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.
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