Credible Credentials

Note: Due to the length of the service on June 10th, I edited this sermon on-the-fly to allow for time. The entirety of what I intended to preach is what follows. -JC

Text: Galatians 1:11-24

Preachers are often well known for their personal hobby horses. That one favourite topic that we like to rock back and forth on until the wood rots, or the horse itself collapses out from under us. The late Jerry Falwell was well-known for them, the Apostle Paul had his own recurring themes as the “light to the Gentiles.” And yes, I have my own that I seem to get stuck on… I fully admit that… but I would like to think that it’s something that emerges out of the text, rather than my personal agenda. At least, that’s the defence we use when we are accused of riding our own hobby horses.

So I’ll be blunt, here’s one of mine: I believe that we do our faith an incredible disservice when we place figures in the Biblical story on a pedestal. I believe that we do our faith an incredible disservice when we place people within our own communities as being somehow more faithful than we are, that there is something qualitatively “better” about their faith than ours. It puts a comfortable distance between them and us, that God won’t notice us, or call on us to do anything special because we’re not like Paul, Elijah, Moses, Peter, or Mary. I know I’ve preached on this before… but maybe it’s because the topic doesn’t get old… or at least it hasn’t gotten old yet. There’s still a lot of wood left in this hobby horse. What made any of these Biblical characters special is not what they did, but that God called them, often from very ordinary, anonymous lives.

When we encounter Paul in this part of his letter to the Galatians, he seems to be in the midst of a rant about his own qualifications… or rather… lack thereof. It’s not about what Paul’s qualifications are, but what God has done, often with the most unlikely of people.

Paul is evidently rather irate with the infant church community in Galatia. He dispenses with any kind of formalities or blessings which are common to most of his letters. Instead, he immediately launches into a tirade against some serious issues that he has encountered with this young church… because something has gone desperately off the rails.

He writes, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. –not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

Paul wasn’t the only one who travelled in the early days of the church, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. There were others, and quite often rivals who came with their own agenda… proclaiming that their message was somehow better than everybody else’s. Perhaps Paul is getting a bit territorial, but it’s for good reason. Much of his message proclaimed the good news that Jesus Christ was for all people, not simply those of the Jewish faith. Though Jewish himself, Paul proclaimed Jesus as a “Light to the Gentiles” –a gift from God freely given that we neither earned nor deserved. Paul would get particularly testy if someone else came along and began to place restrictions on who was in and who was out… whether it was so-called Super Apostles in Corinth who required people to put on a show, or in the case of Galatia… rival teachers who believed one needed to become Jewish first in order to receive Christ.

Needless to say, Paul is not impressed. He dispenses with any kind of formalities, and immediately goes to the heart of the issue. On the way there, he reminds the Galatians of his own Jewish credentials, and how he has already done a great deal of theological work on this very issue. If there is anything that Paul is good at, it’s a good, solid rant:

11For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; 12for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. 13You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.

It’s a bit more of his own resume… sharing his credentials… particularly reminding the Galatians that he himself was not only Jewish, but someone who aggressively persecuted the church… until Jesus revealed to him a glimpse of the big picture. Paul’s special mission was to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to Gentiles… people who had not grown up in the Jewish tradition. He understood what God did in Jesus Christ as being an “expansion of the franchise” so to speak; the good news of a personal relationship with the living God was no longer the exclusive property of Judaism. Paul clearly understood in what God had done in Jesus Christ, there was not a need for people to become Jewish first in order to receive the good news.

This was a debate amongst the Apostles in the early church, but it was a debate that Paul, Peter, and others had settled some years before. Paul reminds the Galatians that he actually went to Jerusalem and consulted with the other Apostles. When Paul is talking about visiting a person by the same of Cephas… that’s actually the Aramaic word for “Peter.” –So Paul is going straight to the source, and reminding the Galatians precisely about that…

Whoever these other preachers are, who have come to the Galatian communities, they’ve evidently not been talking with Peter. They proclaim that one must become Jewish first, before one can receive Christ… and yet because Paul knows that Peter believes, understands, and endorses his mission to the Gentles, there’s something fishy going on. Somehow, whoever has been visiting the Galatians has not been in touch with Peter, because if they had there wouldn’t be this problem.

Paul is likely rolling his eyes, and wondering to himself about yet another fire that needs to be put out. The message that the Galatians were getting from these traveling preachers wasn’t a credible one… they were eager to learn, but they were willing to accept pretty much anything without checking on its credentials first. Paul was cautioning them against that.

There’s been a wonderful commercial on as of late. It describes the nature and feeding habits of the “House Hippo.” Done in the style of a nature documentary, and using some rather creative special effects that provide pictures of a tiny mouse-sized hippopotamus; the male-voice narration of the commercial goes something like this:

It’s night time in a kitchen just like yours; all is quiet, or is it?

The North American house hippo is found throughout Canada and the Eastern United States. House hippos are very timid creatures and they are rarely seen, but they will defend their territory if provoked. They come out at night to search for food, water, and materials for their nests.

The favourite foods of the house hippo are chips, raisins and the crumbs from peanut butter on toast.

They build their nests in bedroom closets using lost mittens, dryer lint and bits of string. The nests have to be very soft and warm; house hippos sleep about 16 hours a day.

At this point in the commercial, after showing these scenes overtop of this narrative, it pulls back, showing the last few seconds of this clip on a TV sitting in a livingroom. A female voice then comes on and says:

That looked really real, but you knew it couldn’t be true, didn’t you? That’s why it’s good to think about what you’re watching on TV, and ask questions, kind of like you just did.
A message from Concerned Children’s Advertisers.

It’s an effective commercial, warning us to be a bit more critical in our thinking of the information that comes to us. Just because it’s on the internet, email, on TV, or something that a friend told us does not automatically make the message to be true.

We might think that this is a modern problem, but as Paul’s experience with the Galatians tells us, it has been with us for a long time… and Christians are not automatically immune to it. They were getting their information from a flawed source. Paul caution to them is also for us: “don’t blindly accept any message that you hear…” The good news that he preached, as he proclaimed, was not one of a human origin. It was something that God revealed to us, and it was something that the early leaders in the church understood: placing limits on what God had done in Jesus Christ is something we simply cannot do.

Not only that, because we cannot put limits on what God has done, we also cannot put limits on who God calls… or put someone else up on a pedestal because God has called them to something special. Why? Because God doesn’t choose people because they’re special, but summons ordinary people like you and me to be a part of something special. That’s what makes the good news of Jesus Christ so powerful, that anyone can be a part of the kingdom of God.

Amen.