Sermon Text

The Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 6, 2010

AN EXAMPLE
Galatians 1:11-24

In the old-time tent-meeting revivals, there was always a stock character. This was the guy who would stand up and recite a lurid list of sins (usually wild sex, lots of alcohol, gambling, etc.) And then, with tears streaming down, he would testify to the mercy of Christ. Then the evangelist’s sermon would continue, exhorting all present to confess their sinful unworthiness and to throw themselves on the not-always-tender mercies of a righteous God, and would then offer a step-by-step plan for how you could accomplish your salvation.

Then we have the Apostle Paul, whose background story sounds a little different from the norm:

“I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.”

Now, when Paul speaks about “Judaism,” he’s not using the word in the same way we do today, to indicate an entire religious faith. Paul is talking about his particular part of Jewish belief, that we know as Pharisaism. He was zealously upholding the teachings of his party in the Jewish faith of his day, and he was more zealous than all the others. Paul was a kind of first-century Joe McCarthy, bent on rooting up subversive followers of Jesus and snuffing them out. There was blood on his hands and murder in his heart, all in the name of respectable orthodoxy. Yet the risen Christ knocked him off his horse and took hold of him in mercy -- he was forgiven! At first, those frightened early Jewish Christians must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief and wondered if it were true: had Paul really been “born again?” Was he new, from the ground up? from the inside out? And when they finally came to see him as he had, by God’s grace, become, how wondrous that forgiveness must have seemed! Here was a sinner, saved by God’s mercy!

Here is special encouragement for us. If God was so patient and grace-full towards such a rogue as Paul, then surely God will be patient and grace-full with us. If God will show mercy to a hate-filled, violent bigot, will God not also forgive us passive, more-or-less subtle bigots, too?

The word here is, “Hey, all you sinners (and that’s all of us!)! God forgives you first!” What does this mean for us?

One thing it means is that those times in the church’s life when we go around crying about how bad somebody else’s sins are must be both amusing and frustrating to God.

Whenever, in our history, we have come up with lists of sins, there is always a group of “the righteous” who are quick to point out who “the unrighteous” are. Face it! None of us is righteous! As that roguish reprobate Paul reminds us elsewhere, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

One of our Presbyterian faith statements, the Confession of 1967, says it this way:

. . . all human virtue, when seen in the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ, is found to be infected by self-interest and hostility. All people, good and bad alike, are in the wrong before God and helpless without God’s forgiveness. Thus all human beings fall under God’s judgment. None are more subject to that judgment than those who assume that they are guiltless before God or morally superior to others.

All of us are sinners, in need of God’s grace offered to all in Jesus Christ, in whose name we are called “children of God.”

This same reprobate Paul reminds us of this truth: because of what God has accomplished in Christ, we are children of God -- not that we owe God anything, or are freed former slaves. We are God’s children, adopted by grace, gifted with faith and with the Church, and sent into the world to be the embodiment of God’s grace there for all people.

Don’t forget the end of Paul’s story. Saul the sinner became Paul the Apostle. Where once he pounced upon other people’s perceived sins, now we see him rushing around the Roman Empire, spreading the good news of God’s free grace. He didn’t take God’s mercy and press it between the pages of his Bible or use it as a club to beat other people over the head. He had to share it with others, following the irrepressible Spirit of Christ around the Mediterranean as more and more unlikely people came to know themselves as recipients of a love that will not let us go, that conquers our sinful blindness, and raises us to the position of brothers and sisters of Christ, who came into this world to rescue sinners, and who hands to us a servant ministry of reconciliation and love.

Thanks be to God for this inexpressible gift!