Chapel Talk
Galatians 5:1-26
So you come late to the party. You take a quick look around the room and find your circle of friends holed up in the corner. You make your way across the room, politely smiling, greeting other people you know by face if not by name, relieved when you arrive at the social comfort zone staked out by your friends. You see them talking, before you can hear what they are talking about. They are heated, animated; you are curious, walk faster, move closer, and the first words you hear of this conversation in progress come from your normally mild-mannered best friend, “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves.” Or words to that effect. Your second best friend responds to the clueless look on your face by leaning toward you and whispering, “Circumcision. We’re talking about circumcision.” As if that explains everything. Or anything. You subtly look back across the room, suddenly in the mood to get better acquainted with the group in the middle you just passed by.
Sometimes reading the Bible is like stepping into a conversation already underway. Paul’s letters especially can be challenging like that because we only hear one side of the conversation, as it were. Like a friend we hear talking in response to a question we have not heard but can pretty well guess. We might wish that Paul and the Galatians were having a discussion about something else. For those of who arrive a couple of centuries late to the conversation, it might be more interesting if Paul were offering advice on, say, stem cell research or global warming. Even a word or two on how to determine the paternity of the child of a recently deceased playmate might seem more relevant within the narrow boundaries of our cultural attention span. But that’s not what the Galatians and Paul are interested in. They need to talk about circumcision. And since it would be both rude and too early to leave the party, we might as well at least pretend to be curious about why they are talking.
It might help to recall that this is not the first time that circumcision has come up in the conversation. If you have moved in and out of these discussions on Galatians over the past couple of weeks, you have heard it come up before. And when it does, it’s always not just about circumcision, but circumcision and freedom. Parents of newborn male babies have some sense of the connection between circumcision and freedom when they face the decision about having their own male children circumcised. There is the practical question of the health benefits, if there are any, but also the question of the cultural expectations and norms for such things. In that sense the example of circumcision is a symbol of the larger question we all face over and over again: To what extent do we feel bound to the expectations that our culture, our family, our friends impose on us, and to what extent we make our own decisions and act free from those expectations? We can even give the question an ironic twist: Can we meet those expectations and meet them freely? Or might we even sometimes actually feel bound by our own need to resist them? Beginning now to feel more a part of the conversation?
In Galatians the question is not just generally, what does your culture or even your family expect of you, but, what does your religion expect of you? What does God expect of you, even require of you, demand from you? And here is the really odd thing about this conversation we just stepped into. It seems that for many people already in the room, so to speak, for the Galatians, the answer they fear is not that God requires circumcision, the answer they fear is that God gives them freedom. In fact to believe that circumcision is something that God requires actually provides a certain level of comfort for their lives. It is specific, it is clear, there is little ambiguity about whether it is done or not, it is the specific answer to a particular question, what does God expect? But freedom? Freedom is not clear, it is messy, it is ambiguous. Freedom is not an answer but the beginning of a new question without a clear, definitive ending: Now what?
In January of 1990, late one evening, about 10:30 as I recall, I stepped into a train car in Munich train station for the hour and a half trip back to Regensburg, the city where I was living at the time. This was a heady time to be living in Germany. A few months earlier in November of 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. We watched communism crumble along with the wall. People in West Germany where I was living saw these events as the realization of the dream of a unified Germany, something long talked about but which few people actually expected. All of the sudden the possibility had become very real, and you could almost sense the euphoria and excitement in the air.
I had made that trip from Munich to Regensburg many times, but on that particular evening the train was more full than usual. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism the West German government offered East German citizens small cash stipends to help them prepare for the coming changes and to inject some cash into the East German economy. But to receive these stipends, the East Germans had to travel to particular offices in West Germany for the money. As I got on the train there were already quite a few East Germans who had traveled all day from Rostock, at the very northern point of East Germany to come to Munich to pick up the equivalent of some $50 in cash, and now late at night they were beginning the long trip back to Rostock.
They did not look euphoric. Seizing on the sense of history about that moment in the train care, I decided to engage in conversation with these newly liberated victims of communist oppression. As we talked, the words better explained the anxiety that their faces expressed. These were not excited people but frightened people. They had suddenly been thrown into the irony of a freedom not of their choosing. Prior to November of 1989, they had few decisions to make, not many choices to ponder, very little need to prepare or plan for the future. Before they only had to worry about what was necessary; now they were confronted by the ambiguity of the possible. The necessary was safe and comforting; freedom was frightening.
There are many among us who prefer the safety and comfort of the necessary over the frightening freedom of the possible. You can even find them in churches and no doubt here on this campus, too. These are the Galatians of our time whose own insecurity and uncertainty requires that you, too, live your life under the weight of what they think God demands.
But if we can stay with this conversation just for another minute, listen in to what else Paul says, to the Galatians of his time, “But you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters.” Now, to be sure, Paul goes on to say some important things about not using – or misusing – your freedom as an excuse for self-indulgence but for service to each other.
Here is the proverbial bottom line, as Paul sees it, “For the whole law is summed up in the single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’.”
So there it is. Now, if you’re interested, Paul offers his own list of things that serve as signs of misused freedom. You heard them read and you can look them up. But be careful here; this isn’t a check-list for avoiding those particular things that get you into trouble and for finding the loopholes for the things you can get away with. Paul is describing the symptoms of misused freedom not listing the requirements for the course Christian Life 101. But notice how the terms of the conversation change when Paul talks about the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Again, not a list of requirements but a description of the qualities, the characteristics of people not afraid of the freedom that God intends and gives. These are not characteristics of the necessary but of the possible.
The question is not, “What must you do with your freedom?” The question is, “What will you do?” Do you dare to exercise the freedom of the loving, the peaceful, the patient, the kind, the generous, the faithful, the gentle, and the self-controlled? Really, what will you do? Now that you are caught up on the conversation, welcome to the party. Feel free, really free, to join the conversation.