Being Over Doing

We woke up this morning.

We cleaned up, brushed our teeth, got dressed, maybe had some breakfast.

We got into our vehicles, and maybe we listened to the radio - music or news.
And here we are, at this church.  We are having conversation, and then you are listening to me preach this sermon.  Shortly we’re depart from this place, and we’ll go on to other things.

Why?

I don’t mean to devolve the sermon into a scene from Fight Club, but I think it’s a question that we don’t consider very often.  What is it about our nature that causes us to think it’s important to get ready, to go to a job, or to listen to a seminarian’s sermon on a Tuesday.  For that matter, what made this seminarian decide to go to school 18 hours away and then slog all the way back to Ohio to preach to a group of people?

What causes people to cut the ends of their turkey off at Thanksgiving?

What causes people to overuse the resources of the earth without consideration of the consequences?

What causes people to run out into the street to protest?

What causes people to take up arms against one another?

What cause to abandon one another for their own benefit?

The longer we begin to wrestle with the question of why, the more disconcerting it can become, because it begins to open a space to us that feels all too empty, too unexplored.  That we may do the things we do just simply because we do them.  That we may do the things we do because it was what someone told us - our conviction only lies as far as the action itself.  A shrug, and “eh,” and we’re on our way.

This seemed to be a similar issue that Paul found with the people of Galatia as began to craft the passage that we are exploring today.  In fact, the whole thesis of the letter to the people of Galatia is to respond to concerns that the Gentile members of the Galatian church were conforming to laws and practices like circumcision in order to be full members of the church.  

This makes some sense when you start to think about it.  Here is this new Jewish sect that decided to follow Jesus, and in order to make sure that you are, well, kosher, you need to adhere with the over 500 laws that have been a part of the Jewish tradition for over a millennia.  One needs to do in order to be a person of faith.  

Which isn’t a completely foreign concept to us.  If we pray a certain prayer, if we’re nice in a certain way, if we go on this certain mission trip, God will make us better, more, healthy, more cared for Christians.  Our lives and lands will be enriched.  

Paul sees things in a different way.  In what is one of Paul’s first arguments to the people in Galatia, he references back to Abraham, saying that he was “accounted as righteous” or dikaios.  It’s important to note here that Abraham, as the patriarch of the Jewish faith, was righteous before the laws and practices of Judaism existed.   Why did he do the things he did before the law?  For Paul, they were out of faith.  For Abraham, fundamentally, it wasn’t about just doing things because they were inscribed in a series of scrolls, but instead because his being was responding to God.

When we think about faith, we usually attach it to the word “be” and not “do” - I am “being faithful,” not “doing faithfulness.”  For Paul, this has significant consequences - even in his own life.  He repeatedly mentions that he was a person who could follow the law to perfection, and yet had a dramatic experience on the Damascus Road - he could no longer just do law, but had to be with the light of Christ.  This experience was so significant, that he felt that the law could no longer be the sole source of living.  And as the passage in Galatians unfolds, we begin to see the same thing.  Paul sees the world of the law as one that cannot achieve salvation for someone - “no one is justified before God by the law.”  This is, as Paul sees it, a consequence of living under the curse of the weight of the law itself.  For Paul, the consummate Rabbi to say this is significant.

The only way to overcome this curse was to have a redeemer - Jesus Christ.  To Paul, this had already been promised to everyone - God promised that all would be blessed by the faith-world of Abraham.  And in Jesus Christ, we may enter into a world of living in faith, instead of doing to achieve something impossible to achieve, we can be faithful.  And this world of faith - one that can be achieved simply by living - is the most real, most true, most authentic self we can be.  In using Abraham as his central figure, Paul makes a brilliant argument that reaches before the law and demonstrates a way to live into a world of faith.  Abraham was righteous in faith before there had been a world of law, and people lived in that world of faith before the world of law.  And that same world can be shared by Jews and Gentiles: everyone can live Abraham’s authenticity.  In contrast, the world of law was never going to allow the righteous to live authentically.  It was only through Christ - the same one who broke through Paul on the Damascus Road - who vividly represented that through the crucifixion.  Adherence to a world solely in law lead to death.  Christ represented the most authentic living as righteous in the law, and met a tragic end.  However, Christ is resurrected as righteous in spirit - the same as Abraham.  This isn’t necessarily disparaging to the law - Paul isn’t saying that the law is terrible, or that he regrets its existence or his adherence to it.  Rather, he’s saying Jesus Christ moved beyond it, and which him comes the opportunity for a new kind of wholeness with God - a life in faith that the life in law could not achieve.  

So why?  Why do we do the things we do?

In the end, I can’t answer that question for you.  For some of us, it might be that we do things we do because have some series of law we feel the need to adhere to: I need to take my children to the right schools, buy the right house, and spend time with the right people so that I achieve a type of liberation predicated on the rules of the culture around me.  I need to preach this sermon today so that you all know that I am a capable, hopeful soon-to-be-pastor because I need to prove myself enough that you vote that I can be cleared for call.  You need to hear it because you volunteered to be part of this committee.  I follow the speed limit because the sign says so.

None of this is wrong.  But it seems so empty.

However, we may be doing these things because Jesus Christ has demonstrated a way to live that is out of faithfulness.  That it speaks to the deepest parts of who we are and reminds of that we are not meant to be people headed towards death, but towards resurrection and life.  That we care for children because we are meant in our essence to be stewards.  That I preach because I sense Christ around me, and that you are because you sense Christ around you.  I follow the speed limit because God desires us to care for the other, even it means holding off my desire to cut off the person in front of me in anger.  That we do not “doing” faith, but “being” faithful.

Thanks be to a God who brings us out the world of our own self-designed barriers of law, and liberates us to the freedom of faith.  Amen.