GALATIANS 5 (reimagined)
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love. Galatians 5:6 NRSVUE
I reimagined the fifth chapter of Galatians as a letter Paul might write to the Christian churches of America today. I read this letter as part of my sermon at Paradox on August 16, 2025.
To the Christian churches in America,
1:2-3
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, who, before the establishment of the foundations of the universe, chose us to be the adopted children of God so that we might live in freedom, in love, and in wonder forever and ever and ever. Amen.
1:6-9
Now that I have met the standards of courteous etiquette allow me to assert my uncensored feelings with this letter: I am disappointed.
For when I visited your land a few years ago and spoke with each of you, I taught you the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you passionately accepted the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and you committed your lives to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But after I left, you professed conviction in a different gospel. Your gospel perverted God’s gifts of freedom, love, and wonder and replaced them with captivity, greed, and boredom.
My friends, the word “gospel” means “good news,” and any religion, philosophy, or belief structure which leads you toward captivity, greed, and bored cannot ever be categorized as good news.
To heighten the severity of your fallacy, you proclaimed this so called “gospel” as the product of your Christian faith. You attached the name of Jesus to your narrow worldview, and preached from your pulpit, that God’s desire for all of us is to be subdued, greedy, and bored! This agitates me to no end! I frequently express my frustrations about you in prayer and I say things to the Lord about you which, if my prayers ever became public, would make my very own mother blush in embarrassment.
1:10-12
This may sound harsh, particularly in your digital economy, which runs on the fuel of intangible “likes.” I write this letter without any narcissistic inclination for you to “like” me. I write this letter with a willingness to lose all of my popularity, all of my influence, and all of my life’s work so that you might abandon this perverted gospel of human origin and trust the true Gospel of divine origin.
As I look at the churches in America, my heart feels heavy with a great disappointment. You lost the ability to distinguish the work of God from the work of humankind. And this inability to discern the human from the divine suffocates the freedom Jesus Christ promised us in His Gospel.
Allow me to be clear: Humankind is capable of creating great things. I love the boldness of Harmonia Rosales’ paintings, I love the sotries in Percival Everett’s novels, I love the taste of Ryan Burke’s ice cream. I love the engineering of Santiago Calatrava’s bridges, and I love the wellness provided from an mRNA vaccine. These creations are gifts and they are worth celebrating.
But notice how these gifts transform into curses when we steal them from the hands of their finite creators and mislead others by placing them in the infinite hand of God!
What if we declared Percival Everett’s novels to be the work of God and every word in those pages suddenly had authority over our lives?
What if we told people they could never fully understand the love of God until they tasted ice cream from A La Minute and suddenly everyone felt the need for a mandatory pilgrimage to Redlands?
What if we exclaimed Santiago Calatrava received divine inspiration during his design phase, and suddenly changed the International Building Code to require every bridge to look the exact same?
What if we eradicated polio and gave God all the glory, and then suddenly shut down all future research on vaccines because we believed God will save us from our disease if God wills it to be true?
What if we established Harmonia Rosales’ depiction of God to be God’s preferred depiction, and suddenly outlawed art which chose to depict God as anything other than an old black woman in the sky?
These hypothetical questions illustrate humankind’s capacity to of create wonderful things. But these same wonderful things become idolatrous the moment we assign divine intervention as their reason for being wonderful.
5:2-3
Which brings us to the pressing question for the churches in America today: My friends, do you believe the Holy Bible is the work of God? Or do you believe the Holy Bible is the work of humankind?
As you describe the Bible today, I hear you employ words like “Inerrant” or “Infallible” or “God’s perfect word,” or “history and science without contradiction or error.” These descriptors belong to the divine and divulge your answer with unmitigated clarity: You passionately believe the Bible is the work of God.
I need you to listen to me! If you Christians believe the Bible to be the work of God, then Jesus Christ is of no use to you! For if you truly believe the Bible to be the perfect, unblemished, infallible word of God, then you are shackled to its words and obligated to follow every rule contained in its wide berth of pages.
May I remind you of the laws you must follow if you believe God spoke these words perfectly into scripture? These rules include:
Forcing men to take a bath and a time out for the rest of the day after self-gratification. (Lev. 15:16)
Forcing women on their period to sit on specialized menstruation chairs everywhere and then policing those same chairs to ensure women who aren’t on their period, men, and children avoid sitting on them. (Lev. 15:26)
And forcing your pastor to slaughter a bull in a church service, in front of the children (!) to cement God’s forgiveness for that pastor as they lead the congregation for the rest of the year. (Lev. 16:11)
And if those three rules sound overwhelming, may I remind you these rules exist within the span of just one chapter of just one book in the Bible!
So my Christian siblings, do you really want to claim the direct inspiration for the Bible and then enact the death penalty on those who commit adultery? (Lev. 20:10)
Do you really want to say God gave us these rules to follow forever and then examine genitals at the main entry doors of your church? (Deut. 23:1)
Do you really want to hold up the Bible as the complete picture of God and then also defend God’s word justifying slavery as ethical as long as one enslaves others on the basis of race? (Lev. 25:44)
Certainly not!
Consider the damage, the heartache, the oppression, the beatings and the sin unjustly committed in the name of Jesus Christ all because Christians believed the Bible to be the direct work of God!
Now, I anticipate at least one of you listening to my words and objecting, “How dare you Paul! How do you know the Bible is the work of humankind and not the work of God?” The answer, my friends, is quite simple. If we look at all of the books in the Bible, they reveal the truth about this book’s origin.
In my religious tradition, we call the first five books in the Bible the law of Moses, and NOT the law of God.
In my religious tradition, we entitled the Prophet Isaiah’s book, “Isaiah,” and we did not see fit to title that same work “God.”
In my religious tradition, we wrote our history down in the sixth century BCE, and titled that history “1 and 2 Kings.”
Three hundred years later, we realized how much we misinterpreted the work of God in our history. So we rewrote, corrected, and changed our history and then titled it, “1 and 2 Chronicles.” And when the time came to decide which version of history to include in our holy text, the committee reached a profound conclusion: Both accounts of history are holy! Why? To remind us the recording of history, even history in the Bible, is the work of humans and not the work of God.
When we stand under the falsehood that God authored the Bible, we immediately dive into rule keeping and sin management which leads us to captivity, greed, and boredom.
5:4-7
But, my friends, did Jesus walk among us to give us a book? No!
Do we go to church and sing praises a book who redeems us? No!
Did this book exist before the big bang exploded and set the entire known universe into motion? No!
Scientists teach us human beings have existed on this planet for over 200,000 years, while archaeologists and historians teach us the Christian Bible has only been on this planet for 2,000 years. Where do you Christians get the audacity from to claim that people need the Bible in order to understand the love of God?
For in Christ Jesus, neither complete knowledge of the Bible nor complete alienation from the Bible counts for anything, the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love!
5:8-12
And yet, just a few years ago, over 300 prominent leaders of the Christian church gathered in Chicago and published a statement unequivocally denying the humanity of the Bible and falsely establishing the Bible as a product of divine authorship.
This statement they concocted reads, “We are persuaded that to deny (the inherency of scripture) is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word which marks true Christian faith.”
In response to this statement, all I can say is, “Really?!?!?!?!” “To deny the inerrancy of scripture is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ?” My siblings, if you limit the infinite all-powerful Creator of the universe to 1000 pages that can fit in the palm of your hand, then you suffer from a severely minuscule understanding of God!
And so, I write this letter imploring you to repent. Completely reject the inerrancy of scripture so that you might fully embrace the humanity of the Bible. For those who continue to perpetrate this lie will pay the price!
Now, some may hear my words and deem me to be a hypocrite, for people often hear me teach from the Bible about the nature of God. And that is true, I preach from this book. I reference this book. I know this book. And I debate with others about what this book means for us today.
But I only love the Bible when it sits in its proper place: as a literary work rising out of the mud of the earth rather than an edict wrapped in cellophane descending from heaven.
For if God gave us a perfect book, then there would be no need for the birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ! And I wish those who suggest otherwise would have their eyeballs ripped out so they could not see, their ears swollen shut so they could not hear, and their fingers chopped off so they could not read braille!
5:13-15
One day, when Jesus walked among us, religious officials approached him as he sat in the shadow of the Temple in Jerusalem. These religious leaders sought to trap Jesus with a question and make him look like a fool in front of his most devoted followers. “Dear Teacher,” they said, “which commandment in the Bible is the greatest?”
Rather than ducking the question by saying, “I love all rules equally man,” Jesus decided to play along. He cited a commandment from Deuteronomy and said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment.”
Before the religious leaders could say anything, Jesus plowed ahead, “And a second is like it,” he said, and then quoted a commandment from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
And while most Christians are familiar with this exchange between Jesus and the religious leaders, they often neglect the last sentence in this story. Jesus said to them. “(The Bible) hangs entirely on these two commandments.”
In other words, the Bible exists to help us love God and love each other. And if our reading of the Bible leads us away from this love, then we should put it down, because we are reading it incorrectly. Sadly, the most boisterous voices in American Christianity ignore this teaching from Christ and insist on strict devotion to the Bible! No wonder you bite, devour, and backstab one another!
5:16-21
I know it can be unsettling to hear me speak plainly about the Bible. You may feel discombobulated because your desire to become a disciple of Christ probably led to your erroneously high regard for the Bible in the first place!
So how do you know if you are following a false gospel of humans or the true Gospel of Jesus Christ? The answer is simple: Look at where your faith in the Gospel has led you!
Consider for a moment where you are today and where you were on the day you first trusted in a your current beliefs. As you feel the weight of your entire spiritual journey, a necessary question forms in your mind: How have you changed since you first started to believe?
Are you an angrier person now than when you first began?
Are you more jealous of your friends?
Do you feel more envious of the rich and famous?
Are you more prone to drink alcohol because you feel the need to hide?
Do you fight for hours and hours with others over trivial matters?
Do you rush to judgment when you meet someone different than you?
Are you a greedier person now, even though you have more money?
Do you care more or less about the partners you have sex with?
Do you resent personal growth and development?
Do you celebrate the faults and failures of another’s religion?
Do you feel less connected to the people of the world around you?
Are you kept awake at night because you are deeply suspicious of others?
If you answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, then I must warn you that you are devoted to a human gospel, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
5:22-26
But may I ask you to consider your entire spiritual journey, from another angle? Once again, call to mind who you are today and who you used to be when you first started to believe. How have you changed in that time?
Are you a more loving person?
Are you a more joyful person?
Do you find yourself working toward peace instead of insisting on being right?
Do you find you are quicker to apologize?
Are you more interested in forgiveness than punishment?
Are you a more patient person?
Do you find it easier to be more generous?
Are you a person who is more likely to follow through on their word?
Have you heard others describe you as a gentler person?
Have you found it easier to say, “No,” to things because you are more comfortable with the person God created you to be?
If you answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, then I celebrate your devotion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ! My friends, the whole direction, flow, energy, movement and purpose of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to help you emphatically say, “YES!’ to all of these questions! For the freedom we find in Jesus Christ leads us toward these gifts of the Spirit and makes possible us the seemingly impossible experience of living in the kingdom of God here and now.
How do you know if you are following the true Gospel of God? The answer is found in the transformation of your heart.
May your faith in Jesus Christ lead you to become more loving people, more joyful people, more patient people, more kind people, more generous people, more faithful people, and more gentle people. For to God be the glory of the gift of this Gospel forever and ever!
Amen.