“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ
Chapel – Friday, 9 March 2007
Call to Worship: Listen, God Is Calling ELW 513, stanza 1
[note – the refrain has a repeat before the verse]
Invocation top two prayers on ELW, p. 72
Before worship
God of grace, you have given us minds to know you, hearts to love you, and voices to sing your praise. Fill us with your Spirit, that we may celebrate your glory and worship you in spirit and truth, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.
Grace to receive the word
Blessed Lord God, you have caused the holy scriptures to be written for the nourishment of your people. Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that, comforted by your promises, we may embrace and forever hold fast to the hope of eternal life, which you have given us in Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.
Song: Listen, God Is Calling ELW 513, stanza 1
Scripture: Galatians 3:15-29
Homily: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Bev Stratton, Religion
Prayers ending with bottom prayer on ELW, p. 304
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Song: Listen, God Is Calling ELW 513, stanza 3
Benediction and Sending
Now may the God who guards us with the gift of the law,
Christ our Teacher, who loves us with an unstoppable love,
and the Spirit who empowers us to live in freedom,
guard and keep our minds and hearts,
as we love God and serve our neighbors.
Respond: Thanks be to God
A reading from the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia. May the Word of God dwell in you richly …
Brothers and sisters, I give an example from daily life: once a person's will has been ratified, no one adds to it or annuls it. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, "And to offsprings," as of many; but it says, "And to your offspring," that is, to one person, who is Christ. My point is this: the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance comes from the law, it no longer comes from the promise; but God granted it to Abraham through the promise.
Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained through angels by a mediator. Now a mediator involves more than one party; but God is one.
Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law. But the scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. [3:15-29]
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Say it with me: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Paul’s congregations in Galatia were trying to live as faithful followers of Christ—as we are. What does it mean to be a disciple, to learn from Christ in our time?
My students tell me that the Bible is a guidebook for how to live your life. They also have questions about sex: “Is premarital sex OK? What about homosexuality?” And about the church: “Do we have to go to church?” They have some idea what they think the church teaches about these areas: No, No, and Yes. Premarital sex is wrong, so is homosexuality, and yes, you do have to go to church. But many of them are dissatisfied with these answers. Their bodies are urging them to explore physical intimacy with others, and they enjoy it. They have friends, siblings, or parents who are lesbian or gay, and they want them to be loved and accepted as they are. They don’t find church particularly engaging or relevant to their concerns. And they wonder, perhaps a little bit at least if they’re taking a course that requires biblical study, what the Bible has to say about any of this. Some want easy answers—to have some clear boundaries. Others expect to get easy answers—though that will just confirm their suspicion that the church is out-of-date and should be left behind as they become adults.
So, what does it mean to be a disciple, to learn from Christ in our time?
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Paul tries to liberate the Galatian congregations from easy answers that threaten to imprison the Gospel of Christ. To do so, he needs to explain to them the function of the law. You’ve heard already this week about the context of Galatians: that some people were urging, perhaps even insisting that Gentile Christian men must keep the Jewish law by being circumcised in order to be accepted into Christian community. Paul’s letter would have been read or recited to them, and it says a passionate and emphatic—No. Don’t burden those of the new covenant with that requirement of the old. Don’t impose the law on those who would follow Christ. Elsewhere the Scripture, if not Paul himself, sees the law as a good gift of God to help us live well in relation to God and to one another. But in Galatians, Paul has a different emphasis: the law had its place, its time, its function, but the law’s time for that purpose is ended.
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Paul gives an example from daily life to help his community understand the law. The law was a “disciplinarian,” many of our translations say, from a Greek word that sounds like pedagogue. The translation and cognate may give us the wrong idea. We often associate punishment with the idea of discipline and pedantic teaching with a pedagogue. The Greek term meant something different. And here I encourage all of you to listen to your professors’ or librarian’s advice and use a study Bible or on-line references.
From Strong’s Concordance, available at bible., we learn that a paidagogos was
a guardian and guide of boys. Among the Greeks and the Romans the name was applied to trustworthy slaves who were charged with the duty of supervising the life and morals of boys belonging to the better class. The boys were not allowed so much as to step out of the house without them before arriving at the age of manhood.
Catherine Cory clarifies, in the St. Mary’s Press College Study Bible, that it was “a slave who escorted a child to school but did not teach or tutor; hence a guardian or monitor.” La Biblia Latinoamérica, a Spanish Bible I’ve been reading recently, puts it this way: “La Ley nos conducía al maestro, Cristo.” The law leads us to the teacher, Christ.
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
In some ways, I think the challenges our church faces are similar to Paul’s. He saw the end of the world coming soon because Christ would come back; we face the end of life as we know it through global warming, terrorism, and potential biological warfare. Paul’s religious community shifted from a familiar Judaism, to a mixed Jewish and Gentile community, struggling to determine how to live together as Christians. We live in a global culture and a country of immigrants, surrounded by people of many world religions. Paul’s new community brought a changed cultural context as well. The sexual mores of Greco-Roman culture didn’t match those of Palestinian Judaism (and he comments on this more in Corinthians and Romans than he does here in Galatians). Our sexual context has also changed dramatically, with the emergence of feminism, birth control, and AIDS. In times of dramatic change, uncertainty, and fear, it is tempting to fall back on the familiar, trusted and often trustworthy rules of the past, but I think Paul admonishes us in Galatians to remember:
“The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
Since the Greek paidagogos is no longer familiar in our culture, let me offer two brief stories from modern parent-child relations to illustrate two approaches to the gift of God’s law and freedom in Christ.
“Mom, can I go to the mall?” Sandy asked, when she called from a friend’s house.
“Why don’t you play outside in the snow?” her mom replied, saying no to Sandy’s request.
Sandy told her high school Sunday school class that she went to the mall anyway, without her mother’s permission, and then she and was grounded. Her mother’s “picky” expectation, trying to choose her daughter’s activities for her, was an example of why teens rebel against their parents.
Another story.
“So, do you have a new ‘beau’?” I asked my fifteen-year-old daughter on Sunday. (She had shared her heartbreak with me a couple months ago when she and her previous boyfriend had broken up.)
“No, but I wish we could have guy friends to hang out with, instead of having to ‘go out.’”
“What if you just asked someone to hang out?” I asked. I don’t remember whether Sara responded, but later she did invite a guy—someone who’s been in her Sunday school class since they were three-year-olds—to come over that afternoon and play in the snow.
What do these stories have to do with our Galatians text for today? In the 21st century U.S., we too have needs and expectations for guidance. Some parents think that a strict hand is necessary. They attempt to guide by keeping a close watch on their teens’ activities, causing some to chafe and rebel against the disciplinary rules that are only meant in love to help their children.
My family has chosen a different route. Our teenage children know our values—that we expect them to treat others well, that it’s important to take care of their own bodies and spirits, that they have responsibilities to do their homework and their chores, and that we expect them to stay safe and to come home at a reasonable hour. They know that we will always love them and that they can call us if they get into trouble or even if they’ve just forgotten to ask for a ride home and it’s late. They don’t have a curfew; they don’t get grounded; and they behave responsibly.
While Sandy lives in a family with a more explicit law—parents that seem to provide specific rules about her every movement—my kids live with an internalized law of love. They know that it’s important to love others and to love themselves, and they know that they are loved and trusted to make their own good decisions, guided by these values. Sandy’s family is not wrong in living with a more detailed, explicit law, but her family may not experience the same freedom as mine.
My daughter Sara’s wish for a way just to hang out with guy friends shows another side of the law. Decades ago, when the rules perhaps were clearer about courtship, teens knew what to do, or at least I imagine they did—who was supposed to call whom, when to talk with parents about your intentions, what to do on dates (“no petting below the neck” and “no sex before marriage” were my mother’s expectations), etc. Now there are fewer explicit social conventions, more dangers related to sexual activity, and perhaps less certainty about how to interact as friends and to get to know one another in emotionally as well as physically intimate ways. I heard my daughter longing for some clear and different social rules—some unofficial teen ‘laws’ that would allow her just to hang out with guys.
These examples show two different approaches and experiences of law or rules in relation to parenting and dating. Similarly, in our church today we have two understandings and desires for the law in relation to sexuality. On the one hand, we want the certainty of specific rules and boundaries. They make social expectations clear. Some of us would like the church and the government to provide a definition of marriage as being between “one man and one woman.” We want the church to enforce policies that make explicit our expectations for clergy and others’ sexual practices. And some of these civil and ecclesial rules are necessary to protect people from abuse.
On the other hand, we want the freedom to make our own decisions.
Young people and old need some boundaries and guidelines, but we are also testing the values and the gender expectations that have been handed on to us and learning to adjust them or to embrace them as our own. We need reason, honesty, clear information, and gentle stories of experience, passed on with love and trust, so that we can develop our own wisdom as we navigate the messiness of relationships, gender, and sexuality.
My hope for our church as we delve more deeply into Galatians and deliberations about sexuality is that we will both seek to address concrete questions about sexual ethics, and that we will demonstrate, through our dialogue and explicitly in our teaching, a sophisticated understanding of how God speaks to us through community and Scripture. The Bible is not simply a rulebook that we mine for specific verses to resolve disputes among us or to settle our own quandaries. We need to turn to the Bible with hearts open to hear what is the law, leading and guarding us like the ancient Greek paidagogos, and what is the Gospel, teaching and clothing us in freedom with Christ.
Say our refrain with me again: “The law is the servant; the teacher is Christ.”
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