Motion Verbs (Luke 9:51-62)

      We’re well into Ordinary Time, which is anything but ordinary, actually . . . it’s the time when the lectionary readings turn to discipleship, how we should behave in the world, both as a church, as the body of Christ, and individually.  It’s kind of what this time of year’s all about, and let me tell you it can be as painful for me as for anybody else, when I compare my life, to the Christian ideal . . . today’s passage is a case in point, it’s a turning point in Luke’s story, when Jesus turns to Jerusalem.  Biblical scholars recognize this as the beginning of Luke’s central section, but we know it as the journey to Jerusalem, and we alsoknow what happens when he gets there . . . and so did the original audience for the Gospel, the folks Luke wrote the gospel for, some fifty years after Jesus’ death . . . the people in Luke’s church knew what happened at Jerusalem, so the first sentence of our passage is freighted with meaning, with pathos,because before he was “taken up” into heaven on that cloud, he was nailed to a cross.

      And this foreshadowing sets a mood for this whole section— it reminds us right off the bat that whatever we sayabout livingthe Christian life is in the framework of Christ’sdeath, and further, everything we’re toldabout Christian living, all we’re asked to do and give up, pales next to what Jesus did. . . we’re told that he “set his face” to go to Jerusalem . . . he set his faceto go there.  He is resigned to going, no matter what is fated to happen at journey’s end, he’s determined. . . Luke repeats the phrase, it’s so important.  And those Gospel-fall-guy Samaritans wouldn’t receive him precisely becauseof this, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.

      And so this introduction to Jesus’ final journey is packed full of significance . . . we’re meant to feel its finality, its fate, its inevitability . . .  Jesus set his face toward his destiny, which was the cross.   And all of a sudden, we’re blinded by a flurry of motion verbs, verbs of movement, that are conspicuous in our English translation, but reallystand out in the Greek . . .there are five different verbs of motion – going, going out, coming down, entering, following  – used fifteen different times.  Going, going, going, going, going.  It reminds me of somebody who just can’t sit still before the start of a trip . . . I myself have been know to be a little – how shall we say it? – impatient at that time.  Well, maybe that’s too genteel a word, perhaps obnoxious better.  You ready?  Come on . . . you can do that in the car.  We’ve gotta go, get down the road, if we don’t go, if we don’t leave, we’ll just never get out of here . . . aren’t you ready yet?  Why didn’t you do that before now?  What have you been doing all morning?  Let’s just go . . . and my long-suffering family has put up with it all these years, though it’s a wonder they haven’t done something totally un-Christian and thrown me off an overpass . . .

      And our passage is all about that, all about going, going, going, it’s all about the motion, the journey.  It’s about the Christian life as going,as following,as doing, only unlike my fruitless, fitful, manic-ness, our passage is about motion as ministry,movement as the mission of God.  It tells us what kind is appropriate, and what kind . . . isn’t. They’re negative examples, like on that BBC show what not to wear, only here it’s what not to do in the mission of God.  Jesus sends out messengers to prepare his way –does thatremind you of something? – and they enter a Samaritan town.  And we know all about those Samaritans, don’twe?  They’re like the poor cousins of righteous, God-fearing Israelites, but it’s really another kind of foreshadowing . . . Jesus will carry the Gospel to the entire world, even the hated Samaritans . . . but not yet . . . now he is rejected – like he will be at journey’s end . . .

      And James and John are mortally offended by the slight, they’re hungering for vengeance, itching for a fight.  “Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”  Huh? huh?  Do you?  Doyou?  They remind me of comic-book henchmen, saying to their mob boss “Can I hit ‘em? Huh?  Can I boss, can I?” But unlike the mob boss, who always gives them permission in the end, Jesus just looks at them and rebukes them . . . and this word rebuke is the same word Luke uses to describe Jesus commanding the demons of Capernaum and the wind and the raging waves  . . . it’s a word of power, of directive so this has the force of a commandment: Jesus commands them not to call down fire on the Samaritans.

      It’s important for us to see the pattern here.  He’s rejected, like he will be at Jerusalem, and he refuses vengeance, like he will at Jerusalem.  So the first thing “not to do” is “Don’t exact retribution.  Don’t seek vengeance.  Don’t use violenceto punish the Samaritans.”  Talk about your radical notion . . . it’s human natureto want to get back at someone who’s done us wrong, it’s the way of the world. Individuals do it, cities do it, governmentsdo it.  A large chunk of our foreign policy is based on the notion of deterrence – other nations are deterred from attacking us – theoretically, at least – for fear of what we might do in return.  As Teddy Roosevelt was supposed to have said, speak softly and carry a big stick.  Only here, Jesus commands James and John to put downthe stick, to notbe punitive, to notuse violence.  And it’s a policy Jesus will stick to his entire life, even in the face of certain death. He who could call legions of angels down to protect him, who could call down his ownfire from heaven, thank you very much, did not once use violence – or the threat of it – as a means to achieve his ends.

      And James and John – it’s curious, isn’t it, that it’s the same two who, over in Mark, ask to be first in heaven – James and John, after several years of running around Palestine with Jesus, still don’t get what he’s about.  They still don’t get that he’s about anything butbringing fire and brimstone down on some hapless Samaritan, no matter howmuch they dissed him.

      Well. The rest of the passage is framed by yet another motion verb – follow – only this time it has more than one connotation, it means more than just trailing around physically over the countryside.  When that first someone—notice Luke doesn’t say who, the teaching is about us all—when he or she says “I will follow you wherever you go” she’s saying both physicallyand philosophically, as in I will accompany you to Jerusalem and beyond, and I will be your disciple.  And does Jesus say “Thank you very much?” or “I’m very grateful for your support?”  No.  He comes out with a warning: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  In other words, if you follow me,it’s not gonna be to some comfy motel, or a nice room with a view of lake Cuomo, it’s gonna be tough and you’re not going to have any refuge, any shelter.  Jesus is truth in advertising personified: there’s nothing about the Christian life that’s comfy or cushy, he’s not like some of these televangelists who preach prosperity doctrine, who say if you just commit to Jesus, it’ll be returned, a hundred-fold, and you’ll have victory, victory, I tell you . . . and this is a consistent witness of Jesus and his followers, from Peter to James to Paul, right through the New Testament.  The Christian life might be fire insurance in heaven,but it sure ain’t here on earth.

      So the first things we’re should understand is that (a) it isn’t going to be any blooming bed of roses and (b) we’re not supposed to pretend that it is.  And now to one more motion verb—Jesus gives a command: “Follow me.” Followme. There isn’t a lot of room for wiggle, is there?  Pretty cut and dried, but the other tries to find some, anyway: “Lord,” she says, “Let me first go and bury my father.”  Now this seems perfectly reasonable, especially by our standards, where we’ve been taught to place the biological family above every thing else.  The person wants to go take care of family business, and what’s wrong with that?  Honor thy father and thy mother, for St. Peter’s sake.

      But Jesus isn’t having any of it: “Let the dead bury their own dead;” he says. Ouch!  Not very pastoral, is it?  You can’t have a week off to mourn, or even a day: “As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Loyalty to Jesus comes before any other loyalty, even loyalty to the idol of family.  But this shouldn’t surprise any of us, should it?  After all, there’s that seminal story in all three synoptic gospels – and by seminal, I mean “one we try to ignore” – where Jesus refuses to seehis family, saying that “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Contrary to what we’re taught in this culture, we’re not to worship our biological family, we’re not to use our family obligations to avoid the mission of God, to skip our responsibilities of discipleship.  Loyalty to Christ trumps loyalty to family any day of the week.

      Finally, one moreunidentified person comes up to Jesus and says “I’ll follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to the folks.”  And this certainly sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  It couldn’t take toolong to do that, could it?  But Jesus answers in an elliptical – but clearly negative – way: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” And Luke’s readers would have understood this as a reference to Elijah, who allowedElisha to go back and kiss mom and dad – see, Jesus says, it’s harder to follow me that to follow Elijah,and you knowwhat a stickler hewas.  But wait, there’s more!  What happens when you look back while you’re plowing, while you’re walking along behind a mule or a horse?  The plowing gets messed up, doesn’t it?  The way becomes crooked, not straight, and we knowhow God loves a straight path.  You can’t look back in regret, you can’t have ties to the mundane when you’re doing the work of the Lord, or the way will no longer be straight.

      And again I say: Ouch!  This is harsh stuff.  Surely Jesus couldn’t have meant all this literally . . . there’s gotta be some metaphorical kinds of things going on here.  Service to Christ comes before service to family?  Proclaiming the word comes before putting food on the table? Maybe Jesus is just testing them, maybe he sees into their hearts that they’re not ready.  Maybe the father of the second guy isn’t dead, and won’t be for years . . . but none of that is even hintedat in the passage . . . just the opposite, in fact: all signs point to its being meant literally. When you look at the first part – the foreshadowing of the crucifixion and the renunciation of violence – and put it together with the last, it gives a coherent picture: Jesus was on his way to die for us,he set his face to Jerusalem, set his facetoward it, and it’s clear that the same kind of single-mindedness is required of the disciples as well.  Jesus gave the most precious possession for us, his own life, and we are required to return the compliment.

      I was talking to somebody from the board of pensions one time, and she complained that the rate of planned giving, the rate of bequests to the church, has fallen drastically, people just leave it to their families instead, and I shrugged and said: Well, what do you expect?  They’ve internalized the lesson the Christian church teaches, the lesson societyhas taught – for whatever reason – and we’ve acquiesced to the notion that biological family is all important.  There arefamily values on display here, it’s just that they’re not the values of Ozzie and Harriet – or even Ozzie Osbourne.  They’re Jesus’ family values, they’re Kingdom family values, not the values of the world.

      And I’m tempted to leave it at that, to let this uncompromising word stand alone, to let us all cogitate on it, chew on it, maybe get mad at it . . . after all, that’s what Jesus did.  He told the story and got out of the way, moved on down the road to another stop on the journey.  But though we don’t have time to unpack all its amazing ramifications, I’ll throw in a couple of few words.  Two, in fact: Christian community. “My mother and my brothers,” Christ said “are those who hear the word of God and do it.”  Just as he radically redefined society – the last shall be first, and the first shall be last – Jesus radically reimagined family.  In the Kingdom of God, our family extends to all Christians everywhere, and at any time.  We might not feel it all the time, we might not feela familial closeness in our individual congregations, but it’s true:  India, Africa, Kuala-Lampur.  Egypt, Iraq, Latin America.  We areone in Christ, sisters and brothers, heirs according to the promise of God.  Amen.

Children of Abraham (Galatians 3:23-29)

This is an extremely well-known passage … and of course what’s best knownabout it is the soaring affirmation of equality in Christ: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  This single verse does two things: it goes against the notion—I might even say gives lie to it—practiced by so many of our fellow Christians, that there are somehow classes of Christians less equal, less able to fulfill leadership roles in the church . . . in this line, Paul covers all the categories in ancient culture by which folks are classified.  Greek versus Jew signifies foreigners, outsiders versus insiders … slave or free was another huge dividing line, all peoples were classified as either owned or not owned . . . and of course male and female, and note that Paul uses the Genesis formulation of “and” instead of “or” to emphasize that as it says in Genesis one male and female, both, are created in the imago dei, the image of God.

Of course today, most of the church hasn’t gotten this yet, most obviously in the case of women . . . fully 80% of the world’s Christians are Roman Catholic, who do not ordain women, and the great majority of others are evangelicals, and most of themdon’t do it either. But—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—these churches are, as Paul would put it, stuck in categories of the world, conforming to the model of the flesh, rather than that of Spirit, rather than that of Christ.  There is no longer male and female, those categories have disappeared, for all are one in Christ, and in his body the church.

The second thing this one verse does is to debunk the notion—popular among certain folks—that Paul of Tarsus, writer of over a quarter of the New Testament, was a raging sexist.  Sorry, but I’ll be equally blunt here: it doesn’t wash.  In the letters that we are sure he actually wrote—seven out of the thirteen attributed to him—he is anything but sexist, with only one passage in 1 Corinthians that can be construed that way, and most Pauline scholars think that a later author inserted that part.

That’s not to say that Paul was a full-fledged, 21^st-Century feminist: he was a man of his time, after all.  But his writings and practices—see Priscilla, whom he considered an equal in the faith—were radical for the time.  But they’ve been used historically—like so much of the Bible—to keep women out of leadership roles both within the church and outside of it.  And none of that is Paul’s fault.

For our purposes, it should be noted that this one verse tends to overshadow the rest of the passage, which is remarkable in its depth.  Within the letter itself, it is part of an argument about the nature of the law—the Torah, to be exact—and how it relates to faith in Christ Jesus.  As we saw a couple of weeks ago, the Galatians were being proselytized by a group of Christians that evidently—we don’t know for sure, all we have are the clues in the letter—who taught that Christians must first obey the Torah —i.e., be practicing Jews—before they are admitted into the Christian faith.  In other words, they must practice the dietary laws, for instance, and be circumcised.

This didn’t sit well with Paul, and so he wrote this letter to protest the teachings of these “false teachers,” as he called them, and to convince the Galatians of the righteousness of his position.  And this passage sits smack in the middle: he has first argued that it was by faith, not works, that Abraham became father of the promise, that he was “blessed,” as Genesis says, “to be a blessing.”  And through Christ—a offspring of Abraham—we are alsoheirs according to that promise.

But—and this is where our passage begins—if the law is no longer necessary, why was it instituted in the first place?  Why did God hand those ten commandments down to Moses—some time after Abraham, Paul might add—if Christ would nullify them?  It was added because of our transgressions, to keep us in line until “faith came,” until Jesus Christ came upon the scene.  For Paul—and for John Calvin, for instance, who made this one of his “uses of the law”—it was there as a guide for us, as a yard-stick by which to measure our behavior.

But more than that: “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law . . . the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.”  This is more than just our using it as a yardstick, more than a passive measuring tape.  It’s as if the Torah were both the regulation and enforcer, both the civic code and the judicial system—police, prosecutor, judge and jury—all rolled into one.  Paul uses the Greek word paedagogos, which we translate here as “disciplinarian,” to get at what he considers the law to be.  In upper-crust Greco-Roman society—that is, among people who could afford one—a paedagogoswas the hired guardian of a minor:  a teacher, disciplinarian and protector, all rolled into one.  But when minors came of age, they were no longer under their thumb, under their guardianship.  So the term “now that faith has come”—synonymous with now the Christ has come—can be viewed a s coming into adulthood, coming of age.  “The lawwas our disciplinarian, our paedagogos,until Christ came.”  As he says over in First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”

We were children before Christ, minors subject to the law . . . but it’s important to note that Paul is not talking about an individual conversion experience, here, as in we were children before we became a Christian . . . Paul does not say “before we accepted Christ” or “after Christ came into our hearts,” he says “after Christ came,” as in “into the world.”  He is talking about Christ’s physical coming, his crucifixion, and that mysterious, miraculous thing we call the resurrection.  We were imprisoned and guarded under the law, we were minor children under the paedagogos,the disciplinarian, before the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And now … we aren’t.

And why not?  Because in Christ Jesus we are all children of God through faith.  That very faith that has come with Christ—as if it were not here before—provides the conduit by which we are children of God.  Notice that this faith was not here before Christ,and that  linguistically, at least, Paul goes so far as to equate the two. So this faith, through which we are made children of God, it is not something we have innate within us, it is not some inborn ability we have, it is totally external to us … it is in fact a gift every bit as much as is salvation, a species of grace every bit as much as much as anything else we receive from God.

 Paul continues with a startling statement: all of us who have been baptized into Christ Have put on Christ, have clothed ourselves with him.  Here is the second great metaphor of our passage.  And though it seems a bit . . . weird to us, the phrase “to clothe oneself” in someone or, in an alternate translation, “to put on” someone, was used a fair amount by ancient Greek writers.  The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, writes of folks having “put on or clothed themselves with Tarquin" and the Assyrian rhetorician Lucian speaks of himself "having put on Pythagoras."  Other Greek writers speak of putting on Plato, Socrates, and etc., and they mean to take on the characteristics of that person, to emulate them, to use them as a model.  And so for Paul, to clothe ourselves in Christ means to model ourselves after him, to use him as a standard of behavior, to be like Christ.

This metaphor is such a powerful one that first and second-century Christians soon adopted its symbolism in their own baptismal rites . . . the baptismal candidate would meditate and keep vigil all night, and then walk into one of the shallow baptismal fonts of the day . . . they would be clothed in normal street garb and after the priest had poured the water over their heads, they would be briefly hidden from view, only to emerge in dazzling white . . . thus they were clothed in Christ, no longer in the raiment’s of the world, the raiment’s of the flesh, as Paul might have put it, but in the clothing of the Spirit. They had “put on Christ” right before their witness’ eyes.

Paul uses similar language in other places, but perhaps no more strikingly than over in Philippians, in the passage we often say as an affirmation of faith.  There, he describes Christ as “emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, and being born in human likeness.”  Of course, he is speaking of the incarnation, here, or his understanding of it . . . and in that incarnation, Christ emptied himself, he put on humanity so fully, clothed himself with humankind so completely, that there was nothing left of his divinity, nothing left of his god-ness.  Christ clothed himself in us so completely that he becameone of us, fully and without holding back.

And as for us, clothing ourselves is an apt metaphor . . . for if we clothe ourselves, we do not become, but we do indeed imitate . . . we do take on some of the qualities of Christ . . . for Paul, putting on Christ is to become like him, to in a sense, thinklike him, at least in a limited way.  As much as it became a cliché, as much as I got sick and tired of hearing it constantly and trivially, the phrase “what would Jesus do” was an attempt to grapple with part of this.  Many Christians go through life not really giving this much thought or, worse, assuming that whatever their country or culture does, or whatever seems right to them, is what Christ would do.  In this way, they become clothed in the world, wrapped in the flag of whatever state they give allegiance to, like those sports fans that celebrate by wrapping themselves up in their team colors.

But as Christians, we are to wrap ourselves in Christ, not the world, we are to model ourselves after Christ and his life and actions on earth.  And Paul couples this with our baptisms, and it’s very apt, for it is at our baptisms that we are given the wherewithal to do so. For it is at baptism that the Spirit of God, that Christ himself promised us, is bestowed upon us, the spirit of truth and comfort and, lest we forget, power.  At our baptisms, that spirit descends upon us like it did upon Christ, at hisbaptism on the River Jordan, and we are given the power and strength to go against culture, to go against the world, and clothe ourselves in our Redeemer.  Amen.

Women’s Work (Luke 7:36-8:3)

So, a Pharisee invites Jesus to supper, and I can almost hear the boos and hisses now . . . Pharisees are the fall-guys for an awful lot of stories in the New Testament, stories that pit them against Jesus, who invariably comes out on top.  Because of this, many of us have been conditioned to think very poorly of them, and some of us—no one here, I’m sure—some of us hold Christians up as the opposite of Pharisees, and even get a little self-righteous about it, as in “Thank God we’re not like the Pharisees, who thought one could workone’s way to heaven . . . all they thought about were rules, rules, rules, gotta follow to the rules.  Thank God that we’re not saved by rules, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ!”

 But those who demonize Pharisees—again, I’m surenobody here!—those who demonize Pharisees probably don’t really realize who they were . . . they were super-Jews, the most devout of the Jews, the Jews that everybody wanted to be like.  Remember Aunt Tilly, about whom you marveled, saying “I wish Ihad as much faith as Aunt Tilly?”  That was what the Pharisees were like.  Further, it wasn’t that they were stuck on following the rulesso much as they were worried about purity,that is, whether you were clean or not, whether you were in or whether you were out.

That’s the problem with the woman in this passage: she is hamartalos, which commonly is translated as sinner,as in somebody who sins, somebody who does something bad.  Actually, the word hamartalos is a technical term for one who is ritually unclean, and therefore unwelcome in the practice of Judaism, unwelcome in the synagogues and in the temple.  She has done something that has made her that way, or done failed to do something, but Luke doesn’t tell us what it was.  Over the years since, leering biblical scholars and churchmen have assumed that she was a prostitute, but there is not a shred of evidence in or out of the text that this was true . . . funny how we jump to that conclusion, isn’t it?  Especially when it’s a woman . . .

So we think we know who this woman is, this hamartalos,but it’s important to consider that this is the same word used for Peter just a couple of chapters back, when Jesus calls him into service as a disciple . . . remember?  Luke says that “ . . . when Simon Peter saw [the large catch of fish], he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner,’” I am hamartalos.  Luke doesn’t tell us what Peter has done to become unclean any more than he tells us what the woman at the dinner party has done. Peter goes on to be the model disciple, both in terms of virtues and frailties, and is the hamartalos-woman at the Pharisee’s dinner party anothersuch model, another such signof God’s amazing love and regard for the peopleof God?

But the Pharisee doesn’t see any of this, he doesn’t see the woman as who she really is.  Oh, to him she’s an sign, all right, but it isn’t of God’s love . . . to him she’s unclean, outside the pale, and thus, in a way, invisible.  And it was verboten to associate with an unclean person, with hamartalos, much less touch one, as Jesus was doing.  If you touched something or someone that was unclean, that unclean-ness was passed on to you, and you would have to purify yourself before you were fit to associate with decentpeople, AKA good, ritually clean Jews.  And here Jesus was, allowing this, this . . .sinnerto touch him, and did the man have no shame?  Did he set outto flout his host’s hospitality?  He’d invited Jesus—which he didn’t have to, you know, he was not exactly on the Pharisitic A-list—and what does he do?  He throws it back in his face, embarrassing him and causing all manner of discomfort to his guests.

And the unwanted visitor isn’t just hamartalos,she’s a woman.  And she was brazenly touching the teacher, rubbing her hair all over him, anointing his feetwith oil that it would’ve set the Pharisee back a year’s wages to afford.  Women didn’t get that familiar with males they didn’t know, or who didn’t know her,which he most certainly did not,cause if he did, he would knowshe was unclean, and he surelywouldn’t have let her touch him like that . . . and this guy is supposed to be a prophet?  Hah!

Just as the Pharisee is thinking this, Jesus shows he knows what he’s thinking, anyway:  “Hey Simon,” he says, “I have something to say to you” and he tells him a short parable about two debtors, one who owed a moderate amount, and one that owed ten times that, but neither could pay the debt, so their creditor forgave the debt, and which one does Simon think will love him more?  That’s easy, thinks the Pharisee, and he says “I suppose the one for whom the greatest debt was forgiven.”  And Jesus says “you have judged correctly,” and then lays into him for his measly hospitality.

And do we detect a note of irony here, a note of disapproval of a guy who knows the value of a transaction—the one who has more debt cancelled “pays back” the creditor with more love in return—but doesn’t know about true hospitality and regard?  It reminds me of the old definition of a cynic as a person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing . . . is this a reflection of Jesus’ summation of the entire law with “Love thy neighbor as thyself?”

This short parable bears closer examination . . . our translation has it that the creditor cancelledthe debts of the debtors.  But the Greek verb hecharisato carries more weight than mere cancelling . . . it carries the connotation of generosity and great good will on the part of the one doing the cancelling.  And in fact, the cancelling of debts just because somebody couldn’t pay was every bit as rare in those days as it is today, perhaps even more so.   And finally, a noun derived from hecharisato—charis—is frequently translated in the New Testament as grace.  So, while the parable seems to explain the slavish devotion of the woman—she is forgiven a lot—it’s the fact that she is forgiven at all that is the real point.

The woman’s slavish love is not only a sign of God’slove, but it’s a sign of hergreat faith and willingness to serve Christ.  And notice that she serves him, she washes his feet and dries them with her hair, beforeJesus declares her forgiven.  Perhaps she has heard about divine pardon—after all, she comes prepared with the oil in its expensive alabaster jar—or perhaps not, but is truly her faith, her trust, and her willingness to serve Christ without strings attached, that saves her.

And the Pharisee?  Well the Pharisee is certainly not a sign of God’s love . . . he doesn’t even do the minimum in the way of hospitality that is required by ancient middle eastern customs.    “You gave me no water for my feet,” Jesus says, “but she has bathed my feet with her tears . . . You gave me no kiss, but . . . she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head . . . but she has anointed my feet . . .”  The Pharisee, presented with the same evidence as the hamartalos-woman, having heard perhaps the same words about the work of Jesus the Christ, finds the grace offensive and takes the woman’s presence as a scandalous imposition.

Now,  it would be easy to compare and contrast on the basis that of biological sex, and I think there’s some room for that—after all, there are often a lot more women in church than men—but it’s father’sday, so I won’t do that, and really, this is a story about two sinners, two hamartalos—one who realizes she is one, and one who doesn’t.  The unexpected guest knows full well what she is, that she has fallen short before God, and because of that, she is enormously grateful.  The Pharisee, on the other hand, doesn’t even know he needs forgiving, that his debts need cancelling: if he has been forgiven, he doesn’t know it, and really:  how can you live into that forgiveness, how can you live a life of joy, live a life of wonder and service, if you do not know you are free?

The Benedictines celebrate Compline, or night prayer, just before they go to bed . . . it’s the only one of seven daily hours that monastics can celebrate on their own if they choose.  It’s the most personal hour, where they are directed to examine their conscious to see where they have fallen short of God’s plan and will for them.  And that’s what our confession of sins is for as well . . . so that we can acknowledge—to ourselves as well as to God—that we have fallen short, that we are indeed, as the old hymn goes, standin’ in the need of prayer.

But the Benedictines do something else at Compline: they say the Song of Simeon.  “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all the people.”  They acknowledge that they haveseen God’s salvation during the previous day, that they have seen that they are forgiven, and that because of that, they can go to their rest in peace, in knowing that by the grace of God, they are free from the bondage of sin.

Sisters and brothers, when Christ said to the woman “Your sins are forgiven,” it was assurance to her—and a lesson to the Pharisee—that God had forgiven her sins . . . it is and was God who forgives sins, and the same thing is going on when the liturgist declares our sins are forgiven. And what is our response?  Is it joy, is it celebration, is it grateful service to Christ?  We have been redeemed, we have been set free, let us be glad of it and rejoice.  Amen.

Untouched By Human Hands (Galatians 1:11-24)

Remember back when we were kids, maybe the first or second or third grade, and they taught us how to write a letter?  We were taught how to begin it, then follow up with asking after the recipient’s health, and the help of her or his family.  “Dear Grandma, how are you?  I am fine . . . how is Grandpa?  I hope his goiter isn’t acting up . . .”  and there was an accepted form for a personal letter, and back in Paul’s Greco-Roman day there was a standard format for a Greco-Romanletter, and all of Paul’s letters follow it, to some extent, at least.  Greco-Roman letters generally begin with a Salutation—the dear Grandma part—and indeed, here in Galatians it’s found in verses 1 through 5, which we read last week. In it, he specifies who the letter is from—Paul an apostle and all members of God’s family with him—and to whom it is written—the churches in Galatia—and then he greets them: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from t he present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”  Notice that he basically sums up the gospel just in this opening greeting—Paul never couldpass up a preachable moment.

Now:  in a normal Greco-Roman letter, the next part would normally be the “thanksgiving,” where the letter writer expresses her or his appreciation for its recipients in the form of thanks to God.  Listen to the thanksgiving from 1 Corinthians:  “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Notice that here again, he can’t resist a sermon.

All this is to say that the parishioners in Galatia, sitting in church, listening to this letter from their beloved founder—the letters were always read aloud—as they sat there, they were expecting to hear a thanksgiving section, extolling their virtues—by the grace of God, of course—but instead they get: “I am astonishedthat you are so quickly deserting the one who called you”—that’s Paul—“in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel”  It’s as if a grandchild followed up the greeting to her grandmother with a whining complaint: “Dear Grandma, I am flabbergastedthat you didn’t give me a bicycle for my birthday . . .”  Grandma might faint dead away . . .

Of course, that is the effect that Paul is after, he wants to emphasize how upset he is, to impress upon them the gravity of the situation, as he sees it anyway, and the situation is this:  there is a group of Jewish Christians, perhaps from Jerusalem itself, which scholars call the Missionaries, visiting the churches in Galatia, the churches that he founded.  And they are preaching a version of the Gospel that Paul believes is false: namely, that you had to be a Jew and be circumcised and all that to be a Christian. And to Paul, this was nonsense, and worse, heresy, against the very foundation of Christianity, and as we spend some time in Galatians over the next month or so, we will come back to this question, which for Paul was a question of freedom in Christ, but for now it’s to set the stage for our passage, which seems prickly to say the least if not downright defensive.

And if it does, it’s probably because Paul feelsthat way, he feels under attack, and that at stake is nothing less than the Gospel and his standing as Apostle.  He tells them that the gospel that was proclaimed by him—gospel and the verb to proclaim come from the same root, so the Greek is something like “the proclamation that was proclaimed”—the proclamation that was proclaimed to him wasn’t of human origin, he didn’t get it hanging around the water cooler in Jerusalem with the boys, he didn’t read it in the paper or see it on Anderson Cooper, but it was a revelation from Jesus Christ.  And the Greek word rendered here as “revelation” is  apocaluptos, and maybe a more literal translation would serve better, as in “I received it through an apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” because it certainly created an upheaval in his life, an upending of his whole belief system, for he was a devout Jew, a Pharisee, by his own description “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age.” 

He was devout, and as an expression of that devotion, he was actively trying to destroy this upstart religion called “the way.” And so though he might not have reallybeen knocked off his donkey like Luke claimed, his conversion had a lot of the apocalyptic about it:  going from persecutor in chief to church planter extraordinaire and though he never renounced Judaism that we know of, he argued vehemently that Christianity stood alone, and was available to Gentiles like you and like me.

But God called him from before he was born—the Greek is literally “from the womb”—and revealed—and once again, it’s apocalypted—and apocalypted God’s son to him, to preach among the Gentiles, he didn’t get anybody’s permission, he didn’t confer with anyone up in Jerusalem—although he did later visit Peter (whom he calls Cephas) and James, Jesus’ brother—and what he is trying to emphasize here is that his apocalypse is directly from God, he didn’t pass go, he didn’t collect $200, he didn’t set out to become a believer, God came to him,God converted him,God chose himbefore he was born, and Paul didn’t have a thingto say about it.

About a decade ago, Campus Crusade for Christ initiated a marketing campaign built around the simple slogan  “I found it.”  They had flyers printed up with “I found it,” bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with “I found it,” and scribbled “I found it” all over campus chalkboards. Of course, it being Campus Crusade for Christ, the “it” they found was Jesus Christ, and aside from the problematic use of the neutral pronoun—Christ is an it?—and the reduction of the entire Gospel to just one word, the more insidious thing is that it assumes that it is in our power to “find,” that it is somehow in our control whether or not we do. As the episode with Paul shows us, we don’t find God, God finds us.  The hymn doesn’t say “I once was lost but now I found it,” it says I once was lost but now am found.  The lyric is in the passive tense—am found—just as is Paul’s story.  Paul no more reveals the gospel to himself any more than we findit ourselves.

What’s even moreproblematic, though, is when we think we can determine whether or not somebody elsefinds Christ does.  In Gold Beach, Oregon, the site of my first church, the ministerial association was peopled largely with pastors of a more traditional bent, and I remember one meeting where they were beating their breasts over the condition of the town, which they considered largely “lost,” and “unsaved.”  If they’d just work harder, redouble their evangelical efforts, they could change things, win the whole town over for Christ.  And the only other mainline pastor in town, the Lutheran Pastor Tim, said “Wait a minute . . . isn’t it God that saves people?”  and they had to admit that he had a point . . .

It isn’t anything we do that saves somebody any more than anything we do to save ourselves.  Just as God set Paul apart before he was born and called him by God’s grace, so God does to us. As biblical scholar Heidi Hustad Armstrong puts it, “all conversion stories begin with God’s decisive action. God always takes the initiative.”

The notion that people somehow won’t “be saved” if we don’t work thathard enough is a form of idolatry, with ourselves as the idol. We, the created, put ourselves in the place of our creator and that is never a good idea.  It can lead to arrogance, it can lead to dominance, it can lead to war . . . if it is up to us to save people, doesn’t it put ourselves over even our God?

In our passage, Paul insists that he didn’t get his version of the gospel from anyone other than God: “I did not confer with any human being,” he says, “nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me.”  He sounds impassioned, almost pleading:“In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” And though we can’t be sure, it may have been that he was being accused by the Missionaries of spouting a version of the gospel he got second-hand from the realapostles in Jerusalem.  Whatever the case, it’s easy to get the impression that it is alldefensiveness, all an attempt to set himself apart from others.  But as Armstrong puts it, he’s not saying “Look at how great Iam” but “Look at how great Godis, how great the Gospelis.”  It’s no wonder that he gets upset, so upset that that he just dives into his complaint, without observing the niceties of 1^st-Century correspondence.  For him, the thought that you have to do something to earn God’s grace—become a Jew, get circumcised—flies in the face of the God’s saving power, it negates the very heart of the whole thing.

Paul doesn’t tell us about his life to build himself up, he tells us about it to build the Gospel up.  He tells us about his conversion from a church hater and baiter—with no help from anybody else, untouched by human hands—to emphasize the primacy and astonishingly radical nature of grace.   Two-thousand years before John Newton, Paul would certainly have agreed with another line from Newton’s great song:  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.  Amen.