For the next two weeks we will read from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. They were a Celtic people who settled in what is now central Turkey. In almost all of Paul’s epistles he begins by giving thanks to God for his correspondents. Not for the Galatians — he starts right off chiding them. In his epistles Paul frequently tries to straighten out bad behavior or misunderstandings. The letter to the Galatians has a strident tone because he looked on their errors as going to core of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. The Gospel preached by me is not of human origin … but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For Paul, unless all are welcome you don’t have Gospel.
