Jesus and His Bible, Part 11

 The Rejected Cornerstone

Immediately following the parable of the faithless vine-growers, Jesus carried the confrontation into the religious leaders’ camp.  He asked them: “Have you not even read this scripture: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, this became the chief corner-stone; this came about from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10). 

Let’s not ignore the implications of how Jesus introduced his quotation.  “Have you not even read this scripture?” Not conciliatory in the least.  And you can tell this is so by their reaction, which is to move toward assaulting him, only restrained by their fear of the crowd. I wonder how often today God’s Holy Spirit says to each of us, “Have you not even read this scripture?” Do we respond with defensiveness or do we sit down to listen? I remember when the Spirit brought these verses into my heart and said, “Have you not even read these scriptures?” And I had not actually let them sink in to form the foundation of my faith until that point.

Hebrews 10:1 The Law foreshadowed good things to come but could not bring them about.

Ephesians 2:15 Christ abolished in his flesh the law. 

Romans 7:4-6 We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law.

Romans 7:25-8:2 The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.

Hebrews 7:18-19 The earlier commandment has been annulled and replaced by a better hope in Christ as our high priest, through whom we draw near to God.

Galatians 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not annul or reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law. 

So Jesus’s question to religious people of his day is still resonant today.

The passage Jesus quotes is from Psalm 118. This Psalm celebrates the everlasting kindness of God. The psalmist says that he called to God and God answered, that the Lord is for him, and that with the Lord’s name he cut down all the nations. “You pushed me hard to knock me down but the Lord helped me. My strength and my might is Yah, and he has become my rescue.” He claims the Lord as his rescuer. Then comes the passage that Jesus quotes: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. From the Lord did this come about—it is wondrous in our eyes. (Psalm 118:22-23).  The psalmist then petitions the Lord for rescue and prosperity and then this: “Bind the festive offering with ropes all the way to the horns of the altar.”

By quoting this passage, Jesus identified himself with the psalmist as one who fears the Lord. He asserted that God has answered his call, that God is for him, that God is his strength and might. Yet at the same time, the faint echo of the coming offering/sacrifice is hinted at as well.  

Jesus also calls his critics to account—do they fear the Lord? Can they point to where God has answered their call?  Are they rejecting the cornerstone, the stone from which the whole building is measured out and built? 

Four Brothers and God’s Grace

Preached at Tigard Friends Church 1/27/2019

I want us to look at two stories from the Bible that use the relationships between older and younger brothers to explore what God wants from each of us, and how each of us has our own unique relationship with God. Ultimately, both stories give brilliant pictures of God’s grace to each of the brothers and also to each of us.

The first story is of the first brothers, Cain and Abel. They each specialize in a different branch of agriculture. Cain raises grain, and Abel raises sheep. When it comes time to thank God for the harvest, each offers something of what they have raised.

God graciously accepts Abel’s offering and rejects Cain’s. We do not really know why and must infer it from what happens next, namely that Cain carries the seeds of murder in his heart.

If we identify with Abel, we are working hard and giving part of what we produce to God. We are glad to see that God graciously accepts our offerings. We are also innocently oblivious to the inner dynamics in other people and trust that they mean us well. Abels are often surprised by the envy and hatred of others.

When Cain sees that God has rejected his offering and favored his younger brother, he becomes afraid that God has rejected him and as a result he is jealous and angry. God speaks to him directly and says, “Why are you angry? If you behave well, you will be accepted. If you behave badly, sin is at your door and wants to eat you up.” Cain says, essentially, “Whatever.” We see here the commitment of God to our free will, in that God could easily have prevented Cain from killing Abel and did not. It is always surprising how and when God intervenes in human affairs.

What in us might identify with Cain? Perhaps it is actual rivalry we have with our siblings. Perhaps our parents favored one child above the rest.  The first child has to watch parents get more lenient with second and third children. Perhaps now that we have grown up, we can see that our sibling has more trappings of success; we can see that though we work as hard or harder, everything goes our brother’s way. Even in religion, our sibling has a sunnier relationship with God and doesn’t seem to be afraid that God will reject her offering. Our sibling’s serene confidence is all by itself annoying.  Perhaps someone tries to reassure us that God will accept our offerings if we do the right thing, which we interpret as meaning we need work harder to earn God’s favor. Now we’re angry because we already tried that and failed.

So then Cain invites Abel out into the fields and kills him. This murder derives directly from the deadly sins that Cain has embraced in his heart. First, envy, then anger, then hatred. But just recall that they all are rooted in Cain’s fear that God does not love him as much as God loves Abel.

God again speaks to Cain directly and says, “Where is your brother?” Cain replies, “How would I know? Am I my brother’s keeper?” God says, “The earth itself cries out for justice for your brother’s blood. Therefore, you will be cursed by the land, which will not bear fruit for you. You will wander homeless.”

Cain says, “My sin is too bad for your grace. You have cast me out and you will hide your face from me, and I am a homeless wanderer. Anyone who finds me will kill me.” God replies, “No, in fact, whoever kills Cain will be punished even more severely.” And God places a mark on Cain so that no one will kill him.

So Cain departs from the face of God, a fugitive on the earth. But he finds a wife, they had a son named Enoch, and Cain builds a city and names it after his son.

Now why was Cain’s offering unacceptable? God’s rejection of the offering was not a rejection of Cain, which we can see in that God shows up to talk with Cain again, but it brings Cain’s inner life into the open. Cain is prone to comparing himself to others, which has its roots in fear of being unacceptable or inadequate, and which becomes envy when he sees God accepting Abel’s offering. This envy evolves into wishing Abel ill and progresses to actively eliminating the competition for God’s favor. Perhaps Cain sees God’s favor as a limited resource, so if Abel gets some, there is less for Cain.

I have found that this story stirs up in me a desire to do whatever it takes to be acceptable to God, so I can be as good as Abel, the one God likes best. It makes me want to be and do good so that God will be gracious to me. This impulse derives from the part where God says to Cain, “If you behave well, will you not be accepted?” When I respond this way, with increased good intentions, I miss the point, and the good I do is marred by its origin in comparison. St. Paul tells us to rejoice when others rejoice and to weep when they weep. This is impossible to do when I am comparing myself to others and becoming envious as Cain does.

I also have shared in Cain’s sense of being cast away by God. But note: Cain is the one who says that God is banishing him from God’s presence, and this internal state is what he carries with him. However, we know that we cannot elude God’s presence, though it is not always comfortable to have God so close. As the Psalmist David says, “Where can I go to get away from you? If I ascend into the heavens, there you are. If I make my bed in the grave or descend to hell, there you are.” And as Job the theologian says, “Could you not look away from me for one moment so I can swallow my spit?” So the distance between Cain and God exists only within Cain.

I also have shared Cain’s idea of justice. A murderer is beyond grace, deserves to be rejected and cast out of decent society. A murderer deserves to have the life taken away that he or she took away from someone else. This is justice, and Cain expects it. It makes sense, like adding 2 plus 2 and getting 4, or more appropriately subtracting 1 from 2 and then from 1, ending up in nothing and no one left.

It is interesting to note that the physical earth cries out about Abel’s blood. The need for justice runs through the universe and executing justice is God’s problem. We humans tend toward revenge rather than justice, and when God limits our revenge to eye for eye, we think that’s God’s idea of justice. But the prophet Micah says to us that we ourselves are to do justice and to love mercy; loving mercy mitigates against eye for eye justice. Instead, we judge God’s justice and mercy by our own, which hardly does justice to God..

What we learn about Grace

First, God’s grace shows in God’s willingness to have unique personal relationships with humans. God speaks directly to Cain, confronting him with the truth about what is inside him and then later with what he has done. God is gracious enough to confront us, to remind us of our ability to choose good, and often to give us time to grow into better people. There is no question that Cain chooses to behave badly, so it is easy to ignore the fact that when God confronts his attitude, this is grace to him, reminding him that he has a choice, and that God exhibits grace to him even when he has chosen very badly.

Second, God describes to him how the physical universe cries out because of Abel’s blood, and that there are life consequences for Cain, the farmer. The exercise of our free will has consequences, sometimes ones we see close up, sometimes ones experienced by subsequent generations or peoples far away. God’s grace doesn’t often (or perhaps ever) remove the physical and temporal consequences of human choices.

Third, God does not, in fact, shed Cain’s blood in payment for Abel. This calls into question our idea that the later Mosaic law that says, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life expresses God’s ideal. God’s grace uses a different kind of math to achieve justice. Furthermore, God’s grace makes us question our own simple understanding of justice. Indeed, God protects Cain from others who might kill him as a murderer.

Fifth, Cain does in fact wander, but eventually he has a family and builds a home and a city. So, in a moment when God could be exactly just and take from Cain the same life Cain took from Abel, God instead shows Cain mercy, gives him protection, and allows him to live a full life.

I won’t speak for everyone here, but I do think it’s common to be envious when we see God taking care of other people, particularly other people we see as second to us, either by birth order (as for Cain), by morality, by nationality, by some other measure. The psalms are full of questions to God: Why do the others prosper? Why are you so unhelpful to me?. “Why do the wicked prosper?” we complain with the prophet Jeremiah. We often have a desire to see God’s justice distributed on the bad guys and to have God’s mercy and grace distributed to us.

Our response to seeing God’s favor showered on other people reveals to us the state of our own souls. St. Paul says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” But if I’m obsessed with fairness, I may well rejoice in others’ misfortunes and weep only over my own. Turns out, God doesn’t like that. God will confront me directly and warn me about my envy and fear of unacceptability.

The second pair of brothers is the famous unnamed pair in the story we call the Prodigal Son. Jesus tells this story in the context of stories about God caring for the lost. Two brothers and a father, and the younger asks for his inheritance and goes off to waste it in wild living. The older stays home and works like a slave for their father while keeping an eye on his future inheritance.

The younger is working as a swineherd when he comes to his senses. He realizes that the pigs are getting more to eat than he is and that his father’s slaves live in more comfort than he does. He decides to go home and plans a repentance where he offers to work for his father as a slave. 

And when he nears home, the father, who has been watching for him since he left, runs to meet him. The father orders up for the prodigal son the best clothing, the finest jewelry, and the fattest calf for a (prodigal) feast. “My son who was dead is now alive!” he says.

When we identify with the younger son, we can celebrate whole-heartedly the gracious welcome of the father. We see how God is always waiting to welcome the wanderer back with open arms and heart. We are relieved to note that there is a welcome for bad brothers, the Cains of the world, and this encourages us to leave our unsatisfying self-made lives and run to God. I’ve found this so hopeful when I’ve clearly made a mess of things and found that God’s love is nonetheless constant.

But when we identify with the older brother who has worked all his life to please his father, we can learn some additional things about God’s grace. First, it is possible to live a life surrounded and infused by God’s presence and grace and never notice. It is possible to believe that we are earning God’s favor by our diligence and devotion. And when we do not recognize that we owe everything to God’s grace, it is maddening to see God ladle it out over a person who has forsaken God and goodness. It scandalizes our sense of fair play, of justice even, especially when there is no acknowledgement of our own moral excellence, when the only notice we get is to be invited to welcome the wastrel back.  We didn’t even get to throw ourselves a birthday party! I myself have said to God, “I know you’re gonna let that so and so into heaven and I’m not happy about it.”

The father’s response to his sulky son (who may be thinking about inviting his brother into the field to kill him…) is to confront his inaccurate view of their relationship head on. First, he calls him, “My son,” affirming their intimate relationship. Second, he reminds him, “Everything I have is yours.” The father remains committed to the son’s best interests, despite the son’s self-absorption. Third, he says, and I imagine gently, “But isn’t it appropriate to celebrate when our son and brother comes back from the dead?” He invites the son to rejoice with those who rejoice, to join the party.

So what do we learn from looking at these sets of brothers side by side?

1.     We humans have a tendency to compare ourselves to others.

2.     This tendency is often destructive of inner peace and relationships with those others. It leads to envy and other deadly sins.

3.     We humans tend to want God to be just to other people and gracious to ourselves.

4.     However, God’s grace surrounds and infuses our human lives, whether we recognize it or not. God’s grace reminds us to go home to God, protects us when we are wandering, offers hope for something better.

5.     We cannot and do not earn grace. Grace means favor we have not (and cannot) earn.

6.     Our response to seeing God’s grace in action for ourselves and for others needs to be gratitude (which includes the word grace). God’s grace is gratis—or free—and this is true for us and for those we have written off as prodigal, wicked, naïve, or prissy.

7.     We can tell we have the right attitude about God’s grace when we can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

One of the dominant metaphors for God’s kingdom is a feast, a party. Let’s be grateful for how God’s grace surrounds us and how God is gracious to others as well, and we can be the life of the party in the kingdom of God.

The Law Is Nailed to the Cross

Preached at South Salem Friends Church
May 21, 2017

I’m a missionary kid. My parents went to central Africa, right at the end of WW II. I was born in Kansas, but went back with them at 6 months old. Eventually, they put me in a School for Missionary Children, a boarding school. I was seven.

At boarding school, I had to make my bed, tidy my drawers and surface spaces, dust and sweep my room every morning. While I was in classes, my dorm mother inspected the rooms, and if they were not up to her standards, we came back to find our names in the doghouse. We had to clean it to passing standards right away.

If we got put in the doghouse three successive days, we were confined to our rooms for the time between school and supper. I can’t remember what happened if our tidiness still didn’t meet standards, but I’m guessing it involved more of the same.

It was embarrassing to be put in the doghouse and have the fact posted in public. But even worse was the consequence for wetting the bed. My roommate was a chronic bed-wetter, and every morning she had to drag her soiled sheets up to the laundry room and wash them out by hand. Again a public event. One night I had a bloody nose and had the same consequence. I told everyone who would listen that it was a bloody nose, not wetting the bed. This public humiliation was hard to bear.

And once in school, still seven years old, I didn’t have my homework done. I was so afraid of the teacher’s response that I wet myself, and the urine ran into a puddle under my chair. But I remember in this case that the teacher scolded the boy who laughed at me and made him clean it up, and she sent me to the dorm to change my clothes without berating me.  After school, she asked me why I was so frightened, and I explained that I had heard her scold a different boy who didn’t do his homework and threaten him with a spanking, and so I expected the same. She said, "He almost never does his homework."

And that same year, I deliberately broke a rule by reading a Nancy Drew mystery under my covers with the flashlight after lights out. My roommate told on me, and I had the book confiscated and was in significant trouble.

This is vivid to me because at seven, I entered a system of law different from what I had previously experienced. I didn’t know before that time that I should make my bed. I doubt if I knew how to make it, even. I didn’t know about homework. Learning to read with my mother had been a game. I was unaware of obligation, to a large extent, though of course my parents had a few rules. And since at home we had to turn off our electricity at 9 p.m. or so, I may have been reading by flashlight without penalty before I went off to boarding school.

Now the apostle Paul has some interesting things to say about sin and law in Romans 5:12-21:

I need to make some things clear, says Paul.

Before a command was given, sin was in the world, but it wasn’t counted against anyone.

(To connect this to my story, my not making my bed was not a disgrace before I went to a school with rules.)

Paul says: Sin is not part of the reckoning without law. However, until God gave the Law to Moses, death had the upper hand even over those who did not directly disobey God’s command as Adam did.

(For me as a little girl, even though I wasn’t penalized for messiness before I went to school, there was in fact messiness, and someone had to clean it up. Messiness does rule if no one cleans. And when there is a rule against messiness, shame arises. And shame is a kind of death.)

In fact, the Law came in so that we humans could see how sinful we are, how prone to error; but where sin increased, grace hyper-increased, grace filled and overflowed the deficit caused by sin.

Adam is a prefiguring of Jesus Christ In his effect on those who came after.

And if Adam involved all humanity in sin and death, how much more does Jesus involve all humanity in the grace of God. Adam’s trespass brought a condemning judgment, but Jesus’s free gift brings many trespasses into favorable judgment.

Just as through one human, sin, error, trespass, disobedience came into the harmony of the cosmos, with sin came death, and death passed through all humans because all sinned—to repeat: if by one man, Adam, death ruled over humanity, how much more will life gain the upper hand, and people will receive abundance of grace and the gift of being set right with God and will reign in life by the one man, Jesus.

Therefore, as by the disobedience of one man all were condemned, so now by the obedience of one man all are set right with God and brought into life.

  

So just as sin has ruled through death, even more grace rules because grace makes people who they are meant to be even into eternal life.

Paul is very repetitive about how grace through Jesus Christ dominates and dismantles the law and with it shame. But it’s hard to imagine living without rules. So who can we look at to see what that kind of life is like? We can look to Jesus.

Jesus himself said, I have come not to blow up or break apart the law, but to demonstrate what it looks like when someone understands its true intent and fulfills that intent. Matt 5:17-18 (fulfilled = completed, filled up, satisfied, accomplished) Paul, reflecting on the work Jesus did, said, “Christ in his flesh abolished the law” (Eph. 2:15).

This is what it looks like for Jesus to fulfill the Law: Jesus and his disciples were not scrupulous about following the law to wash up before eating. Jesus violated Sabbath restrictions and had the nerve to say that both he and his Father were still working. He said work done to help was holy and not a violation of the Sabbath laws. Jesus said that God had set up Sabbath laws for the welfare of humans, rather than creating humans so they could obey Sabbath laws. You break Sabbath in order to circumcise, to cut a person up; yet you want to kill me for breaking Sabbath to make a person completely whole (John 7:22-23).

Jesus touched the dead and the lepers. Both made him unclean—unable to participate in temple worship. The same is true for the woman who was bleeding.

Jesus did not condemn a woman taken in adultery, stoning her to death as the law required, but instead told her not to make that mistake again. Jesus called the Pharisees to account for their marriages and the hardness of heart that destroyed their married unions, but when he met the Samaritan woman, he brought her serial marriages into the light but did not scold or condemn or shame her.

Jesus consistently told people to examine their own hearts and behavior before judging how others were being obedient. Did Moses give you the Law, and none of you keep it (John 7:19).

The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17).

Whoever loves another fulfills the Law, and love works no harm for another (Romans 13:8-10).

Jesus showed us what it means to love another and thus fulfill, or fill up, or satisfy, the Law.

The Law foreshadowed good things to come but could not bring them about (Heb. 10:1).

Paul says that the Law is useful like a schoolmaster.  The Law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but now we are children of God by faith, and in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ (Gal 3:24-29).  We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law (Romans 7:4-6). The earlier commandment has been annulled and replaced by a better hope in Christ as our high priest, through whom we draw near to God (Heb 7:18-19).

The fact that we can’t keep the Law, in other words, creates in us the awareness of ourselves as sinners in need of grace, and the need for grace drives us to trust in the character and work of Jesus Christ. And when we put our trust in what Jesus has accomplished through his death and resurrection, and we trust God’s Holy Spirit to lead us every day, we live in freedom, not under the law.

We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law (Gal 2:16-21).

Keeping the Law does not justify, but we are justified freely by grace through the redemption accomplished by Jesus; justified by faith in Jesus, not by works of the Law (Romans 3:20-24, 28).

The Hebrew and Greek words we often translate as “sin” have in them a number of pictures that help us understand this theological concept.

Sin is To Miss the Way, to Stumble, to Wander, to Misstep, to Slip, to Stumble.

Sin is To Miss the Mark, to Miss the Goal.

Sin is To Fail at the Assignment, To Avoid, to Neglect, to Overstep.

Sin is To Run the Wrong Way when Terrified, To Lose Oneself.

Sin is To Bend, to Make Crooked, to Distort God’s Truth.

Sin is To Overturn God’s truth, To Trespass, to Rebel, to Break Away From, to Defect.

You can see that “sin”—or trespass, or iniquity, or transgression, or other synonym—is a living word that works on several levels of intentionality. 1) We can try to do right and end up messing things up even if we have given ourselves to God, and 2) we can decide to do wrong, and 3) we can deliberately assert that we belong to ourselves, not to God. All are kinds of sin. The last is most dangerous.

As John says in the first letter, if anyone says she or he is without sin, they lie. But if we confess or own up to how we have messed things up and gone the wrong way and avoided what we know God wants from us, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and clean us up and set us straight. This verse is about how those who want to belong to God can keep themselves moving with rather than against God.

There is a path God wants us to travel through our lives; there is a purpose toward which God wants us to aim; there are things God wants us to do; there are things God wants to make plain to us; there are principles God wants us to live by. What are these?  Jesus said the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How do we do this? We live out of love as much as we can, we ask God how to live out of love and we do what God puts before us to do, and we try not to harm our neighbor or ourselves. And when we fail, we confess it to God and let God work to help us do better the next time we have an opportunity to show love. We live under the law of liberty and we count on our gracious God to help us use our freedom lovingly.

Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty (James 2:12).

For in Jesus Christ all that counts is faith working through love (Gal 5:5-9, 13-25).

God chose to birth us through the word of truth; we need to humbly accept that word which is planted in us and which can save us, and obey it, the perfect law of liberty; be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry (James 1:18-25).

But if we really are living and walking in the Light, as He is the Light, we have true fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ the Son cleanses us from all sin and guilt. If we say we have no sin, we delude and lead ourselves astray, and the Truth is not in us. If we admit we have sinned and confess our sins, He is true to his own nature and promises and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness  (1 John 1:7-9).

I started out talking about the shame of finding myself in the doghouse because I couldn’t measure up, and about being humiliated for my human frailty. I added in the fact that sometimes I deliberately broke a rule. However, I did not want to own myself rather than to belong to God. This kind of active rebellion can occur in church-goers and in atheists, and it prevents the rebels from knowing that God is Love.

The Law helps us realize we have missed the mark and are sinners in need of grace. However, when the Law brings us to the point of trusting Jesus, it has done its work and has no more to say to us. We know that Jesus is the answer to our frailty, our imperfect attempts to do the right thing, our mistakes, and even our deliberate wrong-doing. We know that when we come to Jesus, he does not condemn, even when he does instruct. Sadly, we can also turn our backs on God and insist on owning ourselves, of earning our own way, and when we do this, we cannot grow in grace and we rely on keeping rules rather than obeying the Holy Spirit of God.

Let us give ourselves to God, accept the grace Jesus gives, and live guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us embrace our freedom to live out love for God and neighbor.

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Galatians: Grace and Trust, Not a New Law

A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians

Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay Press, a Friends publishing house

Lesson 11

Galatians 1:6-9; 2:11-16, 19-21

I resonate with Paul’s frustration here in Galatians. George Fox taught from the beginning that God calls both men and women as ministers and gifts them to do the work. The second preacher in the Quaker movement was Elizabeth Hooten. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, Quakers in a number of churches preached that women were not allowed by Paul to be preachers (or pastors or elders). Just imagine what Paul thought when he heard that! NO, he shouted from beyond the grave, NOT A NEW LAW!  I said you are set right BY TRUSTING IN JESUS, and you are now free to listen to God and obey what God tells you to do. If God says preach, DO IT!

Just try and pry people loose from a rule that makes them feel competent and comfortable. It’s nearly major surgery. Yet Paul has a similar problem here. He has taught, as he always did, that we are saved through confidence in the work of Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection, and what that tells us about the character and will of God. This saves us into freedom from rules and laws and freedom to hear and obey the lively and living Spirit; and yet, the Galatians are yearning for something safer and more obvious—circumcision. So much easier, really, a few minutes of excruciating pain and then recognition by others that one is “in.”

I can see Paul tearing his hair out. Live by faith, he says; you were included in Jesus’s death, and now your daily life is lived through and by Jesus. The death of Jesus proves that the law was not doing the job of setting people right. Don’t start trying to use the law for that purpose now.

And don’t be like Peter, says Paul, who talks out of both sides of his mouth—acting like someone without the law one minute and then trying to fit in with those who insist on the law the next. Act consistently with the truth of the gospel. How often do we compromise the free air of the good news because we are afraid of those who insist on following rules?

Lesson 12

Galatians 3:1-14

The measuring stick Paul introduces here is the presence of God’s Spirit in the lives of the Galatians. Just as Abraham’s faith was what set him right, so also the Galatians’ faith set them right so that God’s Spirit now dwells in them. This Spirit is the guide for living.

Paul points out some things about trying to live by the law that I wish we would listen to as we apply some part of the law today and ignore the rest. Paul says that those who rely on the works of the law to be right with God are cursed unless they do EVERYTHING written in the law. Paul says that relying on the law is the opposite of living by faith. This is true even with regard to advice Paul gave to churches in his time. Paul is not instituting a new set of laws that set us right with God. He must still be frustrated with us.

What does it mean to live by faith?  We believe the good news about God that Jesus came to tell us and illustrated by the way he lived; he identified with us as human beings doomed to die and brings us along with him into the resurrection. Now, identified with Christ, we have died to the law in order to be free to live to God.

The last part of Galatians 3 celebrates the equality of all in Jesus Christ. When we trust our oneness with Jesus Christ, we are all children of God. We are wearing Jesus. We don’t have lines drawn between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. We are one in Jesus and we are one with Jesus.

Lesson 13

Galatians 5:1-6, 13-18, 22-25

I remember seeing a Gordon setter walking itself around the track at a local middle school. The owner was ahead by ten feet or so, and the dog followed, carrying its own leash in its mouth. A 1000-lb. horse wearing a halter can be led by a tiny person. In both cases, the animal still wears the “clothing” of intimidation or domination. But Jesus has let us off the leash, out of the halter, and has set us up as freeborn human beings.

George Fox wrote of being renewed to the innocence of Eden before the fall. This is a good picture of the eternal truth of what Jesus has accomplished for us. Implicit in it is the truth that each day we make the choice between listening to and obeying what God says and acting on our own advice or as we are dominated by voices other than God.

Paul particularly warns against attempting to bring Judaic practices into the life of freedom in Jesus. His own experience of living under the law made clear to him that he wasn’t going to be able to please God that way; only his face-to-face blinding encounter with the resurrected Jesus made it possible for him to live at peace with God.

As always, freedom is not the same as a license to kill or harm. As the Spirit fills more and more of the corners of our lives, our actions can be characterized not by competitiveness, egotism, or envy, but instead by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This shows that Jesus is working in us to bring about in our bodies what we hope for—our complete redemption.

One word about aging: it seems to me that aging requires us to lean entirely on what Jesus has done for us. I know many older folks who are more rather than less anxious, more rather than less querulous, more rather than less self-absorbed. I encourage the elderly to remember that it is not our own good behavior that earns us God’s love. It comes freely as we trust in what Jesus reveals about God and accomplishes for us through his life, death, and resurrection.