July 19, 2009 Sermon

How Do We Receive the Spirit?
Galatians 3:1-9

We receive the Holy Spirit by believing in Jesus Christ. That's it. That's the whole sermon. I'm done. Well, perhaps not. The Apostle Paul wrote the words from Galatians we just read. He said the same thing, though in the form of a rhetorical question: “Does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?” “Believing what you heard,” would be the correct answer. But what have we heard?

I heard President Obama got caught staring at a pretty girl during the recent G8 summit meeting. In fact, I saw a photo of him looking her way. On the other political hand, I heard Sarah Palin posed for pictures while wearing a bathing suit and holding a rifle. I heard Michael Jackson wore a prosthetic nose and it came off during a concert. In fact, I have heard many, many things in my nearly fifty laps around the sun. So few of them prove true I have become cynical. That photo of President Obama lies. A video of the same moment shows him looking down and back to grasp his wife's hand in order to help her down some stairs. The girl just happened by at the moment. Now French President Sarkozy, standing to one side, openly stared at her as she walked past. Has he gotten away with that because he is French? (Another rhetorical question, for which the answer would be yes.)

We receive the Spirit through faith. Paul wrote this elegant summary in the midst of a passionate letter to a church that had fallen off its faith foundation. Our chapter opens with words that sound irate even in English translation. In their original Greek they were raw and bitter. Here is my attempt to render them into language we would understand. “You stupid Galatians! Who brainwashed you? I preached the truth about Jesus Christ's resurrection to your very faces. Let me ask you just one question: Did you receive the Spirit by being good little boys and girls, or by believing what you heard? Are you really this idiotic? After starting by receiving the Holy Spirit, do you now wallow in sin?” And so forth.

Give Paul his due. He had earned the right to write so angrily. He had put his life on the line—repeatedly—to preach the Gospel. Some years before he had wandered into Galatia, a region in central Turkey. He spent considerable time and effort encouraging the churches there. He corrected false teachings, particularly about the place of the Jewish law in the Christian life. Recall that Christianity sprang from Judaism. Jesus had told his followers he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Jesus and Paul agreed that keeping the Law was a terrific idea. So did certain people who followed Paul through Galatia and taught their own slant on the law. But they disagreed on why Christians should keep the law.

Paul's opponents had a name: the Judaizers. They believed that in order to become Christians all people, no matter what their ethnic or religious backgrounds, had first to become Jews. As part of this conversion to Judaism, these new Christians would need to keep the Jewish law. They saw following Jesus as the fulfillment of Judaism. After all, the Jewish prophets had predicted the rise of the Messiah. Jesus was a Jew. Why should Christians keep the law? For the Judaizers the answer was that a covenantal relationship with God depended on obedience. Obeying the law satisfied God's justice and earned them, they thought, a safe place in God's heart.

Paul was a Jew, a Pharisee as a matter of fact. Yet he had received a revelation from the Holy Spirit that told him Christians did not need to become slavish followers of the Jewish law. They had, instead, to believe in the resurrected Jesus as the Messiah. Why should Christians keep the law? For Paul the answer was we should obey God's law out of gratitude for the salvation Jesus Christ has already purchased for us on the cross. Faith comes first, then Spirit, then obedience.

This may seem like an ancient argument with little application to today. When did somebody last urge you to do a better job at keeping the Law of God as found in Leviticus? When did somebody last get on you about the unlawful way you keep your ox, or for failing properly to drain the meat before you barbeque? But try asking this question, instead: How do we get right with God? Do we get where God wants us to be by following the rules or by believing in his crucified and risen Son as our Lord and Savior? We do not always behave as though we know the correct answer. And because we do not, we hamper both our faith and the Spirit it brings us.

We receive the Holy Spirit by believing in Jesus Christ. Paul uses Abraham to hammer home his point. The very Old Testament law the Judaizers promoted tells Abraham's story. God picked him for no known reason to become father of a nation. Before Abraham there was no such thing as a Jew (or Hebrew). He came from territory we now label part of Iraq. But when God called him, Abraham believed. “Go over that killing desert to your west,” God told Abraham (I paraphrase), “and I will give you the land you will find there. It will produce richly for you. You will have descendants beyond counting.” But before Abraham could do such a thing, before he could obey, he had to believe. Paul quoted Genesis, again part of that law: “Abraham believed, and God reckoned his belief as righteousness.”

Legalistic Jews like those Judaizers thought the path to righteousness, the path to holiness, was via obedience to the law. But their own law stated that the path was via faith. Paul added one more point. In the law, again in Genesis, he found the promise that all the Gentiles would find blessing through Abraham. Abraham's great legacy, Paul concluded, was his faith in God. Through faith he received blessing. By following his example, Christians too can find blessing through faith. We receive the Holy Spirit through faith.

I heard an elder of this church say this week that we Christians waste an awful lot of time arguing over the fine points of our faith when people outside the churches are dying to believe what we believe. I agree that this is literally true. A year has passed since I served as a commissioner (or delegate) to the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s General Assembly. I have not fully gotten over the experience. We deliberated over an incredible list of things. We renamed a couple of offices in the headquarters. We solemnly pondered whether to change the word “sympathy” to the word “compassion” every time it appears in a fifty year-old document nobody reads any more. Or maybe it was the other way around. (After half an hour of committee time plus three minutes of whole assembly attention we voted “yes”.) We presumed to tell the President of the United States what to think on a whole range of issues. He was not alone. We declaimed also to the United Nations, congress, the World Council of Churches, the premier of China, the Prime Minister of Australia and Lord remembers who else. I am sure each recipient of one of these pronouncements gave it every second of attention it deserved.

Meanwhile our denomination lost over 46,000 members last year, a drop of two percent. If the PC(USA) were a for-profit corporation we would have had stimulus money and a government takeover forced down our collective throats. People are dying to know Jesus. People are dying to believe in him. People are literally dying to believe. We have the Spirit. It has come to us through faith in the risen Lord. Let us act like we do. I believe that is one kind of obedience God wants to see us produce.

August 3-6 we will hold our first Vacation Bible School in years. Please pray for the planning group, that they may offer a fun, appealing and spiritually effective event. They have gotten off to a positive start, but they can use all the help they can get. The only way this VBS can achieve its full potential is if we participate in it. No, even better: this VBS will grow the Spirit best only if not only we, but friends and neighbors we invite, participate in it. We bill it as being for all ages, including adults. Let us make it so. If you were to ask people who have participated in the life of the Northern Lakes Community Church since before we built a building to name their top ten NLCC events, I no doubt that every one of them would mention the VBS we used to do out on our property. Why do they recall it with such fondness? Because of the spirit of the thing, that's why. Almost everybody came. We ate together. We played together. We prayed together. Whether we knew it or not, we experienced the Holy Spirit together. Let's try that again, shall we?

And bring along somebody who does not attend a church. What are we afraid of? If we ask somebody the worst they can do is say no. They will not challenge us to a duel. Certainly inviting people to participate in a church event can get complicated. But we are all grown ups here (except for the youth and children, but they can ask other youth and children, thus keeping it all on the same level). VBS is the perfect way to introduce people to our congregation's distinctive culture and life. (If having a potluck picnic and Holy-Spirited activities while wearing shorts and oddly-decorated t-shirts does not say NLCC, what does?) I mean this in all seriousness. Any time I start to feel worried about the future of our church (because of finances or whatever) the Holy Spirit reminds me of all the spirited, caring, giving people we have.