Scripture: Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3

“For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God.”

-- Galatians 2:19

The second century Christian text entitled “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” tells the young churches how they might spot a false prophet. These churches were house churches and they received traveling apostles, teachers, evangelists and prophets. The “Teaching” tells them to give hospitality to all such visitors but only for a limited time. If a prophet wants to stay more than three days he or she is a false prophet; that is how you tell. False prophets stay too long. My Methodist tradition is one of itinerant ministers, and I think it was John Wesley himself who said that if a preacher could not say all that he had to say in two years there was something wrong with him, and so in any case he should move on.

I have been with you eight and a half years now and by those standards I have been here much too long, but circumstances have been different and it is not until recently that I have become convinced that for the sake of the church I should move on. You need new and younger pastoral leadership, and I have turned 65, a decent retirement age. You need to hear the Gospel from fresh hearts and minds, more in tune with contemporary suburban culture than I am. I have preached 421 sermons here, and as I carried most of them, collated and bound, from my office to my car last week, I felt how heavy they are. You have done well to endure them. Some have found them helpful, even inspiring, for which I am grateful. Nobody excepting perhaps my dear wife Rosemary (and possibly also Vic Fredericks and Bob Mullen of the 8 o’clock group) have heard them all, but most of you have heard enough of them and can now look forward to a change.

The text I take up on this my retirement day is set by the lectionary, but is in any case a favorite of mine. In Galatians 2 the Apostle Paul says that he had to die to religion in order to live for God. “”For I through the law, died to the law, that I might live to God.” The law here is the law of Moses, which is a symbol of the whole Jewish religion into which Paul was born and for which he was so zealous, and thus a symbol of all organized religion. So the saying amounts to an admission that he found his religion to be a barrier to his communion with God; the more religious he was the farther he drifted away. Thus Paul raises acutely the question of the relationship between participation in organized religion on the one hand and life with God on the other, and there is much in what he teaches to suggest that in important ways we have to resist the former in order fulfill the latter. Be that as it may it is not the theme I wish to dwell on today.

Rather I want to reflect on what a life for God might be, as I look back on a life that has always at least wanted to be such a life for God. Whether we succeed or fail we Christians all have as a constant melodic line in the composition of our lives the desire that they should be for God. Paul had to give up the religion of his ancestors, in which he had attained great prominence, in order to live for God. He had to sacrifice the promise of a great future in the religious establishment of his time in order to be true to God. On that Damascus road he discovered that despite his great learning and position of trust he was headed in the wrong direction, and had to retrace and then repeat the journey of his life. It cost him a great loss of prestige and wealth, great physical deprivation and suffering, but he could call all such things “garbage,” by comparison with the great gain of knowing Christ and being a part of Christ’s suffering in this world, assured of being a part of his resurrection in the next (Philippians 3:8-10). In our text he calls this a being “crucified with Christ.” He had to make a great sacrifice in order to live for God, and so might we.

Being crucified with Christ means dying to the rewards and satisfactions that we gain from success in the world of men and woman. We do this in order to follow Christ, in order to live not for the world but for God. Listen to the Apostle as he explains what it means to live for God: (I find these lines the most moving in all the Bible). “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  The conviction that God’s Son loves me and gives himself for me is the heart and soul of my own life as it is of the Apostle’s.  and of every Christian’s. I can scarcely take it in. He gave himself to the cruelty and humiliation of the Cross, for me! For me! How can he then fail to give me all things in due time?

On this day when I give back to God the gift that he gave me, the gift of the privilege of preaching His Word, I feel it as a crucifixion, a self-sacrifice, a dying. But it is a dying with Christ, a dying to one set of satisfactions of in this world, in order that I might live to God. God loaned me the honor of the pulpit for these years and now I must give it back; but at this time of loss I know that although I no longer live as before, Christ continues to live in me, and the life I now shall live in the flesh I shall continue to live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.  He loved me and gave himself for me long before I loved him and gave myself for him, and long after I can no longer because of frailty give him much he will continue to give me all, because he loves me. So living for God entails at the right time giving up the precious things God once gave us.

I have always found Paul a special teacher and guide. Perhaps because I have the same stormy temperament as he had, stir up enemies as readily as he did, irritate people, as he did. I know it has not been easy for you to have me as your pastor. I apologize for that aspect of my personality, but I assure you that I have always risked your anger for a good cause, the cause of speaking the truth of God as I believed God gave me to see it at the time. And of course you were never under any necessity to agree with me. Living for God entails risking the anger of men and women.

Let us at this point take a peek at our Gospel lesson in Luke 7. Simon the Pharisee who refused to show Jesus the elementary courtesies due to a guest, - a kiss of welcome, water to wash the dust from his feet, oil to refresh his head and face - is an example of what Saul the Pharisee was like before he became Paul the Apostle. I believe that he would not even have gone as far as Simon did to invite Jesus to dinner, despite the fact that having invited him he insulted him. The woman must have been aware of the insult, and made a move to mitigate it by offering Jesus her most precious possession, the alabaster flask of ointment.  She weeps because her beloved, the one man of all the men she had known and had known her, who really loved her, has been humiliated, and she cannot stand it. She lets her tears lave his dusty feet, and wipes them with her hair, and all the religious man, the representative of organized religion, can say is that she is a whore and Jesus is a false prophet because he cannot see that. It never occurs to him that Jesus receives her caresses precisely because she is a whore, because he came to save sinners, because the power of his purity is greater than any pollution that might come from her, and that as she lavishes love on him he is cleansing and healing her, responding with pure love to her exploited and exhausted love, taking it into himself and healing it. The representative of religion can only censure Jesus, and thus set up once again the sad conflict between the truth of God and the power of the religious institutions. “Is it possible to live for God in such institutions?” one asks.

When Paul says the he died to the law through the law he means that his encounter with the risen Christ showed him the cruel absurdity of that kind of religious life. The truth of God is not the laws of religion or the customs of society but the divinely inspired openness to the love of others that Jesus shows in this Gospel story. Jesus shows us here the power of receiving love. He receives her love, he accepts her caresses, he lets her tears fall upon him, her hair rub across his skin, this filthy whore. We all imagine ourselves eager to give love, but are we able to receive it? That is the more searching question of our Gospel text. Simon the Pharisee, poor fellow, is able neither to receive nor to give love, because he knows it all and controls it all within the patterns of his religious law. To live for God he must die to the control of the religious law.

“The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Can you receive that love? Can you let Jesus love you? Or do you insist on loving him and thus controlling the relationship. I can no longer control anything in the little institution which is this church, if I ever could,  since I am giving up my role in the organization. So I pray that this congregation will remain centered on the Son of God, and allow him to love you and give himself for you and to you, and thus mitigate as far as possible the temptation to live for religion rather than for God.

May I end on some personal notes? Today is the third retirement day I have enjoyed in my life. The first was in 1986 when I retired as the Dean of Chapel and Senior Minister of Stanford Memorial Church. The second was in 1997 when I retired as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. And now Rosemary and I have the sweet sorrow of retiring from your midst here at the Woodside Village Church. So many of you have become our beloved friends. We have shared with you the birth and baptism of your children, your marriages, the crises of illness, the joys of recovery, the solemnity of death. You have listened to my preaching and taken the sacrament from my hands. I thank you for the honor and trust of those relationships.

I have had five careers during the forty years of ministry, as a college professor, a seminary professor, a university professor, chaplain and administrator, a political researcher and a parish pastor. For each of these God gave me the blessing appropriate to the time and the challenge. Thus I am firmly convinced that God gives the appropriate blessing for every stage of our life. Therefore we need not look back longingly, but rather thankfully, and we need not look ahead fearfully but rather expectantly, seeking the blessing God has for us this time, and time and time again until the final blessing, for which in the end we all live. Living for God means, therefore, living in the light and power of the divine blessing given for the time we are now in, and promised for all time and for eternity. 

I bid farewell in the words of Paul. He ends the letter to the Galatians thus: “But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world…The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters.

Amen.