Galatians 4:8-20; Wisdom 11:21-12:11

Sermon preached on the third Sunday before Lent 2025 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Have you ever been in a situation where somebody, that you know pretty well and with whom, by and large, you agree with on all the important things, suddenly does something which makes you think that actually, they don’t share your view on something rather important? I was just trying to think of what would be an example of the sort of thing that I am thinking about.

Say, for instance, your favourite charity is the RSPCA or Cats’ Protection, and you are very big on avoiding cruelty to animals, and you’ve got a friend who is a farmer, say, with lots of animals that they care for: sheep, some cows and chickens, plus sheepdogs, and a cat or two as well – and you do things together to support animal charities. perhaps you man a stall together at a fête or two and have your wills done by the RSPCA, (which I think you can have for free, if you leave them something in your will).

Then one day, the friend phones up and says, ‘Would you like to come and see the Hunt set off next Saturday? Yes, the Hunt. You can join me at the pub for a ‘stirrup cup’, and then you can wave us all off.’

‘Golly, I didn’t know you were into hunting’.

‘Oh yes; I’ve done it for years. I’ve got a horse, as you know, and I love riding to hounds.’

‘Wow! But what about the poor old foxes? Surely hunting with dogs is no longer allowed?’ The friend gives you a sort of knowing wink, and then tells you that, of course, they won’t be chasing foxes, but instead they will be following a trail laid down by the organisers to simulate the smell of a fox. They will be doing what they call ‘drag-hunting’. But of course, if a fox accidentally gets in the way, well, you know, dogs will be dogs.

This isn’t really your thing at all, and frankly, you didn’t know that your friend felt that way, or could countenance that kind of cruel behaviour. What do you do? Would you, for instance, write him an earnest letter, or maybe, these days, send him an email. or an Instagram with some nice pictures of handsome foxes with bushy brushes, and say, ‘I thought you believed in the same things I did, that cruelty to animals is a bad thing. I didn’t think you believed in all that nonsense about drag hunting. Is that really what you believe?’

I think that’s the sort of letter that Saint Paul found himself writing to the Galatians. We are a bit hazy about exactly who the Galatians were, but it’s generally reckoned that they were people who lived in the middle of Asia Minor, as it then was, or modern Turkey. Reading that letter is only one half of the conversation, of course. We don’t know precisely what the Galatians had said, or done, to prompt Saint Paul to write to them, quite firmly. Earlier on in the letter, chapter 3 begins with the words, ‘You foolish Galatians!’ You stupid Galatians! It’s quite a sign of exasperation on Paul’s part.

Whatever they had done to annoy him, we have to do a bit of detective work to try to work out what it might have been. Bear in mind that the people in Asia Minor had probably been converted to Christianity by Saint Paul, because he talks in his letter about his previous visit. It sounds as though he had some trouble with his eyes on his first visit.

In a rather ghastly way, he said that, during that first visit, he had been suffering physically and the Galatians had shown a lot of kindness to him; indeed, that, if they could, they ‘would have pulled their eyes out and given them to him’. This rather gruesome transplant idea seems to suggest that he had something wrong with his eyes at the time.

The general background is that when Paul was going around, converting people to Christianity, he was the apostle to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that Paul’s usual practice, when he went to a new town, was to visit the synagogue, and to make friends with the local Jewish people, but here not all of the Christians were Jewish, because there seems to be a controversy about whether new members of the Christian church needed to convert to Judaism first.

Just before our reading today, in Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he famously says there is ‘… no such thing as Jew, or Greek… for you are all one person in Christ Jesus’. But just like when you’re listening to somebody on the telephone, you may realise that the other side of the conversation is more complicated than you at first thought. Here Saint Paul is ticking the Galatians off, not for seeking to adopt Jewish practices such as getting circumcised, (although he has done that in other parts of his letters), but he talks about them being ‘enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods’, which he calls ‘elemental spirits’. ‘How can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits?’ He asks.

I’m not sure what elemental spirits really are. It’s a word in the Greek which is used to mean basic principles, component parts. Whereas you might think that this is a dig at superstition, voodoo spirits, something like that, I think that what St Paul is driving at is not that, but suggesting that the Galatians might be going back to a period before they knew about God, and were simply going on what they had observed in nature, without acknowledging any divine ruler and creator. In other words, they were holding to something like the Richard Dawkins position.

But Saint Paul goes on to remind them how good it was, and how much better they felt, when they all had the same idea and belief, when they all acknowledged the divinity of Christ.

In this context, let’s have a quick look at the other lesson today, from Wisdom. You won’t find that book in all our Bibles. It’s what’s called a deuterocanonical book, part of the Apocrypha. It’s in a ‘second order of authenticity’ as part of the Bible. It is generally acknowledged to be a biblical book, albeit of the second rank.

A lot of people say that, if you substitute for the word ‘wisdom’ in the book the word ‘God’, or even ‘Jesus’, it makes a lot of sense, almost on a prophetic level. ‘Wisdom’ could be taken as a code word for God. The book is called the Wisdom of Solomon, and it claims to have been written by Solomon, the great king of the Israelites after David. Most scholars think that it was the last of the Old Testament books to be written, and this was probably no more than 50 or 60 years before Christ.

Wisdom was not written in Hebrew, like the rest of the Old Testament, but instead it was written in Greek. It is thought to have been written in Alexandria, where the Jewish scholars had their Bible in Greek. They didn’t know Hebrew. The interesting thing to note in the passage that we had tonight is that it is a particularly striking celebration of God as being powerful, loving and merciful. ‘You love all things that exist and detest none of the things that you have made. You spare all things, for they are yours’.

What lessons can we draw from this? Going back to my example of the secret fox-hunter, what if it is not fox-hunting, but something much more important? What happens if somebody loses their Christian faith? How do we deal with them, how do we treat them? Do they stop being a friend? You know, although I would be surprised and saddened if any of my closest friends turned out to be a fox hunter, it wouldn’t be as important, it wouldn’t make so much difference, as if I thought they had lost their faith.

What would I do? We talk a lot about evangelism, bringing people to Christ in the first instance. But what about bringing them back if they have left? That’s what it looks like St Paul was doing with his letter to the Galatians. For us it could be a really tough one; but it is something which is really worthy of our thoughts and prayers tonight. I’ll leave it to you to work out which apostates, people today who, perhaps like the Galatians, have turned away from Christ, that we should be thinking about this afternoon and praying for.

One thing is for sure; that we should be praying for them. And as the Book of Wisdom reminds us, we should remember that God loves them and will be gentle with them. ‘You correct little by little those who trespass’. Little by little, let it be so!