Good morning! It’s good to be back from being gone for a couple of weeks. Anne and I had a chance to worship at a Lutheran church up on Whidbey Island, and last Sunday at St. Mark’s Cathedral. It was great…but we always miss being with you!

This maroon colored book… “God’s written Word.” That’s what the church has called this book for almost two thousand years, because through thick and thin, through misuse and ignorance, God has faithfully breathed life into his people through these scriptures. There is such a mix of literature in this book. Stories, parables, poetry, historical narratives, lists of genealogies, teaching, apocalyptic visions…and Letters.

Remember those? Those were one of the main communication pieces of earlier generations. Before cellphones, before email, before text-messaging, before blogging, before instant-messages, we used to hold these sticks called “pens” in our hand and think about what would be important to communicate to someone, and then write words on shiny crinkly stuff called “paper.” Then we would fold the paper up and put it in an envelope and write someone’s name on it and send it (depending on how old you are) by horse or truck or bus or airplane across the city or the country or the world, and it would take several days or even weeks to get there. It was terribly inefficient. Barely above cavemen drawing pictures on walls.

It did have a few advantages, though. You would often think about what was important to say before writing it…rather than saying anything which came momentarily into our mind, like we tend to do with email. And when you received a letter, you could almost picture where the person was, and what they were doing.

I have one person I still write letters with, about one a month. I’ve told you about him before, his name is Dr. Cullen Story, and he was my Greek professor back in seminary, though even then he was in his seventies. He’s the one I used to shoot baskets with at the gym at Princeton, and we would play H-O-R-S-E…
actually, he insisted that we play “H-I-P-P-O-S,” which is the Greek word for horse! Always teaching. Dr. Story turned 90 years old this week. I opened our mail box last week and found a handwritten letter from him which starts like this:

“Dear Dan.

Once again the choice is made, the easy chair in the living room instead of the office chair before my electric typewriter. Ergo, my young brother Dan suffers through the uncertain script of his former prof. But the Bethany pastor is long suffering and will bravely weave his way through his senior brother’s letter.”

I haven’t received many emails like that lately! I can picture him there, sitting in his living room in Georgia. As I read through his letter, the things he is most passionate about jump off the page. He chooses words carefully. A “real” letter is still an amazing thing.

Today, and for the next 5 weeks, we will read a real Letter found in the New Testament, Galatians. It’s written by the Apostle Paul in the first century AD, and was intended to be read by a number of small Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia, what we would think of as modern day Turkey. I want to invite you to stand for the reading of God’s Word:

Galatians 1:1-10

It was less than twenty years after the death of Jesus. An educated man from a Greek Jewish background named Saul had been rounding up Christians to throw them in prison. In Saul’s eyes, this new sect of Christians was perverting religious tradition by claiming that Jesus Christ was the grace-filled embodiment of God, and that he had been raised from the dead.

Saul, whose name soon changed to “Paul” had a personal encounter one day with Jesus that changed him forever into a follower of Jesus, a missionary who wrote ¼ of the New Testament, in letters.

Can you picture the Apostle Paul? Though the book of Acts gives us some biographical history on him, Scripture tells us virtually nothing about what he might have looked like. There is, however, in the ancient library and tradition of the Church, one piece of literature (The Acts of Paul and Thecla) that says this about Paul:

…Paul was “bald-headed, bowlegged, strongly built, a man small in size, with meeting eyebrows, with a rather large nose.” So much for romantic notions of Paul’s appearance!

Paul probably dictated his letters to someone, a normal custom of his time. I picture him walking around a simple room, voice loud and constantly having to slow down so that his writer could catch up to him. But in the case of this Galatians letter, I think Paul may have been wearing a path in the dirt floor. He was agitated, wound up.

You see, it was Paul who knew these people in Galatia, most of them decidedly not from religious backgrounds. It was Paul who had gone to them and introduced them to Jesus. It was Paul’s great discovery to pass on that God was far more interested in people knowing Him and following Him than He was in perpetuating religious ritual. It was Paul who had explained to them the grace and forgiveness to be found in God’s Messiah, Jesus. It was Paul who had helped establish these church communities.

And now, it seems, there were other teachers going through the Galatian churches, not necessarily arguing with what Paul was taught, but saying it was incomplete. It needed to be added to. They insisted that the new converts live not only the Jesus Gospel but also the Jewish traditions…like circumcision and the keeping of the law. And it seems that some of the Galatians were listening to them.

Now, letters in antiquity had a certain form to them, and an educated person like Paul knew the form well. This letter starts off in a fairly typical manner, Paul identifying himself, then an address “the churches of Galatia,” then a greeting, “Grace and Peace to you…” Now that greeting is significant. Paul uses it in many letters, always in that order… “Grace and Peace to you.”

“Grace” was a word that would have been a common greeting in any Greco-Roman greeting, while “Peace” (God’s “shalom,” wholeness) was a very familiar Jewish blessing and greeting. When Paul combines them it is no accident. He is saying that Jesus is for all people, Greek and Jew. He is saying “It is God’s grace that brings forth peace.”

After the greeting, it would be customary for Paul to have a paragraph of thanksgiving and blessing, and most of his letters do. But he skips that entirely here, and instead…pretty much goes off on his readers.

“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!”

Imagine you writing a letter: Dear Joe, how are you? hoping you are well, it was good to see you last week, are you nuts?!

Not exactly what you would write to encourage a group of young Christians, is it? Not unless you were really concerned. Not unless you really loved them a lot. Not unless you were willing to risk everything to be sure they were not misled.

For Paul, the big deal was that there was only one gospel. What God had done in Jesus was so amazing, so unique, so all-encompassing, the fulfillment of so much…that he could call it simply “the good news.” The gospel of Jesus Christ. Even in this opening to Paul’s letter, he manages to fit in the things that matter:

• Jesus Christ’s identification with God (verse 1)
• that Christ had been raised from the dead (verse 1)
• that Christ came and gave himself for our sins (verse 4)
• that in that giving we are set free from the bindings of the evil present in the world.
• that the gospel of Christ is the good news of God’s grace (verse 6)

The good news. It is primary. Don’t settle for anything less, Paul pleads. Good news is free and available to all people. And don’t add anything to it. The good news needs nothing else.

Today we don’t argue about things like circumcision or the Old Testament law being added to God’s word of grace. But there is a lot of competition in the “gospel” business. There are all sorts of “evangelists” proclaiming “good news” about all sorts of things. “Evangelist” has even become an accepted word in the business world. Companies assign “evangelists” to spread the “good news” about certain products or programs.

But for Paul, there is only one gospel, the Jesus gospel. It absolutely drove his life. And as much as anything this morning, I just want to ask: What about you? What really drives your life? What will you make sacrifices for? What will you give your life to? What is the good news?

Here are six of the gospels I hear:

a) The Gospel of the Busyness of the Church.

Maybe this one is just for me. There is a whole industry of pastors, and church growth folks saying if your church is bigger, the numbers are growing, the budget is increasing, has a bookstore, or is on television or has more programs, then surely there’s the good news going on. No. That’s not the Jesus Gospel.

b) The Gospel of Happiness.

Shelves and shelves of books at Barnes and Noble advocate taking control of your life, assessing your needs, getting your desires, feeling happy. The statistics tell us that hundreds of thousands of people change marriage partners every year, believing that it was their spouse that made them unhappy. Or their job, believing that the job made them unhappy. Or they move, thinking that where they lived made them unhappy. “Happiness, that’s the good news.” That’s not the Jesus Gospel.

c) The Gospel of a Particular Personality.

The good news is often supposedly connected to one particular preacher, one leader. He’s on TV. She gives seminars. There just seem to be dozens of personalities on Christian TV and somehow the good news is always connected with the offering, and somehow if you get involved, you will prosper materially.

I read an article this week in an old New Yorker about a preacher who flies around in his Lear jet, drives a Rolls Royce, and whose message and ministry is committed to making his followers richer. “Tithing,” this preacher explained, “means giving the church ten percent of your income, before taxes, which, he noted, was good news, in a sense, because it meant that when you got your tax refund you could keep the whole thing.”! I used to just dismiss such nonsense…but I’m now realizing there are millions and millions and millions of people buying into the promises that come from such personalities. That’s not the Jesus Gospel.

Paul himself says it’s not about the person. “If anyone, me or anyone else, preaches a different gospel…curses be upon him.”

d) The Gospel of Politics.

The good news is connected with a particular economic system, an issue, a political party. If we can just have faith-based organizations involved, if we could get someone out of office, or the right person into office, the right system, the right people in place, then the good news will take effect. But it’s not the Jesus Gospel.

e) The Gospel of Legalism.

There’s a way to earn God’s good opinion, as in a ticket to heaven. We just have to come up with it. If I just had my quiet time consistently, if I just memorized the whole Bible, if I just give more time to church, if I just don’t do anything majorly wrong, if I just keep the rules, I’ll have the good news. The rules become primary, and one’s relationship to a grace-filled God ends up in the background. Brennan Manning once said that this is “the genius of legalistic religion- making primary matters secondary and secondary matters primary.” The rules are not the Jesus Gospel.

f) The Gospel of Significance.

This says if you’re richer, or more educated, or travel more, or have more things than others you must be experiencing the good news.

In Donald Miller’s book “Searching for God Knows What,” he reminds us of an old group value clarification exercise: “There is a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat are the following people: a male lawyer, a female doctor, a sick child, a stay-at home mom, a garbageman, etc. If one person has to be thrown overboard to save the others, which person do we choose?”

It made me laugh when Miller put it in his book, because I actually remember being in classes or small groups where we discussed this kind of thing!

But Miller’s point was that we spend a lot of time acting like we have to defend why we deserve to be in the boat. We need to convince others why we are so significant, and if we can convince others that we should be in the boat, that’s good news. But it’s not the Jesus Gospel.

There’s a lot of gospels running around. Most of them even claim that they fit right in with the Jesus Gospel. But there’s only one Jesus Gospel, and that’s the one that Paul was so ferociously protecting in this book of Galatians. And that Jesus gospel says that:

• God is so in love with you, that it is your main identity: you are someone loved by God.
• Christ came to bring us forgiveness…whoever we’ve been, whatever we’ve done, His grace covers us.
• Christ came to free us from the stuff of this world that ensnares us.
• His resurrection changes everything. everything, about life and death.
• as we know this God…we are drawn to give our lives away to others.

The gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ…is pretty simple. Not simplistic, but simple. Karl Barth, the prolific 20th century theologian who published thousands and thousands of pages of theology visited Princeton in 1962 and was asked by a nervous student whether or not it made any difference where you begin the study theology, as in, with what topic. He said he didn’t think it really mattered where you started…as long as Jesus Christ was at the center. And it was at that same time that someone else asked Barth to distill the essence of his life’s work down to a few words, he replied rather famously : “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible told me so.” The good news.

My old professor, Dr. Story, closed a recent letter to me by saying this: “The Word of God always pins us down or points us to what is really important.” Paul tells us what that is: the simple gospel, the grace of Jesus Christ, the Jesus gospel. Nothing more, and nothing less.