What Grounds and Guides Us Now?
Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29
1 You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! 2 The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? 4 Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. 5 Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? 6 Just as Abraham "believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," 7 so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. 8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, "All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you." 9 For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.
23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.
I wonder what comes to mind for you when you hear the word disciplinarian? What do you picture? I wonder how you feel about hearing a people being called foolish?
Perhaps having these words so close together takes your heart and mind back to schoolyard days or another time when maybe some harsh voice made you feel fearful or small.
These cruel experiences we may have in our history are not what Paul claims God to be, not now nor in the past. But there are plenty Christians who DO see and speak of God as a kind of shaming taskmaster, and if we don’t reckon with or at least acknowledge our own stuff that inevitably comes up when we read a letter like this in Galatians, we are likely to get stuck in a similar understanding, to be bewitched by a spiritual culture that happily preys on our insecurities.
“Foolish” likely carries a weight of judgement in our ears, but the original word means something more like “misunderstanding.” In the same way that Jesus often spoke to the disciples, “do you still not understand?” Misunderstanding is simply part of human nature. I misunderstand all the time. I had a meeting this past week where I totally misunderstood some of the expectations. I’m not dumb, we just didn’t line up in our thinking.
Similarly, for this ancient context in which Paul is speaking, the word for disciplinarian probably means something different than what our modern minds picture. Here it describes a household servant who walks children back and forth to school. Synonyms include “guide” and “custodian.” The word describes a very specific job of care that one’s charges outgrow. Until Christ came, and “before faith came”, the law served a custodial purpose. This law, these 10 commandments and the 613 total laws of the Torah...shaped the lives of Jews like Paul for generations. Paul describes a limited use for the law and then announces that its usefulness is past. The law functioned as someone who would accompany the vulnerable and protect them from harm...for a time.
Like a parent who sets boundaries for their kids. Like a teacher, who establishes the rules of the classroom to create a shared culture of respect, one that would nurture life-giving values. These healthy structures exist to ground and guide us until the time comes when we grow or circumstances change that changes our relationship with those practices.
The pandemic has brought us to a similar wrestling with caring and careful practices, communal well-being, as the shifts of what is prescribed have unfolded and changed over time. “Don’t wear masks because medical staff need them.” “Ok, now you should wear masks, any mask, because it reduces the risk of spread to others.” “Actually, some styles and fabrics don’t work as well, it needs to meet this list of things to truly be safe.” “don’t travel or go out anywhere.” “Stay 6 feet part.” “but maybe now kids don’t need to stay so far apart at school” And now we’re being told that once vaccinated, some of the rules we’ve pain-stakingly followed as a matter of life and death for the past 14 months can just….stop?
Likely, we have some reckoning to do with this shift too. Each guidance was the best we could do for a time, to keep ourselves and others safe, to keep us one the right path as a people. It has required heartbreaking sacrifice and discipline, even deep tension in relationship, but it’s been the good and right thing to do. Even as CDC recommendations change yet again, there is still cause for caution. But... there is a time coming when the things we’ve relied on in this way will no longer serve the same purpose. If we don’t reckon with the fear and hurt we have picked up and may still carry from this past year or so, we will struggle to let go of these things as the way to be ultimately safe and enact a love for others. We don’t have to do it immediately or overnight, it will likely take time and gentleness with ourselves, but it will be worth our while.
These practices have been one expression of underlying care, but we are ultimately grounded by the care and not the practice. And sometimes it takes divine grace to remember that.
The law once nurtured belief, but it was never the ultimate source of belief. This faith which reckons and redeems emanates only from God and extends to cover all time and all people. We can look all the way back to Abraham and Sarah who were grafted into the tree of God's family through belief, not the law, and they were reckoned as righteous before their Creator. In the cross and the resurrection, God declares that not only will nothing stand between us and the love of God, but we are indeed intimately a part of God’s goodness, joined with God through deep familial relationship, named as God’s own children. Christ’s love is revealed to be so expansive as to cover and clothe us so that we are given Christ's own righteousness, God's own goodness.
Christ's own faith and belief becomes fully and completely ours. So then even our faith is Christ's accomplishment and not our own. And by the same token, there is absolutely nothing we can do to mess it up. Ultimately it is this identity in Christ that endures beyond all others.
It’s honestly a struggle to fully embrace this, to let go of the structures I rely on to feel right and good and instead to start from a place of promise that God already holds me as right and good. Often, I would rather return to the law for its clarity and for the way it allows me the illusion of control, especially when things feel out of control. The law also lets me be twistedly comforted by the idea that there will always be someone who is worse at the law than me. This is essentially what the Galatians have gotten stuck clinging too. They want to lean on the law as the ultimate marker of their identity, the preeminent way of being in relationship with God...but it inevitably leads to viewing other followers as lesser and is not the heart of who they are.
Paul insists that such division (and really hierarchy) have no place in an Easter church. It distorts the direction of righteousness as one that emanates from ourselves rather than from God. Christ has created a new way of being.
Paul essentially says, “think about it...think about when you’ve felt connected to God through the Spirit and the things that have resulted...think about when you’ve known true healing and wholeness, and power and wonder, and goodness, when you’ve seen these expand throughout the community…think about every time we’ve experienced it as the people of God through history...was it the result of our own performance or was there something beyond that?
It could only be God’s all-encompassing, all-surpassing love embodied in the resurrected Christ. This is what guards and guide us now, indeed what always has. This love is our starting place, over and above any practice. This is also who we are, children of God. And whoever you are, whatever else you may be called, this includes you!
Be rooted in this divine promise, that we are all one with God and so one with each other. One, not over and above. One, not separate but equal. One, not the same. The proclamation that there is “no longer Jew nor Greek, male nor female” is not a declaration that we are to lose our distinctness, that we cease being different as God created us...but that our distinctions are no longer distorted in service to division. They no longer separate us or subjugate us. And so through the expansive embrace of faith through Christ, the source of our ultimate identity, we can celebrate and aim ourselves toward that which makes us a vibrant body of Christ together.
Perhaps you feel the strong tension between the world you see around you and the world envisioned in this way. Perhaps you sense the dissonance between this divine promise and what you see and experience in your own self or in news headlines. That struggle is real and I will not deny it. It can be daunting and debilitating. And yet, even in the midst of these things, we are still invited to be. To start from a place of who we are, and how much we are loved, not just what we can or can not do. We are invited to sit deeply in our identity before God, in our being, in our reckoning as righteous.
And this, I find, strengthens us for resilience, for resistance, for daily resurrections. This Gospel breathes new life into us, ushers in the dawn of a new creation, and a new way of being. Amen.