July 12, 2009 Sermon

Law vs. Faith
Galatians 2:11-19

I found the following story on a web site entitled batteredsheep.com. I cannot verify it but, sadly, it rings true to this pastor of twenty-four years experience.

A family loved their church. They had belonged to it for about ten years. Most of their friends came from the congregation. They were growing spiritually. But the father and mother (we'll call them J. S. and A. S.) began to have misgivings about the pastor. He publicly criticized families that did not home-school their children. He became hostile when anybody questioned his interpretation of the Bible. And he staunchly supported R. P. R. P. had a strategy for church families to make money on E-Bay. Step one: put any old thing up for auction and start the bidding at one cent. Step two: bid on each other's items, driving up their prices, and drop out in time for somebody not from the church to “win” the bidding.

This fake bidding is called shilling. Shilling is a federal crime. J. S. and A. S. participated in their church's secret shilling network for a time. But they started feeling guilty about it. They researched it, learned the truth, and approached their pastor, who had also participated in the shilling. He accused them of creating discord in the church. He ordered them to follow the procedure for reconciliation found in Matthew 18 by going straight to R. P. and confessing their “sin” against him! Confused, they approached the elders. But the elders closed ranks against the S. family. At a meeting with the pastor and R. P. (the E-Bay tactician), the elders handed J. and A. S. a written resolution that unanimously stated their finding that their church had done nothing wrong on E-Bay. And since the elders all agreed, and since the pastor could cite Bible passages that, if read in the narrowest possible way, seemed to support them, they were right and the S. family was “in error”!

Later in that meeting A. S. began a sentence with, “We feel...” but the pastor cut her off. "You said we! You are speaking as the covenantal head of your family!" He added that she was in rebellion and that if she didn't repent, she would destroy her marriage and her family and that she was the cause of all their trouble. Perhaps you cannot believe a church could behave this way. Perhaps you believe it possible, but only in a more conservative church. In fact, this happened in a Presbyterian Church—though not from our exact denomination. (We are a PCUSA church; this happened in a PCA church, for those of you who care and understand the differences.)

Legalism kills. The Apostle Paul said so in the passage from Galatians we read today. The Law kills. Faith brings life. Faith brings life here and now, and faith brings eternal life. The Law of God has a critical place in the Christian life and in the church. But when the Law supplants faith it becomes legalism. I will say it again. Legalism kills. Faith brings life. Keep the faith.

Paul wrote Galatians late in his career. Years before he had passed through a region in Turkey called Galatia, encouraging the Christian churches there. Time passed. His next known interaction with the Galatians came when he wrote them. It was the angriest of Paul's New Testament letters. Every other Pauline letter started with praises for the recipients. Paul always thanked God for the churches' faith. He always praised their perseverance and their good works. Not this time. Galatians begins with harsh criticism and self-defense. Paul had learned that the Galatians had wandered off the reservation and he meant to bring them back. How, exactly, had they misbehaved? They had become legalists.

The Galatians had listened to a group that plagued Paul throughout his work: the Judaisers. It all went back to the origins of Christianity. Jesus was a Jew. So were most of his earliest followers. Some of those Jewish Christians believed that while anybody, from any ethnic and/or religious background, could become Christians, they would also have to become Jews. They would have to obey the Law of God as found in the Old Testament. Non-Jewish men who wanted to worship Jesus would have to get circumcised. Everybody would have to observe the Sabbath, the festivals and all the rest of it.

Paul was a Jew. Actually, he was a Pharisee. He was trained in the Jewish Law. He had spent his early career zealously defending that Law against all threats—including Christianity. But once he became a Christian he changed his tune about the Law. He still followed it. But he believed the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that non-Jewish Christians were not bound by the Law. Jesus had taken this position in fierce and repeated arguments with the Pharisees. The Law still stood. Jews still needed to observe it. It had its uses for Christians. But Christianity stands or falls on faith, not law. We do not behave to earn God's love. God has already proven his love for us in Christ's death for people who break God's law, people like you and me.

Paul gave an example of how the law can kill the spirit. Years before Cephas (another name for Peter) had met Paul in Antioch for a conference on how to spread the Gospel. At first, Peter had sat down to eat with Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians. But when a delegation from Jerusalem sent by James, Jesus' half-brother, arrived, Peter stopped eating with Gentiles. (Many Jews believed the Law prohibited them from eating with “unclean sinners”, that is, non-Jews who did not obey the letter of the Law.) Paul called Peter a hypocrite. After all, Peter had widely reported a dream God sent him, in which all kinds of food came down out of heaven on a sheet. A voice told him to eat, for God had created all of it. Peter came to understand this as a call to take the Gospel to all kinds of people. Now, however, he would eat only with Jews. Paul was upset that the Galatians were falling for the same kind of legalistic hypocrisy.

Paul reminded the Galatians that he was an expert on the Jewish law. “Yet we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” What an extraordinary statement for a Pharisee to make! Justification means getting in line with God, getting into the place God wants us to be. Paul said that being good little boys and girls does not get us in with God. Only faith in Jesus Christ does that. Legalism kills. Imagine Peter, the famous Apostle who had walked intimately with Jesus, visiting the church at Antioch. He would have been a rock star. The Christians would have imitated his every move. But one move he made was to change tables, refusing to eat with Gentile Christians once his fellow Jewish Christians arrived from the Home Office. When our daughter entered junior high she made new friends. She stopped hanging out with some of her elementary school friends. She wanted to change tables at lunch but hesitated for weeks. Once she finally did change, her old friends said a few nasty things to get back at her.

Our daughter's old friends were not bad kids. They were human beings who felt rejected. And that is precisely the point. When Peter stopped eating with Gentile Christians he killed a part of the spirit in that church. He allowed the legalistic party, the Judaisers, to guide his behavior. Paul recognized the threat this represented was far greater than discord in the lunch room. He saw the underlying principle: legalism kills. Faith brings life. Keep the faith.

We get right with God through faith in Jesus Christ as our risen savior. That faith brings us life here and now, and it brings us eternal life. When we live in faith, grace and forgiveness flow. The church experiences new life. Last Monday our elders held a special meeting. According to Presbyterian law, when the elders hold a special meeting they cannot discuss anything beyond whatever was clearly specified in the call for that meeting. Last Monday the call specified that the elders would receive the monthly financial report and nothing more. The elders took about ten minutes to deal with the financial report. Then they adjourned, and sat around the table for another half hour, no longer officially meeting, you see. But they spent those thirty minutes deciding how to follow through on the excellent input you had given us at the brainstorming meeting the previous Tuesday. The elders will use those ideas to grow our church and its ministry. Grace, peace, healing and more will flow because they did not allow the law to stop them from doing what God called them to do.

Contrast this behavior with the legalistic response in that other church to members who had a problem with the criminal misuse of E-Bay. But make no mistake: this church, its pastor and its members do not have a perfect track record. We have behaved legalistically. We have harmed brothers and sisters. We have sinned. Every person and every church does. Let us therefore ask God for forgiveness, and then let us move forward. Let us do what we can to promote faith and grace. I eagerly await the outcome of our brainstorming process. The elders created an ad hoc committee of three to follow through with all that input. Please join me in praying for those folks. Let them receive guidance from the Holy Spirit of God, and let us in turn be guided by them. Finally, when an elder or deacon asks you to consider helping to make one of those ideas become reality, say yes if at all possible.

We all need to see the Good News of the Gospel shining in our lives. We need to believe that Jesus Christ died, that he rose from the dead, and that he offers us life. We need to keep the faith. Legalism kills. Faith brings life.