Sermon for Jun 22, 2025: All Are One based upon Galatians 3:23-29

Galatians 3:23-29
 
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 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.

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     In her notes on the book of Galatians, Sheila Briggs points out that while the movement to follow Jesus was still largely connected to Jewish communities by the middle of the first century CE, preachers and teachers, Paul foremost among them, were helping to increase the number of Gentiles within the movement. In fact, in the book of Galatians, Paul explicitly says that God called him to preach about Jesus to the Gentiles. Because Paul carried so much authority within his community and started so many churches, he was often consulted around thorny theological and interpersonal issues in congregations. His letters were seen as wise enough to pass around to congregations beyond the original intended audience. The book of Galatians is a letter that people found so worthwhile that it made it all the way to us, 2000 years later. In this letter, Paul uses the authority granted to him to offer a strong critique of some faith practices these churches had developed after he moved away.

     Briggs also notes that this letter was written to be passed around among the several churches in Galatia. New missionaries had begun to teach in this area. Briggs, in her commentary, points out that we don’t know much about them except what we can reconstruct from Paul’s arguments against them. It seems that they taught that these predominantly Gentile Galatian churches needed to begin adopting some Jewish practices in order to truly follow Jesus. This was a real and challenging conflict among the earliest followers of Jesus. We’ve heard about it in the book of Acts and in multiple letters from Paul. In the early days in a movement, they were still trying to figure a lot out. This question of how to be in relationship with people you were once taught to avoid sharing a table or community with would have been important to address.
If you have always built a community of faith by following a specific set of rules to reflect your understanding of God and to help define your community as a distinct people, it can be challenging to imagine living out your faith and your relationships differently. Paul knows this, even as he believes the new missionaries are wrong. In her commentary on this text, Sarah Henrich notes that Paul spoke of himself as being Jewish and being invested in the promises of the covenant. In his introduction to the New Testament, Bart Ehrman also points out that not only did his Jewish identity continue to inform his ideas about Jesus, his particular identity as a Pharisee within Judaism also shapes how he understood Jesus.

     Ehrman argues that since he had been a Pharisee, we can be pretty sure that Paul believed that God would one day intervene on behalf of God's people during what came to be known as an Apocalypse.  This Apocalypse would be a radical disruption of the sin and oppression that had developed in creation. Paul did not stop thinking that God would disrupt the world's oppressive order when he began to follow Jesus. Instead, he would come to understand his vision of Christ as a sign that he was witnessing the first part of God's radical disruption and redemption of creation. All the rest of his ministry would be shaped by his certainty that Jesus would be returning very soon and would finish the redemptive, re-creative work of the Apocalypse.

     Paul’s work, as I have said, is theologically dense and we’re really only reading a tiny bit of it. I really appreciate Ehrman’s overview of Paul in his introduction to the New Testament because he helps compile and condense a bunch of theological arguments from several letters. He makes the argument that Paul roots his idea about covenant primary in the covenant God made with Abraham. The covenant with Moses is secondary. God had said that Abraham would be a blessing to all nations. Because of that, Paul believes that Jesus, as the fulfillment of the covenant, would want to offer redemption and liberation to as many people as possible, not to just one group of people. That's why this argument over how one becomes part of the Christian community was so important to him. He didn't think God wanted to create more barriers for people to take part in God's liberation. Asking people to become Jewish in order to follow Jesus seemed like an extra unnecessary step to him.

     It must be noted that Paul never completely disavowed the religious scripture and communal practices known as “the law.” Brigitte Kahl, in her commentary on this text, reminds us that centuries of anti-Jewish understandings of Christianity have developed because people read Paul’s distinction between “law” and “faith” as a repudiation of Jewish religious law. Paul actually argues that the law has a purpose. He describes it as a “disciplinarian,” which was, according to Alicia Vargas, a term used to refer to a slave who was put in charge of children to keep them safe. He understood the value of the law in guiding the Jewish people. He just also believed that it was not the end of the guidance God would offer people. Jesus, the Word made flesh, would be God's final word. Where Paul believed the law offered guardrails, he saw Jesus as offering liberation.

     People who not been a part of the Jewish community did not need their specific guardrails because they would be adopted by Jesus not into the Mosaic covenant but the Abrahamic covenant, which was for all people. Just as Abraham was first blessed because he had faith in God, Jesus' newest Gentile followers would be blessed primarily through their faith, not through their ability to learn and follow all of the law that was developed after Abraham. I read this argument as Paul justifying two paths to Christ: one through the laws of Moses, primarily for Jewish followers of Jesus, and on through adoption into Abraham’s covenant. They would be blessed through faith in Christ by way of Abraham's covenant. This adoption is an unusual one where, as Carolyn Osiek points out, everyone with faith, regardless of gender, ethnic background, or economic background gets beloved status akin to that of the most favored son in the surrounding cultures. Paul believed Jesus made it so everyone could be Abraham's heir and inherit God's blessing, no circumcision required. 

     Because all people could become heirs to Abraham's blessing, Paul understood that the social distinctions that would have once prevented people from interacting as family would no longer prevent people from being part of Christian community. According to Paul, even the most powerful and rigorously protected social hierarchies could no longer be used to prevent you from being an heir to grace. Please do not doubt that the binaries Paul lists in our reading- Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male and female- were rigid, holding no overlap in meaning or identity. Kahl points out that these pairs being opposite and often oppositional was just basic common sense to most of the people who first read this letter. Paul completely upended everything about how people understood how to use these categories of people to organize their lives and their communities. Paul said you don’t have to be the powerful one in a binary to have access to Christ. You just have to have faith.

     The Galatians weren’t the only Christians trying to figure out how to build up the body of Christ and getting stuck on how to build relationships with people you were taught were untrustworthy. Being a part of certain social groups still gives you unearned privilege to this day. It seems that this is one of the hardest things for us as humans to learn to do differently. Particularly in our current political moment, Christian nationalists are arguing that certain kinds of people and certain nations are more deserving of protection, liberation, and access to the community of Christ. Sometimes even good-hearted attempts to live a communal religious life, where all people have access to the blessing of faith, can still be marred by unacknowledged, unconscious bias towards people who have the least amount of privilege in a society. It can be especially hard if a Christian community understands itself to be struggling, and is worried that the introduction of "new" kinds of people will change the character of their faith.

     I can’t forget hearing a member of a small church here in Maine that very much wanted to remain vital express concern about the Open and Affirming Process. She worried that if they went through it and agreed to openly and publicly affirm LGBTQ people, that they’d become “the gay church.” I still am not sure with what’s wrong with being the gay church, unless you see something negative about being LGBTQ or being seen as gay by the broader community. And yet, here was a sister in Christ still struggling with accepting someone from the less privileged side of a binary into community.

     Paul is a complex figure. He certainly has little good to say about women like me who develop romantic relationship with other women. And, yet, our reading for today contains great wisdom. "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". We would do well to regularly ask ourselves: In this time and in this place, how might we better live into Paul’s vision of a big, adopted family of God, where everyone is an equal heir to grace? How are we crafting a Body of Christ where difference in ethnicity, sexuality, religious background, and gender are no longer barriers to accessing God? Paul changed so much by finding a place for Gentiles in the churches is Galatia. What will we change by finding a place for the excluded in ours?

Resources consulted while writing this sermon:

Sheila Briggs' notes on Galatians in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: The New Revised Standard Version with Apocryphya, ed. Michael Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Bart. D. Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction of The Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Sarah Henrich: https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1683
​Brigitte Kahl: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-12-3/commentary-on-galatians-323-29-6
Alicia Vargas: https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2873
Carolyn Osiek, "Galatians," The Women's Bible Commentary, eds. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998)