The apostle Peter once said this about the author of today’s Epistle: “Some of the things Paul writes about are hard to understand.”

Boy, is that an understatement!

Then Peter went on to complain about how people who don’t know what they are talking about often twist Paul’s words, and distort their meaning, and apply them in destructive ways. Unfortunately, the church itself has been among the more frequent offenders.

Mark Twain once said, “There is no limit to what a person can fail to understand if his livelihood depends on his not understanding it.” I think there’s something similar going on here: that sometimes we say we find something hard to understand, when what we really mean is that we find it hard to swallow. And when it comes to Paul, the reason that we in the church have often failed to “get” Paul is not that he is inherently “un-get-able,” but because what he is driving at is somewhere we don’t want to go. And so we interpret him in ways that totally miss the point

In today’s text, for example, Paul is trying to trying to get the church folk in Galatia to come to terms with radical grace and to fully grasp the far-reaching freedom that it was offering them in their relationship with God and with each other. He wants them to understand how thoroughly their participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ would transform their lives, if they would only let it. He wanted them to think it through to its logical conclusion – because they were resisting those implications. They were having trouble with the idea that their relationship with God rested entirely on God’s love for them, and that there was nothing they could do to make themselves any more worthy of relationship with God than the next “gentile sinner.” And they’re not the only ones.

Over and over again, church folk have turned this text and others like it into a polemic by Paul against Jewish law. We set up Jewish law as a straw man and knock it off its pedestal. Then we take Paul’s idea of radical grace and enshrine it on that same pedestal, where we can safely worship it as a doctrine, while in our daily lives we continue in the legalistic illusion that by living up to our own, more comfortable set of rules, we are making ourselves at least a little bit more worthy of God than, say, that group of people over there. And all the while avoiding Paul’s logical conclusion that our relationships with God have nothing to do with our worthiness.

What Paul is trying to do is to get to ask the question, “If grace is true, so what?”

Let me try a little experiment. Since like Paul, I am also a Son of Abraham by birth, allow me to “put on Paul” for a moment, and render today’s brief text into plain English. Here it is, the letter of St. Paul to the Galatians, according to Ken.

What’s up with you Galatians? You think being born a Jew puts me on up on you? You think we Jewish followers of Jesus have some secret checklist and that if you learned the secret handshake, you’d finally have a crib sheet for staying on God’s good side?

Oh, please! Don’t you think we haven’t already tried that? Take it from me. Even before we became Christ followers, those of us who grew up in the Jewish faith knew very well that rule-keeping isn’t relevant to relationship with God. We Jews had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! But we’ve always known that no amount of human self-improvement can make a human being worthy of relationship with God. We’ve always known that for relationship with God, humanity must we ultimately must rely on God’s forgiveness. So when Jesus the Messiah convinced us that God’s forgiveness and love was built into his nature, and that all we had to do was trust and receive, we snapped it up in a heartbeat. Certainly some of you must have noticed that people like me are not yet perfect? (Surprise!) Some of you even accuse me of hypocrisy because I am imperfect. (Duh!) Pretending to be perfect – now that would be hypocritical!

Learn from my experience. I tried keeping rules – worked my butt off so I could feel worthy of God. But it didn't work. Deep down inside I still knew I wasn’t worthy. So I quit being a “rule man” so that I allow Christ to make me God's man, so I could identify myself completely with Christ. Just like Jesus set aside what his ego may have wanted, and willingly went to be crucified so that he could be a perfect conduit of God’s love, I have allowed my ego to be crucified along with Christ. And because what my ego wants is no longer central to me, I no longer feel driven to impress God (as though I could). And I certainly no longer feel driven seek your good opinion of me or to have you – or anyone – think of me as righteous.

You see, I know now that there is not enough of what is truly me in me to make me the me God created me to be: not enough love in me to make me truly, completely, and fully alive. Only God contains that love. And Christ gave me that love by giving himself for me. Now that I know that, I can’t go back to my old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing, God-appeasing ways. That would be abandoning everything that is personal and free in my relationship with God. More importantly, it would be a repudiation of God’s grace. I would be saying that rule-keeping and a living relationship with God are the same, and that implies that Christ’s life, death, and resurrection were unnecessary. I just can’t do that. I won’t.

O.K. Done channeling Paul.

I think Paul was really onto something. We really do have this deep-seated drive to have our lives under OUR control, including our relationship with God, maybe even especially that. But here’s the problem. If you’ve spent any time in a close relationship, you have learned the hard way that a relationship based on the need to impress is deadly – to the individuals, and ultimately the relationship itself. We cannot trust any love and acceptance we might get in return because we know that it is in response to someone that we are not. There is no freedom in that. Only anxiety.

Ah, but to stop pretending to God that we are something we are not. To stop trying so hard to be loveable and just accept the love that God has already extended to us without condition… To know that because of that love we belong to God’s family just as we are… To know that God does not ask us to become anything other the truly and completely the persons God made each of us to be… What freedom! What joy! Like the woman in today’s Gospel, if we lay ourselves bare to that forgiveness, we will be so filled with love that we will not be able to stop ourselves from washing Christ’s feet with our own tears of love.

And so I invite us all to join in closing this sermon with the words of today’s collect:

Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.