A Bar of Irish Spring Soap

This morning’s (second) scripture reading is Galatians 1: 11-24, and can be found on page 823 of your pew Bibles.
I invite you to listen for the Word of God.
I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and I later returned to Damascus.
Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles – only James, the Lord’s brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing to you is no lie. Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judaea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they praised God because of me.
-The Word of the Lord
-Thanks be to God.
Sermon
I would always end up jealous on the days when the students who came from anther country were invited to dress up in traditional clothes and bring their traditional foods for the class to eat. They were invited to share a part of their heritage with the rest of my elementary school. It’s weird that I remember it all so well I guess, but I really wanted to wear something cool. I remember that in my class on that day there were students who wore Kimonos, others who wore traditional clothes of Eastern Spain, a girl with roots to Sweden I think even wore some wooden shoes her grand mother brought her, but I remember not really having much of anything that made me feel special. I would end up feeling like I didn’t have any deep roots to some exciting part of the world.
It’s possible that this experience of longing for an exciting culture to celebrate is the root of my fascination with Irish Spring Soap – that was all I used for a while in fact. When I did some kind of research paper I found out that I was mostly Irish, so buying this soap made me feel like I was connected to something exciting. Or, I figured I was at least beginning to smell like someone connected to something exciting.
But Paul the Apostle, unlike me, seems to have done a lot more than use a particular soap to celebrate his roots. We know from this passage in Galatians that he advanced in Judaism beyond many people his own age, for he was far more zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. He was considered by some to be a Jew’s Jew, a man who did more than buy Jewish Spring Soap, but ate Judaism, read Judaism, breathed in Judaism, truly living out the traditions of his ancestors – living in the line of hero’s like Moses, Ruth, and Ester. If he would have gone to elementary school with me I would have been jealous beyond measure.
But, this faith of Paul’s led him to persecute the church – he in fact, as this passage we have read this morning tells us, was persecuting the church in the hopes of destroying it. To use his own words in this letter: “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.” But God, who had set him apart before he was born and called through God’s grace in what he calls a “revelation from Jesus Christ”, changed the course of his life completely so that he might proclaim Jesus to the Gentiles.
To do so is not nearly so easy as some might think, and for those of you who think it might have been easy for Paul to turn his back on his traditions, turn his back on all that he had been raised to believe and take pride in, let me tell you that it would have been hard for me to give it all up. As a kid sitting in a lunchroom with a hot dog or peanut butter sandwich, longing for an enchilada, Kim chi, or potato pancakes, anything to make me feel like I was a part of some exciting culture, I don’t see how he did it sometimes. His culture defined him, his culture told him how to live and how to measure his success, his culture told him whom he was – and in measuring his success and his adequacy, his worth, told him that he was pretty darn good. According to the standards of his culture he was a good person, a successful person, a zealous believer.
But he let it all go, something very difficult for anyone to do.
Including myself, who at one time thought his only link to anything respectable was through a bar of soap. Of course, even though my family line goes back to Ireland and Wales, as well as many other exciting places, I have my own cultural heritage that runs much deeper. I am connected to the American South in a way that does make me proud at times. I take pride in eating boiled peanuts and chicken livers, not only because I like the way they taste, but because I love the way it feels to be connected to a particular place in this world, connected to my ancestors in an important way.
But Southern food is merely the tip of the ice berg when it comes to the culture that I am so much a part of I don’t recognize it sometimes. A culture so much a part of me that I didn’t recognize it was even there in elementary school. Today, it is funny, but also ironic, that I found some kind of cultural expression in Irish Spring Soap, because in buying something, I was doing the thing that seems to define my true culture more than doing almost anything else.
Its true, and sometimes it’s a sad truth, but we are in fact drenched in a consumer culture, just as much, if not more, than Paul was drenched by his Judaism. Paul learned the Law, those ancient rules of his people recorded in books like Numbers and Deuteronomy, and we – “celebrate everything American” – a slogan I saw not long ago just above a huge plate of stake and potatoes – often by buying stuff. Driving up 85 yesterday I saw a man driving a car with a giant bumper sticker that said, “I love my wife.” A great example of how we show our love and affection by buying things, by buying things that display who we love for everyone to see, whether in a bumper sticker, a tattoo, or a diamond ring. We even express our faith through this cultural mechanism, buying Jesus fish for the car, books on faith at the grocery store or local Christian Book store, even watching movies, whether it be Bruce almighty, Evan Almighty, or Jesus of Nazareth, we do in fact celebrate what we believe and who we believe in all through our most common cultural mechanism – and so we might ask ourselves, who is it that we are worshiping in the act of buying things?
Through a “revelation from Jesus Christ” Paul left the faith of his father’s and mother’s to follow Jesus. It was a revelation so strong that he became a great leader in the faith that he once persecuted, the faith he once wanted to destroy – and I wonder how and why he did it. But I assume that it is for the same reasons that, despite what we buy and what we are able to buy, we do not find the happiness we are promised. There is a Voltzwagon ad up on I 85 that says, “Negate Negativity, Dare to be Happy.” I guess this one struck me in a way that some other signs don’t because it seems so happy to say exactly what it means, whereas other advertisements that are forced on us each day are not so up-front. “Dare to be Happy,” at a time when the world does seem so negative, but do so by buying a car that runs on something that is going to be more and more expensive, needing more and more maintenance, that you will spend more and more time in as your commute gets worse and worse.
And if this car does not “Negate Negativity,” If “Daring to be Happy” and buying this new car does not in fact turn out to be all we thought it would, what will you do then. I assume Paul faced a similar situation living according to the Law. If maybe he could only squash this little group of Christians he might have thought to himself, maybe if I just get them destroyed, then I’ll get the promotion I was hoping for, and then I’ll be happy – knowing that my way of life is what God intends.
The fact that Paul was faced with, is that the way he was raised, the culture that surrounded him, was not as perfect as he had been raised to believe – and so it is with us. We have been raised in a culture that some times tells us one thing while Jesus tells us another. In the same way Paul found that he could not live up to the Law, could not find his salvation by living according to its statues and claims, and saw in Jesus Christ the true means for salvation – so we will find that though our culture seeks happiness through more money, more goods; seeks peace through bigger guns and a new campaign for a missile defense system, buying up the most technologically advanced products that are promised to ensure a safer and more secure future, what we find in the Bible is very different. Jesus calls us to trust in his own act of salvation, not in our ability to earn it ourselves. To trust in God’s call, mentioned three times, in Micah, Isaiah, and then Joel, this call to “beat our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks.”
Such a call doesn’t make much sense in our consumer culture, and the call of Jesus didn’t make sense in comparison to Paul’s culture either- that God’s love would come for free, to all people, whether they wore the right fabrics, ate the right foods, obeyed the right traditions – so different in fact was this Jesus that the Law that Paul tried so hard to live by must have seemed so harsh, so much like a prison, once the “revelation from Jesus Christ” set him free.
To think, that he could eat shrimp and pork, when he had gone so long without it.
To think, that the beard could be cut, when it had taken so long to grow it.
And then, the circumcision – well, we will talk about that later in chapter 5.
This new way of life that Paul discovered in Jesus Christ he will later call “A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” and why shouldn’t he? This new life in Jesus is so different from the life that he was living as a Pharisee.
And the Christian life is no different in contrast to “this present evil age.” We want to buy happiness in cars and houses, buy security in alarms and locks, even buy peace in missile defense systems. But we can fight against the culture that enslaves, living lives for Christ by doing the smallest things. In letting go of our money, giving it away, we are setting ourselves free from a culture that tells us there is not enough, claiming our new life in the new creation where there is plenty. In saying that more hours at work is not necessarily worth all that the pay check promises, to believe that less could be more, that life lived in ways that build up relationships, human dignity- a life that honor’s all people, that these things are more important than anything else.
In doing so God will set us free from the clutches of a culture that we will never measure up to, and that God will use us just as God used Paul – the wealthiest country in the world can do just as much by changing its ways – and freedom, happiness, and peace will be our wages.
-Amen