Credentials and Testimonies

When the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians, he did not know we would be reading it today. He didn't even know who would be reading it - for sure. This letter did not go to a particular church or a particular town, it went to a region we now call Asia Minor and he expected it to be passed from church to church, a kind of general letter for the attention of a wide group of people. In this sense, it must have had particular significance to him, since he wanted to reach as many people as possible. To emphasize just how important he thought it was, he took the pen in his own hand to underscore how he felt about what he was writing. "See what big letters I write!" he says, probably because he suffered from poor eyesight and usually relied on a scribe to write his letters for him.




We need, if we can, to feel that same sense of urgency when we read it today, and in order to do that, we need to ask ourselves, "in what ways do we resemble these Galatians? What were they doing Paul considered so disturbing, and are we doing the same thing?"



The problem seems simple enough: the Galatians, being gentiles, had never followed the rigors of the Mosaic Law: in particular, the practice of circumcision. Some body had come to them, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, or even a gentile who had become a Christian - such people were called Judaizers - and explained to these men that it was necessary for them to obey the Jewish Law if they were to become full-fledged Christians. That meant they must be circumcised.



Now Paul was born both a Jew and a Roman citizen: he had dual citizenship if you will. He had lived by the Mosaic law, including circumcision, and he could brag about his righteousness as well as any other Jew. But Paul knew something else. His righteousness had never satisfied him. As hard as he tried, he could not get good enough to face God with clean hands and a pure heart, and he knew it. His relief came when he meant Christ on the road to Damascus, intent on going there to seek out converts to Christ and kill them.



At first blush, this hardly seems like a contemporary issue for us. How are we supposed to get instruction from this non-issue? If Paul was that upset, shouldn’t we be too?



I think so, but we have to read carefully to see what Paul was really upset about. It wasn’t the circumcision issue itself. I don’t think Paul cared one way or the other. But he did care passionately about what getting circumcised signified to these pseudo-Christians. For them it was a mark of being true Christians, the guarantee that they were saved if you will. And to Paul’s mind it shifted the emphasis from faith in Christ to faith in how well we obeyed the law.



Put in a nutshell, it was trusting in having the right belief rather than faith in Jesus.



Paul tells the Galatians he can match their righteousness with his own record. Born a Jew. Raised in the Jewish faith. Taught by the Pharisees. Zealous in his observance of the Mosaic Law, his record is unblemished. That’s his credentials, if you will. But what mattered was not what he did but what God did. God erased the sin and guilt by sending us Jesus Christ.



How does this speak to any issues we might have today? Well, stop and think about what you consider important in your religious life. Where do you put your faith and trust? We say we have accepted Jesus, but that says easy and does hard. The truth is, we don’t trust Jesus, we trust behaving ourselves. Work hard, be good, and God will take care of you. God helps those who help themselves. God won’t put more on you than you can bear. Love your neighbor as yourself. You know the list. I won’t argue with it. They’re all good. Notice Paul doesn’t argue with such rules either. He argues with the motive - the trusting part, the part that says “If I do these things, I’ll be all right.”



Well, he did all those things, and he wasn’t all right. And we’ve done all those things, and we weren’t all right either. I remember a remark an elder from my church made when we discovered our beautiful building had become infested with termites. He was incredulous. This was impossible. He could understand termites attacking a house of ill repute, but not a church! If we put our faith in living good, clean lives, we are making a short-cut to righteousness. We are saying, in affect, we trust our own ability to save ourselves. I remember Roger, a fellow seminary student, who was genuinely puzzled by all the fuss over the Ten Commandments. He had never broken any of them. They were the rules, you lived by them, and you had a clean bill of spiritual health.



Jesus seemed to think it was not that easy. “Do not kill” - “He who hates his brother has already killed him.” (Matthew 5:21-22) “Do not commit adultery” but if you lust after another - (Jesus says a man lusting after a woman, but I see no reason to confine it to men alone!) You have committed adultery already in your heart.(Matthew 5:27-28) Paul doesn’t tell us how much he struggled with obeying the law. That he had struggles we know from a cryptic remark he once made in his second letter to the Corinthians - “I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan sent to buffet me” (12:7) We don’t know what it was, what he does tell us is that we all are afflicted with such problems. He told the Romans “There is no one righteous; no, not one:” and he proceeds to describe us in humiliating detail. And it’s not all about sex either. That’s hardly the big sin in his eyes. The big one is our assumed righteousness, our pride in our goodness, our smug self-righteousness - the kind of thing my seminary friend Roger was demonstrating - that’s the big one, and Paul knew whereof he spoke, because he considered himself first among sinners on that score.



The book of Galatians is Paul’s testimony, if you will, his attempt to redirect our eyes and our thoughts from concentrating on laws we don’t break, to the inner reaches of our hearts where our ungovernable wills run riot. He does this, not by recounting his stellar record as a good man, but by placing before us the incredible power of Jesus Christ who met him at the very moment when he - Paul - was determined to destroy all traces that Jesus had ever lived! It’s this story, not a book of instructions, that Paul believes will bring relief and healing.



When I consider the world in which I live, I am struck by how amazing we are, how no miracle seems too impossible for us to accomplish. Yet how miserable we are. We have countless rules to guide us, yet even those who obey all the rules can still be miserable. Termites still come. We talk a good talk about rules and regulations to make sure that we will be safe - from oil spills in the Gulf, for instance, or explosions in coal mines. Yet we still find ways to get around those rules for the sake of profit. And we use those rules to justify ourselves. “We didn’t do anything illegal.” And in the end, we have only succeeded in proving that our true god is not love, or goodness, or truth, but expediency and profit.



That’s what Paul is talking about. That’s what has upset him so he must write in Big Letters! And that’s why we need to listen to him so carefully today. The credentials of a Christian is our story - the story of how we have been met by the Christ, and our lives been changed. We must give up trusting our ideas about being good, and turn instead to the Christ who makes us good in God’s eye - not because we deserve it, but because we are loved.