GALATIANS 4 (Reimagined)
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.. Galatians 5:1 NRSVUE
I reimagined the fourth chapter of Galatians 4 as a letter Paul might write to the Christian churches of America today. I read this letter as part of my sermon on August 9, 2025.
To the Christian churches in America,
1:2-3
Grace and peace to you in the magnanimous name of Jesus Christ, who emptied the heavenly storehouses to heap blessings upon all of us so that we might live with unending wonder for the mystery of our shared existence. Amen.
1:6
Now that our mandatory social pleasantries have been fulfilled, allow me to state the purpose of my letter bluntly: You Americans boast to the world about your love for freedom, but your daily behavior demonstrates how you actually prefer to lie down and suffocate underneath the boot of subjugation.
1:8-9
To make matters worse, you preach from beneath the proverbial sole that your faith in Jesus Christ led you straight into this tyranny which could not be further from the truth! Look, if you want to choose to live in darkness, go right ahead.
But may God rain curses upon the one who proclaims it is faith in Jesus Christ which leads them into despotism when we know the sacred Name leads us directly to the untethered freedom for every human being. If you missed my point, let me be clear: I don’t believe in hell, but if I did, I hope it would be reserved for the people who profane the Gospel by misleading others to believe God yearns for us to be miserable, joyless, and lonely.
1:10
If it isn’t obvious to you yet, I’m not trying to win any popularity contests by sending you this letter. Instead, I write these harsh words to you because I serve Jesus Christ, and my trust in His holy name rouses my voice to speak up when I see my siblings in Christ practicing idolatry,
1:11-12
In our modern world, we mistakenly think of idolatry as a sin of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth! Instead, we commit idolatry today whenever we reduce the infinite nature of God down to a morsel we can comprehend, and then worship that morsel as the complete definition of God.
Precious few understand the concept of idolatry better than Barry Taylor, who is, of all things, the former Road manager for the rock band AC/DC. Taylor once said, "God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.”
This statement illustrates the human need for mental blankets as our faith seeks to understand the nature of our Creator. Our ephemeral brans can never fully grasp the eternal Divine, so we must use metaphors to comprehend the incomprehensible. There is nothing wrong with using words less than God to understand God which includes even the name “God”! But we commit the sin of idolatry when we throw a blanket over the Mystery and then insist that your blanket is the Mystery!
4:1-7
My point is this: You Christians in America accepted the mystery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, threw a blanket over it, and then proclaimed your little blanket to be the complete experience of God! You told the world God viewed each and every human being as a sinner and, from the moment they arrived on this planet and drew their first breath, they instantly saturated their lungs with sin and deserved nothing less than the death penalty.
According to your blanket, God could only see these fragile infants as worthy of love if they eventually accepted their sinful identity and expressed faith in a Savior to die in their place. And so, you said, God sent the Son to die a horrific death which in turn settled a debt with the devil or satisfied the wrath of God (depending on which Christian you ask), so that we might one day, in the distant and far off future and in a distant and far off world, finally experience the taste of freedom
My friends, this gospel is a false gospel. Your ideas lack any trace of freedom and reek of complete subjugation to sin.
For the core idea in your blanket is that sin is in control of our destinies as long as we are on this earth. Under this paradigm, the purpose of life is to hunker down, hang on, and pray Jesus Christ will return soon so that we might finally have Him as the master of our fate and not sin.
This paper-thin blanket weaves together many errors in logic, primarily in the way it condemns the air in our lungs, without any acknowledgement that this same air sustains life in all of us through our lungs. For whenever and wherever we breathe on this planet we breathe in the very presence of God.
If you feel like I am stretching the Great Mystery, then consider the story of Jesus Christ.
For Jesus Christ, the very incarnation of God, lived in utero, gestated inside the womb, emerged from a vagina, and inhaled O2 molecules so that he might live. I must ask all of you: In that first breath, was Jesus deemed a sinner? Of course not! In that first breath, was sin suddenly in control of His destiny? Absolutely not! In that first breath, was Jesus’ primary purpose on this earth to hang on and survive? Certainly not!
Instead, the birth of Jesus Christ showed us, unequivocally, that God is with us the from moment we take our first breath.
But the life of Jesus did not end with his birth. Jesus lived in the full spectrum of our humanity. He laughed, He cried, He ate, He drank, He peed, and He pooped. He paid taxes, He got a job, and He loved dinner parties. He went to synagogue, He debated, He believed, and He doubted. He bled, He healed, He prayed, and He healed others. He inspired, He infuriated, He changed minds, and He befuddled. He felt the sting of betrayal, He felt the weight of abandonment, and He felt firsthand the unknown mystery of death.
And why did He do all of this? To set in stone the scandalous truth that God is with us in every millisecond of our human experience.
His life forever challenges the oppressive idea that God sees us as sinners and, instead, serves as the official adoption papers that every one of us is a child of God. God chose us to be God’s children before the foundation of the world!
And no amount of sin, no amount of mistakes, and no amount of apathy toward religion, can take our sacred identity away from us.
4:8-11
Before you understood the truth of our adoption, your belief in Jesus served as a means to an end: You said the Sinner’s Prayer, you managed your sins, and you applied for membership in your local church, because you wanted to believe that life AFTER death was possible. But then, some years later, the blanket tore and you caught a glimpse of the mystery and you realized Jesus Christ called you to believe that life BEFORE death was possible.
4:12-15
Which brings us to your country’s favorite word: Freedom.
May I remind you, my siblings, of our story together? When I arrived in your land, you threw open your arms to welcome me.
But you also received a shock to the system when you discovered that I could not see out of either of my eyes. Apparently, you heard all about my work and all about me, but no one told the churches in America I was blind. Or some of you heard of my blindness, but you also heard Ananias cured me from this physical infirmity.
And after spending a few days with you, you began to say things like, “Paul, a few of us put a prayer vigil together for you. We are going to pray for God to cure you!” or “Oh Paul, I thought God cured your blindness! Did you become blind again?” or “Paul, is an eye transplant possible? If so, take my eyes, for I think your ability to see can help the world far more than if I am able to see.”
I still appreciate the good will you showed me in these words! But those same words revealed something about the way you perceived me.
At the beginning, you focused so intensely on my lack of eyesight, that you barely listened to a word I said. I began to sense you wanted my blindness to go away so that you could be more comfortable.
But days stretched into weeks, and then weeks stretched into months. You began to see my humanity beyond my disability and you listened to the words I shared.
I taught you how, even without my eyesight, I still love to be alive. I still love to breathe this air. I still love the taste of grapes. I still love the smell of rain. I still love the sound of Janelle Monaé’s voice. And I still love every step of my life, even in complete darkness, because I trust each one of these steps to be in complete companionship with my Creator.
You want to talk about freedom? Freedom is when one suffers from blindness and still lives in a way in which the blindness does not define who we are.
But freedom does not stop with physical disabilities.
Freedom is when we grieve the loss of a loved one and then continue to open our hearts to love even though we know the pain this might cause.
Freedom is, in the words of the great Howard Thurman, “Wherever (the spirit of Jesus Christ) appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage;
for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.” Freedom is life before death.
And when in the time I spent with you, I saw you trust this freedom in Jesus Christ even though I could not physically see anything.
4:16-21
But since I left your presence I heard your testimonies, your sermons, and your podcasts which abandoned love, liberation, and hope and instead stoked fear, hypocrisy, and hatred all under the guise of “freedom.”
What happened to you? How can you walk into church and listen to the Gospel every week and then walk out of church and publicly assert true freedom exists in the ownership of a gun?
Tell me, will you not listen to freedom as it exposes the hypocrisy of your idolatry? Because I hold doubts as to whether or not you truly desire freedom.
4:22-5:1
Imagine a scenario in which you wake up in the middle of a field. As you blink in the sunlight, you look around and see two churches at opposite ends of the field. While some distance separates these two buildings,
the field is peaceful enough that if you sit still, and hone your ears, you can make out from what each church is preaching to their congregations.
The pastor of the church to the east speaks confidently about the supernatural power of God, and declares God possesses the power to enable any of God’s followers to live forever. All we need to do is believe!
Beyond life without end, the pastor says, she can’t really promise too much about what God will or will not do. For if God grants us the ability to live forever, then wouldn’t that be enough for us?
She sits down and as the postlude subsides from the church to the east, the prelude from the church to the west rises from the silence.
The pastor of this church speaks with equal confidence about the supernatural power of God, and she announces God possesses the power to enable each of us to live in the depths of what it means to be human. All we need to do is believe!
Beyond a life of depth, the pastor says, she can’t really promise too much about what God will or will not do. For if God grants us the ability to live with purpose, then wouldn’t that be enough for us?
She sits down, and as the prelude from the west begins to die down,
and silence returns to your ears, a question arises: If both churches could deliver on their promise for a single miracle from God, then which church would you attend?
If freedom is what you long for, then the church of the west, the church which offers the miracle of depth, is the church you would call your home.
For if you could live forever, but never experience anything beyond
the surface layer of what it means to be human, then life would become a lonely curse with no end in sight.
But if you only live for one more week, and in those seven days you fight for justice and savor a delicious meal and celebrate another’s accomplishments and appreciate your own achievements and make love and play in a band and grieve and respond to hatred with compassion and forgive another and apologize to someone you wronged and accept love and also give love away then you have lived a life worth living even though that life is filled with imperfections, death, and heartache.
The great prophet Isaiah picked up on this idea long before Jesus arrived on this earth. In Isaiah’s day, the prevailing theology taught that any couple who struggled with infertility was a couple who had made God angry. Otherwise, the theologians argued, God would have blessed them with the ability to get pregnant. As you can imagine, this heaped a massive amount of guilt on couples who already suffered from the isolation of infertility.
But Isaiah believed something different. He believed couples could live a meaningful and fulfilling life whether they could bear children or not.
In fact, Isaiah even saw how barrenness could be a sign of God’s blessing!
Isaiah wrote, “Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children,
burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs;
for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous
than the children of the one who is married.”
Even in infertility, Isaiah believed life before death was possible. This is what it means to be free.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the idea that you are anything less than a child of God.
Amen.