Every once in a while, a sermon comes along that speaks to the high and it brings them low. That same sermon can speak to the low and bring them up. This, I've read, is the goal of every good sermon. It upsets the comfortable and comforts the upset. Today's sermon did both, and with good reason.
The lectionary from the epistles was from Galatians:
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 justified 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.
The sermon focused on the second part of the reading, which is often neglected in favor of the easier to preach first part, in which we are all children of God through faith. The NIV has "sons" in place of "children", and in some ways makes the second part of the reading more salient. "Sons" points out the tradition of inheritance, of the rights afforded to men only in this society. But what to make of this "sons" when "there is no longer male and female"? The sermon went back to the promises of Genesis 12, but I'd like to take this a bit further back, to Genesis 1. In the creation myth, the first account of how God created human kind is as follows:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
Note how God creates one single man in the beginning. It's a singular. Yet in the third line, both genders are present, as well as the plural, "them". "Man" is able to stand on its own, a placeholder for all of humanity. But once man, created in the image of God, must be explained in depth, the words for gender are used, side by side, made equal by an "and". And yet, for millennia, female has been relegated to a place below male. This has been done by making woman the other to the man; she is what he is not, and helps him define his masculinity. We do this even today: when we speak of politics, there are either issues or women's issues; seldom do we hear speak of a "male issue". This is not because men have fewer issues than women, but because their experiences are counted as central, and women's experiences are reduced to a smaller sphere. I'd like to add here that you shouldn't ever call abortion a woman's issue. In the same vein, giving women fair treatment is not a women's issue. It is an issue for all of us, just as affirmative action is an issue for all of us, because we live in one single society. We are all responsible for the ramifications of that society's actions.
Back to Galatians 3: this distinction disappears in Christ. The ideal before the Fall, which becomes corrupt with the Fall when a man rules over his wife, disappears completely in Christ. There is no distinction. What does this mean in the case of politics, where we have "women's issues" and "minority issues"? In Christ, that is to say, in the body that is the Church, these things disappear. Or at least, they should. But do they? If we take Fr. Jerry's charge that the three instances in which the field gets evened are race, politics, and gender, then does the Body now reflect that?
On Sundays, the church shows that selective segregation is alive and well. Clearly, we've allowed for there to be a distinction made between "Jew" and "Gentile", now simply replacing them with "Black", "White", and "Latino". And, wherever we can, we allow those distinctions to stand, talking dismissively about, as my friend P. says, "those people".
"Slave" and "free" gives us a bit more trouble, as today it is not so easily made visible. And it is perhaps more troublesome: these political differences are not simply the false dichotomy of "Democrat/Republican" or "Liberal/Conservative". Poor, rich, upper class, working class would be these instances of "other".
The last, "male and female" is a bit more difficult for me to address, for I'm not one of "those" people, I'm "these people". In the two above instances, I'm not among the disenfranchised, so I'm in a position of power when I point out the wrong the church has done. Race, politics: I am not the trampled calling out for justice, I am in the group that can offer it, but don't. And that accountability falls on my head, to my shame. But in the case of male/female, I am not in power. Women are disenfranchised in the church, and in most, they only have access to positions of authority and teaching through their husbands. This requires women to marry in order to have any standing. And so I cannot speak out, because to speak out would contradict the rules imposed on me concerning speaking, teaching, and "obeying". For reasons I would love to get into, but will not for brevity's sake, the allowance of female standing only through marriage dangerous and does not keep in line with the gospel; it is a blatant abuse of Christ's teachings on marriage.
The Galatians reading calls us to the difficult work of not only accepting the gospel, but living it.
It's time to accept the concept of "living water" and live what we've been called to.
