Galatians 1:11-24
Proper 5 (10) - Year C
Good news can come from beyond our currently accepted and approved set of cultural/religious norms. In fact it has to, unless one is foolish enough to claim that we have finally made it to the best of all possible worlds.
A revelation of Jesus Christ to a zealous Pharisee such as Saul shifts accumulated details around so a basic structure can again be seen. In this case a posthumous revelation that a pronounced heretic was actually a prophet whose voice needed to be reanimated.
G*D’s creation covenant and its renewal is for everyone, period. Where once it was with individuals and their descendants who became a people, it now needs to return from a focus on the group to the individual as a prophetic sign. A hyper-chosen-people needs to put down its exclusive claim to remain among the chosen (well, alongside all creatures great and small).
This was not an easy shift to make. Paul makes it sound as if it were a three-year confirmation of revelation. This otherwise undocumented journey follows the arc of Elijah and brings Paul back to a multitude of other’s when he was off playing lone-wolf.
So where are you participating in living out a revelation beyond current communal or religious practice? May it bless you and all.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/06/galatians-111-24.html
Paul writes as a corrective to the divisions within the church at Galatia. To do so he brings a story delineating his authority. Key is a view from above that allows change. He had been an important adversary able to find every weakness of Jesus' followers. So he was able to divide and conquer Christians. Out of his experience he found a central unifying source of gospel that those on the inside kept overlooking because they were too close.
Some of this important distance is also found in his journey away from Jerusalem into the wilderness of Arabia.
From adversarial and geographical dislocations Paul is able to speak truth to the power of focusing on the surface of things, rather than their depths. As Galatians continues, these depths will rise to view.
"The Galatians are on the verge of a wilderness apostasy, hence Paul colours his rebukes and warnings with language that evokes Israel's own tragic wilderness failings."[source] Paul may be able to do this from his own wildernesses of 3 days blind and 3 years in Arabia.
Our own wilderness times are important witness sources for our interacting with a settled church attacking its own.
- - -
caught
traditions
ancestors
freed
unknown
neighbors
traditional persecutions
unknown grace
new families
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html
I've been engaged with an unfortunately on-going conversation regarding the place of gay men and lesbians in the ordered leadership of the United Methodist Church. As we argued about polity, my friend Jeff entered a word about this lection:
I've been thinking about our friend St. Paul. It's probably not wise to use Paul in support of a position that he seems not to affirm, but in the lectionary reading for Sunday (Gal. 1:11-24) Paul is in the process of defending his decision to move outside of the established "church" and offer the good news of Christ to people who were considered to be outside of the accepted community. Paul was willing to include persons who hadn't been "marked" as Jews without insisting that they go under the knife and change who they were. Even Peter came to the realization that people outside of the Jewish tradition were OK as they were. We seem to have taken a step back.
This catches a dilemma of community - it takes a wrenching experience to have the church move forward in extending and expanding the love it has experienced. Paul and Peter each had their transformative vision of Jesus and G*D that allowed them to step outside the legalism (read theology) of their community. An outcome of church is partly that of desiring and instituting stability and this is a set up for instability. If we don't keep up with changes they build up within and around the church. Just as the longer an earthquake takes to shake loose its entrapment the larger its effect will be, the more people will be lost. Can we not change and change? Theoretically, but not historically.
There have been a series of seismic slips (earthquakes) in the church wherein we make significant leaps forward. Always, though, there is a breaking of some ideal unity as those who cannot keep their balance with the new landscape rebuild over the old fault rather than move on.
A mystery is how the next vision/revelation change will occur. In this instance verse 23 may need to be adapted: ["Those the church persecuted proclaimed their faith in the face of their destruction by the church." G*D was glorified because of their faith.]
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/06/galatians-111-24.html