Chapel – Friday, 9 March 2007
Call to Worship: Listen, God Is Calling
ELW 513, stanza 1
[note – the refrain has a repeat before the verse]
Invocation
top two prayers on ELW, p. 72
Before worship
God of grace, you have given us minds to know you, hearts to love you, and voices
to sing your praise. Fill us with your Spirit, that we may celebrate your glory and
worship you in spirit and truth, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.
Grace to receive the word
Blessed Lord God, you have caused the holy scriptures to be written for the
nourishment of your people. Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn, and
inwardly digest them, that, comforted by your promises, we may embrace and
forever hold fast to the hope of eternal life, which you have given us in Jesus Christ,
our Savior and Lord. Amen.
Song: Listen, God Is Calling
ELW 513, stanza 1
Scripture:
Galatians 3:15-29
Homily: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Bev Stratton, Religion
Prayers
ending with bottom prayer on ELW, p. 304
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the
ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out
with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading
us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Song: Listen, God Is Calling
ELW 513, stanza 3
Benediction and Sending
Now may the God who guards us with the gift of the law,
Christ our Teacher, who loves us with an unstoppable love,
and the Spirit who empowers us to live in freedom,
2
guard and keep our minds and hearts,
as we love God and serve our neighbors.
Respond: Thanks be to God
3
A reading from the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia.
May the Word of God dwell in you richly …
Brothers and sisters, I give an example from daily life: once a person's
will has been ratified, no one adds to it or annuls it. Now the promises were
made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, "And to offsprings," as
of many; but it says, "And to your offspring," that is, to one person, who is
Christ. My point is this: the law, which came four hundred thirty years later,
does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the
promise. For if the inheritance comes from the law, it no longer comes from
the promise; but God granted it to Abraham through the promise.
Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the
offspring would come to whom the promise had been made; and it was
ordained through angels by a mediator. Now a mediator involves more than
one party; but God is one.
Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a
law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed
come through the law. But the scripture has imprisoned all things under the
power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might
be given to those who believe.
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the
law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian
until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith
has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you
are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into
Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of
4
you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are
Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.
[3:15-29]
5
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Say it with me: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Paul’s congregations in Galatia were trying to live as faithful followers
of Christ—as we are. What does it mean to be a disciple, to learn from Christ
in our time?
My students tell me that the Bible is a guidebook for how to live your
life. They also have questions about sex: “Is premarital sex OK? What about
homosexuality?” And about the church: “Do we have to go to church?”
They have some idea what they think the church teaches about these areas:
No, No, and Yes. Premarital sex is wrong, so is homosexuality, and yes, you
do have to go to church. But many of them are dissatisfied with these
answers. Their bodies are urging them to explore physical intimacy with
others, and they enjoy it. They have friends, siblings, or parents who are
lesbian or gay, and they want them to be loved and accepted as they are.
They don’t find church particularly engaging or relevant to their concerns.
And they wonder, perhaps a little bit at least if they’re taking a course that
requires biblical study, what the Bible has to say about any of this. Some
want easy answers—to have some clear boundaries. Others expect to get easy
6
answers—though that will just confirm their suspicion that the church is
out-of-date and should be left behind as they become adults.
So, what does it mean to be a disciple, to learn from Christ in our time?
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Paul tries to liberate the Galatian congregations from easy answers that
threaten to imprison the Gospel of Christ. To do so, he needs to explain to
them the function of the law. You’ve heard already this week about the
context of Galatians: that some people were urging, perhaps even insisting
that Gentile Christian men must keep the Jewish law by being circumcised in
order to be accepted into Christian community. Paul’s letter would have
been read or recited to them, and it says a passionate and emphatic—No.
Don’t burden those of the new covenant with that requirement of the old.
Don’t impose the law on those who would follow Christ. Elsewhere the
Scripture, if not Paul himself, sees the law as a good gift of God to help us live
well in relation to God and to one another. But in Galatians, Paul has a
different emphasis: the law had its place, its time, its function, but the law’s
time for that purpose is ended.
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
7
Paul gives an example from daily life to help his community
understand the law. The law was a “disciplinarian,” many of our translations
say, from a Greek word that sounds like pedagogue. The translation and
cognate may give us the wrong idea. We often associate punishment with the
idea of discipline and pedantic teaching with a pedagogue. The Greek term
meant something different. And here I encourage all of you to listen to your
professors’ or librarian’s advice and use a study Bible or on-line references.
From Strong’s Concordance, available at bible.crosswalk.com, we learn
that a paidagogos was
a guardian and guide of boys. Among the Greeks and the Romans the
name was applied to trustworthy slaves who were charged with the
duty of supervising the life and morals of boys belonging to the better
class. The boys were not allowed so much as to step out of the house
without them before arriving at the age of manhood.
Catherine Cory clarifies, in the St. Mary’s Press College Study Bible, that it was
“a slave who escorted a child to school but did not teach or tutor; hence a
guardian or monitor.” La Biblia Latinoamérica, a Spanish Bible I’ve been
reading recently, puts it this way: “La Ley nos conducía al maestro, Cristo.”
The law leads us to the teacher, Christ.
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
8
In some ways, I think the challenges our church faces are similar to
Paul’s. He saw the end of the world coming soon because Christ would come
back; we face the end of life as we know it through global warming,
terrorism, and potential biological warfare. Paul’s religious community
shifted from a familiar Judaism, to a mixed Jewish and Gentile community,
struggling to determine how to live together as Christians. We live in a
global culture and a country of immigrants, surrounded by people of many
world religions. Paul’s new community brought a changed cultural context
as well. The sexual mores of Greco-Roman culture didn’t match those of
Palestinian Judaism (and he comments on this more in Corinthians and
Romans than he does here in Galatians). Our sexual context has also changed
dramatically, with the emergence of feminism, birth control, and AIDS. In
times of dramatic change, uncertainty, and fear, it is tempting to fall back on
the familiar, trusted and often trustworthy rules of the past, but I think Paul
admonishes us in Galatians to remember:
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Since the Greek paidagogos is no longer familiar in our culture, let me
offer two brief stories from modern parent-child relations to illustrate two
approaches to the gift of God’s law and freedom in Christ.
9
“Mom, can I go to the mall?” Sandy asked, when she called from a
friend’s house.
“Why don’t you play outside in the snow?” her mom replied, saying no
to Sandy’s request.
Sandy told her high school Sunday school class that she went to the
mall anyway, without her mother’s permission, and then she and was
grounded. Her mother’s “picky” expectation, trying to choose her daughter’s
activities for her, was an example of why teens rebel against their parents.
Another story.
“So, do you have a new ‘beau’?” I asked my fifteen-year-old daughter
on Sunday. (She had shared her heartbreak with me a couple months ago
when she and her previous boyfriend had broken up.)
“No, but I wish we could have guy friends to hang out with, instead of
having to ‘go out.’”
“What if you just asked someone to hang out?” I asked. I don’t
remember whether Sara responded, but later she did invite a guy—someone
who’s been in her Sunday school class since they were three-year-olds—to
come over that afternoon and play in the snow.
What do these stories have to do with our Galatians text for today? In
the 21st century U.S., we too have needs and expectations for guidance. Some
10
parents think that a strict hand is necessary. They attempt to guide by
keeping a close watch on their teens’ activities, causing some to chafe and
rebel against the disciplinary rules that are only meant in love to help their
children.
My family has chosen a different route. Our teenage children know our
values—that we expect them to treat others well, that it’s important to take
care of their own bodies and spirits, that they have responsibilities to do their
homework and their chores, and that we expect them to stay safe and to come
home at a reasonable hour. They know that we will always love them and
that they can call us if they get into trouble or even if they’ve just forgotten to
ask for a ride home and it’s late. They don’t have a curfew; they don’t get
grounded; and they behave responsibly.
While Sandy lives in a family with a more explicit law—parents that
seem to provide specific rules about her every movement—my kids live with
an internalized law of love. They know that it’s important to love others and
to love themselves, and they know that they are loved and trusted to make
their own good decisions, guided by these values. Sandy’s family is not
wrong in living with a more detailed, explicit law, but her family may not
experience the same freedom as mine.
11
My daughter Sara’s wish for a way just to hang out with guy friends
shows another side of the law. Decades ago, when the rules perhaps were
clearer about courtship, teens knew what to do, or at least I imagine they
did—who was supposed to call whom, when to talk with parents about your
intentions, what to do on dates (“no petting below the neck” and “no sex
before marriage” were my mother’s expectations), etc. Now there are fewer
explicit social conventions, more dangers related to sexual activity, and
perhaps less certainty about how to interact as friends and to get to know one
another in emotionally as well as physically intimate ways. I heard my
daughter longing for some clear and different social rules—some unofficial
teen ‘laws’ that would allow her just to hang out with guys.
These examples show two different approaches and experiences of law
or rules in relation to parenting and dating. Similarly, in our church today
we have two understandings and desires for the law in relation to sexuality.
On the one hand, we want the certainty of specific rules and boundaries.
They make social expectations clear. Some of us would like the church and
the government to provide a definition of marriage as being between “one
man and one woman.” We want the church to enforce policies that make
explicit our expectations for clergy and others’ sexual practices. And some of
these civil and ecclesial rules are necessary to protect people from abuse.
12
On the other hand, we want the freedom to make our own decisions.
Young people and old need some boundaries and guidelines, but we are also
testing the values and the gender expectations that have been handed on to
us and learning to adjust them or to embrace them as our own. We need
reason, honesty, clear information, and gentle stories of experience, passed on
with love and trust, so that we can develop our own wisdom as we navigate
the messiness of relationships, gender, and sexuality.
My hope for our church as we delve more deeply into Galatians and
deliberations about sexuality is that we will both seek to address concrete
questions about sexual ethics, and that we will demonstrate, through our
dialogue and explicitly in our teaching, a sophisticated understanding of how
God speaks to us through community and Scripture. The Bible is not simply
a rulebook that we mine for specific verses to resolve disputes among us or to
settle our own quandaries. We need to turn to the Bible with hearts open to
hear what is the law, leading and guarding us like the ancient Greek
paidagogos, and what is the Gospel, teaching and clothing us in freedom with
Christ.
Say our refrain with me again: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”