Sermon Transcript: June 22, 2025
We are reading today, again, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. And what I would just say as a way of kind of reorienting us in this letter is that it really is kind of Paul’s treatise on the gospel, and particularly how it relates to the Torah. And from there, how the Christian community — the burgeoning, developing early Christian community that might not have really even called themselves Christian yet, just followers of Jesus, followers of the Way — how they relate to the Jewish faith, particularly from the perspective of non-Jews, of Gentiles.
As I’ll talk about in my message, the question that’s at the foundation of all of this is perhaps a surprising one to you, because it’s actually the mirror image of a question that we ask all the time. So I’ll get to that. But now,
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.
For the Word of God in Scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.
***
I am the youngest of my four siblings. And I’m not only the youngest, but I am the youngest by nine years. I have two sisters and one brother. And what I’ll say is the home that we grew up in was very nice. I have no complaints. It was in a great neighborhood located within walking distance of my elementary school, my middle school, my high school.
In fact, my high school was so close that literally I could be eating my morning cereal and hear the first bell ring and have time to get to class by the time the second bell — that said you’re supposed to be in class — would ring. Usually. Usually.
Now, when I was in college — this is a reality I’m coming to learn in my own adulthood — but when I was in college, my parents added on to the house. Now, I’m the youngest, so when I’m in college, I’m the last one out of the house. Then they added on to the house. And I asked them at one point, Why did you wait until we were all out of the house to add space? And the response was simple and matter of fact: We couldn’t afford it before.
What that meant is that growing up, from time to time, we had to share a bedroom with a sibling. My own children do that now. As the younger brother, this was actually really a welcome prospect for me — not so much for my brother, who was probably about 14 or 15 or 16 at the time, and I was seven or eight. But I remember being really excited to share a bedroom with him.
We moved into the only bedroom that’s on the ground floor of our house. And it was one of the bigger ones, too. But my brother, as we were moving in, set some ground rules. And the biggest one is that he decided that it would work best if we each had our own side to the room. So he drew a line down the middle and told me to stand.
The only problem was that the door was on his side. I had no way out. I was trapped. And I honestly don’t remember how long I was in my corner of the room before my mother came down and figured out what was happening and rescued me and told my brother that he would have to grant me safe passage to the door and that, no, he could not charge me a fee to cross over.
We draw lines all the time. Property lines, state lines, borders, this side of the tracks, that side of the tracks. If you want to cross over, it will cost you. Perhaps some of these lines are necessary, maybe some are even helpful. Maybe they help keep peace, but they also divide us and are often the source of much conflict.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that Jesus has come to erase all of these lines. There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. All of you are one in Christ Jesus. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Case closed, sermon over.
Except we know that that’s not quite right.
Bridget Call, professor of New Testament at Union Seminary in New York, writes: Condensed into seven verses, our text seems to capture both the best and the worst of Pauline interpretation. The famous baptismal formula in verses 26 to 28 declares the end of all racial, class, gender divisions, and has inspired justice seekers and peacemakers throughout the centuries. But the sharp contrast between law and faith in 23 to 25 has been turned into Paul’s rejection of the Torah as a birthmark of Christianity and has fueled Christian anti-Judaism, dogmatic conservatism, pious individualism, and self-righteous othering of many kinds.
So even in trying to make the case that Christ has obliterated all of these binaries, Paul himself falls into the trap that he is preaching against.
But — and this is important — the question that Paul is trying to answer is not the one that we might think. The question we think Paul is answering is the question that me and many of my friends had when we were on a summer trip with our church’s youth group. A group of us gathered after dinner and we were chatting about life and faith, you know, as teenagers do, right? Okay, so maybe we weren’t typical teenagers, but a few of us were trying to figure out something, and it was something that we all agreed really bothered us.
You see, we had friends from other faith traditions, or no faith at all. We had Jewish, Muslim friends. And we were worried about them because we thought being Christian meant that we had to believe that God would not love them unless they were Christian too. We were so bothered by this that we asked our youth pastor to join in our conversation. Now what you need to know about our youth pastor is that he rarely gave us an answer. He asked what we thought. He affirmed our questions and he told us to keep searching and exploring. What a jerk.
But this time he did give us something a little bit more substantial. He said, Well, you know, Jews were God’s chosen people even before Christianity. That was it. That’s all he left us with, and we had to wrestle with that and explore the rest on our own. And I remember being not very satisfied at the time, and it really didn’t make sense to me until I was a little bit older and I really read and studied Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Because when you really look into it, you realize that the question Paul is facing is not How are Jews included in the covenant? That’s a given from this perspective. But it’s How are the Greeks, how are the Gentiles, how are the non-Jews now included in the covenant? Can they too claim to be heirs of Abraham? Heirs of the promise?
And when you realize that’s the question that’s at the heart of what’s going on in the community in Galatia, when you realize that’s the question, suddenly you understand that Paul is actually expanding the circle ever wider. He is being more inclusive than what had come before — though ironically, many have misinterpreted what Paul has said and misused his words to actually exclude.
Part of the reason for this is, like I said, that even in trying to erase these dividing lines, Paul still holds fast to one. He talks about the law and the gospel as two different things. The law comes to constrict and confine us. The law draws a line down the middle of the room, and the gospel comes and erases that line, or at the very least, like my mother says, No, you can’t charge for passage.
Paul wants to draw a line between the gospel and the law, between the gospel and the Torah. But Jesus himself — he did not draw that line. Jesus said, I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And when a young man came and asked him, Jesus, which is the most important of all of the laws? he didn’t say that the laws were old and no longer applicable, that we don’t have to pay attention to them, that none of them are important. He said, The greatest law is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength. The second is like it: to love your neighbor as yourself. And then Jesus said, These do not replace the laws; they are the summary of them. They are the epitome of them. They are the heart of the law.
Another way we may misunderstand this passage is to say that these distinctions, whatever they may be, no longer matter. But even just as we read that list of distinctions, we can see on the face of it that that is not the case. Paul isn’t trying to say that we’re really all the same. He’s not trying to say that cliché we sometimes hear that there’s more that unites us than divides us. Rather, in his own imperfect way, Paul is saying that the gospel is something different — that the gospel is bigger than any other category we’ve ever encountered before because it is actually inclusive of our differences, of our diversity.
True unity in Christ is not uniformity. It is appreciating those things that make us different and recognizing them as part of a whole that is greater than any one of us.
Paul uses very intentional language. And I want us to pay real close attention to this. He says we are heirs according to the promise. When you think about that, there’s nothing that an heir does to become an heir. And a promise is something that is given to us, something that we receive. We don’t bring it about.
In other words, according to Paul, faith is not something that we do. Faith is trusting in what God has done and is doing for us. Faith is not an achievement; it is a gift. We always want to turn it into an achievement, don’t we? Into a badge of honor. Into another line that we draw that separates us from one another. For those of you who are more actively minded: faith is not climbing a mountain. Rather, faith is soaring through the air.
Some of you have heard this story before, but it’s a good one and it illustrates a point — and boy, it’s just been coming to mind for me so much over the past several weeks and months. It’s a story that the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen tells about going to the circus when he was a young boy and seeing all of the attractions. He went with his friend and his friend’s father. They took him to the circus and he was just in awe, and he was so drawn to and enamored, especially by the trapeze artists.
There was a group of trapeze artists there who were family. They were called the Flying Rodleys. And they were famous all over Europe. And not only did Henri Nouwen get to see them perform and fly through the air and do all of the things that they do — he got to talk to them after their performance. And he went right up to the star of the show, the one — the brother who flies through the air and does all of the tricks, the one where the spotlight is always on him, right? And he said to him, How do you do it?
And he said to Nouwen, Actually, you know what? The trick is, I don’t do anything.
You don’t do anything? What are you talking about? I saw the spotlight on you. I saw you flying through the air!
He said, No, I don’t do anything. If I try to do anything, if I try to fly or if I try to grasp my brother when he reaches out for me, disaster will follow. I will fall. I may bring him down with me. Nope. They are the actual stars of the show. They’re the ones that do all the work. All I have to do is trust that they will catch me when it’s time.
And Nouwen says that is faith. Flying through the air, trusting that God will catch us when it’s time.
Amen.
