Easter 7 (NL3) John B. Valentine
Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29 June 1, 2025

“ON BEING RE-ORIENTED”

The topic on the table today is “navigation”.

Seriously .....

• How many of you have some kind of G.P.S.-based navigation device in your car?

• How many of you actually USE the G.P.S.-based navigation device in your car???

• How many of you rely on the navigation device that is built into your phone ... or maybe the one that is attached to your wrist?

• And how many of you still prefer a paper map ... and/or a map and a compass???

Now ... granted ... G.P.S. ... the ‘Global Positioning System’ ... is an amazing technology.

You just pull out your phone ... or flip to the navigation screen on your car ... and you can immediately locate exactly where you are.

But before G.P.S. ... if you wanted to know exactly where you were ... you had to rely on a map ... and a compass.

You had no choice.

You got out a map .... hopefully a pretty accurate one ...

You tried to identify a couple of known landmarks ... like a lake or a mountain ...

And ... by orienting your map with your compass ... and checking the directions of those landmarks ... you could triangulate your location pretty precisely ... IF you knew what you were doing.

They called it “orienting yourself” ... if you were on land ... or “findings your bearings” ... if you were at sea ...

As opposed to being “disoriented” ... or just plain “lost”.

+ + + + +

You see ... maps are helpful. Good maps are potentially VERY helpful. And knowing how to read a map is a very helpful skill.

But a map alone won’t cut it.

Likewise .... compasses are amazing. They always point in the same direction ... at least if you have a good compass and don’t stand any too close to a magnet.

But a compass alone won’t cut it either.

But put a good map and a true compass and a knowledgeable user together ... and you have magic!

The ability to determine exactly where you are ... and to calculate just how you need to go to get where you want to be.

+ + + + +

Anyhow ... we’ve spent the past couple of Sundays hearing stories about Saint Paul ... first from the Book of Acts and now from the letter which he wrote to the church in Galatia ...

And ... increasingly ... as I’ve spent these weeks thinking about Paul and his life’s journey ... I’ve found myself thinking about maps and compasses.

Paul ... by his own admission ... was “well-trained” in reading the map.

THIS map.

This map that is the Word of the Lord our God.

In fact ... Paul notes that he spent most of his life studying this map ... and going to map-reading school ... and sitting at the feet of the master map-readers of his day.

Paul knew “the map” ... the Hebrew scriptures ... what we call the Old Testament ... backwards and forwards.

Paul didn’t have a “map” problem.

But it seems as though Paul ... again by his own admission ... did have something of a compass problem.

+ + + + +

You see ... the compass that Paul had originally been trained to use ...

The compass which had oriented the whole of his education ...

The compass that situated everything that Paul stood for in his former life ...

Was what he called “The Law”.

And so ...

• when Paul considered the stories of Holy Scripture ...
• when Paul considered the words of Holy Scripture ...
• when Paul considered the meaning of the texts of Holy Scripture ...

His whole ‘orientation’ ... there’s that word again ... had to do with the Law.

It was what guided his whole way of thinking about a life of faith and a lifestyle of faithfulness.

And thus ... guided by the Law ... Paul’s big question was one that asked “What can I do ...?” ... “What must I do ...?” ... “How best can I uphold and adhere to the Law of the Lord our God?”

But something happened on the so-called “Road to Damascus” that ... again by Paul’s own admission ... was truly and literally ‘disorienting’.

He had this encounter with the risen Jesus that somehow broke his old compass.

In fact ... it might not be wrong to say that ... in his encounter with the risen Jesus ... when the scales fell from his eyes ... he was given a new compass ... a compass that forced him to re-orient himself in relationship to the map that is the Word of God.

Same map ... NEW compass.

And ... in the days and weeks and years that followed ... Paul devoted himself to working through just ....

• how that new compass worked ...
• what that new compass pointed to ... and
• how to live with that new compass as one’s source of orientation.

+ + + + +

Now ... let’s call time-out for just a moment and highlight a bit of good news for us in Paul’s self-told life story.

You see ... for the longest time ... the church has talked about Paul’s encounter with Jesus as his “conversion experience” ...

And kind of assumes that it was one of those “a-ha” moments ...

A “Wow, I could have had a V-8" kind of a thing wherein ... all of a sudden ... Paul just ‘got it’ and suddenly it all made sense ...

Like one of those pictures that you see on your phone that ... “Once you see it, not you can’t unsee it” sorts of things.

But if you look at Paul’s actual telling of his life story ... and particularly that text on which Pastor Pam preached last week ... Paul makes it pretty clear that it took him a while ... three years even! ... to make sense of what happened to him on that Damascus Road.

And to re-orient himself to living with that new compass.

And I take Paul’s story as a reminder that “change is hard” ... and that “change takes time” ...

And that actually re-orienting our lives and our living and our thinking to the way of Jesus is usually not something that just happens “BAM!”

• It involves being stretched ... and sometimes those stretches hurt ...

• It requires patience.

• It requires diligence.

• AND it requires a spirit of humility that says “Where I am right now is NOT where God is calling me to be.”

But the end result of that spirit-driven change in Paul’s life ... was good for the Church .... and good for the world and good for the Kingdom of God.

+ + + + +

Anyhow ... back to the particulars of Paul’s re-orientation ...

Do you pray tell know what Paul’s new compass looked like?

It looked like ... it looks like ... a cross.

And it points ... no surprise here ... to Jesus ...

And when you orient the map ... this map ... to Jesus ...

Then you no longer see the Law ... the Law ... the Law ...

But faith ... faith ... faith ...

This overarching awareness that the goodness of God is not appropriated by doing things ... but rather by trusting that God has already done them for you.

And the rant that Paul is on in today’s scripture lesson is really nothing more ... and nothing less ... than a reminder to the folks at the church in Galatia that they’d be idiots to go back to using their old compasses when the new one is so much better.

+ + + + +

Back in the day ... when our youngest son was still in Boy Scouts ... I got cajoled into teaching the Orienteering merit badge.

It was all about getting young Scouts to figure out how to read maps ... and use compasses ... so as to find their way in the world.

And the final exam had to do with their being able to successfully chart their way through a course using just their map and their compass.

And ... inevitably ... what threw most all of those Scouts for a loop was the concept of “true” versus “magnetic” north.

You see ...

TRUE North is the actual geographic North Pole ... whereas MAGNETIC North is the place to whence compasses naturally point.

TRUE North is a fixed point that never, ever moves .... whereas MAGNETIC North moves around a bit ... and has been moving quite a bit in recent years!

TRUE North IS the North Pole ... whereas ... as of last year ... MAGNETIC North was about 500 miles away from the actual North Pole.

And most all of those Scouts would forget to accommodate for the difference between MAGNETIC and TRUE North ... and ... inevitably ... they would have to redo the course.

And so maybe we could liken MAGNETIC North to what Paul calls ‘The Law’ ... the closest approximation we could get to True North back in the day ...

But Jesus ... Paul declares is the TRUE North ... the absolute North ... the One by which all other standards of North would need to be judged.

+ + + + +

Now ... thankfully ... our high-tech G.P.S. systems allow us to not have to worry about making accommodation for magnetic declination anymore.

Even though it’s still fun to make Scouts learn to use an actual map and a compass ...

But ... at the end of the day ... it would be foolish to rely on those old tools in matters of life-and-death when you have G.P.S. available.

“Don’t rely on ‘the Law’” ... that old magnetic North that was the best we had ‘back-in-the-day’ ... when you can count on Jesus ... the TRUE North ... as the One by whom to chart your course.”

You see ... at the end of the day ... Paul’s message to the Church .... Paul’s message to us ... is that there will be times in life when we feel disoriented ... or even just plain “lost”.

We may be in a soupy fog that brings us to a standstill.

We might be in a sandstorm of confusion and despair.

But if we look to Jesus ... and orient ourselves to him ...

We can know where we are ...

And know how to find the way home.