Galatians 2:1-10
Twenty-fifth
Sunday after Pentecost/ 18th November 2012
“The dogmas of the quiet past are
inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty – and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and
act anew.” That’s what he said. That’s what Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
said. December 1, 1862 in an address to
Congress, one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Remarkable words, remarkable insight, a model
of visionary leadership.
With the release this weekend of Steven
Spielberg’s new movie Lincoln, we are
given a new look into the life of our sixteenth president. I saw the movie yesterday and it was great. I’ve always been struck by Lincoln’s
strength, courage, and deep moral core.
As a religion and history major at Rutgers College, I wrote a thesis on
Lincoln’s theology and his quest – a spiritual quest – to save the Union.[1] On Election Day
this year I felt drawn to go back to the Lincoln Memorial, my favorite place in
Washington, DC, to read again those profound lines in the Second Inaugural, “With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to
bind up the nation's wounds.”
From our vantage point, Lincoln was
among our great presidents, perhaps the greatest. During his presidency, however,
especially through the storm of the Civil War, he had his critics, even in his
own Republican party. What made him a great leader, however, was his
determination to be his own person. He knew the right, the moral, the just thing to do. He was not called to be popular. Yes, he was politically savvy and wise, but
he was also his own man. And he was
odd. He was odd looking. He marched to
the beat of a different drum. While Lincoln
was never a formal member of any church, as president he often worshipped at the
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, just a few blocks from the White
House. He was good friends with the
pastor, the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley (1816-1868). Instead of sitting in
a pew where his presence might be a distraction during worship, Lincoln
listened to the sermon from the pastor’s study with the door cracked open.
There was a kind of freedom in Lincoln’s
own being that freed him to be his own person (and the movie makes this clear);
he was free to be odd and different, free to do the unpopular thing, especially
freeing the slaves and bringing an end to slavery – which was unpopular even in
the North. A liberation, as Lincoln said
in his address at the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, just 52 miles from this
sanctuary, yielding “a new birth of freedom.”
I can imagine that Lincoln would
have gotten along well with the apostle Paul.
There might be a little of Paul in Lincoln – for Lincoln knew his Bible,
he read Paul’s letters. Lincoln had
large parts of the Bible memorized; it was part of his being. (As a boy he
regularly recited the Sunday sermon by memory later in the week for his friends.)
They were both lawyers, although Paul’s
early life does not parallel Lincoln’s early life, when Paul was known as Saul,
before the Damascus Road experience, before Paul had a change of heart. Paul,
too, was not popular; he was looked at with suspicion by both the Jewish
authorities and the early followers of Jesus.
Paul was driven – not by pride, ego, or ambition, but as he himself
said, he was driven by the Spirit of God.
At the beginning of the letter he makes it plain, “Paul an apostle –
sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus
Christ and God the Father” (Galatians 1: 1), and later he added, “I want you to
know…that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origins; for I
did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it
through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:11-12).
That “revelation” was a turning
point in Paul’s life. It was “a new
birth of freedom” for him. Despite his former life when he was actively
persecuting the followers of Jesus, he was now a Jesus follower. Not just a follower, but also an apostle, that
is, someone sent by God to serve the
revelation of God found in Jesus Christ.
Because of the grace that Paul experienced – Saul, now Paul – Paul knew
that everything in his life had changed.
This past week I heard Bono (of U2 fame) speak at Georgetown
University. He talked about the need for
“a conversion heart.” When a conversion
of heart occurs, you cannot un-know what you’ve come to know, you cannot un-see
what you’ve come to see. This was true
for Paul. There was no going back.
Paul was given a new understanding
of God – a God rich in mercy and
grace to the likes of him, a God not easily “managed,” who takes delight in
doing the unexpected. God did that which
was unthinkable, unimaginable for a Jew.
God was at work in someone like Jesus, who, according to the Law must be
considered “cursed.” As Deuteronomy states,
“Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:23). The cross is like such a tree. The fact that God would raise, would justify
such a man and then to embrace the fact that such a man was God’s son – all of
this was blasphemous for Saul. But for
Paul, it was also true. As Paul discovered, God isn’t too worried about
blasphemy. God is doing something new.
And so Paul was given, then, a new self-understanding,
how he viewed himself had to change. And
how Paul understood his role in the wider Roman
world was also in need of change.[2] In relation to these – God, self, world –
Paul was given a new birth of freedom through a revelation that changed his
life. This was so earth shattering and
mind-blowing for him that he went away to Arabia (Jordan) for more than
fourteen years. It’s not surprising that
Galatians is known as the epistle of freedom.
Paul writes in Galatians 5, “For freedom, Christ has set us free, do not
submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1).
What is that yoke of slavery? The burden, the enslavement of empty religiosity. For Paul, that meant all the trappings of the
Jewish Law. Some said that one has to
become Jewish before following Jesus.
Being Jewish entails following the dietary laws, kosher laws, for some, circumcision,
the sign of covenant. Paul, raised in
the tradition, says, no. A Gentile does
not have to follow Jewish practices in order to follow Jesus. This is the tension, the conflict, the war
waging in the church in Galatia and throughout the Jewish world.
Why does Paul feel this way? Why is he
so passionate about this? Because he knows from personal experience that God’s
love and grace always liberate, they always free us. It’s the grace and love of
God that matter most, therefore we need to be wary and even “war” against
anything that asserts that we have to do something
or be someone in order for God to
love and accept us. Religious rituals
and practices are not wrong, but in themselves, they’re not the means of grace.
As you can imagine, therefore, the
authorities in Jerusalem were not happy with Paul. Paul was undermining the tradition and the
institution that preserves these traditions.
And so Paul stayed away from Jerusalem for at least ten years. As a new follower of Jesus, Paul left
everything. He went to Arabia (Jordan) –
to make sense of his new calling, to live with other Jesus followers. He’s on his own, for the most part, probably
part of a Christian faith community.
Like Lincoln, he’s odd, aloof, doing his own thing, following the rhythm
of a different drum. Paul runs from
conflict, hiding from the conflict tearing the church apart: the Jewish-Gentile question.
Paul easily could have stayed away
from Jerusalem. He could have demonized
the Jewish authorities. He could have dug in his heels and refused to have
anything to do with them, living isolated, cut off, alienated. That would have
been a natural response, a human response.
We can think of plenty of parallels in our age, both within and without
the church, of similar conflicts tearing apart community, with name-calling,
demonizing, us vs. them attitudes. He
could have dissociated himself from Jerusalem – and maybe, at some level he
wanted to do that.
But that’s not the way of Jesus
Christ. That’s not the way of the God and
Father of Jesus Christ. That’s not the
way of a Christ-follower. “Then after
fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabus…. I went up in response
to a revelation” (Gal. 2:1). Another revelation,
an insight, a tug of the Spirit, a word from the Lord that would not allow him
to remain cut off, but sent him into the lion’s den, as it were; a word from
the God that sent him to “them,” to the other,
to the people who were excluding him and making it difficult for him to live.
Can you imagine what that conversation
was like? Can you image what that was
like, having to justify his very existence before a group of people who
believed he was wrong? But he went and told his story – he gave testimony, he
witnessed to God’s grace in his life.
And when they heard his story and saw the evidence of grace in his life,
“when James and Cephas [Peter] and John, who were acknowledged pillars,
recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabus and me
the right hand of fellowship…” (Gal. 2:9).
The right hand of fellowship. Reunion.
Connection. Communion. Peace. Reconciliation.
That’s the way of Jesus Christ. That’s
the way of the God and Father of Jesus Christ.
That’s the way of a Christ-follower.
That’s what Paul had come to know.
That’s what the Spirit called him toward. That’s what Christ is always calling his
sisters and brothers toward. Reconciliation. Paul knew from his own personal experience
that God’s good news is ultimately about reconciliation, healing alienation, restoring
relationship. Paul knew in his bones, in his body, in his guts that there was a
time when he was alienated from God’s way, but now he is welcomed home nevertheless. He knew that by grace that Christ was alive
in him and therefore he was ultimately free – free to live in a new
relationship with God, with himself, and with the world. He was then free to go the people he was
alienated from to experience reunion, the relationship restored. This is what grace can do. This is what grace
always does. It’s not what we expect;
the outcome is more than one could ever hope for, always yielding something
new. Paul says elsewhere, “So if anyone
is in Christ, there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation that
is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their
trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2
Corinthians 4: 18-19).
“The dogmas of the quiet past are
inadequate to the stormy present….we must think anew and act anew.” The old ways, the expected ways, the usual
ways are inadequate to the present, new ways are required, new ways are given
by grace in order to allow us to do a new thing in the world.
When Lincoln stepped out of the Capitol
building to give his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, the crowd, indeed, the world
were expecting a speech that would humiliate and shame the Confederacy. The city was packed with visitors. There were not enough hotel rooms available. People were sleeping in hotel hallways on cots. One reason why space was so limited was because
every other available space was used for wounded and recovering soldiers. There were hospitals everywhere. The number of amputees in the city shocked
visitors. The people were angry and mad.
Every family was touched by grief and loss. Approximately 700,000 people died the
war – an enormous percentage of the population in the 1860s. Compared to our
current population today, it would be equivalent to approximately 5 million
casualties.[3]
Lincoln never says Confederacy, traitor, nor
rebel in the speech. He doesn't feed
off of their hate and anger and need for judgment and retribution. Instead, in a speech lasting just eight
minutes, he ends with these words: “With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to
bind up the nation’s wounds.” Remarkable,
really. Where does such wisdom and grace
come from? The crowd and the press didn't know what to “do” with such a
speech. It’s not what they
expected. But it’s what was needed for
reconciliation. Grace is never what we
expect. It always surprises us. In just over a month Lincoln would be dead, on
Good Friday. Yet, he had the freedom to say and do what was needed to be said
and done.
That’s why I think Lincoln and Paul
would get along. It’s why I hear a lot
of Paul in Lincoln. The freedom exercised by Paul and Lincoln and countless
others is always available to you and me. For God’s grace and love always yield liberation. Liberation for us – a new birth of freedom –
and liberation for others. Anything less
is no gospel. Anything less, Paul would
say, is “anathema” (Gal. 1:8-9).
Anything less than liberation is not gospel.
Image: The only image of Abraham Lincoln giving the Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.
[1] Kenneth E.
Kovacs, “Lincoln’s Quest for Union: The Use of Covenantal Thought as a New
Paradigm for an Historical and Political Understanding of the Relationship
Between Religion and Culture in America, 1801-1865,” Rutgers College, B.A./
Henry Rutgers Scholar Thesis, May, 1986.
[2] Here, I am
indebted to Brigitte Kahl’s extraordinary commentary, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading
With the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 277. “God’s
apocalyptic revelation (apokalypsai,
1:16) drops him into a devastating threefold self-alienation that entirely distorts
his image of himself, of God, and of the other…” (277).
[3] See Ronald C.
White, Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest
Speech: The Second Inaugural (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2002),
21-29.
