Life gets messy.  We move in and out of seasons where our life and the world around us get just plain nasty.  The list of tragedies that we have endured in the past few years is uncomfortably lengthy and includes: hurricanes like Helene, the COVID pandemic, contentious presidential elections and administrations, an increase in school shootings and violence.  And that only looks at the messiness and tragedy we have experienced as a nation and a region, it doesn’t include the international turmoil that is ongoing, nor does it scratch the surface of what many of us have experienced in our daily lives, individually.  It becomes easy to wonder how we are to find joy, let alone happiness, in the face of such ugliness. 
 
How are we to find joy in the midst of such tragedies like we see around us every day? It is in the finding of the answers to that question that I am reminded why I love being a Christian.  You see, the Bible never hides the fact that life gets messy and ugly.  What we are promised is that, in the midst of that messiness and ugliness, we won’t be alone and will be able to rejoice.  Not a superficial, “I put on a happy face even when I’ve fallen in the mud” happiness, but that deep-seated joy that we all long and yearn for.
 
As we walk through this letter, we will see that we can share in the joy Paul talks about in the face of the messiness of life that so often seems like it’s going to overwhelm us.

The last book of the Old Testament opens with a declaration of God’s love for His people, and closes with a vision of His love made manifest. It’s a book written to a people who had become complacent and preoccupied, losing sight of the God who loved them, not realizing the spiritual crisis they’d brought on themselves. As Eugene Peterson writes, “The prophecy of Malachi is made to order for just such conditions. Malachi creates a crisis at a time when we are unaware of crisis. He wakes us up to the crisis of God during the times when the only thing we are concerned with is us. He keeps us on our toes, listening for God, waiting in anticipation for God, ready to respond to God, who is always coming to us.” Written to a people who lived 500 years before Christ came, it is just as relevant for those who live 2,000 years after Christ.

This morning we begin a new series, “Galatians: The Heart of the Gospel.” This series will go through the season of Epiphany, which this year is 8 weeks long. The season of Epiphany takes what is a moment of piercing awareness and spreads it out over a period of time. In particular, Epiphany is a celebration of the Gospel going to all people in all places for all times, not something that’s just for a select few. But when people who are “outside” come “inside,” those who are “inside” have to figure out what’s most important and essential for what they believe. The Galatian Christians struggled to figure out what to do with all these Gentile converts. In other words, and we’ll explore this more later in the series, just how Jewish does a Gentile need to be in order to be a Christian? Other than believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, what do we need to do in order to be saved? 2,000 years later, it’s still something we struggle with in the church and as Christians today. The Letter to the Galatians strips away everything we add in order to get to the heart of the Gospel, reminding us that the only thing that matters is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.