Galatians 1:11-23
Third
Sunday after Pentecost/ 9th June 2013
The
sermon title is taken from the musical Wicked:
The Untold Story of the Witches
of Oz, otherwise simply known as Wicked; music and lyrics by Stephen
Schwartz—who also wrote the music and lyrics for Godspell (1971) and Pippin
(1972). Wicked is told from the
perspective of the witches of the Land of Oz.
The plot begins before the arrival of Dorothy from Kansas and has
several references to the 1939 film and the original novels by L. Frank Baum
(1856-1919). The musical tells the story of two unlikely friends, Elphaba,
the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the good Witch of the North. It’s the
story of their struggle through opposing personalities and viewpoints, rivalry
over the same love-interest, reactions to the Wizard’s corrupt government, and,
ultimately, Elphaba’s public fall from grace.
The citizens of Oz celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch of the West
as Glinda descends in her bubble to confirm the circumstances of the Witch's
melting. She recalls that the green-skinned Elphaba, who would grow up to
become the witch, was conceived during an affair between the erstwhile Munchkin
Governor's wife and a mysterious stranger with a bottle of green elixir.
Everyone was repulsed by Elphaba from the moment she was born—because she was
green—and so Glinda asks the Ozians to empathize with her side of the story —in
the opening song “No One Mourns the Wicked.”
The rest of the musical is a flashback through their lives, the relationship
between Glinda and Elphaba.
And so the sermon title is a line
from one of the signature songs in the show that Glinda and Elphaba sing to
each other at the end, they face their differences, seek forgiveness, and give
thanks for what they learned from each other. Toward the end of the song they
both sing:
Who can say if I've been
Changed
for the better?
I do believe I have been
Changed for the better.
Glinda sings, And because I knew you... and then
Elphaba sings, Because I knew you… and
then they together sing, Because I knew
you…I have been changed for good.[1]
There’s not a direct correlation
between Wicked and Paul’s letter to
the Galatians, of course. But what they do share is a transformation through
encounter. What Paul is alluding to in
his letter is what happened to him on the Damascus Road, that moment when he
was changed, radically changed—for good, when he encountered the gracious power
of the Risen Christ.
Paul makes it quite clear here that
there was a before and an after, a former way and a new way, a “once blind but
now I see” moment. Remember, Paul was once
called Saul, and with that name he was ruthless, notorious. He confesses here,
“I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it”
(Gal. 1:13). He inflicted untold
suffering upon followers of Jesus (Acts 8) and probably had a hand in the
stoning of Stephen (Acts 7). Paul was an
educated leader of his community with considerable influence and authority. He
was an over-achiever who climbed the religious ladder. He’s very honest here: “I had advanced in
Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous
for the traditions of my ancestors” (Gal. 1:14). He was part of the establishment. He was
the establishment. And he used every means available to make sure the religious
establishment remained in place. He was
zealous for the tradition, the rich cultural and religious legacy of Judaism,
centuries old, of God’s unique relationship with this special people. Saul’s job was to preserve that tradition,
steward that legacy, hold on to the past, and resist anything or anyone that
tried to change it or lessen its influence.
But all that changed when he
encountered the Risen Christ, the one shamefully, ignobly crucified, the one
God raised from the dead, this Son of the Living God whose presence overwhelmed
and astonished and blinded Paul and changed his life, irrevocably—for
good. In fact, this revelation, as Paul
describes it, was so disturbing and troubling that he had to get away, he
needed time to process it, to comes to terms with his experience. He didn’t go back to Jerusalem, he left for
Arabia—to the wilderness—and then in time he returned to Damascus and only then,
after three years, was Paul finally ready to return Jerusalem to meet Peter, to
tell Peter that God was calling him to proclaim Jesus, the Messiah, to
Gentiles. And that’s what he did with
their blessing, after some convincing. Paul
is a symbol of change. For he was now changing the shape of Judaism and their
understanding of Jesus’ message and their understanding of God and their
understanding of the Holy Spirit—everything was changing and coming undone. So that it was said of Paul, “The one who formerly
was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy”
(1:23). Paul writes, “And they glorified
God because of me” (Gal. 1:24).
Before and after. Then and now. Time
and again this pattern unfolds throughout scripture. The Bible is full of people who undergo
radical change when God shows up, stories of people whose lives are forever altered
when God gets involved. The New
Testament and the story of Paul in particular are all about change—transformation,
really. That’s what life in Christ is for Paul. That’s the message he preaches.
If we think the Christian life is
essentially an ethic, then we’re going to miss this part of Paul’s
message.
If we think that being Christian only
means following a rulebook, then it’s easy to miss what he’s saying.
If we think that being Christian
means simply behaving in a certain way, then hearing the gospel of
transformation will fall on deaf ears.
Yes, there’s an ethic that comes
with following Christ. There is the rule
of love that is the only law that really matters, “the only thing that counts,”
said Paul, “is faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Yes, there are certain behaviors that reflect
that love. And Paul expected that ethic,
that measure, that way of love to be embodied in the church. But Paul could expect such an ethic because
he knew that when people are in Christ, when they are rooted and grounded in
his love (Eph. 3:17), when their lives are flowing out from the ongoing, transforming
life of the Spirit, they are changed and are being changed, which means that
the world around them is changing too.
Paul assumes change; transformation comes with the territory when we’re
walking the way of Christ.
In the June Messenger I made reference to the contemporary essayist and poet
Christian Wiman. He’s a remarkable writer, sharp, thoughtful, humane, with a
generous spirit. He’s the former editor
of Poetry magazine, a venerable, century-old
periodical celebrating verse. Wiman was
raised a Christian in Texas, moved away from it, and recently reconnected with
the depths of his faith around the time he was diagnosed with a rare terminal
cancer. The faith is not an intellectual
abstraction for him. It’s really real.
In fact, he insists, “You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all your abstractions
in one way or another, including words such as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’.”[2] Wiman’s latest book, entitled My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, a memoir,
released in April, is bound to become a classic text of Christian spirituality. It’s not for the tame of heart or mind. But that’s his point: faith isn’t tame or timid. It should be alive and intense on fire. In the first section of the memoir he talks
about faith and change, how they go together. They have to. Wiman believes that “faith in God is, in the
deepest sense, faith and life—which means that even the staunchest life of
faith is a life of great change. It
follows,” he writes, “that if you believe at fifty what you believed at
fifteen, then you have not lived or have denied the reality of your life.”[3]
When God encounters us we are changed and never left the same.
This is not to say that all change is God,
because it’s not. We have to discern and
we need prayer in order to discern. Prayer is needed so that God can work deeper
than our egos. Our egos dislike change
with a vengeance. We’ll hold on to things the way they are, we’ll dig in our
heals and fight and resist changing our minds or our opinions or our beliefs or
habits or addictions or behaviors, even when we know they’re harmful or
destructive or not giving life or have served their purpose, when they no
longer serve us well. God is less
concerned with the conventions of our egos than with the depths of our lives
coming fully alive in him. God wants us to come alive.
And sometimes our resistance to
change is actually obstinate opposition toward the very things that God intends to make for life. Look at Paul’s life. Or, Saul, actually—that was his story.
On Tuesday, I leave for India where
I’ll be teaching a weeklong seminar on the Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961) at the St. Andrew Centre in Conoor.
Jung has been part of my life since college, but especially so over the
last couple of years. As I shared last
week, I believe that Jung has something to say to the contemporary Church, he
has something to say about the Christian life.
Jung devoted the last twenty years of his life to the future of
Christianity. Writing in the 1940s, he
knew that the structure of the faith had to change, meaning the Church. He knew that people worried, even then, about
the declining influence of the Church in society and people wanted to know what
to do about it. But Jung also knew there
were forces, both conscious and unconscious, that worked against trying to do
anything about the decline, which simply tried to maintain the faith and
protect it from any change. Jung said,
“The advocates of Christianity squander their energies in the mere preservation
of what has come down to them, with no thought of building on to their house
and making it roomier. Stagnation in
these matters is threatened in the long run with a lethal end.”[4]
He was critical of those who
actually destroy what they’re trying to preserve, the so-called tradition. They’re not allowing the tradition to
grow. “Jung sees tradition as a living
thing, whereas what…some call ‘tradition’ is mostly ‘convention,’ a non-living,
stultifying dogma.”[5] Tradition, if it’s really tradition, is
living and, because it’s living, changes over time. Traditionalism is something else, it’s an idol, a false god, that’s stagnant
and leads to death. Jung was hopeful
that there was still a future for Christianity.
“I am…convinced,” he said, “that it is not Christianity, but our
conception and interpretation of it, that has become antiquated in the face of
the present world situation. The
Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further
development. It can go on developing; it
depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to meditate again, and
more thoroughly, on the Christian premises.”[6]
Jung makes it sound like it’s all
about us, that’s up to us. The good news
is that it’s not. The Christian life is
rooted in what the Spirit is doing in us and through us. What is required from us is cooperation. We
are called to submit, surrender, yield. We are asked to yield to what the
Spirit is already doing. When this happens, by God’s grace, our egos
are moved away from dead center (as was true for Paul), to make space for who
we are deeper than our egos (for we are more than our egos); then space is made
for our souls. Souls that yield to God’s revelation, souls that dream, souls
that take risks, souls that grow in the Spirit, souls that are open to the
ongoing transformation of the people of God. Souls that will then give others
cause to glorify God because of us.
Amen.
[1] Stephen Schwartz, Wicked (2003).
[2] Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press,
2007), 165.
[3] Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Garrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 7.
[4] C. G. Jung, Aion (1959), cited in David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality,
Religion (London: Routledge, 2013), 154.
[5] Tacey, 154.
