Text: Galatians 2:15-21
Theme: "The Third Option
4th Sunday after Pentecost/Father's Day
4th Sunday after Pentecost/Father's Day
June
16, 2013
FIRST
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Denton,
Texas
Rev.
Paul R. Dunklau
+In
the Name of Jesus+
15 “We who are Jews
by birth and not sinful Gentiles
16 know that a person is not justified by the
works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith
in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in[d] Christ and not
by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be
justified.
17 “But if, in
seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the
sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! 18 If
I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.
19 “For through the
law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 20 I
have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not
set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the
law, Christ died for nothing!”[e]
I
mean, the offer was more than fair.
There was this man named Naboth, and he had this very nice piece of land
next to the palace of King Ahab. It was
actually a garden. Ahab wanted that land, and he was willing to pay a big chunk
of money to Naboth in order to have it. But Naboth wasn't selling because that land
belonged to his family for generations.
There was no deal. As a result,
Ahab was bummed out. One translation of
this Bible story says that he had a "sullen" expression.
His
wife, Queen Jezebel, notices the mood change.
So what does she do? This queen
premeditates the murder of Naboth so her husband can have his vegetable garden. And -- long story short! -- King Ahab didn't
even bother to find out why Naboth was killed.
He just went down to Naboth's garden and took possession of it. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? It certainly can, but there's more than
corruption going on here.
Ahab
and Jezebel. If there ever were two
people who did what wanted, took what they wanted, lived the way they wanted,
and removed all obstacles in the way of what they wanted, it was these two. It was all about them -- first, last, and
always. If you want something, take
it. If you have to run someone else down
in the process, run them down. If you
have to lie; if you have to cheat; if
you have to steal; if you have to murder, it doesn't make any difference. You do what you have to do. You're the center
of your own universe; you're the lead actors in your own play. Everyone else is just a stage-hand or a tool
at best and a bother at worst.
Believe
in God? "Sure", Ahab and
Jezebel and people like them would say; "Sure, we believe in God -- as
long as God performs the way we expect him to." So God, if they even bothered to believe in a
"god" at all, was just a means to an end. Ahab and Jezebel, simply put, were
self-centered in the extreme. As a
person in recovery, I have to wonder if they were alcoholics or addicts of some
kind. Why do I say that? Because drug
and alcohol abuse is only a symptom. The
underlying problem is self-centeredness.
Ahab and Jezebel. They certainly
illustrate one way to be, one option. To
a greater or lesser degree, it remains a very popular way to be.
Today's
Gospel reading, the story of Jesus in the home of a man named Simon, points out
another way to live, a second option.
Simon was a Pharisee, and Pharisees were both educated and very
religious. They were the people, by
golly, that were going to follow the rules -- to wit, the ten commandments --
perfectly. And to help them toward that
effort, they endeavored to keep the Mishnah
which listed dozens upon dozens of rules and regulations designed to help
them keep the ten commandments. They
lived obediently; they lived religiously.
And the last thing they would do was spend any time, or have any
interaction, with those who did not live obediently or religiously. In their worldview, God, like them, would
want nothing to do with outcasts and sinners and riff-raff, lost sheep, and,
for that matter, for people who did not live EXACTLY the way they did. For them, it was all about conforming to the
Law of God.
So
when Simon the Pharisee saw this woman -- a well-known, "sinful"
woman -- paying all this attention to Jesus with her tears and her hair and her
alabaster ointment, is it any wonder that Simon muttered under his breath: "If this man were a prophet, he would
have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him-that she is a
sinner"? He was simply speaking
like the obedient, religious, conformist that he was.
Yes,
Simon the Pharisee illustrates a second option, a second way to be. It's the religious choice. Like
the first, it is still a most popular choice.
Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was a professor at Fuller
Seminary in Pasadena, California who came up with something called "The
Homogeneous Unit Principle." It
meant that -- at least, statistically -- people like to become Christians, join
a church, etc., without crossing racial or economic lines. The message to Christian congregations was
that if you wanted to grow, you had to attract people like yourselves -- the
ones who looked like you, behaved like you, made roughly the same amount of
money you did, and so forth. What do you
think? Does this not smell, suspiciously, like the exclusivist, conformist,
religious attitude of Simon the Pharisee?
As an aside, it just amazes me when people basically say that the Bible
is old and out-of-date. I've found, the
more I dig into it, that it's far more up-to-date than any of us can begin to
think!
So
there you have two out of the three options.
You have the choice to just damn the torpedoes and be as self-centered
as you want to be. You might argue that
since everyone else is doing it, why not throw in the towel and do it
yourself. If that doesn't sound too red
hot, well, then you have the religious.
Keep the Law of God perfectly; follow the rules and regulations to a
T! Hang out with, and only with, people
who live like you, act like you, believe like you, behave like you. Be polite, but under your breath -- like
Simon the Pharisee -- exclude all the rest.
I
don't know about you, but I hope to God there is a third option. You want me to give my testimony? I've lived both ways. I took option number one and I ran with
it. It was a slowly-developing
catastrophe that almost killed me. I
took option number two and I ran with it.
The same thing happened. Even
worse, and at its worst, I lived a combination of the two. In my mind, I was the greatest thing since
sliced bread. In my mind, I was going to
save the world with the Word and the Sacraments. A wise person once said that "The road
to hell is a gradual one," and, gradually, that's exactly where I was
headed. If I was so great; if I had all
the religious answers, then why did I experience what the AA program calls
"pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization"?
One
day, in the midst of all this, I came across a passage in the Old Testament
book of Isaiah. It was chapter 29, verse
13 where God says this: "These
people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their
hearts are far from me." That made
me realize that the distance between my mind and heart made the Grand Canyon
look like tiny, dry creekbed!
You
see, in my mind I could formulate thoughts about God, and those thoughts could
be translated into words. Looking back,
many of those words were right. But my heart?
Don't go there; don't you dare. That heart had been hurt and beaten and
broken -- some times, many times, by my own thoughts, words, and deeds. Don't go there. Don't let anyone in. All that's in that heart, all that's in that
soul, is doom and gloom; all is darkness in that room. God says:
"These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with
their lips but their hearts are far from
me." "Why is that?" I
thought.
In
my mind there developed this thought:
"Your heart is far from me because of your self-centeredness and
your religion." In a way, it's a
wonderful irony. Here on this Father's
Day, I can remember the time when I came to believe that God was no longer the heavenly
version of an earthly father that I felt I could never please enough. Indeed, in Jesus Christ, God was my Lord and
Redeemer, but only much later in my life did God become also my brother and
friend. Somehow or another, the wind of
God's Spirit tore open that storm cellar of my heart. I began to really learn what it means to live
by faith. More than that, I discovered
that faith acts in love -- and that love has an object, and it's not me: it's my fellow human beings.
I
would not be standing here today saying these things if this hadn't
happened. There is a third option for
everyone. It's called faith.
Is
it easy? No, not at all. I'm still tempted -- tempted every day and in
so many ways -- to be completely self-absorbed.
Either that, or I pride myself on what a fine Christian believer I am
and wish that others were fine Christians like me too. I may not say that, but I think it. In other words, I still try to resurrect
option one or two. How pathetic is
that?
I
have no other way to describe it. For
that matter, there is no better way to describe it than St. Paul did in our
text for today: "I
have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me."
So
there you have them: options one, two,
and three. Options one and two are roads
well-worn and well-traveled. I take
leave of the pulpit this morning by sharing with you these words from the poet
Robert Frost: "I took the road less
traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
Amen.
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