Today we’ll be continuing our Galatians study through our weekly Sunday evening gathering and common meal. If you aren’t able to join us, you can gather with others on your own and practice our simple liturgy or something similar:

• Begin by gathering around the communion table and reading Galatians 2:15-16
• Receive communion together, meditating on how the Lord’s supper demonstrates our faith in Christ.
• Have a short time of open prayer for placing more of our trust in the work of Christ for our lives.
• Eat together
• After dinner, gather together to read through Galatians 2:11-21 and discuss the story of Paul’s confrontation with Peter.

Today is a rest and reflection day. No studying on Galatians. Get out and have fun, work in the garden, see a movie, read something for pleasure, etc. Enjoy.

Yesterday we read about the first council at Jerusalem, and read about James speaking up from Amos 9:11-12. Today, let’s read that passage in it’s context. Read the whole chapter of Amos 9.

Questions:

1. What is this chapter about? What is being described?
2. How does the chapter make a shift from judgment to hope towards the end?
3. Why do you think James pointed to this prophecy in order to validate the decision to allow gentile believers to free free from Jewish laws? In other words, how does his use of this prophecy make sense?

Today, read Galatians 2:1-10 alongside Acts 15:1-35.

Questions:

• How does the Acts 15 passage clarify the controversy of Galatians for you?
• After Acts 15, what would you say is the “freedom” Paul is referring to in Gal 2:4? What is it freedom from, exactly? What isn’t it freedom from?

Yesterday we read that Paul was upset about the Galatians turning away from the gospel he preached to “another gospel.” Today, lets hear the gospel Paul preached in his own words. Read Acts 17:16-34.

Questions:

1.What is different about Paul’s gospel to the Athenians than other versions of the gospel you’ve heard? Specifically, what does he emphasize that you haven’t heard emphasized before, and what does he omit that you have typically heard emphasized?

2. If you heard the gospel articulated exactly this way in a public place today, do you think it would be criticized by some Christians? If so, why?

3. Read earlier in this chapter, Acts 17:1-9. In this passage the local Jews from Thessalonica are upset about Paul’s gospel, and summarize it as “There is another King, one called Jesus” (v7). Do you think this is a fair summary of what Paul says to the Athenians in 17:22-31? If so how, and if not, why?

3. Setting aside your previous concepts of the gospel, how would you summarize Paul’s gospel from Acts 17 in one sentence?

Read the opening of Paul’s letter to the Galatians again today (Gal 1:1-2:10).

1. 1. What seems to be the reason for Paul’s letter?
2. 2. What passages strike you as clues to the differences between Paul’s gospel and “the other gospel” he’s coming against?
3. 3. What questions, if any, do you have about this passage?

Today we begin our series on the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians.

Along with the letter to the Romans, Galatians is widely considered one of the two most important letters written by the Apostle Paul. These “books” in the Bible contain his strongest statements of theology concerning God’s plan of redemption for the world through Jesus Christ. As a result, the arguments and language of Galatians can be densely packed and difficult to grasp. To make matters even more difficult, there have been sharp disagreements about how to interpret and understand the finer nuances of Paul’s theology, and those disagreements have possibly become more strenuous in the last 15 years than they have ever been.

However, there is no reason we can’t read this letter together, and – with some diligent attention to the Old Testament narrative on the one hand and the first-century backdrop on the other – fully grasp Paul’s message to the extend that we are able today (we are always advancing in our understanding of theology, and we can expect that to continue).

Still, this will require some work on our part and it is well worth the effort.

Paul’s letter concerns nothing less than the meaning of the Christian “good news” or gospel, so this is something we must endeavor to get right. We’ve spent the better part of the last year reading through Christ’s teachings, ministry, death and resurrection, and as we move on to Paul’s letters we should bear in mind that some popular renderings of the Christian gospel (such as “Accept Jesus into your heart so you can be ’saved’ and go to heaven when you die” or, Joel Osteen’s “Let Jesus help you live your best life now” or political pundit Glen Beck’s recent articulation of the Christian gospel, “It’s all about you“) owe much to historical readings of Galatians and Romans, but they bear little resemblance to Jesus’ message of the Kingdom (see Matt 4-7, Matt 13, and Matt 25:31-46).

This apparent distance between Paul’s message and Jesus’ message is something we’ve inherited from the Reformation. 500 years ago the Protestant Reformers saw Paul’s strong emphasis on “salvation by grace through faith alone” as a powerful critique (and rightly so) of certain Catholic doctrines and practices that had no grounding in scripture. This Reformation emphasis, however, filtered through Enlightenment philosophies in the ensuing centuries, has only widened the apparent gulf between Jesus and Paul, leading some prominent contemporary theologians to conclude that Paul simply invented a new greek-influenced religion on top of Jesus’ death – a religion, they assert, that has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.

This problem is not merely academic. Despite 500 years of strong emphasis on “salvation by grace alone through faith” in Protestant churches it is widely recognized today that the Western Church bears little resemblance to Jesus (the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church fare no better). Unbelievers have noticed too. As one recent book title puts it, They Like Jesus, But Not the Church.

So, one way to attempt to move past the weak or thin versions of the gospel mentioned above is to try to grasp how Paul’s teachings do, in fact, build faithfully on the gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated. This means we will need to dig a little deeper than normal, and perhaps ask some uncomfortable questions about our understanding of the gospel that reveal our own Enlightenment prejudices.

Again, let me say, it is well worth the effort. If we, as a small group of Jesus followers, do not grasp the depth and breadth of the good news that Jesus brings to the world we will be of little use to ourselves or anyone else. For the next 8-10 weeks, I’m asking you to make sacrifices in order to grapple with this letter from Paul. Work less. Spend less time watching television or surfing the internet. Spend less time at the gym. Whatever it takes to carve out an hour or so a day to seriously engage with the gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul is articulating.

No matter what you currently believe about the gospel, I can nearly guarantee that Paul’s breathtaking revelation of Jesus’ gospel will turn out to be a bigger, more surprising, perhaps more scandalous, and definitely more powerfully relevant to “real life” today than you realized.

A final word on what to expect from the format. Over the next 8-10 weeks we will gather on Sunday nights as usual and read through a portion of the text and engage with its meaning (we started last night by reading Galatians 1:1-2:10). Every Monday through Friday between gatherings we’ll engage with daily readings that help is dig a little deeper than we’re able on Sunday nights.

As we prepare to enter our study of the book of Galatians, we’ll use this first gathering to prepare our hearts and minds to engage with the gospel we find there.

• Begin by gathering around the communion table and reading Galatians 3:28
• Receive communion together, meditating on the reconciliation demonstrated by the Lord’s supper
• Have a short time of open prayer for reconciliation in our lives, relationships, and the world
• Eat together
• After dinner, gather together to read through Galatians 1:1-2:10 and discuss Paul’s opening words

Questions for reflection:

1. What seems to be the reason Paul is writing?
2. What passages strike you most?
3. What clues can you find that reveal how Paul is distinguishing his gospel from that of those he’s condemning?
4. How is the gospel you first heard different from the gospel you’ve come to understand as you’ve grown in your faith?

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ~ John 12:24

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ~ John 6:53

Once there were two men who longed for real tomatoes with good flavor unlike the bland, waxy variety found in the chain supermarkets. So they both decided to start their own home gardens.

The first gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too. He dug in the hard soil (there was a lot of clay in their area) and planted and watered his seeds, careful to space them apart properly, and reflecting on how – in a sense – the seed had to die before new life could spring from it.

Every day he was diligent to water and weed his garden and, sure enough, in about a week little sprouts poked through the surface. But neither the tomatoes nor the others plants grew as big as those in the catalog pictures, and although his tomatoes tasted far better than the waxy supermarket variety, they looked a bit scrawny and didn’t produce very much.

The second home-gardener bought the best seeds he could find in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too.

Because there was a lot of clay in their area he rented a roto-tiller and spent a day plowing up the hard dirt for his garden bed. The tiller violently ripped into the hard soil about a foot deep, churning everything over and deeply cultivating the topsoil and clay into a soft new mixture. Then he went to the local compost facility where grass clippings, pulled weeds, and other yard waste from all over the city was allowed to rot and decay into smelly black piles of rich organic matter. He filled his truck bed to the brim with this living-dead dirt and shoveled it onto his freshly-tilled planter beds. To this he added earthworm castings (worm poop!). He then folded the compost deep into the soil turning it over and over again one shovel-full at a time.

Then he added organic fertilizer, made from decomposed bone, kelp, and fish meal. He sprinkled the ashy white powder all over the planter beds and raked it into the dirt, shaping the beds into gently sloping mounds, which were now smelly, soft, and a deep dark brown color. Into this graveyard of decomposed animal and vegetable waste he planted and watered his seeds, and reflected on how they would have to break open and “die” in order for life to spring from them. And he thought, too, of how the young plants would be – in a sense – eating the flesh and drinking the blood of all the animals and plants that were sacrificed and given on their behalf, and he marveled at how much death was required to produce rich, full life.

That summer his tomatoes outgrew their cages, and the pepper plants were so full they crowded each other in the beds. He picked so many big, beautiful tomatoes and peppers that he had to share them with his friends and neighbors since it was more then he could possible eat all by himself. And his tomatoes were tasty.

Today is our final reading before Easter, and much like yesterday’s chapter, today’s is packed with action as Jesus approaches the climactic moment of his earthly ministry. Take time to read through Matthew 27 today and reflect on the questions below:

Questions for Reflection:

1. What scene or character in this chapter do you most identify with? Why?
2. Imagine you were one of Jesus’ disciples, and expected him to be the anointed one who finally overthrew the Roman oppressors and vindicated you and your people. How would this series of events impact you? How might you have made sense of it all?
3. There is a tension that runs throughout Jesus’ ministry between him and his followers: they want him to conquer with power but he typically serves and sacrifices instead – including giving the ultimate sacrifice. That is, Christ’s strength always looked like weakness. How does this tension continue today between Christ and his followers?