June 17, 07   Sermon # 1 on Galatians

For the next four weeks, we will be reading the Letter of Paul to the Galatians.   Our starting point today is the situation that Paul left behind in Jerusalem.  He had been there for the first church “council”.  We would like to imagine that this was a peaceful gathering of spirit driven and like-minded disciples of Jesus.  It was not.  Paul was up against the “circumcision Party,” who wanted the Gentiles to prove their faith by accepting the Jewish religion with all its practices.  But Paul wins the day with a compromise from the Jerusalem leaders that allowed the gentiles to participate in the church without circumcision and the practice of the law—without becoming Jewish, so to speak.  After Paul went home the trouble began.  Paul had shamed these guys, the so called circumcision party. They began to lobby the leaders of Jerusalem and probably to try to wreck vengeance on Paul. They wanted revenge and their best hope was to have the Jerusalem leaders reverse the compromise they had reached with Paul and to insist on the necessity of circumcision for Gentiles. They had a distinct advantage.   Scripture was on their side.  Once Paul, Barnabas and Peter had left Jerusalem, they began lobbying James and John.  Presumably their argument was that orthodoxy had been desecrated by the compromise with Paul and that nowhere does the Bible say that the Gentiles get a free pass.  And it looks like they won, because shortly after Peter got back to Antioch he got orders from James of Jerusalem, to break communion with the uncircumcised gentiles. Peter caved and here is the first breach in the Christian communion; the compromise reached with Paul in Jerusalem was directly revoked and even Peter and Barnabas succumbed to the false brethren. 

All this sounds familiar to anyone who keeps up with church news.  The question of who gets to sit at the table, the threat of breaking communion over disputes of orthodoxy, the question of the authority of the Bible.  Our present crisis in the Christian denominations only appears to be about sexuality, but the real issue is the authority of the bible.  Throughout history, there have always been two sides, those who understand Scripture to be a set of commands to be followed without question and those who like Paul, bring in life experience and reason to determine the authority of the Bible. 

This Church building was less than ten years old, when the bible wars appeared on its doorstep.   During the 1850’s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding.  The authority of scripture was the issue.  Slave owners had almost all of the old and New Testaments on their side which gave every indication that slave holding was the will of God.  All the abolitionists could point to was the passage from Galatians where it says in Christ there is no slave or free. Once the Civil war broke out, there were fist fights on Church property and the very survival of Nativity church was at stake.  The only way to save Nativity was to forbid discussion of the civil war entirely.

Here we are in the 21^st century.  We look back to the first century and wonder how the question of circumcision could have been a burning question.  We look back to the 19^th century and wonder how slavery could have been such a burning question. So how is that when we look back on those arguments for slavery based on the Bible that everybody today whether conservative, moderate, or liberal sees them as wrong.

The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to everybody, well just about everybody, through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired by a homestead in “old Washington”, and, of course, through the horrific Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of Bible wars once again. My point is not that we should not read the Bible and I’m sure that if there is going to be a war about the Bible, most of us would stay home.  Let me quote N. T. Wright.  He is a bishop, a scripture scholar, and a noted conservative in the Anglican church:

“…the phrase “the authority of scripture” can only make Christian sense if it is short hand for the “authority of the triune God exercised somehow through scripture”.

My point is not that we should give up the authority of scripture, but that we should give up oversimplifying.  We should struggle, really struggle, like Saint Paul did who refused to force his experience of God in Christ into the frame of his previous understanding of Scripture.  Instead he felt the authority of the triune God so deeply that he began to read and reread and reinterpret all of the Bible.  In prayer, he re-discovered that the Scripture was a prophecy that revealed Christ in ways that he had never seen before—and could not have seen before. In short, we would not have the New Testament as Scripture if men like Paul and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had not been willing to obey the living God and discover in their own experience that God was speaking directly to their own hearts.