Community
Church Sermons
Third Sunday after
Pentecost – June 20, 2004
So, let me tell you about my
hair. My hair has always been a source
of conversation ever since I was a little girl. Some of the conversation has been very favorable – the color, the
curls, the cut…adults would fawn over my ringlets when I was a child…mothers
would want to hold me and touch my hair…one woman even approached my mother
about having me as a baby model because of these red curls…but, I have to tell
you that most of the favorable comments about my hair have come in my adult
years. When I was a young adolescent,
my hair was not an asset and most of the conversation about it was very
unfavorable! I was teased unmercifully
because of this red, curly hair - 'carrot top', 'Bozo the clown' and 'brillo
pad' were just some of the monikers of choice my classmates gave to me!
These hurtful nicknames stayed with me as I matured and as a result, I fought
with feelings of rejection. These early
forms of rejection inaugurated my journey with striving to be accepted and I
would not be deterred! I knew that if I
just had straight hair, blond hair, or any other kind of hair BUT my red curls
I would be accepted. So, I used curling
irons, I had my hair chemically straightened, lightened, tortured all as a part
of my striving for acceptance. You
know, I believed that if I just worked hard enough on my appearance, I would
win my peers’ approval. I bought the right products, I wore the right
clothes, I worked hard to stay thin, and on and on it went. But you know I found that striving for
acceptance was like running on a treadmill – always running, but never crossing
the finish line. The minute I thought I
found just the key for fitting in, the standards would change and acceptance
was as elusive as that finish line.
Do you remember these
days? Do you remember that sense of
striving to fit in and wanting so badly to be accepted? Do you still have a sneaking suspicion that
even as an adult, you continue to strive to fit in? Strive to have more, look better, or climb the ladder of success
in order to be accepted?
Now, all of us long to be
accepted, don't we? We all long to be embraced by love in
relationship. Most of us know the
pain of not being accepted. Most of us
also understand the agony that ensues from working so hard to fit in - trying
to do all the right things, and yet still feeling like we never quite measure
up. Perhaps Father's Day
has a particular poignancy for you because you never felt the acceptance you
wanted from your earthly father.
Whatever your unique story might be, we all know how it feels to try to
earn someone’s acceptance through striving – we know what it’s like to pour all
our effort and energy into struggling for acceptance. And most of us know that ultimately, striving for acceptance is
an endless game. It may not be that
others won’t accept us; we simply won’t accept ourselves.
As difficult and arduous as it is to strive for acceptance from our peers, I
think many of us have struggled even more ardently trying to feel accepted by
God. Perhaps we’ve come into the
church in order to ‘make up’ for our ‘past lives’ of sin and moral failure. God will love me if I go to church on
Sundays. Or, perhaps we’re already
involved in the church, but we feel that we’ve got to keep doing more in order
to win ‘points’ with God. So we try to
get more involved, volunteer more hours, or give away more money. But how many points do we need to accumulate
to earn God’s favor? Who really
knows? And since we can never be sure,
we enter the race of striving to please God.
But we often feel that no matter our efforts, God is constantly looking
over our shoulder watching our every move with disapproval and shouting at us,
‘more, more, more.’ Unfortunately, we
Christians do not help the situation.
We perpetuate this sense of striving to please God as we judge one
another and place unattainable standards on one another. We reinforce the sense that God is never
pleased with us because we are rarely pleased with one another.
Well, the Apostle Paul understood striving for acceptance. Before Paul saw the risen Christ on his way
to Damascus, he lived a life of exacting standards, discipline and zeal as a
Hebrew of Hebrews. Paul believed that he had to earn God's
acceptance. If he worked hard enough and long enough on his religious
observances and obedience, he would ultimately meet with God's
approval.
Given his own personal
history with striving for acceptance, Paul was very concerned about what was
happening in the Galatian church. You see, a group of Jewish Christians
arose who believed Jesus' death on the cross wasn't really enough to save
people from their sins or from striving to win God’s approval through obedience
to the Law. These folks came to be called 'Judaizers' because they
believed that total commitment to Israel’s law codes was the climax of
conversion to Christ. [1]
In addition to having faith in Christ, one also had to keep the Mosaic Law,
particularly the food laws and the laws concerning circumcision. You have
to understand that the folks coming into the Galatian church were eating
‘unclean’ foods – most likely sacrificed to idols because they were pagan
Gentiles. And because they were pagan
Gentiles – they were not circumcised.
And as far as these Judaizers were concerned, they were as far away from
being true Christians as they could be!
So, the irony here is that in order for the Galatians to be true
Christians, these pagan Gentiles had to become Jewish through law
observance. Striving to keep the law
provided the ultimate example of their justification before God – meaning, in
order to be set right with God they
had to keep the Law of Moses.
Paul writes to the Galatians, then, to remind them that their striving to please God by obeying a certain set of rules will never earn God’s acceptance. In fact, this was never the function or intention of God’s law. God intended the law to serve as a tutor, as Paul tells us in our text. As a tutor, the law made us students. But we were only meant to be students under the care of the Law until the promise of faith was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And now that faith has come in Christ, we are much more than students under a tutor; we are all God’s children – sons and daughters by faith.
Why then, would the Galatians
want to remain in the custody of a tutor?
This is Paul’s question to the Galatians; this is Paul’s question to
those of us who feel we must still strive to earn God’s favor and
acceptance. Let me put this in another
way. We have all been amazed at the
technological revolution of the past 40-50 years. One such technological evolution that revolutionized our lives
is the development of the typewriter into the electronic, faster, and far more
complex computer. We realize that the
computer far transcends the typewriter.
Everything that a typewriter wanted to be is now found in the computer. So, now that we have computers, why in the
world would we want to go through all the work, trouble, and inefficiency of
using a typewriter?[2] In the same way, why would we want to go
back to working so hard to earn God’s favor when God has already earned our
acceptance through his Son, Jesus? Paul
reminds us through his letter to the Galatians that God’s promise to us is
based on faith and not through striving.
Before the Law came, God already made a promise to Abraham that through
his seed – meaning Christ, ALL THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD WOULD BE BLESSED. Abraham didn’t strive to earn that promise –
God made that promise to Abraham and Abraham received the promise through
faith. The Scriptures tell us that
Abraham ‘believed God and it was counted righteousness.’ Abraham accepted God’s
acceptance and lived according to faith.
In the same way, God accepts us in Christ because of what God has done
on our behalf. That is God’s
promise! It is through faith that we
become God’s children – and it is by faith in what God has promised to do for
us in Christ that we too can accept our acceptance.
Now, lest you think I’m
saying that faith invalidates the law and so we can live anyway we please,
because, hey – we’re accepted, you are mistaken! This is not what Paul is telling us in this text. Remember our analogy about the typewriter and
the computer? Well this analogy helps
us to understand the rightful place of our obedient response to God’s
promises. When the computer age
arrived, we put away our manual typewriters because they belonged to a former
era. But in putting them away, we do
not destroy them. We fulfill them by typing on the computer. Every maneuver on a computer is the final
hope of the manual typewriter. The
typewriter is not contrary to the computer, just as the law that Jesus came to
fulfill is not contrary to God’s promise. [3] So, when a Christian lives in the Spirit and
under Christ by faith, that Christian is not living contrary to the law, but is
living in transcendence of the law, just as a computer transcends a typewriter. And just as the typewriter serves as the
foundation for the computer, God’s acceptance of us serves as the foundation
for living a life in obedience to Christ!
We respond and live out of God’s loving acceptance, just as every time
we type an email on our computers, we can do so because of the typewriter. Since you are accepted by God, you can build
a life of obedience based on and growing out of the foundation of God’s
acceptance.
Now that we understand that
we belong to God through Christ and are God’s beloved children through faith in
Christ, Paul reminds his Jewish brothers and sisters in Galatia that our
acceptance comes from Christ and is not dependent on our inherent worthiness –
not our striving, not our economic status, or on our gender, or on our
nationality. These were the barriers
used to keep people ‘out’. And we still
use them today. But, God has broken
down these barriers through Christ, so that all may come into the embrace of
God’s acceptance. Just as we don’t
‘earn’ our way into our families of origin through what we bring to the table –
(right, we’re either born into a family, or if adopted we are ‘chosen’ by our
adoptive parents) Paul declares that all who have faith in God’s acceptance of
us in Christ are considered the true children of Abraham. We don’t bring anything to the table to earn
God’s acceptance, but we live out our acceptance by living obediently as ‘one
in Christ Jesus’ by faith. One of the
ways we live out our acceptance is to remember that all who are in Christ are
accepted too – so we should treat one another with the same kind of love and
dignity and grace that God has shown us.
My new brothers and sisters
here at Tellico Community Church, through Christ, you are accepted – I am
accepted, red hair and all! Let us all
live obedient lives for God in response to and based on God’s gracious and
loving acceptance. Amen.