June 17, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

The moment always arrived when I used to teach American history.
We’d open the documents book to the manifesto
from the 1848 Seneca Falls conference for women’s rights,
and I’d begin to hold forth on a favorite theme:
how Thomas Jefferson had claimed it to be “self-evidently” true
that all human beings had been created equal by God,
but that this nation only gradually found ways
to acknowledge and protect that natural equality.
When I got to the part about women’s rights,
there’d be a couple of audible groans,
and a few students would start rolling their eyes heavenward.
Uh-oh. Woman professor about to hold forth on women’s rights.

Well, even though the 4th of July
that commemorates Jefferson’s Declaration is coming up,
and even though a grand event is taking place today on Jamestown Island
to commemorate the founding of the first American colony,
this isn’t an American history class.

But maybe you will roll your eyes.
when I single out this sentence of St. Paul’s in this morning’s Epistle.
“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.”

Is she about to launch into some out-there feminist theology???
Well, no.
But even while what St Paul says lies close to the bone
of all that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ mean,
and how life in Christ transforms anybody living in this world.
It is very radical.

In Jesus and Paul’s time it was normal to classify people by opposites.
You were a citizen of Rome or not,
slave or free, man or woman.
And so important for the Jewish community,
you were either a Jew or something else – called “Gentile” or “Greek.”
You were sorted and judged by these antitheses.

That was the ancient world,
but this kind of either/or sorting is familiar to us too, isn’t it?
We might call it binary thinking.
“There are two kinds of people,” somebody begins to hold forth at a cocktail party,
and you know somebody is going to be judged.
And we do sort people. We could add to St. Paul’s list:

With children or without.
Young or old.
Republican or Democrat.
Black or white.
Straight or gay.
Able or disabled.
Poor or rich.
Employed or unemployed.
Conservative or liberal.
Failure or success.
Maybe even dog person or cat person.

We use these polarities to make judgments about people,
and often to include them or exclude them.
And powerful though the movement towards the protection of equality
has been in the United States in the 20th century,
I almost think that the rage against equality
and the tendency to demonize others has increased.
We need only to look at this week’s news in Gaza,
or fighting between factions in Iraq,
or nearly tribal us-vs.-them mentality in American politics.
You are one thing or you are the other,
it’s a “zero-sum game,”
and God help you if you try to blur the lines of binary thinking.

Jesus’ radical teaching and his radical manner of living
cut across the grain of all the polarities of his day and ours as well.
He ate with Pharisees and sinners,
allowed a scorned woman to wash his feet,
and touched lepers, who were ritually unclean.
He numbered women among his followers as well as men
and he healed people who were not Jews.
He had dinner with a tax-collector.
You could make a good case of it that Jesus was crucified
precisely because he would not honor the binary thinking of his day.

You could say that this was because Jesus was an egalitarian politician,
but if you did, you would miss the point.
Jesus was actually more radical than that.
For it isn’t just that Jesus expects his followers to treat everyone equally;
it’s that in Christ all the distinctions you can think of evaporate
before the simple truth: we are one in Jesus Christ.

Does that mean we are homogenized and lose our individuality?
Or blended into half one thing and half another, so that we’re less than whole?
Absolutely not.

Does it mean that we pretend we can’t tell
that we are different colors or genders,
have different abilities or histories?
No, not that either. Our traits do not change.
We still have big ears, or cry easily, or walk with a cane, or speak French.

Rather, it means that in all our diversity
we are animated and enlivened,
bound together and redeemed by the one Christ,
so the only trait that matters at all is being “in Christ.”
By our Baptism, by our renewal in Christ every day,
and every time we come to the altar to receive him,
we affirm that what divides us may be annoying or it may be interesting,
but it is nothing compared with the unity which, simultaneously, we have in him.

There are some profound ways that this affects us.
Of course it means that we don’t discriminate,
because that is an unChristly thing to do.
But it also means that all kinds of barriers we assumed to exist do not.

For one thing, there is no real distinction
between who is a care-giver and who is a care-receiver.
To give care is simultaneously to receive it.
There is no distinction between the worthy and the unworthy.
We cannot any more label anyone an outsider, because Christ has invited them in.

And in this season when so many people we know and love have died,
I am moved to suggest that for all of us gathered in Christ’s name,
even the distinction between being alive and having died blurs.
Of course being alive matters so very much,
but I am quite sure that to be in Christ is to continue to be in Christ
right past the dying.
It is to be cradled tenderly in the hands of a God
who makes Christ dying, Christ rising, and Christ coming again
all simultaneous, and our own living and dying all of one piece.

So is Paul’s dictum that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,
neither slave nor free, so spiritual that it is not political?
Far from it.
I am convinced that a civilized and virtuous civil community
will never permit malice and walls of prejudice against the polar “other.”
I think at its best, American government and American culture uphold this virtue.

But the more radical meaning of Paul’s words to the Galatians
startlingly remind us that God’s will for all creation is unity.
Differences and multiformity are God-given incarnational details.
Even death cannot be avoided.
But all these distinctions are held, with exquisite gentleness,
and caught up in the beautiful and redemptive reality of God
as manifested in Jesus Christ.
To participate in the simultaneous oneness of it all
is to participate in the very life of God.
There are days when to be part of this oneness
is all I ever need to know about God’s promise to humanity,
all I ever need to hope for. Thanks be to God.

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