Paul N. Walker Christ Church 6/19/16 Galatians 3:23-29 “Prison Break”

There are two great opposing forces at work in all of life. They are at odds with one another and you know at once which one is at work in your life. Each force may be described in different terms, but the operational effect on you is always the same. I’m talking about the opposing powers of judgment vs. love, or justice vs. mercy. You could also say demand vs. freedom, or accountability vs. absolution.

Again, you know which force is currently more active in your life by how it works on you. When you wake up with a sore jaw because you’ve been grinding your teeth, you know that some kind of judgment is at work in you. C.S. Lewis describes this force when he says, “It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your (concerns) for the day rush at you like wild animals.”

Conversely, if you find that you are going through your day without really thinking about yourself, you are not too concerned about what you are wearing, or what other people are thinking about you, then you know that some kind of absolution is at work. If you are experiencing joy in the thing you are doing, without worrying how well or badly you are doing it, then you know that love is at work.

A friend is considering buying a little property in the country. When I asked why she wanted this particular piece of land, she answered that it made her want to do cartwheels on it’s fields. It made her feel like a 10 year-old girl. The place clearly represents and an escape from demand into freedom.

St. Paul names these two forces in our reading from Galatians this morning. He calls them law vs. faith. Faith is also known as grace, or the gospel. Paul says “Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.” Here he describes as a strict disciplinarian, and even worse as a prison guard. Such is the effect of the law on us.

A friend in prison was asked by his young daughter if, when a prisoner was released, whether the other prisoners threw a party for the person getting out. My friend said no, and when asked why by his daughter, he said that people in prison don’t feel like throwing parties because they are scared and nervous all the time. They have become so scared and nervous from being in prison that they are even scared and nervous about leaving prison. Fear is another major felt effect of the law at work on you.

St. Paul compares the law to a prison guard because the law is all about executing justice. There is no mercy to be found in the law. The law exposes what you’ve done wrong and reveals what you truly are – a sinner. And although you are not literally in prison this morning, I’m certain you feel imprisoned by any number of forces and factors in your life.

There is a debut novel out by Stephen O’Connor titled “Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings.” It is an imagined account of Jefferson’s relationship Hemmings, a woman enslaved at Monticello. Nearly all historians now believe that DNA evidence has proven that Jefferson was the father of Hemmings’ children.

O’Connor’s book is an unsparing examination of the ways that slavery warped the human soul; it illuminates the moral and psychological contradictions that shaped the lives of its protagonists. It depicts the Jefferson-Hemmings relationship as it occurred, but then juxtaposes dreamlike sequences of Jefferson watching a movie about his own life. It also includes scenes of a kind of afterlife judgment, in which Jefferson suffers for his sins.

One scene is vivid. Jefferson is in jail and his jailor is an unnamed woman – maybe Hemmings? Here’s the scene, sanitized for church use.

- Leave me alone.

- Hah! Fat chance! I’m your judge, jury and executioner. You got that? And I’m not going to let you get away with one blanking thing….I’m going to catch you out on every lie, your every evasion, your every attempt to escape your own conscience.

- Leave me alone, I said!

- No way. I’m with you to the end.

- You’re a lunatic! This is so insane!

- Of course it’s insane! Justice is relentless. And monomaniacal. It has to be. I mean, do you think that once you commit an evil act it can be undone?

The guard laughs. She speaks.

- You can do a thousand good deeds and make a thousand apologies, but the evil is still there. It never changes, and it never ends, and you can never escape it. Justice too. Justice never ends; it is eternal, universal and implacable. That’s the lesson I’m teaching you. I’m going to strip you of every shred of dignity and pride until you are so desperate you fall on your knees and beg forgiveness.

- And guess what? There will be no forgiveness. But you know that, don’t you? That’s why you trembled when you thought God is just. And, actually, that’s the beauty of all this. You are condemned, not merely by your most evil acts, but by your finest words, those self-evident truths of yours that created a whole new world – a world that will never forgive you for your sins.

If that isn’t a depiction of hell, I’m not sure what is. You don’t have to be a slave owner to fear a place where your every lie, every evasion, and every attempt to escape your own conscience is always present and never forgiven. It is a gruesome enough vision of the power of the law to make us ask, as St. Paul does elsewhere, “wretched man that I am, who can deliver me from this body of death?”

Somewhere around the year 30 A.D., a little known man from an insignificant town, walked into his local synagogue on a Saturday. He stood up to speak. He walked over and chose a scroll, which contained an ancient prophecy. He unrolled the scroll in front of the crowd and spoke. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me….He sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives….”

Everybody stared at him in a hushed silence. The scripture describes the moment this way. “He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And all the eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”

The one who delivers us from this body of death has come. St. Paul answers immediately his own question: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” St. John says, “the law was given through Moses, but grace came through Jesus Christ.” There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. He came to set the prisoners free. The prison guard is out of a job.

There is a 1916 film by D.W. Griffith called “Intolerance.” At the end of the film, Christ returns to the world. He comes to a prison full of convicts, dressed in prison stripes. As the prisoners look up, the prison walls begin to fall. They emerge, every single one of them, into the absolving light of a graceful God. Grace is a total prison break.

Grace is your prison break too. In this world, judgment, demand, and accusation – i.e. the law will always be at work on you. But in Jesus Christ a more powerful force has entered the world and entered your life. When His grace opens your own prison doors, it may even move you to sing out with Charles Wesley, “my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee.”

Amen.