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| John Oliver's Last Week Tonight |
This continues a sermon series on Paul's letter to the Galatians preached at St. James Lutheran Church in Johnston, Iowa, on June 11-12, 2016. It's based on Galatians 2:15-21 and Luke 7:36-8:3.
Grace to you and peace my friends, from God our Father and
our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’m thankful for the chance to preach all these weeks in a
row on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. As I’ve worked through Paul’s argument
with my Grand View students in my Christian Faith and Life course at least two
or three times a school year, it’s become my favorite book of the Bible. It’s
all because Paul makes an argument that tears away any pretense I have of
confecting my own future or of putting together my own set of proofs for why
God should look at me and be what the psalmist says, “Slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love.”
That’s because, as we’ve seen the past two weeks, Paul
established that it’s Christ and Christ alone who saves me. Christ does it
without my own merit, effort, or understanding. What he endured on the cross
was absolutely for me, and I’m now the beneficiary who’s destined to receive
the inheritance of new and eternal life with him. Two weeks ago, we heard Paul
talk about the “false gospel” of trying to add something to what Christ
accomplished for me. Even if it’s something as good as circumcision was for a
Jew like Paul or personal devotions and weekly worship are for Christians
today, if it’s Not-Christ we’re looking to for our life, our future, our hope,
then you’ve lost it all. Christ is enough, Paul says.
And when Paul’s opponents who came to Galatia from Jerusalem demanded his credentials, last week we heard Paul counter that, when Christ is all in all for us, we don’t need no stinkin’ credentials. Paul’s response to the demand for proof of his authority is that he has none. Paul understood himself as being dead in sin, and all he has to present is Jesus himself. For Paul, doing nothing and having nothing means that Christ’s glory can break forth.
C
Now in today’s reading from Galatians, Paul gets to the heart of the matter. He uses a phrase that has marked Lutherans since the 16th century. “We are justified by faith.” Paul's Jewish Christian opponents from Jerusalem told the Galatians that they needed to follow Jewish religious laws. Jesus and the disciples were Jews, and if you’re going to belong to Jesus you need to become one as well. Task number one for the Galatians, then, was for the uncircumcised pagan men among the Galatian believers to submit to the knife.
Paul is brilliant in his response. If his opponents are going to trot out some supposed religious requirement from Jewish law that Jesus supposedly wants you to fulfill, then Paul will use his opponents’ own scriptures and history to show that they’ve got it all wrong. That’s why he begins this section of the letter by saying, “We ourselves are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners…” He’s saying that he and his fellow missionaries to the Gentiles are Jews. They’re no fools. They know exactly what’s required and what isn’t. So he puts a different spin on his opponents’ case. They want adherence to the law. They want the Galatians to act rightly to get what Jesus has to offer. Paul calls that “works of the law.” They’re functioning according to an if/then view of the world: If you do this, then you’ll get the reward. If you don’t do it, then you’ll receive the punishment, if only having the good thing you want withheld.
In this case, what we want is Christ’s benefits – his life, forgiveness, and deliverance from sin, death, and the devil. Paul uses the legal term “justification” as short hand for all those good things. And he says you don’t get ‘em by being good enough, nice enough, strong enough, financially sound enough, religious enough, buff enough, pure enough, or anything else enough. To ask you to do anything for your justification and salvation would be to do the same thing Paul’s opponents did to him. It would require you to come to the throne of God and present a credential, in this case a to-do list for so-called “good Christians” with all the required boxes checked off.
The problem with doing good works to get what Christ has to offer is that it shifts the focus from what Jesus did on the cross to what you do in your life. It basically says that our Lord’s crucifixion is not enough. God needs something glorious and wonderful from someone glorious and wonderful like you. It says that the promise Christ gave on the cross to the thief and to you, that you would see him in paradise, is not enough. Some proof is needed that you’ve decided you really want it or that you deserve what he came to give. But Paul says, “No. Don’t even start down that road. It’s Christ or nothing at all. He needs nothing from you and wants you to keep your good works for someone who can use them. But if you want to try to make your case to God, then let me warn you that every word of your argument will turn out to be just another way of declaring that Christ died for no good reason. Why should he have bothered with all that gore and suffering and pain if your actions were what really did the trick?”
Then Paul says an odd thing. He says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul declares he’s as dead as the widow’s son in Nain last week and as unworthy as the centurion the week before that. “When it comes to the proper proof that I deserve what Jesus says I have coming to me, I’ve got nothing. My pockets are empty. My bank account is in arrears. And I’m as good as dead. The only life I can count on belongs to Jesus.” It's an admission of unfaith and a confession of faith at the same time.
Paul knows that his past, his history, his abilities, and his religious good behavior (or lack of it) all add up to one thing: a bottom line that’s in the red. No matter what he does, it’s all going to end up in the emptiness of the grave and Paul left wanting. But Paul also knows that in Christ he has something better than anything he could concoct himself. He preached to the Galatians about it when he was among them. And now he gives that one good thing again. He gives them a Lord whose modus operandi is forgiveness. Where’s he’s headed in the letter is to tell the Galatians that they’re home free. They’ve won the salvation lottery, and whatever debt their sin left them owing to God has been erased.
And when Paul’s opponents who came to Galatia from Jerusalem demanded his credentials, last week we heard Paul counter that, when Christ is all in all for us, we don’t need no stinkin’ credentials. Paul’s response to the demand for proof of his authority is that he has none. Paul understood himself as being dead in sin, and all he has to present is Jesus himself. For Paul, doing nothing and having nothing means that Christ’s glory can break forth.
C
Now in today’s reading from Galatians, Paul gets to the heart of the matter. He uses a phrase that has marked Lutherans since the 16th century. “We are justified by faith.” Paul's Jewish Christian opponents from Jerusalem told the Galatians that they needed to follow Jewish religious laws. Jesus and the disciples were Jews, and if you’re going to belong to Jesus you need to become one as well. Task number one for the Galatians, then, was for the uncircumcised pagan men among the Galatian believers to submit to the knife.
Paul is brilliant in his response. If his opponents are going to trot out some supposed religious requirement from Jewish law that Jesus supposedly wants you to fulfill, then Paul will use his opponents’ own scriptures and history to show that they’ve got it all wrong. That’s why he begins this section of the letter by saying, “We ourselves are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners…” He’s saying that he and his fellow missionaries to the Gentiles are Jews. They’re no fools. They know exactly what’s required and what isn’t. So he puts a different spin on his opponents’ case. They want adherence to the law. They want the Galatians to act rightly to get what Jesus has to offer. Paul calls that “works of the law.” They’re functioning according to an if/then view of the world: If you do this, then you’ll get the reward. If you don’t do it, then you’ll receive the punishment, if only having the good thing you want withheld.
In this case, what we want is Christ’s benefits – his life, forgiveness, and deliverance from sin, death, and the devil. Paul uses the legal term “justification” as short hand for all those good things. And he says you don’t get ‘em by being good enough, nice enough, strong enough, financially sound enough, religious enough, buff enough, pure enough, or anything else enough. To ask you to do anything for your justification and salvation would be to do the same thing Paul’s opponents did to him. It would require you to come to the throne of God and present a credential, in this case a to-do list for so-called “good Christians” with all the required boxes checked off.
The problem with doing good works to get what Christ has to offer is that it shifts the focus from what Jesus did on the cross to what you do in your life. It basically says that our Lord’s crucifixion is not enough. God needs something glorious and wonderful from someone glorious and wonderful like you. It says that the promise Christ gave on the cross to the thief and to you, that you would see him in paradise, is not enough. Some proof is needed that you’ve decided you really want it or that you deserve what he came to give. But Paul says, “No. Don’t even start down that road. It’s Christ or nothing at all. He needs nothing from you and wants you to keep your good works for someone who can use them. But if you want to try to make your case to God, then let me warn you that every word of your argument will turn out to be just another way of declaring that Christ died for no good reason. Why should he have bothered with all that gore and suffering and pain if your actions were what really did the trick?”
Then Paul says an odd thing. He says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul declares he’s as dead as the widow’s son in Nain last week and as unworthy as the centurion the week before that. “When it comes to the proper proof that I deserve what Jesus says I have coming to me, I’ve got nothing. My pockets are empty. My bank account is in arrears. And I’m as good as dead. The only life I can count on belongs to Jesus.” It's an admission of unfaith and a confession of faith at the same time.
Paul knows that his past, his history, his abilities, and his religious good behavior (or lack of it) all add up to one thing: a bottom line that’s in the red. No matter what he does, it’s all going to end up in the emptiness of the grave and Paul left wanting. But Paul also knows that in Christ he has something better than anything he could concoct himself. He preached to the Galatians about it when he was among them. And now he gives that one good thing again. He gives them a Lord whose modus operandi is forgiveness. Where’s he’s headed in the letter is to tell the Galatians that they’re home free. They’ve won the salvation lottery, and whatever debt their sin left them owing to God has been erased.
This
wasn’t just pie-in-the-sky-in-the-sweet-by-and-by for Paul. It was actual life
for him, because that’s how forgiveness works. When your sin and your past have
added up to nothing and marked you as undeserving of anything from any good
god, then Christ’s forgiveness comes to bestow a future on you. When someone
forgives you, they’re basically saying to you that your past actions and undeserving
character will not bind them. The one who forgives tells you that you have a
new future and a new life that is not tied to your history or your present
circumstances. Now the future of your relationship together will be determined
by the forgiver. Your life from this point on is not ginned up by your
abilities or good intentions or ruefulness and regret. It now comes solely from
your forgiver. And if Christ is the one who forgives you, then the life you
have from that point on comes not on your own account, which is bankrupt, but
from Jesus. The life you live, you now live in him.
Our gospel reading today gets us to the same place. The sinful woman who anointed Jesus feet with oil was spurned by the Pharisees Jesus was eating with, because she hadn’t met the mark of proper behavior. She was one of those people who did things we should talk about in church. She wasn't religious enough or pure enough to enter a Simon the Pharisee’s home and sooth Jesus’ tired feet, let alone to be in good standing with God. But Jesus got right into the face of his religious do-gooder host. By telling his parable about the two debtors that are forgiven, he pointed a finger at the Pharisee's lack of charity toward the woman and their self-regard as religious law-keepers. The only reason he could look down his nose at the woman is that he thought he stood above her on the holiness scale. Not only did that allow him to judge her, but it also kept him from looking to Christ as the very present help in trouble he wants to be. She had all the forgiveness and mercy the Lord has to give, because she had no problem fessing up to being a sinner. The Pharisees missed the mercy boat, and Jesus declared their accounts to be as wanting as the worst sinner's bottom line.
If Jesus wants me to be like the sinful woman, then after 36 years, I guess it’s okay to finally come clean. It can’t hurt me anymore, but it is true. I once contributed my fingerprints and mug shot to the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I bought a James Taylor album without money in my checking account my first sophomore year of college. I got an overdraft notice with its accompanying surcharge. A couple months later, while I was working at Bible camp that summer, I got a registered letter from the record store, telling me my debt would be turned over to a collection agency and they would press charges if I didn’t immediately send them a registered check for the amount I owed. My first day off, I got to the bank post haste and sent them my payment.
I assumed everything was copacetic. Months later, though, I came back to my dorm room in Granskou Hall at Augustana College, and my roommate Bruce told me the police had been there to arrest me for an insufficient funds check. He said I needed to go to the police station to turn myself in. There a very kind and patient officer rolled my fingers across an ink pad twice in order to send the FBI their copy and stood me in front of a camera. Snap. Turn. Snap. Bail money was paid. A court date was set a month later. I stood before the judge and plead guilty. I paid the fine and court costs, and now, truly, that was that. But I still have a stupid record that comes of lack of impulse control and not knowing how to manage money. And when Jesus talks about the consequences of debt and the hope of forgiveness, it’s not an abstraction. It’s a real thing. I need what he has to give.
The last week or so I’ve seen a viral video that keeps getting shared on my Facebook timeline. It’s a clip from John Oliver’s satirical news program Last Week Tonight on HBO.(Watch the video here.) In it he totally demolishes the multi-billion-dollar debt-buying industry. He tells the story of a couple whose medical needs created $70,000 in unpayable debt over and above what their insurance would cover. With that kind of debt, the creditor you owe money to can sell it to a debt-buyer for pennies on the dollar (and take a hefty tax deduction at the same time). The debt-buyer assumes the debt and can go to extreme lengths to collect on the debt – even if it’s been forgiven by the original debt-holder, paid off, or past the statute of limitations. The tactics the debt-buyers often use are abominable. My family’s finances when I was growing up were shaky at best, and I have unfond memories of fielding debt-collection phone calls. But that’s nothing compared to the threats and underhanded methods debt-buyers can use. But that’s not all. Because debt-buyers can sell your debt to another debt-buyer for more cents on the dollar. The debt-buyers don’t even have to know anything about what the debt was, what your circumstances are, or anything else. All they get is a spreadsheet with your name and address, Social Security numbers, and amount of debt. And they go to town. Anyone caught in the cycle is in real trouble.
So here’s what John Oliver and his crack production team did: They went online, paid
fifty bucks to the state of Mississippi, and created a debt-buying corporation.
In no time at all they received an offer from another debt-buyer that would let them purchase $15 million
dollars in medical debt from Texas that was past the statutory limit. And they only
had to pay $60,000 for it. That’s a half-cent for every dollar of debt they
bought. By doing it, they had the authority to go after the debtors, even
though it was all zombie debt – debt that had no real life but had come back to
haunt them. The return on investment could be huge if they wanted to collect. Our gospel reading today gets us to the same place. The sinful woman who anointed Jesus feet with oil was spurned by the Pharisees Jesus was eating with, because she hadn’t met the mark of proper behavior. She was one of those people who did things we should talk about in church. She wasn't religious enough or pure enough to enter a Simon the Pharisee’s home and sooth Jesus’ tired feet, let alone to be in good standing with God. But Jesus got right into the face of his religious do-gooder host. By telling his parable about the two debtors that are forgiven, he pointed a finger at the Pharisee's lack of charity toward the woman and their self-regard as religious law-keepers. The only reason he could look down his nose at the woman is that he thought he stood above her on the holiness scale. Not only did that allow him to judge her, but it also kept him from looking to Christ as the very present help in trouble he wants to be. She had all the forgiveness and mercy the Lord has to give, because she had no problem fessing up to being a sinner. The Pharisees missed the mercy boat, and Jesus declared their accounts to be as wanting as the worst sinner's bottom line.
If Jesus wants me to be like the sinful woman, then after 36 years, I guess it’s okay to finally come clean. It can’t hurt me anymore, but it is true. I once contributed my fingerprints and mug shot to the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I bought a James Taylor album without money in my checking account my first sophomore year of college. I got an overdraft notice with its accompanying surcharge. A couple months later, while I was working at Bible camp that summer, I got a registered letter from the record store, telling me my debt would be turned over to a collection agency and they would press charges if I didn’t immediately send them a registered check for the amount I owed. My first day off, I got to the bank post haste and sent them my payment.
I assumed everything was copacetic. Months later, though, I came back to my dorm room in Granskou Hall at Augustana College, and my roommate Bruce told me the police had been there to arrest me for an insufficient funds check. He said I needed to go to the police station to turn myself in. There a very kind and patient officer rolled my fingers across an ink pad twice in order to send the FBI their copy and stood me in front of a camera. Snap. Turn. Snap. Bail money was paid. A court date was set a month later. I stood before the judge and plead guilty. I paid the fine and court costs, and now, truly, that was that. But I still have a stupid record that comes of lack of impulse control and not knowing how to manage money. And when Jesus talks about the consequences of debt and the hope of forgiveness, it’s not an abstraction. It’s a real thing. I need what he has to give.
The last week or so I’ve seen a viral video that keeps getting shared on my Facebook timeline. It’s a clip from John Oliver’s satirical news program Last Week Tonight on HBO.(Watch the video here.) In it he totally demolishes the multi-billion-dollar debt-buying industry. He tells the story of a couple whose medical needs created $70,000 in unpayable debt over and above what their insurance would cover. With that kind of debt, the creditor you owe money to can sell it to a debt-buyer for pennies on the dollar (and take a hefty tax deduction at the same time). The debt-buyer assumes the debt and can go to extreme lengths to collect on the debt – even if it’s been forgiven by the original debt-holder, paid off, or past the statute of limitations. The tactics the debt-buyers often use are abominable. My family’s finances when I was growing up were shaky at best, and I have unfond memories of fielding debt-collection phone calls. But that’s nothing compared to the threats and underhanded methods debt-buyers can use. But that’s not all. Because debt-buyers can sell your debt to another debt-buyer for more cents on the dollar. The debt-buyers don’t even have to know anything about what the debt was, what your circumstances are, or anything else. All they get is a spreadsheet with your name and address, Social Security numbers, and amount of debt. And they go to town. Anyone caught in the cycle is in real trouble.
That’s the position Jesus says both the sinful woman and the Pharisees were in – and that you are in, too. You’re in arrears with nothing you can do to get out from under the burden. But you’re not without hope, because Jesus is a Grand Master Debt-Reliever. He does to you exactly what John Oliver did with the $15 million in medical debt he now owned. With a push of a button, all the debt of the nine thousand Texans who owed it, was transferred to an organization that eliminated the debt. It was all gone.
There's the promise for you and the sinful woman, and even for self-righteous Pharisees. Jesus slides all the beads on his abacus to one side and zeroes out your bottom line with God. That’s what Paul is talking about when he talks justification by faith. Who in the world would ever do such a thing as forgive $15 million in debt, let alone the eternal enormity of debt that your sin has racked up? Jesus would, that’s who. Where before John Oliver’s debtors’ lives were entirely tied up in past circumstances that left them owing, now his writing off the debt gave them a new future. How much more is it true when Jesus does this for you! Wiping your slate clean means a future determined by the one who is so merciful and loving toward you that he would endure the cross for you. The life you live, whether you recognize it or not, comes from Jesus. He’s taken on a debtor such as you and wiped you clean. When Revelation talks about the heavenly saints having washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, that’s what it is. When you’re washed in Jesus’ blood, it’s impossible to see all that red ink.
When the devil, the world, or the worried sinner in you start hounding you about your debt, now you can tell your three nefarious enemies that they're trying to lay zombie debt on you. That's when you treat them like a debt-buyer and say, "Jesus has erased every last thing I owe. My accounts with God were cleared on Gologtha. Go find some other fool who's willing to play into your spiritual Ponzi scheme. As for me, my credit with God is good, and he's told me to rely on his good will to give me everything I need for this life. Jesus promised it, and what he says happens happens." Now my friends, you can spend your good credit with God by serving your neighbors, doling out good works for their benefit, and enjoying all those good gifts.
Coming up next week, Paul will give you and the Galatians good news about the dress clothes God has set aside for you to wear at his eternal celebration of Christ’s victory over death. For now, revel in Jesus debt-elimination scheme and feel how free it is not to owe a single penny or good work to him. Amen.
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