Justified by Faith

Galatians 1:13-17; 2:11-21

Sing this one with me if you remember it from Bible School. “I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together. All of God’s children, all around the world – yes, we are the church together.”

Sometimes those old simple songs can bring back a feeling of love and hope that hangs out deep in the marrow of our bones. I think that’s why it can be so hard to learn new hymns sometimes – even really good new hymns that our choir director wants us to learn. It’s also one of the reasons that any congregation can become unwittingly unwelcoming and unwilling to change.

I’ve never heard anyone say that we were unwelcoming, but I have heard people say that they just don’t know how to connect or to get involved. At the same time, those of us who are more involved sometimes fall prey to the fallacy that it’s just easier to do it all ourselves. Besides, if we don’t do it, who will?

I don’t have an easy answer to either of those issues, but I think our scripture reading speaks to them today. At least it speaks to the issue of how we live into this faith that we share together. You may recall that this reading is Paul’s side of the story from the council meeting that we read about last Sunday in Acts. While Paul certainly has some differences of opinion with Peter – and he seems a little salty about it – the point that he is working out with the Galatian congregations is the same. How do we do church together?

That may sound like an oversimplification, and it kind of is because they were wrestling with the basic question of belief and practice and inclusion in the spiritual community. They were asking questions like: If we’re a community of believers and some follow kosher food handling practices and some don’t, what do we do at the pot luck supper? Who do we sit with? Does the inclusion of a broccoli salad with bacon taint the whole table?

These were serious questions that had to do with their identity as God’s people. It kind of reminds me of years past in which some of us have joined a local Mosque for Iftar during Ramadan. We offered to bring food and they said, “No, but you are welcome to eat with us. We don’t want the burden of our laws to fall on you.” This certainly was true, but it was also clearly a risk to their sense of identity to allow us to prepare food for them, and we understood that.

Likewise, we have beliefs and customs that define us. We have the sacraments of Baptism and Communion that function as public demonstrations of God’s claim upon us and God’s redemptive love for us, and we have a belief and practice that trusts God to call all people into leadership positions equally so that they may empower the church for ministry.

I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together, and what Paul is getting at in this salty, convoluted argument to the congregations in Galatia is that the way we function as God’s people is a reflection of how we understand God to be active and present in the world.

What I mean by that, and what Paul is saying about that, is that there are two things tangled up in all that we say and do. One is the physical act of relating to one another, and the other is the spiritual reality of being God’s people together. For example, in 2:11-14, Paul is spittin’ mad over the double standard that Peter shows by moving over to the “cool kids table” when the observant Jews came to town.

Likewise, in 2:16 he acknowledged the spiritual implications of our actions when he wrote, “yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”

Ok, now we are getting to the heart of the matter. To justify something is to prove it to be right or reasonable; in theological terms, it means to be right or good in the eyes of God. Paul is telling us that there is nothing that we can do – no rules that we can follow – that will justify our lives before God. That may not sound very fair, but it’s also a recognition that, as they say, nobody's perfect.

In fact, Paul continues to argue in v.19 that following the letter of the law only brings death (you may recall that he said in 1:13 that he oversaw violence against the church and was rewarded for it), but faith in Christ offers life – a resurrected, renewed, reformed life that we live with God in kinship with one another, right here and right now!

So, what do we do with that life? For one, Paul warns us in v. 18 not to become a monster in order to protect ourselves from the other monsters that are out there. If we set up barriers and restrictions to knowing and loving God and being in community as God’s people other than the revelation of God through the love of Jesus, then we are just repeating the sins that Jesus came to tear down. Likewise, if we begin to believe that “God helps those that help themselves,” then why would we need Jesus in the first place?

Notice here that Paul never says to get rid of the law – which of course means the laws of Moses that include the ten commandments and all of the Deuteronomic and Levitical codes. He just says that living by the law as though it could save you and redeem you from sin is not going to end well. Instead, what theologians and scholars in the Reformed tradition have argued through the years (and what Paul goes into greater detail about in Romans 8) is that everything we do is in response to God’s grace – even when we follow the law of Moses.

Obviously, we don’t follow them to the letter, but we follow the one who embodied them and summarized them as loving God and loving our neighbor with all that we have and all that we are. Yet even when we do that, everything we do is in gratitude for the life that we’ve been given; for the chance interactions that allow us to demonstrate kindness; for the community of believers that holds us during tragedy and celebration; for the words of scripture that assure us that our lives are lived in fulfillment of God’s love.

That means that you, yes you, are an expression of that love just as much as I am, and we know this because we have come to believe that God expressed God’s love through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus! “And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by faith in Christ (v.16).”

Now, I recognize that there are people in the world – maybe even in our pews – that find the resurrection of Jesus hard to swallow. In fact, it can even become the same kind of barrier that Paul was telling the Galatians to keep from putting up. The important thing about it all is to remember that whatever you believe about the death and resurrection of Jesus, having faith in Jesus – following the way of Jesus – means accepting a constant invitation to let go of the attitudes and behaviors that separate us from God and one another.

When we put our division on the cross we rise to a new way of being. We live, we become self-aware, only inasmuch as we become aware that we are held by God’s grace. Last week I told you that being God’s people was like packing each other’s parachutes and jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. This week I’ll add that justification by faith means that all those chutes end up working fine, even though some of them were not packed quite right.

At the end of the day, belief and faith are gifts that we have received from God. We have decisions to make about what to do with those gifts, but God is going to keep giving them. As God’s people, we will continue to struggle with how to include others and how to hold onto the traditions that help us to feel like we have a sense of identity and meaning and purpose, but as long as we remember that our life together is a reflection of how we understand God to be active and present in the world we’ll be alright.

I am the church. You are the church. Yes. We are the church together because we have come to believe and so we are justified through faith, not to act as we want, but to be included in the actions of God – and to God be the glory for that...now and always. Amen!