June 24, 2007 - Spiritual freedom

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
24 June 2007
Galatians 3.23-29
Spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007


In 1998 they made a big deal about a meteor shower that was supposed to happen in November. Apparently, the comet Tempel-Tuttel zooms by the earth every November 17th, or thereabouts, and in 1998 they expected the fly by to produce a meteor shower so spectacular that it has its own name, the Leonids. I went out and looked up to the sky on the scheduled night, but it was overcast and I didn’t see anything.

But in 1833 it was a different story. Of course, they didn’t have the science to predict the Leonids, and so when something between 100,000 and 200,000 meteor per hour lit up the sky from the eastern seaboard to the Rockies, people were shaken. When something that cosmic happens, it usually means something—something probably not good.

Abraham Lincoln was 24 when he witnessed that most spectacular meteor storm, and he recalled the experience by way of explaining the nation’s difficulties to people. Walt Whitman related an account of it that Lincoln related:

One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door and I heard the deacon’s voice exclaiming, ‘Arise Abraham, the day of judgment has come.’ I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window and saw the stars falling in great showers! But looking back of them in the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.

Harriet Tubman was an eleven-year-old slave the night of the 1833 Leonids. Her skull had just been fractured when her overseer threw a dry goods store weight at another slave and struck her by mistake. Tubman was from then on given to having visions and conversations with God, so that fantastical night sky held special portents for her. Like Lincoln, there was something steady and reliable behind the sky’s chaotic foreground. The one unmoving star in the sky, the North Star, came to have particular meaning for her, for that was the star by which she steered as many as 300 slaves to freedom, over the years.

And there was also Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, who watched the Leonids in the skies over Kirtland Ohio, concluding it to be a sign the Christ was about to return, according to his diary.

Lincoln and the deacon at his church, the slave who created freedom and the Palmyra farmer who created a religion, they and everyone across the land stood on the same earth and watched the same Leonids with the same wonder and the same ignorance of where it came from or what it meant. Occasionally, there come such singular moments. There are moments when the truth strikes home as hard as a dry goods store weight against your skull that if you look deep enough, you see we are all of us made of the same stuff, cast in the same predicament and subject to the same forces and same mysteries of the universe. We are neither slave nor free, neither president nor prophet. We are together in this, our often chaotic world where confusion comes easy and meaning comes hard.

Paul is working hard to describe a background of meaning to the church at Galatia. We don’t know exactly what reports have come to him about the Galatians, but it’s clear there has been some dispute between those who believed a believer had to become Jewish under the law of Moses in order to become Christian and those who believed that Gentiles could be Christian without being subject to Mosaic law. Paul works himself into such a lather that he hurls insults at his readers: “You foolish Galatians!” he sputters at the beginning of chapter three. He reminds them that they came to faith because they believed the story Paul told them about Jesus Christ, not because he made them obey religious laws.

Then, in our passage today, he says a funny thing. He doesn’t counter the claim that being a Jew is necessary with a claim that not being a Jew is acceptable. He says something surprising. He says their are no Jews. But, to be consistent, there also are no Greeks (Gentiles), either. For completeness, Paul adds that there are no slaves, even though some of the people listening to the reading of his letter seem to be owned by someone else. And if that is not comprehensive enough, there is no such thing as a male or a female. In other words, the social order that has seemed so real to the Galatians all their lives and that seems to determine where they can go and what they can do and who they can be just does not exist. All the apparent categories of life that people push against, yield to, and rail at vanish in the moment you pull over your head the garment of Jesus Christ. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ,” Paul explains, “have put on Christ.”

I believe this, and it is for me wonderful and hard. I am happy beyond words that I am not what people say that I am. People over the years have often explained to me who I am, according to them, and I am always surprised. For instance: I affirmed once that I think the theory of evolution explains how plants and animals adapt over generations of change, someone called me a “secular humanist” and quit my church. Now, to be fair, I do certain secular things unabashedly. In civic life, I vote in elections. At public events, I sing the Star Spangled Banner. When I study, I learn from the humanist John Calvin, among others, about the vast possibilities of human knowledge. But because of what I’ve learned from Paul about faith and selfhood, no one has the power to assign me to the category of secular humanist.

I find, come to think of it, that when people put me in a category, they usually do it either because they’re afraid of what it means that I’m in the category they’re not in, or if I am in their category, they’re afraid because of all the categories out there that are a threat to our category. I admit, I myself find it convenient to distinguish people by categories when talking about broad cultural developments, because it’s useful to see where ideas fit and how they work in our common life to change things or keep them the same. Harriet Tubman was certainly glad she could reject the category of slave for herself, but she was certainly just as happy that there was a category called Abolitionist that she could identify and rely on. She would have been justly afraid of anyone who shunned the category of Abolitionist. Her fear would have been rational.

But Paul is making an important distinction about how we understand categories of human beings. Putting someone into a category may tell you something about a life condition in common, like slavery, or a set of ideas you share, like Judaism, but if you really understand the meaning of Christ, these labels that describe your condition or your ideas have nothing to do with who you are. Who you are on this earth under the sun is freely defined in your relationship with God. In the second paragraph of this chapter we’ve read from today in Galatians, chapter three, where Paul has just called them all “foolish”—Paul may not divide people by categories, but he’s not above the occasional insult—he explains that the promise God made to Abraham has now come true. That promise, the big one that outlasts all the momentary ones God made to Abraham, is that in Abraham “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” [Gn 12.3] In other words, there is now only one category of person on the earth, and that is the category of the blessed.

What is interesting here is that Paul does not say to the Galatians that they are now in the category of Christian. In fact, nowhere in any of Paul’s writings—nearly a third of the New Testament—nowhere does Paul call himself or anyone a Christian. He never sees himself as an agent to establish a new category of religion in history. He just starts from the religion he came from, kicks out the door, knocks over the walls, and says: Here. I have seen a vision of God, which I know as Christ, that has shown me a world where no one is separated from the love of God, and I know how to describe that grace to you so that when you believe it, you will receive that grace.

This is the constant star that Paul finds behind the chaos in the night sky. As Abraham Lincoln saw an intact Union behind the national chaos of war and Harriet Tubman saw the North Star behind the moral chaos of slavery, Paul saw Christ behind the spiritual chaos of a heartless culture ruled for the sake of empire and heedless of the health of souls. Paul’s North Star is Christ, and when he follows that star, he comes into the promised land of grace, where neither he now anyone is separated from the love of God.

The trick is to believe that this is true. The trick of living the life of faith is to believe that, all the conditions and ideas people apply to you notwithstanding—all the conditions and ideas that get you shunted off into categories of those who don’t belong to the good or to the right or to God, all of that notwithstanding—you are among the blessed of the earth. Harriet Tubman, for one, figured this out. She put the notion that the blessed of the earth cannot be slaves together with the notion that she is among the blessed of the earth, and it became impossible to believe that she was a slave. Living in that truth took some risk and some work, but once Harriet Tubman fully believed in it, nothing could stop her. Harriet Tubman figured out that she was a descendant of Abraham according to the promise that everyone ever would be one, and that put her in a whole new story. Then the story of 300 more children of Abraham also changed.

So you can take that home and live your life with it. You can live the life of the blessed of the earth, once you believe you are. It does involve risk and work. Living as the blessed of the earth will require a set of decisions. The first, of course, is the decision that it is true. If the idea of Christ is compelling for you, then putting Christ on as a garment is the first choice. It means that you honor the tradition you came from and at the same time live beyond it. It means that you begin to see that the resources of the earth are enough for everyone, and just as Jesus decided to feed 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes, you begin to take what we have and make it enough for everyone. Putting on the garment of Christ means that you tell the hardest truths for people to hear with the deepest love they will ever know. It means accepting the difference between what you dearly wished being blessed would mean and what is actually so. (Harriet Tubman could do amazing things, but she could not, for one, turn herself from black to white.) Putting on Christ means doing a lot when you have a lot to offer and doing at least a little when you think you have nothing left. It means sticking up for people nobody cares about and defying people everybody’s afraid of. It means also that letting go of things you cannot change is sometimes your most faithful choice. Putting on the garment of Christ means waking up on the scariest day of your life and trusting that it is the day that the Lord has made, all the same.

This is the grace of Christ, not that you get it and wait for bliss, but that once you have received this grace, everything you do flows from that blessing. This is the freedom of Christ, not that the world falls over and leaves you alone, but that once you are free, none of the world’s fear or hatred or alienation or violence will defeat your spirit. Grace lets you believe; freedom lets you risk and work. Then there is redemption, which is that when all is said and done, the whole of it is taken up into the arms of God, remembered in all its joys and all its sorrows, and healed at the touch of the loving hand that has been reaching out for us all from the beginning of time. Grace, freedom and redemption are the fulfillment of the promise in which you live. So why don’t you go right ahead and live it? Amen.