Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 06.19.2016
Scripture Lesson: Galatians 3:26-29
The Presbyterian Church (USA) is meeting in our biannual General Assembly this week, as thousands of delegates fly across the country to Portland, Oregon, where they’ll gather and sing and make important statements about things. This year, the big push is to divest from the fossil fuel industry because of the threat emissions pose to our environment. It seems odd to me that we’d fly thousands of people in jet aircraft thousands of miles to debate this issue, which is why I’m smugly following it on #twitter.
in the peculiar position inhabited by so many generally progressive but majority Anglo institutions. We think/write/meet about diversity on an almost pathological basis, wringing our hands about just how flagrantly Anglo Saxon the Presbyterian church tends to be in appearance every Sunday. The church commissions studies, and create materials, and talk about welcoming the Other.
This rarely goes well.
Obsessing about demographics was one of the first things done at this year’s Assembly, as participants were asked to register their identities as racial/ethnic persons. What it found?
As a denomination, we're still almost entirely only margin-of-error more diverse than the Aryan Brotherhood.
The analogy is painfully close, even more so if the Aryan Brotherhood was entirely comprised of skinhead septuagenarians, 'cause our efforts to be generationally diverse haven't exactly been radiantly successful, either. We want to reach out to the young people. We love the young people. But they don't show up at our services or come back after college, no matter how earnestly we strum our guitars and do the Facebook and try to figure out how to use Snapgram and Instachat.
Why? Why are we so bad at diversity?
I think, honestly, that we're over-thinking it. That's what Presbyterians are best at, after all.
Wait. Can you think about over thinking? Doesn't that make it even worse, sort of a meta-analysis paralysis? Hmmm. Perhaps we should form a task force to explore it.
Overthinking doesn’t work. The answer, I think, paradoxically revolves around not obsessing about diversity, and not obsessing about labelling and categorizing every human being you encounter.
It is that faith that is described by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Galatia.
That letter, a portion of which we’ve heard today, was most likely written sometime in the mid-50’s CE. It was written at a point in time when the boundaries between the new Jesus movement and the synagogue were still very blurry. What did it mean to be a follower of the way that Jesus of Nazareth had proclaimed? What did you have to do? Paul, who’d established the church in Galatia, was not alone among the early Jesus followers. As the message of his life and his teachings began to spread, many of the people who embraced him as the promised messiah of Israel argued that he was exactly that: the one who had been promised as the new anointed one of Israel.
To follow Jesus, these folks argued, you had to first embrace all of the laws and customs and practices of the people of Israel. You had to keep kosher, staying away from the bacon double cheeseburgers and at least some of the sushi. Rule of thumb: if you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it. You had to keep the laws of ritual purity. For the guys, it meant that becoming Christian required one further step after baptism. Not a big deal, really...just sit still while I sharpen these scissors. Don’t flinch...unless you really want to join the Women’s Group.
The assumption, on the part of Paul’s opponents, was that in order to be a part of the Way of Jesus, you needed to completely subsume your identity into one of the pre-set binary categories of the ancient world.
This really, really made Paul angry, because it flew in the face of everything he knew about Jesus, his teachings, and the faith that define the path.
Paul, the mystic, understood that the heart of the Way tore apart those categories and distinctions. If you followed Jesus, those divisions simply no longer had any relevance. And so he took those binaries apart, one by one.
In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, Paul said, no Judaioi or Hellenai. This is meant to have different cultural resonances than the ones we hear in it now. My wife is a Greek Jew, but that’s not what Paul meant. By Jew, he meant the Jewish people, of course. That’s still the same. But by Greek, he meant “everyone who is not a Jew.” Greek meant “Greek speaking,” and in the Roman Empire, Greek was the common language spoken among many cultures, like French in the 19th century, or English today. To the Galatians, Paul says: the dynamics of race cannot be the primary defining feature of your relationship with one another.
In Christ there is no slave or free, Paul said. This was a distinction in the ancient world that had none of the demonic racial overtones of American slavery. It was an economic category, one of social status and power. Those who were owned were, in their culture, just the poorest of the poor, who either by birth or through an accident of fate found themselves in a position where they didn’t even have ownership over their own bodies. The power imbalance created by this dynamic was still horrific, leading to abuse and cruelty towards those who inhabited the place of objects in their culture. To the Galatians, Paul says: You cannot allow this socioeconomic divide to impact your obligations to one another as followers of Jesus.
In Christ there is no male or female, Paul said. Here, a feature of humanity that had social implications in the ancient world, one that paralleled the status distinctions between slave and free. And yet it’s an even more fundamental distinction, one that goes beyond our decided-upon categories and into some pretty essential chemistry and plumbing. To the Galatians, Paul says: even this category, even this one. Once you have committed to the path of grace, mercy, and compassion established by Jesus, even that cannot be a primary factor.
Where Paul’s three-fold injunction bears most weight is in how it impacts those who occupy the power position in any given culture. If you have an inherent advantage, for reasons of status or wealth, following Jesus requires you to set that advantage aside. You must see the Other, no matter who they are, as being just as you are in the eyes of God.
You also don’t annihilate their identity, assuming that they are just the same, or that they must conform to your way of being. You don’t expect another soul to cease being themselves, bringing the richness of their language and culture into relationship with you.
There, being aware of our distinctives can help, but there’s a shadow side to that awareness. If we are over-aware, hypersensitive to differences and distinctives, it can hinder the shared walking of the path. If what we see, first and foremost, are categories and labels, then we’ll lose that sense of gracious connection that is at the heart of the path.
It is that shared identity that we need to hold in front of us, in all that we do and say as we journey together.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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