The Rev Gerald Mann, the founder of a religious institution on Loop 360 currently named the Riverbend Church, explained the success of his operation by saying, “We take ‘em any way we can get ‘em.” While his phraseology may not be quite that of the Book of Common Prayer, the sentiment underlying his words is very much like that which guided St Paul and quickly embroiled him in the first great controversy in the Church, an angry controversy which, in its own day, was as hotly debated and bitterly fought as today’s polemics and actions swirling around the nature of human sexuality and the place of homosexuals in the Church of God.

For Paul the issue was the universality of the Cross: Christ may have come to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but Christ died for all of us, for Jew, for Gentile, for every other stripe and ilk of humankind.

It was Paul’s calling to found churches. One place he visited to do this was Galatia; he founded churches there, and, as was his practice, he preached to ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ and labored diligently to bring them into the family of Christ just as they were. He took ‘em any way he could get ‘em. Then, as he always did, he left those churches in the hands of local leaders to go elsewhere, to preach the good news of Christ in new places and to found new Christian communities. Hot on his heels, however, other evangelists came into Galatia with a quite different understandings. Jesus was a Jew, they said, a good Jew, a follower of the law. His disciples were Jews too, and so were his apostles— even that heretic who calls himself Paul. Christians ought to be Jews too, they went on, and that meant men had to be circumcized before they could be baptized and enter the Church. When Paul got wind of this new development he was absolutely furious. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but Paul ran her a close second. His letter to the Galatians is scathing. He rakes them and those other missionaries over the coals— but even in his wrath Paul was able to spout remarkably solid theology.

Today’s brief reading from Galatians is a case in point. Paul describes his Lord as the Son of God, sent by God as a human being, as much as Paul was a human being, as much as any of us is a human being; and sent by God to be a Jew, as much as Paul was a Jew, to redeem those who were under law— the Jewish law, which Paul found so inadequate for salvation— and those under the law of the pagan world, which Paul found even less to his liking. So Paul says, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive adoption as children.” Paul’s theology, even when talking about the birth of Christ, always has the Cross at its heart— the Cross and the freedom the Cross bought for us all through the sufferings and death of Christ.

Part of this freedom was, for Paul, freedom from the law. In this morning’s reading wer heard Paul say, “The law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.” The word Paul uses here is “pedagogue.” Back in his day, a pedagogue was not a teacher but a slave, usually an older man, who accompanied boys roughly between the ages of six and sixteen to and from school. It was the pedagogue’s duty to carry the books and writing materials, to make sure the boy actually got to the school (and didn’t run off to play in the streets or get into trouble), and to act as a body guard to protect his charge from kidnappers. The pedagogue had the authority to punish and, of course, he was able to give a good or bad report to the boy’s father when the day was done.

His presence was a continual reminder that the boy was still a child, not yet able to stand on his own two feet, not yet able to make his own decisions, not yet able to chart his own course. So, says Paul, the law was our pedagogue until Christ came and opened the door to faith. In other words, through the faith of Christ we can now be reckoned as adults; through faith we can make our own moral decisions, make our own way through the world, work out our own salvation.

John was not writing a letter in the heat of controversy; he was, rather, laying out for his own Christian community a thoughtful and considered explication of just who this Jesus called Christ really is. Like Paul, he starts very early on, with the eternal Word, with God’s everlasting, consuming desire to communicate with his creation. This Act of Communication, This voicing of the Divine Love, says John, became flesh and dwelt among us. He came into a creation of his own making, into a human world he had called into being so that all who recognize him for what he is and who he is— those people through faith have power to become children of God.

And that’s just the way Paul describes the new maturity that comes by faith: a new status as children of God.

And that’s us. Today we’re right in the middle of Christmas— day six as in “six geese a-laying”— and our thoughts are still in Bethlehem. But remember, the babe in the manger is only a foretaste of the man who will stride purposefully to Jerusalem to embrace all human kind from the Cross, to embrace each one of us, to give each of us the power to become a full human being, to stand maturely on our own two feet, to make decisions for good or ill, to work out our own salvation with no pedagogue to push us on our way, but with the power of Christ in the Holy Spirit to nudge us gently into the waiting arms of a loving Father.

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