“No Freedom Without Baptism”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, January 25, 2026
Reading: Galatians 3:23-29
Are there any divisions between us human beings more basic than religion, race, socio-economic status, gender? Paul tells us God washes those divisions away in baptism, like a tsunami to a sandcastle. We have not yet caught up to the revolutionary implications of these words.
We are in a series here at the church on the sacraments—the mysterious ways God saves. This is the last of three weeks on baptism The next three weeks we’ll discuss the Lord’s Supper. For now, last go on baptism for a while. Let’s make it a good one.
The church in a place called Galatia must have been puzzled. They had heard from Paul that Jesus Christ, the messiah of Israel is saving not just Israel, but the whole world, even non-Jews, gentiles, like them, like most of us. And they’d signed up and been baptized. Ancient peoples admired the Jews for their morality, their talk of a God who frees slaves. But it’s hard to be Jewish. You have to circumcise males, keep kosher and the rest of the laws of Torah, put up with anti-Semitism. So, a fair number of people were admirers of Judaism but held back from becoming Jewish. Now the Galatians learn they can draw close to the God of Israel because he’s drawn close to them in Jesus Christ. Sign us up, they say. Give us the waters of baptism.
Now they hear from other missionaries that they haven’t yet done enough. ‘We’re glad you’re baptized,’ this group says. ‘Now you in fact do need to become Jewish too. Keep the laws of Torah and the ways of Israel.’ Okay, that’s not what we heard first from Paul. In this letter Paul responds with fury. “You foolish Galatians. Who has bewitched you?” This is not language with which you win friends and influence people. One of you told me you can’t imagine a city official communicating this way: “You foolish Torontonians, who has bewitched you?” For Paul, Jesus Christ is all you ever need to relate to God. Being Christian is a matter of Christ-plus-nothing. For Paul, Jewish practice is great ... for Jews. Paul himself keeps kosher. His assistant Timothy gets circumcised in accordance with the laws of Israel. But the Galatians are not Jewish. They don’t need to convert twice. All they need is Jesus. All anybody needs is Jesus. To add anything to Jesus it’d be like boarding a plane wearing homemade wings. Why do you have those on for? Well, we’re flying, aren’t we? Foolish.
They say university fellowship groups are the best way to spread the gospel. In college we’re reevaluating our whole lives, faith included. Some go to university and drop God. Many, many more pick up God, or rather are picked up by God, who never sets us down. Churches that are growing invest in campus ministry. A friend’s fellowship group had a new person come to faith in Jesus. Marvelous. His first question: okay, when do the guitar lessons start? What do you mean? Well, you guys all play guitar, I figured that was next. Sweet, silly, and no, there is nothing intrinsically holy about the guitar, or the organ, or any other instrument, but they can all be useful. You can learn guitar if you want, but you don’t have to, to follow Jesus Christ. In much American evangelicalism it is assumed that to be Christian you must be a Republican. When I was young, I reacted against this by insisting the opposite: no, Jesus is a liberal. Today faith has often been shoehorned into another prop for Donald Trump. No, no, and no. Faith is Christ plus nothing. Perhaps our temptation in this room is like mine once was, to lean too hard the other direction—real faith is to cluck our tongue at Trump, support public radio, and trade in for an electric vehicle. Nope. Christ plus nothing. Christian piety has often suggested being a Christian means you don’t drink, smoke, swear, chew or go with girls who do. The same way a previous century in the Victorian or Edwardian era thought being a Christian meant being a gentleman or a lady and graduate from an Oxbridge College. Nope, you don’t need the resurrection for any of that. In fact, Jesus’ baptism washes such superficialities away.
You can understand why the good people of Galatia were open to more of the God of Israel. To be Jewish means you’re part of Abraham’s family, either by birth or by adoption. The Torah is the ten commandments given at Mt. Sinai plus the 603 other laws the rabbis delineate from the books of Exodus to Deuteronomy. When you pray in a shul, you’ll see that committed Jews will put on a prayer shawl, beautiful robe with fringes. It’s a sign that they’re covered in Torah, shielded, and protected. When I visited once someone offered me a robe. Someone else said “no, don’t give that to him.” Because I don’t shield my life in Torah. The offeror, who was just trying to be polite, said, “I thought he might be cold.” I love Judaism enough, and I hope you do too, that I’m jealous of those who live under Torah’s covering. But it’s not for me. I’m a Jesus guy, a gentile, Torah is for Jews, bless ‘em. It would have been a kind of play-acting, appropriation, for me to put that robe on. The missionaries telling the Galatians to put the shawl on are as misguided as the man offering errant hospitality to me. All they need, all anybody needs, is Christ.
The Galatians are called “Celts” in other parts of Europe. They were a people spread from modern Turkey across Europe to the British Isles, to the city of Boston’s basketball team. Vast stretch of territory. They didn’t have a written language, unlike the Romans, who go on and on about themselves, so we don’t know as much about the Celts. Here’s why they shouldn’t become Jewish. It’s not that being Jewish is bad—it’s beautiful. Paul himself is Jewish, like Jesus and all the twelve, most everyone who wrote the New Testament, all the earliest church. The Jewish people are the family through whom God is saving the world. Emphasis on the latter part. The world. God chooses one people, the Jews, through whom to bless all the others. When God chooses Abram, he promises “in you all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). The prophet Isaiah expands on this promise:
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
Do you hear? All nations. Many peoples. Not just Israel. God’s gifts aren’t for Israel. They’re through Israel for everybody else. I regret to inform your high school English teacher was correct—the prepositions really matter. Same is true for us, church. God’s gifts aren’t for us. Whatever gifts you have from God, sure, enjoy them, but don’t get used to them. You’ll be giving them away sooner or later. Jesus’ coming means Israel’s gifts are available to all right now.
Listen to Paul’s revolutionary words again.
“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.”
The ways we creatures divide ourselves have been erased. That’s why Paul doesn’t want the Galatians to become Jews after becoming Christians. In Christ, Jews and Gentiles are made one, brought together, no longer divided. If Christians have to become Jews, then the two groups won’t be reunited. Difference will just be erased. To use a neuralgic example these days: some in the US seem to think Canada should join America as a 51st state. They might say, “then we can be united!” Uh, no, we can be best friends and keep that border, shall we? A 51st state wouldn’t be unison; it’d be a takeover. So too for Paul: for Jews and Christians to be united they have to be distinct but made one in Christ.
This passage in Paul is sometimes called the Magna Carta of Christian freedom. Paul himself may have no idea just how radical he’s being. There are trendy post-modern philosophers who are all atheists who insist this is the most revolutionary statement they’ve ever seen. It’s not in Marx. It’s in the Bible. Believe it or not. So, claim Slavoj Zizek from Slovenia, Alain Badiou of France, Giorgio Agamben in Italy. You can drop those names at the university and sound au currant. Patricia Cornwell, the mystery novelist, had always assumed Paul’s cultured despisers were right, Paul hated women. Then she actually read Paul. And realized, uh, no, this is the best news for women available.
Churches like ours that ordain women trace that 20th century innovation to this passage. Well, if there’s no more male or female, and we baptize women, how can God not call them to ministry? Someone wise was asked if he believed in women ministers. Believe in them? I’ve seen them! The slavery Paul discusses was not modern chattel slavery based on race like we had in the Americas. It was economic. If you got in trouble economically you could sell your labour to a master who would take on your debt. It’d be like all of us in debt to the VISA card people being offered: okay, your balance will be zero if you work for VISA for a few years. VISA would own the world. Anyway, you could get out of the slavery Paul is imagining. In the US’s slaving days, you had to get to Canada.
Paul says baptism is stronger than your debts. Financial and moral. Baptism levels every way we human beings rank and regard one another. Every single way. Do you know there were laws on the books in slave states in the US saying ‘okay, if you baptize your slaves, fine, but they need to know it doesn’t affect their legal status as slaves.’ Now why do you pass laws like that? Because someone was saying the opposite! Okay, I’m baptized, now I’m equal to you master, the Bible says so. Uh, no, the legislature of South Carolina says otherwise. We can understand Paul’s fury at adding anything to Christ if we imagine a slaver saying, “you’re still my property you know.” Baptism makes you siblings. He’s a son of God like you, she is Israel and God in person, like you, not an animal or a piece of furniture. It is a scar on the face of the church that we spent a half a millennium more or less okay with slavery. There were exceptions—William Wilberforce and friends convinced Britain to oppose the slave trade. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and others railed against slavery as escapees and Christians. Ontario was the first British province founded to be anti-slavery. There were some who realized how radical baptism is. Just not enough.
In my country of origin the US, we’ve had a nasty dispute over so-called illegal aliens for some decades, culminating in today’s street violence in Minneapolis and other places. It’s a dispute between one vision of America, “give us your poor, your tired” as the statue of liberty says, and anxiety over millions who cross borders without permission. There can be a genuine dialogue around such competing commitments. We have one in Canada with honourable disagreement. But notice the language of calling a human being “illegal.” Most Latino migrants are, in fact, either Catholic or evangelical or both. They are baptized. I’d hazard to say most wanting to keep them out are also baptized. And that changes things. They are in fact family. One humanity in Jesus Christ. For Paul there are only two types of humanity. Those needlessly still divided over race, class, religion, gender. And the new humanity being gathered up by Jesus Christ through baptism.
During this series on baptism our musicians Elaine, John, Stephen and the choir have been coming alongside with songs on baptism. And do you know more of them come from the black church than usual. There are spirituals on every part of the Bible, but the black church has always loved the Exodus. Slavers would quote passages that say, “slaves obey your masters.” But black people found better passages. About how God rips a nation of slaves, Israel, out of Pharaoh’s grip in Egypt and leads them to freedom through the sea. That’s the heart of the story. Slavers often pointed to Christianity to justify slavery: we’re making Africans Christian. Little did we know Christianity was freedom on a time release. It contained the seeds for slavery’s undoing. Isn’t it interesting that Christianity is booming in Africa. Withering in North America and western Europe? God doesn’t always come when you want. But he’s always on time.
We might expand on Paul’s notion of baptismal freedom. I remember when I started to understand why some people are unhappy with our society’s gender roles. It was a graduation for one of my kids, so you sit there while hundreds of kids parade across stage, waiting for your kid. And I noticed something about the girls. One or two had the sort of model look that our age values: tall, thin, curvy, gobs of makeup, expensively dressed. That left 150 or so other girls on the outside looking in, dissatisfied with their bodies, even hating them. Whole industries take advantage of that anxiety with promises to fix things with drugs or exercise or whatever. Forgive me as a man for evaluating all this, just trying to get out of my own skin. I could see why some would say ‘if that’s what a woman is, I’m out.’ I’d rather be an athlete, or another gender, or just cover up, anything but that. Paul says in Christ your identity is not male. Not female. Baptized. And that’s enough. I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “if you’re not going to ordain women then stop baptizing them.” It’s a little long and serious for a bumper sticker but it makes the point.
I hope you noticed the bad poetry in what Paul says.
“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.”
Jew or Greek. Slave or free. Male and female. Oops. Some English translations improve on Paul and just change it to or. Nope. Why does this matter? In Genesis when God makes our first parents, we’re told this:
God created humanity in his image,
in the image of God he created him
male and female he created them.
Notice the pronoun slippage. “In the image of God, he created him, male and female he created them.” There is something about both femininity and masculinity together that reflects the image of God. This first division into sexual difference generates all humanity. And oppression between genders only follows the fall. Eve is told after she and her husband sin:
your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.
Sexism and misogyny are not original to humanity. They’re part of our brokenness and tragedy. Paul is saying that brokenness is undone in baptism. We’re peaceful, life-giving “male and female” again. Now, let’s get busy acting like it.
Here’s maybe a riskier expansion on Paul’s vision. When terrorists attacked a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, one was disarmed by a fellow Muslim. Ahmed al Ahmed owned a fruit stand nearby and took a bullet for intervening and saving lives. He is a Muslim, an Australian, a human being, sacrificing himself for others. And as a Christian I can’t not see baptismal identity. Not because either is baptized. But because the God who heals humanity with baptism shows up in surprising places. The Prince of Peace doesn’t limit peace to us Christians, thank God. Watching the video, I was struck how pitiful the shooter looked after Al Ahmed disarmed him—he slinked backwards in fear. Al Ahmed, injured, looked like humanity as God intends.
I think most of us imagine faith as our individual beliefs. Yes, I consent to all this. No, I can’t stomach this or that. Do you see how much bigger faith actually is? Paul is saying God is making through baptism a whole new humanity. As peaceful as Adam and Eve once were. As equal as God originally intended. No division on religion, race, class, gender, or any other status marker. God is making us all part of Jesus Christ, his beloved child. Some part of this new humanity may quibble: I’m not sure about this. That’s okay. Christ is. And in baptism we’re part of him whether we like it or not.
I’ll close with this. There was a time in my life when I was even more depressed than usual. I was in one of my back injuries, which made every movement painful. I was unhappy in my job, discouraged about vocation. For us job ambitious types we can think if our job isn’t going well then nothing is. We’re wrong about that; there is so much more to life than our work. Baptism is a threat to ambition and achievement too. I digress. On the way to the dead-end job I’d pass a corporate fountain, sort of soulless thing banks put out. And something clicked in me, baptism on time release. The running water reminded me I was baptized. And that’s the most important thing about me. And nothing that happened that day, or any day ever, could change that. Thanks be to God. Amen