"A Gospel For All People"
Bridging divides: We are all “one in Christ Jesus.”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Text: Galatians 2:1-10
I remember walking home from school one day when one of my schoolmates told me that a local Protestant paramilitary groups had “strongly advised” the few Roman Catholic families in a neighbouring estate that they should “move on.” It shouldn't have surprised me, for in another neighbourhood that I passed on the lengthy trek home, Protestants, some of whom I knew, were erecting a massive bonfire against the wall of a house owned by a Roman Catholic family. On the night before the Orange parades, the bonfire was lit along with many others to see in the Twelfth of July celebrations. Similar events occurred in other parts of the city, Catholic against Protestant, as both sides engaged in forms of ethnic cleansing. “Christian” was pitted against “Christian.”
I thought that I had moved away from all that when I came to Canada but, prior to the first Toronto Argonaut football game that I saw, I heard the crowd “boo” the national anthem. “What's that about?” I asked Brian, the person I was with.
“Oh, they're booing because he's singing some of it in French.”
“What's wrong with that?” I asked, and I got an introduction to the levels of animosity between English and French in Canada in the years following the FLQ crisis. I remember thinking, “Oh no, not problems in Canada as well.”
A few years later, I moved to the United States in search of a theological education. While there, I had supervised ministry training working as an assistant to the chaplain in a prison. It was a dozen years or so after the struggles of the late ”˜60s and the Martin Luther King years, but working in that prison gave me insight into racial divisions in America. It seems that everywhere that I have lived some sort of division has existed between one people and another.
I worry about division and divisiveness because too often I have seen them transformed into something worse, including violence. In recent years we have witnessed racial conflict in Los Angeles, in England, in France, and in Sri Lanka, among other places. There has been intra-religious strife in Ireland and in the former Yugoslavia between Serbians and Croatians. And there has been inter-religious intolerance between Christian and Muslim in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Indonesia among other places, perhaps the worst of which in recent years was probably the ethnic cleansing cum genocide in Srebrenica in 1995. Divisions seem to be everywhere and sometimes lead to dire consequences.
It should not surprise us, therefore, to find evidence of division in the New Testament. If one reads through The Acts of the Apostles, one can note how Paul constantly runs into opposition from both locals and the Jewish populations in the centres that he visits. Last week, we embarked on a study of one area that he visited and specifically, we started looking at St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, which I propose to continue looking at today and in the month of July as part of the Summer Series.
In Galatians, likewise, we find divisions. Perhaps the clearest example is the division between groups of believers. Paul had taken the gospel of grace to some unspecified towns in Galatia (modern-day Turkey) and they had received the message with joy. Shortly after he left, however, a group which favoured more Jewish practices and traditions, though they believed in Christ also, came in and undermined what Paul had taught, encouraging the Galatian believers to be circumcised and follow the Torah. Paul was furious that they were giving up their freedom in Christ and fired of a letter: “O you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? (3:1)” he wrote. Evidence of divisions in the earliest Church.
But there is another, more widespread division apparent in Paul's letter, which is alluded to as he argues for his own credibility as an apostle of truth in face of the opponents. The division I speak of is not highlighted directly but is implicit to the statements that the main body of Jesus' disciples carried the gospel to the Jews, while he was charged with bringing it to the Gentiles.
Jews and Gentiles … how many times have we heard of that division, a division that had been a part of Jewish existence for generations. In an effort to maintain purity in the midst of the polytheistic, pagan cultures that were all around them, the Hebrews maintained a strong “we-they” ethic. Although some generations forgot and interacted significantly with other nations, as outlined in the books of Kings, Chronicles and the Prophets, there were frequent calls to be separate, to be distinct, to be different than other nations. We find it in Deuteronomistic elements of the Old Testament where certain groups and nations were excluded from the assembly of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:1ff). We find it in later Jewish law such that it specified that Jews were not to have certain dealings with non-Jews. They were not, for instance, to eat with them, an issue that Paul took up with Peter in the second half of Galatians 2. We find the separation of Jew and everyone else in the constant Old Testament refrains that God had chosen Israel alone from among the nations as his people. We find it in the temple itself, where courts where set up for certain groups of people. In the centre of the temple was the holy of holies. It was the place where only the high priest could enter. Around that was the court of priests, around that was the court of Jewish males, then the court of women, and then the court of the Gentiles. Non-Jews, you see, could only proceed so far toward the holy of holies; they were excluded from drawing close to God lest they pollute the sacred space. There was separation, there was division; they were unclean, unholy. There was exclusion and an exclusivity that sometimes was transformed into political struggle and violence between peoples.
The separation may be seen in the vocabulary of Galatians. Those born into the chosen nation were “Jews,” people of Judah; everyone else was “Gentile” (2:14). The Jews were “the circumcised,” following the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 17:10) and everyone else was termed disparagingly, “the uncircumcised,” for they did not follow God (2:7). The people of Judah were God's people; others, again disparagingly, were “Greek” (2:3) where the word, “Greek,” is used, not to connote a person coming from Greece but, in a world that had been deeply Hellenized, as a synonym for “non-Jews” and often Greek speakers. And “Greek” was a disparaging title because religious Jews deemed many Hellenist and Roman practices associated with religion - games, baths and nudity - deeply immoral. Even the word “Gentile” itself was a derogatory title. Paul, almost in a state of political incorrectness while addressing a Gentile audience, picks up on a common Jewish phrase as he refers to “Jews and Gentile sinners” (2:15).
Non-Jews were thus perceived to be out of touch with God in terms of worship and practice. They were uncircumcised, Hellenists and sinners, while the Jews, by comparison, were circumcised, followers of God and his law and a holy people. And even though in the Hebrew scriptures God called his chosen nation to a mission to the nations, as so often happens when humans get involved in divine things, divisions occurred and a great divide was perceived between the people of God and the rest of the world, the sinners.
In that context, the faith that Paul teaches is a truly wonderful thing. For, as he argues that he had received the gospel directly from God, independent of the disciples who walked with Jesus, he also speaks of the continuity that exists between the gospel that he preaches and that which the disciples preach. He speaks of how he went up to see Peter and James for 15 days in Jerusalem after his time in Arabia. He speaks of going again, some 14 years later, to lay out his teaching before all the leaders, lest he was running in vain (2:2). What derives from these visits is that the unity of the gospel is affirmed. There is only one gospel. The disciples take the gospel to the Jews, Paul and Barnabus take the same gospel to the Gentiles. The gospel is one. It is a gospel of grace, a gospel of the grace of God that is not dependent on who one is, where one is born, of what nation or race one is born into, or on what one has done with one's life. It is a gospel that says that through faith in God's grace, all peoples may have salvation. It says that a relationship with God is not about circumcision, following the minutiae of the law, or keeping some prescribed holy days, it is founded solely in the work of Christ and the law of love. This gospel is the logical consequence of monotheism, of the teaching that there is one God and one alone … God is not the God of one people but of the whole world. There can be no divisions; there is no separation in Christ between this person and that, between this nation and that, we are all one in Christ Jesus. Indeed, Paul says a little later, “There is, therefore, no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male nor female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (3:28).” It's a gospel for all people.
A number of years ago, in a suburb of this city, the churches sought a display of unity by holding a joint service of prayer and worship. All the priests, ministers and pastors were contacted and we hoped for representation from all denominations and churches. It was not to be, however, and it was unfortunately the largest church in the area that refused to join us. Their Board held that the rest of us were not “saved” and it created a great heaviness of heart among those who participated. That is a division that should never happen in the Church of Christ. We are one and the gospel is a gospel for all people.
One of the things that saddens me as I visit different churches is the level of ethnic integration - it is poor! Isn't it? In a city that is a melting pot of many races, cultures, and nations, we have white churches and black churches, Chinese Churches and Filipino Churches, we have Sri Lankan Churches and Armenian Churches but very few that are integrated, and reflect the multi-cultural make-up of our city. Why is it that the Church of Jesus Christ, so often, seems unable to bridge the gap of ethnicity? We are one. We are called to be one. The gospel is one. It is a gospel for all people and we should do better as we recognize our joint faith.
What about other things that divide? About 20 years ago, I was serving what could probably be described as a predominantly white, middle-class Methodist Church in the city. It was five minutes to eleven one Sunday morning when four or five rough looking characters walked into the church. Everyone else was dressed in suits, dresses and their Sunday best. These individuals were all in black - black jeans, black concert t-shirts, big boots, leather jackets, chains hanging from various places. Their hair-styles were outside the norm. Strands and clumps stuck up here and there and their hair was long and scraggly when long was no longer in style for males. The women and some of the guys had a blackish makeup on. They looked weird, scary, more like head-bangers than anything else. As they took up a pew, several people could be seen to move away. After the service, I, having youth ministry as part of my portfolio, decided that I should go and chat with them. It wasn't easy. They were different. But I did and several other members of the congregation followed me. They were chatty. The following Sunday, five minutes to eleven, the same group came in again, only this time there were more of them. I went up to one I had chatted with previously and welcomed him back. After the service as I got to know them, it turned out that they were actually Christians attending Tyndale College. They had purposely decided to wear what they were wearing in order to minister to some of the down and outs, some of the young people who were on the streets of the city. They had a band and played a Christian heavy metal style as a part of their efforts to bridge the gap with young people on the streets. They told me that they had come back to our church because it was the first church they had attended in which people actually talked to them and welcomed them. Everywhere else, people had turned away. They were viewed as weird, ostracized, avoided. Well, “you can't judge a book by its cover,” can you? These young people stayed at that church for a while. They were accepted, rather quickly, I thought, and I was proud of the congregation, especially when they invited the group to play one of their tunes during a Sunday service. After warning us that it wasn't traditional Christian music, they did. Nothing like we'd heard before...
It seems to me that that congregation knew a little bit about the gospel; that it is a gospel for all people and that in Christ there is neither “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, we are all one in Christ Jesus.” The gospel is one, the faith is one, our citizenship in God's kingdom is one, just as God is one. So let us be at one with all people regardless of rank, regardless of race, regardless of language or culture; regardless of what people wear, or economic status or anything else that would cause human separations. May we be, as individuals and as a congregation, a people who bridge divides that the world may know this Christ whom we serve. Let us remember the call to Abraham and God's people. We are blessed that we might be a blessing (Genesis 12:2).