"A Radical Gospel"
Faith first
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Text: Galatians 2:11-3:9
Our world and culture are always changing. The presence of, and the phenomenal attendance at, something like a Gay Pride Parade, for instance, speak of how much we can change even over a decade or two.
A century ago, a change of another kind occurred. It is hard to believe now but 2008 marks only the 90th anniversary of the enfranchisement of women. Prior to that, women were not permitted to vote. In some jurisdictions they were not even considered persons.
It may have begun in 1832 when Mary Smith, an unmarried property owner quietly petitioned the British Parliament to allow women who owned property to vote for members of parliament. The House of Commons “laughed at the petition,” a reaction that was to be repeated several times over the next few decades. As the 20th century opened, organizations were formed to press the suffragette agenda. The largest in Britain, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, was led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. But it is thought that, more than any other, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, pushed the agenda.
The WSPU was a radical organization. It was militant in its day. They believed that peaceful means and letter writing campaigns had brought little in terms of results. And as the government dithered, their gatherings in some cases turned to stone throwing and rioting, they damaged property, set houses and sports pavilions on fire, seared golf courses with acid, broke street lamps trampled public flower beds, and painted the slogan “Votes for women” in various locations around England. Notably, these were society women from the upper and upper middle classes and when imprisoned, they insisted on being called political prisoners. These suffragettes, the WSPU, were a thorn in the flesh of the government and traditional society.
When war broke out in 1914, however, the radical suffragettes relented and went to work to support the war effort. At the war's conclusion, the British parliament passed a reform bill giving the vote to women. It is generally held that the radical nature of the WSPUs actions on behalf of women's suffrage was the main factor in giving women the vote in 1918. They kept the issue alive, fresh, and ongoing in the press and in parliament. Canada followed suit, of course, and it was not long before Agnes MacPhail became the first woman elected to the Dominion parliament in 1921. Radical action brought about change in the nation.
It so often happens that it is the radicals that cause great change in a culture and in his day, the apostle Paul was a radical. Not that Paul engaged in violence to push his agenda, but Paul was a radical thinker. In the midst of the first century world that gave birth to Christianity, Paul brought something new, something that would change a portion of the Jewish people and be central to the church forever.
Christianity was born in the Jewish world. Early Judaism was the mother-tradition that spawned what has become our faith and Judaism had a particular culture. Its culture was marked by specific thoughts, values, actions, and acceptable behaviours. It was a tradition was steeped in the Torah. There was the written Torah, what we call the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy which gave God's basic law to the people taught them how to live. But these laws needed interpretation to give them meaning centuries after they were written and, so, there grew up the tradition of the elders, the rabbis interpretation of the law, an oral tradition that gave specifics as to how God's people should live within the Torah. And the tradition grew and grew, such that some, including Jesus, referred to it as a yoke around the necks of the people. There were dos and don'ts, do this's and don't do that's, and if one was really a member of the people of God, one had to live with it, all of it, and it was difficult to break out from under the tradition of what it was to be one of God's own.
I remember how, as a boy, I ran into this sort of situation in terms of Sabbath law. In the Christian framework, of course, the Sabbath is the first day of the week, Sunday. Sundays as a child were tedious. We could do virtually nothing, besides go to church and, maybe, read and go to Sunday School and go back to church again later. There was no Sunday shopping back then, nothing was open. There were no sports, no one dared play … or did they?
I remember one time, I went with my family to visit my grand-mother. It was in a little fishing village in Northern Ireland. I am not sure when we arrived, but as the sunny, summer, Sunday afternoon dragged on, a lot of young people like myself were getting “antsy.” We wanted to run, we wanted to play, we wanted to do things. At the back of my grand-mother's there was a great field and as we wandered someone managed to come up with a cricket bat and ball. We set up an old box for a wicket and we began to knock the ball around. One batter, then two, then another … and the level of noise began to rise as we shouted, “Howzat?” and “You're out!” and we pretended to be our favourite players. I was John Snow, the English fast bowler, someone else was Gary Sobers, the West Indian genius. Others came and joined in and the game was just getting interesting when suddenly my grand-mother and a number of older ladies from the Pink Brae houses stormed out of their homes, all at once, it seemed, grabbed the ball at the first opportunity, told us all that we should be ashamed at ourselves, and that God would surely deal with us for our flagrant transgression of his law. And there we were, caught red-handed. We all knew better. This wasn't to be done. Our heads all went down as the ladies' lecture continued. We kicked a little dirt with our feet as we were brought into line with the culture. In some ways, they may have had it right, in others not but in Northern Ireland, in the summer of '65, it was so hard to break free from that dominant, conservative and pietistic culture.
The apostle Paul had been a part of the first century Jewish culture with all of its customs and traditions. It too was a pietistic culture, a society that believed that they were God's chosen people, a society that was always on guard against the widespread polytheism and moral laxity of the peoples around them. Paul had even fought for the religious purity of his people and had persecuted the rising Christian sect, until one day on the road to Damascus he was struck down by a great light. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” came a voice as Saul encountered the risen Christ.
For three years after this Saul, who became Paul, went away to Arabia and pondered and thought about what had happened to him (1:17). For three years, the Spirit of God worked on Paul revealing truth to him (1:18). He checked things out with the apostle Peter in Jerusalem and then went out with the good news of Jesus Christ to the world (1:18).
One of the places he eventually went, some years later, was to the Roman province of Galatia in the central region of modern day Turkey. Paul perhaps preached to the forefathers of some of those great Turkish players whom the Germans narrowly knocked out of the semi-finals of the European Soccer Championships two weeks ago. And when Paul preached, some believed. After Paul left, however, other, probably well-minded Christians came and told the new believers that if they were truly to be God's people, they would have to be circumcised, follow the Torah, and there would be no “cricket” on the Sabbath. Apparently the Galatians began to do that and Paul was incensed. “O you foolish Galatians,” he writes, “Who has bewitched you (3:1)?” You don't need to be circumcised (2:3ff.). You don't need to follow Jewish table laws (2:11ff.), you don't need to observe special days and weeks and seasons (4:10), in Christ you are free, Christ died for you just as you are. You are made right with God by faith, not by following the Torah or law.
That thought, Paul's thought, which may seem natural to us after 2,000 years of Christianity, in its day it was as radical as Emmeline Pankhurst was in the early years of the 20th century or as radical as the Gay Pride movement was 25 years ago. People would laugh, “Paul, everybody knows that God has asked his people to be circumcised. Everybody knows that you shouldn't eat with Gentile sinners. We are called to be a holy people. We are called to be faithful and obedient people, to follow God in all things, this is his law, everybody knows that.” And they ridiculed Paul at first but as he persisted, laughter turned to dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction turned to force, and Paul and his compatriots were persecuted for what they preached was a radical departure from things Jewish in the first century.
Paul kept going, however, for he had had an encounter with God. Many of us would like an encounter with God. I don't know about you, but there are times when I'm having difficulty with a thought or direction in life and I think, I wish God would come down and make things clear to me. Unfortunately, those encounters seem rare, but Paul had one of them and it changed Paul's life and thought forever. He had been a Pharisee and a learned man, probably moving up the ranks toward becoming a rabbi himself. He was steeped in Jewish tradition and the interpretive tradition … but God had come and encountered Paul and it was as if, Paul was forced to bring that experience into his world view, as if he now had to re-visit all that he thought, all that he had grown up with, and see it in the new light of God's revelation to him. It was as if Paul worked out a new tradition, the logical consequence of God's interaction with him and as he watched him interact with others.
Paul writes to the Galatians and after objecting to the need for circumcision and after opposing Peter for following Jewish table laws, Peter had refused to eat with Gentiles when the other Jews came to town; Paul says, “I'm not just saying these things, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, or by what one does, but through faith in Christ Jesus (2:16).”
“It is impossible to continually uphold the whole law,” he says. “We cannot do it, yet God has encountered us anyway, in Christ, just as we are, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. We have seen,” says Paul, “how God's Spirit has fallen upon people of every nation, not only upon those who were circumcised. The Spirit does not come because a person follows the law but because he or she has faith (3:2ff. cf. Acts 10:44; 11:15).”
Furthermore, he goes on, we know even from our own Jewish history. “Why was Abraham considered right with God? It was not because he followed the law, for he lived before the law came through Moses. The scriptures reveal that ”˜Abraham believed God and it was reckoned unto him as righteousness (3:6).' It is faith and belief in God that are all important. Having begun your spiritual journey with faith and the Spirit, ”˜are you now ending with the flesh and the law (3:3)?' For if we turn again to the law, then Christ died for no purpose (2:21).”
That was radical in its environment and day. In the early 20th century, Emmeline Pankhurst and others radically changed the world, its perception of women, and the role of women in society. In the first century, Paul was involved in such a radical transformation of thought, as he taught of how Christ superseded what had gone on before, that there was now a new covenant and a new testament in Christ centred around faith and belief in the grace of God.
We live now in the 21st century and I wonder if it is possible to hear the results of Paul's encounter with God afresh. Throughout the ages, the church has existed and at times it has responded to change slowly, at times it has been more radical and led the way. In its early days, it spoke out strongly against popular opinion about the violence associated with Roman games and gladiatorial fights. In the 19th century, many sectors of the church spoke out against poverty and were at the forefront of bringing education and social aid to the masses and people in need. Methodists and Presbyterians and then the United Church early in the 20th century sought to Christianize the entire social order of Canada and in faith stepped out with a powerful and radical, social gospel aimed at helping those in our nation who could not help themselves. As they did, they influenced governments and social policy over generations.
In more recent years, the United Church has taken some radical stances, not all of which are agreed upon, as they have sought to affirm all of God's children. But here we are now in the early years of the 21st century and as a church we are really good at some things. We are really good at opening our arms to the disenfranchised. We are really good at helping others and performing acts of service to the world. But there are those who feel that our emphasis has been such that we have cut ourselves off from the faith that brought us to do those things in the first place. There are those who feel that in our radical service, we have entered into a way of being, a spirituality that says, “If you are tolerant and open to others, you are right with God. If you engage the world and help those who are down and out, you are serving and right with God. If you think like we do and do as we do, you are on the right track with God. There are those who feel that by doing these things and saying these things, we may be doing good things but we have missed the boat entirely. We are reducing Christianity to being and acting, akin to following the law, removing faith, belief, and the Christ event from the centre. What do you feel or think?
Today, the word of the Lord comes to us again through the apostle Paul and says, “no one is made right with God by anything he or she does … but through faith in Jesus Christ (2:16).” That was a radical statement then and I think it is radical once more.
I wonder if it is time for us to do something radical again, to step outside of what has become our culture with all its mores and traditions, its views and considerations of what is and what is not politically correct for life and for spirituality; I wonder if it is time to rediscover the importance of Christ and the importance of faith? For that is the gospel, a radical gospel … one that calls us to respond to a cross and an empty tomb (1:1).