Taking pride in Christ's cross

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: 

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.

I am myself

Texts:  1 John 3.1-7; Luke 24.36-48

When, in Luke’s version of the story, the risen Jesus first appears to his closest friends and companions, they are not entirely convinced that he is Jesus, the man they had known and loved.  At first they think he is a ghost, some kind of other-worldly apparition who has come to harm them.  They start to believe only after Jesus has said, ‘Look, I am not a ghost, I am myself’ and invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and his feet. A few moments later he eats some fish in the presence, again to show that he is himself, ‘in the flesh’ as it were.  This story, and the one before it about the encounter on the road to Emmaus, have always intrigued me.  Not because of their apparently miraculous elements (I have never really struggled with the idea that God can do miracles) but because they model for us that rather paradoxical process by which Christian selves become yet more themselves by dying to themselves.  So, that is what I should like to talk about this morning: becoming who you are by letting go of who you are in order to become a new self that is like the risen Christ.

According to Luke’s story, Jesus was not always himself.  Which is not to say that he was not recognisable as himself.  His name was Jesus, he was a son to his mother and a brother to his siblings.  He grew up in Nazareth and learned a trade, which he then used to support his family.   Everyone who knew him over a period of years could have identified him as himself, even if they had not seen him for some time.  Even after his baptism by John in the Jordan, even after Jesus left his home town in pursuit of a new and dangerous vocation, Jesus was recognisably Jesus.  And yet.  And yet Jesus had not yet become entirely himself.  Even at the point of his death on the cross, Jesus was not yet what God had promised he would be.  He was not yet the risen one, who could shake off the power of sin, evil and death.  He was not yet the new kind of human being that the disciples encounter in our story: a flesh and blood person who could nevertheless appear and disappear as though he were no longer subject to the powers of time and space.  For much of Luke’s story, then, Jesus is not yet himself in the sense of having become who God had destined him to be. 

Crucially, in the story, Jesus is only able to become truly himself by letting go of a whole heap of cherished dreams about his future, some originating in his own imagination, and some in the imagination of others.  His mother, being a Jewish mother, probably hoped that Jesus would become a successful lawyer or rabbi.  She, and he, had to let go off that dream.  His friends and companions hoped that Jesus would become a political leader, a leader who could oust the Romans and restore the fortunes of Israel.  They, and he, had to let go of that plan.  And from the story of the garden of Gethsemane, we can surmise that Jesus himself would really have preferred to live rather than to die, to retire quietly to some regional synagogue perhaps, rather than to suffer the wrath of the Jewish Council.  Yet, in the end, he makes a crucial decision which makes all the difference.  ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ he says.  He says that to God, his Father.  And by that decision he lets go of his own hopes and dreams in favour of his Father’s hopes and dreams, which enables God to complete the process of his becoming.  By this death, Jesus becomes the Christ, the one anointed by God to bring a new kind of life in the world, a life so new that most of us still have trouble coming to terms with what it all means.

But that is how it is for all of us, as well.  We shall never be truly ourselves until we are able to let go of ourselves—the usual hopes and dreams planted in us by family, friends, and media—grasping, instead, the self that God wills and promises for us, the self that is Christ.  The Christ-self, as the 1^st letter of John tells us, is ‘righteous’.  Not ‘righteous’ in the sense of a self-interested hiding away from the rest of the world or a sitting in judgement upon it.  No, the Christ-self is righteous in the sense that Jesus was ‘righteous’—an engaged embodiment of the mercy of God, a tough kind of love that is centred on other people and refuses to simply abandon them to the powers of death, despair or banality.   According to John, we shall never be entirely ourselves until we are like the risen Christ, the new human being, the revelation of what God intends for humanity in general.  ‘When he appears,’ says John’ we shall be like him’.  This is God’s promise, but like all God’s promises, it is not a promise that can be fulfilled apart from the choices we make.  God created us for freedom.  To become who we are, we must choose the path that Christ would choose.

Ego eimi autos . . .  I am myself.  That is what the risen Christ said to his disciples.  And we shall only be able to say that ourselves if we are prepared to do what Jesus did, to take our baptism into his death seriously as a very real dying and a rising.  We shall be ourselves when, by faith, we have allowed Christ to take away the fear of what others may think, and the desire to conform to all that is conventional or common-sense.  We shall be ourselves when we are prepared to risk both security and sense for the sake of a gospel of outrageous love.  We shall be ourselves when we stop believing that there is nothing we can do to transform this crazy world of economic and scientific rationalism.  We shall be ourselves when prayer has become a more familiar habit that watching TV or surfing the internet.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to attend to the needs of others (‘needs’, note that, not ‘wants’), even if that means putting aside what we think we might need for ourselves.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’.  Now, I am very aware of not yet being myself. And you, I know, are aware of it too.  But in faith I believe that Christ will complete the work that he began when I was baptised.  He will do it for you to.  If only you will surrender.  If only you will let go.