Do Men Buy You Drinks? - Galatians 1:10 (Ash Wednesday)

My brothers and sisters, tonight we enter the season of Lent.  Lent, throughout church history, has been a period of self-reflection.  It is a time where we are invited to prepare ourselves for the Easter celebration.  It more than looking in the mirror at our physical appearance, for what we see in a physical mirror may or may not be pleasing to the eye.  Self-reflection means looking deeper, asking not, “Is my hair the right length; Is this the right outfit for Easter worship; Did I use too much make up; Do I have something from breakfast between my teeth.”  We are called to look into our lives and see where we fall short of God’s glory.  We do this, first, to acknowledge that we fall short.  However, we are called to go beyond mere acknowledgement, and, during Lent, move to repentance…move to the point that we change our lives…move, with the power of the Holy Spirit changing us, to be reconciled to God that we might be able to join fully in the Easter Celebration, knowing that we have the promise of a completely new life in Christ.  Lenten self-reflection is about asking hard questions, tough questions, questions that challenge us to face the truth about ourselves. 

Tonight I want us to ask one of those tough questions…do men buy us drinks?  First, this is not a sermon on temperance…it is not a debate on the evils of alcohol…that is from another time in our history, and maybe for another time in our history.  It is not a question for women to ask whether they look good enough that men buy them drinks…this is not a question of winning a bet so folks in the bar have to buy us a drink.  It is a question that springs out of the following scene from The Patriot.  In this scene, Benjamin Martin, considered a hero of the French-Indian War, reflects on that status, as he discusses with his son why, everywhere he goes, men buy him drinks…

In this scene, unable to be shown here, Benjamin Martin recounts how he and the rest of the group he was part of in the French-Indian War inflicted a great massacre and the daily guilt he deal with as a result…

Have we ever gotten so caught up in what was going on, that we just went full force into it along with everyone else, without stopping to ask whether what we were doing is right or not?  Are there things that we have done in the heat of the moment that we now regret?  Do we get caught up and develop a mob mentality as Martin reflected on doing at Fort Wilderness?  Or even more simply, do we do things simply to be popular with those around us…so that they will like us, approve of us, accept us?

This Lent we ask ourselves the question, “Do men buy us drinks?”  Or to put it in Paul’s words to the Galatians, “Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval?  Or am I trying to please people?”  For Paul it was not about a blood frenzied massacre, but it was still about a mob mentality bloody mutilation.  Paul had been teaching that salvation comes by grace through faith in Christ and that there is nothing we can do to earn the gift of salvation.  Paul is confronting the fact that a number of folks are deserting the church in order to pursue teaching that based salvation on circumcision and doing works of the law—that salvation was not based on a gift of grace through faith in Christ, but based on getting circumcised and follow the prescripts of the law, which pretty much put folks back into where they were before Christ, unable to achieve their own salvation…and Paul watches, as one person after another deserts the church to follow the crowd.

You know how it works, I hear ____________ and _____________ over here teaching that, you know, you only need to give a dollar to church and at max, spend an hour in worship, God doesn’t really want you to work that hard and earn all that money that He enabled you to earn, God would want you to keep most of your money to spend on yourself, and as far as your time, if you can’t get everything from God you need in an hour, then something’s wrong…There’s something in there that sounds good to me, that God wants me primarily to look out for myself and keep almost all of my money for myself and that God can give me all that I need in one hour once a week., something in me says it doesn’t sound quite right, but it sounds good.  I also know how well liked __________ and ______________ are.  I start fearing that if I don’t go along what they are teaching, then they, or someone else, is going to think I’m stupid for giving away a lot of my money, and so I join in with them.  Then __________ over here sees the three of us following that way of living, starts worrying about what folks are going to think if she’s not doing it, and so she joins in…then ____________, then __________, then _______________, and it can go on and on and on.  And, hey, it would make us popular, telling folks to keep their money and use their time on themselves….they might like us so much with all that extra money and time, they might invite us to go down to O’Charlie’s or Outback or somewhere and offer to buy us a round or two for helping them see the light, and you know if the money and time are mine, then my behavior doesn’t really matter either…besides, all my friends are getting wasted anyways.

Before we jump on any bandwagon…or if we are already on one…we need to hear the words of Paul:  “Am I now seeking human approval or God’s approval?  Or am I trying to please people?  If I were pleasing people, I would not be a servant of God.”  That’s the real question for us this Lent:  “Am I now seeking human approval or God’s approval?  Am I trying to please people or trying to please God?” We have to stop and ask ourselves, “Why are we doing what we are doing?”  If we are doing it to please someone other than God, then we need to examine that, and get rid of either the activity or the attitude.  Why not just say, the activity?  Because it is not just the bad activities we get caught up in and do so that someone will like us.  Some activities are good, we just do them for the wrong reason.  Coming here tonight, that’s a good thing to come to worship God…but are we here for God, or because we want that person of there to see that we were here?  Giving our time and resources to God is a good thing, but if we are doing it so that folks will place us on a pedestal and say how great we are for having done it, rather than simply offering it up as something pleasing to God, then as far as God’s concerned, we might as well have not done it, because we are not serving Him, we are seeking to server ourselves.  As Paul puts it, “If I were pleasing people, I would not be a servant of God.”

This Lent let us ask ourselves the question, “Do men buy me drinks?  Am I trying to please people or trying to please God?” 

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.