“Growing into Spiritual Maturity” (Galatians 3:23-29)

 One of the great things about being a follower of Jesus is that you quickly discover that you are a member of a vast international family that encircles the entire world. I am not a huge traveller, but it has been my privilege to worship with other believers in such faraway places as Australia, Britain, France, Haiti, India and Libya. While some of the customs in each of those places may have differed somewhat and while we may have stumbled at points during the service, what was far more evident was the deep bond that we shared through our common faith in Jesus Christ.

I remember too the day we welcomed the first of several dozen refugees from Burma into the congregation where I served in Minnesota. Our primary means of communication initially was through an interpreter. And so much of what they were experiencing was utterly strange to them (not least the weather!). Yet there was no question that when they were with us they were at home among their spiritual family.

I suspect too that there are some in the congregation here this morning who, when they first came to Canada, found a number of our customs—things that seem perfectly normal to us—strange and mystifying.

In many ways, entering the world of the New Testament and meeting with the believers there is much the same. Some translation is required—and I am not speaking just from Greek to English. I’m also thinking of the many customs that were observed in the Jewish and Roman worlds of the first century that require sometimes considerable explanation if we are to gain a proper understanding of the message of the Bible.

For example, when Jesus told his parable about the woman and her lost coin, we may not be aware that her loss would amount to more than a hundred dollars in our world of today. Or when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink (which may seem like a perfectly normal thing for us to do on a hot day), he was breaking with nearly a thousand years of open hostility.

Well, welcome to the churches in Galatia in the middle of the first century—in the midst of a culture about as far removed as any in our world today. If we are to gain a proper understanding of the message the apostle Paul was seeking to get across to them, we will need to go behind his words to delve into the cultural background that underlies them. So let’s turn to Galatians 3:23-29 and see what we can learn from these verses and how we can apply it to our lives today.

The Pedagogue

When you read the opening verse of this morning’s passage, it appears that Paul has a very negative view of the Old Testament. “We were held captive under the law,” he says, “imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” It sounds as though the people of Old Testament times had been languishing in some kind of dark dungeon for fifteen hundred years.

And there are lots of people today who share that point of view about the Old Testament. On more than one occasion I have heard someone say to me, “I don’t like reading the Old Testament. It’s all about sin and punishment. I much prefer to read Jesus’ words about love and peace in the New Testament.” I don’t like to remind them that Jesus spoke about hell and judgement in some of the most vivid and frightening terms in the Bible. Just think of the parable of the rich man who ended up in anguish in hell and pleaded for Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31) or Jesus’ warnings to be careful not to be thrown into hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).

But I want to say that it was never Paul’s intention to be critical of the Old Testament. In fact, in the course of his thirteen letters Paul references the Torah forty-five times. He quotes from the prophets fifty-three times. And he draws from the psalms twenty-three times. Indeed, his reverence for the Old Testament scriptures comes out in the next verse of this morning’s passage. There he speaks of them as “our guardian until Christ came”.

Now the word our Bibles translates as “guardian” is has a very specific meaning. Elsewhere it is translated “guide” (1 Corinthians 4:15) and it refers to a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school, to teach him manners, and when necessary to inflict punishment. However, the guardian was not the child’s teacher. His role was simply to bring his charge to the teacher.

These guardians (the technical term was “pedagogues”) were often known for their harshness and strict discipline. Yet the fact is that many developed life-long relationships with their charges. Whatever the case, however, their duties came to an end when the boy reached the age of maturity.[1]

Paul recognized this fact. And he recruited it as a perfect image for the role of the Old Testament. Like the guardian who did not teach his charge, so the Old Testament cannot bring us to salvation. But through its stories and instruction about righteousness and sin, it brings us to the point where we can recognize our need for salvation and, more specifically, our need for a Saviour.

I rather like the way Eugene Petersen put verses 23 to 25 in The Message:

Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors … who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for. But now you have arrived at your destination…

The Toga

That was Paul’s first picture: the pedagogue responsible for bringing a child to his tutor. Paul’s second picture was another that was familiar to everyone living in the Roman Empire of the first century. And it was this:

In ancient Roman culture when a boy reached an age of somewhere around sixteen, he was considered to have entered maturity. Until that time he would always have been dressed in a child’s toga. Then, in a solemn family ceremony, he would discard the toga of his childhood and it would be replaced with the pure white toga of adulthood. From that day on, wherever he went, whatever he did, everyone would recognize him as a man.

Now we can’t be altogether sure about all the details involved in baptism in New Testament times—whether it was by immersion or sprinkling, whether it was in standing water or running water as some insisted, whether or not candidates removed their outer garments, and a host of other details.

However, we do know that very early on in the tradition of the church—and very much like the tradition of the toga—the newly baptized, on coming up out of the water, would be clothed in a white robe. That white robe was a visible reminder that Jesus had taken away the stain of their sins. More powerfully still, it was a dramatic anticipation of the day when they would join with that great crowd that we meet with in the book of Revelation—“the multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)

Whatever the case, just as the young man of Roman times put on his adult toga, so you and I through faith have put on Christ. Elsewhere Paul writes about our calling to attain to maturity, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13-15)

So it is that part of our calling in Christ is a challenge to spiritual maturity. When I was a very young Christian, a popular book that was doing the rounds had the title In Understanding Be Men. The title was based on the old King James Version of 1 Corinthians 14:20, which in our more contemporary translation of the Bible runs like this: “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

What are the marks of a mature faith? I think the best list was given to us by Paul himself. He calls them the fruit of the Spirit, and we will come to them in a few weeks in our study of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And if I could add a tenth, it would be humility: never to make the mistake of thinking we have arrived, that there is no more room for personal growth in our lives, but to keep on maturing in our faith—seeking to love Jesus and others more and more day by day.

The Church

So far Paul has focused on faith from an individual perspective. It is as though we have been looking at the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread out across the table. Now in the last two verses Paul fits all those pieces together. And what emerges?

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. 

It is a glorious picture. Suddenly all the things that once seemed to make a difference and had the potential of dividing us pale into insignificance: nationality, status, gender… And no doubt Paul (and you and I) could continue the list: age, political persuasion, education, tattoos, musical preferences and a whole host of other things that differentiate us and could easily cause us to drift apart or even drive wedges between us. But our unity in Christ is far more valuable, infinitely more precious than any of those things.

I wonder how many of you are familiar with the law of entropy in physics. The law of entropy states that when left alone in its natural state, everything tends to greater and greater disorder. I had a friend who used to talk about the law of spiritual entropy. That is, when left to itself, everything in the church tends to greater and greater disorder—and sometimes even to outright chaos!

The challenge for you and for me is, that if we are to avoid that spiritual entropy, if we are to be the community that Paul is describing for us in these verses in Galatians, it takes commitment and it takes hard work. We can’t be satisfied just to be pew warmers.

Unfortunately, the way our church building is structured (and most church buildings for that matter) it looks as though the great majority of us are an audience, with a few performers on the stage. Well, in my Anglican tradition, the area of the church where you are sitting right now is called the nave. It sounds a lot like navy, doesn’t it? That’s because the two words are related. “Nave” means “ship”. And in olden days, long before engines or even sails were invented, ships were powered by oars. And that’s where you come in! You are the oarsmen. You are the ones who are meant to be powering the ship.

Now I know that there are already an awful lot of people putting in an awful lot of sweat to keep this ship moving ahead. (In fact sometimes I worry that some of them are going to burn themselves out!) But let’s each ask ourselves, “How can I use the gifts that God has given me to help make this church the Christ-honouring community that God is calling us to be—where people looking in from the outside say, ‘See how they love one another!’ and yearn to come in?” This was the kind of church that Paul was yearning for in Galatia. And this is the kind of church that the world is yearning for today.

---

[1]     See https://scispace.com/pdf/the-figure-of-the-paidagogos-in-art-and-literature-eubcjb89ko.pdf

“Blown Away” (Acts 2:1-11)

 I’ve been scratching my brain to find a suitable metaphor to describe the experience of Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first came upon them in power. One image that came to mind was the four Pevensie children in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia—Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy—when they first entered that strange, enchanted land with its fauns and talking beavers, a witch who turns innocent creatures into stone and of course Aslan the great lion-saviour.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the second image that came to me (and maybe I am about to reveal things about me that you didn’t want to know!) was from the movie Ghostbusters. Do you remember the scenes where the cameras began to reveal strange things happening beneath the otherwise normal streets of New York City? Odd-coloured vapours arising from the drains, paving stones heaving, gargoyles on buildings starting to twitch…

In each case we are being introduced to a world beyond our own, to the notion that what we consider normal is only the tiniest fragment of a vast, hidden realm unperceived by our senses. For the Pevensie children it lay behind the doors of an ordinary wardrobe. For Dr Peter Venkman and his team of parapsychologists it was hidden in the recesses of a major metropolis.

For Jesus’ followers something of that wider world had been opened up to them as they followed him through the towns and villages of Galilee. There they witnessed things that they would never have thought possible: paralyzed people walking, blind people seeing again, lepers being cleansed, demons being cast out, the dead raised back to life again. To use Jesus’ own words, the kingdom of heaven was among them. And of course things had become stranger still in the days following Jesus’ crucifixion, as he appeared among them recognizably the same and yet somehow strangely different.

Up until now you might say they had just brushed with the kingdom of heaven. On Pentecost they were actually stepping into it themselves for the first time. “Suddenly,” as Luke describes it, “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Many of us are so accustomed to reading this passage at Pentecost that I wonder if we haven’t lost sight of what a terrifying event this must have been.

The sound of the wind that swept through the room was not like some gentle summer’s breeze. Nor was it even that of a strong wind in which you might be tempted to go out for a sail or fly a kite. No, it was “a violent wind”, a wind powerful enough to sweep you off your feet and blow down trees. In the words of Psalm 29, it was a wind that “twists the oaks and strips the forests bare”. Those of us who were here in Halifax for Hurricane Juan a dozen years ago would have an idea of what I mean. The word Luke uses to describe the forcefulness of that wind at Pentecost is found in only two other places in Scripture. We come across the first instance as Moses and the people of Israel stood on the banks of the Red Sea with all the might of Pharaoh’s vast army approaching fast behind them. We are told that Moses “stretched out his hand over the sea” and the Lord drove back the waters with a powerful east wind that turned the sea into dry land (Exodus 14:21). The second is when the psalmist speaks of the thick oaken beams of a ship being shattered like matchsticks by a violent wind (Psalm 48:7). Such was the roar that filled the whole house where the disciples were sitting at Pentecost. Those first followers of Jesus were literally being swept up into a whole new world.

New Language

Now one of the problems with wind is that it rearranges things. You’ve just raked up all the leaves from your lawn when a wind comes up and takes you back to square one. You’ve just neatly arranged all the papers on your desk, when someone opens a window and they’re all over the floor. So it is with the Holy Spirit. He has an annoying habit of rearranging our lives, jostling us out of our settled ways, challenging our neat, man-made categories. That was certainly the way it was with the disciples, as suddenly they found themselves praising God in languages they had never spoken before.

Of course what they didn’t know at that point that what was happening to them was not for their benefit but for that of the many pilgrims who were in Jerusalem for the festival. Those visitors began to hear the praises of God being proclaimed in their own individual languages—Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest in that long list of unpronounceable nationalities. And it had them bewildered.

I had a small experience of that when I was rector at St Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade. During the weeks following Christmas we would read from the gospel in a different language each Sunday. The intention was to give us all a greater appreciation of the worldwide church. On one particular Sunday the reading happened to be in Mandarin. As it was being read a man entered the church having just arrived from China as a student. He had come just to take a peek inside an historic building and spoke almost no English. Yet there he was hearing his own language being spoken. Needless to say, it was a deeply moving experience for him and we saw him every week after that.

In the last church where I served, we had a member who had a Master’s degree in Teaching English as an Additional Language. She was keen to reach out to the many immigrants to Saint Paul from all over the world and so she trained some of the members so that we could offer English conversation sessions. In spite of every effort, I think that over a period of two years we had only one taker and we were a little disappointed. Then suddenly we were inundated with more than a hundred refugees from Burma, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English, but the Holy Spirit had made sure that we had our conversation partners in place.

One of the ongoing challenges for the church is to relate the good news of Jesus Christ in language that people can understand. It is a sad fact that the longer we are involved in the church the more comfortable we become with a language called “Christianese”. Words such as “sin”, “repentance”, “grace” and “Saviour” have rich meaning for us and I would not begin to suggest that we even think of discarding them. But they are at best meaningless to the average non-Christian and in some cases they are seriously negatively loaded. (When I was a child I used to think that the Salvation Army had its name because it picked up old discarded clothes and furniture and saved them. I had no idea that people could be saved too!) We need the fresh breath of the Holy Spirit to sweep us out of the language of the Christian ghetto to communicate the good news of Jesus in new ways that touch the minds and hearts and lives of those around us, that causes them to ask questions as the crowd did at Pentecost. “How is this happening?” “What does this mean?” “What shall we do?”

New People

The result of the Holy Spirit’s work on the day of Pentecost was that three thousand people were added to the little band of Christian believers in its first twenty-four hours. I can’t imagine the logistics involved in baptizing all those people! However, I know that growth on a similar scale continues in many parts of the world today. In the Middle East and North Africa there are reliable reports of thousands of Muslims turning to Christ, sometimes quietly and beneath the official radar, sometimes in mass baptisms of dozens, even hundreds, of people. An article a couple of years ago in the London Telegraph told the story of massive church growth in China. It included a calculation by Purdue University Sociology professor Fenggang Yang that by the year 2030 the Christian population of China will exceed 247 million, making it the largest Christian population in the world.[1]

I am sure we welcome such growth. At the same time growth also brings its challenges. Remember that wind of the Holy Spirit, stirring things up, moving them around, undoing our tidy little arrangements? It didn’t take long for that to happen among the Christian believers in Jerusalem. Just move a few pages along in Acts, to chapter 6, where Luke begins, “In those days when the number of believers rapidly multiplied…” It all sounds good. But then he goes on: “… there were rumblings of discontent.”[2] The problem centred on the Greek-speaking believers, who were complaining that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. A couple of chapters later we meet with Simon, who had been a practiser of sorcery and had the crazy notion that he could buy the Holy Spirit with money. In each of these cases (and there would be many more), the problem the disciples were facing was the challenge of growth, as new people came into the community and brought with them new backgrounds, new ideas, new issues, and new needs.

The New Testament bids us look forward to the day when people of every nation, tribe, people and language will stand around the throne of the Lamb crying aloud, “Salvation belongs to our God!” (Revelation 7:9-10) That is a picture of heaven, but from an earthly perspective things can look different. The church in Corinth included in its number women and men who came from backgrounds of sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, thievery, crass materialism, alcoholism, backbiting and dodgy business practices.[3] But they were there because the Holy Spirit had brought them there. I imagine that the lives of the elders and deacons in that church would have been much quieter without them. As it was, however, it must have been something like a bronco ride. The wind of the Holy Spirit was blowing through them—and all they could do was to hold on for dear life and pray!

New Creation

As the Holy Spirit moves through us he will bring new people into our midst—and unless we are only prepared to accept clones of ourselves, that will bring its challenges. But the Spirit is equal to them and we must trust him to do his work.

There is a new movement that has been gaining strength in the church. It’s called “messy church”. I don’t know a lot about it, but I am attracted to the title. I well remember an elderly clergyman coming into my office and staring at my desk. “You know,” he said (and I’m sure you’ve heard this before), “a messy desk is the sign of a healthy mind.” I’m not sure that that is entirely true, but I took it as a compliment. At the heart of “messy church” is the notion that a church that is healthy and growing, a church where the Holy Spirit is blowing, will always be a little messy, a little rough around the edges, perhaps even a little unsettling at times. At the same time it will undoubtedly be an adventure. It will bring rich, deep and lasting relationships as we face life’s challenges together, as we don’t ignore the mess around us and within us and together allow the Holy Spirit to do his work.

All of this is so worth it, because it is part and parcel of participating in God’s new creation irrupting into the old. As in the opening chapter of Genesis, the Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters, bringing about a whole new order from the darkness and chaos that surround us. And you and I have the inestimable privilege, with Peter and James and Mary and Joanna and Andrew and Paul, with Augustine and John of the Cross and Theresa and all the countless saints down through the ages, with men and women and children in Burma and Argentina, Libya and Nigeria and some of the most unlikely places in the world today, of being participants in and witnesses to that new creation.

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Are you and I willing to be swept off our feet by the Holy Spirit and blown into that adventure which is God’s new creation?

---

[1]        Tom Phillips, “China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years”, The Telegraph, 19 April 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10776023/China-on-course-to-become-worlds-most-Christian-nation-within-15-years.html

[2]        New Living Translation

[3]        See 1 Corinthians 6:9-10