Second Sight (Mark 10:46-52)

      This is a deceptively complex episode—not because the action is complicated, because it isn’t. An unsighted person, Bartimaeus by name, cries out to Jesus as he and his entourage pass on their way out of Jericho, the city where the walls came-a-tumbling down, and he cries out to Jesus to have mercy. When Jesus asks him what he wants, he says he wants to see again, and Jesus restores his sight, and the man follows him “on the way.” That’s it, a rather “unremarkable” healing story, if any of Jesus’ healing stories can be called “unremarkable.”

But like a lot of episodes in Jesus’ ministry, it’s deceptive in its depth, because of its symbolism and its resonance with other passages of Scripture, and perhaps even other literature of the day. Take the name Bartimaeus: in Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue, it means “son of Timaeus,” a fact which Mark emphasizes by repeating it in Greek: saying “Bartimaeus son of Timaeus” is like saying “son of Timaeus son of Timaeus,” so it’s a safe bet that Mark wants us to get it . . . and there are several possibilities. First, Timaeus is the title character in one of Plato’s dialogs, written several hundred years before, in which Timaeus gives a impassioned ode to the faculty of sight: he says that sight “is the source of the greatest benefit to us” and that God gives us sight so that we might “behold he courses of intelligence in the heaven”—in other words, so we might see the signs of God’s intelligence written his creation. And thus, Bartimaeus is cut off from this aspect of the almighty, cut off in a sense from God.

Another possibility is that in Aramaic it sounds like a play on words for “unclean,” and that is certainly what Bartimaeus is. He is squatting beside the road, covered against the dust by his robe, when Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd—shades of the time Jesus healed the hemorrhaging woman in a large crowd—and when he hears who it is, that it’s Jesus of Nazareth, he begins to shout and carry on, saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And many in the crowd try to shut him up, because what he has said is very political, and it could get them in a whole lot of trouble. Calling him “son of David” in those days was tantamount to calling him a revolutionary, an usurper of religious and civil authority, because a descendent of David was supposed to rise up and restore Israel to its God-given place as a great and powerful nation, throwing out the Romans and their puppets, who just happened to reside in Jerusalem, just 20 miles away.

So this is one politically-charged scene, and you can’t really blame folks for trying to shut him up . . . you can just hear them saying “Shhhh . . . don’t say that, don’t you know there are spies all around?” But this makes Bartimaeus shout out even more loudly: “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And in the midst of the crowd Jesus stops and stands still, just like he did when the hemorrhaging woman touched him, and in fact Bartimaeus’ shout is very much like her touching of his robe: it is a sign of faith, a sign of confidence in the power of Jesus Christ, Son of Man, and it stops him in his tracks. And what does this faith look like? It’s bold, it’s forward, it doesn’t care what how it looks. “Son of David, have mercy on me” . . . again, it’s like a hyper-version of the hemorrhaging woman, who showed remarkable chutz-pah just by touching Jesus’ cloak.

And speaking of cloaks, Bartimaeus flings his off as he springs up, providing another, verbal link to the earlier episode, after Jesus tells his followers to call him . . . and they say “Take heart; get up, he’s calling you.” And the double repetition of the verb “to call” emphasizes that this is more than a healing, more than a miracle, this is Jesus calling the beggar, every bit as much as when he called bis first disciples. And by jumping up and throwing off his cloak, throwing off his possessions, Bartimaeus answers that call, giving up his worldly goods and following Jesus, which is something that the rich guy from an earlier episode is unwilling to do.

And if you’re getting the impression that this episode is kind of a summing up of themes from his ministry, a symbolic greatest hits, if you will, you’re right. The restoration of Bartimaeus’ sight, thereby making him ritually clean, is the final episode in the central section of Mark, the section that describes his ministry. And it comes right before his triumphal entrance to Jerusalem, when his identity will be out of the Messianic closet. And in fact, unlike many of the earlier healings, he doesn’t warn Bartimaeus not to tell anyone. It’s like the cat is out of the bag, already—he’s hiding his identity no more.

So, in this summary or hinge episode, we see a lot of his ministry themes hinted at: the boldness and necessity of faith: check. The giving-up of worldly goods: check. The necessity of following him: check. And one more episode is echoed: instead of healing the man right away, Jesus asks him: “What do you want me to do for you?” And it’s the same, exact words he uses when he asks James and John, in the episode right before this one, “What do you want me to do for you?” Only in this case, Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for power and control like they do, he asks to see.

And I think the “seeing” he asks for is a lot more than just physical sight; I know that Mark means it that way. Sight is a metaphor for a certain species of knowing, a certain kind of perception. We call a person with pre-cognitive abilities a seer, or we say she has “the sight.” When mystics are enlightened, it is said that they see the same world we see, only differently, with greater clarity, or with deeper insight. To the great Jesuit scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin it was all about how and what one sees. “One could say,” he wrote, “that the whole of life lies in seeing.” And by that, of course, he meant more than just photons hitting our eyeballs.

And is that the same for Bartimaeus? I think so . . . in fact, I think his “seeing,” his enlightenment, began well before Jesus healed his physical sight. As he often does, Jesus says it at the end: “your faith has made you well.” But Bartimaeus had faith before his physical sight was restored. Where did it come from? Was it, as John Calvin thought, a gift from the Holy Spirit? Did he come by it from hard experience, did he have some reason to have faith? In Mark, we’re never told how he got his faith, just that he has it, and it has made him well.

And that’s the way it is in the kingdom of God . . . faith is a mysterious thing, at least as far as the gospels are concerned. As in Mark, in Matthew and Luke Jesus either commends people for having it—“Your faith has made you well”—or chastises them for not having it—“O ye of little faith.” In John, the word “faith” is not even found, but Jesus does give a hint as to where it might come from. He says “Nobody can come to me unless drawn by God.” And so the most we can say is that Bartimaeus was drawn, or led, to approach Jesus by God’s own self. And in a way, an outcast beggar without the sense of sight nevertheless sees more than the rich young ruler, more than James and John, more even than James and John’s mother.

And I wonder: where does our faith come from? Do you remember how it was for you? Was there a time when you didn’t have it, and the next moment did? I can’t remember such a moment . . . like many of us, I think, my parents took me to church from when I was little. I grew up in the faith, as the saying goes. But where did my parents get their’s? Through other folks as well . . . and you can go back and back, the faith being passed down through families, or “sideways” by friends, and sometimes the media. It’s like the tale of the student who asks a sage what holds up the world, and the sage replies “My son, it rests on the back of a great tiger.” And the student asks “But master: what holds the tiger up?” And the sage says “My son, it stands on the back of a massive turtle,” and when once again the student asks “But master: what holds the turtle up?” the sage looks at him and says: “my son, it is turtles all the way down.”

It’s turtles all the way down: no matter how far you go back, how you trace your faith development, it ends up with a mystery, and we call that mystery “God.” Our capacity for faith, and the faith to fill it, come from the same source: the all encompassing, indwelling spirit of God. And when we realize that faith, when it becomes evident in us, it’s like Jesus saying to us that our faith has made us well, and like the formerly-blind Bartimaeus, throw off our cloaks and follow. Amen.

The Zebedee Two-Step (Mark 10:32 - 45)

     So . . . yeah. This is quite a tale. The Zebedee boys, James and John, ask Jesus to do for them whatever they ask of him. And right off the bat, I think of the way a lot of Christians treat their relationship with the divine . . . they want God to do whatever they want. God is some sort of celestial Santa Claus, and one of the perks of being a Christian is they get to ask God for stuff. They pray for something—a good test result, a better job, a better relationship—and the they expect to get it, or at least get consideration about it. It reminds me of the old joke about the evangelical preacher sitting at a stop light, praying to God for permission to get a new Cadillac. “Lord,” he says, “give me a sign. If you want me to have that new car, make this light turn green . . . now!” We can usually get God to authorize our desires if we want.

I’ve often thought it interesting that God grants the wishes of people who are better off—comparatively, at least—with greater frequency than those who are, well, not so much . . . I mean, you know there’s a greater chance that prayers for Aunt Tilly’s recovery get answered if Aunt Tilly’s got good health insurance . . . is that the way it’s supposed to be?

Anyway. James and John ask Jesus to do whatever they ask of him, and Mark ratchets up the irony by putting this episode right after Jesus predicts his death and resurrection for the third time. This always reminds me as if Aunt Tilly—that woman really gets around!—if Aunt Tilly were to tell her nephews she has a year to live and they start arguing over who gets the silverware . . . Matthew puts the two together there too—biblical scholars think he in fact copied Mark’s account—but oddly, edits it so the boys’ mother does then asking: “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” Now, I don’t want to say Matthew’s a bit more patriarchal than Mark, but . . .

Well. Here in Mark, where the boys ask him to do anything they want him to, Jesus doesn’t get all haughty on them, he doesn’t get up on his toes and say “how dare you treat me, your master like a slave.” No. He says very calmly, very humbly, even, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And right here, he exhibits the qualities of a sage (which he certainly was, among other things), taking even the most objectionable, the most clueless utterances of his students calmly and seriously, and using them as a teachable moments. When the ask to sit at his side in his glory, he doesn’t answer their question directly, but tells them they don’t know what they’re asking. And they clearly don’t, even though he’s just told them, for the third time what’s in store: “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes . . . then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him.” And yet they still ask him to sit at his right and left hand, imagining some kind of royal throne room where they are the royal flunkies.

His students are once again mistaking him for their preconceptions about him, about how all of this is going to come down. They’re like the rich dude from last week, whose stuff makes it really hard to enter the kingdom of God, to live into the reality that already surrounds him . . . n the same way, their idea of what the Messiah is going to be—inherited from ideas common to a lotof Jews at the time—coupled with their own very human desire for power and influence, has blocked their ability to discern the truth.

This seems to be quite a theme in Mark, doesn’t it? Everybody seems to mistake Jesus for their own ideas about him, from his homies, who try to make him king, to Peter, who rebukes him, to James, John, theirmother, if you take Matthew’s word for it . . . I think it’s a part of the human condition, to mistake one’s own idea of reality for reality itself, we get these ideas about something, some concept about how things really are, and it blocks our ability to see what is right in front of us. In the case of James and John and the others, what has been explained to them three times, already. I guess it’s really true that we see only what we want to . . .

Or perhaps it’s that we see only what’s in our minds. Everything we perceive is, first, filtered through our perceptions—via our sense organs—and, second, constructed in our minds as a concept or, as Buddhists call it, a mental formation. Thus, as cognitive scientists—and Buddhists—point out, these mental formations are what our mind thinks about when we think, not objective reality, whatever that is. We do not perceive and think about reality, but a representation of it, a construct in our minds. And, as in the case of Jesus’ disciples, the way we construct these representations, and the values we attach to them, can vary widely from the truth.

Here’s a trivial example: everybody can agree if something’s bright red, right? But not so fast . . . what if you’re red/green colorblind? It’s caused by one of the three kinds of cones in our eye-balls not working correctly. And to those folks, their reality is different from ours . . . and who’s to say which is the “true” reality: the one where there is red and green or the one without? Well, you might say, we can measure those wavelengths, we know when they’re there, but I didn’t ask whether we know about the wavelengths, but about the phenomena called “red” and “green.” These are concepts, symbols invented to represent what happens in the retinas and brains of the majority of humans when these wavelengths are encountered. In other words, red and/or green are what we decide it is.

A more serious example, at least nominally, is when a candidate for office elicits quite the opposite views in the electorate: his supporters can see the same ads and read the same speeches and position papers as his detractors, and come to exactly the opposite conclusions. People who vote one way tend to—not completely, but tend to—have been raised similarly or be of a different generation—ours is always the best—or be in a similar economic sector. And for them, reality is based on how they were raised, what they grew up with, and how much money they have. Each group can look at the same facts, the same science, the same everything and reach very different conclusions.

And that is what the disciples have done . . . they’ve seen the life of Jesus—how he heals the sick and feeds the hungry, how he puts everybody ahead of himself—and heard him say three times what is going to happen, yet they view reality the way they have been conditioned. The concepts in their minds, that they’ve been raised in, their economic position on the bottom of the scale determine the way they see reality, to wit: Jesus is going to kick out the Romans and their rich backers and people like themselves—humble fishermen like James and John—are going to be in charge.

Well. When the other ten disciples hear the Zebedee’s desire, they get really mad, and we’re not told why, but based on my own good, protestant upbringing, I interpret it as them being mad at them for bringing it up in the first place. Or, in a more cynical moment, I might think they’re mad because they didn’t think of it first. Whatever the case, it prompts another teachable moment: “You know that among the Gentiles—and here he seems to be saying those who subscribe to the current socio-political system— in that system, those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” Pretty standard stuff in the ancient world: the powerful ruled absolutely and pretty-much did whatever they wanted.

But it isn’t like that among the followers of Jesus, and here I suspect he is talking as much about the new reality, the one he calls the Kingdom of God. It’s not like that in the Kingdom of God: whoever wishes to be first in the Kingdom of God must be slave of all. In this Kingdom, in this new reality, the mark of first-ness, the sign of greatness, is that one must be as last—and you couldn’t get much more last that a slave. In other words, as Jesus says at other places in the Gospels, the first shall be last and the last first.

And now he comes right back around to where he started: He himself came not to be served but to serve, and to give his one life for the many. Once again, at the end of this speech, he predicts his own demise, but this time in a newly disconcerting and immediate way: as an example for his followers to . . . follow. And a lot of modern Christians have problems with this—if everybody is a servant, who is going to lead? Who’s going to make policy, who’s going to make sure the rules are enforced?  It seems, on the surface at least, to be incompatible with decency and good order.

And I guess I want to leave y’all here this morning, with a question: how are we to live out Jesus’ teachings? In a life structured by society into hierarchies, where the cream supposedly rises to the top, how are we supposed to be servants of all? How are we supposed to serve the person who checks us out at the supermarket, who works as our secretary or mops our floors? How are we supposed to give our lives for many and be the face of Christ to a confused, chaotic and hurting world? Amen.

Of Rich Folks and Camels (Mark 10:17 - 27)

In 1945, near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, by the Nile River, a guy named Muhammad Ali—no, not that Muhammad Ali—unearthed some clay jars containing the most significant find of the twentieth century. It’s best-known for the complete version of the Gospel of Thomas, which I taught a Christian Ed class on earlier this year. But hidden among the manuscripts was a letter that was so explosive that the Catholic Church stole it and kept it in a secret Vatican vault until just last year, when it was released to the press by Vati-leaks, the shadowy group headed by a Gambian albino responsible for bringing the equally-explosive Pope files to light, which revealed that Pope Benedict was actually a Haitian woman named Rita.

What makes the Nag Hammadi letter so mind-blowing, and what caused the Church to sit on it for over half a century, was that it revealed that there was actually a thirteenth disciple; in fact, the letter was from him to his girlfriend. And as a Greenhills Community Church exclusive, I have obtained a copy of the letter’s first translation into English. Here’s what he wrote. His name is Shawn.

Hey, Babe, how you doing? Been down to the beach lately? I really miss those onshore breezes, and how you look in that little one-piece hijab . . . and how’s your old lady? Did she get that cyst removed? Tell her I’m finally makin’ something of myself, that this Jesus cat is gonna be big, he’s gonna run the place one of these days, and we’re gonna get in on the ground floor. Ask her how’d she’d like to live in a big ol’ place, a palace, even, cause I’m sure it’s gonna come to that before it’s all over.

I’ve been just OK, kind of hot and tired, and my feet always hurt, because we couldn’t have camels, man, or even donkeys. No. Jesus is all into this humility thing, this “don’t get above the people thing,” though I know it’s gonna be different after the war. He won’t have any choice in the matter, after he throws Herod and his toadies out of the country, they’re going to put him on their shoulders , parade him though town, and install him in that golden palace. After all, they already tried to take him by force and make him king, but he snuck off, ‘cause it wasn’t time. That Jesus is one smart dude.

So there we are, rolling down the road, and even though I’m tired, I’m diggin’ it, ‘cause the journey’s, like, the thing, man . . . we’re free, with the wind in our hair, we can do what we want, how we want . . . well, except for that donkey thing, what I wouldn’t give for just one measly little donkey. Can’t you see the road’s a metaphor, man? A metaphor for life? Dig it: life’s like a journey, and we don’t know where it’ll end, man, it’s like a road . . . what a great metaphor, maybe I should write book . . .

Where was I? Oh yeah . . . so here we are, on the road, and we’ve been there for a while, talking about life, talking about how to live it, how to follow him, And this cat comes up to Jesus, and he’s obviously rich, he’s well-dressed, in a purple robe and designer sandals—la Boutin’s, I think—and he kneels in front of Jesus, like he’s some kind of king, you know? But he calls him “Good Teacher,” and it sounds to me like he’s just being polite, like somebody’d come up and say “my good man,” or something, but Jesus comes down on him for that, he says he’s not good, nobody’s good but God, and it just blows my mind, ‘cause I thought he was good, you know? I mean, if any body’s good, it’s Jesus . . . He’s a better than all of us put together, that’s for sure, including those Zebedee cats, James and John. They keep asking him who’s the greatest, and if they get to sit at his right and left when he comes into his kingdom. They keep doing that and they’re gettin’ nowhere, fast.

Anyway, Jesus say’s nobody’s good but God, and then he reminds the dude about the commandments, like everybofy didn’t know them, already, and sure enough, they rich guy says he’s followed them since he was a kid, and he acts like he’s proud of it. As far as I’m concerned, it just sounds like more rules, like . . . don’t steal stuff and honor your old lady . . . What kind of revolution is this, man? All those rules . . .

Anyway, after Jesus lists all these commandments, all these rules, the rich guy says “Teacher”—I notice he drops the “good”—“Teacher, I’ve kept all these since I was a kid.” And Jesus loved him, he did, you could see it in his eyes,they almost brimmed over with tears, and it got me thinking of why we all started to follow him in the first place . . . You ever think about that? Why we followed him, I mean? Why James and John left their father on the beach? Why Zaccheus—that wee little man—gave up his lucrative career defrauding his own people? For that matter, why I left my primo spot on the Galilee surfing team, not to mention a hot babe like you? It’s because we can see the love in his eyes, we can tell it is real, man, that no matter what we do, no matter the idiotic stuff that comes out of our mouths, he’ll love us the same as he does now. Cat like that I’d follow anywhere (especially if it ends up in that golden palace . . . don’t forget to tell your mom)

So Jesus loves the guy, and smiles at him, but it’s tinged with sadness, like he already knows how it’s going to end, and he says “Only one thing missing: go and sell all your stuff and give the money to the poor—don’t worry, you’l have treasure in heaven—then come follow me.” And you can see the rich cat deflate like a punctured balloon before sneaking away all hang-dog like.

And it kind of freaked us out, you know? Though I guess it shouldn’t have—when Jesus sent out the seventy, two by two, he told ‘em not to take anything, not even an extra suit of clothes, and then there was that refusal of a camel or even a donkey (oh, my aching dogs)—but even though we should have been used to it, it still made us uneasy . . . I mean, if a cat like that couldn’t get into heaven, what about us run-of-the-mill working dudes? Jesus must have noticed ‘cause he gathers us around and tells us how hard it is for a rich guy to get into the Kingdom of God, and that makes it worse, because now it seems like God doesn’t like rich dudes—which is ok by me ‘cause I don’t much like ‘em either—but come on, this is God. Isn’t he supposed to love everybody?

But instead of reassuring us, instead of explaining how a love of stuff can clog up our hearts and our minds so we can’t love anything else, which means we can’t experience the Kingdom—which he says is all around us—he doubles down: “Children,”—I hate it when he calls us that—“Children, It’s really hard to enter the kingdom of God! It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich guy to enter the kingdom of God.” And I go “Dude! That’s hard! Then who can be saved?” And he just looks at us, and it’s that look he gets when we’ve been particularly stupid, and says “For humans it’s impossible, but for God? Not so much. For God, all things are possible.”

And it hits me hard, you know? It hits me like a ton of bricks, like I’ve wiped out and hit my head on a hard Galilee rock, and I’m thinking “Holy Moly! He’s right . . . God’s a big dude who can do anything he wants!” And I begin to put it together: it’s not that the guy’s rich that’s the problem, it’s just he’s got so much stuff! More stuff than the rest of us combined, that’s for sure, but the requirement for rich guys is the same as for us: if you’re gonna follow Jesus, you gotta give it all up, just like we did. Just like James and John and Peter gave up their boats and nets, just like Zaccheus gave up that income and I gave up my board, you gotta give it all up for Jesus. It’s just harder for rich dudes.

And when you look at it that way, it’s pretty good news. In this Kingdom of God place, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, a foreigner or home-dude. The rules are all the same: to follow Jesus, you gotta give up all your stuff.

But at the same time,we aren’t the ones who can do it, we aren’t the ones who can save ourselves, and that’s good news, at least on the surface. But here’s the thing: only God can save but we’re still supposed to give it all up? If only God can save, why doesn’t God just do it? Now my head is really starting to hurt . . . we have to give everything up, but we can’t do it ourselves? I guess it is reassuring that in the end, that it’s not up to us, that God makes it possible for us to do it, to give it all up . . . maybe it’s like that combination of skill and luck that keeps me from killing myself on a wave, only instead of luck, it’s God’s good grace . . . Dude! Where’s the Tylenol?

Well, babe, I gotta go . . . Jesus is being accosted by one of those Pharisee dudes again.  I think maybe the thing is, we’re trying to figure out these cosmic mysteries with our tiny little noggins . . . maybe we’ll find out by and by. Say “hi” to your mom, and don’t forget to tell her about that palace on the hill. Love, Shawn. P.S. One thing I do know is that God is good, all the time. Amen.

World Wise (World Communion Sunday)

     Carol Holtz-Martin, Pastor of First Baptist Church of Macedon, New York, tells a story about one of the seemingly-endless wrangles over sexuality in her denomination and says that she was getting mightily tired of it. “Enough,” she said at a meeting. “I am sick of this. Let’s all get on with feeding the poor and taking the good news to the world.” She says she felt clear eyed and holy as she spoke. That’s when one of her friends turned to her and said “Carol, this is a struggle for the soul of the church. Go home and read Galatians.” “I did,” she says. “He was right.”

Oy vey! The soul of the church. Heady words, to be sure, and the epicenter of heady-ness is right here in our passage, verse twenty-eight to be exact: “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.” All of us Christians—all of us!—are one in Christ. One. In. Christ. And there it is. The inescapable secret of Galatians. It doesn’t matter who you are—what sex, nationality, what social station—you are one in Christ. Gay Christians are one with straight Christians. Russian Christians are one with American Christians. Poverty-stricken single parents are one with the richest pew-sitters in the land.

What does this mean? Does it mean that all those distinctions are erased, that they no longer hold? Of course not, as Paul might have said. Clearly the distinctions are still there—there obviously still are. There are still gays and straights, still Russians and Americans, still—despite Jesus’ call elsewhere to even out such things—extreme poverty and obscene wealth. Indeed, Paul infamously told Philemon—in his letter of the same name—that it was his duty to be a good little Christian slave, something that Christians today find abhorrent. I hope.

But if not that, what does it mean? As always, the answer comes from the verse’s context. Paul was defending his version of the Gospel—salvation through faith alone—against what he considered false teaching, and though we don’t need to go to any great lengths about it, the false teachers seem to have maintained that Christians need to follow some of the Jewish Law, such as circumcision and the dietary restrictions. Paul, on the other hand, insisted that Christians were completely out from under the Law, and were reconciled to God by the grace of God through faith in Christ. “Before faith came,” he says, “we were imprisoned and guarded until faith would be revealed.” It follows from this that “the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.” And this word we translate as “disciplinarian” in Greek is paedagogos, a title used for a person hired by wealthy parents as guardian and disciplinarian and teacher—all rolled into one—for their minor children. So Paul uses coming of age as a metaphor for the coming of faith, which he personifies as Jesus. “The law was our guardian/teacher/disciplinarian until Christ came,” he says “so that we might be justified—saved—by faith. But now that faith—personified as Christ—has come, we are no longer subject to a guardian/teacher/disciplinarian, because we are children of God through Christ.”

So here’s the deal: Paul is saying that we are no longer under the disciplinarian, the paedagogos, the Law, because . . . what? Because through the coming of Christ, we are siblings of Christ, AKA God’s children. In fact, through our baptism we are clothed in Christ, we have put on Christ like a garment. And here I feel the need to stop a second to catch our breaths, and remind ourselves that this is all metaphor. I repeat, it’s all metaphor. Paul is not saying we literally put on Christ like a suit of clothes, like some kind of Christ-disguise. What he is saying is that we have become Christ-like in some pretty profound ways. So profound that in this condition, in Christ—remember we’re in him, we’ve “put him on”—nationality, social status, and sex—the big three in the ancient world—do not matter. The distinctions human society values are not valuable in Christ.

Again, this does not mean the distinctions are not there in society, in the human realm, just that they do not make any difference in the family of God. They are superficial, not key, peripheral, not core, to our basic identity, which is as God’s children, sisters and brothers of Christ. And I have to say that this is a point of intersection between Pauline Christianity and other world religions, which see a constructed, false identity or self, and advocate accessing—through some spiritual practice—and in some way unifying with the inner, true identity. In Hinduism, this inner self is called “atman;” in Buddhism, an inner “Buddha nature,” or seed; in Sufism—the mystic form of Islam—it is the true self, which is spirit, and which resides in the heart.

And that’s what Paul is saying in this passage—all those outer, constructed distinctions—whether constructed by ourselves or society—are immaterial in Christ. And not only immaterial, but not there. What matters, what unifies us, what makes us one is our core identity as children of God. And I wonder: what would the Christian church look like if we just applied these criteria? If we had applied these criteria from day one? It started out well . . . women, for instance, participated in leadership positions in first-century churches, but it wasn’t long before they were relegated—by a variety of mechanisms—to supporting roles, so that by the time of Emperor Constantine, 200 years later, it was an all-male church hierarchy. Oh, they could be church members, you understand, but their roles were restricted to non-leadership positions. It wasn’t until the 20th century until things began to loosen up, but women are still second-class citizens in the vast majority of Christianity. Even though in Christ there is no male and female . . .

That was—and still is—a common trick . . . Category X of people—blacks, gays, women—could be church members, but they couldn’t have any meaningful say in what that meant, or how the church operated. That’s why passages such as this one—the Ethiopian eunuch over in Acts comes to mind as well—it’s why such passages are so important. They show early Christians—Paul, here and Philp in the case of the eunuch—they show early Christians working out the implications of Christ’s teaching and applying them, counter to the prevailing culture of the day, which was intensely tribal. Jews were Jews, Gentiles—which is what Paul meant by Greeks—were Gentiles, and they stuck together, and they excluded others from their Jewish-ness or their Gentile-ness. More importantly, perhaps, each group viewed the other as inferior, and on that basis denied others the benefits of being part of that group. To use a modern expression, they “siloed” or fenced off their goodies from everybody else.

One other thing—we shouldn’t ignore the language Paul uses to couch his metaphor. We are one in Christ Jesus. One. This again echoes the idea of mystical unity that underpins all the major religions. Because we are “clothed in Christ,” or to put it as Jesus did, because we abide in Christ and he in us, we are one with Christ, and if Uncle Johnny is one with Christ, and I am one with Christ, then I and Johnny are one as well. And I and Bishop Tutu, and I and Sister Joan Chittister —who, by the way, is going to be at Knox Presbyterian soon—are one as well. And what I do to Sister Joan and Desmond Tutu, I do to myself. And what others do to the Sister and Bishop, they do to me. That’s what being one means.

And of course, that’s why this is such a popular passage on World Communion Sunday. Our core identities as children of God transcend our national boundaries, they transcend our petty tribalism, which is on the rise in the world, disguised as so-called populism. And this morning, all around the world, Communion is being served, and no matter what individual denominations’ theology says about it, whether it’s a sacrament or a bare remembrance, whether Christ is considered to be in it or not, it is a powerful symbol and reminder that we are all God’s children, heirs according to the promise, one in Christ. Amen.