No ... Your Other Right (Mark 10:35-45)

     I must confess that people who bust into line in front of me test the Christian charity in me to the limit.  One time, Pam and I were coming back from Europe, we’d spent 10 days in France and  not once had been the victims of the infamous French snottiness, until just as we were getting ready to land back in the States, and I went to get my coat out of the over-head bin, and I noticed another guy had it – I think it looked like his or something – and he said in a thick French accent – “Do not worry, I am not stealing your coat,” and he almost added “you stupid American,” but he didn’t have to, the animosity was radiating off him in waves, and his wife was glaring at me, and his kids were glaring at me, and I don’t handle conflict well, you know, so I was just glad to get away from them.  Well, we had a two-hour layover, so after getting through customs, we went in search of dinner and ended up at McDonalds at the end of a long line, resigned to wait for our greasy burgers – another thing I don’t do well – and who should come along but the French guy from the plane, wife and kiddies in tow, and they barged right to the front of the line.  And I was really mad, and filled with righteous indignation . . .

     And that’s exactly how the other disciples feel when, on the road to Jerusalem, the Zebedee brothers, James and John, take Jesus aside and ask him to let them go to the front of the line – “Grant us to sit,” they say “one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  Not that Jesus had ever said there was gonna be any glory, mind you . . . but he’d just got finished predicting his death and burial and resurrection, and maybe they figured that anyone who’s raised again’s gotta have some clout somewhere . . .

    But Jesus knows what they haven’t yet figured out – Jesus knows what following him will mean.  “Are you able to go all the way?”  he says, “Are you able to do what it takes?  to drink the cup I drink?  to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”  And they say yes, of course they’re able, and Jesus says “OK, you will . . . you will drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized . . .” and we need to understand it’s not an accident Jesus is speaking about the sacraments . . . the Christian life is a life immersed in his, a life defined by him and by his mission . . .

     Following Christ is sacramental, it is sacred. sanctified . . . bounded on one end by baptism, the new birth in Christ, and on the other by the cup, the new covenant in his blood . . . at baptism, we are made new, decisively marked as God’s children, heirs – as Paul would say – to the promise.  And along the way, throughout our Christian journey, we partake of the life-giving cup of the covenant – our lives as Christians are defined by the cup, to which we return again and again, for food and encouragement and power.  And through our walk with Christ, God works to mold us and conform us to God, to draw us into a sweet, mystical communion with God . . .  in a sense, the Christian life is a sacrament, performed by God through us, by which we are gradually transformed into the likeness of Christ . . .

     But of course, there’s a darker side to Jesus’ words – you will drink the cup that I drink . . . because just as Christ was sacrificed for them, just as he gave his life for them, so are they expected to give theirs for him . . . and indeed, we are told in Acts that James, at least, was martyred by Herod Agrippa fourteen years after our passage takes place . . . and  Jesus knew it right there on the way to Jerusalem that they would drink the cup he drinks, be baptized with the baptism he is baptized with.

     Note that Jesus is saying his life is exemplary in the literal sense, as an example that the disciples are to follow . . . James and John ask him for a place of privilege, to sit at his right and left hand in his glory, and Jesus tells them instead what it means to be his disciples, to be his followers . . . it means to imitate him, to use his life as an example for theirs.  Jesus is about sacrifice his life for them, and he’s saying it will come to that for the disciples as well.  Here he was, heading to Jerusalem, heading for the cross, for his passion, and he's telling them that they must experience it in their own lives.

     Every night, before they go to bed, the monks at Benedictine monasteries around the world pray the office of Compline.  It's sometimes called the “dear office,” because it's the most personal, private prayer-time . . . it's the only one that's prayed alone, not in the chapel with the whole monastic community.  The prayer begins with “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit . . .” and if it sounds familiar, it should . . . Jesus says it on the cross in Luke, just as he dies.  And so Compline helps those who celebrate it to remember Christ's death every night, as the darkness comes, and the light has long since faded . . . what's more, it helps them relate their own approaching “little death” of sleep to Christ’s.  Finally, at Compline's close, they pray the Song of Simeon: “Now you set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised . . . these eyes have seen the savior whom you prepared for all the world to see . . .” and simultaneously with identifying with Christ's death, they look forward to their own, and remember that during their waking hours, during that very day, they've seen Christ, they've experienced him in every place, in every face, and deep within their own hearts . . . and so Compline helps place those who pray it deep within the life of Christ, deep within his death . . . it helps them drink the cup that Christ drinks, and be baptized with the baptism of Christ . . .

     And now the other disciples have gotten wind of the Zebedee brothers' request, and they aren't happy, to say the least, and so Jesus – I imagine with a heavy sigh – gathers them around for a little chat.  It seems he's going to have to spell it out for them, after all.  “You know those Gentiles,” he begins, “their rulers, their top dogs lord it over them, their great ones are tyrants over them, for Pete's sake . . . they take credit for all their workers’ hard work  and pay themselves 300 times more than them.  They put their name first in the papers, take the twenty-seventh-floor corner office with a Central-Park view, and when everything goes South, do they take the blame?  When the bottom falls out of the dot-coms, do they take the hit?  Of course not!  They strap on their golden chariots, and ride away into the sunset, leaving the little guys out in the cold, laid off without work or health-care or retirement.  Well, it isn't like that among you, among my followers . . . it isn't like that in the Kingdom of God!  In the kingdom of God, whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.  That's right!  Your servant!  And further, whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”  And why?  Because of that imitation thing, because Jesus' life is an example, and that's in the end what he came to do – serve.  “For the Son of Man,” he says, “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  As the last, greatest example of his service, he would give his life.

     And I'll bet James and John were kicking themselves, I'll bet they were wishing they'd never even brought it up, because this wasn't exactly what they wanted to hear.  They wanted to hear that they were going to be rewarded for following Jesus, that they were going to get seats of honor in the great by-and-by, where they had the ear of the master for all eternity, where their names would be above all others – except God and Jesus, of course – in perpetuity. All this talk about being slaves and losing one's life wasn't what they wanted to hear at all.

     It's certainly not what a lot of us want to hear these days, either . . . we lionize those Gentile rulers, those captains of industry, those Pharaohs of the boardroom.  And for many of us – especially us male worker bees – we strive to get to the top, or at least to a little higher rung on the ladder . . . a bit more prestigious position, a few more people to supervise . . . in the case of pastors, it's often a little bigger church in a little better neighborhood.  In almost every occupation there's a hierarchy of workers, sometimes based on merit, but sometimes only on something as trivial as time spent on the job, that determines status, that determines who’s the top dog.  But the Kingdom’s standards aren’t the standards of the world.  In the kingdom, the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  And in case you didn’t get just how last, Jesus is telling us right here: to be first among us we must be slaves of all.  Bummer.

     But, you know it’s true . . . just look at Mother Theresa, beatified just seven short years after her death, on the fast track to sainthood, a status she’s liable to receive in record time, and all she had to do is to spend her life living down in the muck and mire of Calcutta, down on the streets with her charges, and she’ll reach a place none of those Cardinals gathered in the Vatican this week will likely get to, even with all their playing the game of power, the worldly game of climbing the old ladder, even if it is in the church.  Theresa wasn’t perfect, she could be severe with her nuns, she was criticized for taking money from the shady characters that perpetuate the grinding poverty on the streets . . . but Jesus didn’t say we have to be perfect, just that we have to serve, and be a slave to all.

     And he used his own life as an example, as an exemplar. After all, he became that ultimate slave, who willingly served us all by giving his life . . . and can we drink that cup, can we be baptized with that baptism?  That question is just as relevant to us, here today, as it was to the disciples.

     But you know what?  The life and death of Jesus isn’t the only thing in the equation, is it?  Think about the baptism image for a second . . . Jesus went into the water – that’s the death part, the going into the grave, into the ground – but he came back up out of it as well, in a glorious resurrected body . . . we go every night to the little death, to the sleep that renews us, and in the morning we awaken to a new day, a fresh chance, new hope that breaks in upon us from above . . . and in fact that’s the  good news, that life does come after death, daily in the cycle of our planet, and hourly, minute-by-minute, after all our little losses, our quiet mortalities, the failures and humiliations we suffer every day.  Through the presence of the risen Lord, we are afforded life after these deaths, and we are promised, and have in Christ a sure hope, that just as he rose out of the waters of death, just as he was raised from the dead, so shall we, for we are assured that if we participate in his life and death, we shall participate in his resurrection as well.  We shall not perish, but have everlasting life.  Amen.

Camels and Needles and Rich Men, Oh My! (Mark 10:17-31)

      I love movies . . . and the best way to see them at home is on DVD or Blu-Ray, those little disks the size and shape of a CD that a whole movie – and more! – can fit on.  I love to sit with my feet up, put a movie in the player, turn the stereo sound up – Pam says too loud – and get lost for a couple of hours in the story of Butch Cassidy or ET or Saving Private Ryan . . . and I’ve got quite a growing collection of DVDs, let me tell you . . . over a hundred of them, all lined up nice and pretty on a living room shelf, all alphabetized, protected, and on display, and woe betide anyone who leaves one of them sitting around OUT OF THEIR CASE or SCRATCHES ONE OF THEM or . . . well you get the picture, and so there they are, and I can look at them and count them and watch them over and over again . . .

      And then I read this morning’s passage and – Oy Vey! – I see a lot more of the rich man in me than I’d like . . . like him, I love things, I love my stuff much more sometimes than I ought to.  Is it the same with you?   Are there things that you love a lot?  Maybe a building, a house or a church, that you take great pride in, that you guard with your life, you make sure it stays in great shape . . . or a car, it’s gotta be polished and buffed, and shined and kept in tip-top shape . . . or maybe it’s money, a savings or retirement account . . . God help the wife who scratches or dents the mint-condition 1998 Dodge Ram Quad Cab, or the youth group who doesn’t vacuum the fellowship-hall floor, or the child who breaks a piece of treasured, heirloom dinnerware.  This kind of thing damages friendships and church functioning . . . it says to other people – our loved ones, our youth, our brothers and sisters in Christ – “Our stuff is more important to us than you are.”  Love of things gets in the way of relationships, in the way of mission, in the way of life . . .

      And Jesus is saying in our passage that possessions have a way of getting in the way of our relationship with him.  This man – over in Luke, he’s called a rich ruler – this man falls on his knees in front of Jesus, so we know that his problem isn’t that he’s proud – kneeling, after all, is the universal sign of submission, of humility . . . he looks upon Jesus as his superior, and he calls him “good teacher,” a formal address of student to rabbi, and he asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life.  And immediately, Jesus disabuses him of the notion that anyone but God is good – and of course, as Christians, we believe that he is God, and so there’s a double irony at play here – but Jesus says “You know the commandments . . .” and the man with many possessions says “Yes, and I’ve kept all of them since my youth” And we have no reason to disbelieve him, he’s a good man, reverent and faithful . . .

      Then Jesus, who sees into the heart, who knows what is inside of us all looks upon him and loves him, and I can imagine the intimate, compassionate, penetrating gaze  . . . and as he looks upon him with love, he tells him what he must do: give up everything, all he owns, sell it and give the money to the poor, and then come follow Jesus . . . and the young man’s face sags in realization, as he comes to understand what discipleship will entail . . . for he has many possessions, and he loves them well, and he grieves for his lost dream of the Kingdom of God . . .

      Saint Benedict, in his Rule for communal living, forbids his monks to own anything . . . he felt so strongly about the subject that he wrote an entire chapter on it.  He says “Those in monastic vows should not claim any property as their own . . . absolutely nothing at all, not even books and writing materials.”  He calls personal ownership of property a “wicked practice” and that “everything in the monastery should be held in common,” as in the early church described in Acts.   And although Benedict doesn’t say, I imagine this passage was one he had in mind  . . . that, and his own personal experience in community life, how it could be poisoned by possessions, tainted by personal stuff . . .

      After the rich man goes away, Jesus uses the episode as a teaching moment, an object lesson for his disciples . . . “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God,” but the disciples are perplexed, they don’t get it, even after the rich guy’s refusal to give up all he owns costs him everything . . .it kinda reminds me of today, when we don’t get it either . . . so we spiritualize this passage, interpret it to mean give up spiritual baggage, or we say it’s an ideal, one to aspire to, but in Jesus’ context, he meant exactly what he said . . .  give up all you have and follow me.

      So Jesus gives them an analogy, a visualization: “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  And now they get it, it becomes crystal clear, and they all have this mental image of somebody pushing on a camel’s behind, trying to shove it through a needle . . . and they ask in despair “Then who can be saved?”  And Jesus looks at them – the same way he looked at the rich man, and loved him – Jesus looks at them in love and says that “for humans, it’s impossible . . . but for God, all things are possible.”

      Humans cannot save themselves, but God can . . . God can make it possible, God can reach down and redeem anyone God pleases, just like that . . . this statement is rich with nuance, rich with the stuff of God’s kingdom . . . in a sense, all the Good News is wrapped up in it . . . our God is a God of the possible, a God of the infinite, a God who is doing something new, something powerful, day by day.  For us, it is impossible, but for the creator, all things are possible.  Do the disciples get the depth, the rich, nourishing stew of hope contained in that statement?  God can save whomever God wants, whether she lives in Palestine or not, whether she gives up all she has or not, even whether she follows Jesus or not, if God wants to . . . and case in point, the rich man couldn’t give up his stuff on his own, but God can.  And you can see the root of profound  tension here: the rich man is told to give up all he owns, but he can’t do it, only God can do it . . .

      And perhaps Peter senses all of this, for he says “We’ve done it . . . we’ve given up all we’ve got, and we’re following you . . .”  And that’s opening for one last lesson, the most astounding one of all: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields” Jesus says “who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions” and the disciples look around at each another, and wonder what he means.  Aside from the persecution – and they’d had plenty of that – where were all these things?  Where was even one house, one brother or sister, one field – much less a hundred-fold – to replace the ones they gave up?  What’s Jesus talking about?  And Mark doesn’t say if they get it or not, but we do: Jesus isn’t talking about personal possessions here.  Remember – they just get us in trouble.  He’s talking about the world-wide community of Christians . . . every Christian, world-wide, is the brother and sister of the disciples and the houses and fields of every Christian are theirs also . . . and the persecutions of every Christian on earth are theirs persecutions as well . . . what Jesus is talking about is the coming Kingdom of God, which is here right now in the persons of Christ’s body on Earth.

      The rich man couldn’t participate in the kingdom, he couldn’t partake of the radical sharing community of Christians unless he gave everything up, unless he quit making his things the center of his life, and focused on Jesus instead.

      And right after our passage – but interestingly, not in the lectionary – Jesus predicts his death once again – “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes . . . [who will] hand him over to the Gentiles; who will and kill him . . .”  And once again, the link is made between Jesus’ radical life, his radical economics and his death . . . is it any wonder they killed him?  Is it any wonder that a system where the accumulation of wealth is based on barter and trade and buying and selling would kill somebody who advocated that his disciples own nothing?

      And of course, the message is every bit as radical today as it was back then . . . our economic system is every bit as dependant on owning and buying and selling things as the one in Jesus’ day.  Even more so, actually . . . there was no middle class in those days, just the wealthy who fed off the lower classes . . . today, the vast majority of wealth is still accumulated by a small percentage of our population, and it’s still built on the backs of the poor, but now there’s the middle class as well, with enough money to feed themselves, and disposable income as well . . . and our insatiable desire for things is amplified by Madison avenue, which exists to create a craving for goods and services, and our love of possessions is cynically exploited and fed by the Powers that Be to increase their wealth.

      What Jesus is preaching here is not some denial for denial’s sake, not some half-baked, hair-shirted scheme of personal penance, but liberation . . . liberation from the rat-race, the tread-mill of work, work, work to acquire more and more stuff, so we can work and work and work some more to feed and maintain this stuff, so we can get more stuff to poison our relationships and our minds and our souls, to alienate ourselves from our families and friends and brothers and sisters in Christ.

      Chuck Campbell, one of my old preaching professors, has written that preaching this kind of thing is tough, because every middle-class preacher in America is caught right up in this stuff, we’re all right there with our congregations, right in the middle of it all.  And that’s perhaps as it should be . . . after all, Jesus surely experienced what he preached as well, he surely experienced the glittering call of things, of little idols we buy and sell to replace God . . . and the question is – and this is the hard part – the question is, does this passage call us to do it?  Does it call us to give up everything we own, to divest ourselves of all but our clothes, all but the shoes on our feet?  Remember that Jesus was talking to disciples, who were on the road with him, who were to be stripped-down, lean-and-mean evangelism machines, who had to travel light . . . does it apply to us?

      Well, God may not be calling us to give up our televisions or our cars or DVDs – after all, recreation is not a bad thing in and of itself, we are expected to rest the mind and body, it’s essential to our well-being – but the trick is to not let our stuff rule our lives, ruin our relationships, or be substituted for God . . . and one way is to take our minds off our stuff, and put them on Christ instead.  There’s an old hymn that says Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full on his wonderful face, and the things of the Earth will go strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace” and of course, prayer is the way to do this . . . prayer develops an ever-deepening, on-going relationship with God through Christ, and an ever-decreasing distance between ourselves and God . . . through regular prayer we learn to keep our eyes on the prize, our eyes on the kingdom of God, where they belong.

      Oh, it’s not particularly easy, disciplined prayer never is, it’s not a happy-magic pill, one day we’re ruled by our stuff and the next by God, and there’ll be times when we are absolutely in thrall to the world, and our lives will feel desolate and magnificently messed up.  But Jesus promised it in the great commission – lo, I am with you always, always, and when we’re discouraged and weak, when we think we can’t do it anymore, that we’ll always be slaves to our desires, Jesus will look upon us with compassion – like he did the rich young man – he’ll look on us with sympathy and empathy and commiseration, and we will know we are loved.  Amen.

Boxes With Topses (Galatians 3:27-29)

So, there was this man named Roy, who worked in a widget factory.  He spent eight hours a day putting widgets in boxes, little tiny widgets in little tiny boxes.  The boxes sped down an assembly line past his station, or at least they seemed to speed past to Roy, sometimes at least.  In fact, although Roy didn’t know this, the plant manager had spoken to his human factors engineers, and they’d spoken to the mechanical engineers, who had calibrated the speed of the conveyer belt to precisely meet an average worker’s capabilities.  It ran not too fast, not too slow, but just fast enough.

As I said before, Roy’s job was to put the widgets into boxes, but it was a little more complicated than that.  The widgets had to be sorted first so the right kind of widget went into the right kind of box.  They were coded by color: red widgets had to go into red-widget boxes, blue widgets in blue-widget boxes and green widgets had to go into—wait for it, wait for it—green-widget boxes.  Roy had no idea what would happen if green widgets were to go into red-widget boxes or blue widgets into green-widget boxes, but he didn’t want to find out.  He liked his job, so he kept on putting red widgets into red-widget boxes, green widgets into green-widget boxes, et-cetera, et-cetera, et-cetera.

One day, he wasn’t feeling very good, but he didn’t want to use his sick leave, so he went to work anyway.  But it turned out he shouldn’t have: all of a sudden, he felt dizzy and couldn’t keep anything straight, and blue widgets started going into green boxes, and green widgets started going into blue boxes, and red widgets went every which way, every-which way but into red boxes, that is.

When he discovered what he had done, he was mortified: he pushed the emergency stop button, hoping to keep defective products from going out, but it was too late: by the time he’d stopped the line, several cartons of messed-up widget packages had gone out.  Dejected, Roy went to the plant managers office and confessed what had happened, for he was an honest man, and just stood there, waiting to be let go.  But the plant manager stood up from his desk, walked around it over to Roy, and laid his arm over his shoulder.  “That’s all right,”  he said “It makes no difference.  Under the paint, they are all the same.”

We human beings like to put things in boxes, don’t we?  And it’s very important that each thing be in its proper place, that each widget be in its proper box.  It’s one way we learn . . .  by categorizing things in the world and assigning a type, or a class to them.  It’s actually a very powerful thing . . . it’s fundamental to doing science, for instance.  We make a category of soil—sandy, loamy, sedimentary—or compound—acid, lipid, protein—based on characteristics each has in common.  In plant science, the category Fabaceae contains beans, peas, lentils, alfalfa, clover and soy.  And if you know that a certain plant is a member of that category, popularly called the legume family, you know that certain things will hold true: it’s seed will be rich in protein and it’s roots will have nodules that contain symbiotic bacteria called Rhyzobia.  These bacteria give the plant the ability to convert nitrogen in the atmosphere to a form that is useful for itself, other plants and, eventually, us.

In studies of churches—congregational studies—we have found that churches of a certain size have certain characteristics in common.  Churches with 50 or less in worship tend to operate like a family, with a matriarch or a patriarch that runs the show.  My first church was like that—the matriarch was a woman named Louise, who famously stood up in a congregational meeting and said “The pastor can be a hairy ape as far as I’m concerned, it’s my church.”  Woe be the pastor who gets on the wrong side of the church matriarch; fortunately, Louise and I got along well.

Churches with between 50 and 150 or so in worship—churches like Greenhills—tend to be organized differently, and the pastor’s leadership style needs to be different from how it is for a family-sized church.  If a pastor knows the characteristics of the size categories, and where a given church falls within them up front, it gives her a leg up when it comes to leading it.

Of course, like any good thing, this penchant for categories, for making sure everything has a box and that it is in it where it belongs, can be bad if misused or used too much.  Although churches of a similar size tend to have certain similarities, it is a mistake to assume that . . . some churches, though they are smaller sized, have over the recent past lost members, and still are organized like the next category up.   Trying to lead such a congregation as one would a smaller church can spell disaster.

Another problem with categories is that we tend to assume that just because something can clearly be lumped into one, it has other attributes that supposedly go with the category.  All Asians—because they are Asian—are good at science.  All country music is whiny.  All Native Americans are shiftless and alcoholic.  Categorization—placing everything in their correct little boxes, and shutting them in with their correct little topses—is the root of much evil.

The Apostle Paul knew all about this sort of thing.  After all, he was one of the chief box-enforcers of the Jewish faith.  He persecuted people who were outside the Jewish box, and there were plenty of those to go around.  Take Samaritans, for instance . . . good Jews couldn’t associate with them or eat with them, much less invite ‘em to synagogue . . . and this was even thought they came from the same root stock, even though their religious practices were very similar one to another.  Our modern title for the parable of the Samaritan is aptly named—the term “Good Samaritan” would have been a non-sequitur to good Jews, for whom there was no such thing.

Judaism—indeed all of the semitic religions of the day—drew sharp little fences around themselves to keep everybody else away, everybody who wasn’t in their box, who wasn’t like them.  This is why Christianity was so radical—it insisted that the good news, the heart of the faith, was for everyone.  As Al read this morning, Jesus commands that Christians spread the Gospel to all the nations—in Greek, all the ethne, all the people—and that means everyone.  As a bumper sticker I once saw reads:  Jesus loves everyone, no exceptions.

Paul, as a Pharisee, was well versed in the law, and further, in the interpretations of it that strictly enforced the separation of Jews from everybody else, as well as it’s exclusion of anyone not in the Jewish box.  Then something happened:  Luke says it was on the Damascus Road, where Paul was on the way to persecute some hapless Christians, but Paul doesn’t tell that story.  He just says that Christ and the gospel was revealed to him—note the passive construction, it wasn’t something he did—that the gospel was revealed to him, and in the book of Galatians, he defends his version of it from some false teachers that are running around preaching that one must be circumcised before becoming a Christian.  In other words, one must become a Jew, enter into the Jewish category, the Jewish box before one can become a Christian.

And Paul spends the letter to the Galatians arguing otherwise, and in the course of the argument we find today’s remarkable passage:  All who are baptized into Christ, he says—and notice that he doesn’t say everyone who believes in Christ—everyone who is baptized into Christ is clothed in Christ, she puts on Christ like a garment.  Therefore, she doesn’t look like a woman anymore, but has the aspect of Christ.  Thus, it is possible for him to say that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female”—and notice his deliberate echo of the creation story—“ but all are one in Christ.”

And though it is a metaphor—we don’t really wear Christ like a business suit or shorts and a tee—it at its heart reflects the all the radicalism of the great commission: in Christ we are all the same, Jew or Gentile, male and female, slave or free.  There is no distinction between anyone in Christ, so I wonder: why do Christians act like it so much?  How come we create little boxes with their topses to place our various members in?  How come the Christian church has so many of those boxes—sometimes called denominations—into which we place ourselves?  We have black churches and white churches, gay churches and straight churches, Baptist and Methodist churches.  Oh you’re a Baptist?  Then you must take the Bible literally . . . Catholic?  C’mon, how can you take that eating of Christ literally . . . and being in that box called “woman” disqualifies you from full participation in the life of the vast majority of Christian churches.  What happened to the old “one in Christ” thing?  How have we come so far away from Jesus’ intent?

I was in Cameroon the summer before I went to Seminary, and on the last weekend we were there, we attended a huge service in the local Presbyterian cathedral—yes, it was a cathedral, built by Presbyterian missions.  Though there were services every Sunday there, this was a special, quarterly service where all of the churches from all of the villages got together to install elders and deacons, and baptize anybody who needed it.  There were 50 baptisms at that one service, which lasted all morning and well into the afternoon, and let me tell you my, ah, nether regions were sore from sitting on wooden benches with no back-rests for so long.

When it came time for the baptisms, the session of the church came forward, all dressed in black—one of our hosts called them the San Hedrin—leading the adults to be baptized, or the parents holding the babies to be baptized, who were dressed in ordinary clothes, such as we saw on the folks in the congregation who were looking on.  One by one, the ministers of the church baptized the 50 and then the elders surrounded them in their street clothes, hiding them from our view.  Suddenly, they stepped back to reveal that the new Christians were now dressed in dazzling white, shining in the natural cathedral light.  They were clothed in purest white, clothed in Christ, and now heirs, as Paul wrote millennia ago, to the promise of God.

Sisters and brothers, like the bulu villagers baptized that day, like the Galatian Christians Paul wrote to long ago, we are clothed in Christ.  And in Christ there is no Baptist or Methodist, Republican or Democrat, no German or French.  In Christ there is no blind or sighted, no soccer mom or junkie, no prisoner or free.  We are all one in Christ, heirs to the promise, no difference between us in the eyes of God.   Amen.