Galatians 5:22-26

Galatians 5:22-26The Message (MSG)

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.

So what happens when we live God's way?.....

Paul gets to the heart of the question we all have.  Just what DOES God's way look like? Can you feel it, reading his reply? Can you believe that affection for others, exuberance about life and serenity ARE gifts worth having?

When we truly belong to Christ, we don't need to force our own way. We automatically open our hearts to the other. We don't need to mindlessly serve. We BECOME service.

And then for me the crux. The thing I think that 21st religion still gets mired in:

Faith in Christ is not a idea (or dogma) in our head. And it is not sentimental, Hallmark faith either.

It takes over us like that mustard plant.

It infects and grows in us like the yeast in bread.

It is deep and rich and abiding and complex and messy and exhausting...

...and enlivening.

What happens when we live God's way?

Life happens. Real, abundant, full life.

God of life, fill us to the brim with your perfect way so that we may perfectly and wonderfully live! Amen

Galatians 5:16-21

Galatians 5:16-21The Message (MSG)

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.

It's true, you know.

The kind of life that develops out of trying to get our own way all the time, isn't the kind of life that is fulfilling, affirming, or joyful.  Instead, it does rather have that erratic quality that Paul talks about here.  It is a life that is doomed be be not satisfied.

Because honestly, I'm pretty sure that most of the time, I've got it wrong about what's best for me.  I know I'm wrong when I push for my own way, because that rarely works out the way I hope.

That's quite a list Paul leaves as the outcome of seeking your own way. I can identify with many of those. I've seen them. Been caught up in some of them and see them all around me daily in this society that seems focused on "me, the individual."

God offers another way. A way of freedom. "Let Go and Let God," says the bumper sticker on the car of someone following the Twelve Step Program.  In the program, they are reminded every time and at every meeting when they recite the Twelve Steps.  Maybe we aren't powerless over alcohol, but sometimes I wonder if we all wouldn't benefit from the program nonetheless.

I've turned the first five steps into a prayer I say each day as a reminder that going my own way, isn't the way to go.

Good and gracious God, I am powerless over sin (and ____________), and when I forget that, my life becomes unmanageable.  Only you can restore me to sanity, to wholeness, to health, and to hope. Help me this day to turn my life over to your care and walk in your ways and with your Holy Spirit. Amen

Galatians 5:7-15

Galatians 5:7-15The Message (MSG)

You were running superbly! Who cut in on you, deflecting you from the true course of obedience? This detour doesn’t come from the One who called you into the race in the first place. And please don’t toss this off as insignificant. It only takes a minute amount of yeast, you know, to permeate an entire loaf of bread. Deep down, the Master has given me confidence that you will not defect. But the one who is upsetting you, whoever he is, will bear the divine judgment.

As for the rumor that I continue to preach the ways of circumcision (as I did in those pre-Damascus Road days), that is absurd. Why would I still be persecuted, then? If I were preaching that old message, no one would be offended if I mentioned the Cross now and then—it would be so watered-down it wouldn’t matter one way or the other. Why don’t these agitators, obsessive as they are about circumcision, go all the way and castrate themselves!

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

Here we get to the whole crux of the difference between Christian freedom and worldly freedom.

You hear a lot about worldly freedom.  American freedom even. Freedom for the individual. Freedom to do what you want, go where you will, own whatever property - or weapon! - the law says you can.  

But Paul reminds us that Christian freedom isn't anything of that kind at all.

Rather than being about each of us as individuals, Christian freedom is about the community.  It is about our neighbor.

It is about loving others as we love ourself.

I love that last line.  Love is the true freedom because without it, we'd annihilate each other (which sometimes in the news it seems to me we are doing).  And where will our precious freedom be then?

It seems paradoxical perhaps. That love - service to our neighbor - is true freedom. That's because we are used to hearing of freedom being about ourselves.

But Paul lives contently in the paradox, just as Jesus did.  

As Luther said, we are free from all, and a slave to all. Both. And.

At the same time.

That's what true freedom is.  

The freedom to need each other and love each other.

Lord, help me serve my neighbor and love as I would be loved. Amen.

Galatians 5:1-6

Galatians 5:1-6The Message (MSG)

Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.

I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.

I'll bet it doesn't take much for us to think about what it is that we are slaves to. Not circumcision, no.

But we are slaves, aren't we? Set free by Christ, we still find other masters in our lives.

Masters like time, work, money, status, family, iPhones, other "stuff."

Stuff is a big one in our society where the idea that "he or she who has the most toys wins."

But we've already won.  In Christ we are already winners.

Sometimes we are even slaves to things that seem as if they are appropriate - as circumcision was for the Jewish Christians. 

We can be slaves to traditions in our churches - how we worship, how we organize, how we lead. Who gets to be on which committee. How we decorate. Where we meet.

What music we sing.

What liturgy number we use.

How we get communion.

Are we slaves to any of that?

Christ has set us totally free. And when we lose sight of that prize to focus on our other masters, we forget just how good God's grace is!

Gracious God, set us free from our bondage to sin and to stuff and help us see your freedom with new, clear eyes! Amen

Galatians 4:21-31

Galatians 4:21-31The Message (MSG)

Tell me now, you who have become so enamored with the law: Have you paid close attention to that law? Abraham, remember, had two sons: one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. The son of the slave woman was born by human connivance; the son of the free woman was born by God’s promise. This illustrates the very thing we are dealing with now. The two births represent two ways of being in relationship with God. One is from Mount Sinai in Arabia. It corresponds with what is now going on in Jerusalem—a slave life, producing slaves as offspring. This is the way of Hagar. In contrast to that, there is an invisible Jerusalem, a free Jerusalem, and she is our mother—this is the way of Sarah. Remember what Isaiah wrote:

Rejoice, barren woman who bears no children,
    shout and cry out, woman who has no birth pangs,
Because the children of the barren woman
    now surpass the children of the chosen woman.

Isn’t it clear, friends, that you, like Isaac, are children of promise? In the days of Hagar and Sarah, the child who came from faithless connivance (Ishmael) harassed the child who came—empowered by the Spirit—from the faithful promise (Isaac). Isn’t it clear that the harassment you are now experiencing from the Jerusalem heretics follows that old pattern? There is a Scripture that tells us what to do: “Expel the slave mother with her son, for the slave son will not inherit with the free son.” Isn’t that conclusive? We are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

Are you a child of the law, or a child of promise?

There is, as Paul tells us, a distinction.

Now this does not mean we have no use for the law. Laws are good and helpful things that give a society boundaries.

But laws also get broken. And manipulated. And used as weapons. And twisted. 

Law can be enslaving. 

Instead, we are people of a promise. A promise of Spirit and life.

A promise of freedom and truth.

A promise of love.

A promise born of God's ways rather than human beings' ways. 

God's promise of freedom is expansive and open to all.  It invites and shelters. It does not, like the law, exclude. Instead, it opens up and draws in.

Are we children of the promise?

We are.

So open your arms and invite the world into God's loving embrace!

God of promise, you have set us free! Praise your holy name! Amen!

Galatians 4:12-20

Galatians 4:12-20The Message (MSG)

My dear friends, what I would really like you to do is try to put yourselves in my shoes to the same extent that I, when I was with you, put myself in yours. You were very sensitive and kind then. You did not come down on me personally. You were well aware that the reason I ended up preaching to you was that I was physically broken, and so, prevented from continuing my journey, I was forced to stop with you. That is how I came to preach to you.

And don’t you remember that even though taking in a sick guest was most troublesome for you, you chose to treat me as well as you would have treated an angel of God—as well as you would have treated Jesus himself if he had visited you? What has happened to the satisfaction you felt at that time? There were some of you then who, if possible, would have given your very eyes to me—that is how deeply you cared! And now have I suddenly become your enemy simply by telling you the truth? I can’t believe it.

Those heretical teachers go to great lengths to flatter you, but their motives are rotten. They want to shut you out of the free world of God’s grace so that you will always depend on them for approval and direction, making them feel important.

"It is a good thing to be ardent in doing good, but not just when I am in your presence. Can’t you continue the same concern for both my person and my message when I am away from you that you had when I was with you? Do you know how I feel right now, and will feel until Christ’s life becomes visible in your lives? Like a mother in the pain of childbirth. Oh, I keep wishing that I was with you. Then I wouldn’t be reduced to this blunt, letter-writing language out of sheer frustration.

Back after a break while my church of St. Paul's did a study on 2 Corinthians. And here, with the Galatians, I am reminded of a recurring theme.

False teachers spreading a false gospel.

Does that happen today?

I've decided to use The Message Bible for a while.  I like its straightforward, easy-to-understand approach. Paul becomes even more alive and relatable to me.

So, is there a false gospel today?

I read an article this week where the writer bemoaned the fact that when polled, 87% of the general population thinks that the primary quality they see in Christianity is judgment.

Christianity, the harbinger of good news, has become known as the religion of judgment.

Might that have something to do with declining numbers in our churches?

I admit that for me, judgment is impossible to completely let go of. I do it constantly. Even when I'm not really thinking about it. It is as easy as breathing.

And admittedly, to survive, we have to make some judgments in our life about things that are good for us or bad for us.

But when it comes to people, judgment "shuts you out of the free world of God's grace."

Grace and judgement don't make easy bedfellows.

Paul was calling the Galatians to the Gospel of Christ. We are called to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. That gospel is wide and scary and beautiful and open.  It has grace to cover a multitude of sins, and is open even to those we judge and might wish weren't included.

How would the world view a faith that was known for its radical grace rather than its judgment?

Lord of all, you are the judge and redeemer of Creation! Open our minds and hearts to share your radical love and grace! Amen