Faithful in Little (John 6:1-15)

So.  The Session of First Calvin Covenant Presbyterian Church is gathered in the fellowship hall for its monthly meeting, which they call whether they need it or not, and Pastor Roy is droning on about whether or not they should pay their head-tax, which he’s against, because the Presbytery has done something he doesn’t like.  Suddenly, there’s a blinding flash of light and a huge puff of smoke, and when it clears, there’s Jesus himself, standing beside the pastor, who proceeds to faint dead away.  Jesus is brushing something off his Brooks Brothers suit, saying “Angel dust . . . it gets into everything.” And he looks down at the pastor, gestures and suddenly Pastor Roy is in his chair, staring blearily around.

And there is dead silence as the elders stare at Jesus with mouths agape, and Jesus looks back at them and says “What?  Is it the suit?  You don’t expect me to wear a robe and sandals in this weather, do you?”  Doug, noting that Pastor Roy was still out of it, and feeling that his position as clerk demanded that he take the initiative, speaks up: “Uh, no . . . that’s not it . . . we’re just wondering, well . . . what are you doing here?” and Jesus says “Didn’t you believe me when I said ‘Lo, I will be with you, even unto the ends of he Earth?”  And he shakes his head, saying “Never mind.  Listen . . . I’ve got a job for you.  See those people out there?”  And they look out the window and there’s a huge crowd of people of all races and genders and socio-economic classes, and Jesus says “There’s five thousand of them.  Where are we going to buy them something to eat?  Is there a Costco open this late, or how about a deli?  Hard to get good pastrami at the right hand of God . . .”

And the members of the Session of First Calvin Covenant Church look uncomfortably at one another, and the finance committee chair says “Uh, Lord . . . we don’t have the budget for that . . . we have to pay the minister”—at which Pastor Roy perks up—“and the secretary and the choir director, and our building needs a new roof, and what about the Little Sisters of Perpetual Anxiety?  They depend on the little bit we give them every year.”  And the head of Missions nods her head, saying “We only have a tiny bit of our budget allocated to emergency needs,” and the Trustee representative chimes in with “and besides . . where are we going to put ‘em all?”

And they shuffle their feet, and look increasingly hang-dog, and Jesus just stares at them, until the Deacon rep says “Well my son over there” and she points to a sullen teenager in the corner  “my son has 5 Big Macs and a couple of super-sized fries, but that wouldn’t be nearly enough . . .”  But Jesus says “Go outside and sit ‘em down” and Lo!  The crowd sits in the parking lot, and it sits in the street.  It sits in the highways and hedges and all over the church lawn (the grounds chair mutters about how it’ll never recover).  And Jesus says “Bring me the burgers and fries” and he takes them and give thanks to God, and begins to hand them out the to the people in the crowd, saying “take, eat all you want.”  And the disciples—oops, I mean elders—begin to move back, behind their savior, and their eyes dart nervously around, because you never know what a hungry crowd’s gonna do, especially when you run out of food.

But you know what?  They don’t run out of food.  Jesus just keeps handing it out, and handing it out, and somehow it doesn’t run out.  And they don’t quite see how it happens, there’s no special-effects flash and bang . . .the food just keeps on coming, quietly, steadily.  It just keeps on coming.

And when everybody has been fed—when they’d all had seconds, and even thirds—Jesus tells the elders to go out and gather up the leavings, and they don’t even roll their eyes at the thought of anything left, they’d seen enough to convince them anything was possible, and sure enough, they gather up twelve of those reusable Kroger shopping bags full of Big Mac and french fry leavings, all mooshed together in a gooey mass of meat, pickles and potatoes, along with those little seeds that get caught in your teeth.

And after Pastor Roy is cited by the police for not having a crowd permit, and after they file back into the fellowship hall, Jesus stands in front of them and shakes his head “I can’t believe you were skeptical, that you didn’t think it could happen.”  Pastor Roy speaks up: “Well, you can hardly blame us, we’ve never actually seen a miracle . . .”  But Jesus says:  “Don’t you get all those stories in your Scripture?  Haven’t you read about all the signs I performed, all demons I cast out . . . Why I even raised old Lazarus from the grave, for heaven’s sake.  And you know this bears at least a slight resemblance to another sign I did beside the Sea of Galilee.”  And he smiles.

The elders look at one another uneasily, while Jesus continues: “That should be a big, fat hint: what was the point of those signs, which you call miracles?”  The Deacon representative timidly raises her hand, and feeling like he was back in the synagogue, Jesus calls on her: “Susan?”  “That you’re the Son of God?” she says.  “Well, yes . . . but all the signs point to that . . . look: I’ll give you a hint.  Think mustard seeds, water into wine, and leaven.”  Then he disappears.  Poof!

Well, that gets ‘em looking for Bibles—“there’s gotta be one around here somewhere,” the clerk mutters, “after all we are a church”—and finally they find some in the library and after they dust them off and pass them out, they first look up the water into wine, and Joyce reads it aloud.  When she gets to the end, they all begin to talk at once, and remembering his role as moderator, Pastor Roy says “one at a time, one at a time” and looks at the chair of Christian Ed.

“Well,” she says, “What jumps out at me is that the jars were filled to the brim, and I got the feeling that there was plenty to go around.  After all, those wedding parties went on for seven days, and there was a lot of wine drunk.”  There are snickers at that, and the pastor says “Ok, ok . . . so how is that like our miracle?”  “The abundance,” someone says, and another says: “it’s grace . . . grace is abundant, there's always more than enough to go around.”

“Aha!” says Pastor Roy.  “Grace is abundant.  In fact, it seems to me it’s super-abundant, there’s more than enough.  Now.  What about the mustard seed, and the leaven?”  Which sends them scrambling once again to their bibles, looking up the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven, which are, conveniently, back-to-back.  And again they all begin to talk at once, and again the pastor has to restore order, and this time he looks to the chair of building and grounds, the one so worried about his lawn.  “Fred?”

“Uh . . . the mustard seed is so little, and the tree it produces is so big, and it’s got room for birds and bees and everything.  And the leaven’s the same way, it just takes a little bit, a little tiny bit, and the whole loaf is changed, it’s transformed.”

“And so?” prompts Pastor Roy, proud of himself that for once that he has resisted the urge to preach.  “What does that say for us?”  And one of them pipes up:  “Maybe we’re called to step out in faith, use the little we have.”  And another:  “Maybe we’re to be confident that the little we have, the little we give, is enough—in the hands of God—to transform the whole world, to bring about God’s just reign on earth.”

Pastor Roy smiled and says “Bingo!” as if he’d thought the whole thing up.  But inwardly, he is praying and thanking God for the life and witness and forgiving grace of the man from Galilee.  Amen.

A Taxing Situation (Matthew 22:15-22)

 

Both St. Paul and St. Francis remind us that we are created beings, for Paul we stand alongside, but for Francis, we are part and parcel: we are sisters to the Sun, brothers to the Moon – but does the moon use money? Do the stars? How about a jellyfish, adrift in blue-green depths? If we are part of creation . . . if God created us just like the rocks and the trees and those obnoxious little gnats that gnaw on our arms, we’re also different, because I don’t know anything else that uses money. I don’t know anything else that loves it, hoards it, covets it like many do  . . . now I don’t mean any of us, mind you . . . we’re all the model of sober Presbyterian upstanding-ness. But those Methodists, or Baptists . . . now they’re a greedy bunch.

And it’s no wonder! Everywhere we look, everywhere we turn, we’re reminded of it – money, money, money, money. Our media is saturated by it . . . car ads blare it out . . . If you own a Mercedes, it shows you’ve got money, it shows you’ve arrived, but if you drive a Jag . . . well! You’re the Emperor of the World! On TV, everybody’s young and has money, and if you’re not young, all it takes is money and a knife, and voilá! You’re young, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof  . . . And politics . . . oy vey! does the candidate with the best answers win the day? The one with the best grasp of the issues? Of course not! It's the one with the most money, money, money, money . . .

And now, with the economy still shaky, with politicians slinging mud and each saying the other’s at fault, it’s hard to think of anything these days but money, it saturates the news cycle like absinthe, bathing the talking heads in a green, crinkly glow . . . what’s going to happen to our money, money, money, money . . .

 But for all our fascination with it, all our yearning for it, all our worrying and fretting and fussing and fighting over it, why are we so reluctant to talk about it in church? It makes us nervous, it makes us angry, congregations hate to hear about it and preachers hate to preach about it, and that's strange, because Jesus had no problem with it. His teachings were mostly about money . . . the rich young ruler, who could give up everything but his money to follow Jesus . . . the needle’s eye, the rich folks, and the camel squeezing through . . . the widow’s last coin . . . and then there's today's story – “Give unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” It’s gotten to be a catch-phrase, whenever somebody wants to justify the inevitability of government – like death and taxes! – it’s like “Oh well . . . Give unto Caesar . . .” And especially here in the U.S., it’s come to support the separation of Church and State, like it’s dividing assets up between players in a game . . . give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God’s . . . and little by little, step by step, that which is God’s has been shrunk into a little pile over here in the corner, into the privacy of our own homes or into a little altar in some quiet room. Or maybe what’s God’s is just what’s here Sunday morning – including an hour on Thursdays for choir and the occasional committee meeting – and the rest is Caesar’s. Pretty good deal for Caesar, wouldn’t you say?

But that's not what this passage is about, Jesus isn't talking about some abstract doctrine of church and state, or even stewardship . . . what he’s doing is neatly sidestepping a trap – and a very dangerous one at that. Because it’s not just any old tax they’re talking about, it’s the “head tax” that Rome instituted in 6 A.D., when Judea became a Roman province, and it was the hottest topic of the day. The tax had to be paid in Roman coins, which were inscribed with Caesar’s head and an inscription which read “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest,” and to devout Jews, this was incredibly sacrilegious – only God was divine, and the only high priest was right there in Jerusalem in the Temple. So to even pay the tax you had to handle these idolatrous coins, and the issue was so hot that it eventually led to the disastrous Jewish rebellion 35 years after Jesus’ death, and to Jerusalem's destruction five years after that. And for Matthew, the story is clear-cut evidence that Jesus was who he said he was – he’s so smart, so holy, so full of Godly wisdom, that he handily outsmarted the best Hebrew intellectuals, like those young hot-shot Pharisees sent out to ask the question. The authorities had already decided to get him, you understand, and now they were looking around for an excuse. And so they made what they thought was a no-win situation for Jesus. They sent some Herodians, who were for the tax, and if he came out against it, they would surely report him to the Romans, At the same time, the crowd was just full of lurking Jewish nationalists, revolutionary types who hated the tax, were itching for a fight, and if he came out for it, things might get out of hand, and before the authorities could do anything, he might have been lynched right there on the spot.

And so here come the young-Turk Pharisees with the Herodians hot on their heels—maybe trying to look casual, like they just happen to have gotten there at the same time, “Uh, hi, Dick, Harry … what are you doing here?”—and they try to disarm him with flattery: “Teacher,” they say, “we know you are truthful, and you teach God’s way in truth, and you don’t just say the things people want to hear, you're a straight-shooter, and you love your mama, so we know you’ll give it to us straight . . . is it lawful to pay tax” – and here the Greek is census, that’s how we know it’s the head tax, not just any tax – “is it lawful to pay a head-tax to Caesar or not?” And although he's supposed to be flattered, he knows where they're coming from, he knows their malice – literally, their evil:  – “Why do you test me,” he says, and he’s comparing the religious authorities to Satan, who also tested him in the wilderness, you'll recall. “Why do you test me? Show me the coin of the census,” he says, and hmmm . . . here's this supposedly hyper-devout Jew, pulling an idolatrous coin out of his pocket—what a picture that was—and sure-enough, there’s the hated likeness of Caesar right there on the front, stamped there just like honest Abe on a penny, and Jesus asks them: “Whose head is this, and whose inscription?” And right here, where it’s crucial, our translation fails us, because the Greek translated in the NRSV as “head” is eikon, and a much better translation is likeness, or better yet, image as in the King James Version – he asks them “whose image is this on the coin?” And they have to say that it’s Caesar's, that it’s the emperor’s image right there on the coin, and of course that’s when Jesus says it, the punch line of the whole story  – “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

And Matthew says they left amazed, no doubt at the thoroughness with which they'd been had.  Jesus had neatly slipped the noose – nobody could deny that Caesar’s likeness was on that coin, that his foundries had minted it in Rome, way over across the Mediterranean – And the Herodians could have had no problem with that answer, and so had no excuse to report him, and he'd made them all look like idiots, and worse, idolaters to those lurking revolutionaries – they’d been caught red-handed, with a idolatrous coin, participating in the hated Roman economic system. They had the coins, those sacrilegious, unclean coins right on their persons and I wonder – did they get them from the Temple coffers?

I’ll bet they left in fear as well as amazement. Because finally, he'd one-upped them theologically as well, he'd taken the question to a higher plane, and that’s where that word eikon comes in, because it’s the same word used for image in the Septuagint, in the Greek version of Genesis, which all the religious authorities of the time would’ve used. It says “God created human beings in the eikon – in the image – of God,” we are stamped with God’s image, just as surely as the census coin was with the emperor's, and as surely as that coin belongs to him, we belong to God . . . and this statement is breathtakingly theological, and at the same time deeply subversive. Far from separating church and state, it does exactly the opposite, it plants Christianity right at the heart of politics. Because if we are God’s, we can’t be the emperor’s, if our lives are the Lord's, everything we do belongs to him. And being subjects of God’s, we can’t be the subjects of any state. And that applies just as surely today as it did in Jesus’ time.

I think it's clear Jesus doesn't forbid the head tax, and that doubtless applies to taxes today. But with its veiled revolutionary reference, and its reminder of just who we belong to, he invites us to think about what we give to earthly powers – like the Roman empire or the United States of America or Costco or Ford Motor Company – and what we give to the Lord.

Of course, there is an ultimate answer, and though it’s threaded throughout scripture, it’s summed up in Psalm 24: “The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it . . .” and I like this solution, especially for those who glibly repeat the “give unto Caesar’s” verse. Because if we do that, if we give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s, we’ll give nothing to the state ‘cause everything belongs to God. And there are Christian groups who stick to this hard line as much as they can . . . the Quakers, for example, are one of the few denominations our government regularly excludes from the draft, and you can see their point – we have God’s image stamped on us, not that of the U. S. of A.

But for the rest of us, perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle after all, the state does do things we think God desires. Things like . . . keeping the streets safe, providing basic services to the poor, educating our children, etcetera, etcetera . . . the problem is, what do we do when the state does things that clearly God would not want? What about when the state oppresses, when it passes unjust laws? What then? What then is the Christian responsibility to give unto Caesar what is ultimately God’s? These are tough questions, for thinking Christians, as I know everybody here is, and they get tougher every day, as this old world becomes more and more dangerous, as our economy wobbles like a badly spun top . . . we should all ask ourselves: just what does it mean to say “Jesus is Lord?”  Amen.

A Tale of Two Readings (Matthew 22:1-14)

As she put the liturgy together for today’s service, Pam commented that I’d chosen a grim passage to preach on, and that in fact, all of the lectionary choices this morning were kind of on the bleak side.  I protested: “Hey,” I said “it’s the wedding banquet . . . How grim can it be?”  It was then I noticed that this is Matthew’s version of the parable, not the one from Luke, the version Karen read, with the host going out into the highways and hedges, but the one where the host—elevated to King—(a) responds with retributive violence to the killing of his emissaries and (b) invites people off the streets, but when he sees one of them without the proper clothing—who just found out he was invited, and thus would’ve had no opportunity to change—he condemns him to a place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (and, presumably, inadequate dental care).

“Oops,” I thought, “wrong parable,” and prepared to choose another, but then I thought “Hey, it’s the passage you were given, so buck up and preach it.”  (My inner voice often says stuff like “buck up.”). And what I discovered was that the interpretation of this parable depends, as so many of them do, on how it is read.

First, however, we need to acknowledge the thing that first led me to choose it—no, not my inclination to preach the easier version, or that I’m easily confused, but that there are indeed two versions of this parable.  It seems that Matthew and Luke had access to written sources that neither Mark or John had, and this parable was one of them.  A lot of scholars think that the one in Luke is the earlier version, maybe a little closer to the original, but both have been edited to fit the theological agendas of their authors.

Luke’s is a hands-across-the-water version that is in line with the inclusive, world-stance of that gospel.  Matthew’s rendition is, as you can see, a completely different kettle of fish, tailored, we think, for his audience of upper-class Jewish Christians.  We also think that they might have been smarting from being ostracized, shunned by their fellow Jews for following this upstart guy named Jesus.  It might be that Matthew’s editing of the episode reflects these facts.

The most noticeable difference is the violence—there is none on Luke’s version.  Matthew, on the other hand, has two instances: first, the King’s slaves are set upon and mistreated, and if that’s not enough, they’re killed by some of those who are invited.  Talk about an abrupt RSVP.  The second violent episode is the King’s retribution for the killings, when he sends in his troops, kills the killers, and burns the city to the ground.

Another big difference is the guy—one of the good and bad that the King’s slaves have gathered in from the streets--who the King consigns to the outer darkness for not being dressed appropriately.  It’s not even in Luke's version, it has been added by Matthew, apparently to bolster his interpretation of Jesus’ parable.

So.  Just what is that interpretation?  What is Jesus—in Matthew’s version, at least—trying to say?  Well, it’s likely that Matthew read it allegorically—that is, as having a one to one correspondence between elements in the story and elements in real life.  And in this reading, the King is God, his Son is Jesus, and the banquet is a representation of the new reality, called the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God.  And the King/God sends various prophets to the Jewish people—who, remember, are already God’s people—to come and partake of the riches of the new reality available through the King/God’s son.  But they refuse to come, saying they’re too busy with their homes and businesses, and some are downright hostile and kill the prophets.  This riles the King/God up, and he sends his troops, kills the offending Jews, and destroys their hometown which, of course, stands for Jerusalem.

And this last is thought to be a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Roman army came in and savagely put down the Jewish revolt that had been brewing for decades.  And so Matthew’s version of this parable, in an allegorical reading, explains the destruction of Jerusalem as divine retribution, through God’s trusty instrument Rome, for God’s people killing God’s messengers and refusing to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven available through Jesus Christ.

So.  After killing all those people and burning all that real estate, the King/God worked up quite an appetite, and there was still that wedding feast, all ready to go, so he sends his slaves out to the main streets, as Matthew puts it, and they gather up the good and bad and bring them to the banquet.  So to get gathered up into this wedding feast—symbolizing, remember, the Kingdom of Heaven—you don’t have to be an angel, you just have to be there, you just have to have a pulse.  Or, in our allegorical reading, you don’t have to be a Jew, you don’t even follow the Law.

But wait . . . there’s more—in Matthew's version, anyway. God shows up at his son’s banquet to survey the guests, and sees one of them—are you sitting down?—without a wedding robe!  And the monarch is enraged, he’s flabbergasted. He can’t even speak he’s so mad, and he immediately banishes him to the outer darkness—which, in spite of everything you’ve heard, is probably not New Jersey, and where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So there you have it.  An allegorical reading of the parable of the wedding feast, embellished in Matthew’s version to picture a violent deity who gets the Romans to do his dirty work, to punish a whole people—and destroy an entire city—for the deeds of a few.  A deity who is capricious enough to banish a guy to the outer darkness for not wearing a tux, even though he’d just been hauled in off the street and wouldn’t have had time to go home and change into one, which he probably didn’t have anyway.

And you know what?  That’s pretty much how interpreters over the succeeding centuries have read it, even though a lot of them have claimed not to like it.  But a surprising consensus is to kind of say “oh, well . . . that’s God for you.  Never can tell what that deity’s gonna do.  After all, our God is an awesome God, who reigns from heaven above, and that God is not bound by our puny mortal ideas of what is right.  Our God can be capricious if he wants, he can be arbitrary, and besides . . . the Jews did kill our savior, they did kill God’s only begotten son . . . And you know what?  Jesus said it, I believe it and that settles it.”

And it’s that last little bit, the thought that this refers to the consignment of a whole race to Hell—which is how most interpret outer darkness—that has been tremendously damaging over the years.  Wave after wave of Christian violence against Jews, from Crusade to pogrom to holocaust—has been fueled by passages like this.  And here’s the thing: Matthew and his congregation—smarting from being shunned by their own people—might have viewed it that way, too, given the way he edited the original.

But here’s the good news: the very fact that there is another reading of this parable, preserved in Luke's more grace-filled version, clues us in that Jesus probably didn't tell it that way . . . there’s a rule in literary criticism that says when faced with two versions of the same story, the simpler is likely the older.  And besides: is it not out of character for Jesus, who healed the centurion who came to arrest him, and wouldn’t use violence to save his own life?  Isn’t out of character for a God who we believe is the absolute embodiment of love?

Well.  As theologian and pastor Michael Hardin commented about this passage, if that’s what this passage is about—a violent and retributive God whose will will be done . . . or else, maybe we’d just better quietly move along.  I thought about doing that, I thought about making this a lesson in Biblical interpretation, and leave it at that.  But what if this parable can be redeemed?  After all, it is still, somehow, God’s Word, and it hurts my little pastor’s heart to think that we can’t learn at least something from it, and the key into that is the first thing out of Jesus’ mouth: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to,” he says, not the kingdom of heaven is like.  The latter “is like” implies similarity, but “may be compared to” is much more neutral, much more inviting of ambiguity.  What if Jesus is making a negative comparison?  What if he means to say you can compare the kingdom of heaven with this counter example, the way they all know things can be in the world, where kings are violent, vengeful and not a little capricious?

That way, the king would not be God, but almost the anti-God, perhaps the Emperor, who violently crushed the Jewish revolution by killing everybody and burning an entire city for the deeds of what were doubtless only a few.  Who demanded everybody eat and drink his way, who kept them oppressed with little room for free will, demanding that they regard himself—and his son—as divine.  And who singled out a scapegoat—Jesus Christ himself—who wouldn’t submit, who wouldn’t bow down, who wouldn’t wear the Emperor’s new clothes?

Well.  I guess I should have called this “a tale of three readings:” Matthew’s, Luke’s and, now, mine.  And the interesting thing is, two of those readings—Luke’s and Matthew’s—are both together, in the same Bible.  Two contradictory versions of the same parable, left in by the folks who determined the canon, that list of books that became our scripture.  In fact, the bible is full of contradictions: different versions of the same story, incompatible stories, and incompatible theologies, all put together to make our Bible.  And us moderns, we have to know which one is true, which one is right, even us liberal preachers, who tend to avoid Matthew’s reading like the plague.

But you know what?  We don’t have to choose.  As Pam told me this morning, it’s not a contest.  Both readings are there, both are scripture, and both—as I hope I showed with my poor offering—have something to teach us.  I say these things in the name of God the Creator, God the Redeemer, and God the Comforter, Amen.

 

The Disciples' New Clothes (Galatians 3:23-29)

      I was in Cameroon, West Africa, the summer before I went to seminary. Presbyterians were early missionaries there, but over the years our presence has dwindled, so now it's a shadow of what it once was . . . there are buildings left, some crumbling, some whole, all kind of . . . ghostly, full of shades of the past, when our mission was full and rich and, sometimes, oppressive. We stayed across a dirt road from a huge brick church, an African cathedral, really, built by Presbyterians past, and used by Presbyterians present.  African Presbyterians, the fruits of our missionary efforts a century ago. Our hosts are of the Bulu tribe – all things in Cameroon are tribal – and they are a beautiful people, with finely-chiseled features and kind hearts.

      I remember in the absolute, pitch-black African nights, our bare-bulb lights would flicker and go out, and we knew that the church across the street was in use, sucking up all the precious current, and we’d see dim lights inside, and hear the ethereal music of the choir as it practiced in the night. A wild, African sound that we knew, because they were our hymns, translated and transformed and transmogrified . . . the sound floated in the moist night air they were ours and yet . . . not ours, made fully African, wholly their own, but ours as well.

      This was a decisive experience for me, it helped propel me into seminary, and every time I hear this beautiful passage – some of Paul’s best writing – I think of it . . . you may recall that in Galatians, Paul writes to condemn the teachings of what he considered false teachers, who were probably traveling evangelists preaching a different form of the gospel. It’s hard to say what it was, because we have nothing from the other side, but it apparently included following Jewish law in addition to Christ. To Paul, this was anathema – Christ died precisely so humankind could be justified—made righteous, made right with God—by faith, rather than the law. He thought it absurd that gentiles should have to follow the law, when God’s own son had paid the price for all. Our passage comes near the end of a long, sometimes tortuous, argument designed to show that Christians are inheritors of God’s promise, God’s covenant, where God said “I will be your God and you will be my people,” and that the promise supersedes the law.

      For Paul, the law was a temporary measure, designed to keep humanity out of  trouble until Christ came. And that’s how our passage begins . . . “before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.” And notice that here, faith is almost a stand-in for “Christ” –  you could almost read “before Christ came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until Christ would be revealed.”  For Paul, faith is all important, not obedience to the law, which nobody can do perfectly, anyway – and Paul should know.  After all, he spent years trying to follow it – he was a pretty good Pharisee, by his own account. But following the law was only necessary until Christ, until faith, came. As he says “the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.”  The law was there to keep us in line until we could be justified by Christ, by faith. “But now that faith has come,” he says “we are no longer under that disciplinarian,” no longer subject to the law.  And why?  Because in Christ Jesus we are children of God through faith.  By virtue of Jesus, Christians are God’s offspring . . . and here’s where the stunning imagery comes in . . . we are God's children because “we were baptized into Christ” and thus we’ve “clothed ourselves with Christ.”

      Once a quarter, there’s a massive gathering at that huge church in Cameroon . . . members travel, sometimes for days, and elders hold court in session, and on that Sunday, they gather in the church for worship.  It’s an incredible sight – four thousand souls, packed to the rafters; we sat on the front row and watched, and

let me tell you, those folks know how to do church . . . hymns echoed joyously, scripture after scripture, they ordained – there must've been 30! – deacons, and that took an hour, and then even more elders –  another hour – and then it was time for the preaching, and fortunately, it was one of us Americans, so it took wenty minutes, not another hour.

      Finally, three hours into the service came the baptisms, and fully fifty babies were brought up, dressed just like every other baby in Cameroon, and presented to the congregation – and us honored guests – parents’ faces beaming, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins were up there, fussing, and it was riotous, chaotic, and the sponsors were asked the questions, and they answered, and they huddled around the babies, around the parents holding them, and all were hidden from view and then Behold! they were in clothed anew in dazzling white!  See! A new creation . . .  they were clothed in Christ.

      And that is what Paul is talking about here, the moment of transformation, of rebirth we witnessed on that African morning, on the other side of the world, we witnessed initiation into the communion of God's saints. And like the first Christians two thousand years ago, they symbolized it with clothing.  They took off the old, and put on the new. They were garbed in white, wrapped in the Lord . . . clothed in Christ, an image at the heart of today's passage.

      Now this is worth unpacking a little, because it makes what comes next just a bit easier to understand . . . notice that Paul says we were baptized into Christ . . . and that’s not just window-dressing, not just pretty speech.  For Paul, Christians had a mysterious, personal unity with Christ . . . over in Romans he says “do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” and further, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will . . . be united with him in a resurrection like his.” So for Paul, this union is at the heart of Christian identity: we were baptized into Christ, literally, and have therefore clothed ourselves with Christ . . . we have put Christ on like a garment. When you put something on, when you clothe yourself in something, you take on its characteristics. And when we are baptized, we put on Christ like a new set of clothes.

      But . . . and this is crucial for understanding what comes next . . . Paul is talking to a community, to a church, not to individuals. The letter to Galatians is not a letter to the head elder, nor is it to the president of the women’s group, or its pastor. It's to the entire church . . . over in Corinthians, he says the church is the body of Christ . . . as individuals, we are baptized into that body, into Christ.

      And in the same way, when Paul says there’s no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, of course he’s not talking about individual characteristics . . . if a person was a Jew, she wasn’t a gentile, she wasn’t Greek.  If a person were a slave, he wasn’t free . . . and of course a person is (usually) either male or female, that’s a biological fact, the way we were made.  But in the body of Christ, in the Christian community, these distinctions no longer hold.  For Paul, the advent of Christ ushered in a whole new reality, he called it a “new creation” over in second Corinthians, and in this new creation, in this new reality, in this new community, ethnic differences do not matter – there is no longer Jew or Greek. Social differences do not matter – there is no longer slave or free. And biological differences, gender differences, do not matter; there is no longer male and female.

      In the old order, in the old creation, so to speak, there were hierarchies based on these things, hierarchies ordered around whether you were man or woman, Roman or Jew or Greek or Scythian, whether you were free or owned by someone else, all these things determined your status in whatever community you lived. For example, in the Jewish community, circumcision was an initiation rite, a sign of status. But it was only administered to males, so only males had status. But for Paul, circumcision was no longer a sign of status, neither were ethnic, social or biological differences. Through baptism – a rite administered the same way no matter who you are – these differences are abolished.

      Of course, it's questionable how much the church has lived into this new reality – even in Paul's writings, we see the already/not-yet quality of the kingdom. But there's evidence that the Christian churches of the first century had remarkably egalitarian means of government. In at least some early churches, leadership rotated through the membership, whether male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek . . . but we know that it didn't last, and by 200 AD, women, at least, had been driven out of Christian leadership. And that’s not all . . . in 1860, the Presbyterian Church and other denominations split over slavery, and it wasn't until 1983 that we were reunited . . . And here in 2001, an overwhelming majority of the church does not recognize the equality of women with men in Christ's body.

      And yet Paul saw the truth, he knew it in his bones, he knew that God has made a new creation, a new community, and he summed it up in one last statement – why was did the old distinctions no longer hold?  Because all of us are one in Christ.  We are all Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. All of us are one in Christ.

      It's Christmas 1999, at the midnight mass at St. Phillips, the huge Episcopalian cathedral in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia. Outside in the parking lot is a fabulous array of metal-armored status symbols – Beemers, Jags and that ultimate Atlanta car, the Mercedes Benz.  Inside, the pomp and circumstance – which I admit, I kind of like – is in full swing – incense billows, pipe organ bellows . . .  the Bishop, paces up the aisle, golden mitred head afire in the television lights . . . and we wait in line for communion, all four thousand of us or so, and as I take the wafer from the Bishop himself, and dip it in the wine, my mind flashes back to that cool African afternoon. After the proud parents and wailing children and parading deacons of the morning, all clothed in Christ, we gather in the brick church for communion, all four thousand of us, and I am back there, sitting on the rock-hard pews waiting for the elements to be passed down the rows, by the elders all dressed in black . . . and Bulu hymns float on the breeze, and the earthy, loamy smells of the bush caress me, and smiling faces greet me, and I realize that . . .  I am in Africa, I am among the tribesmen and tribes-women and children in that brick church, and geckos scamper up the walls, and I'm there with the bishop and the hoi-polloi of Atlanta, too . . . and they are the same in that moment, in that communion, in that action . . . the same movements, the taking and breaking of bread and wine, and as four thousand people take communion together in Atlanta and Cameroon, separated by time and space, I know we are the same, we are one in Christ. And right now, all across the world, the body partakes of holy communion along side us, and we are one in Christ, and we are here and in Atlanta and in Cameroon, right here in this church on Winton Road.  And it doesn't make any difference if we're black or white, Asian or aborigine, English or American or woman or man . . . through our baptism into Christ, we are clothed in Christ, the body of Christ on this earth. We are one in Christ.

      I say these things in the name of God who shows us the way, the one in three and three in one, the unity of Creator, Redeemer and the Comforter, amen.