“Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”
This is the greeting Paul uses to begin his letter to the Galatians,
which we begin to read this morning, and continue reading over the next five weeks.
As we read these opening paragraphs – and, further into the letter, Paul’s words about law and freedom, circumcision and uncircumcision, Jews and gentiles – we might wonder what is going on for Paul and those long-ago followers of Jesus.
I thought it would be good to take a closer look at what this letter is all about,
and what is a stake here for Paul, the Galatians – and for us.
 
The first thing to note is that this is a letter.
Do you remember, back in your school days, learning about writing letters?
A saluation, the body of the letter, a closing, a signature.
And if it’s a formal letter, there are more expectations – the addresses of sender and receiver appear at the top of the letter, along with the date, and the greeting and closing are more formal.
There were similar expectations for letters written in the ancient world,
and Paul follows such forms.
First the sender identifying him or herself – so he starts with “Paul, an apostle . . .”
Then he identifies to whom he is writing – to the churches of Galatia.
The greeting follows – Grace and peace to you . . .
Typically, this is followed by a thanksgiving, and Paul is known for some prolonged and effusive thanksgivings in many of his letters.
To the Philippians: “ I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying  with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you
Or to the Corinthians: “ I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace  of God that has been  given you in Christ Jesus
 
So the first indication that there is something significant going on here is that this letter skips the thanksgiving altogether – and in the place where the Galatians expect to hear words of appreciation, instead they hear:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the  grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel”
Uh oh. That doesn’t sound good.
It is clear that Paul is really upset with the Galatians.
He accuses them of abandoning the gospel he taught them in favor of what someone else is teaching.
But he’s not just mad that they are listening to someone else and he is not getting his way.
He is concerned for them – he truly believes that they are missing a fundamental point of faith, which, for him, makes a huge difference in their lives, as individuals and as a community of faith in Christ.
 
 
Here’s what is happening.
Paul visited Galatia, and preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and many came to believe.
A church formed there, and Paul continued on his travels to spread the word to new places  – but stayed in touch with his spiritual friends in Galatia.
Now he has heard that new teachers have come to Galatia, and they are teaching the fledgling church that, in order to follow Jesus, they need to become Jews.
The men need to be circumcised, they need to keep the dietary laws and all the other Jewish law – in short, they must first make a full conversion to Judaism, before they can follow Christ.
 
And Paul isn’t having it.
Paul is convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ is available to Jews and Gentiles –
in fact, his own mission is to preach to the Gentiles, to invite people who do not  follow the laws and ways of Judaism into the Way of Jesus Christ.
He believes this is the reason Christ appeared to him,
the purpose for which he was called to preach the gospel.
So he introduces himself in this letter by saying “Paul, an apostle – sent neither by human  commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father,  who raised him from the dead.”
And again, at the end of today’s reading, “For I want you to know . . . that the gospel that was  proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source,  nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
You will remember that unlike most of the apostles, such as Peter and John,
Paul never met Jesus in person –
Jesus appeared to him in a vision – knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus –
and sometimes, in his letters, he speaks of meeting the risen Christ “face to face.”
Jesus appeared to Saul, and on that day his life changed, along with his name,
and he gave his life entirely to proclamation of the gospel which had set him free –
free from his former life of fulfilling the law, being the perfect Pharisee,
from violence and fear of this new religion –
free for a new life of faith and purpose.
 
Freedom.
That is exactly what Paul believes is at stake here.
That is why Paul is so angry, and so passionate.
It’s not about circumcision.
It’s not because the Jewish faith is bad, or the law is wrong.
It’s because the new teachers have set an obstacle in front of the people of Galatia –
a hoop they must jump through before they can be followers of Jesus.
And Paul won’t accept that.
Paul lays out the theme of his letter in the opening lines:
Paul, an apostle – sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities,  but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead – and all  the members of God’s family who are with me, to the churches at Galatia: Grace and  peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for  our sins to set us free”
Paul starts his argument right here, and continues it for four chapters.
Christ gave himself so that we might be free.
Our freedom is based only on what God has done in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In a few weeks we will read, from chapter two of the book of Galatians,
these beautiful words of Paul:
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is 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 is telling the Gentile believers that they are full members of God’s household,
 without any other condition or obligation on their part.
Paul is absolutely convinced that Christ is sufficient – 
that nothing else is needed to become a part of the body of Christ.
 
In the first four chapters of Galatians, Paul lays out his arguments for our freedom,
based solely on our acceptance of what Jesus has done for us.
Then, he turns to a different theme -
for what are we set free?
Paul writes, 
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom  as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one  another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love  your neighbor as yourself.
You do not follow the law in order to be saved.
But once you have heard the gospel, once you have received the gift of salvation,
what then?
What comes next, Paul says, is to live like Christ.
To allow Christ to live in you, to care for one another,
 to share God’s love with your neighbors.
 
 
So, here we are –
far from Galatia and centuries removed from Paul and the fledgling church.
What does this letter have to say to us today?
 
I think, everything.
Because we still struggle with setting obstacles to faith for one another, and for ourselves.
We still face limits on who is welcome in Christian community.
Many of us have faced such barriers in other places,
and found our way here to find welcome and community.
Yet we still struggle, as much as we try, to bring down all the human barriers we place  between our neighbors and their full participation with us in this place.
We need to pay attention to the ways we send subtle messages about who is and is not welcome here, and continue to pull down all obstacles to people who are not yet here with us.
 
There are also the internal barriers we face.
Am I good enough?
I know Jesus loves all these people – but surely he can’t really accept me, like this,
with my mental illness, addiction, debts, lies, messed up family . . .
All that talk of freedom and grace – it’s beautiful, but it can’t mean me.
 
And that’s where Galatians comes in – with those beautiful words,
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
There is no longer gay or straight or trans, no longer rich or poor, no longer democrat or republican – there is no longer insider and outsider,
because all are welcomed into God’s family.
 
Christ gave his life that we might be free.
We don’t have to conform to someone else’s idea of what a Christian looks like.
We don’t have to be good enough.
What we do have to do is accept the grace and freedom God offers us -  
to accept love, and forgiveness, and the chance for new beginnings.
And then we take that love and give it to the world.
That is freedom.
Freedom to love, to give, to share who we are and what we have,
knowing we will never be perfect,
knowing we will never get it just right,
but doing it anyway, because we are set free in Christ.
And it is enough.
 
That is the gospel on which Paul, literally, stakes his life.
That is the good news he offers to change our lives, 2000 years later.
You are saved.
You are free – freed by love, freed for love.
Go out into the world to live your freedom in love for one another.
 
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters.
Amen.
 ​

“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.”


When I first joined the small group that sings Morning Prayer each day here in the church, I noticed that at the end of the psalms we did not add the traditional “Gloria Patri”: Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. When I asked out of curiosity why that was the case, I was told: “Because when the psalms were written, the Trinity hadn’t been invented yet.”
Now that’s a quintessentially St. Michael’s sort of answer: respectful, but at the same time also a bit skeptical, and therefore inviting conversation. (That’s one of the great things about this parish: we give one another no end of things to talk about!)
It is true, of course, that nowhere do the Hebrew scriptures contain any direct reference to the Trinity; and even in the New Testament, the references tend to be somewhat oblique. The idea that God is both one and three, and three in one, is in fact largely the product of the first three or four centuries of Christian theology, as the early church tried to digest the full meaning of who Jesus was and what he did. So yes, in one sense it’s true that at the time of the psalms’ composition, “the Trinity hadn’t been invented yet.” 
Yet today’s observance of a Sunday dedicated to celebrating the Holy Trinity begs for some further reflection upon it, however time-bound and remote the idea may at first seem to us.
Still, that idea of the Trinity having been “invented” kind of hangs in the air, doesn’t it, casting a bit of a shadow on the whole idea? Is it really something that is primarily the product of the dominant neo-Platonism of the early church—and an idea that is therefore relatively unimportant to us now?
Personally, I think not. However historically complex its genesis, the Trinity serves an important role in a Christian understanding not just of God, but of creation as well.
So to try to get our minds around that idea, let me propose the following proposition as a rule for theological reflection that might help us get started: any idea of God that is worth its salt should over time be able to yield fresh insights, beyond the limitations of the era and cultural context in which it was first expressed. In short, there should be the possibility of “fresh conclusions from orthodox sources.”1 So, the question for us is whether the Trinity holds up to that test?
When the church was first formulating a fleshed-out idea of the Trinity, the greatest challenge was to find a language for articulating how it could be that the transcendent being of the creator of all things, could also be present in the immanent person of a first-century Jew named Jesus. Hence, the theology of the period is a dizzying array of reflections on the characteristics of being, and personhood, and the definition of nature. And many of the resulting terms--ousios, and homoousios, and perichoresis, and on and one—can seem very remote from our concerns today.
But the underlying intent of describing God as a trinity of persons was nevertheless to understand the essential relationality of God as it is grounded in love—and that is something that continues to have immediate meaning for us. When we understand God as a community of persons that is bound together by the giving and sharing of love, then we also understand ourselves as the product of the overflowing of that love into the creative activity of God, like a pot boiling over because it can just no longer contain the energy inside it. (And come to think of it, isn’t it interesting that our own procreative activity is described as “making love,” a perhaps unrecognized reference to God’s own unrestrained love which likewise pours itself out in the creation of children to love?)
We are, in other words, the product of love, and furthermore, we were created to live in response to that love—just as a child naturally responds in love to his or her parents. This centrality of love in grasping God’s relationship to us is especially emphasized in the tradition of John’s gospel and epistles. As he writes: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God” (I John 4:7).
So because the Christian idea of God is of a communal trinity of persons bound together by love, our idea of God is not of a distant, abstract being who is unrelated and uninvolved in human affairs. Rather, our god is a god whose love makes God to be deeply embedded in the very marrow of our lives. God is not passive, but passionate; God is not unknowable, but defined by relationship; God is not abstract being, but the active power of a creative, generative love. And so likewise, we also understand the fundamental nature of the reality that was created by this God, to be one of relationship. As Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, “None of us lives for oneself; and no one dies for oneself; … whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14:7-8).
The Trinity’s model of relationship, then, becomes the light in which we see and understand everything else. You might think of it this way: like the brilliant sun that floods the New Mexico landscape around us with an inexpressibly beautiful light, the Trinity of relationship that is God is the source of the illumination by which we see and comprehend the world, and it is the light by which we build the relationships we instinctively seek with God and with one another. Without it, all would be dark and obscure, but in its light, all is given meaning and purpose.
And that perspective is one that has immediate relevance for us, because as any number of recent observers have pointed out, we as a society are experiencing a breakdown of patterns of relationship. (See for instance David Brooks’ column in Friday’s New York Times on “The Fragmented Society.”) The question of how we are to restore relationship with one another, therefore, and overcome the increasing individuation and atomization of our society, is indeed of urgent importance. And from a Christian point of view, it is essentially a Trinitarian issue. 
Because to affirm the Holy Trinity, is to affirm that our fundamental identity as human beings is one of relationship: relationship with God, relationship with one another, relationship with the created world, relationship with ourselves. It is the very antithesis of the polarization, isolation, nationalism, and nativism that we face as a nation.
It was St. Augustine who said that the world is filled with traces—or vestiges—of the Trinity. “The knowledge of God,” he wrote, “is to be sought by love, which God is said to be in the Scriptures; and in this love is also pointed out the existence of some trace of a trinity.”2 Those traces are in every relationship that we have, in every experience of love that we enjoy, in every longing for companionship that we express, in every spiritual intuition that we discern. They are the building blocks of the relationality by which both church and society live. And so in any relationship in which we engage, we are intuitively responding to and bearing witness to the Trinitarian nature of God and reality—implying (if not always actually saying),

“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.”

© Joseph Britton, 2016

1 A phrase that has been applied to the theological method of former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

2 Augustine, De Trinitate, Book VIII, Preface