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.