A Whole New Life

There’s a thing we Presbyterian pastors do when we meet a new Presbyterian pastor. It might not be the first question we ask, but it won’t be long before we ask, “So where did you go to seminary?” I don’t know if people in other fields do that…I just know that for Presbyterian pastors, that’s a really important question. Not because some seminaries are good and some aren’t…the Presbyterian seminaries are all good. But, because “Who formed you?” is an important question for how you approach ministry.

That’s the question that Paul realizes has been raised about him by the agitators in Galatia. That’s the question he is answering here this morning in the second section of his letter. The format is not unlike what we would type up in a memo.

From: Paul, an apostle whose commission is divine and not human, and all the brothers and sisters with me

To: The churches in Galatia, if you know modern day Turkey, Galatia was a name for the north-central plateau region, east of Ankara. In Biblical times, this area was inhabited by Gentiles. Now, a note about the category “Gentile” – that just means not-Jewish people. So, the people of Galatia were not Jewish.

Regarding: The Gospel
Now, this memo was printed on red paper and stamped “Urgent.” As I shared with you last week, one scholar notes that Paul was “hopping mad.” Someone or some group has been teaching the Galatians that when Paul came to Galatia and told them about Jesus, he left a lot out – the whole step of converting to Judaism. Paul, they were telling the Galatians, was strutting around, preaching an easy people-pleasing, gospel that wasn’t the full truth. The full truth, they were teaching, was that you had to be circumcised and follow the Jewish law and customs and be a follower of the way of Jesus.
To which Paul responds, this is the Gospel.
1. We live in an evil age. The Law has not done what it was intended to do. It has not brought humanity into right relationship with God. It has not curbed sinfulness.
2. God is for us. God wants relationship with us. God wants us to choose God over sin.
3. When creation runs the way God intends, God will be praised.
4. Jesus chose to give himself to set right what our sin broke. Jesus rescued creation and offers to restore us to right relationships with God and one another.

But, why should they believe him? That is what Paul addresses in the passage we read this morning. Who is Paul? They met him. He is the one who first told them about Jesus. They believed him. They trusted him. But, after these other people raised doubts about him, about his motives, about his authority,… How well did they really know him? What did they really know about him?

So, Paul begins,”It’s not about me.” “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” But then he goes on to give a little autobiographical sketch.

“Who is Paul?” Let’s just summarize what we know about him.

He was born a Roman citizen, a privileged status that gave him legal rights to vote, to own property, to fair trial and to appeal, and protected him from punishments of torture. We don’t know how his parents came to be citizens…you could buy citizenship, but it was expensive, or you could be granted citizenship for a display of loyalty or service to the empire. How ever they came to be citizens, Saul’s parents were, so he was also when he was born.

His parents named him Saul when he was born. The name, “Saul,” was the name of the first king of Israel, and in Hebrew it means “prayed for;” he was a baby boy answer to the prayers of faithful Jewish parents.

They lived in Tarsus. A center of trade and the capital of that Roman province, Tarsus was situated on a river that flowed, about 10 miles down, into the Mediterranean. AND, Tarsus sat at a major pass in the Taurus mountains. So, he grew up surrounded by people from other cultures, who spoke other languages – people from all over, who travelled and traded goods.

Saul is a good student, a fine young man, he studies God’s Word and lives it. He becomes part of a society of scholars who are deeply pious, known as the Pharisees. They strive for righteousness – to follow the over 600 laws of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Old Testament, and to follow the oral tradition, and to observe all the ceremonial purification rituals – so that they can be in God’s presence, worthy of relationship with God.

And he is zealous! Acts tells us that when the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council at the Temple, ordered and carried out the stoning of Stephen, the first follower of Jesus to be martyred, Saul approved. Then, Acts tells us, “Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.” It was on his way to the synagogues of Damascus to arrest any there, men or women, who had become followers of The Way and take them as prisoners back to Jerusalem that he is brought to his knees right on the path by a blinding flash of light and a voice asks, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

Everything changed. For three days, he was blind, and he saw how blind he had been and he fasted. At the end of those three days, a disciple named Ananias came, sent by God to restore his sight. When Ananias laid his hands on him, it was like scales fell from his eyes. He was baptized and began preaching about Jesus in the synagogues in Damascus.

We would love a nice neat timeline to be presented of Paul’s travels with dates and places and acquaintances…and we can do an ok job…but he didn’t carry a smartphone and he wasn’t on social media…so we don’t have a GPS tracker or any history to mine. The best we can do is that after his conversion, when he began preaching in the synagogues of Damacus, people were pretty suspicious. They did not want to get trapped in a sting operation.

When he showed up preaching Jesus, they looked at each other like, “We know him, right?” Acts (9) tells us, “Everyone who heard him was baffled. They questioned each other, “Isn’t he the one who was wreaking havoc among those in Jerusalem who called on this name? Hadn’t he come here to take those same people as prisoners to the chief priests?”

“22 But Saul grew stronger and stronger. He confused the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ.
23 After this had gone on for some time, the Jews hatched a plot to kill Saul. 24 However, he found out about their scheme. They were keeping watch at the city gates around the clock so they could assassinate him. 25 But his disciples took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the city wall.”

It is as he turns from trying to preach to fellow Jews about Jesus to preaching to Gentiles, that Saul begins to go by his Roman name, Paul.

Paul tells the Galatians that then he spent around 3 years in Arabia, a predominately Gentile region. Then he goes and spends about 2 weeks in Jerusalem with Cephas (remember Cephas means “rock” in Aramaic, so it is the name Jesus gave to Simon…who we call Peter or Simon Peter…on this Cephas I will build my church) but Paul says he does not meet any of the other apostles. Then on to Syria and Cilicia, a region north of Damascus, between Damascus and Paul’s hometown, Tarsus.

Whoever the agitators are in Galatia, they seem to be questioning Paul’s relationship with the establishment. Paul’s response is to affirm that these agitators are absolutely correct. Paul is NOT teaching under the authority of the apostles in Jerusalem. He doesn’t even KNOW most of them. He spent a couple of weeks with Peter, and that’s IT.

Paul says, “I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ.” Judea is the southern kingdom of Israel, the area around Jerusalem. They only heard the report: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.”
“And,” besides, Paul fires back at the accusations of the agitators, the people in the churches of Judea, the Jerusalem followers of the Way, “praised God because of me.”

Galatians is the 3rd letter of Paul’s that we have in the Bible. I and II Thessalonians pre-date it. But, it wasn’t the last. He wrote nearly a quarter of the New Testament. But, he wrote many more letters that we don’t have preserved to the many churches he founded on his multiple missionary journeys. Today, there are scholars who spend their whole careers studying nothing but Paul, so we won’t cover his whole life today.

Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore asked her students at Luther Seminary to write short stories about Paul. REALLY short stories, Paul in 6 Words.
What needs to be included? The complex work of using a mirror to try to figure out what questions he is answering in his letters, so we can better understand what those answers mean as a guide for the church today. The whole new life he lived after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. The gospel he preached.

Some of the efforts:
“Contains some things hard to understand.”
“From elitist egomaniac to enigmatic egalitarian”
“Christ Jesus. What was the question?”
I liked this one, “Death. Resurrection. Living on the hinge.”

So, I decided to try it. You might want to try it as well. Here’s mine. Paul in 6 Words: “Jesus met me, changed me completely.” Try it. How might you summarize who Paul is in 6 words? Then try this: in 6 words, what short story could be written about your life?