Text: Galatians 6.7-16
There are many things in life which people like you and I take pride in. Our work. Our kids and grand kids. Academic or sporting achievements. Our gardens or our mechanical skills (I stand in awe of anyone with mechanical skills!) But today I'd like to reflect on what it means to take pride in the cross of Jesus Christ. In the passage we read from Galatians, Paul says this:
May I never boast of anything save the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the life of the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision in anything; but a new creation is everything! (6.14, 15)
What's
Paul on about here? What is this concern
he has with those who take pride in their circumcision more than in the cross
of Jesus? And what value could this
rather bizarre and ancient controversy have for our contemporary life in faith? Well, I'd like to have a go at answering
those questions, but we'll need a little background first.
When Paul wrote to the Galatian churches in 54 or 55 of the first century, he did so with a clear purpose in mind. Apparently some of the folk in the region had begun to teach that one had to obey the Jewish law in order to find salvation. In particular, these teachers encouraged their followers to be circumcised, as a sign of their belonging to that community, the community of the Jews and of the Jewish law. Paul's letter is a serious attempt to expose the futility of these claims.
For
Paul, you see, the Christian gospel proclaims a complete and permanent freedom
from the Law of the Jews through the crucifixion of Jesus. The Law, he argued, is double edged. It is good in that it reveals the ethical
standards of God for human beings. And these standards are very important. But the law is also bad because not one of us
is able to entirely obey the Law. The Law functions, in fact, to condemn us: to sentence absolutely everyone to death as
people unworthy of a holy God. Paul's
good news chimes in at precisely this point.
Through the law I am condemned to death.
But if, through baptism, I die with Christ himself, I then also rise
with Christ, leaving the power of the Law for condemnation behind me. Through the living Spirit of Christ, I am
enabled to participate in a new life of freedom with Christ which is no longer
subject to the crushing weight of the Law.
Now this is a seriously climactic move! In one fell swoop, which has reverberated through the ages, Paul dispenses with the religion of law and social status; in its place he urges us to embrace a spirituality of death and re-birth in Christ. Can you hear the difference there? Can you discern how the landscape has changed forever?
Let me reframe this whole discussion by bringing it into the present. We ourselves live in a very religious society. Karl Marx rightly said that the main concern of religion is social control. Each person is raised to their allotted path in life, pre-destined to be bigger, better and more worthy than the generation before. The religious person is mainly concerned with whether or not they're 'doing the right thing' in the eyes of their community, their elders or their peer group. The religious person gains self-esteem and a sense of purpose from the positive feedback of that community. So, as long as you do as you are told, you’ll thrive. That’s the promise, at least!
But religion fails, of course, when a person finds themselves either unable or unwilling to live up to the goals and expectations their community has allotted them. Let me share with you a personal example. From a very young age I was told, by a complex system of media and gossip, that I will have made it in life if I were able to buy a large house in the suburbs and drive a nice car—if, in fact, I were able to join the middle-class. The funny thing is, that when I went to university on a scholarship and started hanging out with middle-class folk for the first time, I found that they weren’t very happy. Many of them, even as students, already had nice cars and were well on their way to owning their own homes. Yet they felt a constant pressure to do even better than that: to own more, to have a better job, a better body and more prestigious credit-card than the other bloke, to have travelled more extensively and squeezed in more ‘experiences’ than the other person. Even at University, many of the people I met were already being crushed under the weight of those expectations. Some of them folded under that weight and thought themselves utter failures. Others gritted their teeth and set out to be happy in the terms their parents and their community had allotted for them. But they, and most of us, never get there. We never become good enough, or affluent enough, or good-looking enough, or credentialed enough, to be happy or content.
Paul suggests that if we really do want to move on from that point, we need to let go of religious concerns, the laws and concerns of our society and culture, and embrace the life of the Spirit. Now, ‘letting go’ is like a dying, and that's why Paul is forever talking about crucifixion with Christ. Note that Paul does not suggest, as some preachers still do, that the death of Jesus is able to achieve our salvation apart from what we ourselves do in response. It is not simply the fact that Jesus dies in our place that is able to save us from the terrible weight of religion, but also our willingness to participate in that death by dying ourselves. In chapter 2 of Galatians, verses 19 and 20, Paul says:
At that moment, according to Paul, salvation arrives as from another place. When all our own achievement comes to nought and nothingness, Christ arises to face us with a word of surprising grace: you are forgiven, you are loved, you are free . . . But I hesitate at this point. I am reluctant to talk of grace too quickly. I suspect, you see, that many of us have been taught about a rather cheap kind of grace, a grace that arrives apart from the gospel injunction to take up one's cross and follow after the way of Jesus, a grace that tries to skip over the necessary experience of emptiness and void which John of the Cross called the 'dark night of the soul'. Don’t get me wrong, grace is real, it is powerful, and it is freely given. But it is certainly not cheap. In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to lay ourselves bare. We must let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule. Then, and only then, when we have been stripped bare of every skerrick of cultural capital . . . then we may be ready to receive that mystery we call grace.
And so I ask you today: what is the circumcision in your flesh which you rely on for your salvation? Is it your attendance at worship? Is it the fact that you're heterosexual rather than homosexual? Is it your generosity or charity towards others? Is it your self-effacing nature? Is it that fact that you've worked hard to provide for your family, or remained faithful to your spouse? Or is it, more nakedly, your caste or position in the social pecking-order? Whatever it is, hear this word of God today: 'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!'
This sermon was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in 2004.
When Paul wrote to the Galatian churches in 54 or 55 of the first century, he did so with a clear purpose in mind. Apparently some of the folk in the region had begun to teach that one had to obey the Jewish law in order to find salvation. In particular, these teachers encouraged their followers to be circumcised, as a sign of their belonging to that community, the community of the Jews and of the Jewish law. Paul's letter is a serious attempt to expose the futility of these claims.
Now this is a seriously climactic move! In one fell swoop, which has reverberated through the ages, Paul dispenses with the religion of law and social status; in its place he urges us to embrace a spirituality of death and re-birth in Christ. Can you hear the difference there? Can you discern how the landscape has changed forever?
Let me reframe this whole discussion by bringing it into the present. We ourselves live in a very religious society. Karl Marx rightly said that the main concern of religion is social control. Each person is raised to their allotted path in life, pre-destined to be bigger, better and more worthy than the generation before. The religious person is mainly concerned with whether or not they're 'doing the right thing' in the eyes of their community, their elders or their peer group. The religious person gains self-esteem and a sense of purpose from the positive feedback of that community. So, as long as you do as you are told, you’ll thrive. That’s the promise, at least!
But religion fails, of course, when a person finds themselves either unable or unwilling to live up to the goals and expectations their community has allotted them. Let me share with you a personal example. From a very young age I was told, by a complex system of media and gossip, that I will have made it in life if I were able to buy a large house in the suburbs and drive a nice car—if, in fact, I were able to join the middle-class. The funny thing is, that when I went to university on a scholarship and started hanging out with middle-class folk for the first time, I found that they weren’t very happy. Many of them, even as students, already had nice cars and were well on their way to owning their own homes. Yet they felt a constant pressure to do even better than that: to own more, to have a better job, a better body and more prestigious credit-card than the other bloke, to have travelled more extensively and squeezed in more ‘experiences’ than the other person. Even at University, many of the people I met were already being crushed under the weight of those expectations. Some of them folded under that weight and thought themselves utter failures. Others gritted their teeth and set out to be happy in the terms their parents and their community had allotted for them. But they, and most of us, never get there. We never become good enough, or affluent enough, or good-looking enough, or credentialed enough, to be happy or content.
Paul suggests that if we really do want to move on from that point, we need to let go of religious concerns, the laws and concerns of our society and culture, and embrace the life of the Spirit. Now, ‘letting go’ is like a dying, and that's why Paul is forever talking about crucifixion with Christ. Note that Paul does not suggest, as some preachers still do, that the death of Jesus is able to achieve our salvation apart from what we ourselves do in response. It is not simply the fact that Jesus dies in our place that is able to save us from the terrible weight of religion, but also our willingness to participate in that death by dying ourselves. In chapter 2 of Galatians, verses 19 and 20, Paul says:
Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.What saves us, according to Paul, is our willingness to surrender every religious rule or aspiration that may have pushed us along, every socially-constructed behaviour or symbol which may have defined our sense of worthiness up until now. Like Christ on the cross, in our baptism we are stripped of any status or power we may have possessed as a result of our conformity to religious rules or socially defined paths towards status or achievement. We acknowledge, in a rather horrifying moment of clarity, that the sum total of all these things is nothing. They are unable to save us, to liberate us from either guilt or the ever-present spectre of failure. They are unable to fill the void, to bring contentment, to make us whole. The American singer John Cougar Mellencamp put it well a few years ago when he sang 'There's a hole in my heart that I can't seem to fill/ I do charity work when I believe in the cause but my soul it troubles me still'.
At that moment, according to Paul, salvation arrives as from another place. When all our own achievement comes to nought and nothingness, Christ arises to face us with a word of surprising grace: you are forgiven, you are loved, you are free . . . But I hesitate at this point. I am reluctant to talk of grace too quickly. I suspect, you see, that many of us have been taught about a rather cheap kind of grace, a grace that arrives apart from the gospel injunction to take up one's cross and follow after the way of Jesus, a grace that tries to skip over the necessary experience of emptiness and void which John of the Cross called the 'dark night of the soul'. Don’t get me wrong, grace is real, it is powerful, and it is freely given. But it is certainly not cheap. In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to lay ourselves bare. We must let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule. Then, and only then, when we have been stripped bare of every skerrick of cultural capital . . . then we may be ready to receive that mystery we call grace.
And so I ask you today: what is the circumcision in your flesh which you rely on for your salvation? Is it your attendance at worship? Is it the fact that you're heterosexual rather than homosexual? Is it your generosity or charity towards others? Is it your self-effacing nature? Is it that fact that you've worked hard to provide for your family, or remained faithful to your spouse? Or is it, more nakedly, your caste or position in the social pecking-order? Whatever it is, hear this word of God today: 'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!'
This sermon was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in 2004.
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