One In Christ, a sermon on Galatians 3:26-28
A Sermon for First Austin, October 3, 2021
By Rev. Carrie Houston
Galatians 3:26-28
One In Christ
Who are you?
How would you describe yourself?
What adjectives would you use?
What categories would you put yourself in?
Wife. Mother. Sister. Runner. Athlete. Violinist. Preacher. Texan.
Principled. Disciplined. Afraid of making mistakes. Defensive.
When you think about yourself, you’ll likely use certain classifications to describe yourself. American. Texan. Democrat/Republican. Female/male or non-bianary. Gay or straight. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Not one word fully describes who you are completely, but it gives someone an insight into where you belong… or where you are not welcome.
We can also be grouped based on our deeply held beliefs.
Pro-life, Pro-choice
Christian, Jew, Muslim
Feminist, Nationalist
Pro-Oxford comma or against
Aggie or Longhorn
A deeply held belief doesn’t require any proof nor does it require any facts to be true. We all hold certain beliefs that have been formed by life experiences.
I have a deeply held belief that roaches are the worst creature on the planet because when I was 10, a roach fell from the ceiling and ran down my neck and shirt, terrifying me forever. There’s nothing you could do to make me think otherwise about these repulsive creatures. And if you know me, you know I feel similarly about squirrels, but that’s a different rant for another day.
Deeply held beliefs are our personal values and are core to a person’s guiding principles.
They can dictate our behavior and help us differentiate between right or wrong. They can be based in religious teachings, or be influenced by pop culture or societal norms. They may or may not be based on facts, but rather, guided by emotions and memoires.
When our beliefs challenged, our brain does everything it can to protect them, making it so hard to change another person’s mind. It’s why no matter how many times you retweet or repost that political meme, you aren’t changing anyone’s mind. In fact, you’re likely just annoying them and inspiring them to unfriend you. Consequently, our beliefs can be profoundly influenced by fear and misinformation causing us to characterize large groups of people as “others” because we disagree with their deeply held beliefs.
Brenรฉ Brown calls this, living a life “zoomed out” where we are looking so broadly and surface level that we become disconnected from an individual person’s life story. We fall into the trap of hating large groups of strangers that believe differently than us because of these mischaracterizations and generalizations.
“You vote this way therefore you must hate…. Immigrants, gay people, babies, the constitution….”
Social media and the 24-hour news cycle helps add fuel to the fire here. It’s easy to get caught up in the sound bites and the social media opinions that are disembodied from truth. How many times have you seen a post on social media catering to your fear, confirming your bias, and working to deepen the fracture that is rapidly growing between people that disagree?
We are losing sight of what connects us as humans, as believers in Christ, and instead, focusing on our differences while trying to force someone to conform to our ways of doing things.
Things weren’t too different even back in Jesus’ day. Let’s talk about what’s happening in the book of Galatians. For some bible trivia for you, Galatians is one of the oldest writings from the New Testament, second only to 1 Thessalonians. Galatians is a letter written by Paul to the church he founded in Galatia while on his missionary travels. We assume that these Galatians are converts that were formerly Gentile pagans based on what he says about their worship of other gods in chapter 4. Paul preaches the gospel to the Galatians and they “accepted the message joyfully, were baptized, and experienced dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit.” (Richard B. Hays, NIB, pg 184).
But sometime after Paul left the church to run on its own, rival missionaries showed up on the scene preaching a “different gospel,” one that required Gentile Christians to be circumcised to be considered true Christians. Spoiler alert- they weren’t circumcised. The Gentile Galatians were confused by these Jewish-Christians claiming they must adopt Jewish principles in order to belong. So they write to Paul for advice.
Naturally, Paul is very upset about this. Angry, likely. We can hear the passion in his letter. He had spent so much time shepherding and building this community and he cared deeply for them. His community was in crisis. Now he has to defend his teachings by reassuring them that the good news of Christ is for all, not just those who abide by the law, as these false teachers are preaching.
Listen to what Paul writes to the Galatians. He says:
“You are all God’s children through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.28 There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal 3:26-28
All are one in Christ Jesus! The gospel of Christ is the great equalizer, not some ethnic or social or national identity. Gone are the barriers of gender or race or status. Distinctions that separate people into the haves and have nots, or the ins or the outs, are directly confronted by these freeing declarations of who God’s children really are. All are one in Christ Jesus.
This new community of Galatian Gentile believers in Christ was brought into being by God’s grace through Jesus Christ. Oh how radical this was to a society of Jews who had strict ritual requirements! And to the gentiles, who worshiped other gods completely! All the strongly held religious laws from the Jewish influences are directly being challenged and overturned by this message of equality and inclusion.
The modern-day church can learn a lot from Paul’s declaration of unity in Christ. What do we do when we still see inequalities and injustices within our own societies, where God’s children are blatantly being excluded or held to the rules and standards of a false gospel? If Paul were writing this letter to us, I bet he’d say something like “neither American or Mexican, neither Jew nor Palestinian. Neither trans nor gender non-conforming, neither homeless or immigrant, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Don’t you think?
Have we not learned from this letter to the Galatians? 2000 years have passed and we are still struggling to accept the message of radical inclusion that God offers through faith in Christ. Think about the divisions we have within the capital C church in America: women in ministry, racial divides, LGBTQ rights, to name a few. There are a number of other issues we can probably think up right now that seek to exclude groups from fellowship in the church.
What about the ones we subconsciously exclude? Like someone who believes differently than we do politically. Or maybe they clap and raise their hands in worship. Or they dress differently, or smell like they haven’t had the luxury of a shower in a few days. Or maybe they struggle with understanding the reality around them. Or maybe they haven’t had the privilege of higher education. There are any number of reasons why we may “other” a group of people. But whether we like it or not, we often exclude people from fellowship for being different. I’d like to give us the benefit of the doubt that we aren’t all terrible people and take a guess that we are just afraid. Afraid of different. Afraid of going deeper to really get to know someone. Afraid to enter into dialogue and have all of our deeply held beliefs turned upside down.
It so easy to listen to the politicians and meme-ers and talking heads telling us evil and horrible things about the “other side.” But when we do, we are subject to such gross misrepresentations and generalizations! When you take the time to listen and honor someone’s humanity, to truly see the Jesus in someone else, something changes inside you. The table gets bigger. You see someone for who they are and base your opinion of them on that, and not just by the labels you’ve put on them. Brene Brown says, “people are hard to hate up close. Move in.”
We’ve got to do the hard work of moving closer, to have a conversation with someone we disagree with. I had this experience just yesterday when a friend was asking me questions about what I believed about some hot-button political topics. We both had the opportunity to share from our hearts, to explain why we believed something, while respectfully listening to the other share. We didn’t yell at each other. We didn’t call each other names. If anything, we walked away not agreeing at all but left with more respect of the other because we could have a civil conversation about something we disagreed about. He genuinely wanted to know what I believed, not just to trap me in an argument. Are we still friends? Yes! Did our perception of “the other” change for the good? Yes, at least for me, it did.
I know opportunities for real face-to-face conversation are harder to have during Covid times where we are staying isolated but as vaccination rates increase and virus transmission slowly ticks downward, we will begin to emerge from our cocoons hungry for real and meaningful human interactions. Dinner tables will be filled again. Reservations to our city’s best eateries will be hard to find as we are starting to venture out again.
Eating is such an important element to our culture. It’s not just the act of consuming food for substance, but it’s a social ritual meant for entertainment, closeness and vulnerability. Just think about all the times you’ve shared a meal with someone. It usually begins with an invitation, either to a favorite restaurant or around someone’s kitchen table. Then comes the small talk, the “how have you been”s and the “how’s your family.” When the food is served, there’s the “ooohhs and ahhhs” of each entree, maybe with some “can I try that?” or “take a bite!” or “ you HAVE to order this next time!”
Then the plates are cleared and you’re sitting back, resisting the urge to unbutton the top button of your pants because you’re so full, and the conversation turns into an intimate exercise of sharing one another’s burdens. You share your struggles with depression or loneliness. She shares that her mother is sick with cancer. You have a direct view into her eyes and see the pain and the burden she’s carrying. In this moment, all you see is the humanity of the person sitting across from you. Not her conservative political beliefs, or her tendency to read the Bible in a more literal way than you do. She becomes REAL, a person filled with hopes and dreams, a person shaped by experiences which are very different than yours. You look past all that those little things you disagree about and reach out to support her in her time of need.
“In her book Eating Together, Alice Julier argues that dining together can radically shift people’s perspectives: It reduces people’s perceptions of inequality, and diners tend to view those of different races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds as more equal than they would in other social scenarios.”- the atlantic.
Sharing a meal can change us.
It’s the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread and Jesus is sitting at a dinner table with his disciples. There’s tension in the air. That feeling of uncertainty, like you know something is going to happen but you’re just not sure what. Everything the disciples have experienced the last three years has led to this moment. The disciples are ancy.
Jesus is acting different. You look into his eyes. Is he even present in this moment? He’s clearly thinking of something else. There’s pain in his face. You look down at his plate in front of him. Jesus is barely eating his food. He’s just pushing it around his plate, trying to summon an appetite. When what feels like 3 hours finally passes, Jesus speaks. “I assure you that one of you will betray me.” Shocked and in disbelief, you look around at each person seated at the table, trying to find the one he’s talking about, because, surely “It’s not me, is it?”
Instead of revealing the guilty one, Jesus picks up the warm loaf of bread in the center of the table. He thanks God for it, and then breaks it. He passes a slice to everyone at the table. He does the same with the cup and all who were sitting around the table share the wine.
We are all the guilty ones. Guilty of betrayal, guilty of causing someone else pain. Guilty of judging someone and guilty of sacrificing a friendship for personal or financial gain.
But Jesus still invites us to the table. Jesus still shares his bread and wine with us. He looks us in the eyes and listens to us rant about our complicated relationship with our family. He comforts us when we share our hurts and our fears. He pulls up a chair for another lonely and sick person to take their seat in front of their savior.
We break bread and share the wine to remember Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The love that conquered death. The love of a God that reminds us that the table is big. So big, that there are more than enough seats for us to dine with Jesus. Jesus pulls up a chair for each one of us. We are all included regardless of our interpretations of the bible, our political party affiliation, or our sexuality or gender. Jesus just wants to sit down next to us and listen to our story over a shared glass of wine and bread.
Are you ready to pull up a seat at the table of God? God’s table is big enough. Jesus has made room for all of us to have a front row seat. All are welcome to the table of Christ.
Amen.
As we prepare our hearts to dine with Christ and with each other, I’d like to share this poem written by Jan Richardson.
And the Table Will Be Wide
A Blessing for World Communion Sunday
And the table
will be wide.
And the welcome
will be wide.
And the arms
will open wide
to gather us in.
And our hearts
will open wide
to receive.
And we will come
as children who trust
there is enough.
And we will come
unhindered and free.
And our aching
will be met
with bread.
And our sorrow
will be met
with wine.
And we will open our hands
to the feast
without shame.
And we will turn
toward each other
without fear.
And we will give up
our appetite
for despair.
And we will taste
and know
of delight.
And we will become bread
for a hungering world.
And we will become drink
for those who thirst.
And the blessed
will become the blessing.
And everywhere
will be the feast.
Amen.
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