"God's Timing"

12-Dec-2010

“God’s Timing”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196 corinthtoday.org

The message of Christmas is that God is your Daddy.

Galatians 3:27-4:7

December 12, 2010

Mall surprise

Imagine yourself sitting in a mall food court in Canada in mid-November, enjoying your shopping break with a chicken sandwich and basket of fries. You hear a little organ music in the background, but continue lunching and planning your next purchase. You are not expecting to find Christmas.

A young woman with a cell phone on her ear and a bright red scarf hanging down to her waist, Canadian flags on both ends of the scarf, stands and begins singing, “Hallelujah!” A young man in a pale blue sweatshirt stands up in a chair and takes up where she left off. Soon 80 singers stand from around the food court, some on the floor and some in chairs, all performing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

It all seemed random, but it wasn’t. The singers were members of the Niagara Chorus, a group comparable to our own Hickory Choral Society. Their public performance clearly startled the shoppers at Seaway Mall in Niagara Falls, Canada. The event was planned as publicity by Alphabet Photography, a company that draws its name by selling pictures of the letters of the alphabet. The letter A might be a large neon sign “A” or the end of a picnic table.

The Niagara Chorus performance on November 13, 2010 has created a sensation for the online video web site, YouTube. More than 15 million times someone has clicked on Alphabet’s video of the Food Court Hallelujah. Most of the YouTube viewers have also sent the link to me. (I thank you all.) You have to love the crowd reaction, from the mesmerized 10-year-old on a chair to the woman wiping tears off her cheek to the many in the crowd whipping out cell phones and cameras.

All this would have never been possible if George Friedrich Handel’s father had gotten his way. The elder Handel was a surgeon in the days when surgeons were not physicians but barbers. That fact alone is likely to lose your attention for several minutes. Young George loved music and had to sneak into the attic to play the clavichord because his father forbade him musical instruments. George was supposed to become a lawyer.

At age 9, the Duke heard Handel playing the organ and convinced his father to let him study music. When Handel was twelve, his father died, making him the “man of the house” and giving him full freedom to choose his own path.

A half century later, Handel wrote Messiah (not The Messiah, by the way) in 24 days including score and orchestration. Depressed, in debt, and under criticism for taking church music into the secular theater with his operas (he would have been quite proud of the food court video), Handel told the New Testament story of Christ using mostly Old Testament texts from the King James Version of the Bible.

Handel found Christmas in unexpected places. That’s what we are doing, two weeks before Christmas, camped out in Galatians 3-4 instead of Matthew 1 or Luke 2. As we open the text, we find some surprising parallels to the stories I just shared with you.

ABCs

This passage is critical to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. This is probably his earliest letter that is part of our New Testament. It’s so early in the development of the church that the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, establishing once and for all that non-Jewish believers did not have to be circumcised or keep the law, had not yet taken place.

So the issue was still somewhat undecided, especially in Jerusalem. Paul had traveled to the province of Galatia to preach the good news of grace. We “have put our faith in Christ Jesus,” he told them, “that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16).

We no longer have to measure ourselves by our performance. It wouldn’t do us any good, because “the whole world is a prisoner of sin” (3:22). Why, then, was the law given in the first place? “To lead us to Christ,” Paul insists (3:24), but “now that faith has come we are no longer under the supervision of the law.”

Writing Galatians, however, Paul is angry because some false teachers have shown up on his heels, supposedly representing Peter and the Jerusalem church leaders. They insist that the Galatian Christians keep the law. Paul writes to refute them.

All of that is laid out in chapters 1-3. Now Paul turns to his affirmation, starting in 3:26 – “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” Some of the newer translations say “children of God,” and there’s nothing wrong with being gender-inclusive in that context. But in Paul’s day, it would have meant more to say you are all “sons” because it was sons who had rights – not daughters – in the first century. Only sons inherited their fathers’ property. “All of you,” Paul continues in verse 27, “were baptized in Christ.”

Then, in one of the most far-reaching verses in the New Testament, he says in verse 28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (emphasis added). As a Jewish freeman, Paul would have been taught as a boy to pray every day, “Thank God I’m not a Gentile, a slave, or a woman.”

Those distinctions are gone in Christ, Paul insists. You are all heirs of God’s promise to Abraham (30).

As we move to chapter four, an unfortunate chapter division, Paul continues his argument. In a sense, he says, we were all slaves apart from Christ. A child has no more rights than a slave when he is underage (1). Guardians and trustees (The Message calls them “tutors and administrators”) tell him what to do and manage his assets (2).

All of us were slaves to the ABCs. All of us work for Alphabet Photography, obsessed with “basic principles of the world.” The Greek word is stoicheia, and it refers to things lined up in a row, like ABCs, 123s. Paul is picturing what we might call a Kindergarten classroom.

Here he seems to be talking about the Jewish law. He uses the same word in verse 9, and there he’s talking about pagan religions – superstitions, false gods, astrologies, and so on. In your earlier life, you were enslaved by kid stuff – boundaries that kept you in bondage and did not bring you to God.

Unexpected Christmas

“But when the time had fully come,” Paul says in verse 4, “God sent his son, born of a woman.” Talk about finding Christmas in unexpected places! We would no more expect Mary and Bethlehem and the manger to enter a conversation about slavery and inheritance than we would a highly-trained choral group to perform in a mall food court.

I have long been intrigued by this verse. Many years ago I preached an entire series of Advent sermons from this one verse, pointing out how all the conditions of the first century made this the right time for Jesus to be born and the church to spread. The Jews had prepared the world for Christ through the law and its exposure of human failure. The Greeks had prepared the world for Christ through their own pagan emptiness and the gift of a common language. The Romans had prepared the world for Christ through the Pax Romana (world peace) and an infrastructure that made transportation and communication much easier.

Jews and Gentiles the felt spiritual needs of the world and the possibilities for Paul and others to spread the message made this the right time.

All of that may well be true, but it’s more than what Paul says here in Galatians 4. His point is simply that Christ is what F. F. Bruce calls “the nodal point of salvation-history” (The Epistle to the Galatians, 194). “Nodal” means “central” – like a crossroads. Before Christmas, slavery for both Jews and Gentiles. After Christmas, “the full rights of sons” (5).

Christmas changes everything. Brennan Manning, a Roman Catholic theologian, writes about Christmas in his book, Lion and Lamb. He tells of a miracle that occurred in Lourdes, France in 1957.

A French father took his ten-year-old son, blind from birth, on a pilgrimage from Brittany to Lourdes. At the shrine, the child begged his father to pray for him. His dad prayed aloud, “Lord give my boy his sight.” Instantly, the boy could see. He looked around. He saw flowers, trees, green grass, the open sky. Then he looked into his father’s eyes, the eyes that went with the only voice he had known during ten long years of darkness and loneliness. When he saw his father, he said, “Oh boy. Everybody’s here!” (141)

For that boy, that was the moment the “time had fully come.” I find myself getting lost in the question of why he had to endure ten years of blindness. When pondering Christmas I can get lost in the question of why humanity had to endure centuries, even millennia, living under the ABCs of slavery until God chose to send his son and be born of a woman. When I hear stories or witness moments of transformation, I wonder why they couldn’t have happened sooner.

The Bible doesn’t try to answer questions like that – not about Jesus’ coming and not about your suffering or my waiting to see as God sees or know as I am known. The point is that the time did come for Jesus, and it does come for us when our eyes are opened. At that moment all we see is the Father, and that’s enough for us. “Everybody’s here!”

Man of the house

This is precisely what Paul has in mind as he moves to verse 5. “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”

Here’s one of many places where the doctrine of the Trinity appears in the New Testament. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all mentioned together and functioning as one to bring us our salvation.

The word “Abba” is Aramaic for “Dad” or “Daddy.” It’s an intimate, family word. Only three people call me “Dad,” unless it’s their mother referring to me.

That’s why The Message freelances a bit in verse 7, adding a phrase about the “privilege of intimate conversation with God.” I find it interesting that Paul now speaks of being a child as positive. In verse 1, it seemed negative – childhood is limiting, kind of like slavery. But that’s temporary childhood, complete with guardians and trustees and ABCs.

Now he’s talking about grown up childhood – relationship, privilege promise. A slave never matures into sonship. “You,” however, Paul declares in verse 7, “are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.”

What exactly is this inheritance that we gain as sons? It is the inheritance of freedom, like what Handel experienced when he became “man of the house.”

Paul will continue the argument in chapter 5 by saying if we use our freedom to indulge self, we choose slavery all over again. Our freedom is for service (13), it’s for the fruit of the Spirit (22-23), which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Breathing freedom

The freedom to know God as Abba, says Sandra Wilson in Into Abba’s Arms, is the freedom to be accepted as I am, the freedom to know that I belong eternally to the Father, the freedom to love and forgive as I have been loved and forgiven. Knowing God in this intimate way is like the experience of “reparenting” (160).

A child who has been abandoned, physically or emotionally, feels lifelong shame and rejection. The child, even when he or she is an adult, never gets past needing to perform with unrealistic perfection in order to be accepted, approved, and loved.

How fortunate the child who finds someone at just the right time – which can be age 1, 15, 28, or 81, who loves them unconditionally and reparents them into their full potential. That kind of adoption, physical or spiritual, is grace.

Sandra Wilson quotes Brennan Manning who told of counseling an elderly incest survivor who had never fully experienced God’s ultimate acceptance. Manning told her to close her eyes several times a day and silently say, “Abba” as she inhaled and “I belong to you” as she exhaled. That simple exercise gave her freedom in Christ.

The message of Christmas is the message that God is your Daddy. If you look for that message, you will find it in unexpected places this Christmas.

You can find it in a mall, you will find it in the stall.

You may get it in a look, you will get it in the Book.

You should see it in the lights, for December’s time is right

To hear Abba say with pride, ”Hallelujah, you’re my child!”

Amen.