Galatians 3:1-14 "The Acoustics of Faith" Scott Hoezee

The second stanza of the well-known hymn "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise" may well capture a certain dynamic in the Christian doctrine of God. "Unresting, unhasting and silent as light, nor wanting nor wasting, you rule day and night; your justice like mountains high soaring above, your clouds which are fountains of goodness and love." In that one lyric we discern what has always been a fundamental tension in our portrait of God: the tension that comes when you combine justice and grace. God is both just and loving. But which of those two looms larger? In that hymn, it is God's justice that is said to have a towering presence, soaring up like a mountain. God's "goodness and love," on the other hand, are compared to clouds--these clouds are also up in the sky but perhaps not quite as soaring or majestic as a Mount Everest whose summit ascends higher than even the clouds.

Who is God first and foremost? If you had to describe God to someone, where would you begin? With justice or with love? Maybe the punch behind that question will become easier to appreciate if you turn matters around a bit. Suppose that one day you happen to overhear a conversation between your adult daughter and a new co-worker with whom she is becoming a good friend. Suppose you hear this other person ask your daughter, "So, tell me: what's your father like?" What do you hope to hear? How do you want to be characterized? Do you want a daughter to say, "My Dad? Well, he's very, very strict. He really laid down the law in our house, and I remember that while growing up, I lived with a certain amount of fear that I'd feel the sting of his justice if I broke the rules." Or would you rather hear something like, "My Dad? He's really loving and kind. Even when I was naughty while growing up, I always knew the love was there."

Which response would you prefer? As questions go, this one is hardly the most difficult one I've ever posed in a sermon! Most all of us would rather be characterized chiefly by our kindness and love. If our children also have memories of our cracking the moral whip and insisting that rules be followed, we would prefer even that to be nestled in the context of a love that loomed larger than our rigorous applications of rules.

Do you think God feels that way, too? The main hints we have as to the mind of God are in the Bible, and so it is properly Scripture that helps us to answer a question like this. This morning I am going to suggest that biblically and theologically our image of God should be formed with God's love being the most prominent. Too often we don't start with the love, however. Instead we tend to imagine that what comes first for God is his fierce justice, his overwhelming determination to make things right by punishing sin. When that becomes our starting point, then we may find ourselves wondering, "Given how fiercely just God is, it must be a struggle for his gracious side to get expressed. How can a just God be also gracious?"

That is pretty much how the Heidelberg Catechism frames the issue. Question and Answer 10 assures us up front that God "is terribly angry . . . As a just judge, he punishes [sins] now and in eternity." The next Q&A follows this up by asking (in the second place), "But isn't God also merciful?" to which the answer is, "God is certainly merciful, but he is also just." In the Catechism's way of approaching these issues, justice is the touchstone. We start there. We begin with an anger that needs resolving, a justice that demands satisfaction. The mercy is there, too, but it seems like that more tender part of God's character cannot be talked about until first we trace out the places to which the justice leads.

Again, however, I want to suggest that we need to turn this around. Perhaps a better way of looking at this is to say up front that God is first and foremost merciful, gracious, and loving. That is fundamentally who God is. In that case, we end up wondering not how an angry God can still manage to be also loving but rather how a loving God can find a way also to deal with an evil that has broken God's heart and so needs addressing.

Perhaps this all seems very subtle yet it is important to get this straight. In the end, we need both the mercy and the justice, both the grace and the divine anger over sin. Choosing one at the expense of the other is the ambit of heretics, and there have been heresies in history that have opted for one or the other but not both divine traits. But even in maintaining both, the question of God's most basic nature persists. In the course of dealing with a flawed human race, does God have to stop himself now and again to remind himself to be more loving? Or is it the other way around: as God deals with a flawed humanity, are all his dealings fueled by love and grace such that even matters of justice are, in the end, aimed toward a loving and merciful goal?

Perhaps our passage in Galatians can help us come to some clarity on these vital questions. Last week I mentioned that Philippians may well be the warmest and friendliest letter Paul ever wrote. If so, then Galatians occupies the opposite end of the correspondence spectrum, being maybe the most terse, direct, and fiery of the thirteen Pauline letters we have. In fact, if you look back at chapter 1, you will see that Paul dispensed with the usual epistolary niceties that you find in all of his other letters.

Ancient writers like Paul "signed" their letters at the beginning. These days we don't sign our name until the very end, usually prefacing our signature with something like "Sincerely," "Cordially," "Love," or "With warmest regards, Scott." Paul always put his signature up front, accompanied by a blessing and followed by a section in which Paul would write something like, "I thank God every time I think of you," or "Praise be to God because I've heard about how much you are growing in the faith." Lines like that were the ancient equivalent of signing a letter with "Cordially" or "All my love."

But Paul's "signature" in Galatians 1 is more like signing a letter "With deepest regret" or maybe one of those lines you may read at the end of a letter to Ann Landers: "Troubled in Topeka"! Paul has nothing nice to say in Galatians 1. He does not say how thankful he is for the Galatians. Instead he launches into a full frontal assault, expressing dismayed astonishment that the Galatian Christians had dumped the gospel of grace that Paul had preached in favor of a different message that claimed salvation is up to us. This was such an urgent matter, Paul didn't mind if he came off as a bit brisk and brusque. When it came to the questions of Jesus' precious gospel, Paul had no time for social niceties.

Indeed, even by the time you get as deep into this letter as chapter 3, Paul is still sputtering his disbelief. "You foolish Galatians!" he cries. "What's wrong with you people? Did someone cast a spell on you, slip drugs into your wine, hit you over the head?! I showed you Jesus on the cross. I told you that God had already taken care of everything through Jesus' sacrifice so that now all you have to do was believe what you heard. But now I gather that you've given up on that and are back to that same old tired treadmill of self-help salvation, trying to bribe God with the pathetic baubles and trinkets of your own homespun morality and get-rich-quick schemes."

And so Paul tells them to give it up. The Spirit of the living God had already come to these people. The Spirit baptized these people with goodness and grace as soon as they heard what Paul preached and took what they heard to heart. In a way Paul is talking about what we could term "the acoustics of faith." Faith is not first of all about doing anything. Faith is not about earning our way into God's favor or racking up the merit points we need to clear God's minimum basic requirements. Faith is about hearing a message. Over and over Paul says that salvation is not something that you do but something that you hear about.

What is the message we hear? Well, it's a message of good news precisely because the gospel proclaims that salvation has already been accomplished. "It is finished!" Jesus cried from the cross. Jesus did not say that he was finished in the sense of being washed up, done in, killed off. Jesus said it is finished, referring to God's entire symphony of creation and now also redemption. That work was "finished" in the sense of being perfectly completed. There was nothing more to add, nothing more to do.

The acoustics of faith involve simply hearing this good news and then living like you believe it is really true. That's why Paul keeps talking about what the Galatians had "heard." That's why he said that even as far back as Abraham, long before the work of Jesus on the cross, God "announced the gospel in advance." Even for Abraham it was about an announcement made by God, not an accomplishment by human beings.

But now we need to return to our theme question about justice and mercy in God. Because in a way, you could say that what "the acoustics of faith" suggest is that we live our lives as though we believe that God really is gracious first and foremost. The problem with the Galatian Christians--the problem that caused Paul to pen all these purple passages --was that those folks had started to live like they thought God was mostly stuck on justice. Do you want to know which children in the world try the hardest to follow every last household rule (and who simultaneously live in terror that they may even inadvertently break one of those rules)? It is not the children who are convinced their father is pure love through and through but the ones who know about the beating that will come if something goes the least bit awry. The frightened ones live their lives tip-toeing on eggshells.

That's how the Galatians were starting to act, and to Paul's mind it was as though they had not heard the gospel's good news at all. They seemed at first to have believed the announcement that God is love but then turned right around and started to live as though that love was still locked up behind the iron gates of justice. The only way to get at God's love was to unlock the gates of justice on their own.

But that's wrong. In the history of theology there has been a false idea that is summed up by the German phrase "Umstimmung Gottes." Roughly translated that means "God's change of attitude." The question has traditionally been: did the cross change God from a basically angry Deity into a kinder, gentler God? Was God mostly upset, angry, furious and bent on revenge before Jesus died? Was the cross like the fire extinguisher that put out the flames of God's wrath, thus allowing love to flourish once more? The orthodox answer to that question has always been a firm "No!" The entire plan of salvation had been fueled by love right from the get-go, from the Garden of Eden all the way to the garden of the resurrection. God never changed from wrath to love. The love was always there.

The question sin forced onto God was not, "How can I ever find my love back now that it has been burned off by the heat of my fury." Rather, God had to wonder, "How can I keep showing my love even while I have to deal with sin?" The cross is the ultimate answer to that question. The cross is God's way to keep letting his love shine even while dealing with sin. "For God so loved the world" that he sent his Son to die. That famous verse does not say, "For God was so angry with the world that he sent his Son so that, after letting him get killed, God's love could make a comeback." No, it's been about nothing but love ever since God graciously and generously created the whole universe in the first place.

The love never went away. The love never receded into the background. The love never took a backseat to the justice. Once sin came to the cosmos, God loved us too much to leave us in that damaged condition. Something had to be done. In the long run, that something was the death of the Christ.

On one level, you might be tempted to think that everything I've said this morning, though maybe interesting, is mostly about the high-end of the theological spectrum. Getting this all straight, while important from an intellectual point of view, maybe doesn't have much to do with the practical realities of day-to-day discipleship. But think again. After all, even for the Galatian Christians it was the shape of their daily lives that set Paul off. They were living like scared children. The same could be true of us. Do we tend to think that most of the time we are walking on a kind of balance beam, constantly fretting that we don't lose our footing and so fall off the beam and into hell?

Living a guilt-laden, fearful life tips our hand to reveal we think God is more strict than loving. Another way this may show itself is in how we deal with other people. Two weeks ago we talked about not taking revenge. We said then that the reason we do not lead a tit-for-tat, vengeful existence is because God has already graced us. We were the ones who deserved to feel the sting of God's just revenge but we didn't. That sets the tone for how we deal with other people.

Similarly, in this sermon, we see that if we are to imitate God, then when we bump into other people's faults, flaws, or sins, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is not, "How can I handle this the most fairly" but rather, "How can I deal with this lovingly?" Asking that question will not mean you get rid of questions of fairness and measured justice, but it nestles those matters into a different context that has a quite different goal. After all, once upon a time, God looked at the sin and evil of this world and said, "What a mess! How can I deal with this lovingly?"

Well, the loving thing was to take us seriously as responsible people who had, after all, the great advantage of having been created in the divine image. We could have done better, and should have. God could not look at us and then say, "Well, what do you expect?!" No, that would not have been a very loving thing to say. It would not have shown much respect for us. Instead, and in love, God looked at us and said, "I did expect more, and I still do. This mess needs to be cleaned up so that my truest desires for these people can flower and flourish once more. I love them enough to do this for them" There was never a claim of justice that love did not temper, re-direct, or influence. Because all along it was the love that was in charge.

That's the good news we need to hear. We can stop fighting, striving, trying, and living in fear. It's over. It is said that in the years after World War II ended, there were isolated incidents in which an individual Japanese soldier was sometimes found hiding out in a cave on this or that small Pacific island somewhere. Such soldiers had never heard that the war was over, that they could put aside their weapons. Lacking this key information, they needed to be told the truth, to hear the news, and then to believe it. There was nothing more for them to do--no more battles to fight, no more medals of valor to earn. What remained was to quit being a solider, go home, and start living again.

Through the acoustics of faith, life begins again. And what is it that we hear? Paul told the Galatians and now us at the end of chapter 2: what we hear is that the Son of God loves us enough to have died for us. That's why, when you look at the cross, you shouldn't have to ask, "But isn't God also merciful?" Given what we see in the cross, a perfectly legitimate counter question would be, "What do you mean by 'also merciful'? The cross makes it clear that the mercy was always in control, and it still is. God is love. In Christ, we are saved by grace through faith. Haven't you heard?" Amen.