The Two-Thousand Year Gamble

The Two-Thousand Year Gamble--August 17, 2016

"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 and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise."  [Gal. 3:27-29]

Just to be clear--we don't lose our gender, our eye color, music preferences, or national background when we become a part of the community of Christ. We don't lose those categories that are often used to define us; rather, those categories lose their definitiveness. They lose their power--if we dare to believe it--to keep us divided from each other and to set us against each other.

The critical thing is to ask, "What most deeply defines me?" And once I realize that the promise we call "the Gospel" says that God's calling me beloved transcends any other category, label, or division, then I can own my particularity and see you, in all your different particularities, as beloved, too, without me feeling threatened or afraid.  The Gospel works out that change in our hearts, even while we are still half-afraid. But like I say, it starts with daring to believe the claim of the New Testament--that the most definitive thing about us is God's calling us beloved, without pretending the other particulars of me aren't there.

So, for example, under my roof and in my immediate family, I'm still a white male of English and German ancestry who grew up going to art museums and orchestra concerts rather than NFL games or NASCAR races. I have straight brown hair, bad eyes, and skin that burns pink in the summer son, and I could never do a chin-up to save my life. My son and my daughter have curly dark hair and brown skin, and they move more gracefully in toddlerhood than I ever have.  We do not share DNA.  But we have staked our lives on the claim that it is love that makes us belong to one another rather than common ethnicity, appearance, or shared physical agility. Our family is not bound by the set of conditions any of us were born with, but it is sort of a daily gamble that a promise of always-love is powerful enough to hold together people who otherwise are quite different in many ways.  And yet at the same time, we don't pretend that we those differences are not there; we cannot.  At some point in our lives, something had to change in our hearts that broke open the old mental picture that family was primarily about passing on your genes, and a new picture, a new kind of understanding of "family" came into my awareness. Everything now is bet on the promise that love can make someone belong even if the traits we call "natural" or "inborn" are quite different from one another.

The followers of Jesus are a part of a very similar gamble. It is something of an experiment that has been going on for two thousand years, and we keep having to re-consider whether there is some label or category out there that is stronger than the promise of God, or God's claim, "You are beloved," is powerful enough to hold together any other difference, label, or category.  We don't forget or deny the things that make each of us who we are, not any more than I pretend my son's curly hair was my contribution to his identity.  To be a Christian, then, is not to pretend that we are all the same, but that the things that make us different are not more essential, not more fundamental, than the claim of God which says simply, "You are beloved--therefore you belong." 

So, if we dare to take these words--really quite radical words, if you think about it--from what we call the third chapter of Galatians seriously, we won't pretend that we suddenly lose our gender, our preferences, our in-born traits and tendencies, or our DNA.  Rather, we come to say that these things are not more fundamental than the love of God which says we all belong.  The old lines and distinctions no longer divide us or carry any force for us within the Christian community. 

Our baptism into Christ defines us, he says, and makes a stronger claim on us than any other label that gets put on us or that we put on ourselves.  Before I am anything else--before I am white or male or English or middle class or married or clumsy or near-sighted or whatever other categorization we might describe ourselves with--I am made a child of God through Christ.  My daughter EzRhianna has none of those demographic boxes checked the same way I do, but she is a child of God, and she and I can both recall the day when the water came streaming down her face and the cross was traced on her forehead to inscribe the promise over her. I don't stop being any of those other things that I am, and neither does Ez, and neither do you. Paul would tell us that none of those other things are the basis of my belonging or my identity any longer.  The old labels used to define me just don’t stick.  The Christian community is not defined by what we were born with. It is defined by a promise.

Now... truth be told, the problem we face with all of these words, though, is that we have let it go as just a utopian vision and we perpetually fall short of it.  Martin Luther King, Jr. used to point out that the most segregated hour in America was the Sunday morning worship hour--a sad reality that flies in the face of all that Paul says about what it means to live in the Christian community.  For that matter, for generations, Christians have either ignored or spiritualized this passage from Galatians so that women could not have positions of leadership in the church--often with the claim that they were abiding by other scriptures that speak against women's leadership, but clearly then ignoring this passage.  How tragic is it that Paul gives us this radically open, profoundly beautiful picture of community in this passage, and we have spent the last two thousand years inventing all sorts of excuses for why "those people" (pick your label or category) did not apply to that surprisingly inclusive vision in Galatians 3. We have come up with countless new ways to settle for less than this genuine kind of community.  

And maybe the saddest part about all of it is that Paul doesn't describe this picture as a future possibility or a commandment of what we should be or could be if only we would strive harder at it.  This is not a utopian hypothetical community--Paul says that this is how things are for us.  In other words, as far as God is concerned, God regards us already as a community where the old lines of gender, class, and race no longer need to divide us.  God sees Christ in us, and over us, and through us.  God just sees children.  And yet we somehow still settle for the divisions and distinctions and labels.  Paul seems to think that there's nothing more we need to do to create this kind of community, except to believe that it is already the case.  We belong in a family already--the powerful promise of love has already been spoken over us. What happens now day by day is our ongoing answer to the question, "Dare we believe that the promise is true?

It seems painful clear that the culture and time in which we live really struggles with daring to believe it, largely because we keep doing awful things to each other and justifying it in the name of our fear of one another.  Every day there is more evidence on the news of how clumsily we speak about race, how we still use talk about gender to alienate or belittle, how we make assumptions about people from other neighborhoods or tax brackets. The evidence day by say says that we just do not know how to relate to one another, and the temptation can be just to withdraw into our own little categories, and only imagine that God likes people who are "like me." Of course that is the temptation--it is always tempting to stay with what we have always known rather than letting God lead us somewhere new... and yet somewhere that feels profoundly like home.

And in spite of our utter failure (or maybe worse, our giving up on even trying) at loving the "other," here is Paul announcing that the Christian community exists as an alternative kind of community where the old boundary lines really can be taken down--because they have been taken down, once and for all by Christ Jesus.  Maybe the challenge for us, seeing how fractured our world is, is whether we can dare to actually trust the claim of the gospel--that the old lines need not hem us in any longer, that the old labels will not stick, and that our identity is a gift of Christ, a common gift meant to be shared with all.

Can we let our hearts catch up to the bold promise of the Gospel--that who we are comes from Whose we are?  Can we dare to stake our lives on the claim that regardless of whatever categories nature doled out to us at birth, the living God has said over all of our dripping foreheads, "You are beloved.  You belong."

The gamble is daring to let our hearts believe that is true. Believe it.

God of new vision, teach us to see as you see.  Train our hearts to look on your beloved and to see your beloved.  Teach us to own our particularities but not to judge by our particularities.  Teach us to rejoice that you have created a community in which the outsiders are brought in and the lowly are raised high, and we are all given the likeness of Jesus--simply as a gift.  Teach us these things, and we will praise you for them.