*a transcript of a recent sermon I gave on “serve one another.”
When I was asked to take part in this series over at Faith Covenant I had to take a second to think through how long my wife Jen and I have been attending that church: coming on 14 years, which feels wild. That’s a long ways away from that much younger version of myself walking through the doors of a denomination I had never heard of. Here I was, the burnt out kid coming off my last ministry position, peddling my Irish roots steeped in a long history of itinerant preachers travelling across England with John Wesley (more information than you needed or wanted since I’ve been immersed in my family history as of late), which eventually morphed into the good old North American Pentecostalism that became my direct heritage. Walking now into this group of Luther influenced, weathered Swedes whom, rather than arguing about whether we should baptized infants or not, were content to have it both ways. This present series called “one another” is in line with what I’ve come to know about this small denomination.
Actually, true story: the topic I preached on a couple weeks ago, as part of this present series called “one another,” was the call to pray for one another. I made the joke at the time that they dodged a bullet, inviting the Pentecostal in the room to give the sermon on prayer. As it was, one week later and it would have been Pentecost Sunday.
The plot thickens again, as here I am on the other side of Pentecost Sunday being invited again to preach on the same series. I say conspiracy. They must really not want that sermon on speaking in tongues.
Another true story: when I was first asked to preach I was given a couple options. It was between a passage on prayer and an odd passage about circumcision. I’m bad enough at prayer and praying that I debated. When I went with prayer, the running joke was that I was waiting to see what our pastor would do with the sermon on circumcision and would be praying for him.
And now here I am, being handed the sermon on circumcision. More conspiracies.
Okay, last true story. As I mentioned, I suck at prayer, so I went to Jen (who I would describe as a prayer) for advice. Her advice: Dave, get out of your head and just be practical. Which if anyone knows me is a tall order. I live in my head on my best days. In fact, I exist based on whatever existential crisis I might be obsessed with in the given moment
There’s a legitimate reason though for bringing that up, and given that you all have been working through this series at the same time as us, I’ll be curious to know if this has been your experience as well. To hear the call to love, to pray, to serve, it brings to mind a particular struggle, a tension. Yes, that curious tension that emerges with the inevitable thought that to speak these things is also to be reminded that I am not very good at them. And also that in some way, shape or form I should be, with all the complicated emotions and dynamics that come from navigating this within community. And yet my suspicion is, with an endless array of tensions that lie on the surface, the real struggle with these one another passages runs deeper. What hangs in the balance is what we actually think and believe about love, about prayer, about serving, which is intimately connected to what we think and believe to be true about God, about ourselves, and about others. As I said in my earlier sermon, there is a curious thing in the fact that to pray actually creates the tension- to pray, for example, is to be confronted with seemingly unanswered prayers. But, as we discover in the pages of the scriptures, it’s also the answer.
Which is to say, if we are going to get at what this whole one another series means, we have to begin there, in that space in here, in our heads, with what it is that we in fact believe about these things. However, I also think the advice is astute. If we can’t get out of our own heads, the thing that suffers is the one another of it all. This, it would seem from where I have been sitting anyways, has been the point of the series. That’s the process I hope to engage this morning as we move into the simple invitation to “serve one another.”
Intro to central verse, found in Galatians 5:1-15:
From Galatians 5:1, N.T. Wright’s translation: “The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom! So stand firm and don’t get yourselves tied down by the chains of slavery”
From Galatians 5:2-12, my own translation: “A bunch of confusing thoughts about circumcision”
From: Galatians 5: 13-15, NRSV “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves (servants) to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”
The main commentary I used to prepare for this morning was Wright’s relatively recent work on this letter. Since we are jumping straight in to a discussion “in process”, nearly at the letter’s end, I felt it was worth framing how Wright sees this section fitting into the whole. This section in chapter 5 is the culmination of what Wright calls “a delayed rhetorical climax, by which he simply means that Paul has been allowing the tension the problem plaguing this community has created in the context of their particular lives to percolate, and now is finally interjecting. Wright describes it as Paul taking a deep breath and saying, so finally then, here is the point of it all- “The moment where we move from what one must believe (in our heads) to what one must do (getting out of our heads).” That connection matters.
The notes in my NRSV Bible state the context of this community as the following:
“Paul is a figure on the move, travelling from city to city and engaged with Gentile converts. Chapters 1-2 provide our earliest evidence about the leaders active in the years just after Jesus’ death and before the catastrophic Judean rebellion against Rome.” (Chapters 1-2: the context (a community of Gentile and Judean believers being brought together in the light of the story of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension), Chapters 3-5: the problem (conflict between Gentiles and Judeans over how and why they can trust this story in relationship to the covenant with Israel), Chapter 5: the solution (serve one another).
In the James passage (James 5:13-18) that informed our discussion on prayer, we pray in the face of two different kinds of wisdom that come from two very different places, one from God, the other that is not from God but from the Powers that enslave. We know these sources, according to James, by the different qualities that they exhibit and produce. For Wright, Paul here in Galatians is fleshing out these same contrasting realities: the story of the Powers of Sin and Death which enslave the world, which he calls the story of exile, and the story of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension, which is the inauguration of this new creation reality Wright calls the new exodus.
This isn’t, then, ultimately a passage about circumcision. It’s about that covenant story and why we can trust what it says about God, about us, about the world, indeed in a world that continues to push back on us and say, Christ doesn’t appear to have accomplished much of anything at all.
Thus we get back to Galatians 5. You’ll notice the bookends of this mornings passage which I mentioned earlier: The Proclamation from Paul as a faithful Judean, made to a Church grappling with the breaking in of this story of Jesus as it pushes out into the Gentile world: “The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom!” (5:1) And the subsequent invitation from Paul to consider the one another amidst the tension of this breaking in: “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” (5:13-15)
Lest we think this preaches a story that says, “from slavery to slavery,” which is precisely the existential crisis leaving this co-existing community of Gentile and Judean believers stuck in their own heads (and seemingly for good reason, as that catastrophic reality of the temple destruction lies awaiting them around the next corner), this is in fact a story about what is, and indeed has been, transformed by Christ’s work. To become slaves to one another, or in other words to serve one another through love is the way into the story of the arrival of this new creation reality. It is how that reality becomes known in our lives. Slavery to the powers, on the other hand, is what leaves us, as James says, in doubt, divided, knowing no other story but exile, and leaving us only to turn in on ourselves, and indeed one another, over the tensions this creates. In the same way that prayer risks these feelings of God’s absence, to love, to serve, is to risk much to same. As the Galatians passage puts it, as they step into the reality of their own world, their own context, they are driven in response to bite and devour one another towards one end- consumption of the whole. And who doesn’t like a good cannibalism analogy, am I right? Better not to risk. Better yet to put up the walls that can guard us against the tensions. And the first thing to get sacrificed in this case is the ona another of it all, because we mistake that for the true enemy: the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death.
Knowing this risk, Paul’s argument is about why this matters: it is about whether or not the new reality in Jesus has indeed been brought about. It is about whether we can trust this story. It is about what this actually means for the lives of our communities. How is it, Paul states, that we would see the long promised movement of the spirit to the ends of the earth, which is the thing that creates the tension for the readers of this letter, as a means of moving back into slavery to the Powers of Sin and Death. As Wright puts it, to find the new exodus story being played out and to move back into the story of exile. No, this movement, breaking open our imagination for this new reality that God has brought about, is precisely where we want to be, finding each other at that difficult intersection that is the already-not yet nature of this present moment. As Paul puts it, become like me, as I have become like you. When we do this, what takes up the space in the gap this creates? The true story of Jesus.
Central to Paul’s thought is this theological word eschatology. In a very real sense, Paul, who is citing Torah as a unifying vision against those using Torah to create dissension within the community, is proclaiming a certain “eschatology,” a word that at it’s root means a focus on “end things.” Like chapter 5, eschatology is the point of it all, or how we know the point of it all is coming to be. But we misplace the force of this word when we imagine it simply as some future reality way off in the distance, something that we can then weaponize against the tensions of the here and now, and where the tensions continually undercut that future hope. This is a story of Christ whom breaks into the middle of history. Apart from that the tension doesn’t exist. Thus why I said in my sermon on prayer: maybe the tension itself is the gift. The tension exists precisely because Christ did break into the middle of history and proclaim a new reality amidst the old. Eschatology, in this sense, is simply the constant fleshing out of this tension in our present as the signpost of God’s ongoing work. The end in this sense is found in proclaiming the beginning of this new creation reality.
In my sermon on prayer I talked about it being the great leveler. It is what allows us to co-exist within this space between faith and doubt, the “I am’s” and the “I am not okay’s.”. The sick and grieving and those who have faced immense loss alongside those who have experienced healing. It is the grounds by which we enter into the life of this new creation reality together, precisely because it is a reorientation towards and into that redemptive story. A story that all is being transformed by the Spirit of God. In 1 Peter, a letter to a community also in conflict, and as I heard it put earlier this week, taking shape near the end of Paul’s life (whereas Galatians is near the front of his ministry), there is a wonderful passage that brings this to light. Here it begins in 1 Peter 4:7-10
7 The end of all things is near (there’s that eschatology), therefore be serious (about the one another of it all) and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers (that reorienting process, the great leveller that allows the whole to be conformed to Christ).”
If, indeed, as it was said over at Faith Covenant when we kicked this series off, this storied transformation begins and ends with one thing above all- Love, then, as 1 Peter goes on to say,
8 Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. 9
If we struggle to pray, love. If we struggle to serve, love. Love is the greater story. This is the gift that verse 10 calls the “manifold grace of God,” stretching out into the complicated nature of community.
10“Therefore, if this is true, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.”
From this all other aspects of our participation in the story of Christ, and indeed in Christ, find their source. That’s where the uniqueness of your story meets the life of the “one another.” This is not a checklist, as though we have to a, b, c to make sure we are saving ourselves from the end of all things. This is not something we do to bring about the end of all things. This is an invitation to see the world through the lens of a different story, the story of Christ’s breaking into the middle of history.
In the words of Paul in Galatians 5, “become like me as I have become like you.” To do so is to see one another, and to see one another is to see the work of God in Christ. It is to know that story. It is to risk knowing that story and the tension it creates. If to serve brings about this awareness that we, this world, is not yet whole, it also is the way we come to trust that story of God’s transforming work. “We serve” so that, as 1 Peter sums it up, God may be glorified (be present) in all things through Jesus Christ.” The glorious truth; God is in fact present, it is us that needs that continued revelation.
10“To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.”
The Stories of my Life 