Sermon Archives

June 6, 2010
Pastor Jim Bangsund

"No Other Gospel: Staying Centered"
Sermon Series on Galatians (1 of 5)
Galatians 1

It started off as just one of those things curious young boys do to occupy their time. More than two decades have now passed, but some things stay fresh in your memory. Our son Peter was about 8 years old, and he and a friend had found a piece of angle iron, about an inch by and inch by about a foot long. They decided to take turns throwing it at a tree to see who could get it to stick the most often. Which was fine until the piece of iron ricocheted off of the tree and hit Peter in the head. We knew nothing about this until Judy found him in his room, having stumbled into bed with a bleeding head. The wound was small, but the damage was not. He was asking the same series of four questions over and over again. He had a concussion. And we were in Tanzania where medical options are limited.

As we look back on it, we should have spared no effort or expense to get him on a plane to Nairobi, Kenya, where they can drill a skull if internal pressure builds. Instead, we rushed him to a local hospital where he was admitted for overnight observation. The idea was to check on him every hour until morning. That was the idea; that was the point. What actually happened that night was ... nothing. The nurses never came in, never checked. Fortunately, Judy was an O'Connor Hospital RN before we went overseas, and you can believe that she checked vital signs again and again that long night as she hovered over our young son. The story ends well; the pressure subsided, and Peter was home the next day, his life no longer at risk.

What was the difference between Judy and the other nurses that long, fretful night? I suppose we could come up with many things, but the most significant is this: Judy had a whole lot more at stake in the outcome than anyone else in the building. Having the life of your son on the line has a peculiar way of keeping you focused on the task at hand, keeping you centered. It's what's at stake that makes the difference.

That's the kind of intensity, the kind of staying centered and focused, that we find in Paul's letter to the Galatians. Because in Galatia - an area in what is today central Turkey -there was a group of believers who were Paul's children in the faith. He had brought the Gospel to them; they had come to know Jesus through him; now, after all that, outsiders had come in to stir things up and, in the confusion, their faith was at stake. Paul heard about it, but couldn't be there to help them.

What do you do when your children are in trouble? When they start making bad decisions and you aren't there to guide them. Paul wrote a letter, an intense letter, because he couldn't get there himself. Tough for him, but good news for us, because that letter is now in the Bible, and so for five weeks we're going to be listening to what Paul says in his letter to the Galatians as he contends for the faith of his children.

So turn with me, if you will, to Galatians chapter 1 - that's on page 1151 in the church Bibles. We aren't going to go verse by verse, but we are going to be looking at three our four places in the first chapter that will help get us launched.

Galatians begins with the words "Paul, an apostle." That's the way letters were written in his day: with the writer's name at the top. Sort of like e-mail. You see, this really is a letter - a real letter. Paul didn't send it with page numbers and chapters and verses like we have it today. But he does start off immediately telling us he's an apostle. Why? Because his credentials were being challenged. Sort of like if your kids come under the sway of some unhealthy influential person and you have to make it clear that you are their parent and you really have reason to be poking into their lives.

"Paul, an apostle" - and, if that's not enough, he spells out what that means: "sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead." Because, as we'll see, people were challenging Paul's authority in his absence - saying, "Ah, Paul did his best, don't you know? But what you really need is the foundational stuff we're bringing." So Paul reminds them from the get-go that he had been "sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ" who had appeared to him on the road to Damascus and turned his life around.

In verses 3 through 5, Paul goes on with the greeting he uses in all his letters: "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" - and then he adds some critical words: "who gave himself for our sins" - because, as we'll see, it's meaning of what Jesus did that's at stake here.

Now at this point, in Paul's other letters, he says something like "I give thanks to God because of what I hear about you." But not this time. In verse 6 Paul erupts. "I am astonished," he says. "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - which is really no gospel at all." Foregoing the bread-and-butter niceties, Paul launches his attack. Well, "attack" isn't really the right word. Paul cares deeply for the people of Galatia, after all, but he is shaken at what he has heard.

It reminds me of another day, some time after our son Peter's adventure with the angle iron and the tree, when he crawled in behind the freezer with a scissors and started wondering what would happen if he cut the power cord. Who can understand the mind of a young boy? This was again in Tanzania - a place where standard house voltage is 220 volts. The first we knew of this latest adventure was when there was a horrific flash-bang and Peter emerged trembling with eyes as big as saucers and a scissors with a cord-shaped hole blasted out of one of its blades. "What on earth did you think you were doing??" I shouted. "Don't you know you could have been killed?! Whatever ever got into you to do that?!" I was loud not because I was angry but because I was shaken. I was thinking of what could have happened. And this is what we hear in Paul at this point when he cries "I am astonished at you!"

Well, what had happened? Years before, Paul had been an expert in the Old Testament law - a Pharisee - and one who thought Jesus and the disciples had been dead wrong. In verse 13, Paul writes, "For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it." In verse 14 we read of the depth and intensity of his convictions. And then in verses 15-17 he describes that fateful encounter on the road to Damascus when Jesus appeared to him and turned everything around:

"But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man" - again he emphasizes that what he preaches came to him directly from God - "nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus."

Paul had grown up believing that being right with God meant closely following the Old Testament law - a detailed list of dos and don'ts, starting with circumcision at infancy and continuing through the way you dressed to everything you ate. It was a tough challenge to keep all that up. Only those who were wealthy really had the time and the resources to pull it off. But when Paul met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he learned that all this complex and time consuming stuff - the laws of Moses and everything else in the Old Testament - couldn't put us at rights with God. Rather, God had given them to prepare us for, and point us toward, the Cross. Turns out the Gospel is not what we must do but rather what God had done. And Paul, the Pharisee - the student of the Old Testament law - got it! And then Jesus told him one more thing: "This message is ready for prime time. I want you to take it on the road - beyond Jerusalem, beyond Israel; I want you to take it to the world. To the Gentile world. Because it's meant for them, too."

And so Paul did. And all those folks - non-Jews - people like us - responded eagerly to what God had done for them in Christ. The church was born. But then it happened - only after some time had passed - that Paul discovered the shadowy group following him as he went from city to city. A shadowy group from Jerusalem that told people, after Paul had moved on, that in order to really become Christians they first had to become Jews -first had to learn all about, and follow, all that old complex system of Jewish laws. Circumcision, days you had to observe and foods you couldn't eat, the whole nine yards.

What they said threatened to uproot everything God had planted through Paul, the freeing good news of being put right with God through faith in Christ, and they were replacing it with another "center," another "gospel" - which, as Paul points out, was really no gospel at all.

"No other Gospel." That's what we're calling this series on Galatians. And in Galatians 1 Paul begins his battle for the hearts and souls of his children in the faith by telling them of the need to stay centered. Staying centered. Keeping clear in our minds, as followers of Jesus and as a congregation, what's at stake; what the die-for issues are. Already in the first century that was no easy or automatic thing. Nor is it today.

Centers are critically important. Think of someone creating a bowl out of clay on a potters wheel. If your work shifts off center, it's toast; you're cooked. If your work shifts off center and you try to continue, the whole thing becomes at least misshapen and more likely ruined. And so it is for the church if we lose our centering. That's what Galatians is all about.
What is the center? What is it that, if we become un-centered or centered wrongly, we are no longer really the church? What is it that Paul was "astonished" that they were "deserting" and turning instead to a different "gospel"? It's the person of Jesus and the authority of God's Word. You know, you can do a lot of other things and still keep the doors of a church open. Even pastors can lose their convictions and still find things to keep themselves and others busy. Dr. Joe Sittler, University of Chicago theologian and a Lutheran, once made a wry observation that can easily be misunderstood and yet makes the point: "When a man loses his doctrine of the Word," he said, "the first thing he does is wander off into the swamp of liturgy; and there he sinks so fast not even a bubble remains to show where he went down." Now, Sittler wasn't dissing liturgical worship services - they were what he attended, after all. But he was concerned about what happens when the church or its pastors lose their conviction that scripture is indeed God's Word, that Jesus is indeed God's Son, and that the Cross and the Resurrection are foundation stones without which we perish.

My friends, if we lose the center - or if we slowly slide off center - other things will move in to become the center. Centers will not remain empty. Now some of these things that can move in from the periphery are very good and worthwhile things - Sittler's example of liturgy - or music and the arts, or various social concerns. Each of these things, and many others, have their good and proper place, like spokes on a wheel when the hub is the Gospel of what God has done in Christ. But no spoke can take the place of a hub, and none of these things can take the central place of the Gospel ... for two reasons. First and foremost, none of them can put us right with God; none of them can turn you around and change and fill your life - as happened to Paul that day, unexpectedly encountered by Christ on the road to Damascus. Second, none of these other things unite us; rather, if they try to claim the center they divide us. Liturgical forms, musical styles, social causes - you name it. At St Timothy's, we as individuals are all over the map on these things, and if any of them become the center we'd end up arguing with each other. Because, again, there is "no other Gospel," no other center.

Thanks be to God that Paul understood what was at stake, that Paul "got" the Gospel, that Paul - like a parent hovering over a wounded child - would not back off but rather fought for recovery and healing. For the sake of the child, yes, but also for the sake of others whose lives that child would touch. Today our son Peter, who has twice, actually, come near death in a hospital, is himself a medical doctor seeking to help others. And that, my friends, was the sort of thing Paul hoped for the Galatians - and for people like you and me who would follow - that through their recovery and re-centering, through their coming to understand that there is no other Gospel but that which is found in Christ and the cross and the empty tomb - that through them others might be drawn to a relationship with God, lives filled with purpose, and the kind of fellowship and community found only in places like this. And then - when we gather, you and I, around the proper center, God brings about all kinds of things through us: our worship, our music, our social outreach ... all those things that glorify God and help those around us.

So Paul's letter to the Galatians is today one of the most important books in the Bible for you - that's why it's in the Bible - that it might keep you centered on the Gospel, on the only Gospel, on that which alone makes us the church, changes your life, and then shapes and guides you for the purposes God has for you. Amen.