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.