Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost — September 9, 2018 (Reveille Day)
Galatians 3:27-29

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.

There was once a little girl, about four years old, who had been very quiet for some time, perhaps a bit too quiet, so her mother went to check on her, to see what she was doing. Her mother approached and found her lying on the floor, very intently drawing on a sheet of paper with her crayons. “What are you doing, honey?” her mother asked.
Without looking up, the little girl responded “Drawing.”
“Well, what are you drawing?”
“A picture of God.” said the girl.
Her mother chuckled, “But dear, no one knows what God looks like.”
While continuing to draw, again without looking up, the little girl said “They will when I’m done.”

As I said last Sunday, the churches in the Roman province of Galatia were a source of great concern for the apostle Paul. There was conflict between two competing factions in these congregations: one faction who agreed with Paul’s teaching that focused upon the primacy of faith in one’s relationship with God such that the old Jewish teachings on things like circumcision and other things found in the Mosaic code did not apply to those converting to Christianity. The other faction, called the Judaizers, taught the exact opposite, and as Paul wrote this letter, one senses that he feels like he is losing ground. This is why this epistle opens with Paul’s astonishment that the Galatians are, in his words “turning to another gospel.”

Reading today’s chapter, chapter three, one can sense Paul’s passionate, righteous anger. He is vehement in his takedown of the Judaizers, calling the Galatians who follow them “foolish” and “bewitched” for clinging ever so tightly to the old traditions of the Law. Abraham, Paul reminds us, was reckoned as righteous before God, not by what he did, but by the total, absolute, complete faith he placed in God. And then Paul teaches something truly amazing: when we, too, place our faith in Christ, even though we are Gentiles, we too become Abraham’s descendants, God’s very children, “heirs according to the promise,” as he says in this morning’s reading. We are heirs of all of God’s blessed inheritance through our baptisms, through which you and I are bound together, bound to all that has past, bound to all God is doing, bound to all that God will do, bound to each other.
~~~
In the midst of this passionate discourse, it is Paul’s subtext that captures my imagination: his short discourse on church unity. I believe that anytime Paul discusses unity, the tense of his verbs matters. When he discusses unity in 1 Corinthians 12, he says “You are the body of Christ”(present tense). In today’s reading, Paul says “You are all one in Christ Jesus” (again, present tense).

Paul does not use the future tense here. He does not say “you might be,” or “you should be” or even “you could be if you ever got your act together and stopped fighting all the time.”

No. Paul says to this confused, divided, factionalized church “You are…”

Reading Galatians 3, it seems that Paul sees division and discord as the inevitable result of what happens when we overemphasize dogma over relationships. In chapter three of Galatians, Paul hammers home his argument of the primacy of the righteousness of faith over trying to be righteous by obedience to the law and then, in an abrupt turn, he teaches them that for all of the ways that we focus on things that divide us, because of what God has already done in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you are already one.

You are already one, not Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. Stop dividing yourselves by this doctrine or that dogma. You are one. Be who you already are, who Christ died for you to be.
~~~
I believe that God has set before Christ’s church a grand opportunity, the likes of which we may have never before seen, at least not for some time. In a world that is so bitterly divided, where everything is so polarized and so much seems to pit us against one another, nation against nation, political party against political party, ideology against ideology, with division over issues of income, gender, sexuality, education, even where you live and what you do, Christ has placed his church, and it is not an accident that Christ has, especially in this day and age when the mainline church struggles to redefine its purpose and mission.

In a world of such vitriol, where diatribe masquerades as discourse, and the ends borne of ideology seem to always justify fanning the flames of discord, God has placed the church. God has placed Reveille. God has placed you and me. God has placed us.
To be clear, we do not fundamentally change when we enter this place. We all are still the principled, ideological, dogmatic sinners we were when we left the house this morning.

And that, sisters and brothers, is what is right about the church today.

I will stand before you now and tell you the honest truth: in one way or another, I probably disagree with everyone of you on something. I don’t vote like you vote, or on various issues, think like you think. Or, I don’t eat what you eat or drink what you drink. I don’t live where you live. My children attend a different school than yours. I don’t cheer for your team or listen to your favorite band. I even root against your alma mater.

But I love you.

I love you not because we listen to the same news station or read the same paper or pull the same lever in November. I love you because you are my family. You are my sisters and you are my brothers. Because of what we teach and believe about how our baptisms change us, your children are my children, and my children are your children, as together we covenant to live, surrounding them with a steadfast community of love and forgiveness.

I love you because we worship together, rejoice together, grieve together, break the bread of life together, are washed in the same water together. I love you because we learn from each other, you from me, and I from you. And I love you because we serve God and neighbor together.
~~~
In a world where so many people disagree on so many things, where else do differently-thinking people regularly gather together, not in spite of our differences, but in the midst of them, to love one another and serve the world? Where else but the church? Our witness to the fact that we do think so differently and yet still live in community with one another when it seems no one else can may be the greatest gift the church has to give to the world today.

To be clear, I understand what Paul is saying when he writes “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” Yet even Paul would have to admit that Jews and Gentiles did not suddenly lose their history when they were baptized. Men were still men, women still women, and the slaves were certainly not all suddenly set free.

But that is not Paul’s point. His point is that those old distinctions no longer matter, because we have been baptized into God’s great, diverse, expansive family, and in the midst of our differences, we can witness to the world the true power of unity, of wholeness, of one.

Again, we are all still the principled, ideological, dogmatic sinners we were when we left the house this morning, all of us.

And that, sisters and brothers, is what is right about the church today. It is right because although the world uses division borne of difference as a ready excuse for inaction, we have and will find a way to live and serve in the midst of our differences. It is right because it is filled with hope, hope for the church, and hope for the world, for because of our life and witness, yours and mine, we demonstrate for the world that we are not doomed to a life of bitterness and division, that we are not relegated to mere red states and blue states, that we are not reduced to labels like “conservative” and “liberal,” and we have inherited the promise that proclaims that ultimately our identity comes not from our politics, but from the glorious inheritance of our faith in which we are and always will be nothing less than the very children of God, and that no ideology, no political platform, no doctrine, no dogma, no label, and no amount of partisan rancor that can steal our glorious inheritance from us.

Our hope is not that we may someday be one in Christ Jesus. Our hope comes from the truth that we already are.

The task, therefore, is to live like it.

We are heirs according to the promise, the promise borne of faith in the Jesus Christ, the victor over death, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
~~~
There was once a little girl, about four years old, who had been very quiet for some time, perhaps a bit too quiet, so her mother went to check on her, to see what she was doing. She approached her and found her lying on the floor, very intently drawing on a sheet of paper with her crayons. “What are you doing, honey?” her mother asked.
Without looking up, the little girl responded “Drawing.”
“Well, what are you drawing?” said her mother.
“A picture of God.” said the girl.
Her mother chuckled, “But dear, no one knows what God looks like.”
While continuing to draw, again without looking up, the little girl said “They will when I’m done.”

[Everyone in the worship space stands and holds hands]

It is not perfect. Our box of crayons may not have all the colors in it that God intended, but still, look around. This is what God looks like; unity in the midst of diversity, a people united in love for God’s transformation of the world.

As we begin a new program year, let this be the face we show to Richmond and beyond. It is hope that the world needs. It is good news for the future, made real by the power of the One in whom all things are possible.

Gloria In Excelsis Deo.