We're Dead. We Don't Need No Stinkin' Credentials!

This sermon, preached on June 4-5, 2016, continues a series based on Galatians at St. James Lutheran Church, Johnston, Iowa, while their pastor is on a spiritual pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Campostela in northern Spain. It's based on both Galatians and the gospel reading from Luke about the raising of the dead son of the widow in Nain.

This week I was talking to Ryan Cosgrove, a former student of mine who’s now serving as a pastor in Burlington. While I’m an old professor cut off from the ins and outs of weekly preaching, Ryan is a millennial connected to all kinds of social media preaching sites and participates in a pastors’ text study each week. We were talking about today’s reading from Galatians, and he said that he was surprise that the other pastors and posters on social media had declared this passage about Paul’s authority to be pretty thin gruel for preaching. They thought it was inconsequential and boring, with nothing much going on. “I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, blah, blah, blah. But this passage is deceptive in its mundaneness. It’s actually an incredibly big and important part of Paul’s argument in the letter. And it falls right in line with the rest of what Paul is talking about in Galatians.

Remember from last week that Paul had been a Jewish religious lawyer, a Pharisee, and he had persecuted Jesus’ followers – even to the point of helping out at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. When Paul came to faith with his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he also became the church’s greatest missionary and most important theologian. He’d gotten permission from the believers in Jerusalem to go tell non-Jews out in the Roman empire about Jesus. He’d already been to the region of Galatia, which would be central Turkey today. Now, as he’s moved on to preach Christ in other places, a group of Jewish Christians has arrived from Jerusalem to investigate, and they’re shocked that Paul hadn’t taught the Galatians to follow Jewish religious laws like Jesus, the disciples, and they themselves do. They demand that the Galatian men who had been pagans now submit to the ritual of circumcision and have what we’ll call “their former life” sliced away. Paul says what the Jewish Christians have been saying is a false gospel, that is, their demands don’t give Christ’s benefits freely. He says that to stake your salvation on something you do, even something as good as circumcision is for Jewish males, takes Christ out of the salvation equation.

Because Paul preached in the Galatian communities and the Spirit brought people to faith through his preaching, in order to undercut Paul’s work there the Jewish Christians called his authority into question. They wanted to know what exactly Paul’s credentials were. That seems like a reasonable request to us. When Grand View’s education majors want to become teachers, the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners establishes requirements for their curriculum. For instance, you don’t get to become a fifth grade teacher if you haven’t taken a class about educating a diverse set of learners. Our nursing majors have to pass a rigorous battery of tests called the NCLEX in order to be certified to serve. The Iowa Bar Association won’t accept you for membership, no matter how good your law school grades if you don’t pass the bar exam. Each profession has specific requirements, and the church’s pastors do, too: You have to have a Master of Divinity degree or its equivalent, and you have to meet the requirements of the ELCA’s “Visions and Expectations” document, which details sexual behavior guidelines, financial guidelines, lifestyle and other qualities of a faithful pastor.

Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran church’s primary guiding document from the 16^th century, says no one may function as one of the church’s public proclaimers (that is, as a pastor) without a regular call. Even if you feel an internal call to ministry, in the Lutheran church you don’t get to take up a position in a congregation without the church setting you apart as a pastor. Our brothers and sisters in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is going to take up the issue in its national convention in Milwaukee this summer. They’ll ask if it’s kosher for the church to license lay people to administer the Lord’s Supper or if only pastor should be allowed to do it. When it comes to Paul and Galatians, though, it’s a whole other matter. The Jewish Christians want Paul to have checked off all their required boxes: be Jewish, be circumcised, be a disciple of Jesus or authorized by one.

But for Paul, it’s not about adhering to a set of credentials. He was called by the risen Jesus himself. When Paul was still a bounty hunter tracking down the blasphemous followers of Jesus, he was riding a horse on the road to Damascus 138 miles away in order to make some arrests. Suddenly there was a blinding light, and Paul was knocked to the ground and struck blind. He heard the voice of the risen Jesus ask him why he was persecuting the Lord. And he was told to get himself to the home of one of the believers. In that moment, everything changed for Paul. He began to see Jesus’ appearance to him as the dividing line between his old life in sin and death and his new life taken up in faith in the Lord’s resurrection.

When the Jerusalem Christians who’ve shown up in Galatia demand Paul’s credentials as proof that he’s allowed to tell these converts that they don’t have to follow Jewish law, Paul’s response is, “Credentials? I don’t need no stinkin’ credentials!” That’s because for Paul saving faith is all about a relationship with Jesus. It’s what was established for Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul cares about other questions: Has Jesus made you his own? Has the word grabbed hold of you to give you faith? Has the water been poured over you and the promise proclaimed to you in baptism? Has Christ given himself to you with the promise of forgiveness in the Lord’s Supper? Has God announced forgiveness to you on account of Jesus’? In each of these ways, you’ve had the same experience as Paul: Christ established a relationship with you through no work of your own. So Paul basically says, “Credentials? Ain’t got none. I only have Jesus. And if you have a problem with the Spirit having moved a former persecutor of the church like me to preach to the gentiles, you’re going to have to take it up with Christ. You claim to have such good standing with God on account of your adherence to religious laws. Go ahead and trot that out before God as evidence of your worthiness. See how well that works out for you.”

In last Sunday’s gospel we heard the story of the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant and came to confess his own unworthiness and Christ’s great power and authority. Today we come up against another character who’s even less worthy: the dead son of the widow from Nain. By what worthiness or authority did the dead young man come to be raised? He was dead. He had nothing to bring before God’s judgment seat. What’s worse, anyone who came close to his dead body and funeral bier would have been regarded as unclean and unrighteous. People would have to stay away from them for a week lest they, too, become unclean.

But Jesus seems to care not at all about clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous. Becoming unclean and being cast out of the community for a week seems to be a trifle for him. And it doesn’t matter to him that the dead young man can’t present credentials for worthiness. In fact, Jesus has the dead guy right where he wants him: lying there unable to move, unable to perform a good work, unable to defend himself, unable to take a breath and puff himself up in pride. The guy is dead, and that’s not just good enough for Jesus, it’s the only thing for him.

At that point, there’s no longer any hope for action, neither a little finger twitching to indicate the guy wanted to be raised or asking the Lord to come into his life or giving his heart to God. Dead fingers can’t twitch. Dead people can’t catch a breath in order to speak. And this guy’s heart just isn’t beating anymore. The only thing you can say the dead guy is able to do is rot. And even that is about as passive as you can get. The dead son of Nain is simply done with life. He has no more he can do. Now it’s Jesus’ own power and authority to raise him from the dead or nothing at all.

Paul pretty much tells the Galatians that his favorite t-shirt says, “Resurrection from the dead: been there, had that done to me.” That’s what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Jesus grabbed him, and Paul saw that the life he’d led was actually corrupted and rotting from the inside. Paul was as dead in sin as the son of Nain was lying on his bier. The presence of the risen Christ may have knocked him to the ground, but it also raised him to new life.

So once again, we have the same story we had last Sunday when we began to hear about the distinction between what is Christ and what is Not-Christ. Paul’s opponents want to point to his lack of credentials as a problem. But Paul knows that credentials are Not-Christ. When Jesus is the only game in town for Paul, to submit to legalistic credentialing is to deny Christ. And it’s a false gospel every bit as much as the demand that the men of Galatia unzip and be circumcised.

To turn to something that is not Christ seems like it’s just adding a small thing. It’s just a bit of foreskin. It’s just a diploma. It’s a mere exam. It’s simply a class to take. It’s just a decision for Christ. But what Paul’s opponents don’t see, and what he wants the Galatians to open their eyes to, is that adding even the smallest thing is to diminish what Christ has done on the cross and to make him less than Lord of all. Is it Christ who saves or not? If you submit to a demand to be more religious, a better Bible reader, less of a sinner, a more devoted Christian, a stronger fighter for peace and justice, then you have made yourself the hinge of salvation. And what we’re going to hear later in Galatians is that when you’ve allowed that camel’s nose under the tent, it will take over everything, and you will lose freedom and salvation.

When the demand for credentials and proof of authority comes, Paul says he’s unqualified. The only credential he has is the same the dead son in Nain bore: he was dead in sin, and the only life he has is the one Christ gives him. Can anything less be true for you? As Paul says in Romans, while we still were sinners Christ died for us. You who have been baptized into his death are now raised in his resurrection.

When Luther’s prince, Frederick the Wise, died in 1525 after having stood by his local professor and pastor even in the face of the power of the Holy Roman Empire and the condemnation of the church, the reformer preached at the prince’s funeral. He called Frederick’s death the little death. His body was done moving and breathing, and, yes, the people were right to grieve. But Luther said Frederick died the big death, the point when he was loosed from the world’s powers and freed in Christ, when the prince defending the gospel that Luther preached. Luther told the gathered mourners that it was Frederick’s confession of faith via his actions when he died and new life began for him.

It’s a strange thing when that happens to you. You never actually realize you were lying on your bier, traveling through the world dead as nails and unable to move. And yet now by the power of God’s word declared to you, your eyes are opened and, blinking, you think, “Wait! What just happened to me? How did I get here? Wow!” As long as you’re alive enough to hold a credential in your hand, you’re not dead enough for Jesus’ resurrection. Besides, he doesn’t want those papers cluttering up the divine ticket-to-heaven counter. His death was messy enough. He doesn’t need that from you. Keep your good works and use them for your neighbors.

And when your little death comes, and you, too are physically over and done with and of no more earthly good, save as worm fodder, then lie still, because Jesus has a word he’s going to speak to you. He will come to you with sweet somethings for your ears, saying, “Get up. Enjoy the new eternal life I’m giving you starting right now.” You’ll no doubt open your eyes and blink. But you shouldn’t be surprised. Paul has been telling you about it for two thousand years. And he’s announcing it to you again today. Jesus is the only credential you need and the best portable defibrillator around. There’s a new heartbeat, a new life, and a new calling as one of Christ’s own that have been place in you.

Next week get ready because we’re going to come face-to-face with a legal equation that declares your fight to maintain your current death in sin to be over. Of course, it’ll be more of the same, but Paul’s going to take us ever deeper into it. Amen.