Sermon 6/24/07
Discipline - Galatians 3:23-29
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Today we celebrate our graduates – those in our congregation who have completed high-school after what probably seems like a long, long journey, and those who have completed college after what might seem like time that flew by, or even those who have completed upper level degrees – those who just can’t get enough of school and learning. Whatever kind of graduation our students are celebrating today, I can guess about one aspect of their journeys that is a common bond. These journeys – from kindergarten through elementary school, during middle-school days and high-school and for some of you beyond that, the journey of education has involved a lot of following rules and learning to be disciplined. You have to learn rules about how to behave in school – which bus to take and how to get along with your classmates, when you can and when you can’t talk in class. You have to learn how to change classes when you get older and make it in three or four minutes from one end of the building to the other. You have to learn your subjects – math and science, history and English, music and art, language and technology and home and career skills – a little bit of everything. And, to a large degree, you have to learn to stay within the boundaries set for you by the rules, by the teachers, by the administration. You can’t miss too many classes, or show up late. You have to get your permission slips signed to go on field trips, and get permission or passes to be in the hallways. Part of learning and growing up is learning to follow the rules – or suffer the consequences! You have to be disciplined, in a way that comes from inside you, your own self-control, or you will be disciplined from without – timeouts, name on the board, missing recess, detention, suspension, failing classes. You have to follow the rules, at least most of the rules most of the time, or you just wouldn’t be sitting here as graduates today.
But it isn’t only about the rules, is it? I hope for you that you’ve gone beyond the rules – not through the rules, or bending the rules, or breaking the rules, or getting around the rules – but beyond the rules. I hope – not just for our graduates, but for all of you, that you’ve experienced a transition in education from learning because you have to learn because the rules say so to learning because you want to learn. Ok, maybe this hasn’t happened in all aspects of your education – but usually, it happens at least in the areas of learning when you are starting to fall in love with a particular subject matter, when you are starting to learn what will be your passions in life. I remember feeling this way during my piano lessons in high-school. For so long practicing was a chore – something I had to do in order to make it through my lessons without my teacher being too upset with me. It took a lot of discipline to keep practicing my scales and playing the same phrases of music over and over. I like piano, and I wanted to play. But it was more work than pleasure for some time. And then, somewhere in there, the transition happened. My playing, my practicing, became enjoyable. I was actually making some music. And making music inspired me to practice more, to love music more, and to invest myself more in what I was doing. I felt the same way my freshman year of college – I was learning so much and being exposed to so many new ideas that I just couldn’t soak it up fast enough. Like I said, I hope you’ve all experienced or will experience this transition – and it isn’t limited to the classroom, or the world of academics – it’s the passion that my brother Todd has for acting, that made him commit all of his summer vacations to theatre workshops and training programs. It’s the passion our mission team members have that get them to give up weeks of work and learn how to use tools and skills they didn’t know they had because they have a passion for helping. In religious-speak, we call this discovering of passion a vocation, which means a calling. So often, we talk about being called by God as something that happens just to people who think they’re called to be pastors. But theologian Frederick Buechner talks about vocation in a way that I like. He says:
[Vocation] comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. (2)
Where do your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet? What is your passion? This passion that we seek for our lives, this figuring out of our vocation and our call from God – this leads us in to our text from Galatians for today. In the epistle lesson, Paul is in the middle of writing to the people of Galatia, a young and growing community of faith, about law and faith. He calls them foolish – even stupid according to some translations – because instead of trusting in the faith that they have, instead of being moved by the Spirit that they’ve received, they keep returning to the law, thinking that the law will save them, that the law will prove them worthy servants of God. But Paul asks the Galatians, challenges and chides them, “Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?” (1) Where we pick up, Paul is talking about the law that bound these people together before they heard the freeing word of grace in Jesus Christ. Faithful Jews followed hundreds of laws – as God had commanded them too. But Paul argued that while we can live by the law when there are no better alternatives, when we have a better option, we better take it. Since Christ's coming into the world, our better alternative, Paul says, is to live by faith, not by the law, and be justified – set straight – by faith. Paul contrasts the law and faith, saying that living by the law can imprison us, keep us guarded, act as our disciplinarian. Living by faith, on the other hand, means that we “are no longer subject to a disciplinarian” but instead we are “children of God through faith,” “clothed with Christ,” “one in Christ Jesus,” not divided into the strict and limiting categories of the law – Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. And when you belong to Christ, Paul says, you are part of the promise of God to Abraham, a promise of blessing that was established with God’s people before the law was even given.
Paul was trying to teach the Galatians that they could live beyond the rules that they’d been taught from the law. Not against the rules, not breaking the commandments, not ignoring the way that they’d already come to know God – after all, Jesus taught that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. But the Galatians needed to learn that they weren’t bound and imprisoned by the law because they were free in Christ, free by God’s grace to live in a bigger way, live in a deeper way, life in a more challenging and more satisfying way. Imagine if your whole life you had to get a permission slip in order to do anything? That would be ridiculous of course. But that’s how the Galatians were living – so afraid of breaking the rules of the law that they were missing out on the full life God offers to us – the life of faith.
When we make that transition – from law to faith, from rules to freedom, from practicing to passion, finally, change can happen, and finally, transformation occurs, and finally, we start really being disciples and living out the good news that Jesus shared. When Jesus came and began his preaching and teaching, his biggest criticism of the devout religious folks he met was that they were so good at following the commandments that they weren’t very good at loving others. They followed the rules to a T, but they never pushed themselves beyond the rules, to do more than the minimum that was required of them. Paul invites us to a life where we can go beyond law to faith. Instead of God being the Disciplinarian with us as the students just trying to stay out of trouble, Paul reminds us that God is our Parent and we are God’s beloved children. And as God’s children, we’re meant to follow rules, sure, but God most wants us to grow into the unique creations we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be full of passion for what and who God has called us to be, and we’re meant to mature in faith as we are filled with a Parent’s love. That’s a blessing that I wish for each of our graduates – that you are filled with God’s love and freed by God’s love as you continue in a journey of faith. That’s a blessing I wish for all of us. Amen.
(1) Galatians 3:3-5
(2) Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking.