The Life I Now Live

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

June 13, 2010

Text: Galatians 2: 15-21

15-16We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners." We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.

17-18Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who g9o through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous. If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.

19-21What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

The Message (MSG)

“I have been crucified with Christ:

the life I now live is not my life,

but the life Christ lives in me;

and my present mortal life is lived by faith in the Son of God,

who loved me and gave himself for me.”

On a subway train, a poster: “If you are tired of sin, read John 3:16.” Scribbled beneath it, someone had written: “If you are not tired of sin, phone 555 6397.”

Carol’s uncle Bob, when asked what was preaching was like when he was growing up in the 1920s: “Hell-fire and damnation from every church in Miles, Texas.”

Calvin Coolidge: sin? He was agin it.

We have come a long way. In the words of Albert Outler, to whom I am indebted for much of what I want to share with you today:

We are in a new predicament. There has been a radical dissolution of the age-old linkage between anxiety and guilt….self-loathing and repentance, guilt and hell-fire. And we may say good-riddance. At best, it was only half the story.

Outside a church near Haslet, Texas: “The wages of sin is death….. They failed to complete the sentence: “but the free gift of God is eternal life.”

If Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, then Christ responds to sin in its different manifestations----sin not simply as deeds which we shouldn’t have done; or things we have left undone (these are usually a long list in any given day!) but sin as radical separation from the Transcendent source of our being and becoming.

Sin is a condition before it is an action.

Sins as such have an enduring quality: You shall not commit murder, you shall have no other god’s before you, you shall not commit adultery, not covet….These describe the symptoms of a deeper malady, a profound dislocation of the soul.

Human despair, human lostness, feels and looks different at different times in history. It may in our time involve these:

Bewilderment and panic;

Alienation;

Isolation;

Loneliness;

Rootlessness;

Ethnic and racial pridefulness;

Boredom;

Lack of meaning, identity, hope, community;

Impatience; and wanting easy answers;

Blaming;

Insensitivity to the suffering of others;

The celebration of brutal treatment of those considered enemies;

Incivility and demagoguery as amusement.

All of which results in sins against ourselves and others; rejection or ignorance of love of God and neighbor.

Our fallen-ness is evidenced by not even seeing these aspects of our lives as sins, as not the way the world and our lives in it ought to be.

Are we satisfied with life in captivity to these practices and emotions?

Perhaps we can get right with God, with our authentic selves by believing the right things, church membership, mystical experience, self-improvement in all its forms. Each of these often lead us into sin, planting in us a self-righteousness: we have made ourselves better than others. And we boast of our achievements and become adept at hiding our frailty.

Nothing wrong with striving, and none of these are wrong in themselves. But the core of our life is dissatisfied. “God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him.”

RESCUE

Who shall deliver us? How do we get there? Paul was right, even in his first century world-view: We do not struggle against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers in the air. The zeitgeist of our time.

For Paul, it was the law which laid out our failure to be truly human, to be the creatures God wills for us to be. There are standards of behavior that we cannot live up to. We are captive to actions and attitudes which drive us to despair. By our own strength, we cannot free ourselves. We cannot get there from here.

Paul’s liberating discovery was that Jesus “gave himself for [his] sins.” By faith (buoyant trust) alone we are freed for new life. New life is “given, not gained.”

In receiving this gift, “the works of the law are torn down, rendered passé. The gospel overwhelms, eclipses, renders nil all previous claims, commitments and values.” (Texts for Preaching, Year C) Compared to the love of God in Jesus Christ, all other self-justifications are regarded as so much rubbish.

Jesus of Nazareth----his life, teaching, death and resurrection-- was an intervention by God to prove that God is not against us but for us---to get rid of God’s bad reputation (and being a God of condemnation) and establishing a new one (a God who desires nothing less than the redemption of all people, indeed, the whole cosmos). “God was and is in Christ, through whom God chose to reconciles the whole universe to himself.” (Page 34-5)

By faith in this God alone (and here I quote Outler):

Uptight lives are relaxed

Trapped lives are liberated

Arrogant lives are humbled

Soiled lives are cleansed

Slouching lives are raised to tiptoe

Empty lives are filled

Life unto death is turned into life unto life.

The well-to-do find a way out of affluence’s cruel traps;

The victims of freedom (over-choice) [our ability now to be lost in thousands of options and the inability to tell truth from fiction, highways from dead-ends] find moral commitments anchored in God and have some staying power.

The gospel offers a choice….the choice of God’s sovereign grace, life here and hereafter….love to God and neighbor….all of life’s weal and woe, life and death, a life of joy and gentleness and self-control. (page 69)

We receive freedom to live to God’s glory. Cornerstones: “erected by the church to the glory of God.” Thus our lives are being built on solid foundation of God’s faithfulness.

Grounded in grace, we are freed for strenuous service in the expansion of the love of God and neighbor in all of the arenas of our lives.

COMMUNITY

Such liberation gives us freedom of connectedness, of community. Not with angels or an elite cadre of people who are well-informed or successful, but with other struggling human beings like ourselves. Christ’s body is not a club. It is a gift of belonging.

In the words of another: In church, “you meet people who make you feel worthwhile.”

They are Jew and Gentile; they are insiders and outsiders; they are successes and failures; they are black and white, near and far. “Will you commit yourselves to be in the church which Christ has opened to all nations, races and ages.”

If “Christ lives in me, Christ may live in other human beings, regardless of their origin or viewpoints or behaviors.” (Paul’s confrontation of Peter, who had, on one occasion broken bread with Gentiles and then subsequently refused to do so----showing his prejudice toward non-Jews as fully Christian.)

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his enduring book, Life Together, wrote that “Christian community is not an ideal we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate….We are bound together by faith [trust in God in Christ who died for us and gave us our sisters and brothers to live with], not by experience [a fellowship of people just like us, whom we chose on the other bases].” (Page 30)

OUR RESPONSE?

Was Paul a mystic? Was he living in a “strange new world,” in which we cannot live?

Meet Jesus on the roads of life and find out. In the turmoil and terror of our lives, you may find a way to live a life of faith, hope and love which you never through possible.

The life you live will not be your life, with all its old baggage, but the life that Christ lives in you, the one who so loved you that he gave himself up for you.