Mellowed With Age

Sunday, July 2nd, 2007
Sixth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Galatians 6:1-18

1 My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. 2Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 3For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. 4All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor’s work, will become a cause for pride. 5For all must carry their own loads. 6Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher. 7Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. 8If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. 9So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up. 10So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.
11See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! 12It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh. 14May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! 16As for those who will follow this rule—peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. 17From now on, let no one make trouble for me; for I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body. 18May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.

Have you ever done something that at the time seemed terribly necessary, but in retrospect was a little – or maybe a lot – excessive?

As a sophomore in college, I had one year of being on my own under my belt, my parents were thousands of miles away back in Chile, and my closest sibling was three hours away in Louisville.

My college years were those crucial years when I began to figure out for MYSELF what I believed – about life, about interpersonal relationships, about society, government, faith, and God. I met and made friends with people vastly different from myself, engaged in ‘heavy deep and real’ conversations about all the topics I just mentioned, and basically began to hammer out what it was that was MINE – what *I* accepted, and stood for, and felt was worth defending.

In the process, as is likely to happen any time one is searching, I was initially drawn to the more strident voices – the revolutionary zealots, the black and white legalists, the folks who kept things clear and simple – those being the operative words – for the rest of us, who very quickly grew tired of the cacophony – the loud mix – of voices clamoring for our attention.

I wasn’t alone on my quest. My three or four or five roommates – depending on which year or which semester you ask me about – were also engaged in the same search. We pretty much all came from a Christian background, we were all raised to one degree or another in church, so we were all familiar with the language of salvation and redemption and sanctification and all that. What we were trying to work out was how our faith – and our growing awareness of its place in our lives – was going to AFFECT HOW we lived our lives day in and day out.

To us, at the time, the key term was HOLINESS. What did it mean to live holy lives, imitators of Christ, in the world but not of it? What it translated into was a series of steps taken to differentiate ourselves from ‘the rest of the world’. We had all been exposed to a complacent Christianity – the model whereby you went to church for what YOU could get out of it – where you were not terribly concerned with who or how many people were lost and dying so long as you had a comfortably padded pew and a heated or air-conditioned sanctuary to sit in while the preacher told you how wonderful, how blessed, how righteous, how superior you were. Our music of choice was by a man I’ve mentioned to you before – Keith Green. Our anthem was his song entitled ‘Asleep in the Light’. To just give you an idea of his style: a line from the refrain of the song:

“Jesus rose from the dead, and you, you can’t even get out of bed.”

We each had our music that we listened to. In those days it was still either Cassette tapes or records. And being recent teenagers, we’d accumulated a fair amount of music. At some point in the fall of 1982, I think it was, things sort of came to a head in terms of the significance of living for God. There was an “either or” choice to make. Christ words of either being FOR him or AGAINST him were ringing in our ears as we looked at the records we’d collected over our respective teen years.

I don’t remember exactly who it was that started it, but one of my roommates came back to the apartment from classes one afternoon and began to break and throw away all his ‘non-Christian’ albums. The fever spread pretty quickly, and before too long there was a fairly extensive collection of records in pieces in our living room.

I remember at the time having only slightly mixed feelings about what I was doing. There was an element of needing to be willing to do the extreme in order to do the ordinary things that might be required of us as followers of Christ, and in that sense I didn’t have a lot of problems destroying some of the better pop music from the 60’s and 70’s on the living room floor. On another level, I remember feeling separated from the event – watching it from a slight remove – as though it wasn’t me that was doing it, but someone else – someone I wasn’t yet sure I wanted to become.

At this point you might be asking “So, Kenny, what connection does this long autobiographical anecdote have to do with what Paul is saying to the Galatians at the end of his letter to them?”

Good question!

You see, the Galatians were dealing with newness. They were new to the Gospel … actually, at that point, it might be more accurate to say that the Gospel was still NEW to anyone who came in contact with it – anyone who heard it or even to anyone who was preaching or teaching it. The group of people who were first called followers of ‘The Way’ and who only later became known as “Christians” were still trying to figure out what the Gospel Jesus Christ brought meant to them and for them. Some of those followers locked onto the idea that the emblematic theme of the Gospel was freedom, like the folks in the church in Corinth, who Paul wrote to around the same time he wrote this letter to the churches in Galatia. Others tried to somehow fit the Gospel into their already-settled worldview – those who were raised in a long and strict tradition of obeying the law of God and following regulations that governed nearly every aspect of their lives couldn’t imagine something coming from God to be so outside the bounds of what they had come to equate with holiness with the weight of centuries behind it. It just didn’t seem possible that one could accept Christ as the Messiah and NOT adhere to the rules and regulations of the people with whom God had entered into covenant so many centuries before.

Paul spends the bulk of his letter upbraiding the folks in the churches about what it means to HIM to call himself an apostle of Christ and what it means for THEM to be FOLLOWERS of Christ – apart from the rule of the Law of Moses. And it is in these last two paragraphs that in some ways he gets down to nuts and bolts. He’s argued the theology up until now, but he’s getting down to what it means ‘hands on’ to be a follower of Jesus.

His first entreaty – his first request – could actually be put at the opposite end of the spectrum from which he spent most of his letter --

1 My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.

If you take a few minutes and read through the letter to the Galatians in one of the more expressive translations, or versions, or adaptations of scripture, you’ll get a sense of the language Paul uses in talking to the Galatians, and in places it is anything BUT gentle.

And yet, Paul comes to the end of the letter, and his words take on a tone like that of a father speaking to his grown children – a more … subdued tone – a calmer tone even – where he begins to simply list ways the folks he introduced to the gospel can continue to live true to that gospel. Bear one another’s burdens, don’t let yourselves become too proud – too ‘big for your britches’, as we might hear around here. Take an honest look at yourself and what YOU’VE accomplished before you go judging what others have done. If you learn something from someone, show your appreciation to them by helping them out. Don’t get tired of doing what is right. Work for the good of ALL, especially those of the community of faith.

Isn’t that interesting? At a time and coming from a place where any given religion would preach that the good you do should primarily be kept within “the family”, so to speak, here Paul says don’t be exclusive with the good you do. Spread it out. INCLUDE the community of faith, but don’t LIMIT it to them.

And in that final paragraph we see one of the most personal notes in the New Testament -- See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! As was generally practiced, up to this point Paul had been dictating his letter, but he came to a place where he wanted to make as heavy and deep and real an impression as he COULD on the folks he was writing to – and in order to do that he made it plain to them that HE was the one from whom the letter was coming – he makes a note about those who are demanding that the new followers of Christ fit into the mold they have created for themselves of what it means to live a Holy life – the outward signs that one is ‘right’ with God.

How does this relate to the life of Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton on this, the 8th of July of 2007?

Here is where we and the Galatians can end up figuratively sitting next to each other in the pew or the choir loft or in one of these mini-pews up here behind me.

It is so easy to make our faith into something about the outward stuff – our appearance, our dress, our hair, whether or not we have pierced … WHATEVERS, or a tattoo here and there … our skin color, the car we drive, how we talk, what Bible we carry, where we work, what songs we prefer to hear … we are prone to dispose of those who do ANY of those things differently and relegate them to ‘outsider’ status, or we are determined to make them comply with how WE think faith should be expressed when in reality it is God’s own incredibly varied and imaginative life that can be expressed in as many ways as there are people on the earth that we have to allow for. Paul boils it down to this:

14May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!

Do we hear what he is saying here? Paul is saying that it isn’t about ANY of the outward stuff – whether it is the lack of or presence of a foreskin or the lack of or presence of a suit, or a bonnet, or a skirt it is irrelevant. What matters is whether or not we are a NEW CREATION in Christ – whether or not we have taken the gospel to heart – and let IT transform US – that is everything, and ultimately, the ONLY thing that matters!

Let’s pray.