True Gospel, False Gospel

This sermon from May 28-29, 2016, begins a series on Galatians preached at St. James Lutheran Church, Johnston, Iowa, while their pastor is on sabbatical doing a spiritual pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Campostela in northern Spain. It is based on both the Galatians passage and the story of the healing of the centurion's servant in Luke 7.

In our second reading today, we begin a series of six weeks when we get to hear Paul’s letter to the believers in Galatia. As we move through it in the next weeks, there’s one thing you should listen for. In the letter, Paul makes a distinction between Christ and not-Christ, that is, between Jesus – the one who has the power and authority to save you – and everything else in all of creation (even the best of it), none of which has an ounce of power to right what’s wrong between us and God.

In today’s section of the letter, Paul is spitting nails because the Galatians have been manipulated by Jewish Christians from Jerusalem. Those Christians had grown up as Jews, and their entire lives they’d followed all the religious laws. Now, when Paul had been granted permission to go out into the pagan world and bring people the gospel there, these Jewish Christians waited until Paul continued to other places on his missionary journey, and they had come to Galatia to check on things.

What they found there shocked them: The new believers there weren’t following Jewish religious laws from places in the Old Testament like Leviticus. That means the Galatians weren’t worried about not eating pork or shrimp, not wearing two different fabrics, and not getting tattoos. The big problem, though, was there were foreskins aplenty among the Galatians, and the Jewish Christians knew that circumcision was the thing you needed above all others to identify yourself as one of God’s chosen people.  Paul’s opponents from Jerusalem have told the Galatian men that, in order to become true, full Christians, they had to follow Jewish laws just like Jesus did. And that meant they needed to lift their tunics and submit to circumcision.

For Paul, who trusted that Jesus had done everything needed for his own salvation as a Jew and for the salvation of non-Jews like the believer in Galatia, that signaled a blurring of the lines between what saves you and what doesn’t. For Paul, demanding that someone do something in order to be identified as Christ’s own, meant you had displaced Christ as savior and grabbed onto something else. Even the very best things, including circumcision for a good Jewish boy like Paul, become false gods if you look to them to save you. That’s why in the letter today Paul says the Galatians have been bewitched and glommed onto a false gospel. For Paul, as we’ll see a couple Sundays from now, the only thing that matters in your salvation is that you trust Christ to accomplish it. The actual language he uses is that we’re “justified by faith.”

God’s word keeps the distinction between Christ and Not-Christ clear. There in the word God promises you that Jesus, and Jesus alone, has the power to deliver you from sin, death, and the devil, and that he does it without any effort, strength, or understanding on your part. Old Nick, the devil himself, seeks to have you abandon that promise in Christ and look elsewhere. He prefers that you disregard God’s word and keep it sequestered on a bookshelf or, better yet, away from your house.

If you’d be so bold as to open up God’s word to find Christ’s promise, then the devil will get you to put yourself and your religious activity and devotion forward as the be-all and end-all of your salvation. Look how great and pious you are! And then he’ll twist you into worrying that now you’re in trouble because you’re selfishly thinking about yourself and haven’t come to God’s word with the proper attitude. And before you know it, your eyes are scanning paragraphs without ever really finding Christ, because once again you’ve concentrated on something other than what the Lord has done for you. Just about the time you think you’ve begun trusting Christ, you realize instead that you’ve been trusting only your own ability to trust and need to start all over again.

If you even get that far, then the Tempter will bring in his next trick to get you to trust something that is not-Christ. This bit of skulduggery involves turning the promises of God’s word into shady little demands and petty legalism. He aims to take your eye away from the promises of Jesus’ death and resurrection and, like the Jewish Christians plaguing the folks in Galatia, he has you latch on to Moses and the Commandments as your savior and the way to life eternal. The devil comes under the guise of piety and cloaks this temptation to faithlessness in seemingly good-sounding propositions. He would have you concentrate on your advancing your religious progress, on the quality of your commitment, on the level of your giving, on the number of people in the pews next to you, on the number of commandments any of us has kept or broken. The Evil One may even get you to engage in spiritual exercise and pious activities like opening your Bible for daily devotions. But if he does, watch out, because he wants to make even those things and your very faith as well into the objects of your trust instead of Jesus Christ, God’s Son who died for you on the cross.

It’s a dilemma for all us sinful humans. How can we possibly escape our cycle of trusting ourselves rather than Jesus? How can we turn away from our own power, desire, and will? How can we keep from the real danger of succumbing to a false gospel, especially one that presents us with so many seemingly good and God-pleasing things to do? How might we, instead, as Paul bids the Galatians, begin to trust our Lord and his gracious promise.

In our Gospel reading, Luke provides a picture of faithful trust as he gives us the story of the healing of the centurion’s slave. Instead of trusting something other than Jesus, the centurion clings to the one true gospel in his demand to Jesus to just do something, anything, to help his servant back home. It all begins fairly well on the centurion’s part. He’s got a highly-valued slave who’s lying on the welcome mat of death’s door. And the centurion does exactly what he ought to do: He hears about Jesus and goes to put it all in the Lord’s hands. Now that’s good and faithful start. Scripture tells us to seek after the Lord. Luther says we ought to approach God with complete confidence, just as children speak to a loving father. So here the centurion confidently sends a couple of Jesus’ own Jewish elders out to talk to him.

So far so good. But watch how that old sinful self immediately gets in the way and trips any truly faithful gesture by the centurion. What’s the message that the centurion sends to Jesus? The elders start talking about worthiness, just like the Jewish Christian would do years later with the Galatians. They come up with a list of all the centurion’s good deeds for God and country. Although he’s a soldier in an occupying army, he loves the people under his command. And although he’s another pagan Roman, he’s even seen to the religious life of the community by building a synagogue in Capernaum. Jesus must have had a good chuckle to himself as they rattled off this list of the centurion’s good deeds, because Jesus knows he doesn’t give a whit for the centurion’s goodness or righteousness. He’s not out to shape up the world or even show off the centurion as a fine example. For Jesus, the only worthiness that matters is his own, and he’s about to prove it. For the time being he lets the messengers and the centurion keep their illusions, and he heads out of the soldier’s quarters.

Now comes the turning point of the story. Now comes the repentance. Now comes the centurion’s eyes opening up in faith to the true gospel rather than the sham gospel that’s been going down up to this point. But if you want to see the repentance, you have to look closely, because our gospel writer Luke keeps it between the lines. The closer Jesus moves to the centurion the harder it is for the soldier to keep on his mask of worthiness. (Notice, too, that it’s Jesus doing the moving, not the centurion. That’s how Jesus works, you know.) The nearer Jesus gets to the center of the centurion’s life, the more clearly the soldier sees the truth about his own life, the more clearly he sees that scope of Jesus’ power, the more clearly he sees his place within that power and authority.

The centurion can’t bear it anymore. He sends out some of his buddies from the NCO club to talk to Jesus this time. He sends a different kind of message, and in it he begins to make the distinction between what is Christ and what is not-Christ. And he starts to tell the truth. He says, “Jesus, don’t bother coming out to me. That was the wrong message when I sent those elders over to kiss up to you. I have to tell you the truth: I’m not worthy to have you step across my doorstep.” But it’s two steps forward and one step back as the old sinful self in him moves in again to try to give excuses. The centurion says, “Oh, yeah, that’s also why I didn’t come out to you myself.” But finally the presence of Jesus does its work. From the centurion come the most faithful words in the whole story. He says, “Jesus speak the word, and let my servant be healed.”

Let’s stop and think about that. Now, as he’s brought up short in his worthiness quotient, not only has the centurion figured out that none of this has to do with his own worthiness, but he also knows Jesus has something else he wants to do and how the power to get it done. Now there is faith in the centurion’s heart moving him to speak. What faith asks for is for Jesus himself to do what he says he’s come for. Faith trusts that Jesus’ word has power all to itself, without adding the centurion’s worthiness, without some effort on the part of the dying slave, and without the snipping of foreskins or any other commendable religious activity in Galatia.

Without anything else in heaven or on earth, Jesus’ speaking will get done what he seeks to accomplish. And it’s this asking Jesus to speak and waiting attentively to hear something good that Jesus holds up as faith, greater faith even than all the religious, very religious people among God’s chosen people in Israel, including the folks form Jerusalem who’ve cooked up a salvation scheme for the Galatians. Lo and behold, the servant is healed, and Jesus heads off to the village of Nain to raise form the dead a widow’s dead son who has even less chance of doing some good deed for salvation than the centurion and his servant. Next Sunday you’ll see Luke pushing Paul’s same point to its ultimate, amazing end: The best place to be saved is when you’re dead and don’t have a chance to present any good works to God.

But here today, Luke tells of the centurion’s trust in a word from Jesus and the word’s power all unto itself. Paul wants us to escape our cycle of trusting ourselves. How can the Galatians and we begin to trust our Lord and his gracious promises? Luke shows you how it happens as he fleshes out the promises of God’s word in the gospel reading. The end of your sinful self begins with Jesus’ presence moving in through your life. He likes to do that, you know, move in and through your life. He does this with the Holy Spirit who calls us and gathers us in. As the Spirit opens our eyes to see Jesus more and more clearly, we see our own unworthiness. We see how paltry our goodness is and how week our strength to save ourselves is. But we also see Jesus’ own worthiness, his goodness and all-encompassing grace, his mighty strength to bear what you can’t and save what the world regards as hopeless.

We hear that powerful promise that for your sake Jesus died, that you might be spare the punishment God gives to unworthy sinners. As Jesus comes to you in the water and the word in baptism, in the bread, wine, and proclamation of the Lord’s Supper, in the preaching of the good news, and in his story in scripture, he seeks to make that promise work inside you. Jesus is working to separate himself from all other competitors in the salvation game. He’s opening your eyes to the distinction between what is Christ and what is Not-Christ. He’s working to put these words on your lips: “Speak the word, Lord, and let me be healed.” For to trust in the word is to seek after the true speaking of the word, rather than to look to the NutraSweet imitation of a false gospel of morality and ethics, spiritual exercises and pious activity.

To trust in Christ is to go face-to-face with Jesus. It means looking him in the eye and saying, “Come on, Jesus. I’ve got nothing left to lose. Give me what you have. Nothing else can do the trick. I want you. Bring it on, Lord.” Next October we’ll begin a year-long celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation that began with Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. In one treatise that Luther wrote, he talked about the special thing that God allows the baptized to do. He said that not only does your baptism confer on you deliverance from sin, death, and the devil, it also gives you permission to make demands on God. If God has promised you abundant life in Christ and you’re seeing the fruit of that promise, you get to go mano-a-mano with God and demand the abundant life.

That’s an approach that sees Paul’s distinction between a true and false gospel clearly. It knows who it is that bestows life, goodness, grace, and peace. It knows those things don’t come from things you do. They don’t come from whipping yourself into a religious frenzy. They don’t arrive with a stack of good deeds that you can present before the judgment seat of God. What God wants for you comes only from the one who healed the centurion’s slave. Telling Jesus to bring it on is the ultimate act of faith. Go ahead. Try that kind of boldness on for size and then tell the religious law keepers to take their false gospel put it somewhere where the Son don’t shine (that’s Son with a capital S and an o in the middle). Repeat after me: “Just bring it, Jesus. You’ve got it. You want to give it to me. I want it. I need it. Bring it Lord. Bring your promised life. Bring your promised forgiveness. Bring your promised salvation. Raise me from the dead, and number me as your own.” Amen.