“Ascribe to the Lord the
Honor due his name; bring offerings and come into his courts." Amen Ps. 96.8
Good morning and welcome to
this glorious preamble of hot summer Sundays in New England. I want to welcome
anyone who might be visiting today, and especial Lynd Matt who is with us from
The Episcopal Diocese and who will be helping to give out pledge cards for the
Together/Now offering to come in just a few minutes.
First though, a few
reflections on this morning’s lessons.
One of the things I dislike
about human life is the experience of broken relationships. Broken relationship
hurt. We all know of them and we all are probably in various stages of
reconciliation (or not) in one or more relationships.
Not only that, as parents and
grandparents and children of parents, we usually are dealing with several
relationships that put us in different postures. Sometimes we are the wise
parents, sometime we are being accused of being foolish parents.
Sometimes we are grandparents
who know how to listen and sometimes we are overflowing with advice. Sometimes
we are parents who are stumbling to teach their children values that go the
distance; all the while, wrestling with our own brokenness at work or at home.
Sometimes we are children
confused by the above!
Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians is struggling in
his own relationships. He’s struggling with the Galatians, with the Jewish
followers in Jerusalem, and with the Gentiles he’s converting. Paul admits to
being a human being who is wrestling with being a servant of the Good News of God,
on the one hand, and the temptation to be a “people pleaser,” on the other
hand.
In verse 10, Paul exclaims:
“Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please
people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
“If I were still pleasing
people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
Somehow we have heard this
message before, but from a different human being; from the One we call Messiah.
Jesus, too, struggled in the desert with the reality of worshipping God only.
God, not mammon, not other human brings, not family, not friendship, not good
works.
I have a tendency to be a
people pleaser. I have always been tempted to choose the path of least
resistance which, at times, seemed like the people pleasing path. And then
something happened.
In 1974, just after my first
child was born and I was part of a post-Vatican II Catholic Charismatic Prayer
Group, I had an experience of being grasped by God; of being taken over by the
Holy Spirit in a way that changed my allegiances forever.
The best way I can describe
this experience is to recall science class and the iron filings and the magnet,
One minute the iron filings are going here and there and the next minute, they
are completely oriented to the direction and pull of the magnet.
While I was amazed and
thrilled by this new sense of direction, it has taken many years to realize just how strong
that magnet called God’s Love really is. Being a people pleaser by nature often
put me at odds with the God of my conversion. Often, like Paul, I struggled
with whose approval I wanted- was it human approval or God’s approval?
And then Paul’s haunting self
disclosure: “If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of
Christ.”
Our lessons today have themes
of authority and faith running through them.
Whether it is Paul or the Centurion
in his encounter with Jesus, both men had come to a point in their lives where
they were absolutely clear about who Christ is, who the one authority is, and
the dividing line between living the life of God or being cast hither and yon
by this person or that person, this gospel or that gospel.
Wendy Farley, in her
commentary of Paul’s Letter to the
Galatians, writes:
“The Gospel is the unbearably
good news that divine love anticipates us, surrounds us, precedes us; anything
that serves as an obstacle to our awareness of this love is ‘accursed.”[1]
As the disciples would say to
Jesus, “That’s a hard saying!” “Anything that serves as an obstacle to our
awareness…of this love…is an accursed.” For any of us who are prone to be
people pleasers, pleasing people can become an obstacle to our awareness of
Divine love.
Farley continues:
“Christians lived outside of
the claims of empire, loyal and devoted to a completely different logic and
power. The…shadow side of this love is that no authority, practice, or social
hierarchy deserves our deepest loyalty.”[2]
And there you have it. The
ultimate message of Biblical theology: whether we like it or not, it all comes
down to monotheism. There is but One God who created us and when we are called
into a relationship with this one God we find ourselves operating in a
spiritual system of “completely different logic and power.”
In a few minutes, we will all
be faced with a decision: to pledge or not to pledge to the Diocesan
Together/Now Campaign. The decision, really, is a spiritual one. It’s about who
to please: The Diocese or God who surrounds us and precedes us?
We come to Church to set
ourselves and our relationships right before God. We come to offer whatever we
have, even if on any one day that is simply our stuckedness, or our resistance,
or our joy.
No matter how illogical it
seems to us, it is our gesture of offering that pleases God so much.
We come this morning to be
set aright; to be re-ordered by God’s Word, God’s Sacraments, in fellowship
with one another.
For those of us who are
people pleasers, we come to exchange our desire for harmony with others for
harmony with our God.
Our spiritual task this
morning is to be aware of God’s love for us. If we can achieve this, then
giving will be easy and not “accursed.”
To quote Farley one last
time, “The great conversion of faith is to let this love live in us.”
As irrational, uncomfortable,
or unfamiliar this new spiritual awakening may be, we are exactly like those
iron filings sitting on a table top minding their own business until they are
all pulled into a new allegiance that knows only one direction: “One Lord, one
Faith, one Baptism; On God and Father of all.” (BCP. p299)
Amen
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