Jesus now asks Abba, Father, that this hour may pass and this cup may be removed.

Jesus had made it clear before that no one knows the day or the hour, but here Jesus very clearly sees “the hour” coming. That “hour” is strange among our pedestrian hours. It is the hour of judgment that many prophets had foretold. It was the hour that had happened many Passovers before where God showed Pharaoh who was the real God and who was the poser. It is “the hour” seen vividly in the book of Revelation where God brings down his full furry and judgment on this world for what it has done to God’s glorious creation and what we have done to each other. Jesus was facing “the hour” and didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to have all of that wrath, power and vengeance directed at him, personally. It’s one thing to be one guy among millions in the hail storm, but Jesus would be in the cross hairs.

Jesus also had to face “the cup”. Jesus would get the full dosage, not some watered down hand-slap. He would take it voluntarily and it would crush him.

Two men are placed in a garden. Two men are given a choice. One man is told to obey and he will live. He chose to rebel so we all die. The other is told to obey and the reward for his obedience is the hour and the cup. He chose to obey so we all live. He, however, faces the hour we should have faced, and drinks the cup meant for us.

Feb 18: The Institution of the Lord’s Supper: to stream, to download

Feb 25: “All of you will fall away”: to stream, to download

Sermon Audio:

Feb 18: Galatians 6:14: Only Boasting in the Cross: to stream, to download

Feb 25: How the Cross Defeats Evil: to stream, to download

Please contact Paul if any of these links don’t work.

Some suggest that God can simply overlook it all and that a truly loving God would do so. If you think it through though, would simply overlooking it all really express any kind of love? Imagine your child coming to you and saying, “I’ve decided to be a methamphetamine addict. I’ll probably start by stealing from you and my siblings, maybe try some robbery, burglary and if I’m really desperate some prostitution. My goal is to be high most of the time. I just love getting high.” The God who overlooks all would be the unimaginable parent that says “Oh, that’s nice dear. Is there anything you need from me to get started?”

God can’t seriously love us AND simply dismiss all that we’ve done to him, to one another and to this planet. Because God loves us he can’t leave us in this mess. Because God loves us he won’t simply destroy us either. Because God loves us, and so in fact honors us with responsibility and freedom, and because we are so hopelessly lost and misguided like a meth addict, God will need to go to extraordinary lengths and unbelievable pains to rescue us from ourselves and his judgment.

The cross stands at the center of it all. God reveals himself by dually suffering the abandonment of his beloved out of love for those who rejected his love in the first place.

Miroslav Volf, a Croat who knew the war in Sarajevo first hand noted how often soldiers on both sides asserted “we have no choice, it’s them or us.”

We hear that all the time. It’s us and our way of life or the Islamic terrorists. Mujahadim press their population: “The great Satan of America controls our economies, controls our governments, has bombs and movies to threaten our bodies and seduce our minds. It’s them or us!” Palestinians protest Israeli land grabs and missile assassinations. Israelis declare they have no safety from suicide bombers. Both sides cry “we have no choice. It’s them or us.” Everyone knows, the strong inherit the land!

Every declaration of “we have no choice” quietly denies the obvious but unthinkable option: the willing embrace of death and the refusal of vengeance. Evil’s leverage comes from that denial. If the choice is to embrace evil or accept slavery and death we all partake a shot of evil with a chaser of self-justification.

Jesus, however, was no mere victim. He had options. He alone had every right to destroy his adversary (us) and he had the means to do so. He was not forced to confront his adversary, he could have avoided the encounter completely by refusing incarnation. Neither option would have been evil. What he did, however, was to freely embrace the option that we continually declare to be unthinkable. In that choice, evil’s bluff was called. Its worst was embraced, endured and exhausted. Evil from that day forward may continue to bluff those who believe it, but the followers of the Crucified know evil’s little secret, it has lost the game.

The New Testament again and again asserts our union with Christ through his cross. The world has been crucified to us, and we to the world (Gal 6:14). When we embrace our enemies, when we forgive those who have hurt us deeply, when we refuse to hate and chose to love, evil is seen beaten in the new light of the cross. Yes, the body may be killed but the new has already begun and a new body in a new world is just around the corner.

For most of us this is not played out in dramatic, life and death ways, but it is with us every day in a hundred small interactions. Will we assert our “right” to even the score, to correct and control our adversary, to withhold love, to withdraw attention, to deny charity? The cross enters into every interaction and says “I will suffer for you. I will endure for you. I will return the evil you’ve done to me with good. I will abide. I will love you even as you reject me. I will bear the cross and give you the good you don’t deserve.” Each time a follower of Jesus makes this choice evil loses just that much more ground even if only God and that great cloud of witnesses sees.

For many Christians more familiar with the New Testament than the Old, Daniel 7 may immediately remind you of the book of Revelation. Our of the sea, that place of chaos out of which God brought order and created the world (Genesis 1:2, remember there is no “sea” in the book of Revelation) arises 4 terrible beasts. These beasts everyone would know represented empires of the earth that rule the earth with great cruelty and power. We also see the Ancient of Days setting up his court and it is clear that there is going to be a showdown. After the slaying of the beast with the boastful horn another character appears “one like a son of man”. “He was given authority, glory and sovereign power, all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” Note that he is in the presence of the Ancient of Days AND he is worshiped! This must have made a monotheistic Daniel rather puzzled. Who is this Son of Man?!

In Jesus’ day everyone would understand the code talk when Jesus would refer to himself as the Son of Man. Everyone would understand who Rome was in this pageant. Jesus’ followers expected that this Son of Man would triumph over the beast and set up his kingdom. How often don’t they ask about this in the gospels? The number one subject of Jesus’ preaching was “the kingdom.” Everyone also knew how Rome dealt with usurpers to the throne of Caesar who held the title “King of kinds and lord of lords”. Petty thieves weren’t crucified. Crucifixion was for people Rome intended to make an example of. The sign “The King of the Jews” in Latin, Greek and Aramaic insured that everyone got the ironic point. Any fool would understand that the Son of Man being crucified meant that the beast had won and that the Ancient of Days had abandoned the earth. The way of the beast is that you kill the king and become king on his throne. When they saw Jesus crucified it was not just the loss of a friend, a good man, it was the loss of all hope, the abandonment of God himself for their plight as food of the beast. At this Passover, Pharaoh wins.

The way of the cross is the way of victory but not in the way anyone living in the kingdom of the beasts imagine. Son of Man conquers by laying down his life. The world still doesn’t believe it and most of the time neither do we.

March 4: The cross satisfies the wrath of God

March 11: The cross frees us from slavery to Satan and evil

March 18: The cross frees us from bondage within ourselves

March 25: The cross opens the door to a new creation

If you had no acquaintance with Christianity but yet were familiar with the Roman practice of crucifixion, you would rightly consider Paul’s statement here to be either unintelligible or ludicrous. To read more of what Paul would say about the cross might only further your confusion. Lest you think Paul singularly strange in this, Jesus’ own disciples couldn’t make much sense of the whole matter either yet the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus changed the world.

From now until Easter we will be contemplating the cross of Jesus Christ. We will want to understand what it meant in its context, and what it means for all of us today. As Paul’s quote from Galatians makes clear the cross changed his identity, his relationship with everything else in the world. I’ll be writing midweek pieces distributed via e-mail as well as preaching on the following subjects:

Feb 25: Jesus defeats evil by the cross

March 4: The cross satisfies the wrath of God

March 11: The cross frees us from slavery to Satan and evil

March 18: The cross frees us from bondage within ourselves

March 25: The cross opens the door to a new creation

Last week we started into the book of Galatians. We talked about how angry Paul was with some of these churches that he himself had planted. This week in chapter 3 he’s back at them again. Verse one starts out "you foolish Galatians!" Pretty strong language for a pastor don’t you think? Now many of you have been in church a while and you kind of know your way around. What kinds of things get people in trouble in churches? In what kind of occasions do you see pastors getting all worked up?

Those of you who have been around church long enough know that there is a list someplace of sins that will get you into trouble while other sins won’t. Certainly there must be some sexual sin that Paul is angry about amongst the Galatians. Perhaps they are dabbling in other religions found in their cities or maybe they are making sacrifices to idols or something. Surely it must be something like this to get Paul so angry with them to draw this kind of language from them.

As we saw last week, however, it isn’t any of these things, in fact what they are doing is obeying a command directly out of the Bible. In the Old Testament God was quite clear with Abraham that every male who would be included in his covenant with him must be circumcised. If a male wasn’t circumcised he would be cut off from inclusion into God’s promises for his people. This was very serious business and there is not one verse in the Old Testament that would indicate that this command would be set aside in the future. In fact there is a strange passage in the Old Testament where Moses is traveling back to Egypt with his family and he had not circumcised his sons. The angel of the LORD was going to kill Moses, the man God himself called to deliver his people from slavery in Egypt but Moses’ wife did some quick thinking (and knife work) and circumcised the boys right then sparing Moses’ life. Can you imagine their reflections on that family vacation. "Remember that one night on the way back to Egypt when Mom got out the flint knife and circumcised us right there in the tent in the middle of the night?"

Most of us pastors would love the kind of problem Paul is having with the Galatian churches. These Galatian Christians are really "consecrated". These are the kinds of Christians every church dreams about. They are taking all of this very seriously. They show up for all the festivals, they are trying very hard to follow all the rules even to the point that these men are willing to undergo a painful surgery in a very sensitive part of their anatomy without anesthesia. Wow. If people show up today in church regularly, give a bit of money and don’t cause any trouble most pastors would be very happy with them. Why is Paul so upset?

To understand why Paul is so upset, let’s take a bit of what might seem to be a detour now and talk in more general terms about problems.

All of us have problems. We have every day fears and anxieties. Problems with marriages, problems with our health, problems with money, problems with neighbors, problems with just about anything around us. We also live in fear of big things. There is global warming, terrorism, pandemic, the economy, war, etc. All of us bear the weight of these problems to one degree or another and we’re all hungry for solutions to these problems.

For the most part there are four historical approaches to addressing the problems of humanity. We might call these worldviews.

One worldview that addresses problems is pantheism. Pantheism is increasingly popular all around us. It has historically been associated with Hindu and Buddhist religions but is getting popularized by many New Age teaches today. One guy you might have seen on PBS out here is an author named Wayne Dyer. He’s often doing the PBS fund raising spots. He will tell you right off the bat that he isn’t teaching a religion. He says that you can be a Christian or an atheist or a Buddhist or simply a spiritual person and benefit from what he is saying. One of the talks I think he’s very clear in is called "There’s A Spiritual Solution to Every Problem". He’s got a book by the same name. His answer to every problem is for you to get in touch with your "source". Now he would say that your source, my source, our source is the divine. We are all divine and united by the divine. We see things as problems when we can’t see that in fact all things are part of the divine. Therefore the answer to our suffering is to see beyond the particularities of our assumed experience of individuality and suffering. Suffer according to Dyer is a by-product of our mistaken delusion of this experiential world. Many who seek to embrace this worldview and those similar to it often pursue rigorous disciplines of self-denial in order to see above their experience and therefore be freed of this world’s suffering.

A second worldview I’ll call secularism, championed by 19^th century thinkers such as Freud and Nietzsche. In a secular worldview all there is is chaos and physics and all that can be known and should be asserted communally is that which can be observed and accounted for. Ideas concerning things beyond this material world are not verifiable and therefore can be accounted for by other means. Meaning comes from the human mind and is imposed and written into our world by ourselves. We are small animals living on one small planet in a very large universe with no promise of anything other than what we can secure for ourselves. Problems come and we are alone in dealing with them. If we are unable to generate sufficient purpose, meaning or pleasure from our existence a reasonable course of action might be suicide to end our problems and our suffering.

A third worldview I will call "religion". Religion asserts a divine or supernatural reality that is "over" our existence and to one degree or another in control or strongly involved in it. This reality is governed by powerful beings that account for our existence and have expectations for our behavior. If God or the gods or whatever spiritual forces are in control and involved in our world are pleased with us then they can bless us and may even in the future bring is to a blessed place after our death. If these powers are, however, unhappy with us for whatever reason they can bring us pain and misery in this world and are liable to punish us after we pass from this world. These spiritual beings pose for us, in this worldview, both an enormous opportunity for pleasure and advancement as well as an incredible liability for pain and judgment. The prudent person will at least take these powers into account in the course of their life or even devote the majority of their interest and involvement to them in order to gain rewards and blessings while also avoiding pain and punishment. At the heart of the relationship is a transaction. Give God or the gods what they want and they may be fair and bless you back. Slight or offend these spiritual masters and they may get you. Acceptance by the divine is achieved through moral living and/or religious sacrifice and service. Different religions have slightly different rules and different systems, but basically the game is the same and played by all.

The fourth worldview I will call "Gospel". In "Gospel" there is one God and his blessing and acceptance is received rather than achieved. More on that later.

Of the four worldviews I would assert that Religion is the majority case.

Pantheism is growing in popularity and many pursuants of this worldview are remarkable examples of human happiness and moral achievement. At the same time I find that truly convincing oneself that our present experience of this material world is illusory is difficult and rare. The most reasonable expression of embracing this worldview would have to be poverty. Why hold the deed to property and bother with insurance? Why duck for the short door?

Secularism gets very dark very fast. We have an almost inescapable desire to find meaning and purpose in the universe beyond what we ourselves establish. We hunger acceptance and rescue from the divine. We seek a life beyond the grave. For me, secularism for all of it’s challenges tends to leave me cold and alone. It also makes me selfish and grabby. If tomorrow isn’t promised to me then I’d like mine now, like I want it.

Religion to me seems empirically to be the default position of the human heart. "No atheists in foxholes" is an exaggeration, but true hard-line consistent secularists aren’t easy to find. People betray their religious desires all the time with many common phrases like "everything happens for a reason." Popular culture can’t divorce itself from stories of life after death and meaning and purpose that humanity recognizes rather than manufactures. We are incurably religious.

Now back to Paul’s complaint. Why was he so angry with the Galatians? Because they were sliding back into religion.

Galatians 3:1-5 (NRSV) You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?

We should first note that Paul claims they have received obvious and exceptional blessings from the Gospel. They have received the Spirit. They have had miracles worked in their community. According to Paul they have been richly blessed by the Gospel and he can’t for the life of him figure out why they would want to switch back to "religion".

Before we join Paul in blaming them, maybe we should stop and ponder this point a bit. If Gospel is so much better than religion, why would the Galatians be tempted to slide back. Over the last few weeks I’ve been making the point that morality is good but Gospel is better. If that is so, why would one turn on Gospel for morality once more?

Have you ever had a breakthrough religious experience? Have you ever, while feeling the grip of your problems and your anxieties had a moment when God broke through, parted the clouds, and everything seemed to be OK and make sense? Maybe it was a sermon that suddenly caused your troubles to vanish or not seem so bad. Maybe it was a song or a worship experience that seemed to bring you above it all. Maybe it was just something someone said and everything for a while seemed set right once more. Maybe in fact it was a miraculous work of God’s power in your life, something so outrageous, so unpredictable, so inexplicable that it could only have been God that did it. Maybe it was a moment in a church or crusade when you responded to an altar call and your life seemed to change. Once you have one of those experiences and the glory, glow and power seem to fade away leaving you once again in the midst of your troubles, what do you want more than anything? You want it back, that moment, that power, the vision, that insight, that relief.

Now we begin to see the addictive power of religion. They say that the first hit you take from crack is the most amazing thing and a crack addict spends the rest of their addiction or their life seeking to duplicate that first experience. We are addicts for religion. Once we get a taste of that relief, that release, that vision, that understanding, we’ll do anything to acquire it once more. Maybe we’ll attend church, or find another church. Maybe we’ll try that same preacher again and when he fails to deliver look for a new one. Maybe after the effect of that song wears off, and it always does, we’ll buy CDs or hunt churches for that next song or worship leader who can once again restore that high that we tasted. We want it, we need it, we’ll do anything to have it again.

Perhaps this is what drove the Galatians. Sure, at first, when Paul was around the Gospel "worked" for them, did it’s job, but now it’s seeming old, regular, expected, maybe even mundane. Believers from Jerusalem, the place where Jesus was crucified and rose, the ones who go to the church of Jesus’ brother. They are telling us ways to recapture that first hit, that first experience, that first release. If we can just have the right prohibitions (we naturally assume God really likes prohibitions), the right festivals, the right sacrifice, the right service, THEN God will show up again and release us from our troubles.

There is of course a fallacy in this but we perpetually live in denial of it. If that moment was really a "God moment", then is it something we can really manufacture? The whole business of religion, however, tells us it is. New sacrifices, not techniques, new offerings, new teachings, new sermons, new songs, new books, a new something will finally break the blessings free from the greedy clutch of a God reluctant to bless us.

If we are, in fact, crack addicts for religion, then it makes more sense why sometimes God withholds from us. When he blesses us we can’t handle it. We’re like superstitious baseball players who have to keep wearing that hat or using that bat or refuse to wash those socks because it was then that we hit that home run. The truth is of course that we get accustomed to so many blessings that we very quickly fail to see them, be grateful for them, or see God as the author of them.

The Galatians have tasted new wine and they want more, and their willing to do what it takes to make sure their supply is regular and within their control.

I want to take another small detour for a moment. Trust me, we’ll get back to this. Why didn’t God simply make Jesus the son of Abraham and Sarah? If Jesus is simply all about a sacrifice maybe God could have found some Canaanites to kill Jesus in some horrible way and cut out Israel all together. Why go through the whole, long torturous story of Israel before we get to Mary, Joseph and Jesus?

Israel was to be a priesthood for the nations. We’ve heard that before but have we gone to the bottom with it. A priest represents God to the people and the people to God. So Israel represented and bore witness to God before the nations, and the nations to God as well. Even though as Paul will later establish, God’s plan of saving the world was always based on grace, what God did in Israel really also exemplified the height of religion. Here in Israel you had the truest religion you could ever imagine. God gives them the rules directly, no fuzziness, no pleas to "not being fully informed". God rescues them on numerous occasions. God reveals miracles to them. God blesses them. God cleans out the land before them to remove alien religious influences. God hangs in with them for generation after generation and each time they go wrong he sends the prophets and leaders to put them back on the right track.

Paul in this next section of Galatians three starts pinging Deuteronomy 27 and following. Paul notes that in Israel religion has been tried and it has been an abysmal failure. Paul notes that if you want to go the route of religion, perhaps for the upsides of keeping control and leverage over God, you’d better be prepared to keep up your end of the deal. If you break even one small piece of it, you lose. It’s like Willy Wonka’s contract in the old Gene Wilder version of the film. Sorry Charlie, you lose it all. No lifetime supply of chocolate!

Galatians 3:10-12 (NRSV) For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law." Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for "The one who is righteous will live by faith." But the law does not rest on faith; on the contrary, "Whoever does the works of the law will live by them."

Why is Paul so insistent? Because he knows. He himself has lived this life. He has excelled at it, and what did it finally make him into? A murderer.

Martin Luther noted that if you chose "religion" or "law" as Paul calls it, one of two things will happen. Either you’ll fail at it, or you will succeed in your own eyes.

Most of us today consider ourselves to be "good people" Ever notice how this works. We’ve all seen the new interviews with the neighbors of the serial killers. What do they always say? "He was quiet, kept to himself, a good neighbor, kept up his lawn, he seemed like a good person." Recently we’ve heard about this guy who kidnaps these boys. Ask his mother about him. What is she bound to say. "He kidnaped those boys, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a ‘good person’"? We all have our list of bad people too, genocidal dictators, or the people who offend us by cutting in line. Those we like for whatever reasons are "good people". Those we want to see harm befall are the bad people.

If you visit a prison, however, you will likely find people who consider themselves to be "bad people". They’ve done something or failed someone and they see themselves as beyond redemption. People like this, who see themselves as damned, failures of the religious system turn to horrible things to escape their own sentence. Substance addiction or crime often ensue. They are "bad people" and they know it.

Then there is the rest of us. We are like the children of Lake Wobegon, "all above average". We may not be perfect people, but we certainly have our qualities that make us "good people". We might have done bad things in the past, but we’ve promised to make up for them, or at least to not repeat them too much again. We are generally approving of our lifestyle choices. Sure we could be better, but then again one has to be reasonable too. If we have failed or fallen short in any respect, it wasn’t because we didn’t try. After all, trying to be good is at least as important as being good. There are always mitigating circumstances and exceptional reasons for our momentary failures. On the whole, we estimate ourselves to measure up pretty well against the general population, better than most at least.

If this is "religion" or "law, what’s so bad about it? Why should Paul get all worked up about people just trying to be better people?

One of my favorite Sunday programs is "This Week with George Stephanopoulis". There was an interesting discussion at the end of year program:

From the Round Table on "This Week with George Stephanopoulis, Sunday Dec 31, 2006

Is that fair? Is religion to blame for wars?

I think Paul would say that religion will make you a killer. Why? This little game of "good people" that we play always leads to designation of "bad people" Once we've got them labelled, we're one step away from "teaching them a lesson" one way or another. Certainly this is the duty of ourselves and other "good people" like us, to fix this world, to fix our communities, to take matters into our hands.

One of the things we quickly learn is that these "bad people" aren't as easily reformable as we would like. Stronger measures will surely need to be taken to insure their reformation and our protection. They really do deserve it, you know. They are morally inferior. If theirs is a different religion it is clearly incorrect and they should be chastised for the harm they are doing.

Living in a world with labels of "good people" and "bad people", even for as tolerant and generous as we'd like to be will always lead us to a place where we take matters into our own hands. We will discriminate, oppress, and marginalize. Religious wars will ensue.

How does Paul know? He followed this path. He knew this Jesus sect to be dangerous and he was zealous to stamp it out. He held the coats approvingly for those who stoned Stephen. He hunted down the Christians. He did. Religion did not turn Paul in to a "good person!"

We might say to ourselves, "oh, that is extremism. I'd never do anything like that. You are exaggerating when you say "religion" will turn me into a killer."

Jesus says this:

Matthew 5:21-22 (NRSV) "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

Sure, you may not pull the trigger, but you participate in the system. Do you really think "you shall not murder" can so easily be avoided by a failure to directly shed blood?

For this reason, Paul says that if you chose to live by the way of religion, you will be judged by it. You will fail in that path, and for it according to the terms of the agreement, you will be cursed.

But Paul also says this:

Galatians 3:12-14 (NRSV) But the law does not rest on faith; on the contrary, "Whoever does the works of the law will live by them." Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"— in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

Israel was the priest for the religion of the nations, which means the religion of the world. The curse of the world fell on Israel, but the curse of Israel fell on Jesus. The one who knew no sin, the one who upheld the law, received the curse for those to whom the curse was due. That is the Gospel.

Paul says to the Galatians, "the choice lays before you, which path will you chose? Don't go religion, there's only death there because you will fail and the curse will fall on you. Choose the one on whom the curse has already fallen!"

Earlier I told you about the four ways the world addresses our problems. I can't be a pantheist because if I am my own God I'm in trouble. Evil is real, this world is broken, and I need a God that is so far above me and beyond me that he can save me and this world from this mess. I can't be a secularist because it's just too grim. I can't escape the call of meaning and purpose and I too feel that the universe is dripping with it. All we are really left with is the choice between Gospel and religion.

The church today is really a tale of two Christians and they are distinguished by the motivational structures of their hearts. These two Christians look very much the same. They are both moral, they both are faithful in church, they participate, they serve, they give. One Christian is the kind that most of us have been brought up to try to become. They work very hard to please God but they do so out of pride and fear. They want so much from God and they are convinced that he can't "bless this mess" so they are sure doing their best to clean it up for him. We all look up to these kinds of believers, they are the pillars of the church and held up to be models of behavior for us. The only problem is that they are dying inside. With each accumulating sacrifice, each term of service, they grow more bitter, more angry, more resentful at God, the church, and especially the shirkers and flakes that are always getting a free ride and never pulling their own weight. They do deeds of service and generosity but you always get the sense that there are strings attached.

The second kind of Christian gives and serves out of gratitude, doing so out of the joy of their heart. You don't get the sense that they serve out of mere duty or obligation but they serve out of joy. They easily give, easily forgive, easily show grace. They are not harried and worried, they know peace even when things go poorly.

You can pursue religion or law and work yourself to death, growing increasingly tired, angry and bitter against God and this life that you imagine he's exiled you to. Or you can embrace Gospel and live in freedom from condemnation allowing gratitude and joy to motivate your life.

Why wouldn't we chose Gospel? Gospel requires that we lay down the label of "good people" and take up the label of "bad people". huh?

To embrace the gospel is to embrace deep humiliation. It is to embrace the fact that you in fact are not a good person. Whether or not you have actualize it so far in your life you are capable of unimaginable evil in thought and in deed and this evil may crush you. If you embrace religion or the law as a means of claiming the label of "good person" you will participate in a system of subjugation of others. It will happen. Only by embracing the deep humiliation of the gospel will you be able to no longer look down on your neighbor, freeing you to love them and serve them instead of condescending towards them. You will note that you have no moral advantage over them, in fact, for all you know they are your moral superiors. You will be the servant of all.

Gospel doesn't stop there though. Luther said that Christians are simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously sinful and righteous. Even though you embrace deep humiliation, you are loved and accepted by the God of the universe who has taken the curse of the law upon his own blameless Son on your behalf. He has done so not only to deliver you from yourself, but to deliver this entire world from the corruption, the wars, the decay, the disaster that grips it today. This God so loves you that you are now, if you can see it, free from fear, from obligation. You are free to enjoy Him, serve Him, and love him. If this vision grips you, you will naturally begin to play in his new creation by loving and serving those He loves and what He loves.

Paul calls the Galatians "foolish" because they are making a very bad exchange. They are exchanging freedom, joy, beauty, love, and grateful happiness for duty, fear, threat, and a curse that is sure to fall. Will we too be foolish?

9:30 AM: Adult Sunday School

11:00 AM: Worship Service

6:00 PM: Candlelight Christmas Eve Service

No service on December 25.

December 31:

11:00 AM: Worship Service

No Evening Service

Saturday April 8 at 10:00am we will be distributing flyers for the Easter services.

Sunday, Palm Sunday we will have Adult Sunday School, Youth Sunday School and "Let us Pray" at 9:30 and our service at 11:00. Here's your teaser question: What does Woodrow Wilson have to do with Palm Sunday?

Friday at 7:00 we will have our Good Friday service.

Easter Sunday at 9:00 we will have our Early Communion service.

At 10:00 we will have a continental breakfast.

At 11:00 we will have our Easter Service. The Sermon title for that service is "The Gospel of Judas and the Resurrection"