In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this second Sunday of our annual reading through the epistle to the Galatians, beloved in the Lord, I want to consider with you the question: How are we to live? The dominant argument in the epistle to the Galatians is directed to the question: How should Christians live? That’s how the epistle ended this morning. “The life I live now in the flesh, I live…” Well, about life.

It’s really not about the state of being just, being declared just or being just because one is declared just—that’s a very serious misunderstanding of Galatians that emerged for the first time about 500 years ago—but it’s about life: life in the Holy Spirit. But how do you do that? How is communion with Christ expressed in the life of discipleship?

Now, Paul found it necessary to address this question in the early 50s when some Jewish Christian teachers from the Holy Land arrived in the young churches of Galatia, insisting that all Christians, which, by the way, is simply a Greek form of “Messianics,” that all Christians observe the precepts of the Mosaic law. The new teachers in Galatia had a fairly simple answer to the question: How are we to live? They responded: We should live like good Jews! To them, it seemed logical that anyone who wanted to be a true child of Abraham should at least adhere to the teaching of Moses! That would just seem kind of logical.

Now when the Apostle Paul learned of these developments sometime in the early 50s, he sent this letter to the churches of Galatia in order to address that pastoral question. This morning I propose to reflect with you on three aspects of Paul’s response.

First, Paul, when he looked deeply into this controversy, determined that it was not ultimately a question about the Torah. The deeper, more significant question was whether or not a believer’s life was under the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Now, that’s not abstract for Paul. He has seen what the Holy Spirit does in someone’s life. We’ll talk about it in a few minutes. He’s actually seen that, what it’s like when somebody is full of the Holy Spirit. He has seen it. Now, as Paul regarded the matter, the problem of the Torah was its inability to confer the gift of the Holy Spirit. The observance of the Torah, what is called halakha, is concerned with the particulars of a lifestyle. Halakha is about the maintenance of identified rules. This Hebrew noun, halakha, is derived from the verbal root halakh, which means to walk, to travel.

In this sense, the Torah governs how a person lives: what he eats, what he does not eat, what he wears and does not wear, how he cuts his hair, how many candles are lighted on certain feastdays, and so on. I’m saying this to Orthodox Christians who know a lot about halakha. That’s one of the astounding things when a family became Orthodox. They seem far more preoccupied with the rules of fasting than the Jews ever were about kosher. [Laughter] A lot of halakha.

The Torah contains 613 such prescriptions. These are called mitzvot: rules or commandments. Mitzvot is the plural of a noun I suspect all of you know: mitzvah. Mitzvah can mean commandment. I think probably anybody the least bit exposed to American culture knows that. One becomes—one makes his bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. The observance of these 613 mitzvot is what distinguishes a good, observant Jew from a non-Jew. Paul had done all that his whole life long. The problem he sees, however, the argument he makes in the epistle to the Galatians, is that, having observed all of these mitzvot did not give him access to the Holy Spirit. As I shall explain presently, Paul knew this from personal experience.

These mitzvot, these commandments, can morally improve the person who observes them. First of all, the observant person; that that is all they can do is bring about a moral improvement. God is not into moral improvement. He’s into saving us. Now, he wants us to get better—we’ll talk about that in point two—but he’s a God of salvation. The maintenance of halakha will give a person an orderly, disciplined life, but these mitzvot still remain matters of human will and human effort.

Now, Paul knew all about these mitzvot, these rules. He had observed all 613 of them for all his life, and where did it get him? During the three days of serious reflection that followed his experience of conversion on the road to [Damascus], Paul came to see that the zeal for the observance of these 613 rules had, in fact, led him to commit the great sin of not recognizing the Messiah. Paul proceeded to be led into serious sin by the very zeal he had for the Torah. It was a matter of his experience. His devotion to the observance, the halakha, of the Law, had not only blinded him to the recognition of the Messiah. It also had driven him to persecute those who had received the Messiah in faith. It drove him to persecute and kill his fellow Jews.

In the context of his conversion, Paul took stock of this earlier experience. Anybody spot what I’m talking about? What was that early experience? I think most of you know, but you’re too shy to say it. If you want to know, ask Jerry. What was that early experience? The stoning of Stephen. Paul saw in the stoning of Stephen what it meant to be full of the Holy Spirit. When those who stoned Stephen prepared to do so, they removed their outer clothing. You might notice that, when we stone people to death—have you observed that? When we stone people to death, we tend to take off our coats. It’s always been my rule. [Laughter] They took off their outer clothing, in order to throw the stones more effectively. It was Paul who held their clothing while Stephen was being stoned to death.

And what did Paul hear? What did Paul see? He heard the voice of Stephen, a Jew, calling out to his fellow Jews, “Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit! As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you have now become the betrayers and the murderers.” Saul of Tarsus, this stern observer of the halakha, beheld in Stephen, a Jew like himself, a man full of the Holy Spirit, a man who died praying for those who stoned him to death. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Do not hold this sin against them.” He saw someone full of the Holy Spirit, and he began to doubt.

Luke tells us that Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.” The son of man, that’s a figure from the book of Daniel, isn’t it, the ben adam, the son of man. That is to say, Saul beheld in Stephen a man very different from himself. He saw and listened to a man full of the Holy Spirit, while Saul himself, a devout observer of the Torah, now had innocent blood on his hands. And this is why the Apostle Paul, just a few years later, reacted to strongly to these new teachers in Galatia who were insisting on the full observance of the Torah. Paul knew better. He had no doubt about the Law’s inability to confer the Holy Spirit. And this was the promise of all of the prophets, that in the latter days God would pour his Spirit out upon all flesh.

Point two, freedom from the observance of the Torah does not represent for Paul a state of moral autonomy. The epistle to the Galatians does not teach moral autonomy. Freedom in Christ does not leave the believer without a moral code and eternal moral truth. There is no such thing as an autonomous Christian. “Autonomous”: the word “law” appears in there, doesn’t it? “Auto-nomos”: nomos is the Greek word for law. A law to himself: autonomous. Someone was sharing with me the other day, weren’t you, what it’s like to be on a campus, where there’s just total moral autonomy, and how hard that is to be honest at your campus, surrounded by that.

In this respect, we need to consider what it means to be free. According to the Bible, and I will take that as my guide this morning rather than, say, the first ten amendments to the Constitution—I just thought maybe I should go with the Bible this morning—according to the Bible, freedom consists in our servitude to God. There’s an irony there. We are in the service of the One who sets us free. This is truly God’s view of the matter. Indeed, it is the teaching of the Torah. Listen to what the Lord says to Moses in the sixth chapter of Exodus. It must have occurred to Moses: Why did he liberate us from Egypt?

I remember—oh, decades and decades and decades ago—taking a nighttime train from Naples to Rome, coming into this compartment of the train. I’ll tell you what it was. It was the very end of May of 1967. Can you think back to what was going on then? No, most of you can’t. [Laughter] Some of you might be able to. I came into this compartment and I asked in Italian—there was a man and a woman and two children sitting there, so there were two spare seats, and I asked in Italian, because it was Italy, I asked if those seats were available. And the fellow said, “Non parlo Italiano.” I said, “Que lingua parla?” He says, “Englezi?” [Laughter] I said, “Yeah, I do speak some English.” So we started riding toward Rome and were talking.

He was an Israeli. He’d just been called up. He was a tank commander, just been called up at the end of May 1967. We had about two hours to go, so we had a theological discussion. But I remember he was so bewildered. “Why did God have to pick us?” And that was his… “Why did God have to pick us?” So I tried to kind of explain it to him, but I was at a bit at a disadvantage, because he didn’t know Italian. [Laughter] None of what I just said, by the way, is in these notes.

The teaching of the Torah itself— Listen to what the Lord says to Moses in the sixth chapter of Exodus.

“Therefore say to the children of Israel (the ben Yisrael), say to the children of Israel: I am the Lord. I will bring you out from under the burden of the Egyptians. I will rescue you from bondage, and I will redeem you, with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. And I will take you as my people, a mi, my people, and I will be your God, eloeykha.”

“You will be my people; I will be your God.” That’s the covenant. God does not say, “I will redeem you so you can do what you like from now on.” God does not proclaim, “I will rescue you so you can be morally autonomous.” God does not declare, “I will bring you out of bondage so that you will be on your own and live the way you want to live.” God says, rather, “I will do these things so that you will belong to me, and I will belong to you. I am the God of Israel, and you are the people of God.” That’s the effect of the exodus.

We Christians believe that we are the heirs of that covenant and that communion. Each of us, as we approach the holy Communion each Sunday, is addressed as “servant of God, ebed Adonai, servant of God.” Christians are not autonomous people. We do not belong to ourselves, because the Messiah has bought us by his blood. We serve him, not ourselves.

Third, in making this reference to the biblical roots of freedom, I rely on an appeal to a specific apostolic insight, namely the persuasion that the Christian’s moral life will be subject to the same temptations that best the newly liberated Israelites in the desert. What were those temptations? Idolatry and murmuring. One of the great ironies. By the way, there’s a new commentary out on the book of Numbers, which explains all of this. [Laughter] Of the adult Israelites who passed through the Red Sea on their way out of Egypt, how many finally crossed the Jordan River into the Holy Land? How many? Two! Except for two men, Joshua and Caleb, every other adult Israelite died and was buried in the desert. Now Christians took that, the early Christians took that as a warning: This can happen to us. We’ve been liberated from idolatry; we have a responsibility.

The longest exegesis of a single psalm in the New Testament is the exegesis of Psalm 95 (that would be Psalm 94 in the Greek and Latin text), in the third and fourth chapters of Hebrews. That’s the longest exposition of a psalm in the New Testament, two whole chapters. And that epistle is about the danger of apostasy. The danger of apostasy.

Let me remind you, beloved, of a prayer that we say all the time. “Lead us not into temptation.” Lead us not into temptation—anybody familiar with that prayer? “Lead us not into temptation.” What does the prayer mean? What temptation are we talking about? It’s not a prayer that God won’t tempt us. God doesn’t tempt us! It’s a prayer that we won’t tempt God. See, that’s the danger. The danger is we’ll put God to the test. This is exactly what the Israelites did in the desert. When the psalmist speaks of the day of temptation in the wilderness, it was the occasion on which the Israelites tempted God. This is the temptation from which we pray to be delivered. The operative commandment here is found in Deuteronomy 6:16: “Do not tempt the Lord your God as you tempted him at Massah.” It’s in there. Don’t tempt him the way you did at Massah.

How do we tempt God? Recall that Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:16 in the Gospel account of his own temptation in the wilderness: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” How did the Israelites tempt God at Massah? They murmured against the Lord! Hear the word: murr-murr. [Mooing sounds] The Greek is even better: diegogguzen. [Laughter] That is the sound God most hates. There’s not one instance in the Bible of anybody ever murmuring and God was sympathetic—not one!

Paul refers to this in the first epistle to the Corinthians. “Let us not tempt the Lord, as some of them tempted and were destroyed by serpents. And let us not murmur as some of them also murmured and were destroyed by the destroyer.” “Murmur” means one is dissatisfied with what God provides. Some people mistake their murmuring for prayer. No. The essence of prayer is “thy will be done.” We may ask him for things, but the essence is: “Thy will be done, not mine.” That’s prayer.

What were the Israelites murmuring about in the wilderness? Well, just about anything you can think of. First of all, God fed them, fed them every day. I mean, fed every day, fed to satiety every day. It was the consummate welfare state! [Laughter] They were fed to satiety every single day. There was more bread than they could eat, and what are they saying? “We are sick to death of this manna.” Free food, but, you know… According to the book of Wisdom, whatever your favorite food was, that’s what the manna tasted like. It says that in the Wisdom of Solomon; it says that.

What did they miss out in the desert, that they had so much of back in Egypt? Onions! Garlic! Leeks! They’re murmuring! It is surely significant the Bible has more warnings against murmuring than it has against murder. Which is the more serious sin? Well, let’s discuss that some time, but not this morning. What’s the opposite of murmuring? What’s the opposite? Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving. What the Lord wants is a thankful people who bless his name for all the blessings, the grace that he pours out on them abundantly. In all things, give thanks. You see, thanksgiving is the opposite of murmuring.

How should we live? Give thanks all the time. You have two options for those of you who are going to live a long time. For those of you who are going to be martyred, then you’ve got a different vocation, but those of you who are going to live a long time, you have two opposites—two options, rather. You can grow up and grow old as a bitter person, a complaining person, someone who’s disgruntled because they spent their whole life murmuring; or you can grow old with joy and peace because you’ve cultivated the habit of thanksgiving. This is the month in which we finally celebrate thanksgiving, and I’m very much looking forward to that, but every day is thanksgiving day. Every day is for blessing the name of the Lord. Amen.