I know I am not the first leader of a faith community to make this lament, nor will I be the last. The argument began long, long ago and half way around the world. Before the gospels were even being copied by hand in the original Greek, Paul’s letters were being circulated to define what it meant to be a community formed around following this person, Jesus Christ. It also turns out that Paul was frequently misunderstood and hotly criticized for his passion for delivering the good news. We can assume what some of that critique happened to be from the responses made in his letters. I can just imagine the kinds of “parking lot” conversations that occurred around this controversial figure.

Some people said, don’t trust this guy – he used to persecute Christians, and may turn on us.

Others said, don’t listen to Paul – he’ll confuse you with his irony and strange allusions. He may be smart, but he will not hesitate to falsify God’s word in order to win people over to his side.

And yet another group said, surely don’t make friends with this guy – he likes to be nice to our face; then tell us everything we’re doing wrong in his letters. He’s so two-faced.

In preparing this week’s reading, it dawned on me that Paul directly addresses this criticism and yet doesn’t seem to be rattled by his critics. He reminded the communities of believers of his openness, of his deep desire not to wear masks or play games. But then he got on with the business at hand. He had something much more important that they needed to hear. Paul absolutely could not contain himself when he talked about God’s love for all people in Jesus Christ. He didn’t care if people hated him, or mocked him, or even threatened him within an inch of his life. He didn’t worry about receiving a paycheck or a thank you, or having a place to lay his head at night. All he cared about was getting this message across and begging people to believe that it was all true.

“God loves us,” Paul screams through the pages of time in his letters. “Can you believe it?”

For Paul this realization was like night and day, darkness and light. No wonder. His experience of coming to know Jesus Christ was like a light switch being thrown on. His blindness to God’s grace was shown to him in a manner that was physically impossible to deny. He took on a new persona. He was a changed man. What was once veiled to him in his old life became crystal clear in his new one. Paul then uses this imagery over and over again. There’s old law and new spirit, a turn from judgment and condemnation to grace and affirmation. God said, “Light up the darkness,” and what Paul says we see is Christ - brilliant and beautiful.

For Paul, the good news is so obvious he says that anyone who cannot see it must be perishing, falsely led by the idols of the world rather than being able to see the glory of the true God. He says, “They must be looking the other way, refusing to give this news the attention it deserves.” This frank language of his letters is probably what got Paul into such difficulties in his human relationships. People don’t like being told they must be blind or stupid if they can’t see God’s truth. And my guess is that the message of Jesus Christ had its obscurities then just as it does now. What Paul saw as obvious might not have been so apparent to every Corinthian, or Roman, or Galatian inclined to give him a listen.

Today, we still bicker about what constitutes the “right” kind of Christianity. But then again, trusting in Jesus Christ is supposed to be the simple part, knowing then what that leads us to believe and do is where we get into differences of opinion. Some will tell you that dancing and playing cards aren’t activities that a good Christian would do. But then our own Book of Order suggests that we can determine a person’s active membership in the church by whether or not they have attended Sunday worship in the last year, and if they gave money to the church during the same time period. Some define the Christian lifestyle by right belief, others by good deeds, and still others by saving souls. The phenomenon of “shopping” for a good church is now something congregations have to think about as they set up websites, or build parking lots, or commit to language about the beliefs of their church. It’s a reality of our present day understanding of how churches function in our cultural situation. We want to be market ready. We want to attract people like ourselves. We want to link up with those who have similar values and understandings, and religion is one of the main ways we choose to define ourselves.

But what would Paul say? Paul might just tell us that we are looking the wrong way. We are pursuing a false god that promises to give us what we want instead of paying attention to what the God of grace has already given us. “Wake up and smell the coffee!” he’d tell us. The light of Christ is already here. This is the best picture of God we’re ever going to get. It’s better than stone tablets, it’s better than Scripture, it’s better than all the laws combined. Now, we have the gift of love, love in its purest, most concentrated form. Telling people that good news is not only our job, it’s our delight.

But I know, and you know that it’s easy to get tangled up in the details. When it’s about belief – and how we live our lives according to that belief – we get into the mindset that someone has to be “right.” Therefore, if someone is “right,” then everyone else has to be wrong. But what if, instead, belief in Jesus Christ is not really about those kinds of beliefs, but is about trust. Trust in him. That’s what Paul seems to be telling us in his not so subtle ways. Trust that Jesus is the messenger of God’s grace. Trust that God is love, even when the world seems to show us otherwise. Trust that the old laws fall away when love sweeps into the room. Paul was adamant that this news was the best news he’d ever heard in his life. He lived as though this was the best news he’d ever heard in his life. His former life as rule-keeping Saul was over, dead and gone. And yet, Paul is still being criticized two thousand years beyond his death for something that wouldn’t have been thought of in his life. He has become a replacement standard-bearer for the church. Paul’s time-bound words are used against him to say who can’t come to the table rather than being the invitation to God’s love that he understood to cross all the old un-crossable boundaries.

I only wish I had about half the audacity of a leader like Paul. More than that and I might be toast in the human relationships department myself. But I wish I had the courage to always stand firm in the love of Jesus Christ, so much so that no criticism would ever sting, no weight of the world would be too heavy, and my life would be a living example of living openly in the love of God. It’s breathtakingly difficult to do. Living into the love of Jesus Christ puts us right where Paul lived. It reopens everything we ever thought was true but wasn’t. As Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, Jesus shines his light into any and all of the dark places in our souls, and that can be a painful experience to have our weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed and then used to tell the story of God’s glory. Most of us would rather have a far less dramatic tale to tell.

God loves us. Jesus lived that love for us. No matter what else you believe, is there any greater truth than that?

Amen.