Labels Matter, Galatians 3:23-29, 5th Sunday after Pentecost, 6/19/16
You may have noticed that each week Pastor Stallings and I put a question in the bulletin which is designed to help you think about the next week’s sermon text. Last week part of that question was, “Name five things which describe you…where was Christian on the list?” I posed that question because descriptions drive how we think. For example, when I was growing up in South Carolina you could still hear folks talk about the “War of Northern Aggression.” They had a very different perspective than those who call it the “the war to preserve the Union.” And “Civil War” has yet a different connotation. Changing the name, changes how we think..
Labels and language matter. You probably noted the outcry over a champion Stanford swimmer receiving a mere 6 month sentence after being convicted of rape. Social media exploded in outrage over how his crime was minimized by euphemisms. One woman wrote, “There is no such thing as non-consensual sex. There is just sex and rape, and one is not a form of the other. We don’t say swimming and non-breathing swimming; we say swimming and drowning.”
Or to give one more example, what you want to do in response to the tragedy in Orlando is greatly affected by whether you call the shooter a homophobic gun nut, a Muslim terrorist, or a profoundly ill young man. The words we choose both reflect and create our reality. The labels we choose define us and by them we create our self-identity.
In Galatians Paul is writing to a church wrestling with its identity. The immediate question is whether the members of the Jesus movement have to first be good Jews.But the broader challenge is how to build a religious community from many types of people. The church was exploding beyond Galilee and Judea,taking in people withmanynational, cultural, economic, and social identities. That was great, but it also created internal tension as communities struggled to find unity amid diversity. Confronting that tension Paul delivers a broadside against those who give priority to old labels in the new community:
“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ.”
We might paraphrase Paul, “Look, let go of your old identity. Each of you is many things but now nothing is more important than the fact that you have been claimed by Christ. All those old categories are secondary. In this community the old divisions, the old ways of measuring status—they just don’t matter. Only one thing matters: You are a beloved child of God for whom Christ died. You are a disciple of Jesus; that dwarfs every other loyalty.
The challenge of merging many types of people into the community of faith is never ending and if Paul is correct then it has implications for how we understand our life within the church and how we understand our mission in the world. Internally, Paul’s bold assertion says that nothing—absolutely nothing—is more important, than the fact that we share an allegiance to Jesus.. So Trump supporters and Hillary fanatics, socialists and laissez-faire capitalists, gays and straights, liturgical purists and guitar-banging charismatics—all are called to make those loyalties and preferences secondary to trying to follow Jesus as faithfully as they can.
At the synod assembly last week a young girl spoke about why synodical youth events are important. She said, “When I go to those events its like all the stuff back home goes away. When I am there I know that there are a bunch of people who share my faith and I don’t feel so alone. We are unified in this one thing of trying to follow Jesus.” Perhaps she is being a little romantic, but I was moved and wondered if most adults would say the same thing about their congregation. All too often we treat our faith as an add-on, defining ourselves much more by our politics and sports loyalties than our loyalty to Jesus.
Paul’s confession that all are one in Christ also means that every single person has incredible value. There are no second class citizens in the congregation; each person is precious. You may know that our congregation has two funeral palls, one which is placed over a casket and one used with cremains.. You may not know the origin of this practice and its purpose. The funeral pall goes back to the Middle Ages and it served two purposes. One was to call the privileged to humility. The rich could afford the finest, most beautiful casket, but when the casket was brought into church it was covered by the pall. But perhaps more important was the symbolism that even the poorest, most socially insignificant person was as important to god as the rich and powerful, for that casket also was covered by the same pall. Privileged or poor the pall symbolizes that all are equally beloved by god.
Perhaps we know that in our heads, but my sense is that sometimes we have a hard time believing it in our hearts. We assume that others are somehow more worthy of God’s love because they are more dedicated, more pious, more faith-filled. On those days when we feel lower than a Dachshund’s knees we do well to remember Paul’s assurance that all are one in Christ.
But Paul’s words also call us to expand our circle of concern. At the ordination service which highlighted the synod assembly Bishop Mauney took as his text that incident at the end of John’s gospel when the disciples return to fishing and,after a long night of futility, encounter Jesus on the shore,. The bishop whimsically imagined their exchange as something like this:
“Children, have you caught any fish?
Oh, you would not believe the gear we’ve got: Traded the old boat for a new Nitro Z19 with state of the art radar. We don’t use nets anymore; we’ve got some Zebco Omega ProZO3 spincast reels that can drop a line right where you want it.
Yeah, but have you caught any fish?
Uhhh….no, not really.
Well, what you been fishing for?
Mainly whitefish. That’s a nice mild fish.
Humm….You ever thought about fishing for some Redfish, or maybe even some Black Grouper or Yellowfin. I hear that all of those are wonderful too. Why don’t you throw out that big net and see what you can gather in?”
There are a lot of different fish out there. They would enrich our community with their gifts, but that is not the primary reason for us to reach out. We reach out because we believe that the message of a God who does not care about all the superficial divisions is a word our world longs to hear. We reach out because all people seek a place where they are known and valued just as they are. We reach out because there is no division in Christ, and Christian communities are called to be the embodiment of truth in all they do.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I will try not to be tedious in sounding this sametheme again and again over the coming months, but Luke’s gospel and our angry public climate require us to keep returning to this simple fact—the message of Jesus breaks down barriers when we take it seriously. From Paul until our own day the gospel has been both outraging and transforming those who hear it by its radical insistence that God does not play favorites, that God values all people equally, that God has an agenda in Jesus to obliterate our lesser loyalties which too often divide us into fighting factions.
In last week’s bulletin I asked you to name 5 things which identify you. I hope “follower of Jesus” is at the top of that list for “as many of you as were baptized in Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ,”—and that is more important than your sex, politics, nationality, race, or job.