July 3, 2016 sermon - A Different Way Of Looking At The World

Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. Not even those who are circumcised keep the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule - to the Israel of God.
(Galatians 6:12-16)

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     Galileo was right! Everybody knows that now. But in the 17th century? Well, that was a different story. Galileo, of course, advanced the theory that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that instead the earth revolved around the sun. This wasn't revolutionary; the idea had been around for a long time – but Galileo became its most prominent public advocate. He battled the church for years, until finally in 1633, after being ordered by the Pope to stand trial before the inquisition, he was condemned as a heretic and ordered into house arrest – where he spent the last nine years of his life. As I did a bit of research about the controversy between Galileo I came across a book called “Galileo, Science and the Church,” written by a former Roman Catholic priest named Jerome Langford. Langford wrote – and I found this funny, I have to admit – that it was “claimed that Galileo and his followers were attempting to reinterpret the Bible, which was seen as a violation of the Council of Trent and looked dangerously like Protestantism.” (Gasp!!!!) The “reinterpretation of the Bible” revolved around Psalm 93:1, which says that God “has established the world; it shall never be moved.” Therefore, said the church, the earth cannot circle the sun. Instead, everything must circle the earth, because the earth cannot move. It's said that at one of his early appearances before the inquisition, Galileo agreed to recant his theory and said that, in fact, the sun revolved around the earth – but once away from the inquisitors he stamped his foot on the ground and said “and yet it moves” - meaning the earth. The story may be apocryphal, but if Galileo did say it - well – he was right: the earth moves! We know that now. But it was only in 1992 (not quite 25 years ago) that Pope John Paul II admitted that a mistake had been made by the Council that finally condemned Galileo as a heretic. And so the great physicist Stephen Hawking can now write that “In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the centre of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.” We've come a long way. We have an entirely different way of looking at our world.

     The debate between Galileo and the church of course wasn't really a scientific debate. Galileo proposed a scientific theory that should have been tested, and the church reacted with dismissal because it challenged their worldview. The irony of the thing is that Galileo understood what God had created far better than the church understood what God had created. The worldview of the church shouldn't have anything to do with whether the earth revolves around the sun, and it shouldn't be based on a misuse of a single verse of Scripture such as Psalm 93:1 to condemn someone who challenges it. The worldview of the church should be based on Scripture, and it should reflect our own relationship with the God we've come to know through our lives of faith. And since the God we know is a God who constantly calls us to new ways and to be a new creation – God is the God “who has created and is creating,” after all – then we should be always open to different ways of looking at the world.

     Galatians 6:14 shows us that followers of Christ should have a different way of looking at the world – not from the scientific perspective but from the spiritual perspective. Paul says that he boasts in the cross of Christ. From a worldly perspective, the obvious response to that would be: why? Why boast in the cross? It's an instrument of torture and death, and we're believers and Jesus died on the thing. Why would we boast in the cross? From a worldly perspective it literally makes no sense at all. If you're going to boast, after all, you boast about something postive and uplifting – and usually about something that you've done yourself. But like that scientific debate about whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, it seems to me that the church sometimes forgets the unique perspective it's supposed to bring to issues.

     Of course, we're welcoming our friends from St. Andrews here today and I can't speak with any real knowledge of the Presbyterian Church, so maybe this isn't an issue there – but I have noticed over the years that in the United Church at least we don't boast about the cross of Christ – actually, more often, we have a lot of difficulty talking about the cross of Christ. And I don't think that's just a problem in the United Church. I can say that in the last two pastorates I served before coming here we used to have joint services on Good Friday with our Presbyterian friends, because so many of our regular congregants couldn't be bothered coming to a Good Friday service that we brought both congregations together to try to make at least one of the buildings seem relatively full. Maybe it was because people preferred doing other things on a long weekend – or maybe it was because they knew that a Good Friday service would be about the cross of Christ! And it's an uncomfortable topic for all the reasons I mentioned – and generally speaking we don't want to be uncomfortable in church; we want to be comforted in church. That's the difference between us and Paul, perhaps. Paul knew that the message of Christ could provide great comfort, but he also knew that the message of Christ was more than that. The message of Christ contains a challenge – and that challenge is contained in the cross and what it represents.

     Paul sees the crucifixion as more than just the death of Jesus. He sees it as the beginning of something new and bold. He sees it as a radical turn in God's relationship to the world. God no longer seeks obedience to the law, God now seeks faithfulness to Christ. The cross puts an end to what was – enslavement to the law – and brings a beginning to something else – the freedom of God's grace: freedom not to sin, but to joyfully serve. If we were to read back to Galatians 3:28, we would find Paul's argument that in the community of those who are in Christ there is no longer a distinction between Jew and Greek (or slave or free, or male or female, or, for that matter, probably not even between United and Presbyterian!) All that matters is being in Christ. In the context of this letter the issue was circumcision. Paul had a mission to the Gentiles, who weren't circumcised. He told them they didn't have to be, and then others came after him saying that - no, if they wanted to be Christians they had to be circumcised. Circumcision was a stumbling block that was put in the path of Gentiles who wanted to come to Christ - and we remember, I'm sure, what Jesus said about those who put stumbling blocks in front of people - and circumcision represented the entire Jewish law. Do you have to follow it or not? Paul’s position was clear: the law ended with the crucifixion. The cross put an end to the law - or at least to its power. Paul isn't saying that being circumsized doesn't save a person or that not being circumsized does. He's saying that circumcision – and, by extension, the law - doesn't really matter, because the law cannot save; the law can only condemn by creating lawbreakers. It is Christ crucified who saves; it is Christ crucified who reconciles us to God; it is Christ crucified who changes everything, and the change is what Paul calls a new creation: an utterly new way of life for those in Christ, whose crucifixion makes them right with God and set free to be and to live in a new way.

     Many people don't get that. Christians and non-Christians alike mistake the Christian faith as being only a new and revamped set of rules and regulations designed to make you right with God. But Paul understood that laws and rules and regulations don't make you right with God – they simply condemn you by telling you that you're not right with God. And the church falls into that trap over and over again. We set up the rules, we establish the laws, we decide what others must do or not do or what others must believe or not believe, we take away their Christ-won freedom to approach God themselves and let God speak to them, we turn the church into a place not that celebrates God but rather into a place that condemns sin, and woe to anyone who doesn't buy in – like Galileo, for example, and like many today who still feel condemned by the church rather than welcomed by the church.

     The cross should be a remedy to that, because at the cross everyone is equal and, of course, Christians see the cross differently. For Christians the cross should be positive and uplifting. It's the place where evil was defeated – because, in the end, perhaps the most evil act ever couldn't hold Jesus. So far from being about torture and death, the cross becomes (for Christians) about victory and life. And just as Christians see the cross differently, so should Christians see the world differently – and, because of that, Christians should have a different relationship with the world. We shouldn't be tailoring our message to suit the expectations of the world, we should be proclaiming God's grace in all situations and to all people. How the world (or even those who want Christian faith to be just a new set of rules and regulations and laws) responds to us and to what we believe and to what we proclaim is now immaterial – because “the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” What I do I no longer do for the world or to please the world, nor do I refuse to do it because of the world, or because the world might disagree. What my faith calls me to do, which is to proclaim and live the gospel (not necessarily in that order) I now do for God. It's of benefit to the world – it is good news for all – but I do it for God. We have new priorities, and a new way of relating to the world and those around us. Because of Christ crucified, we have a different way of looking at the world.