 

And, all too often, when we do proclaim the gospel, we do so without power or authority.  Think of John boldly declaring the coming judgement and calling Israel to repentance.  It was urgent and powerful.  In contrast we tend to hold the gospel out as good advice, rather than as the good news that it is.  Friends, the gospel is the royal summons to submit in faith to Jesus, the world’s true Lord—the Lord who has come with mercy so that the repentant will escape when he comes one day in judgement.  This was the power behind John the Baptist’ preaching.  But all too often we present the gospel as just another option on the religious smorgasbord—something you might want to try. See if you like it.  See if it works for you.  If not…oh well.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s not the gospel.  The gospel is good news to the people living in the midst of darkness: the king who will set the world to rights has come.  And that means the gospel, when preached as it should be, will challenge and upset the Herods and Caesars of our age and all those invested in the false gods of the world.

 

The Advent message is to be prepared.  Jesus has given us a gospel mission to take the good news of his death, his resurrection, and his lordship into the world.  Brothers and Sisters, pray that we will be faithful to our mission—faithful enough to provoke persecution, because that’s the kind of faithfulness that also reaps a harvest for the kingdom.  Pray for the holy boldness of John the Baptist and the gracious gentleness of Jesus.  Pray that we will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  Pray that the joy of the Lord will overcome us.  Brothers and Sisters, Rejoice!  Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again, I say rejoice.

 

Let’s pray: O Lord, come among us, we pray, with your power and strengthen us with your great might; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness we are grievously hindered in running the race that is set before us, your bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, be honour and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

 

Imagine a little church.  Most of the people in it are converts from paganism.  They used to worship false gods: sex, money, war, power, government.  They all had their favourite sins: lying, cheating, anger, pornography, drunkenness, drugs, adultery.  You name it, they’d done it—often as part of their worship.  But then this funny Jewish man showed up preaching a bizarre message about the God of Israel and his son, the Messiah—the anointed king—who had been crucified and then raised from death.  And this man, Paul, he’d been abused, beaten, stoned, left for dead so many times for the sake of this message, this “good news” he was so earnest about.  He was a little frightening to look at, because he  literally bore the marks of this gospel, the marks of Jesus on his own body.  But this good news was unlike any news they’d ever heard before.  This God, this Jesus, was unlike any god they’d ever worshiped.  He brought love, mercy, grace, and hope into a world of darkness, greed, selfishness, and brutality.  They were won over.  They were baptised into this God who is Father, Son, and Spirit and the new creation begun by Jesus was born in them.  Paul stayed and he taught them and they grew in Jesus and the Spirit.  And then Paul moved on.  And they started to struggle.  The temptations of their old pagan ways came back—as so often happens.  The new life of Jesus and the Spirit—so thrilling at first—became hum-drum and they started seeking after new experiences and new excitements.  That resulted in factions in the church: this group became a fan of that preacher and that group became fans of this preacher.  In the name of Christian liberty they became tolerant of sin—even some that were unspeakable to the pagans.  And that led to further divisions.  And when Paul heard what was happening and wrote to them.  Think of Advent.  He wrote to them: “Hey, you’re living like you’re still part of the old evil age, subject to the old false gods that Jesus defeated at the cross.  You’re supposed to be living as heralds of God’s new creation!”  And they wrote back a nasty letter telling him they were done with him—they didn’t want to hear his “correction” anymore.  They had grown beyond his teaching and they were doing well on their own, thank you very much!  This was the church in Corinth.

 

And this is what’s behind our Epistle today, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5.  Let’s read:

 

I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how we should be thought of: I’m a servant of the Messiah and a steward of God’s mysteries.”  Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault.  The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place.  But Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally.  I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today.  That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement.  Most pastors, when faced with unjust criticism just nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements.  And not just “pastors”.  This goes for every Christian.  We’re all ministers of the gospel.  And we live in an age that is becoming increasingly hostile to the gospel and to gospel people.  Sometimes the criticisms we receive can be justified.  Sometimes Christians and sometimes churches have failed and done awful things.  But those are the outliers.  Most of the criticism we face comes from people who hate Jesus and the message of the cross, who don’t want to hear about sin and don’t want to repent, who have their own ideas of what the world should be like and only want new creation on their terms, not God’s.  Jesus warned us this would happen, but most of us still aren’t prepared for the attacks.  And so even though we’re ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God, all too often we let the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the room.  We go silently and sit facing the corner like scolded children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better.

 

Brothers and Sisters, Paul stresses that ministers are to be found faithful.  That goes for apostles and for pastors and for all of us.  Yes, we need to weigh criticism.  We need to ask if there’s anything to it.  Sometimes there may be.  Maybe we’re not being faithful to Jesus’ instructions and we need to hear it.  But Jesus’ instructions aren’t hard to understand or discern.  As a minister, I’m called to preach the word, especially the gospel about Jesus, and to administer the sacraments.  It’s not quite that simple, but that is the core.  And for all of us, we’re called to proclaim the gospel about Jesus to the world around us and to live in a way that accords with being the people of God.  We proclaim Jesus and we live the life—the fruit—of the Spirit.

 

We need to reflect on our lives in light of that and ask if we’re being faithful.  This is one of the reasons we need to steep ourselves in God’s word.  If we don’t know what God expects, how will we be faithful?  It’s a bit like a bread recipe.  Bread is one of the simplest things in the world to make.  But as simple as it is, you still have to read the recipe and follow it.  Start changing things up and you spoil the bread.  But that’s what we all too often do.  It’s not that we’re not well-intentioned.  We want to see things happen, but sometime we get impatient.  We take shortcuts, because we don’t want to wait.  Sometimes we get bored with plain old bread.  We remember the time we had cinnamon-swirl bread—or chocolate cake!—so we try to change up the recipe or add exciting things to it.  People out there don’t like to hear about sin, so we’ll tone that part of our preaching down.  People out there don’t like commitment, so we’ll make the gospel commitment-free.  People out there don’t like liturgy and sermons, so we’ll have a rock concert and cut the sermon to a few minutes of feel-good self-help.  People don’t feel like getting up on Sunday mornings and driving to church, so we’ll broadcast it to their TVs and computers instead.  Maybe we’re just not confident that people will want to eat our bread.  We’re not confident in the power of the gospel and the Spirit to change hearts and to bring them to Jesus, so we instead build churches around programmes and activities that people do want or we use manipulative techniques to get them to believe.  We make the gospel about them and not so much about Jesus and the glory of God.  These things can and often do bring short-term gains, but in the long-term they’ve been a disaster.  We wonder why people won’t commit, why they’re still worldly, why we’re losing our children, and why we’re seen as increasingly irrelevant.  It’s like we’ve tried to bake bread by replacing the flour with glitter.  The end product might look exciting, but in the end it’s not only unable to nourish, it’s slowly poisoning us.  In contrast, the real work of the gospel is rarely flashy.  Sometimes it brings persecution and even martyrdom.  It means relying on God, not ourselves.  And it means being in it for the long-haul.  Consider Israel.  God called Abraham and it was two thousand years before Israel’s story culminated with Jesus.  And the in-between was as full of hardship, slavery, judgement, and exile as it was prosperity and growth.  And that was God working with a single, small people.  Brothers and Sisters, our mission is the world.

 

We need to follow the simple recipe: Be faithful to the gospel, build churches around word and sacrament, pray and fellowship together, raise covenant children who know Jesus.  And live as the people of God’s new creation in the midst of the old so that the people around us will see what Jesus has done in his death and resurrection.  Make them constructively curious about what makes us different, then explain it to them—proclaim Jesus and the gospel.  Let your neighbours see you live it—when it’s a joy to follow Jesus and when you struggle to bear that cross.  And as we do that, remember that the judgement that matters is not the judgement of other people or the world, but of God.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an ear to the ground.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the world’s judgements.  Sometimes we need to know how the world sees us—even if it’s false—so that we can better know what we’re up against.  So that we can better respond with the gospel.  And, sometimes, the world’s rebukes may have some truth to them.  Jesus promised that his people would be persecuted for his sake, but we need to make sure that we’re actually being persecuted for his sake and for our faithfulness to his word.  I know some Christians who claim they’re being persecuted, but when you get down to it, it’s just that people don’t like them because they’re jerks, not because they’re preaching Jesus.  People will still hate us for preaching Jesus, but Friends, we do need to be sure that as we preach Jesus and as we stand firmly on the Scriptures that the world rejects, we remain committed to being a godly people in every respect.  We need to live the gospel as much as we preach the gospel.  We’re to announce God’s judgement on sin, yes, but we’re also to announce God’s mercy to repentant sinners.

 

It’s simple—it may be difficult, but it’s nothing if not simple: stick to the bread recipe: A church of word and sacrament, a church of koinonia—of gospel life lived together.  Just be faithful in that.  This is the bread that feeds us and the bread that will give life to the world.  And, who knows, every once in a while the Spirit has been known to sprinkle in some raisins or some cinnamon or to drizzle some honey into the recipe—but that’s his prerogative, not ours.

 

So that’s the Epistle.  Let’s turn over to today’s Gospel in Matthew 11 as we continue with this theme.  Again, what does it look like to be gospel ministers who are prepared.  Well, John the Baptist.  In the Gospel, John has gone from announcing the coming kingdom and baptising people in the Jordan to being locked up in prison.  He got there by way of criticizing Herod.  It wasn’t just some off-the-wall criticism.  Tied up with his announcement of the kingdom was John’s denouncement of Herod for marrying his former sister-in-law.  Herod couldn’t help but draw a connection between John’s fiery preaching and himself.  If John was saying that the King was soon to come, it meant John was saying that Herod wasn’t really the king.  So poor John is now in Herod’s dungeon and he’s frustrated and confused.  He’d been faithful in his divine calling to herald the coming Messiah—his cousin, Jesus—and he’s landed in prison.  No big surprise there.  He wasn’t the first prophet to offend a king and end up in prison.  But Jesus—the Messiah—was on the outside, preaching, teaching, healing, forgiving, having dinner with tax collectors and sinners…and leaving John to rot.  Something was wrong or so John was beginning to think.  These things happen to faithful ministry and it’s easy to get frustrated.  We’re preaching the gospel!  Why are we being opposed?  We’re faithfully being what the church is supposed to be.  Why aren’t we growing and why is that other group preaching a false gospel and making glitter bread doing so well?  We’ll pick up from there:

 

Meanwhile, John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah.  He sent word through his disciples and asked him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we be looking for someone else?”  (St. Matthew 11:2-10)

 

I don’t think John was really doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah.  I think this was his way of saying, “Um…Jesus.  Shouldn’t the Messiah be getting his faithful herald out prison?”  Of course, that also meant all the other things to go along with it.  A simple jailbreak wouldn’t do.  The jailbreak would have to be part of a wholesale overthrow of Herod and the Romans—which, of course, is what most people expected the Messiah to do.  Here’s what Jesus says to John’s men in return:

 

 “Go and tell John what you hear and see: Blind people are seeing!  Lame people are walking!  Lepers are being cleansed!  The dead are being raised to life!  And the poor are hearing the good news!  And God bless you if you’re not offended by what I’m doing.”  (Matthew 11:5-6)

 

You see, John expected the Messiah to be like Elijah, confronting the prophets of Baal and calling down fire from heaven.  John wanted to see fire and brimstone.  There is a place for that.  In a sense John wasn’t wrong.  Jesus is the Judge and, you can be sure, he will judge the world and everyone in it.  There will be a time for fire and brimstone and judgement.  I suspect that being a fire-and-brimstone sort of prophet—and that is what John was called to be so there’s nothing wrong with that—I suspect that being that kind of guy means that you get a little fixated on judgement.  And Jesus responds by saying something like, “You expected Elijah…and you’ve got Elijah…but before I come in judgement, there are a lot of people…people like the widow of Zeraphath…people who need to know God’s mercy.”  As Jesus says in John’s Gospel: “I came not to condemn, but to redeem.”  Brothers and Sisters, remember: Sinners already stand condemned.  Judgement is coming.  Announcing that judgement and calling people to repentance was John’s mission.  But before the judgement comes, what Israel needed most was to know God’s mercy, to know his salvation.  This is why Jesus’ road to the throne had to be by way of the cross.

 

So Jesus corrects John.  He sets him straight about the Messiah.  But he then turns to the crowd and praises John:

 

         who will prepare your way before you.’ (Matthew 11:7-10)

 

Even though Jesus’ mission was one of humility and of mercy, Jesus praises the faithfulness of John to his ministry as the fiery herald of judgement.  Again, John was expecting the Messiah to come like Elijah, bringing confrontation and fire from heaven, but what Jesus says—albeit a little obliquely for reasons that get beyond our lesson today—what Jesus says here is that John is the prophet like Elijah.  John is the fire-and-brimstone preacher.  John is the herald announcing judgement and calling the people to repentance.  Jesus quotes from Malachi 3 and confirms two things: John is truly the one sent to herald the Messiah and, two, that means that Jesus truly is the Messiah—the one whom Malachi said would come both to refine Israel and to make her offerings pleasing to the Lord and to judge the unrepentant.

 

Now, in the short-term this was bad news for John.  It was bad news for Jesus, too.  Both the Messiah and his herald would be put to death.  But death was not the end.  As it turns out, we know, it was by the death of Jesus that deliverance was bought and in his resurrection he was vindicated and the unjust verdict on him overturned.  In his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus was confirmed as the Messiah, as Lord.  In that we see the faithfulness of God to his promises and knowing God’s faithfulness, we have hope.  As St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).  This is one of those parts of the gospel that we often prefer to ignore or to leave out of our preaching, because it offends.  We’ve sort of got the opposite problem John had.  John was fixated on judgement and on fire from heaven.  Like so many Jews, he wanted to see God vanquish Israel’s enemies and he nearly forgot about God’s mercy.  Our problem is the opposite.  We’ve become so afraid of preaching about sin and about judgement, that we can’t even preach mercy and grace anymore—because mercy isn’t mercy and grace isn’t grace if we’re not guilty of anything and if there is no judgement headed this way.  And if we gut our preaching of mercy and grace, we can talk all day about the love of God, but there will be no depth to it.  We will make the cross of Jesus pointless.  Why?  Because we can only begin to plumb the great depths of God’s love when we see that he gave his Son to die for our sake—for the sake of sinners who would otherwise stand condemned to destruction.

 

And that brings us back to the recipe for bread.  Brothers and Sisters, bread is simple and often kind of boring.  But if you make it right, it nourishes.  It keeps us alive.  There’s a reason why Jesus used it as a metaphor for himself when he said, “I am the bread of life.”  There’s a reason why it’s a symbol over and over in the story of God’s people for his faithful care and sustenance.  And it points to the way God works and the way his gospel and his word work in the world.  It’s hardly ever flashy.  And you have to be patient, because it takes time to rise and it takes time to bake.  But like the Messiah, who humbled himself to take on lowly human flesh, who humbled himself to be born of a lowly virgin, and who humbly went to death on a cross, the simple bread of the gospel, the good news that Jesus died, that he rose, and that he is Lord, brings life to the world.  To preach it faithfully means to preach it whole and to preach it pure.  Friends, be faithful stewards.  Stick to the recipe.  Preach the Lord Jesus, crucified and risen to give forgiveness and life to sinners.  Pursue holiness.  Build churches centred on the faithful preaching of God’s word and the administration of the sacraments, where, knowing God’s faithfulness, God’s people sing and pray together, where they raise covenant, gospel children, where we live as people who know the hope of God’s life in the age to come.

 

Let’s pray: O Lord Jesus Christ, who at your first coming sent your messenger to prepare your way before you: grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at your second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in your sight; who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Everyone who knows me, I think, knows that I am no fan of Sportzball—of any kind.  That goes for Sportzpuck, too.  I have poor depth perception, so I’ve always been absolutely no good in any sport that involves flying or otherwise fast-moving objects.  I joined the swim team instead and—to this day—thorough enjoy it.  As a kid my favourite was to swim in the medley relay swimming backstroke.  I was really good at that it was fun to contribute that effort to a relay team.  You might not think it, but even on the swim team, as much as it might seem like everyone’s competing individually—except for the handful of relay events—even on the swim team, we all had to pull our own weight, we all had to look out for each other to win.  I struggled with backstroke for a long time, but in high school one of the upperclassmen who would go on to the US Olympic team, not only encouraged me, but took me aside and worked with me to better my stroke.  Because that’s what you do when you’re on a team.

 

But here’s the thing.  We all know this.  It’s a no-brainer.  A team won’t win if it doesn’t work together, if people don’t show up, if everyone doesn’t pull his own weight.  It’s a no-brainer in sports.  But then there’s the church.  In the average church about twenty per cent do eighty per cent of the work.  Compare the membership to average Sunday attendance and in the average church there’s a significant difference between those two numbers.  I’ve been in churches where average Sunday attendance was less than a third of the actual membership.  And, it’s been my experience, that instead of coming alongside to help each other when we see problems, too many of us stand on the sidelines and complain amongst ourselves.  We’ve seen a version of this in Galatians.  The team was being pulled apart: Jewish believers here, gentile believers there.  They were, as Paul puts it, biting and devouring each other and on the verge of blowing the whole thing up, when they should have been bearing with each other in love.  We’re supposed to be focused on Jesus and walking by the Spirit, but all too often we end up focused on ourselves and walking according to the flesh.  So as we come to Chapter 6, the closing chapter of Paul’s letter, he’s made his arguments, but before he sums it up in closing, he visits a couple of relevant points about the unity of the church and what life—what teamwork—in a church characterised by the fruit of the Spirit looks like.  So, first, Galatians 6:1-5.

 

This is what it looks like to build a community around the fruit of the Spirit instead of the works of the flesh.  This is what it looks like to live in love and humility, instead of rivalry and jealousy.  Stuff will go wrong.  We may be walking by the Spirit, but we’re not perfect.  And Paul says that when that happens, we need to set each other right in a spirit of gentleness.  You who are spiritual, he writes.  He might be saying that this is what spiritually mature believers do, but I really think he's writing this as a rebuke to the Galatians.  They think they’re spiritual, but instead of dealing with each other in gentleness, instead of setting each other right, they’re biting and devouring each other.  I really don’t think this is Paul’s instruction to the spiritually mature; it’s his instruction to everyone to whom Jesus has given his Spirit—and that’s all of us—everyone who is in Jesus the Messiah.  Brothers and Sisters, when Paul, in Chapter 5, says to walk by the Spirit, I think out tendency is to picture ourselves walking—each of us alone, each of us doing our own thing in line with the Spirit—but Paul’s point here is that we don’t do this as individuals.  The Spirit joins us into Jesus’ one body and we walk by the Spirit together, as a community.  That means helping each other when we struggle or fall or stray.  And helping means being gentle in the sense that the end goal is restoration and the wholeness and unity of the community.  Remember, we follow Jesus who, as Paul put it earlier, “loved me and gave himself for me”.  We ought to feel the same way towards each other.

 

It’s easy to become prideful.  It’s easy to look down on a brother or a sister who stumbles—as if it could never happen to us—so Paul warns: Watch out.  Someday you might be tested.  Instead, we need to be carrying each other’s burdens.  And now he comes back full circle to this whole debate about the place of the law.  He says that it’s as we bear with each other in love, gentleness, and humility, it’s in this that we actually fulfil the law.  We can never fulfil the law through circumcision or diet or keeping the Sabbath, but by being this community that bears and that lives out the fruit of the Spirit—for each other and for the world.

 

Then, on the other side of the scale, Paul stresses our work, our vocation within this community.  He’s been warning about these circumcision people who want to “boast” in their circumcision.  What he’s getting at is that when persecution comes, they’ll point out that they’re circumcised and can therefore claim the Jewish exemption from pagan worship.  Paul says, no!  God’s given you gospel work to do and he’s given you his Spirit to make it possible.  “Boast” in that.  When your neighbours or the civic officials come to arrest you for being anti-social or anti-patriotic or anti-religious appeal not to your circumcision, but to the gospel, to the kingdom work you and your brothers and sisters have done.  In other words, be the “on earth as in heaven” people Jesus and the Spirit have made you and leave the pagans nothing bad to say about you.  Don’t glorify your flesh; let God be glorified.  And with that in mind he tells them—and us—to get to work.  Carry your load.  In other words, do the work of the kingdom that God has called and equipped you to do.  Don’t sit around waiting for that committed twenty per cent to do it; do what God has called you to do.  Is there something that needs to be done?  Are you equipped to do it?  Then don’t complain about it.  Go do it.  Visit that brother or sister in hospital.  Mop the kitchen floor.  Find an opportunity to talk to your neighbour or your co-worker or your grandchild about Jesus and the gospel.  “Each of you,” Paul writes, “have to carry your own [part of] the load.”

 

And then, speaking of the loads we each bear within this Messiah community, Paul writes in verse 6:

 

So speaking of everyone doing their part of the work…  I’m always impressed by Paul’s ability to talk about money without mentioning money.  But here it is.  There is one job in the church that needs to be paid and I suspect this is Paul’s way of saying to the Galatians, “If you’d been doing this, you probably would have avoided the situation you’re in.”  Brothers and Sisters, those who preach and teach in the church need material support so that they can devote themselves to their work.  We see this in Acts.  There were a lot of things that needed to be done in the Jerusalem church.  Good things.  Godly things.  But the apostles realised that they needed to devote themselves to preaching and to prayer, so they appointed deacons to do those other things.  And this means a lot coming from Paul.  Paul supported himself making tents.  He didn’t take money for himself from the churches he served, and yet he’s always clear that that’s not the norm.  He knew that the ministry of the word is absolutely essential to the church and he knew that it’s time-consuming work and the church needs to do its best to make sure those who preach and teach actually have to time to minister the word well.

 

Brothers and Sisters, you want to see revival?  Revival is always preceded—whether we look at the history of Israel or the history of the church—revival is always preceded by a passion for the teaching and preaching of God’s word—by preachers who are passionate about proclaiming it and by people who are desperately hungry to hear it.  And that same history shows that when the church is at its lowest, there is a famine of the word.  Many of us left Mainline churches that were preaching heresy and people wonder how it happened.  Brothers and Sisters, it happened because the expositional preaching and the confidence in the inspired word of God that were our heritage, gifted to us by the Reformation, were lost.  As John Stott once said, “Sermonettes make Christianettes”.  It happens in theology liberal churches.  It happens in sacramentalist churches.  It happens anywhere the glory of God’s word has been eclipsed by other priorities.  Poorly taught people who don’t know their Bibles are prey to heresy and immaturity and that’s precisely what’s happened.  It’s what happened in Galatia.  And so Paul warns them that they need to support the ministry of men in their churches to give the word of God its due, so that they preach it faithfully and powerfully, so that the churches will grow in the Spirit, know the truth, and recognise error when they see it.

 

And Paul is then clear: If you think you can do without serious Bible teaching in your church and still steer your way through the false teachers and heresies of the day unscathed, you are fooling yourself.  God is not mocked.  He has spoken.  He has given his word because he loves us, because he wants us to know him, because he wants us to know his promises and his faithfulness so that we can live in hope, so that we can each go out to proclaim the gospel faithfully and so that the church can be what he wants it to be.  Brothers and Sisters, faithful Christians should have a natural hunger for that word and to hear it proclaimed fully and faithfully.  Our forebearers back in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, after a millennium-long famine of the word, were eager to hear it.  They’d listen to an hour-long sermon Sunday morning, then come back in the afternoon to hear another two or sometimes three preachers proclaim the word—not pop-psychology, not self-help, not sermons where a verse is just a springboard for the preacher to jump into his own ideas, but to hear God’s word explained and applied.  Because they were hungry to hear God speak.

 

Paul says: You reap what you sow.  There are exceptions.  Sometimes you pay a preacher and he turns out to be useless and there are some underpaid preachers who are brilliant, but as a general rule—and one borne out in the history of the church—if you don’t take preaching seriously and if you don’t invest your church’s resources in good preaching, you will end up with a shallow and half-baked pulpit ministry, a famine of the word, and ultimately all sorts of false teaching and heresy.

 

And still talking about money—again without actually using the word—Paul carries on in verses 9 and 10 with this image of sowing and reaping.

 

If we have crucified the flesh and its works and have put on Jesus and are bearing the fruit of the Spirit, good works should naturally follow, but I think Paul has something more specific in mind here, because I can’t see any reason he would be concerned that we’d lose our enthusiasm—literally he writes don’t weary—of bearing the fruit of the Spirit.  What we are prone to losing our enthusiasm for is the sort of works that we do to build up the church or to carry the gospel and the kingdom to the community around us.  That can get very tiring sometimes—especially when you give and give or work and work and nothing seems to come of it or no one seems to appreciate it.  I think that’s what Paul has in mind.  There was a culture of benefaction in the ancient world.  Wealthy people would often try to outdo each other in gifts and investments in their towns and cities.  They did it for selfish reasons.  They wanted to make names for themselves.  And I think given that context, Paul’s idea here is that Christians need not only to be benefactors within their own churches and supporting their own ministries, but that Christians should also be known as benefactors in their own communities—not for their own sakes, but in order to make the name of Jesus known and as a natural outflowing of the grace of the gospel.  We witness God’s generosity with us by being generous to others.  It’s one of the ways we lift the veil on God’s new creation.  The pagans will accuse Christians falsely in all sorts of ways.  Don’t weasel out of it by trying to be Jews, exempt from pagan worship.  Instead, use your generosity to display the love and grace of mercy of the gospel.

 

And that then brings Paul full circle, back to this issue of circumcision and torah.  In verse 11 he gives us a sense of just how passionately he feels about all of this.  Letters were normally dictated to a scribe, but here Paul takes the pen in his own hand and writes, Look at the large-size letters I’m writing to you in my own hand.  This is personal.  Papyrus was expensive and maybe he wanted to stress how important this all was by showing how willing he was to use more of it.  Maybe he wanted someone to be able to hold the page up and for the congregation to be able to read it for themselves at a distance.  Whatever the case, he comes back to the main issue and stresses how vital it is to their lives as a Christians and as a church.  He writes:

 

The circumcision people are afraid.  As long as the church was just Jews everything was fine, but now these formerly pagan gentiles have heard the good news about Jesus and have believed and when they did, they stopped going to the temples, they stopped making offerings to the gods, they smashed their home altars and threw out their household gods, they’ve stopped offering that pinch of incense to Caesar that he demanded.  In doing that, these gentiles converts have angered their friends, families, neighbours, and the civic authorities and so they claimed the exemption that Caesar had granted to the Jews.  Except these gentile Jesus-believers, they weren’t Jews.  They weren’t circumcised, they weren’t fussy about what they ate, they didn’t even keep the Sabbath.  And so now the Jews were mad.  And they were afraid: What if the authorities revoke our special status and force us to worship pagan gods?  That’s what all this talk about a show in the flesh and boasting is all about.  They wanted to avoid being persecuted for the sake of Jesus and the gospel by putting on a show—a sham of being Jewish.  But that sham meant denying the power of the cross.  That sham meant denying that in Jesus, God’s new world has been born.  And so Paul goes on in verses 14 to 16:

 

Brothers and Sisters, the cross should be our everything.  It was for Paul.  When the authorities came for these circumcision people, they were going to “boast”—meaning they were going to appeal to their circumcision, to being under the law.  But Paul’s saying, when they come for me, God forbid that I should boast in anything other than the cross of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.  Think of Philippians 3, where Paul lists all the things he had a right to boast in.  If anyone had been faithful to the law, he had.  And yet there he swept it all aside as trash because of the Messiah, knowing him, gaining him, being found in him, knowing him and his power, and sharing in the companionship of his sufferings.  For Paul, to be persecuted for the sake of Jesus was confirmation of his union with and of his life in the Messiah.  Jesus had swept him off his feet and given him a new identity and called him into this cross-shaped life that was the fulfilment of Israel’s hope and at the same time the overturning of all his earlier expectations and aspirations.  This is what Paul means when he says that he has been crucified to the world.  Everything about who he had been as a Jew, a Pharisee, none of it mattered anymore.  His old self was dead and buried—crucified with Jesus the Messiah who had fulfilled it all and then launched God’s new world.  That new life, that new world, Jesus and the Spirit—that’s all that mattered to Paul anymore.  The cross of Jesus fulfilled and changed everything.  And so he sums up everything he’s written so far: Circumcision and uncircumcision are nothing—they don’t matter—because Jesus has inaugurated God’s new creation.

 

Think of Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 5:17, where he says that if anyone is in the Messiah…new creation!  New creation.  He just blurts it out.  If you’re in Jesus the Messiah.  If you have trusted him and given him your allegiance.  New Creation!  God has begun to set us and to set his world to rights and that’s what we need to line up with.  God’s given us his Spirit to get us there.  Like a compass, the Spirit draws the line on the map and that line ends in our resurrection and the restoration of all things.  But, Brothers and Sisters, you’ve got to walk that line by the Spirit.  Don’t stray left or right.  Don’t let the flesh back.  Walk by the Spirit, because God’s new creation is all that matters.  So peace and mercy, Paul says, to everyone who lines up by that standard—yes, he says, on God’s Israel.  Again, he stresses, circumcision isn’t the answer.  You can’t go back to the old Israel of the torah.  The way forward, is in Jesus and the Spirit—those who are in the Messiah, who walk by the Spirit, they’re God’s Israel, they are now God’s people.

 

And then finally, verses 17 and 18:

 

They wanted to mark out their flesh with circumcision.  Far more important for Paul were the marks of persecution that he bore on his body for the sake of the Lord Jesus.  He wrote earlier of each of us bearing our own loads.  This was his.  Eventually it may have been the load borne by some of those Christians in Galatia when persecution came.  Paul likens those marks to the branding of a slave.  Those cuts and bruises and broken bones marked him out as belonging to Jesus as assuredly as his baptism did.  He belonged to Jesus and he would serve Jesus to death and one day he would be raised to new life in God’s new creation and there those marks will be badges of glory.  And so Paul closes: Grace to you.  The grace of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.  Because nothing else matters.  May the grace of our Lord Jesus be with your spirit—not your flesh he stresses even as he writes the last words, not your flesh, but with your spirit.  It’s interesting the way Paul puts it: “your” is plural but “spirit” is singular as if to stress again the importance of the life of the Spirit as the cornerstone of these little communities of Jesus-followers.  If you are in Jesus the Messiah, walk by the Spirit.  Give no quarter to the flesh.  Don’t be afraid of the Jews or the pagans.  Just be faithful to Jesus.  Walk the path the Spirit has set for you and he will not only lead you to God’s new creation, but along the way he will make you a witness of that new creation to the world.

 

Brothers and Sisters, that’s it.  Cut through all the issues with torah and circumcision and the problems between Jews and gentiles that we see in Galatians, cut through all that and at the heart of it all is Paul’s firm belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah was the turning point in the history of the world—of the history of whole cosmos.  I was talking with the woman cutting my hair this week and she asked me, “It’s been a long time.  When will they write a New New Testament?”  I said they won’t.  Because there’s no need.  Because Jesus, once and for all changed everything.  It won’t happen again because it can’t happen again.  It’s done.  We’re just waiting—and working towards—the fulfilment of what he started.  I don’t think she really understood.  And I think a big reason for that—and a big reason why so many people out there (and sometimes even in the church!) don’t understand is because we’re often so bad at living as new creation people.  Our problems aren’t the problems of the Galatians, but the results are often the same.  In our disunity we undermine the unity that Jesus established for his church, for his family.  Some Christians even use the Lord’s Supper, which Jesus gave to bring us together, some use it as a means of emphasising our divisions and of excluding fellow Jesus-followers.  Instead of walking by the Spirit, we have our contemporary ways of using our freedom in Jesus as a base of operations for the flesh.  Like the Galatians we, too, often allow our fear to undermine our gospel witness.  Out of fear of opposition or in hopes of winning over the pagans of our own day, we water down and compromise the gospel or we weave into it the secular philosophies of our own day.  We end up proclaiming a message without any power because we’ve stripped it of the offense of the cross, of Jesus, of the life of the Spirit, of God’s new creation.  This is epitomised by the website of a local church I was looking at recently.  They stripped out any references to A.D.—anno domini, the year of our Lord—replacing them with C.E., the “common era”—I guess, lest the world be offended by the announcement that Jesus is Lord and that he has changed history and the world.

 

Brothers and Sisters, we need to take a lesson from Paul.  We need to keep Jesus at the centre of who we are.  Jesus defined everything for Paul.  Jesus called him in the first place.  Jesus’ cross defined who Paul became and it shaped the good news he proclaimed.  Jesus was the fulfilment of everything that had come before and the one who had set his people free from sin and death.  Jesus is the Son whose being sent defines even what we mean by the word “God”.  And it’s now Jesus’ Spirit who has caused God’s new creation to be born in us so that we can live as renewed human beings and so that we can live as the beachhead, the advance guard of that new creation as it breaks into the old.  Jesus’ death and resurrection marked the end of the old world and the birth of the new.  Jesus is the one “who loved me and gave himself for me.”  And, Friends, if we are to be faithful, we will be a church with this Jesus at our centre—not just in our theology, but also in our teaching and preaching and in our shared life together.  We have been called by love.  May we be a church shaped by love and that does everything it can to live by love—the love shown to us by Jesus.

 

Let’s pray again our Collect: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Freedom is a funny thing.  We often think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want, but people who find themselves free to do whatever they want—and who follow through on it—pretty universally end up being the most miserable people on the planet—because that kind of selfish freedom is nothing more than the sinful human heart gone wild.  It’s rebellion unchained.  Think of the tycoon or movie stars who look like they’ve got everything, but end up miserable, friendless, and addicted to drugs having found out their freedom has only made them and the people and world around them worse.  The sinful human heart, the flesh as Paul puts it, can simply never be truly free on its own.

 

Paul understood this all too well himself.  The Lord had delivered his people from slavery and set them free, but he also gave them his law in order to guard that freedom.  Even then, they became enslaved all over again and were no better off than the pagans enslaved to idols and evil powers.  And that’s because, as Paul has said, the law was given by God to magnify sin—to concentrate it, to pile it up all in one place so that God, in Jesus the Messiah, could deal with it once and for all.  But that’s just it.  Jesus has dealt with sin.  So Paul’s been warning the Galatian believers: You can’t go back to the law.  You’ve got to keep moving forward in the Messiah towards God’s new world.  To do anything else—even to go back to the good, God-given law—to do anything else is to abandon the new life of the Spirit and to go back to the flesh.  This is where Paul starts in the second half of Galatians 5.  Look with me at Chapter 5, verse 13:

 

You were called to freedom.  Paul’s deliberate evoking the memory of Israel being called by the Lord out of Egypt—taken from “slavery” to the “free slavery” of the gospel as he puts it in Romans 6.  Because, he goes on:

 

As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, “all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful”.  At the heart of the human problem are idolatry and selfishness.  We’ve become enslaved to them and Jesus has set us free.  In fact, Jesus has come to set creation itself free from its slavery to our idolatry and selfishness.  That’s where God’s plan has been headed from the beginning.  What does God’s new world look like when everything has been set to rights?  Well, it looks like the cross of Jesus.  It looks like this Messiah-shaped love that gives of itself for the sake of others.  The Galatian believers knew this once.  It’s what drew them to the gospel in the first place, but now they’re starting to turn on each other, so Paul reminds them: “you’ve got to become each other’s servants through love.”  They’re thinking about going back to torah, to the law, so Paul reminds them in verse 14:

 

Israel longed for the day when the covenant curses of Deuteronomy would be lifted and the promise would be fulfilled—that day when God’s people would finally be able to really and truly “do the law”.  Think of that rabbinic saying that if all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day the Messiah would come and set everything right.  Think of Paul and the Pharisees trying and trying and trying so hard to keep the law and no matter how hard they tried, they failed.  Now, in Jesus and the Spirit it’s finally happened.  In Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has renewed his covenant with his people.  The Spirit has transformed their hearts, causing love for God and for each other to well up like it never had before.  Paradoxically, as they’ve been set free from the law, they’re suddenly finding that they’re keeping it.  Or they were until this controversy over circumcision came up.  In turning back to the law, all the old evils of the flesh were coming back.  So verse 15 comes like a slap in the face:

 

Paul knew that the divisions making their way into the Galatian churches as a result of these false teachers, weren’t just leading to anger and resentment.  It was going to—if it hadn’t already—turn into actual violence.  We don’t know exactly what was going on in these churches, but for Paul to talk about them biting and devouring each other means that this had escalated way beyond these folks just giving each other angry looks when they passed in the street.  It makes sense.  We who have never faced persecution and who live two thousand years distant from the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans and of Caesar’s “Jewish exemption”—we don’t really have any idea how high the stakes were for these people.  The Jews and the circumcision folks could very well have been on the verge of bringing it to blows if they thought the gentile believers were going to bring the Roman officials down on them.  The danger was real.  When you consider the things that cause church fights and even splits today, it’s hard to blame the Galatians.  I’ve seen church fights and people leave over really petty things like the colour of the carpet, chairs versus pews, hymns versus choruses, modern language versus traditional language, masks versus no masks.  They were facing real, actual danger.

 

It happens.  Some pressure is applied to the church and we forget the Spirit and let the flesh take control and pretty soon we’re biting and devouring each other.  Brothers and Sisters, when we do that we destroy our unified, Messiah-shaped gospel witness to the watching world.  Instead of displaying the sacrificing and reconciling love of Jesus, we simply hold up a mirror and show the world it’s fallen, sinful, selfish self—and why would anyone be attracted to that?  Remember what we’re about.  The church is called to live the gospel, to live the life of the Spirit so that the watching world can see God’s glory and his new creation in us.

 

But how do we do it?  We fail often enough that we have to ask.  How do we live this Messiah-shaped love, because it obviously takes more than just a head knowledge of the gospel.  Paul is clear that we can’t go back to the law.  Going back to living by rules might seem like the easy answer, but as he’s been saying, that’s just another form of slavery.  It was good for the old evil age, but Jesus has inaugurated the age to come and everything has changed.  And we know that freedom isn’t just doing whatever we want or whatever feels good, because that just makes us slaves to the very flesh that has corrupted creation.  Here’s what Paul writes in verse 16:

 

You can almost hear Paul taking a deep breath as he gets ready to give us this fresh imperative.  This is what he’s been building towards: Walk by the Spirit.  Don’t just live by the Spirit.  That kind of sounds like something you could do by osmosis.  No, walk by the Spirit.  Make a choice with every step you take, with every distraction, with every possible turn that presents itself to you, make the choice to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh.  At this point we might get into trouble if we misunderstand and think that by “flesh” Paul is talking about the material world or our physical bodies and that by “Spirit” he means our “souls” or some kind of “spiritual” existence apart from the flesh.  The Greeks thought this way.  The material world and the physical body, they thought, were evil—dead weight keeping us down—and so they aspired to a spiritual existence free from the material world and the physical body.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s pagan thinking, not Christian (or, for that matter, Jewish) thinking.  God created the world and our bodies and he called them good.  They don’t need to be done away with.  In our rebellion against God, we have corrupted ourselves and the world.  What the world and our selves need is his redemption, his renewal.  That’s what this biblical language of new creation and resurrection look forward to.  What God has done for Jesus in raising him from the dead, he will one day do for us—and for the whole world.  The gift of his Spirit is the down payment on that hope.  One day God will raise us as he raised Jesus, to the kind of life he intended for us in the beginning, but in the meantime, he’s poured out his Spirit on us and his Spirit “fixes”—at least in part—what our rebellion once broke.  And so, Paul would say, on the one hand is our flesh, which represents our rebellion against God, our sin, our self-centred and dehumanising way of life, and on the other stands the Spirit who, if we will only walk with him, will lead us into God’s new creation.

 

I think Paul had in mind Moses’ exhortation to Israel as they were ready to enter the promised land: I set before you death and life; choose life!  But that’s impossible to do, Paul warns, if you turn back to the law.  To turn back to the law is to turn aside from the gospel, to turn aside from the crucified and risen Messiah, and that means that to turn back to the law is to reject the very Spirit given to lead us into God’s new creation.  You can’t walk backwards into the kingdom of God, Brothers and Sisters.  But, he says, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.  I think Paul’s being deliberately provocative, because he’s using the imagery of the Israelites being led through the wilderness by the pillar of cloud and fire—what many would say was a manifestation of God’s Spirit all the way back in the exodus.  And here he says, if you are led by that same Spirit who led Israel back then—remember how Jesus has changed everything—if you are led by that Spirit today, he will not lead you back to the law.

 

At this point Paul contrasts what these two sorts of lives look like, the flesh on the one hand and the Spirit on the other.  Look at verses 19-21:

 

In other words, everyone knows these things—not just Jews, who have the law as a standard of good behaviour—but even the pagans know these things aren’t good.  Everyone knows the world is not the way it should be and everyone knows that these are the sorts of “works” that have made it the way it is, the sorts of “works” that hurt others, that destroy our relationships—even that destroy ourselves.  And so Paul launches into a litany of human evils:

 

Paul starts with a trio of words for sexual sins, maybe because sexual sins are so often the worst when it comes to the selfish use and harm of others for our own pleasure or maybe because they’re so often bound up with idolatry, which is what he mentions next: idolatry—the root of all of our sin—and sorcery—which is often the way pagans try to set the world to rights by the invocation of false gods and powers instead of turning to the living God.  From there, Paul gives us a list of eight words that pretty well cover the whole gamut of antisocial behaviour and they do it so densely that it’s actually hard to differentiate between some of them: hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, and moods of envy.  Paul could easily have summed it all up in two or three, but he wanted to emphasise just how wrong the situation in Galatia was.  They’d become focused on the flesh and it was playing out in a whole host of fleshly evils that were threatening to tear the churches apart as they demonised each other.

 

And then there are two final fleshy works.  There’s drunkenness, to which today we could easily add all sorts of drug use—both legal and illegal—that deaden our senses, dull our intellect, and that make it impossible to follow the leading of the Spirit.  And, finally, wild partying—orgies—that were common throughout the pagan world and were often the places where the other works of the flesh were celebrated and cultivated.  And Paul says in verse 21:

 

“People who do such things” is in the present tense, which is Paul’s way of stressing that he’s talking about people who make these things a way of life, not necessarily people who occasionally lapse into sin and repent.  His point is that if these are the things that characterise your life, if you make a habit of selfishness, of idolatry, and of using and abusing others for your own pleasure or ambition, you will not inherit the kingdom of God.  Why?  Because these are the sorts of behaviours, the sorts of sins, that have made the world the mess it is.  The gospel is about God, through Jesus, setting this broken world to rights and about his people having a part in that setting to rights.  It’s simply impossible for those who are set on defacing God’s creation to have a place in the age to come.  When the day comes for God to finally bring to completion what Jesus has begun, to finally bring that life of which the Spirit is the down-payment and foretaste, the works of the flesh and all those who practise them will be destroyed, will be purged from creation as part of its finally being set to rights.  That doesn’t mean there’s no chance for repentance in the meantime.  That, of course, is a major part of the good news about Jesus.  Trust in him and your past is forgiven and his Spirit is poured into you so that you can bear his fruit and be part of God’s new creation, which Paul describes in verses 22-23:

 

The two lists speak for themselves.  Imagine two communities, one characterized by the works of the flesh and the other by the fruit of the Spirit and you know right away which one you want to live in.  Where the works of the flesh are all about “me”, the fruit of the Spirit are all about others.  Most of these virtues require another person as an object in order for them to be lived out.  And that’s the way of the kingdom.  To love others is the way of a Messiah-shaped people.  And he writes:

 

Whether it’s the people wanting to go back to torah or the local Roman officials or pagan neighbours angry that these new believers in Jesus have abandoned the pagan temples and rites, Paul’s saying: If you walk by the Spirit and bear this kind of fruit, no one’s going to be able to complain about you.  In fact, you might just make them constructively curious about the gospel!  But now, in verse 24, here’s the really crucial point:

 

Through faith and baptism into the Messiah, the flesh—and all its disordered passions and desires—has been crucified.  As surely as Jesus was dead and buried, so has your old self and my old self.  And as surely as Jesus was raised to new life, God has poured his Spirit into us and set us walking straight into his new creation.  The factionalism and divisions, the biting and devouring had no place in those Galatian churches.  It was nailed to the cross with Jesus.  The same goes for any works of the flesh that threaten the witness and unity of the church today.  If we belong to the Messiah, we have crucified the flesh—past tense, done deal—and we’re now filled with God’s own Spirit.  So…verse 25:

 

Back in Chapter 3 Paul asked, “Are you who began with the Spirit going to end with the flesh?”  No.  If we live by the Spirit, we need to line up with the Spirit.  When he says “live”, Paul doesn’t just mean to go on existing; he means that through the Spirit, we who were dead in sin are now alive to God.  Again, the life of the Spirit is the anticipation of the day when God will raise us to new life as he did Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, God has given us his Spirit to lead us through the wilderness and into the promised land, into God’s new world set to rights.  That’s why Paul says that to live by the Spirit is to line-up with the Spirit—like using your compass to draw a line on a map to your destination.  Follow the line—follow the Spirit, and he will see you through to God’s future.  Don’t stray into conceit or jealousy or factions, just make the conscious decision to follow the Spirit.

 

What does that mean for us?  Well, I think in our highly individualistic culture we tend to read this as little more than pursuing personal holiness.  But when I read this familiar passage in context, what really jumps out at me is that Paul’s main focus here is on the unity of the church and the witness to Jesus and the gospel that grow out of that loving unity.  The fruit of the Spirit, again, are virtues that shape a whole community into the image of Jesus and that show the world what God’s new age is going to look like.  Paul’s overarching theme in Galatians is the unity of the church as a witness to the power of the gospel and the age to come.  Even if the specifics have changed, the problems remain.  I think, actually, that the Jew-gentile problem of the Galatian churches pales in comparison to the failures of the modern church.  There have been times in history when Christians have been forced to separate from one another over serious matters of doctrine and practice—following Paul when he says to cast out the false teachers.  But in the last couple of hundred years we’ve begun to divide over increasingly trivial issues.  And then, for the last fifty or sixty years, as our culture has become obsessed with commercialism, we’ve carried that same consumer mindset into the church.  Pair that with our tendency to separate over trivialities and it’s been a disaster.  Christians flit from place to place, hardly ever thinking of what they bring or what they might contribute, but always looking for what they can take or what new experience they can have and, in return, churches have begun treating not only our fellowship and worship, but even the gospel itself as a commodity to be marketed, not to family members, not to brothers and sisters, but to religious and spiritual consumers—churches competing with each other for members who are themselves self-absorbed—the very opposite of the sort of communities Paul envisioned being shaped by the Spirit.

 

A Spirit-filled church is made up of brothers and sisters who give and who forgive.  It’s a church full of diversity as people who ordinarily would have nothing in common are drawn together by the good news about Jesus, people who have made Jesus—not their interests or ethnicities or social class—their identity.  A Spirit-filled church is a community that models not the old age of every man for himself, not the old age of divisions and factions, but that models God’s new creation in the midst of and for the sake of the old.  A Spirit-filled church, bearing fruit, will offend as in its light the works of the flesh—idolatry, sexual immorality, drunkenness, and strife—are exposed for what they are, but at the same time a Spirit-fill church, bearing fruit, is the community of light and love everyone in this dark world is looking for.  They ought to see it in us.  Our life together ought to make the world constructively curious.  People ought to be asking what makes us different.  And then, Brothers and Sisters, we have our chance to tell them about Jesus and about the love of God for sinners.  But we don’t have this community—not the way we should.  So what do we do instead?  We market our programs or the production values of our worship experience or our preaching or our politics.  One church advertises, “We ain’t your grandma’s church!” and on the other side we traditionalists advertise, “We are literally your grandma’s church”.  And, Brothers and Sisters, all the world sees are factions and divisions.  Thanks be to God that in his grace, that’s not entirely true.  Even with our failures and disunity, the world still sees the gospel in us—but not the way it should.

 

Think again of those Christians in Galatia.  Their trust in Jesus and the gospel brought them into this new community of the Spirit and they turned away from, they withdrew from the pagan rituals and the false gods that permeated their society.  Their neighbours, their families, the officials—Caesar—didn’t like it.  Suspicion turned to opposition turned to persecution and eventually martyrdom.  And yet little communities like this conquered that pagan empire with the gospel even as that empire did its best to stomp them out.  Why?  Because they lined up with the Spirit and bore his fruit, because that loving, self-giving fruit—particularly as it came under fire—bore witness to the glory of the cross and the love of a God unlike any god the pagans had ever known.  Because those little Spirit-filled communities were full of a gospel hope in the world set to rights by a God who loves so much that he will give his own life.  That hope drew them close together, it concentrated the light they bore, and that lit up the darkness.  I pray, Brothers and Sisters, that that same light would shine from us to lighten the darkness as we, by God’s grace, walk by his Spirit.

 

Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

 

Back in 1998, just after we were married, Veronica and I travelled to Montreal for her interview with the US immigration folks.  While we were there, we took a day to drive to Ottawa to do some sight-seeing.  It was March and still very much winter in Montreal and as we left the island, driving over the bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway where the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers converge, we were surprised to see a Jeep speeding across the frozen river, going in the opposite direction back towards Montreal, driving on the ice.  Having lived my whole life on the West Coast I’d never seen anything like that myself.  I have no idea about the history of bridges to and from Montreal Island, but I would guess that at one point riding a horse or driving a wagon across the frozen river was the usual way to get across during Winter.  But then Spring would come, the ice would melt, and all that would change.  I expect there were ferries that carried people across the rest of the year, until the river froze again.

 

Now, for Paul writing to the Galatians, Jesus is like that spring thaw.  Ever since they’d left Egypt, the identity of the people of God had been tied up in their observance of the law.  Circumcision was the beginning of it—eight days after a boy was born.  That marked him out as one of God’s people, as a member of God’s covenant and an heir of his promises.  But through life, that identity was lived out by keeping the law: by celebrating the Passover every year, by keeping the Sabbath, by offering sacrifices at the temple, by eating only clean foods and by avoiding unclean things and people.  The law was the way to righteousness, the way to fellowship with God.  But that was like driving across the river on the ice.  It was all right and good—and in the case of torah it was God-given—but it was for a time.  Things changed.  Jesus changed them.  Jesus changed everything.  In Jesus Spring has sprung.  God’s new creation has begun.  The old world is starting to thaw.  Think of the wonderful image that Lewis used in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Narnia frozen by the witch—always winter, but never Christmas.  But when Aslan arrived, the whole country began to thaw and the new life of Spring began break through the snow and the ice.  Jesus has changed everything and in Jesus’ new world, the law no longer counts—it’ll no longer get you across the river, because the river’s thawed.  Try to get across with the law now and you’ll just be caught up in the current and lost downstream.  In Galatians 5:2 Paul puts it this way:

 

So over the last four chapters Paul has made his argument to the Galatians and, we saw last week, he’s finished it with the command to cast out the false teachers—to cast them out the way Sarah cast out Hagar and Ishmael—because there’s only one family that has inherited God’s promises.  Cast them out.  They’re undermining the gospel.  Don’t let their heresy fester; cast them out.  But I expect Paul knew they would need more to persuade them to do that, so now he turns back to the circumcision issue.  Actually, this is the first time that he mentions circumcision outright in the letter.  So he sort of pulls himself up to his full height and says, “Look here!  I, Paul—you know, the apostle who met Jesus personally and who told you the good news about Jesus in the first place—I want to be very clear that if you follow the advice of these circumcision folks, if you get circumcised, Jesus the Messiah will be of no use to you.”

 

Those are some powerful words.  These pagan gentiles had been completely captivated by the good news about Jesus: this man in whom God became incarnate, who died for the sake of his people, who rose from death and then ascended to his throne.  They were captivated by the good news about this Lord who was unlike any lord or god they’d ever known.  And they believed, they’d been baptised, and God had plunged them into his Spirit and they’d been transformed.  They knew the power of the gospel.  They knew the power of Jesus and the Spirit.  And Paul’s saying, “If you get circumcised, all of that is gone.

The good news here is that if Paul’s putting this way, it means the Galatian believers haven’t yet caved into the pressure from the circumcision agitators.  Reading between the lines, it sounds like the agitators have split up the church with the ethnic Jews—the circumcised—on the inside, while the gentile believers are being forced to sort of participate or to watch from the sidelines—just as things were in the temple in Jerusalem with Jews in the inner court making their offerings and sacrifices at the altar while the gentiles were stuck in the outer court imagining what was going on inside.  Maybe the agitators had got them eating kosher and observing the Jewish calendar, but none of the gentiles had actually gone all the way to circumcision yet.  And Paul’s trying to get to them, to persuade them before they do.  Because if they do, it’s like driving your car onto that thin, melting ice.  Jesus has made a better way.  So he goes on in verse 3:

 

Paul reminds them what it really means to be under the law.  Even the agitators seem to have forgotten that.  They wanted these gentile believers to do just enough so that they could pass for Jews with the authorities: get circumcised, stop buying pork in the market, observe the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days.  They were motivated by fear.  These new gentile believers were abandoning the gods and the religious customs of the Greeks and Romans and to avoid getting into trouble they were claiming the Jewish exemption—except they weren’t Jews—and if the authorities caught on, it might bring persecution on the whole Jewish community.  So the agitators wanted these gentile believers to take on some of the obvious Jewish externals.  And Paul reminds them of what they should have known already: that’s not how the law works.  The law is all or nothing.  They’ve accused Paul of only teaching part of the gospel and now Paul turns around and accuses them of teaching only part of the law.  If the gentile believers go the way of circumcision, they’ll end up neither genuine Messiah people nor genuine torah-observing Jews.

 

Back in 2:15-21 Paul said that “through the law [I] died to the law” and that “if righteousness is through the law, the Messiah died to no purpose.”  Now in verse 4 he says the same thing another way:

 

To look for justification—which means to show you’re a member of God’s covenant people—to look for that through torah, is to reject the grace of the gospel.  He’s been stressing that God’s covenant people are now those marked out by baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.  That faith in Jesus—and nothing else—is what marks us out as God’s people.  The moment you add to that—whether torah or anything else—you lose the gospel and when you lose the gospel you lose God’s grace.  In this case, if circumcision is what marks out God’s people, then there was no reason for the Messiah to die and to take that old mark in your flesh as a means of justifying your place in the covenant is to reject Jesus and the gospel.

 

But why?  Well, Paul explains in verses 5 and 6:

 

Do you remember last week when I was closing and talked about how seriously Paul took false gospels?  We tend to dither around and make excuses when it comes to false teaching.  We often struggle to know where to draw the line.  It’s not always easy to tell where the line is—where something that’s just poor teaching crosses into bona fide heresy.  In contrast, Paul was really clear: Cast them out.  Get rid of them.  Don’t let the false teachers influence the church.  And the way to tell when something crossed the line was to ask if this teaching was still pointing forward into the age to come or if it was something that would drag us back into the old evil age.  Paul gets at that again here when he says that we’re waiting eagerly, by the Spirit and by faith, for the hope of righteousness.  In other words, true Christians will always be looking forward in hope to the day when God will vindicate our faith in Jesus, that day when he will finally judge sin and evil and wipe it all from his creation, when death will be no more, when everything will finally be set to rights, and we—his people through faith in Jesus—will live in his presence forever.  Does our theology, does our practise honour the saving work of Jesus and the Spirit and does it look forward to the day when the work of Jesus and the Spirit will finally be fulfilled—or—is our theology or our practise dragging us back into the old age, into the things that once held us captive—whether the law for Jews or the powers of this evil age for the gentiles.  In this case, in terms of practical outworking, does our theology and practise bring us together as one people in Jesus, or does it separate us.  Again, think of the temple with Jews on the inside and gentiles on the out—and how these circumcision folks were trying to impose that kind of template on the Galatian churches all over again.

 

In contrast, in Jesus it no longer matters whether you’re circumcised or not.  That was part of the old covenant, the old way, but the ice has melted and that old way won’t get you anywhere anymore.  No, someday, before the watching eyes of the whole world, God will call us his own and it won’t because of any marks we bear in our flesh or because of anything we’ve done, it will because we have been baptised into, because by faith we have put on the Messiah as our identity and because God has poured his Spirit into us.  Jesus and the Spirit are the ticket that will give us passage on the ferry across the river.  What matters, he says, is faith working through love.  Faith is the only way to get the ticket—and here Paul hints at what he’ll have to say later in the chapter—faith is more than just a thinking thing; it’s more than just giving our intellectual assent to the propositions of the creed.  Faith means trust.  Faith means loyalty.  Faith means allegiance.  Faith means committing ourselves to God’s new creation made manifest in the risen Jesus and the gift of the Spirit—a new creation made possible by love—and so faith, true, real faith in God’s love and that returns God’s love and that manifests God’s love to the world, that kind of faith is what matters.  That kind of faith is what marks out the people of God and that kind of faith is what will see us through—through hardships and opposition and persecution and maybe even martyrdom—that is the faith that will bring us through to the day when all God’s promises will finally be fulfilled.

 

And Paul thought they knew all this, which is why he’s so shocked and frustrated with them.  It’s why he wants to know how they could have gone so wrong so quickly.  See how he continues in verse 7:

 

When Paul left them they were well on their way, running for the prize—running into God’s new creation—but now they’ve gone off course.  “Who’s cut in on you?” Paul asks.  It’s not the normal word we might expect him to use for someone interrupting the runners, slowing them down or setting them on the wrong course, but Paul is making a harsh accusation here and so he tempers it with some wordplay.  They want to be circumcised, they want to be cut in their flesh.  That was never part of the plan for this race, so he asks, “You who want to be cut, who’s cut in on you?”  They were set on the truth of the gospel, but these other folks showed up and have cut in on all that with a false gospel.  He reminds them that it was God who called them to this in the beginning—through the good news about Jesus—but this new persuasion, this new “truth” they’re going after, that came from somewhere else—not from God.  They’re playing a dangerous game and Paul reminds them of an old Jewish proverb in verse 9:

 

I think what he’s trying to say is that once you start going astray from the gospel, it’s not long before you’ve lost the gospel entirely.  We see this a lot down through church history.  Add something to Jesus as a marker of covenant membership and pretty soon you’ve lost the whole gospel.  Paul might also be warning them that once you start listening to one false teacher, pretty soon you start listening to anyone.  That happens a lot too.  And so Paul exhorts them:

 

They were originally persuaded by God to pursue the truth of the gospel, but these other folks have persuaded them to pursue something else, so Paul stresses that the Lord has persuaded him.  Persuaded him of what?  That, in the end, they’ll come back to the gospel truth.  He says literally “you will think nothing else”.  When Paul says that he is “persuaded in the Lord”—something he doesn’t say often—it means that he’s been praying about something and that the Lord has given him a clear conviction.  It would be dangerous for us talk this way, but Paul was in that unique position of having the authority of an apostle.  The point seems to be that the Lord has revealed to Paul that the Galatians will come back to the truth, but that it will be Paul’s Spirit-inspired words that will be the means of bringing them back.

 

By the same token, this false teacher who has been trying to lead them astray will “bear the blame”.  Paul might be referring to the way that the Galatians will cast him out—as he told them to do at the end of Chapter 4 or it might even be more serious than that.  He might be talking about God’s judgement and condemnation of this false teacher.  Paul just calls him “whoever he may be” and I don’t think that’s because Paul didn’t know who this man was.  The church in those first decades was small and everyone knew everyone.  Whoever it was, Paul’s point is that they can’t dither on this false teaching.  They can’t treat it as something of secondary importance.  There are lots of things on which Christians can differ.  Someone’s wrong and someone’s right, but there are some issues on which we can disagree while still holding tightly to the truth of the gospel.  This was not one of those things.  This was one of those things on which the gospel stands or falls and Paul wants them to know—it’s a bit of a threat—that this false teacher will without a doubt be held accountable—and the quiet part he doesn’t say out loud is that anyone who goes along with him will also go down with him.  He’s headed out onto thin ice with his car and anyone who goes along for the ride will end up at the bottom of the river with him.  Brothers and Sisters, false teaching is no joke.

 

Then verse 11.  Paul seems to be addressing an accusation against him.

 

It sounds like these agitators, knowing Paul’s history as a Pharisee, back in the days before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, it sounds like they’ve been telling the Galatians that Paul was still preaching circumcision—just not to them.  Saying that Paul’s a hypocrite.  And so Paul appeals to his own suffering and persecution.  They knew what had happened to him.  It sounds like when he first showed up in Galatia, he was beaten and bloody and weak because of persecution in some nearby town or city.  Paul appeals to that.  This is a strand that runs all through Galatians that I’d never noticed until I started this series of sermons, but it’s there.  For Paul, suffering for the sake of the gospel was often proof of its truth.  It goes back to the cross.  Jesus’ crucifixion set the pattern so that to follow him wasn’t just a new way to be religious—as so many people treat it today: it’s good for me, but if you don’t like it that’s okay too.  The gospel isn’t just another option on the religious smorgasbord.  For Paul, the good news about Jesus is the truth that had already begun to change the world.  It is the truth that Jesus has already overthrown the powers and kings of the present age and inaugurated the age to come.  And, in light of that, Paul didn’t see the churches as little religious clubs, but as a network of communities where people, filled with God’s own Spirit, were living out God’s new creation in the midst of the old, declaring that Jesus is Lord right under the nose of Caesar, who made that claim for himself—for example.  Living as one people in the midst of ferocious ethnic and religious divides.  Living as a people of grace and mercy in the midst of a dog-eat-dog world.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, this made the gospel a scandal and a stumbling block.  Even this early in his career as an apostle and mission Paul can say it.  His calling is to proclaim the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen and the world’s true Lord.  The Spirit works in the hearts of those who hear that good news.  In some the Spirit uses that message to bring about faith, hope, and love, but for others the scandal of the crucified God causes them to cast stones at the messenger who dares announce this anti-religious, anti-social, and unpatriotic message.  If all Paul had been announcing was that pagans could get circumcised and join the Jews in their synagogues in order to become exempt from pagan worship, why no one would have been persecuting him.

 

No, if Paul had been doing that, the scandal of the cross would have been neutralised—something I think every generation finds its own way of doing as we trim the culturally offensive bits of the gospel.  And so Paul says, closing off the paragraph in verse 12:

 

Paul comes back to his wordplay with circumcision and cutting off.  Don’t stop at circumcision, just cut the whole thing off.  Of course, under torah, that sort of mutilation would have cut them off from covenant.  But, too, the goddess Cybele was popular in Galatia and it wasn’t uncommon for her devotees to work themselves up in a manic ritual that ended with them castrating themselves.  I suspect Paul has that in mind, because as he’s said, whether it was the Jews under the law or the gentiles under their pagan powers, humanity before Jesus was enslaved and to undermine the cross through circumcision, going back to the law, well, these gentiles might as well just go back to their old pagan gods and their old pagan worship.  Either way, they’ll end up “cut off” from God and from his people.

 

That’s as far as we’ll go this week.  As much as the Galatian problem may seem distant and irrelevant to us, since circumcision and keeping the Jewish law aren’t likely to be our problem, what I hope you can see is the underlying issue.  There are things in every age that we do, by which we undercut the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  The Galatians were motivated by fear of persecution—and that’s often the driver.  We’re afraid, whether it’s that we might lose our lives or just offend friends or family, for the sake of the gospel and so we compromise, we water things down, we shave the sharp corners off the message where it confronts our culture and the powers of our day.  We end up with a false gospel powerless to save and we run the risk ourselves of losing our way—of running off the race course, of trying to cross the river on the melting spring ice…and putting ourselves in a position where we have forsaken God’s grace and made the Messiah of no use to us.  Paul reminds us here that suffering, that persecution for the sake of gospel truth is part of the formula, because we trust in and follow and proclaim the crucified and risen Messiah—a stumbling block to Jews and a scandal to gentiles.  Brothers and Sisters, take hold of that gospel truth and run—run the course that leads straight to God’s new age, straight to his new creation and let no one cut in on you, take no short cut.  There is only one way.  It begins with trusting Jesus and the Spirit, but it also means continuing to trust Jesus and the Spirit along the way, trusting that God will bring us through suffering—just as he did Jesus—to that day when we ourselves will be raised from death and everything is made new.

 

Let’s pray: O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

I have a non-Christian—or it would be better to say, anti-Christian—relative who, I’ve observed, is very uncomfortable with me being a preacher.  At one point she just came out and said it: As far as she’s concerned, preachers are just moralising, kill-joy demagogues who glory in lording their authority over people and pontificating to them what they can and cannot do.  People like this think of God as a kill-joy in the sky and the preacher as his sour and spiteful earthly representative.  She has no clue that the preacher is the intermediary between the loving God who has given his word to make himself known and his people, filled with his Spirit, who desire to hear his word that they might know him and love him in return.  They have no idea that both the Bible and preaching sit at the intersection of God’s love for his people and his people’s love for him.  But it’s not just non-Christians.  Even people in the church forget that God speaks—and he tells us what he expects of us—out of love and they forget that the preacher preaches that word out of love, too.  And so they get angry when they hear things they don’t like.  Sometimes they get angry with God and leave the church entirely.  Sometimes they just shoot the messenger—the preacher.  And that’s where Paul is at as we come to the middle of Galatians 4.  Paul knew the people in the Galatian churches well.  He loved them as brothers and sisters in the Lord.  And he’s deeply troubled by what he’s heard has been going on there ever since these agitators had arrived.  This is why he’s writing to them.  And so far he’s mostly been talking theology—explaining why these people urging them back into torah are undermining the gospel, the good news about Jesus.  And he's been building this argument as he’s walked them through the biblical story, walked them through God’s covenants with his people, walked them through the significance of what Jesus did when he died and rose again.  And he’s about to finally make the point he’s been working toward.  He’s about to tell them what they need to do in light of all this.  But in verses 11-20 he pauses and he takes a breath and he reminds them who he is.  He reminds that he’s not only their friend, but that he’s their brother in the Lord who loves them—and that that’s why he’s taking the trouble to say all of this.  Look at Chapter 4, beginning at verse 12.

 

Become like me, because I became like you.  These Christians were mostly gentiles.  Paul was a Jew.  But as he would later write to the Corinthians, he has become like all things to everyone.  Knowing that the gospel unified them as one in Jesus and the Spirit, Paul came and fellowshipped with them—he prayed and sang and worshipped and ate with them, despite their ethnic differences—which is something that can’t be said of these false teachers.  And Paul reminds them of when he first arrived.  We don’t know exactly what the problem was, but it sounds very much like he arrived in Galatia bloody and beaten after preaching the good news in some neighbouring city.  This might be what he was referring to when he said the brutality of the cross had been shown to them.  He’d stumbled into their fellowship having very nearly shared Jesus’ crucifixion—and they welcomed him.  That would have been a dangerous thing to do.  Harbouring a man who had been in trouble another town over could have brought the local authorities down on them.  It sure wouldn’t have looked good to the community around them.  But they welcomed Paul and took care of him as he regained his strength.  In the meantime, he proclaimed Jesus and the good news in his weakness.  And they received Paul and his message as if he were an angel, a messenger from God—practically as if he’d been Jesus himself.

 

“So now,” Paul asks, “what’s happened to that welcome?  Back then you knew my love for you and you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me if you’d thought it would help.  But now I’ve told you the truth—because I love you—and you’re treating me like an enemy.”  Now he goes on in verse 17:

 

 

False teachers are often full of zeal.  Enough so that they con good Christians into thinking that they’ve got the truth.  And then those conned Christians lash out when the pastor who loves them comes along to show them how the false teachers are wrong.  It happens over and over and over.  Paul says:

 

 

Paul has the temple in mind, with its segregated courts.  Jews could go into the temple court, but gentiles were stuck outside.  They couldn’t go in.  And these agitators, these false teachers are trying to make the Galatian churches like that.  The Jewish believers can come into church, they can eat at the Lord’s Table, but the gentiles are stuck outside until they get circumcised and start living according to torah.  So Paul says,

 

Paul knew all about being zealous.  He’d been zealous for torah and he’d been zealous for persecuting Christians.  And then he’d met the risen Jesus and now he’s zealous for the gospel.  Zeal isn’t the point.  You can be zealous for anything.  So don’t be taken in by the zealousness of false teachers and a false gospel.  And we get a sense of how Paul loves these people and, because of that, how he’s so exasperated.  He thought they knew all of this.  He’d laboured over the gospel with them before, but now it feels like he’s got to labour with them over the gospel all over again, because it’s obvious they weren’t as mature in the gospel—in the Messiah—as he had thought.

 

It happens.  Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the door and they’ve got carefully worked out arguments that fool far too many Christians.  Prosperity hucksters will tell you they’ve got the “full gospel” and they’ll back it up with great zeal.  In our own day we’ve got various Messianic groups or the Adventists with a false gospel rooted in the same errors Paul confronted in Galatia.  They dupe Christians into their false teaching and, apart from praying for such people, all we can really do is confront false teaching with gospel truth.  That’s what Paul does here.  Look at verse 21:

 

Do you recognise the story Paul’s talking about?  He’s going back to Genesis 16.  This is after God’s promise to Abraham, but before the birth of Isaac.  Abraham and Sarah trusted the Lord.  They believed he would provide a son to inherit the promise, but from their perspective a natural heir was impossible.  Sarah was an elderly woman and elderly women past their child-bearing years don’t bear children.  So they followed the custom of the day.  Abraham took Sarah’s slave-girl, Hagar, as his concubine and had a child by her.  Because she was Sarah’s slave, the child was legally hers.

 

But, if you know the story, you know the plan backfired.  When Hagar became pregnant, she lorded it over Sarah.  In their culture, for a woman to be barren was a great shame and Hagar made sure that Sarah felt that shame.  Sarah, of course, wasn’t going to stand for that, so she mistreated Hagar.  Hagar ran away, but in the wilderness the Lord met her and sent her back and she gave birth to Ishmael.  Years later—as if the Lord was really, really wanting to make a point to Abraham and Sarah that with him anything was possible—years later, when Sarah was even more elderly, she became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac.  Sarah became jealous of Ishmael and we have a cryptic text about Ishmael abusing Isaac, so Sarah banished Hagar and her son from the camp.  Ishmael would become the father of the Arabian tribes and Isaac would became the father of Jacob, who became the father of the Hebrew tribes—of Israel.

 

It’s possible Paul brings this up because the false teachers might have been telling this story in their own way, as if to say, “See…Abraham has two families.  You gentiles might have believed the gospel, but since the Jews are the free children of Abraham, you’re like Ishmael and his sons.  If you want to really be part of Abraham’s family, you’re going to have to get circumcised and become a Jew.  Paul has heard this before and says, “No.  You’ve got it backwards and here’s why.  Let’s suppose that Abraham does have two families.  How can you tell which one is the slave family and which one is the free family?  Well, look at the story.  Ishmael was born according to the flesh.  He was the result of Abraham taking matters into his own hands.  Isacc, on the other hand, was born miraculously and in fulfilment of the Lord’s promise.

 

And now we see why Paul has been talking so much about covenants and inheritances and heirs all this time.  This is where he’s been going with it.  In verse 24 he goes on:

 

All you have to do is follow the theme of promise through the story.  Well, that and you have to recognise that the story is ongoing.  The false teachers were telling the story as if it stopped with Abraham—or maybe with Moses—but Paul has been showing how the Abraham story, the story of a promise and a family and an inheritance that encompasses the whole world—Paul has been showing how that story is still going on.  So they were right to see the promise back in the story of the birth of Isaac, but now Paul’s sort of urging them on: Yes, yes.  You’ve got that part right, but keep following the promise through the rest of the story.  Because Jesus changes everything.  And so, sure, Isaac was the child of God’s promise and so were his children and their children and eventually the whole people of Israel.  But before his little break to remind them that he’s not their enemy, Paul was also pointing out how the law, how torah was only meant to serve the promise family for a time—between Moses and the Messiah.  Remember, the human race is sick.  Israel had the same sickness, but the law held the sickness at bay until the promise could be fulfilled.  Or, Paul used the illustration of a babysitter, keeping the promise family out of trouble until the promise to them could be fulfilled.  And, that means, Paul has said, that as much as the law was a good thing given by God for a time, it kept the Israelites as slaves until the Messiah came.  So the law, he’s saying here, the law if left to itself can never set people free.  The law, ironically, makes Ishmael children, not Isaac children.

 

And then Paul adds this sort of parenthetical statement: For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia.  And his point is that—using this allegorical or picture language—the law of Moses, which was given on Mount Sinai, now represents the people, the family on the outside in the original picture.  As much as the Lord’s promise once led his people to Mount Sinai where he gave them his law, the story has moved on in Jesus the Messiah and so Hagar—the mother of Abraham’s son according to the flesh—Hagar now corresponds to Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai represents the law, torah, that the false teachers are saying the gentile believers have to keep.

 

So Isaac represents the promise and freedom.  Ishmael represents the flesh, slavery…none of which would have been controversial, but now Paul has also shown that Ishmael also represents Mount Sinai and the law.  Again, we’ve got to follow the promise all the way through the story to Jesus and then to the present.  The law was part of God’s provision for his people during the present evil age, but the Messiah has inaugurated the age to come.  So Paul’s now ready to bring the false teachers into this.  They’ve been appealing to some authority figures in Jerusalem—maybe James, but we really don’t know—just that they’re in Jerusalem.  And Paul, in verses 25 and 26 is saying, “Okay, but they’re talking about the present Jerusalem, not the heavenly Jerusalem, not the “Jerusalem above”, which is the home of all real believers and the true people of the promise.  To make his point he quotes Isaiah 54:1 which is addressed to Jerusalem herself:

 

In Isaiah’s day, Jerusalem was laid waste, but through the prophet the Lord gave hope to his people.  One day Jerusalem would be restored.  He put it in terms of a barren woman—like Sarah—finally knowing the joy of bearing children and having a family.  By Paul’s day this had become an image of the age to come, when the Lord would return to his people and the heavenly city would come with him, heaven and earth would be rejoined, and his new age would dawn.  So the Jerusalem above—the promise of God’s new age—it was barren, but now through the Messiah it’s bearing children.  The promises are being fulfilled.  In contrast, the present Jerusalem—the city the false teachers are appealing to as their authority—it’s got children, yes, but they’re in slavery.  In fact, the earthly Jerusalem is slated for judgement and destruction.  So now Paul goes on in verse 28:

 

 

Follow the promise.  It has passed from Isaac to Jesus and now to these people—even though they’re gentiles—because they have trusted in the Messiah.  Jesus-believers, uncircumcised as they may be, are Sarah-children, new-Jerusalem people, Isaac-people, promise-people.  But, Paul goes on:

 

Genesis doesn’t elaborate on what Ishmael did to Isaac, only that he abused him in some way, and Paul’s point here is that this is how the children of the flesh are always liable to treat the children of the promise.  It sounds as though the unbelieving Jews were actively persecuting the Christians in Galatia—angry at them because they claimed the “Jewish exemption” from pagan worship, but didn’t live as Jews.  But Paul lumps the false teachers, these people who say they believe in Jesus the Messiah, but also insist on the gentiles being circumcised—Paul lumps that in with the abuse of the unbelieving Jewish community.  The false teachers stand in sharp contrast to Paul.  Even though Paul has had some sometimes harsh words for the Galatians, he loves them like a father.  He’s speaking gospel truth.  The false teachers, for all their zeal, don’t really love the Galatians—not if they’re trying to drag them back into slavery under the law.  And with that, Paul’s ready to drive his point home, he’s ready to tell them what they have to do.  Look at verse 30:

 

Do what Sarah did: cast out the slave girl and her son.  In other words, cast out the false teachers before they drag you away from Jesus and the promise and back into slavery.  At this point there’s a chapter break, but I really think Paul meant for verse 1 of Chapter 5 to be the close of this paragraph, because it’s not easy to cast out false teachers.  And so Paul continues there:

 

Stand firm and don’t let anyone take you back into slavery with a false gospel, because Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has set us free.  Paul doesn’t mess around with false teachers.  Jesus died and he rose again, he is Lord, and he has fulfilled all of God’s promises.  Paul saw the promise fulfilled as the gentiles were forgiven, filled with the Spirit, and swept up into this great story of God and his people and he was outraged at the idea that anyone might come along and drag these people back into slavery.

 

In contrast, how often is our tendency to be wishy-washing about false teaching.  People come in the name of Jesus, but end up proclaiming false gospels—or things that undermine the gospel.  They’ll say, for example, that there are other ways to God and other ways to be good and other ways to enter the age to come and in doing that they undermine the work of Jesus and the Spirit no less than the false teaching in Galatia did by trying to add torah to the gospel.  Others come into the church and tell us that Jesus isn’t enough and that we’ve got to do something extra to receive the Spirit.  Others these days come preaching post-modern ideas of identity that undermine our identity in the Messiah and our unity in him.  And we equivocate on what to do about them.  Instead of dealing with the false teachers we quibble with each other over whether or not the false teachers are truly believers or not—as if we need to treat them differently if the false teaching isn’t so bad as to rule them out as real Christians.  Paul does the opposite here.  The false teachers in Galatia believed in Jesus.  They believed in his death and resurrection.  But they added something that ultimately undermined that good news.  And so Paul says to cast them out.  Get them out of the church.  Just as he did with the man sleeping with his step-mother in Corinth.  Get them out.  Maybe that will get them thinking hard about what they’ve done or what they’re teaching and they’ll repent and come back, but that’s not the first priority.  Get them out, because their teaching undermines the gospel itself and if it’s allowed to fester, the church will cease to be the church.  The promise will be lost.  The false teaching will make us slaves again.  If the Anglican Communion had cast out the false teachers a hundred years ago, our generation wouldn’t have had to face the difficulties we have.  The church can’t fool around with false teachers and false gospel.  But the flip side of this imperative is that we as Jesus’ people need to work hard for unity with our brothers and sisters who do believe the good news about Jesus.  This was the vision of Bp. Cummins when he called together the men and women who would found the Reformed Episcopal Church.  All baptised and believing Jesus-followers are, in fact, one family and we need to do our best, despite our various differences on other things, to live as the one family that Jesus has made us.  I think Galatians has something to say about how we distinguish which of our differences are demand separation and which don’t.  Does the message being preaching point forward to the age to come, or like the Galatian heresy, does it drag us back to the darkness of the old evil age?  If it undermines or undoes what has been accomplished by God in Jesus and the Spirit, we must cast it out.  Standing firm against false gospels while standing just as firm for the unity of God’s gospel people is no easy task—especially as things are today—but Brothers and Sisters it is our calling.  It is what honours God, it is what honours Jesus and the Spirit, and it is what witnesses to the world the new creation that has been born in us.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, make us mature in the Messiah so that we will be able to discern truth from error, and fill us with zeal for your gospel truth, so that we will stand firm—not afraid to cast out false teachers and false teaching, but also zealous for the unity that Jesus and the Spirit bring to your church, that we might be effective witnesses of the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, and of his kingdom, the new Jerusalem.  Through him we pray.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

We didn’t go to the theatre to see very many movies when I was a kid, so when Star Wars came out, it seemed like all my friends saw it before I did.  I had Luke Skywalker and C3PO action figures before I’d even seen the movie.  My best friend, Derigan, tried to fill me in and gave me a sort of point by point run-down of the plot leading up to Luke shooting his torpedo into the thermal exhaust port and blowing up the Death Star.  He got all excited at that point, jumping up, throwing up his hands, and making a big explosion sound.  His plot summary didn’t really do anything to get me excited—probably because he was five and it wasn’t a very good plot summary.  I was just excited to see Star Wars because everyone who saw it was so excited about it.  But when I finally did get to see it, oh wow!  People in the theatre cheered when the Death Star blew up.  Actually watching the story unfold was thrilling in a way a point-by-point plot summary never could be.

 

The creed we just recited is—a bit—like my friend Derigan’s point by point plot summary of Star Wars.  The bishops and other important people of the church got together in AD 325 and hammered out these key points.  They obviously did a better job than a council of five-year-olds could ever have done and it has served the church well for seventeen hundred years as a statement of biblical faith and a bulwark against heresy.  But it’s not very exciting.  I’ve never heard of anyone hearing the Creed and getting so excited about it that they decided then and there to become a Christian.  And that’s because the story has been filtered out of it.  The really exciting part is there: The son of God became man, was crucified for our sake, rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven.  Those words “in accordance with the scriptures” hint that there’s more to the story.  But boy, “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and Son…who spoke through the prophets”.  As much as all the points are true, it’s not even a plot summary—they stripped the story right out.  It’s all true, but it’s not like seeing the actual movie—or in this case hearing that great, ages-spanning story hinted at by those five little words “in accordance with the scriptures”.  Because we’ve often left the creed to stand by itself, some people have even got the idea that these key plot points, like the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, were all later doctrines made up by the church fathers.

 

We’ll be looking at the first half of Galatians 4 this morning, and Brothers and Sisters, it’s all here—in the first of Paul’s letters, which makes it very likely the very earliest part of the New Testament to be written.  And it’s all here: God’s son, born of Mary who died and rose again and the Holy Spirit, too.  It’s stated just as clearly as it was by later men like Athanasius or Basil the Great.  But here it’s part of the great story Paul is always telling, always drawing on, that’s always there underlying, supporting, and giving shape to his arguments.  The story that makes sense of it all.  Without it Jesus’ death and resurrection are an awesome special effect like the Death Star exploding, but we won’t know why it’s important.  Without the story there’s no reason to stand up and cheer.

 

So Paul closed Galatians 3, telling us that if we’ve been baptised into the Messiah, we’ve put him on.  He’s now our identity.  There’s no longer Jew or Greek or slave or free or man or woman—God, through Jesus the Messiah, has just one and only one people.  And he said, “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family.  You stand to inherit the promise.”  These agitators who had infiltrated the Galatian churches were saying that you basically had to first become a Jew to become a Christian and Paul’s saying, “No.  Jesus has fulfilled the promises made to Abraham and to his family.  If, by faith, you belong to him you are part of that family and an heir of God’s promise.  There’s nothing you can add to it.”  So now Paul continues in Chapter 4 running along with this metaphor of the heir and the inheritance:

 

Let me put it like this.  As long as the heir—remember how Paul’s been talking about promises and wills and inheritances—As long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave—even if, in fact, he is master of everything.  He is kept under guardians and stewards until the time set by his father.

“As long as the heir is a slave…”  That’s the cue—especially that word “slave”—that’s the cue that Paul is telling an exodus story.  We might miss it, but people in Paul’s world were shaped by Passover and the other Jewish festivals that came out of their exodus from Egypt.  And hearing Paul talk of slaves, they knew he was now moving from the story of Abraham to the story of Israel’s exodus and exile and their hope of rescue.

 

It's really important that we understand the story the Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves in.  In Deuteronomy—the last book of the torah—the Lord had promise that if his people were unfaithful, that if they worshipped other gods, he would exile them—that they would find themselves slaves—as they had been in Egypt—slaves to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone.  And that’s just what happened.  The people were unfaithful, they were idolatrous, their kings were evil and the Lord raised up Babylon to conquer them and to carry them off into exile.  Eventually the Babylonians were, in turn, conquered by the Persians and the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judea, but nothing was ever the same as it had been.  They rebuilt the temple, but the Lord’s presence never returned to it.  They continued to live under the rule of foreign pagans and their gods.  In Paul’s day Rome just the latest in that long line.  And so, they concluded, the exile had never really ended.  Israel was still living under the curses of Deuteronomy 27.  But that also meant they had hope, because Deuteronomy 30—and the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel—promised a new exodus, a return from exile—when God would set everything to rights.  This is what inspired the zeal of the Pharisees.  They tried to bring the holiness of the temple and priesthood into the home and into everyday life.  If all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day, one later rabbi wrote, the Lord would finally come to deliver his people.

 

Paul puts this story of exile and exodus in terms of a child with a great promised inheritance.  His father has appointed a time when his son will receive his inheritance, but until then he lives under guardians and stewards—remember the “babysitter” in Chapter 3?—which leaves him no better off than a slave—even though he is, as Paul puts it, “master of everything”.  This is exactly how many of Paul’s fellow Jews saw things.  It’s how the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, it’s how the Jewish philosopher Philo saw Israel’s situation in their own day.  Abraham’s children had been promised the world, but they were slaves of Caesar and it was Caesar who was instead and to their great consternations “master of everything”.  They awaited their inheritance.

 

So Paul goes on in verse 3:

 

Paul says “we”—that means he and his fellow Jews—were promised the world, but they were still children.  Paul set this up in Chapter 3 when he wrote about torah being like a babysitter given to keep Israel out of trouble until God was ready to reveal his faithfulness in the Messiah.  Paul now takes that metaphor and turns it into another.  Being a child under torah is like being a slave.  The Jews knew what that meant all too well.  Paul says, slaves “under the elements of the world”.

 

Now this phrase “under the elements of the world” is really difficult to parse out if we aren’t familiar with how people thought in Paul’s day.  I think Paul is deliberately using language that works on two levels at the same time.  First, the Greek word Paul uses for “elements” usually refers to the elements that make up creation.  Think of the periodic table we learned in chemistry.  Everything in creation is made up, in one way or another, of those 103 elements.  For the ancients it was much simpler, albeit a bit more mystical.  They had four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.  The Jews knew that these elements were created by God and subject to him, but the pagans worshipped them and made idols out of them and Deuteronomy had promised that if Israel were unfaithful they would be scattered amongst the people and forced to serve those gods of wood and stone.  That’s exactly what had happened and it was exactly what was still happening.  The covenant curses of torah had subjected them to “the elements of the world”.

 

But I think Paul is also comparing Israel’s situation under torah—under the law—to a sort of medical diagnosis.  People, too, were thought to be composed of these elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and if you were sick—and that could be physically or morally sick—it was because these elements were out of balance.  You’d see a doctor, he’d determine how your elements were out of balance, and he’d give you some course of treatment.  Interestingly enough, the Greek word for that treatment is the same as the word for law—nomos—and this law would then serve as a paidagogos—the “babysitter” Paul mentioned in Chapter 3—to lead you back to health.  So disordered elements are treated by a law that takes on the role of a babysitter.  In other words, what Paul is saying is that people—the whole human race—is sick, morally sick.  These false teachers that showed up in Galatia have been acting like quack doctors, telling the people that to get themselves in order they need to follow the Jewish law and, like a babysitter it will nurse them back to health.  And Paul’s saying that, no, it won’t work.  It never did.  We’ve been trying it for centuries and the best the law, the best that torah can do is hold the sickness at bay.  Becuase, in fact, that’s all it was ever intended to do.

 

Even then—like a virus slipping through the masks and social distancing—Israel was still sick, incurred the curses of the covenant, and found herself subject to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone.  And the gentiles, those pagans, they didn’t even have the law.  They openly and shamelessly worshipped the elements and in abusing the stuff of creation they threw creation out of whack.  Torah promised life, but it could not bring it on its own and these false teachers were wrong to turn back to it.  Paul’s been stressing: God has done what torah never could.  He’s given his Son and sent his Spirit.  Torah, the law, was a thing of the old evil age—a good thing given by God for that time, but still something for the old evil age—but in Jesus and the Spirit God has inaugurated the age to come.  Look at verse 4:

 

Paul’s been reminding us of the original exodus from Egypt, when God rescued his people from a land full of idols so that they could live with him in their midst, so that they could worship and serve him.  And he’s been telling that story so that here, as he tells us about the new exodus, we hear the old one echoing behind it.  When the fullness of time arrived, he writes.  It’s a reminder that Jesus is part of this bigger story—as the creed reminds us when it says “in accordance with the scriptures”.  God was moving history and the world and his people to this one point in time.  We saw last time, this is what the law, torah, was meant to do: to bring Israel to the point where the Messiah could do his work.  But now that that work is done, we have to move forward into the messianic age.  There’s no going back.

 

And so, Paul says, God sent his Son.  In the Jewish thought world the king—especially the promised and long-awaited Davidic king—was the son of God.  In the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul probably would have been familiar with, King Solomon uses this kind of language to pray for God to send forth his wisdom “that she may labour at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you”.  The idea was that the king wasn’t just working using God’s instructions, but that the King actually embodied, in his thought and action, the personal presence and power of the creator God—like David, a man after God’s own heart.  For Paul to refer to the Messiah as the Son of God is to declare him to be both the promised King—that’s what “Messiah” means—and the embodiment of God’s wisdom—sort of God’s second self through whom the world was made.  In other words two things are happening in Jesus.  First, he is the prophecy-fulfilling King and, second, in him the God of Israel has finally returned to rescue his people.

 

Too, in saying that God’s sent his Son, Paul wants to underscore that Jesus is God himself.  He wasn’t simply a Jew born to Mary whom God adopted and called his son.  That’s a perennial heresy as old as the creed that was written to combat it.  No, the Son was sent and that means he existed before he took on human flesh to be born of Mary.

 

And God did all this so that he might redeem—deliver, rescue—his people living under the law.  In other words, to give them the divine medicine for the disease the law had been holding at bay and, in doing so, to fulfil his promises and show his faithfulness and to shine forth his glory—so that—we might receive adoption as sons.  Paul’s been talking about “we” and “us” so far meaning “we Jews”, but here I think he now opens it up.  “We” is now the whole church, Jewish and gentiles believers united as one people in the Messiah.

 

Here's how it works.  God’s Son is born under the law, in solidarity with and as the representative of his people so that he can give his life, dying the death that they deserved, in order to fulfil the covenant promises that God had made to them.  So that God’s sons can truly be God’s sons.  The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme display of the faithfulness and glory of the God of Israel and it happens before the eyes of the watching gentiles who have never seen anything like it.  They worship gods of wood and stone, gods who are deaf and dumb, and then in the gospel they are confronted with the living God who not only hears and speaks, but loves, and who fulfils his promises—even going so far as to take on our flesh and to die.  And the gentiles hear this gospel and fall to their knees in faith before the Son, before the Messiah, and the unbelievable happens: God adopts them, and welcomes them into his presence, calls them his sons and daughters, and makes them full members of this royal priesthood.  And even in that he shines forth his glory again as his promise to Abraham to make the nations his inheritance is fulfilled.

 

But it doesn’t stop there.  Look at verses 6 and 7:

 

The point of the exodus was always for God to live in the midst of his people.  He did that in the tabernacle and then the temple under the old covenant, but that was just a signpost pointing to how he would fulfil his promises in the new covenant.  Our being sons of God isn’t just a legal status.  It’s real.  Just as God sent his Son to lead us, like a new Moses, in this new exodus, he’s also sent his Spirit into our hearts and his Spirit now cries out from within us, “Abba—Papa—Father!”  The church as a whole and every individual Christian is made a tabernacle, a temple in which God himself has come to dwell.  Paul’s been using the plural “you” so far, but here he drives his point home switching to the singular “you”.  If you are a son, if you are a daughter, you are an heir.  This is the new life to which all of God’s promises to Israel and to which the whole story was working.  It can be tempting to think of the Trinity as some dry and technical doctrine, but Paul shows us the Trinity here in three dimensions, in Technicolor, with THX surround sound as he tells the great story.  What that thrilling explosion of the Death Star is to the Star War story when everyone in the theatre cheers, God’s sending of his Son and Spirit to make us his sons and daughters is to the great story of God and his people.  It’s the climax of the story when everything finally pays off.  The old evil age is finished and God’s new creation is born.  We might forget all this when we recite the creed.  I’m not suggesting you all cheer in the middle of the creed, but maybe in your head.  The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Spirit, they’re not just dry technical doctrines, they’re the culmination of this amazing story of God’s love and of his faithfulness and they show forth his great glory.  And they’re all right here in Paul’s letter, in the very earliest part of the New Testament.

 

 

We’ve been set free.  The Spirit, says Paul, crying out in our hearts to God as Father, is the proof that we are no longer slaves to the elements of the world.  This is the medicine that he’s given to finally set us to rights.  It’s the proof that we are his sons and daughters and heirs of his promise—because in Jesus and the Spirit the inheritance has been dumped right in our laps by God himself.  And yet, somehow, bewilderingly, we forget all of this.  That’s what was happening in Galatia.  Paul goes on in verses 8-11:

 

They’re like the Israelites in the wilderness, grumbling to Moses and complaining that they want to go back to Egypt.  Well, sort of.  It’s actually worse than that, because to demand the gentile believers be circumcised and start observing the old calendar of the torah—well—that’s not so much wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s like denying they’d ever been delivered from Egypt in the first place.  Do that, and you’re turning away from the living God who gave his Son and sent his Spirit so that you can go back to the “elements”—to the false gods of wood and stone, back into slavery.

 

“No,” he says, “you’ve come to know God.”  And then Paul pauses and says, “No, better—more accurate—to say ‘to be known by God’.”  To know God is the desire of people everywhere.  To hear God cut through the silence to speak, even if it’s just to tell us what he wants of us.  There’s a prayer from ancient pagan Sumer that was written on a clay tablet and survived the millennia.  In it a man cried out to the gods to speak.  He was miserable.  Everything in his life was going wrong.  And so he cried out in desperation.  He didn’t know what he’d done to offend the gods.  The poor man didn’t even know which god he’d offended, which god to cry out to.  His pitiful prayer is the cry of every human heart.  To know God and to find mercy.  And so we do everything we can think of from ascetic disciplines to mystical practises.  We study sacred texts and we pray long and desperate prayers.  And Paul reminds us that none of this leads us to God.  Instead, God has taken the initiative sending his Son and his Spirit.  This is the gospel, this is the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  In believing this good news and in knowing the presence and power of God’s Spirit, Paul is saying that they (and we) can now say for certain that God knows us and that we know God.  There is no desperate cry to unknown gods.  God’s own Spirit cries out within us to our loving and merciful Father.  Just as the nations watched in awe as God delivered Israel from Egypt in the original exodus, so in this new exodus as God sends his Son and his Spirit, the living God has—to quote Isaiah—“bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations.”  He has made himself known in all his great glory.

 

Brothers and Sisters, trust in this good news.  Don’t try to add anything to it.  To add anything to it is to deny its power and to go back to the slavery of the old gods.  Trust in Jesus.  Know the Spirit.  And know you are God’s son, you are God’s daughter, his new creation is born in you, and as we live this life he’s given by faith, we witness and proclaim his glory—the power of his holy arm—to the watching world around us.

 

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have fulfilled your promises in knitting your people together into one communion through the death and resurrection of your Son and the gift of your Spirit.  Give us grace that we might be faithful stewards of this good news, holding fast to you by faith alone and showing forth your glory as we live the life of your Spirit.  Amen.