No Divisions - Galatians 3:23-29

23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 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. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

On June 19, 1865, General Order No. 3 was issued by Union Army General Gordon Granger upon his arrival to Galveston, Texas, at the end of the American Civil War. This legal decree transmitted the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to the people of Texas and freed all remaining enslaved people in the state. This announcement came two years after the original declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation and officially marked the end of slavery in Texas and is now commemorated as the Juneteenth holiday.

So much of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians feels similar in its proclamation of movement beyond the law, beyond labels, and beyond enslavement, both in practical and spiritual terms. Juneteenth marked the declaration of emancipation after over 300 years of institutionalized enslavement of black Americans. It was a victory of the Civil War, an advancement out of bondage for a large portion of our nation’s population, and a step toward the ongoing work for civil rights and equity in this country.

To liken the bondage to the law and its heavy weight for the Galatian church to the liberation from slavery in American is to naively connect quite drastically different situations. The brutality and dehumanization in American slavery is a deep scar upon our nation’s history. For the early church, rather, the process of emergence from the law was meant to be something of grace and evolution into the new life Jesus had for them and for all of us. We should not take the language of slavery or enslavement in this biblical text as some kind of correlative teaching, especially as Paul, beyond this text, speaks of our life before the knowledge of God as some form of enslavement (which, it certainly can be seen as, especially in the oppressive forces of evil that weigh us down before we find our true liberation in Christ). This is a collective plight, something all humanity shares, a distance from the good life because of being bound to broken ways and malformed actions and desires.

But what we can see on a day like today is the joyous hope that is found in celebrating the undoing of such oppressive systems. We hear that in Christ, there are no longer divisions, no longer laws that separate us from one another or from God. We look on, as a predominately white group of people, at the celebrations of Juneteenth and we can see with eyes that bear witness a joy and hope for an oppressed people. And in this text, we can also see how the other, the ones that are not like us or don’t look like us or who have a different story than us, we can see how we are all brought together as a community in Jesus Christ.

Labels, Divisions, Particularity in Community

Let’s talk about labels.

Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female. How about a bunch more? Rich, poor, just breaking even. Young, old, somewhere in between but definitely feeling old as I see 40 on the horizon. Gay, straight, pan, bisexual or asexual. People from the county, people from the South Hill, Sunnyland or Birchwood or Lummi or Alabama Hill or Sudden Valley people. ADHD, OCD, manic depressive, autistic. Good student, not so good student. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist. Single, dating, married, divorced, widowed. Elder, deacon, pastor, parishioner, staff.

You see, there are all kinds of labels and categories we use to order our lives. None of these categories fully identifies who we are, but they help our minds make sense of each other and know how to relate.

Wedding Ceremony - from one label to another

I have the privilege of officiating a wedding this afternoon for a couple I met during my time serving in campus ministry up at Western Washington University. As I have had a chance to reconnect with them, I’ve really enjoyed witnessing their growth and maturity, moving beyond the formational time of college to becoming passionate about their careers, their community, and their love for one another.

When I work with couples to prepare for their marriage ceremony, I like to talk about how they have come to make this commitment to each other already, how they have been in the process of “becoming married” over their dating life already. In a sense, while the ceremony marks their commitment with sacred vows and meets the legal state requirements for marriage, it is simply another step along a journey that they are making together. It is a marker of their love. But just because they speak those vows today does not mean that they will not continue to grow and deepen their love over the years to come. The work continues, the joy continues.

Any of us who have been in a longterm relationship, partnership, friendship — we know this to be true, right? The label is helpful in that it helps us understand someone’s status and place, but the labels are also just that, labels. Labels and categories are helpful in that they help us make sense of our world. They are not the only thing, but they help.

Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Gender and Love

A couple of more categories or labels and then we’ll get to the point.

Today is Father’s Day. To all the Dads our there — way to go, you’re a Dad. I’m sure you’re awesome at it in some ways and struggle in other ways and hope and dream for how you can continue to grow and love your children over your lifetime. I love being a dad. Asher, my 7 year old son who just graduated from 1st grade is a delight to me, I love him so much. He’s my buddy, a mini-me. I’m a Dad. I take on this label with pride.

But here’s where labels can get to be problematic. Some take the label of Dad or fatherhood as a mark of superiority. The pride in fatherhood can make us feel like we are lesser if we are not parents. Or if we struggle to have kids with our partner. Or if we had a not so good dad growing up and don’t want to repeat that ourselves. So the label is helpful, yes, in that it is a celebration of the goodness of raising a child. But it also must be put into perspective in how it is merely a category that, again, helps us make sense of and order our lives together.

The same can be said for gender identity. Father’s Day and Mother’s Day get complicated when we think about people’s understanding of gender and how it gets publically enacted. Some families don’t have a Dad or some families have two Dads. Does that make them any better or more inferior? No. But when we hold rigidly to these categories, drawing a line in the sand, we start to see how the categories can actually lead us to division.

The Categories of the Law

I’ve titled this sermon series “Who Do We Choose to Be?”, which we will spend the next 6 weeks or so in. This title comes from a fantastic book by Margaret Wheatley, which I’m rereading right now.

The gist of the book and the focus of this sermon series is pretty straightforward: We live in a civilization on the verge of collapse, due to environmental, political, and social factors. We have all of the tools we need to fix these wicked problems, but we stall out because of how divided we are, how unable to meet and rise to the occasion. Sorry, it’s not necessarily a sunny summer beach read.

But in the face of such certain decline, Wheatley asks the provocative question: Who Do We Choose to Be? When all the categories break down, when all the systems fall apart, and even in the midst of it right now — what kind of people, what kind of leaders will we be?

Looking at today’s text, I hear the instruction for us to no longer be a people divided by all the categories we live in.

You’ll notice in this text that Paul talks about the law being our disciplinarian, our task master, before Christ. Laws are meant to provide order, categories, structure to our shared life together.

As an aside, we can also think of the word political in this light. I often chuckle when I hear someone say, “well, I just don’t want to get political” when they are talking about some matter of our shared life together in this country. I chuckle, because all we do is political, all we do is in service of our shared life and common working together. Sure, political can mean partisan, which is simply another divisive category our world uses to keep us opposed to one another. But everything is political, everything is in service of or in protest against how we live our shared life together, here and now.

And that is how the hearers of this letter might well have understood their world: These categories of Jew and Greek and slave and free and male and female — these are all ways of ordering life together. Jews and Greeks had different customs for how they ordered their life. Enslaved people and free people operate in different orders of life, one oppressed and the other the oppressor. Male and female are gender categories that help us make sense of who a person is, and yet we know they fall short in being the truest expression of a person — these are all inadequate labels, yet we use them to order and sustain our life together.

In verses 21-22, which precede our reading, we hear that the law is meant to provide discipline so that we might be justified before God. It is an order upon our lives to maintain order.

But now, in Christ, God’s people are united. No longer do the labels have to define us into neat categories that order and restrict our life together. Rather, it is in the faith of Christ that we find unity in our diversity.

The Faith of Christ

It can be easy to swing very far in the direction of doing away with all labels and categories when we hear this text. For one, when we hear oppositional categories like Jew and Greek or Slave and Free, we start to think that the teaching is to move beyond these entirely. Yes, no more slaves and free people — only people who share in the common good of all people. Yes, no more divisions based on ethnicity or religion, gender or sexual identity. All are one in Christ.

In Galatians 4, Paul brings the argument to a close this way:

The New Revised Standard Version Chapter 4

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

The categories no longer define us before God — all are now heirs to God’s family, God’s line, God’s community.

The divisions are done away with.

In Christ, we are clothed in unity, living as one people, with one Spirit, one baptism, one salvation, together.

And here’s the kicker: Because we are one in Christ, our uniquenesses, our particularity, our Dad-ness or our femininity or our elderhood or race or heritage — all of these categories which are intended to divide us in neat little boxes — what they actually become is a beautiful tapestry of the who we are AS we are united in Christ.

Alright, let’s bring it on home.

Here at St. James, we want to model this kind of unity in diversity in how we welcome each other into the life of the church. So, hear the teaching this way: Single, married, gay, straight, black, white, brown, deeply faithful or deconstructing faith — in Christ, in this gathered body which is Christ’s body — all of these particularities are welcomed and make us one.

Do you hear that? It is our differences that make us one! Our unity, our sharing of life together, it is bound up in Christ and therefore what divides us (according to our world’s standards) is what actually makes us strong and united together.

Who will we be? Well, let’s be a people without divisions, but a people who celebrate our uniqueness. Let’s celebrate the Fathers and the Mothers and the caretakers and grandparents — not because one is intrinsically better (again, another way the world might encourage us to look at this), but rather because each are vital to making a vibrant community of Jesus. Old and young, long-timers and first-timers: one in Christ.

Bringing things to a close, I know that as a predominately white church community, it can feel a bit uncomfortable knowing how to celebrate a holiday like Juneteenth. I look on the situation as a descendant of the oppressors — this is not my day to celebrate. And yet, in Christ, we find that the invitation is to bear witness to the celebration and joy of others, to celebrate them, to champion the cause of those whose experience we do not necessarily share, but because we are all one in Christ, the liberation and freedom of the other is as important to me as my own freedom.

The law divides us, categorizes and differentiates us. Christ, in contrast, clothes us all, blesses who we are, and calls us to work together with all our differences to create beauty in our oneness.