Pentecost 7     11 July 2010    Galatians 4.1 – 5.1      Luke 10. 25-37

There is a person who I was recently struggling to understand; I was finding it difficult to get a grasp on their take on life and so, amongst exploring a few avenues, I thought that I would have a look and see if they had a Facebook page. They did. It didn’t say much about them but it did say that they like Christian Reconstructionism. I didn’t know what this was so I went to look at that source of all contemporary knowledge, Wikipedia.

Christian Reconstructionism affirms Calvinism, Theonomy, Postmillennialism, the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, (i.e. the Bible reveals a self-authenticating worldview and system of truth), a Decentralized political order and laissez-faire economics. Oh, I thought, this explains everything; and nothing. I was bamboozled. I realised that this person sees the world through some very thick doctrinal and ideological glasses. That is when they read the world, when they interpret people’s behaviour, and when they read scripture that they put on glasses through which everything is interpreted. And you can see from the density of these ideas by their title that the glasses are very thick and powerful when shaping what gets seen.

One of the things which has happened to Paul’s writings is that they have become subject to the putting on of doctrinal glasses; so that before we read Paul  we put on a lens, even sometimes multi-focal lenses, through which we read what he has to say; so that we give emphasis to some things he is saying, and in some cases give an unhealthy focus to one particular thing, completely ignoring or missing other things.

An example of this would be the Doctrine of Original Sin developed by St Augustine in the fifth century. This doctrine, which has been tremendously influential and destructive in the Western church and western society, giving us a profoundly degraded view of our humanity, is a based on a sub-clause in Paul’s letter to the Roman church. It’s not based on the heart of an argument that Paul is making but simply on an aside. But Augustine took it and developed an idea based upon it and the church developed a most immense and perverted super-structure based upon that. So that if we read scripture with the “Original Sin” glasses on we read our situation as fatally flawed from the very beginning. So one sub-clause, and we know that Paul loves sub-clauses, gets turned into a doctrine through which the understanding of what it means to be human gets read. Probably our distaste for Paul over the recent past is a result of too many preachers using too many pairs of strange and distorting glasses to read him. Many of these which have not enabled us to read Paul properly at all. So we have opted for the gospels which have less imagery in which we inclined to get entangled and sometimes strangled.

There are two sets of glasses which we might be inclined to don as we read this fourth chapter of the Letter to the Galatians. the first is a tendency towards supersessionism [I will explain]; the second is our notions of freedom; for us very much shaped by  post-enlightenment, post-French revolution, post-1960s ideas about what freedom is.

What we need to understand about this letter of Paul is the point in time at which he is writing. If we don’t do that we can profoundly misunderstand him. As we found when I read out my grandfather’s letter in the week we began to explore Galatians, that he would never have expected that his letter might being read out somewhere 107 years later, so with Paul. I think we can assume that he did not expect that this letter would still be being pawed over, nearly, 2,000 years later.

Some things we need to remember as we read Paul . He is not seeking to start a new religion. He was working within the Jewish faith; he still understood himself to be culturally and religiously a Jew. He is carrying on an argument within the Jewish tradition. He is doing what had always happened and still happens; that within Judaism there is a respectful and dynamic dialogue and perpetual quest to interpret  scripture in the light of experience and events. It’s a long and revered tradition within Judaism. It’s what we do in the church too. But we, being heirs of that break that eventually took place between the synagogue and followers of Jesus (Paul), are inclined to separate Paul out and read him as someone who is seeking to break and away from Judaism and in doing that to wrest the proper reading of scripture from Judaism. This is not so. But with our tacit acceptance that it’s OK to break away we are heirs of a church which has progressively fractured apart – especially over the last 500 years. Instead of engaging in respectful dialogue and being bonded around the table of Christ, so often when we have a disagreement over some doctrinal matter, one group chooses to fracture off in order to keep the faith “pure”.

What we hear Paul do in this passage is playfully explore the idea of Hagar and Sarah being like two covenants. Our tragedy is that we can be inclined to see the suggestion of two covenants through the lens of Christianity as successor of Judaism. This is echoed in our language of Old Testament and New Testament. It is quite probably the perspective many of us were given in Sunday School. As though all that is in the Old Testament is, unfortunately necessary but, somehow now defunct; superseded. Hence supersessionism – a doctrine which has infected the church. But this view is the seedbed of all sorts of arrogance and superiority rendering Judaism and its adherents, implicitly or explicitly, expendable. This is not what Paul is arguing – this is an intra-Jewish debate; as Jesus ministry also was a ministry to reform Judaism. But we have seen the appalling consequences of this profoundly flawed idea that Christianity has superseded Judaism in the last century. We need to take off these glasses, smash them, and try and read with new eyes.

I suppose the point at which it is helpful to look at the Hagar and Sarah imagery is this: For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. What Paul does to make his point is he starts to play with the story of Abraham and his two wives Hagar and Sarah and their sons Ishmael and Isaac. What he begins to do is to draw parallels; parallels between this ancient story, the story, turned into doctrine, which the missionaries were using to get the Galatians to undergo circumcision, and how Paul reads that story and the Galatians predicament.

What Paul is doing by employing allegory is the practice of using a story to reflect on present circumstances. We all do it some way or other. We can use scripture as the mirror or the sounding board against which we sound current events; we do it with history – people so often talk about history repeating itself – this event is like that past event; and we do it with situations in our own lives – often someone to whom we are telling a story will echo our story with a like-story. We play with meaning-laden tales. Paul is trying to reinforce to the Galatians the good news of freedom found in Christ by re-reading, re-telling the story of Abraham’s wives and their legacy – freedom and slavery. The missionaries who had come to the Galatians, after Paul had preached a gospel of radical grace, had preached a message of law and conformity by using the story of Abraham. Paul plays with the same story and says: no, this is a story about faith and freedom grounded in Abraham’s trust in the promise of God.

It’s important to note here that in Paul’s flagging that he is going to read the Hagar and Sarah story in an allegorical way alerts to us that he does not understand that scripture is meant to be read in some literal way. He sees it as meaning- making text which can be legitimately opened up in a variety of ways in order to enlighten  current circumstances. Allegory and, by implication, other symbolic ways of reading texts, are for him part of his tool kit as religious teacher. The tendency in the church to turn Paul’s playing with new ways of reading old texts into doctrine means that we have set his words in stone – in  a sense just repeating what he is arguing against.

Doctrine often seems to have the effect of being used weapon like, as some sort of waddy to corral people into a particular way of thinking. It’s a boundary marking device often. Paul indicates this in verse 17 where he says: they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them. It’s an obscure comment but it’s about power imbalance. Do you know this trick – children do it quite blatantly in the schoolyard but then we become more subtle about it. Someone invents a rule that excludes certain people. [blue eyes] When the rule makers have made the rule they, as it were, make much of themselves because they place themselves on the side of being on the right side of the rule. They become the moral arbiter. So what the missionaries who have insisted that the Galatians males be circumcised have done is they have made much of themselves in the Galatians’ eyes so that the Galatians envy them. These missionaries have described themselves as definitively right with God because they have fulfilled the law of circumcision. So the Galatians who have an interest in things religious respond, naturally, by saying to themselves we have to be like them. It’s a perfectly natural human response. It’s a trick which works on our human nature whether we are being sold more sexy cars or counterfeit religion. So Paul insists to the Galatians: For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

So what is this freedom of which Paul speaks. Our own ideas of freedom at this time in history in the western world are shaped profoundly by three things: 1. the Enlightenment; that philosophical awakening which started, probably in the renaissance, in which the individual became separated out from the collective: the family, the group. The Enlightenment separated the individual out from his fellows – maybe expressed most succinctly in the phrase of the French philosopher De Cartes – I think, therefore I am – the individual as solitary, sentient being. The free-thinking individual.

2. The French revolution gave us notions of equality, liberty and fraternity, and the idea of human rights – freedom from oppressive regimes of all kinds. Freedom from one group in society to oppress another.

3. And the 1960s gave us new ideas about what personal freedom is all about: freedom of thought, freedom of choice and conscience -which had for a long time been the territory of the church and to some extent the state; certainly the church and state in cahoots. It’s a freedom which has brought Christendom to an end. We are shaped profoundly be these freedoms.

But the freedom in which Paul encourages the Galatians to stand is a different freedom – and we misread Paul if we think what he is talking about is the way we have come to think about freedom. The freedom for which Paul argues is a liberty to stand unencumbered by others views of what might make us acceptable before God; it is a freedom to simply trust the promise of God which is created for us in the death of Christ. And this freedom found in Christ cuts through all of our categories; all of those markers we take which set us over and against each other; all our ways of defining ourselves as better or more acceptable than others; definitions which ultimately set us at enmity with others or in fear of them and their power over us. Christ is our peace. As he says in Ephesians: he has broken down the dividing walls which separate us from each other and from God. And so especially for the Galatians this freedom is freedom in the face of a message of religious exclusivity. It is a freedom to form and be real communities where barriers of nation or class or gender are overcome; this is freedom be God’s new people; to be the new creation; embodying the spirit of Christ in tangible ways; ways which bring all comers together in love and community. A freedom to embrace each other in both the joys and the brokenness of our human condition.

You probably feel that I go on a bit, a bit too much if the truth be known, about what the gospel is not. I suppose one of my deep concerns is that the church has lost its way. It has been very proscriptive. It has been concerned with being right; rather than being concerned about enabling its people to be loving; to embody Christ in their time. As we can see from this letter, and the agitation with which Paul writes, the difference between the church as genuine or counterfeit expression of the gospel is very fine. It might seem not unreasonable to require some membership rite to mark people’s belonging but when we begin to promote this as God’s measure of whether people belong or not then we get on to dangerous ground. We so easily place obstacles in each other’s ways. But when we find that we are known by God, not that we know God by our own efforts, but that we are known by God then we find ourselves in place of radical freedom where our human categories of division melt into the background.

In Paul’s writing we hear echo of the the longing of the prophet Jeremiah: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. This is our quest as Christ’s people. To embody the goodness and loving-kindness of God as shown is Christ in the way in which we shape our communities and be Christ’ people. May God give us joy and courage as we continue to seek to be this.

Andrew Boyle