"All One"

Galatians 3.15-29.

I.

            Paul says that the promise God made with Abraham was like a last will that has but one beneficiary, who is the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ.  That promise was made forever, and, like a will, it could not be changed or invalidated by any subsequent agreement.  Since the Law came 430 years later, it does not have the authority to overrule or change the original will or promise.  Therefore, the inheritors of the Promise are not those who keep to the letter of the Law, but Jesus Christ and those who trust in him and are in him.

            The Law came later, mainly “because of offenses,” that is, for the purpose of making it clear when and how people were going astray.   The Law makes visible when we are transgressing.  We only know that something is wrong if there is some kind of law against it. 

            The more positive purpose of the Law was to give structure to the people’s life until the beneficiary, the Messiah, arrived.  The function and purpose of the Law therefore reminds me of several things.

            When I learned to play the trumpet, many, many years ago, I worked through my Dad’s very beat-up and tattered copy of the Arban book, which was then, and I believe still is, the standard manual for learning the trumpet.  The Arban book starts with the most basic elements of trumpet playing, like how to buzz your lips, and proceeds from there with page after page of long and often mind-numbingly boring exercises.  By the time you get to the end of the book, which takes years of practice, you should be a regular Roger Voisin.

            We can extend this analogy to just about anything.  The the grammatical tables and vocabulary lists in a language book; or the calisthenics, drills, and rules involved in learning a sport; or learning to cook by following recipes.  All  of these systems do two things.  They show you how to do the skill right… but they also end up revealing how far short you fall in the process.  They reveal what you’re doing wrong.

            And for any of us who have learned anything like this, it doesn’t take long before we realize that the goal is never fully attained.  The finish-line continually gets pushed farther ahead.  Once you learn the basics, you move on to intermediate and advanced.  But even when we get to the end of the Arban book, we are still not Wynton Marsalis by any stretch.  Simply following the rules doesn’t get us to absolute fluency in a language, it doesn’t make us Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, or Pele. 

            I heard someone on the radio last week describe learning cooking as a girl in Home Ec class and making something for her grandmother, who was from Romania or someplace.  She followed the recipe perfectly, but the grandmother found the dish inedible.  Her comment was, “You killed it with the recipe.”  After being hurt and angry for a time, the girl finally asked what the grandmother meant.  And the grandmother consented to teach her how to cook, a process that began not with learning recipes but with cleaning the kitchen, and then choosing the produce, and only after developing a relationship with the whole process and context, actually cooking something.

II.

            I have been reading since I was about 4 years old.  I read constantly for years.  And I remember how frustrated I was when in like 6^th grade, even though I could read and write good sentences, and spelled impeccably, a teacher kept giving me bad grades… because I was not good in identifying the technical parts of speech and grammatical rules.  I’m still not good at that.  I could probably read and write as well as the teacher, but he kept hammering me because I couldn’t tell an adverb from a participle.

            The point of the recipe, or the Arban book, or grammatical rules is to do the task well: to cook a meal, or play the trumpet, or read and write.  If you can get to the goal without all these rules, who cares?  Isn’t the goal the point?

            Paul is saying that the Galatians got to the goal by God’s gift of grace.  They received the Spirit when they heard and took to heart the good news of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  They have already received, at least in part, the inheritance promised to Abraham’s descendant, the Messiah, Jesus Christ!  In effect they have been given the talent and the skills, which are evident in the results they produce: the love and unity, the forgiveness and acceptance, blessing and joy they share together in their new spiritual community. 

            But now these other teachers show up and tell them that this is not enough.  They have to go back to the recipe, they are told.  They have to go back and start at the beginning of the Arban book.  They have to be able to diagram a sentence.  They have to keep to the letter of the Law of Moses, starting with slicing off part of their bodies. 

            Paul understands that this is insanity.  It would kill the Galatians’ trust in the Lord Jesus if they were forced to learn the rudimentary steps of something that the Spirit is freeing them to accomplish among themselves already.

            Buddhists talk about the difference between the moon and the finger that points to the moon.  If you point to something, a dog will usually express great interest in your finger; it will not usually occur to a dog that your finger is pointing somewhere else and to look over there.  The Galatians had a direct experience of the moon; but their new teachers are trying to get them to concentrate on the finger.  They have the Spirit; but their teachers want them to focus on the Law, the whole purpose of which is to bring people into relationship with… the Spirit.

            It would be like forcing Picasso to do color-by-numbers, or reducing Einstein to doing long-division.

III.

            In the movie, The Matrix, there’s a scene where one of the characters has to fly a helicopter.  So she makes a phone call and simply has the program for flying a helicopter uploaded into her virtual brain.  She did not have to go through years of training.  She does not have to refer to the manual.  She just receives it directly into herself as a kind of gift. 

            Paul is saying that the Galatians received the Spirit kind of like this: directly, by means of their trusting in the faith of Jesus the Messiah, the beneficiary of God’s Promise to Abraham, and seeing their lives re-shaped by the way they lived out this trust together.  Not only is it crazy for them now to imagine that they have to go back and keep the letter of the Law, it is also counterproductive.  It would have the opposite effect.  It would kill their trust in the Lord, and banish the Spirit from their community.

            The miracle is that by God’s grace the gift of faith was bestowed upon these Galatians, without their having to go through the normal sequence of learning the rudimentary rules of the Law and gradually become more proficient with discipline.  They receive the Spirit simply by placing their trust in the message of good news that they heard about how Jesus was crucified by the Romans but defeated them by emerging into a new kind of life. 

            This is why the establishment is so put off by Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching.  First of all, it seems somehow like cheating.  Like in Jesus’ parable where the newcomers in the vineyard get paid the same amount as those who worked in the vineyard all day. 

            Trusting in the faith of Jesus means in effect just sitting and waiting and letting the Lord fill you.  It is a not doing.  It is a response to what the Lord does in and with and among you by the Spirit.  The most you have to do is let your old self die so your true self can be born.  And that is a lot.  You have to give up all the divisions and distinctions that we use to judge and fear other people. 

            And secondly, this approach scares the people in power because it is so dangerous.  It smashes all the ways in which we are held down, or hold each other down; all the ways we cultivate distrust, and the fear, anger, and shame that the powers-that-be use so effectively to keep us enslaved to their agendas and regimes.   If this continues, they reason, as did the High Priest Caiaphas when he encounters Jesus, that it will bring down the wrath of the Empire and destroy everything they hold dear.  Which is absolutely true.

            But when everything we hold dear only serves to enslave us to a corrupt and violent order, its passing is not a bad thing.  It is in fact a liberating event, and we emerge on the other side of it unscathed because of our trust in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

IV.            

            But in the end, by trusting in Jesus Christ, we do keep the Law, in Spirit.  We can actually do what the Law requires, which is justice, righteousness, and love.  But like with an accomplished artist or poet, this happens not according to the written rules, but beyond the rules.  The rules – the recipe, the scales, the grammar, the calisthenics – actually hold you back at this point.  Now we look at the fruits, the effects, the results, the kind of life that is produced by trusting in Jesus.

            This is something the church has not been willing to look at very much because we have been such a colossal failure here.  Coming to church is supposed to make us better people.  Yet far too many people go regularly to church for decades and remain just as bad if not worse than they were when they were confirmed as adolescents.  They are still dominated by fear, anger, and shame.  Many people remain at least as violent, resentful, hateful, nasty, small-minded, and bitter as before.  Many even find ways to twist and debase the good news of Jesus to rationalize and inflate their own greed, bigotry, cowardice, and narrow-mindedness.

            Churches need to look carefully at what kind of community and people we are fostering.  That will tell us whether we are really hearing and trusting in the good news of Jesus Christ.  That will tell us whether the Spirit is with us or not. 

            Are we living together according to Paul’s magnificent statement in 3:28, which I have been repeating on most Sunday mornings when I fill the font?  “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is now no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  Scholars believe Paul is quoting an early hymn of the Jesus-movement, something the Galatians would have recognized.  It is one of the essential key verses in the New Testament.

            It means that God’s action in Jesus Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, has fundamentally changed human life and fulfilled God’s original promise to Abraham.  It means that in him all have been made one, a truth in which we participate and which we proclaim in our baptism.  Our baptism washes away all our superficial differences that we make to be so important, and reveals at our heart and core an essential oneness, in the flesh we share with the Lord Jesus, and therefore with God.   In our baptism our old self symbolically dies and our new self in Christ, our deepest, truest, and most original self, emerges into our conscious life.

            It means no one is an alien, an enemy, a competitor, a rival, and the divisions upon which the Romans depended to keep us broken and under their control, no longer exist.  They never really existed at all.  They were an illusion produced by our egos to keep us enslaved to fear and violence.

V.

            In Jesus Christ we are witnesses to a unity that is true, but that has not yet been realized in human society, which still languishes in falsehood.  This unity, in which all barriers of separation have been broken down, is the Promise that God gave to Abraham.  That in his descendant, Jesus, all nations would be blessed.  The land that his heirs, those who trust in Jesus Christ, the beneficiary of his Promise, inherit is not just a sliver of real estate in the middle-east; it is the whole planet, all creation, all nations, the whole world.  As Jesus says in John 4, the Promise is not about this or that mountain or temple, but about worshiping everywhere in Spirit and in truth.

            This is a truth that we demonstrate and proclaim by the love, peace, and justice that characterizes our life together in the gathering of disciples, and our outward life, projected and expressed in our engagement with and in God’s creation and people.  It means that not only have the barriers been dissolved in our own gathering; but also we work hard to reveal that the barriers have been vaporized everywhere.

            For now there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female… Gay or straight, native and alien, Black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim or Jew or Buddhist or Hindu, for all are one in Christ Jesus.  All are one in God.  All are one in goodness, blessing, hope, joy, and love.

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