Galatians
4.21-5.1
Alison
Morgan, Holy Trinity November 2006
Galatians
4.21-5.1, The Message
Tell me now, you who have become so enamoured with the law:
Have you paid close attention to that law? Abraham, remember, had two sons: one by the slave woman and one
by the free woman. The son of the slave woman was born by human connivance; the
son of the free woman was born by God’s promise. This illustrates the very
thing we are dealing with now. The two births represent two ways of being in
relationship with God. One is from Mount Sinai in Arabia. It corresponds with
what is now going on in Jerusalem – a slave life, producing slaves as
offspring. This is the way of Hagar. In contrast to that, there is an invisible
Jerusalem, a free Jerusalem, and she is our mother – this is the way of Sarah.
Remember what Isaiah wrote:
Rejoice,
barren woman who bears no children,
Shout and cry out, woman who has no birth
pangs,
Because the
children of the barren woman
Now surpass the children of the chosen
woman.
Isn’t it clear, friends, that you, like Isaac, are children
of promise? In the days of Hagar and Sarah, the child who came from faithless
connivance (Ishmael) harassed the child who came – empowered by the Spirit –
from the faith full promise (Isaac). Isn’t it clear that the harassment you are
now experiencing from the Jerusalem heretics follows that old pattern? There is
a Scripture that tells us what to do: ‘Expel the slave mother with her son, for
the slave son will not inherit with the free son’. Isn’t that conclusive? We
are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.
Christ has set us
free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a
harness of slavery on you.
Introduction
Good evening.
Sermon series on Paul’s letter to Galatians. Chapter 4.
Let me recap.
This is a circular letter written to all the churches in a
certain geographical area. Galatia sounds very learned, but we’re actually
talking about Turkey.
Paul had travelled round this region some time before,
preaching the gospel, planting churches, and then moving on. But churches need
input, and these early Christians have welcomed other visiting teachers. The
problem is, some of these teachers have led them back into a more traditionally
Jewish kind of faith, based on laws and customs. Paul is not happy with this,
and he’s writing to set them straight.
So this letter isn’t about the gospel itself, what it is and
how you respond to it. It’s about what comes after that – about how you live
it.
Today we have reached the second half of chapter 4, which
gives us a long and rather obscure illustration all about Abraham, ending with the
first verse of chapter 5 which summarises the point Paul is trying to make.
This verse is one of the best known verses in the whole letter, maybe even in
the NT itself, and it’s our title for today – ‘It is for freedom that Christ
has set us free’. We probably all know this verse, but we don’t usually think
about it in connection with the story about Abraham. We live in a society which
places a high emphasis on personal freedom, so we tend to think we know what it
means. But do we? Does the story about Abraham help, or really is that just for
these Galatians who’d been listening to lots of over the top teaching about Old
Testament law, and whom Paul wanted to rescue from their plunge back into a
rule-based religion? Well, that’s what we’re going to try and find out tonight.
Let’s start by recasting the issue in slightly more up to
date terms. It’s not ancient history which helps us to think today, it’s image.
So let me ask you, where do you stand on this whole freedom versus rules thing?
Because actually it’s a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Do you think that observing
rules and commandments will help you keep close to God? Here’s the image:
·
Woman wearing niqab
Or do you think that freedom from rules and
commandments will help you keep close to God? Because that can lead you in the
wrong direction too. Here’s another image – placed, probably not by mistake,
bang next to the first, on the same page of the newspaper:
·
Kate Moss advertising lingerie
So. Are you in favour of a religion that works through observing
rules, or would you rather pursue the do-as-you-pleaseness which our culture
defines as freedom? Is this topic relevant to us, or not? I think you’ll agree
that it is.
Abraham
But here we are in 1st century Turkey, where
these Galatians have been being subjected to a bit of fundamentalist Jewish
teaching based on Old Testament law. And so Paul starts with Abraham, the OT
father of both Jewish and Christian faith. It’s tempting to skate over the
difficult or historical bits of the Bible, but if we do that we run the risk of
not understanding it. If the Bible is to be any use to us we need to learn how
to build a bridge from it and its context to us and our context. You can’t
build a proper bridge unless it’s firm at both ends. So we’d better start not
at our end but at Paul’s end, and see if we can follow his argument. And Paul
starts with Abraham and the story of his life as it’s told in the book of
Genesis.
Abraham had a wife called Sarah. He also had a promise from
God that he would have a son and be the father of many nations. Given that
Sarah was well past it, they decided Abraham had better give God a hand and
make it happen. So Abraham had a child by Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian servant. The
boy’s name was Ishmael. The story is told in Genesis 16.
But this wasn’t what God had had in mind. So he just
repeated the promise. And hey presto, 5 chapters later Sarah too has a son. His
name is Isaac. The story of his birth is told in Genesis 21. Perhaps
understandably, Hagar and Ishmael began to look down on Sarah and Isaac, and
eventually Sarah persuaded Abraham to chuck them out. God reassured him that
both boys would be the father of nations, but said that Ishmael and his
descendents would always be in conflict with the peoples amongst whom they
lived. Isaac married Rebecca and became the ancestor of the Hebrews; Ishmael
eventually married an Egyptian, and the Arab peoples to this day trace their
ancestry back to him.
So that’s the story. But Paul doesn’t just tell the story.
He says it’s an allegory. That is, it has another meaning, a bigger meaning
than is contained in the events of the story themselves. An allegory is a story
which works on 2 levels, the literal level of what happened, and a symbolic
level too. So everything in the story stands for something else. This is how Paul
explains it. He says
The two
births represent two ways of being in relationship with God.
·
Hagar, the
slave woman, represents a relationship with God defined by the 10 Commandments,
the law given to Moses on Mt Sinai in Arabia. This kind of life is lived by
those in Jerusalem who continue to relate to God through observing the law – and
in our own times also by those who live in Arabia today, modern Muslims; the
word muslim means ‘one who submits’. The teachers who have visited the
Galatians are trying to get them to continue in this law-based way despite the
fact that they are now Christians. It’s characterised by human effort – Abraham
had Ishmael by taking matters into his own hands and sleeping with Hagar
because Sarah was too old to conceive.
·
Sarah, on
the other hand, is a free woman not a slave, and she and her son Isaac
represent a relationship with God defined by promise and characterised by
faith. This kind of life is lived by those who are the inheritors of God’s
promise, a promise which Isaiah restated in his prophecies and which was ultimately
fulfilled in the coming of Jesus. This is the life of freedom which Paul first
shared with the Galatians when he invited them to become Christians. It is one
which will eventually be lived fully in the new kingdom, the heavenly Jerusalem
which John sees descending to earth in his grand vision of the end of the
world. And it can be lived now not by human effort but through the power of the
Holy Spirit. Sarah, who was past the age of child-bearing when she had Isaac, represents
a relationship with God defined by the presence of the Holy Spirit (though
presumably Abraham did have something to do with it..).
So that’s the story. Do you get it? asks Paul when he’s
finished. Isn’t it clear? Don’t think Ishmael, think Isaac, he says. You
Christians are children of promise. You don’t have to keep the laws that these
Jewish teachers are harassing you with. You can live a life not bound by laws
but empowered by the Spirit (verse 29). And he goes on. Do you remember what
Sarah did? She got Abraham to chuck Hagar and Ishmael out. You can do the same
– chuck this rule-bound teaching out. What will you find if you do that? You
will find freedom. It is for freedom that
Christ has set us free. Stand firm, and do not let yourselves be taken back
into slavery. These false teachers are telling you it’s not scriptural to
do that – but it is. Nothing could be more scriptural. It goes right back to
Abraham. It’s them who are deviant, not you.
So there we have it. Live not by the law but by the Spirit.
Your inheritance is not to be bound by rules but to claim the freedom that
comes from an unbreakable promise made by God to you. Paul will go on in
chapter 5 to explain in much more detail what it means to live by the Spirit.
I’m not allowed to talk about that, so this is just the trailer – make sure
you’re here next week… For the moment we
are here, with this story about Abraham, trying to build a bridge from the
foundation at his end to ours. As I’ve thought about it it’s seemed to me that
the bridge has three main elements.
1. Freedom – do we take it or receive it?
Firstly, there’s the question of what freedom is, and how we
get hold of it in practice. God has given us a promise, just as he gave one to
Abraham. It is in fact the same promise. The promise is that through faith – in
our case, through faith in Christ - we will be set free, saved, made alive,
however you want to express it. We will be reconnected with God and welcomed
into the kingdom of heaven. Now Abraham believed the promise he got, that he
and Sarah would be the parents of all this through Isaac. But he and Sarah
thought they had to make it happen. They made a plan. They thought it through.
They took responsibility. They knew they were too old to have a legitimate
child. So they had an illegitimate one. But God hadn’t ever asked them to do
that. He’d just made them a promise.
Now we too have been made a promise. Our promise is a
promise of freedom. We will be set free. The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus said at the beginning of his ministry.
He has anointed me to bring good news to
the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free. That is what it means to be a Christian. To
be a Christian is to be someone who has been set free. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free, Jesus
said to the disciples [Jn 8.31-36].
But what does it mean to be free? We live in a society which
places a high emphasis on freedom, and we talk about it all the time. But I think that what we mean by freedom today
is a long way from what Paul means here by freedom.
Our western culture is based on the philosophy of the 17th
and 18th centuries. One of the most influential 18th
century philosophers was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a book called The
Social Contract, which begins
with the famous sentence ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. He
believed that human beings are innately good, but held in thrall by social
forces which enslave them. So he called for reforms which would set people free
from the chains of institutions, rules, customs, traditions - and religion. By
and large he got them; these are the foundations of the modern secular
democracy. Did it work? Well, in some ways it did. It gave choice to people who
had not previously had any choice. We can now earn our living in the way we
want, spend our time and money as we want, express ourselves as we want. It
unlocked the previously closed structures of society and made mobility
possible. Your life is no longer determined by the circumstances of your birth,
as it had been for almost everyone for thousands of years. And I think this is
still how we define freedom. Freedom is about having choices, choices to do the
kind of things we want to do, choices to live the kind of lives we want to
live.
But this isn’t the kind of freedom Paul is talking about at
all. He’s talking about something much more important – not freedom from
external constraints but inner freedom, the inner freedom which he promises can
be ours through life in the Spirit. This kind of freedom isn’t about what we
can or can’t do, good though it may be to have that kind of freedom. It’s about
who we are. The freedom I have found in Christ is an inner freedom, a freedom
brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit as I allow him to change me from
the inside out. It’s a freedom which brings peace, joy, patience and all the
other things Paul will talk about in the next chapter. It’s a new kind of
freedom, a freedom not dependent on external circumstance; an inner freedom. It’s
not a freedom to do at all. It’s a freedom to be. And this is a
kind of freedom we can’t take. We can only receive it.
It’s quite interesting to look at what Rousseau’s personal
life was like, as he pursued his understanding of freedom. At the same time as he
was writing the Social contract he was in a relationship with a woman
who bore him 4 illegitimate children. As each was born, they took them to the
local orphanage and abandoned them on the steps. And I suppose that’s still
pretty much how our culture understands freedom – it’s a freedom from
inconvenient restrictions. We are brought up to believe that we can have this
and have that, that we can walk away from our commitments, express our
feelings, indulge our desires, reach our dreams. And then we wonder why it is that
families fall apart, communities disintegrate, crime rates go up. This kind of
freedom doesn’t actually make you free at all; it brings you into bondage.
And it turns out that choice-based freedom isn’t real
freedom, it’s an illusion. The real things I want to be free from are inside
me, not outside me. The Greek philosopher Socrates, far greater than Rousseau,
said this: how can you call a man free
when his pleasures rule over him? What I really want freedom from is anger,
dissatisfaction, jealousy, low self-esteem. It’s the inside stuff that is the
main problem. And Jesus said that too.
For a couple of years I employed a cleaner named Christine.
Every Monday morning she turned up to clean my house. Christine had dropped out
of school, become a single parent, lived in social housing, did part time jobs
of one kind or another. All choices she’d made. She could still make choices –
she saved up and took her son to Disneyland. She went clubbing on a Friday
night. She went with a friend for a hmhm weekend in Blackpool. But Christine
wasn’t free. She was so not free that I came to dread Monday mornings. Every Monday
she’d turn up spitting rage about her son, or his school, or her phone company,
or her insurers, or the man who’d bumped into her car. She didn’t have a good
word for anyone, and instead of coffee breaks she’d stand on the patio with a
cigarette in one hand shouting furiously into her mobile in the other. Plenty
of choice. No freedom. One day she walked out because I’d put out the wrong
kind of sheet. Externally, she lives in a society which gives her plenty of
freedom. Internally, she was as bound as anyone I’ve met.
So, what is freedom, and can we take it or do we have to
receive it? The answer for us is the same as it was for Abraham, and the same
as it is for the Galatians. Freedom isn’t about what you can or can’t do. It’s
a promise from God. You can’t seize it, earn it or observe it. You can only
receive it. And it happens inside you.
2. What then is the place of rules in our
lives?
The second element of the bridge relates to what Paul calls
the slave life, a way of life based on the law given to Moses on Mt Sinai, and
summarised in the 10 Commandments. It’s a way of living based on rules, and
this is what the teachers from Jerusalem had presented to the young Galatian
Christians. Paul is telling the Galatians that they don’t have to observe the law,
either as they find it in scripture or as it’s been handed down by tradition.
He’s telling them they have been set free from the requirements of the law.
They don’t have to keep the rules.
And this begs the question, how does that apply to us? Is there
any place for rule-keeping in our Christian lives? It’s actually quite scary to live
without rules. Muslims
often say the advantage of Islam over Christianity is that it offers complete
guidance on how to live your life. You just have to follow the rules laid down
for you. You may be good at doing that or bad at it, but the aim is
straightforward enough. Paul, on the other hand, seems to be saying we are free
from the burden of rules now that we live as children of promise not of law.
And it’s true that if you think about Jesus, you don’t find
him telling anyone what the rules are, even when they have obviously and
publicly broken them. He healed on the sabbath in defiance of the law; and had
endless arguments with Pharisees who wanted to tell him the law says he should
be washing his hands or fasting or not touching people. He talked to the wrong
people and went to the wrong places.
So. To what extent do you live your Christian life by trying
to keep rules? Or, to put it another way, how many ‘oughts’ are there in your
life? Why do you have a daily prayer time, if you do? Because you want to or
because you think you ought to? Why do you come to church? Why do you try and
witness to your friends? Why do you try not to swear, not to lose your temper, not
to upset people? Why do you try to set a good example at work, if you do? Why
do you try to stay faithful to your spouse and to care responsibly for your
children, if you have them? After all, family members can be seriously
annoying, can’t they. Why not go the Rousseau route and claim your freedom from
all these responsibilities, if it’s for freedom that you have been set free?
Well, perhaps the question answers itself: that’s not the
kind of freedom God had in mind. It’s not real freedom, inner freedom. The
Galatians weren’t tempted to try it, but the Corinthians were.
The Corinthians were Greek, not at all inclined to keep the
Jewish law but very inclined to exercise their freedom. They were busy getting
into bed with members of their family, church was a riot of people all talking
at once, and when they met for communion they just plunged in regardless of
anyone else and stuffed themselves. The result was that some went hungry,
others got drunk. All in all, chaos seemed to be the name of the game. And this
is what Paul said to them. Do try, he
said patiently, to love each other rather than indulging yourselves and
competing with each other. Do try and exercise a bit of self-discipline. Do
remember you aren’t just individuals but part of a body. And do remember God is
a God not of disorder but of peace. This isn’t the way to do it. And he
will repeat that advice to this lot in the next chapter.
So what does it mean, do you think, to be free? We don’t
have to live by rules, and we aren’t subject to the law. But that can’t mean,
can it, that we aren’t subject to anything at all. If that were the case Paul
would be congratulating the riotous Corinthians, for whom freedom meant
self-indulgence. Is that really freedom, or is it just another form of slavery?
Remember Socrates - how can you call a
man free when his pleasures rule over him? Freedom isn’t about having
permission to follow your own desires and inclinations, it’s something a lot
bigger and better than that.
So yes, the rules are gone; but they are replaced in your
life not by nothing, but by something, Paul says. And that something is the Holy
Spirit. We no longer need a framework imposed from the outside; we have the
guidance of the Spirit from the inside. Rules are out, but the Holy Spirit
comes in instead, in ways Paul will explain in the next chapter.
3. What is the relation between faith and
culture?
That brings me to the third element of our bridge, and back
to where we started. I think there’s one more thing we have to ask, and that’s
this. What is the relation between our life of faith and the conventions of our
culture? This was the source of the problem for the Galatians. Their faith as
Christians said that they were free from the requirements of the law. But the
Jewish culture of their Jerusalem teachers said that the people of God wear
this and do that and observe the other. Jews get circumcised, Jews keep certain
festivals. So there is a tension between what is received as part of the
package of faith, and what comes to us as part of our human culture.
This is just as important question for us as it was for the
Galatians, but in a different way.
We live in a culture which is anti-restriction, pro freedom.
We embrace freedom all right, but we tend to define it in a very particular
way, in terms of external things - rights and choices and opportunities. Both
Jesus and Paul taught that real freedom is not to do with external things but
with internal ones. So for most of us the main issue in this rules vs freedom
debate is not to do with the rules part
of what Paul is saying, but to do with the freedom part.
But that isn’t so for everyone in our society. We, as the
children of Isaac, have as our friends and neighbours the children of Ishmael.
Here it is again [image]. We, like the Corinthians, are prone to abuse our
freedom and turn it into self-indulgence. Sexual freedom is important to
western culture. Freedom to dress as we want is important. Freedom to read what
we want, to look at what we want, to advertise as we want. But our Muslim neighbours
are horrified by all this. They see it as decadence and immorality. Some of
them want their women to cover everything except their eyes, because this is
their culture. They don’t like our culture of freedom. They want a culture of
law, in accordance with the history of their people. How should we respond to
them?
Well, to some extent with admiration. They are far more
disciplined in their attempts to live by their faith than we are, and they are
right to protest against the immorality of our do-as-you-please society. To
some extent with shame too – it is our task to tell them that it is not through
keeping the law that they will find true freedom, but through responding to
Jesus, and we aren’t doing it very well, because we haven’t really grasped what
true freedom is, and that it is different from the false freedom promoted not
by our faith but by our culture.
And, finally, we must respond with realism, a realism that
Rousseau didn’t have. I read a summary of an article by an Egyptian journalist
recently. He’d analysed the frequency of Google searches for the word ‘sex’.
Where is ‘sex’ most often the search term, worldwide? It’s not here, in the
decadent West, where Kate Moss
advertises provocative underwear. It’s in Muslim countries, where women are
veiled. Pakistan comes out top, Egypt second, Iran and Morocco 4th
and 5th, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia 7th and 8th.
So as a means of achieving purity of thought, following strict religious laws
and requiring women to cover up doesn’t work, does it – as Jesus so often
pointed out. Real freedom won’t ever be found in codes of practice and the
keeping of rules. Real freedom is inside a person, not outside. And it comes
through the Holy Spirit. That’s the meaning of freedom as Jesus taught it and Paul
understands it.
Real freedom, the only true freedom, comes neither from law
nor from licence. It comes as we submit to God and ask for the empowering
presence of the Holy Spirit within us. Next week we sill find out how..