June 23, 2013 – Galatians 3:23-29
Galatians 3:23-29
Jesus Makes us One
5th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 12] – June 23, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
When Paul writes the letter to the Galatians, he is writing to a people he loves.
But the people back in Galatia are doing something he does not love.
Originally he’d travelled there and established a Christian community based on grace
– the unconditional free love of God granted to all people in Jesus.
These Galatians were Gentiles – non-Jews, and yet Paul discovered and they discovered
that God had blessed them with the Holy Spirit of divine love in their baptisms.
This was just as it had been promised to Abraham by God way back in Genesis 12:3:
that in him all the nations or Gentiles of the earth would be blessed.
The Jewish people had up to this time distinguished themselves from their Gentile neighbours by
observing certain laws: dietary laws, ritual laws,
laws relating to observing certain festivals, laws relating to circumcision,
laws that divided people into various categories:
Jews and non-Jews or Greeks, slave and free, male and female.
As my New Testament teacher Craig Koester writes,
Jews observed the Mosaic law; Gentiles did not; some laws were for slaves and some for free people; circumcision was for men and other statutes applied to women.
(at http://wordandworld.luthersem.edu/content/pdfs/9-2_Mental_Health/9-2_Koester.pdf )
In Jesus, though, Paul argues that these distinctions give way in light of a greater unity in Christ.
Now a person’s primary identity comes not from the law or from observing laws,
but from Jesus.
Jesus dies for love of all people, Jew and Gentile.
Jesus’ love unites all people, Jew and Gentile.
And in baptism, each person “puts on Christ,” that is, each person is enwrapped by Christ,
Marked by Christ, is entered by Christ and begins a journey to human maturity,
a journey which has its proper end in becoming
the very image or likeness ofChrist.
Jesus is the primary fundamental primary identity of a Christian. Period.
That is Paul’s point.
From God’s perspective you are brothers and sisters of Christ,
and you are heirs with Christ of every gift God can give.
As I say to the confirmation class and as I said to the adult faith study group:
to us, Jesus is everything.
God looks at each of us and sees a beloved child, just as Jesus was named a beloved son.
And so, as we look at each other, we see Christ, one whom Jesus so loves that each is
enwrapped and suffused and marked and ennobled by the infinite love of Jesus.
For a Christian, baptism into Jesus and his love changes everything:
It changes the way we relate to each other.
Why Paul is so upset in Galatians, is that someone has come in his wake to the
people of Galatia and said: Oh, yeah: we’re glad that dude Paul came and
started you off with that business about Jesus: now, take the final step:
Distinguish yourselves as real Christians by observing all the Jewish food laws too,
by observing the Jewish festivals, and by having your men circumcised.
When news of this reaches Paul, he has a fit!
He had set up a community based on grace, based on the love of Christ for each person.
A community where distinctions no longer separated them.
A community in which one loved the other because Christ loved the other,
not because they had some status that they had achieved or because
they kept the law better than anyone else or because they kept the law at all.
A community in which people of different socio-economic statuses, different ethnicities,
different customs, different colours, came together, worshipped God together,
and then cemented their oneness by doing the unthinkable in the ancient world:
they shared a meal together!
And then, once the meal was over, they shared a common mission together:
to take this radically new way of being out into the world:
back to work with them, back to their homes with them,
back to their communities with them and
live the same way they had at worship,
and in this way participate with God in transforming the world.
I know it’s tempting to think that hey we’re all modern people and
this really has no relevance anymore.
We’re all equal now, right? Right. It’s just that some are more equal than others.
We live in a culture that is hungry for status,
for the thing that will distinguish us from our neighbours, like the laws did long ago,
only now it’s not observing laws around food or festivals,
it’s about the car, the house, the lifestyle, the level of education, the income,
the so-called importance of the job,
how much you weigh, the way you look and the way you dress.
This creates what sociologists call “status anxiety” in our culture.
And so, maybe not surprisingly,
there is a deep, deep hunger for the kind of community Paul sought to establish long ago.
What I did on my summer holidays:
Two weeks ago, my wife Sue and I went to the Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale,
s gathering of people interested in Polynesian Pop or the Tiki culture of the 50s and 60s.
Now a gathering of people interested in this will have certain identifiers:
I’m sure the non-tiki people in the hotel we were all staying in had a notion that
something was up based on customs the tiki-people observed:
Customs around dress: the unstated dress code for Hukilau stipulates Hawaiian shirt,
but it might include a fez and your status is really upped if you’re inked with some tats.
Customs around festivals: surf-music and Polynesian floor shows at the bar.
And of course customs around food: pupus and many, many, many tropical cocktails.
But I discovered a great, great irony in all this.
At the gathering,
a documentary about Polynesian Pop and its resurgence in the 90s was premiered.
People who participated in this were interviewed about
why gatherings like the one we were at were important.
Do you know what really resonated with people and what got the biggest cheer?
When one person said, “At the Hukilau, you can see a Wall Street lawyer chatting with
biker. At the Hukilau those distinctions don’t matter anymore; we’re all just people.”
The great cheer this statement got told me that this really resonated with people.
And I immediately thought: Wow: these people have spent a lot of time and money
traveling to this event to experience what genuine human community is all about when
there are undoubtedly scores of communities within biking distance of their
homes dedicated to just that.
I’m talking about Christian churches.
And then my second thought was: gee, I guess the church has done a really lousy job at
being places where there really is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female,
Wall Street Lawyer or biker but where we are all one in Christ Jesus.
It was like, “Hey! That’s what we’re supposed to be good at.”
But we often aren’t, so I guess God has found other ways to nurture that kind of community.
However – and it is a big however – I think at First Lutheran Church we have done a
very good job at nurturing the kind of community Paul envisioned.
I think we’ve been intentional about it, I think we’ve prayed for it, and I think
the Holy Spirit of God has come in response to those prayers and made us one.
I think we’ve thought deeply about our primary identity coming from Christ,
about the fact that for us Jesus is everything.
It means when we look at each other, we see a brother or sister in Christ first of all.
It means in our friendships with one another we see a sister or brother in Christ first of all.
It means when we welcome guests we see Christ first of all.
It means in our marriages when we look at our partners we see
a sister or brother in Christ first of all.
And it means when we mistreat one another, when we neglect one another,
when we don’t respond to each other;
when we do not welcome the guest, when we do not respect children and family members,
when we abuse our spouses verbally or physically:
this means that when we do that we are doing these things to Jesus.
For each of us has put on Christ in our baptisms, and that is a sheer gift of grace.
This is a very special community, because by and large this is how you treat one another.
This is a real gift.
So I implore you, I beg you, I plead with you not to take this community for granted.
It is such a gift and such a blessing and is that rare thing: a community that is becoming
what it is meant to be: a community with a purpose,
to share the unconditional grace of God in Christ with the world.
A community that in its gathering this morning,
is a little picture of what God finally intends the world to be: a great community at peace,
sharing the gifts of God, nurturing healing, seeing Christ in one another,
sharing grace with the world outside of these walls.
Friends, this morning we are welcoming a dear child of God into this community and
into this purpose.
Kaitlyn Grace from this moment on is our sister, a fellow traveller clothed with Christ.
We’re not putting Hawaiian shirt on her, we are clothing her in a huge great white robe of
love and light – the fullness of Christ’s love and light – that
we promise to help her grow into.
We’re not inking her with tattoos but marking her with the sign of the cross as a sign that
she belongs to Christ and that the love of Christ for her is what gives her her worth and
nothing else so that she can conduct herself in the world with dignity and grace.
We’re not inviting her to observe a Polynesian floor show as a spectator but
inviting her to participate weekly with us as a person dignified with gifts to contribute to
our community mission to love, bless and
heal this whole world and every person in it.
We’re not inviting her to consume tropical cocktails at this table this morning,
but something infinitely finer: to share with us the free gift of Jesus himself,
that we might here become and be transformed more and more into
not Jew or Greek or slave or free or male or female or
Wall Street lawyer or biker, but rather into Christ,
in order to be his active living body in this world God loves.
This is what God is working among us this morning.
So let us give thanks, and together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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