the Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser
Being In Christ is a Different Thing
Wow, this is another Sunday where I want to preach on each
of the texts! Over the years, I’ve explored
each of these texts, and even memorized portions. Songs have been written on the Psalms text,
about our souls longing for God like a deer for water, and the phrase “deep
calls to deep” is one I quote. I
actually had a meditation published on the 1 Kings 9 text, about Elijah lying
discouraged under the broom tree, then hearing that “still, small voice of God”
in the silence. Luke 8 is the memorable story
of the man with so many demons in him that they tell Jesus their name is
Legion, and when Jesus casts them out of the man and into a herd of pigs, the
whole herd commits suicide.
Yet its the Galatians text that holds what may be my
favorite verse, or at least among my top couple
- Galatians 3:28: 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. This is the verse that taught me of the radical
inclusion of Christ’s kindom; that gave me a glimpse of the wonder of the
diversity included in God’s love and creation.
And this is the verse that, for a 22 year old young woman raised in very
conservative Christianity where women were captive in a patriarchal system
based more on culture and habit that
outlined what a woman’s sphere was and was not - for this young woman who loved
Jesus, Jesus’ church and the Scripture, this verse told me deep in my heart
that yes, God could be calling me to the ministry. Because in the realm of God divisions cease,
male and female have nothing to do with our call, our gifts from the Spirit,
and our service in ministry. It was okay
for me to go to seminary. While my love for God remained the same, the content
of my faith changed as I let go of the rules taught me as a girl, and saw that
this Scripture actually challenged those rules.
I realized the way my ministers had interpreted the Bible (although they
would have denied interpreting and would have said they just read it literally)
did not account for the vision and breadth of this verse, and was actually
influenced by what they thought oughta be according to the culture they’d grown
up in. At that point, my faith in God
went through a transformation that led me out of my home church, where no
questions were allowed and no deviation from what the preacher said was
allowed. I grew that day, and my experience of God grew, too. I realized that
there were other ways of being a good Christian than the ways I had been
taught, and that good people could interpret Scripture differently.
Suddenly, I was curious and excited to learn
some of those other ways faithful believers saw the Scriptures. Before that, I had accepted that my preacher
taught the only right way to be a Christian.
And that there was only one right way. Since other people disagreed with my
preacher, they had to be wrong, or be deceived or not praying right. I was really good at arguing or debating with
people that held other interpretations, because I knew lots of verses to quote
that my preacher used. I thought that as
a Christian, I had to hold tightly to these rules the preacher taught, and get
better at showing people where they were wrong.
Now, suddenly, all that dropped away - it wasn’t that I lost my faith,
because this change seemed to be of God.
There was now a bigger way of faith to be explored, things I’d never
heard or been exposed to. I felt a
little scared, but mostly excited.
Those kinds of transitions in my faith life
have continued to happen periodically.
Usually its because a situation in my life doesn’t fit in the way I’ve
organized my views of faith and God and life.
That transition I mentioned about Galatians 3:28 happened while I was
grieving the death of my dad, and wondering why God took him while my sister
and I were still young …and my dad was a good and faithful Christian, too. I was struggling with how God let this
death happen to us. There were also things going on in my home
church that didn’t sit well with what I thought I’d been taught, and that was a
struggle. I was trying to understand
these things in my rule-oriented legalism about God, and it was like trying to
force a round object into a square hole - it wouldn’t go. Realizing there was
much about God and faith that I didn’t know, I was free now to ponder in a
bigger realm.
I had another transition in joining a
Presbyterian Church, not staying with my Baptist upbringing. Again when my 3rd child was born terminally
ill, I wrestled with my understanding of God and bad things happening when I
was trying so hard to do well. My own
health crisis 4 years ago, when cancer was found in my body after I’d had a
terrible experience in a church - that
became a time of a faith transition as
God once again proved big enough to contain my questioning and my grief. While going through the time was painful, my
confidence in God’s love eventually led to a new understanding.
The young girl that I was, would think that
the current me is the next thing to a heathen.
Yet its been a journey of faith.
Some folks I’ve known along the way have found
these crises of faith too difficult to bear, and decided to just abandon all
belief in God, and leave church altogether.
Their anger at God for not fitting the box they had put God in, was
deep. They couldn’t see that they had put God in a box, and limited what God
does and who God is. When their
experiences in life didn’t fit, they chose to quit. At least for the present - God doesn’t give
up on people. Growth and new life is
always possible in God.
In the apostle Paul’s letter to the believers
in the city of Galatia, he uses the illustration of this kind of growth to
explain how the gospel of Christ builds on the faith of Israel, as a young
child’s thinking about rules gives way to a more mature vision of living in the
grace of God in Jesus. I can come to this Scripture now, not taking it
literally, and see that Paul was trying to explain both Christianity’s
continuity with Judaism as well as its difference from Judaism. I can se that taking his argument literally
can lead to an anti-Semitism, or to making Judaism seem lesser, which us
smarter people have surpassed. Maybe at
the beginning of Christianity this kind of thinking was necessary, just as the
Protestant Reformers had to vilify the practices of the Roman Catholic churches
when the two separated. Like people who
want to leave a relationship - or a church -
have to work up a head of steam and anger in order to leave, proving
that they’re doing the more righteous thing.
We have to be careful speaking of the faith of
Israel here, not to say its childish or that Christianity surpasses it. Judaism produced Jesus; his love for God and
his insights into what God desired were formed within Judaism. Jesus never left Judaism; he was a Jew when
he was crucified and still a Jew when he was raised. All Jesus’ early followers were Jews. Judaism kept alive a faith in the One God,
and formed many deeply faithful men and women in their relationship with God.
Following the precepts of the Law, ie the rules, led reflective people to
embrace a way of life with God that included and respected much arguing and
debating over the meanings of the words of Scripture, and led to important
explorations into science and the human condition. The world has indeed been
blessed by Judaism, including the blessing who is Jesus.
Just as Jesus sought to purify the practice of
faith in his day, so the apostle Paul seeks to explain Jesus’ vision of the
kindom of God as one of welcome, oneness, mercy, grace, forgiveness and
restoration of our distance from God.
Instead of approaching this through the Law, however, we are invited to
approach God through gratitude, and through Jesus’ vision of the realm of God
where righteousness and justice are done.
We might call it a paradigm shift in the way to approach God, which
actually opens the way for us Gentiles to come to God and share in the
abundance of love, forgiveness and welcome God has for humanity.
Its not unlike the change in comprehension of
a child to that of an adult. To me, it mainly feels like a different approach and
perhaps a different order of understanding.
Judaism certainly includes all the words like mercy and grace and faith,
even while it speaks of the Law as the disciplinarian. Christianity starts with the love of God, the
forgiveness of our sins and the restoration of our brokenness from God - and in
our gratitude for this, we then take on new
behaviors fit for living in the kindom of God. Its a different model.
The thing about faith is that its never
static, never in a box, never totally understood, never practiced in its
fullness. We humans are limited by many
things - our brain development, our emotional wounds, our tendency to go off on
tangents, our willfulness and sinfulness, our places of weakness where greed or envy pull us by the
nose right off the true path. We all
have need to grow; and our whole lifetime isn’t long enough to overcome all
that weighs us down.
“Lifelong Discipleship Formation” is
the language that the Vital Congregations Initiative uses for this. In their research, it was realized that
persons of every age need the challenge and invitation to grow. Faith can’t
stay at the same level from childhood to adulthood - it is faith all the time,
of course, not lesser or greater; it just changes in its understanding and its
application as our living gets more complex.
Vital churches recognize that all people need to continue the journey
with God, from learning facts and stories and the book of the Bible in order
perhaps, then pondering its meaning, then living it in all its implications for
life. We might know the story of
Pentecost, for example, about the Holy Spirit coming on those Christ-followers
gathered in the upper room praying, which is not the same as feeling guided by
that same Spirit into mission and ministry ourselves, and then opening
ourselves to follow and do it.
Paul’s example in this text has to do with the transformation of how our
rules that divide humanity are now subsumed under the great vision of God’s
kindom, that we all become one in Christ; that as Christ’s body now, these
divisions are dissolved. Not that we
don’t stay male and female, or black or white, or Mexican or Asian, or Jew and
Gentile, or tone deaf or athletic - its that, now that we’re all believing in
Christ, divisions are overcome with love.
Former divisions don’t have anything to do with being called to serve
God. Distinctions that matter in the world have nothing to do with who is more
important in Christ, who is better in Christ, who is able to serve God. Our relationships with one another are
transformed in love. Living in God’s
kindom, everything is different from what it was before. Being in Christ makes a huge difference in
everything - our values, our behaviors, our goals, our world view, what we see
as good, what we see as important.
Its even more difficult to live in the kindom
of God without those rules, so the church attempts to put them back in on a
pretty regular basis. To standardize
things, to regulate things, to see who’s doing it right or better, whoops - we
hear our need to win coming in….
Responding to God in gratitude and love often needs to be worked out
again and again, as different eras challenge different accepted truths that may
be more cultural than faithful. We need to keep growing, because like we
Presbyterians say, we are reformed yet always being reformed as the spirit
leads.
This expectation of continued growth and study
needs to be a mark of our faith. There is more to see and learn in the
Scriptures than we see when we were younger - growing in faith is not limited.
This is the message of the text from Galatians to us today - the invitation to
see our oneness in Christ at a new level, to ponder again how being in Christ
is different from being a good citizen or a nice person, to look at just how
different this kindom of God is from what we’ve known in the world, and consider
our own growth and maturity in our spiritual lives. AMEN.
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