It’s World Communion Sunday, and as far as I’m
concerned, it can’t have come too soon.
There’s been a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence over the past
several years, and I am at a loss to explain it. Oh, there are all the partisan arguments, one
side says one thing, another side says another, yet another says something
else, and I’ve engaged in some of that myself, I’m sorry to say, but I really
think it’s bigger than all of that, I think it has to do with the way we humans
view reality, all of us, with the possible exception of very primitive, hunter-gatherer
societies. If there are any of those left.
And as I was re-visiting the Galatians passage
from Paul, one of my go-to scriptures for World Communion, I came to the
realization that Paul—and/or one of his disciples (we’ll get to that in a moment)—that they got it, whether they understood exactly
what they had or not. And to see why, let’s take a look at the two passages
I read; first the one from Galatians, likely the one written first.
Paul wrote Galatians some time in the fifth
decade after Jesus’ birth, sometime probably closer to 50 than to 60 Common
Era. Nobody is certain exactly where the
church or churches were, and it’s likely that he established at least one of
the churches himself (if there were indeed more than one). It’s clear that he considered himself their
spiritual father, and they’d been bad, and like any parent of such a child, he
was angry. Or at least the letter gives
the appearance of anger; as the user
or Greek rhetorical techniques, it can be difficult to tell what his actual
mood was when he wrote his letters.
At any rate, the letter has an angry tone, and
the reason isn’t important here, except to help locate our reading in the
general stream of things. The final verse
of today’s passage is the conclusion of Paul’s argument as to why the Galatians
are Abraham’s heirs according to faith instead of any external sign like
circumcision. And it has the sound of
one . . . a conclusion, that is. It’s a
declarative statement of belief, one that he has derived in the preceding
discussion: “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according
to the promise.” Anything else you might
do, or have done to you, doesn’t matter.
If you belong to Christ, then you are a child of Abraham, and heirs of
the promise to be God’s children, God’s people.
But what interests me this World Communion Sunday is what comes just before the
conclusion: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” And it’s well understood that by Greek Paul
means Gentile—in other words, anybody who’s not a Jew—and slave or free, male
and female are obvious references, and it’s clear that he’s obliterating primary
categories in the Middle East, primary labels, primary boxes in which people are placed . . . In Christ Jesus there is
none of that.
And it’s also clear that in Galatians he’s
speaking in a Christian context: those
who are baptized into Christ, he
says, have clothed themselves with Christ. And for centuries, congregations would replicate
that . . . When I was in Africa I witnessed such a baptism. The candidates were dressed in street
clothes, maybe a little more drab than usual—the Bulu are a colorful people—and
after their baptism, black-clothed elders surrounded them as they changed, and voilá! The big reveal: they stood before
the congregation clothed with Christ, in blinding white as if on
Transfiguration mountain. It’s those folks who, for Paul in Galatians,
are one in Christ, in whom there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male
and female. Christians those who have been clothed in Christ.
Ok, now that we’ve got that straight, let’s fast forward a few years, maybe a couple of
decades, maybe less, when Paul—or a follower thereof—penned the letter to the
Colossians. Because Colossae was
destroyed by an earthquake in 61 CE, if Paul wrote the letter, it was likely
around 60. If a disciple wrote it in
Paul’s name—a common practice back then—it could have been written sometime in
the 70s, even as late as 80 years after Christ.
Whenever or by whomever, it shows a different, some say more advanced,
theology. Particularly, the author has a
more cosmic view of Christ; or as Richard Rohr says, the Christ in Colossians
is the Cosmic Christ.
The passage I read at the beginning is ground
central for this concept. Christ “is
the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,”Paul (or
whoever) writes, and of course this harkens back to Genesis one, where humans
were created in God’s image, and like what John says in his Gospel, all things
in heaven and on earth were created in, through and for him, things Version
should blue and invisible. Note—all things, not just on the earth, but
in heaven—the whole universe, the entire cosmos, “whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or powers.”
In fact—and here’s the kicker—Christ “is before
all things and in him all things hold
together”. Note the present tense: we’re talking how things are right now,
and this verse—especially the last clause, in him all things hold together (another
translation might be subsist), is
what made Teilhard de Chardin’s heart sing, because he saw in it a validation of
what he had experienced mystically, the sacredness of all matter, that God was in everything,
and that everything was held together in that divine presence.
And so we see that Pauline theology has
developed, it’s changed between the writing of Galatians and that of Colossians. If you asked Paul the question “who is in
Christ?” shortly after the turn of the fifth decade, he might have answered
“those who have been baptized into
Christ. If you asked him a decade or so
later, he (or his disciple) would have said all things, and that includes all people, plants, rocks and horses, the
whole cosmos, the whole shebang, all are in Christ.
Now. Does
that mean all things are Christian, that they follow Christ? Of course not! as Paul himself might have put
it. It’s self-evident that not everyone follows the path laid out by Jesus of
Nazareth. He’s is not talking about
whether someone is saved or not, whether they’re justified or not. Here in Colossians, he’s saying that all are in Christ, whether they know it
or not. And if we’re all in Christ, then
we are all one in Christ, there’s
neither Cypriot or Greek, Venezuelan or American, Israeli or Palestinian. Neither Hindu or Muslim, Buddhist or
Christian, Floridian or Puerto Rican, all are one in Christ Jesus.
So how can we fence anything or anyone else out from our regard? If we are wrapped in Christ, suffused by
Christ, glued together by Christ, how
can we exclude anyone from the bounty given to us by God through Christ? When we
exclude another, when we regard another as inferior or superior, we exclude Christ, we regard Christ as inferior or superior.
And that gets us to that problem in the way
most of humanity views the world, including but not limited to our Western
culture: we regard ourselves as
separate, both from nature and from one another. We regard nature as something to be tamed, to
be used to further our own ends, and we regard one another in the same
way. We think about everything other
than our own selves—what we think of as ourselves, that is—as separate, as
other than ourselves. As Cynthia
Bourgeault puts it, we are subject and every other person, every other thing, is object. Therefore, we are forever defending ourselves
and what we have sequestered, that part of God’s bounty we so presumptively
call “ours,” from those people and things we consider not us. And conversely, because nature is separate,
because it’s not part of us, we can use it up, exploit it for the
aggrandizement of our supposed self.
But here’s the thing: if we are truly pervaded
by Christ, if we are truly one in
Christ, how can we talk about separation?
How can we call ourselves separate from one another or nature, which is also perfused by Christ? Paul set the stage in Galatians and drove the
nail home in Colossians: we can’t. We
can’t say that we are separate. And if
we’re not separate, if we are all embedded in Christ, if Christ—as he himself
told us—is in everything, what we do to each other, how we treat immigrants,
foreign nationals, even our enemies, is how we treat Christ.
And if there is no separation, perhaps equally difficult
important, how we treat immigrants, the poor, the outsiders, those we seek to
exclude, is how we treat ourselves. Jesus famously told us to treat our neighbors
as ourself, and we expend considerable energy and ink trying to figure out who
our neighbors are, it the answer is
simple: who are our neighbors? We
are. Amen.
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