During my seminary years, I served at a parish whose founding families had famously been thrown into jail in the early 18^th century for refusing to pay taxes to support the local Congregational church, which was—and remained until 1818—the official, established church of Connecticut. This week’s events have reminded me of those early struggles over the relationship between church and state. First came Friday’s decision in which five Catholic justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, then Monday’s decision allowing a public-school football coach to lead players in prayer after games at the fifty yard line, then the Wednesday-morning quote from Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who—speaking at a church service on Sunday—said: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church… I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

It’s one thing to declare that “the church is supposed to direct the government.” The question is—as it has always been—“Which church?”

You know as well as I do that “The Church” doesn’t agree on much, let alone enough to “direct the government.” Boebert’s own religious views are… idiosyncratic, to say the least. (Only last week, for example, she joked that Jesus “didn’t have enough [AR-15s] to keep his government from killing him.” I’m not one to accuse people of heresy willy-nilly, but… yikes.) If my church directed the government, I imagine Lauren Boebert would hate it. Kids would learn in school that God makes some people queer, and loves them as they are. Coach Kennedy would be out there chanting Evensong after the Big Game. City Hall would be full of stained glass windows, and not one of them would show Jesus holding a gun! And if Lauren Boebert’s church directed the government, I’m thinking I would probably hate it, too. And that’s exactly why the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion: because in a world in which no church can direct the government, many churches can flourish.

I found it particularly ironic that she made her remarks while speaking at Cornerstone Christian Center, which describes itself somewhat generically as a non-denominational Christian church. Like most non-denominational churches, it’s part of the broad tradition of Baptist and evangelical free churches with little structure or hierarchy beyond the local congregation. In other words: it’s exactly the kind of church that the New England Puritans would’ve banned, back when the church really did “direct the government” in these parts. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Roger Williams!)

We Episcopalians exist in a very funny place regarding the separation of church and state. On the one hand, we’re the close spiritual cousins of the still-established Church of England, whose Supreme Governor is Queen Elizabeth II, whose bishops sit in the House of Lords, and whose Book of Common Prayer can only be amended by an Act of Parliament. On the other hand, we are explicitly not the Church of England — our distinctive church structures of elected vestries and bishops and representative Diocesan and General Conventions originate from the post-Revolutionary effort to find some way of organizing a non-established church in an independent state. While disproportionately represented among the roster of presidents and the 20^th-century social elite, we are and have always been a minority religion in America.

The Church of England remains established. But even by the time of the Revolution, it had significantly scaled back its understanding of what its establishment meant. Religious dissent, at first punished, had become tolerated, and this was not a warm-hearted decision to embrace religious pluralism. It was the inevitable result of more than fifty years of civil war and strife, during which the English government was overthrown multiple times in multiple different religious conflicts between different groups of Christians struggle to exert their power over the government. A Puritan Parliament overthrew and executed King Charles I. Episcopalian royalists succeeded in restoring Charles II. A “Glorious Revolution” overthrew his Catholic son James II in favor of the Protestant William and Mary.

Even in a uniformly-Christian country, which ours is not, when “the Church” can’t agree on its own business, it has no business trying to exert its power over the government. And the attempt by one faction of Christians to codify their theology through the law can only end in violence and persecution.

Just go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ask those Baptists what they thought.

Like many organizations, the Church has been grappling with its history over the last few years, particularly with regard to race. Our diocese has invited parishes to investigate their own history to try to learn more about our complicated relationships with racism in America: the ways in which we have been complicit in, benefited from, and fought against the sin of racism.

Our neighborhood, too, has been engaging in these conversations, including a monthly dialogue on race and equity hosted by the Charlestown Coalition in the Peace Park on Tuesday evenings. (If you’re ever available, I’d strongly recommend attending at least once!) During one recent conversation, I was fascinated to hear the very different childhood stories being shared by two parts of our community: middle-aged adults (all white) who had grown up as white students during “the busing,” and current high-school students (all people of color) telling stories of police encounters and sidewalk slurs today.

So I was fascinated to come across the following reflection on busing from the Rev. Neil Hastie, who served as Rector of St. John’s from 1973-1981, as part of a much longer (and really fun!) reflection on his ministry. It features several characters who’ll be familiar to many of you—and is a really thoughtful reflection on the difficult challenges and beautiful opportunities that the racial diversity of our city provides. I’ll simply present Mr. Hastie’s words here:

I did not approve of the 1973 federal court decision to integrate only Boston schools, and ignore Greater Boston. I envisioned what in fact happened. White flight to the suburbs—with which I was already only too familiar in Roxbury—intensified. White students became a small minority in Boston. It rankled the working class—black and white alike—to have affluent suburban judicial authorities demand of our low-income communities what they had no intention of demanding of their own well-to-do enclaves. I was reminded of the old racial policies of the Deep South: the pitting by upper class whites of lower class whites against the blacks. But I was proud of St. John’s congregation’s response to the school-busing crisis…

On the second Sunday morning in September, all the women of St. John’s were huddled in conversation in the center aisle of the church when I arrived. I walked up to them and said that I knew what was on their minds. The same thing was on the minds of all Boston parents that day: the busing of children next morning into unfamiliar neighborhoods, to effect the racial integration of the public schools. I said, ‘I have never spoken to you about race. But you know my family lives in Roxbury [i.e., in the black community], and we come here every Sunday morning with no bruises or broken bones.’ Ruth Sherwood replied, ‘I think of that all the time!’

Marion and Winkie Wood’s younger soon Randy got assigned to an elementary school in lower Roxbury, only two blocks from St. Cyprian’s Church, where Marion had attended Episcopal district meetings with me. In August, Marion and Winkie attended the parents’ orientation meeting at the school. When they said they were from Charlestown, there was a gasp of surprise. The first day of school, only one other child from their neighborhood attended, along with Randy. Marion went door to door to reassure her neighbors about safety issues. By Friday they all went. Middle school Charlestown students in Florence Johnson’s neighborhood were assigned to the Timilty School at Eliot Square, across the street from Roxbury’s ‘Missionary to the Indians’ John Eliot’s historic First Parish Church. Florence said, ‘We are not going to send our children to a place we have never even seen.’ She led a group of her neighbors on a thorough inspection tour; then they consented to their children’s attendance.

I was safer living with my family in mostly-black Roxbury than in all-white, angry Charlestown. It had not made sense for us to move into St. John’s handsome, spacious Monument Square rectory. John’s and Beth’s school, and my weekday work [Greg’s note: Mr. Hastie was only 1/3 time at St. John’s], were all in Roxbury, where we owned our house. In my stead, Marie Hubbard moved with her family into the rectory, and experienced the three a.m. random firebombing of her parked automobile…

I had a black pre-seminary year-long full-time assistant, J. C. Woods, who grew up in Memphis and attended a predominantly white college in the mid-west. His college chaplain, Robert Gamble, my former seminarian, referred him to me…

I took J. C. with me to visit Goldie Graffam. In the project parking lot, several teen-age boys confronted us, still in my van. The leader, who carried a baseball bat, demanded, ‘What’s he doing here?’ ‘He’s my student assistant at St. John’s Episcopal Church.” ‘Hmmph!’ They walked away. ‘Remember, J.C., ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’ In huge black letters on the wall by the project door, we saw, ‘KILL N—RS.’ [Greg: I’ve chosen to censor the slur, here.] ‘J. C., it’s a good thing you’re not a n—r!’ I reminded J. C. that he was in Charlestown only one day per week, where I was in Roxbury at least six days per week. He knew that I knew the difference.”

Sermon — June 19, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“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.” (Gal. 3:28)

Some of you know that I spent most of last week in summer school, taking a week-long class on archaeology, theology, and the letters of Paul. So I’ll ask: Who here has feelings about the Apostle Paul? And the follow up: On a scale from “two thumbs up” to “two thumbs down,” what are those feelings?

People have mixed feelings about Paul, and for good reason. It’s Paul who infamously says that “women should be silent in the churches.” (1 Cor. 14:34) It’s Paul who says, “I permit nowoman to teach or to have authority over a man.” (1 Tim. 2:12) It’s Paul who says, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling… as you obey Christ.” (Eph. 6:5) And it’s Paul who says, “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.” (Gal. 3:28) It’s one of the many paradoxes of Paul: his writings include both breathtaking calls for liberation and confounding endorsements of oppression. And on this Juneteenth, on the day we celebrate the emancipation of the last enslaved people in the Confederate States, as we hear Paul proclaim that “there is no longer slave and free,” it’s worth asking: What’s up with Paul?

For what it’s worth, many people want to apply the findings of historical scholarship of the New Testament to get out of this problem. You may or may not know that there’s significant debate over exactly which of the “letters of Paul” were actually written by Paul, and which were written in his name by later followers. And it just so happens that of the three troubling verses I just quoted, two come from letters that most scholars in our tradition argue were not written by Paul himself, and one is arguably a later insertion into manuscripts of the text. So it may well be true that many of the most troubling things we ascribe to Paul are actually written by later Christians, writing in his name. And for some, this is comforting; it lets them love the Paul they love and ignore the “Paul” they hate. But this is too easy a solution, because not all of the difficult things he says can simply be pushed away onto someone else.

So what do we do with Paul? Well, I want to suggest to you that while Paul’s writing is inconsistent, while it does contain some deeply reactionary words, the theological argument that he’s making about Christ is fundamentally one of extraordinary liberation. To borrow an image from Luke, Paul looks at us as Jesus looks at the man who is living in the tombs: he sees us living in a world where we are bound with chains and shackles, and he tries to free us. (Luke 8:26-29)

I want to go deeper into that reading from Galatians now. “In Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, “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.” (Galatians 3:26–29)

If you were here two weeks ago on Pentecost and you remember the epistle from that day, you may hear a foreshadowing of Paul’s later letter to the Romans, in which he uses a similar image: we have been adopted through Christ, and become children of God, and if children, also heirs. (Rom. 8:17) Here, though, he adds something. He clarifies that this is for everyone. It breaks through every distinction. There is no longer “Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” “male and female.” All who are in Christ are heirs of Christ. All who are in Christ are children of Abraham.

This is a wild thing to say, in the first century or today. Each of these categories was supposed to be immutable, unchanging, set for us at our birth. They’re part of the top-down, patriarchal family structure of Roman society. And Paul claims, that in Christ, they are undone.

These categories may sound different to you than they would have to Paul. “Jew or Greek,” to us, sounds like one religion and one ethnicity. For Paul, though, “Jew” and “Greek” were two national identities, two ethnic groups. “Jews” were the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, who also happened to be the chosen people of God. And “Greeks” weren’t “people from Greece,” they were “Gentiles,” non-Jews, all the other nations of the world. There was no real “religious conversion”: a Jew couldn’t become a Greek any more than I could just decide to become Irish. Conversion to Judaism was possible; but for a man to convert to Judaism actually meant undergoing the rituals surrounding birth, to undergo the rite of circumcision that a Jewish baby boy would have experienced on the eighth day of his life. To become a member of the family of God meant being “born again,” in a very different way from what we mean today. (And yes, I know this is a male-centered example.) Yet the main point of Paul’s argument in his letter to the Galatians is that it’s precisely this ethnic division that does not matter. You do not need to be circumcised to become a Christian, because you do not need to become a Jew to become a Christian. And if that sounds bizarre to you, given that we think of “Judaism” and “Christianity” as two distinct religious identities, it’s a testament to how distant the Biblical text is from our own lives, and how careful we need to be when we read and try to understand it.

“Slave” and “free” were likewise life-long categories. Actually, many enslaved people were born free and enslaved after being captured as prisoners of war. But once enslaved, a person could never leave the legal category of “slave.” Even if they were freed, they became not a “free person” under Roman law but a “freedperson,” a separate category with more limited rights than those who’d always been free. One of the archaeological tidbits we studied in this summer class was an inscription describing how an enslaved woman had purchased her freedom from her enslaver, on the condition that she remained in her enslaver’s household for the rest of her life and obeyed whatever orders she was given, which… sounds very much like slavery, in fact. But think about it. This woman purchased her “freedom,” on the condition of remaining in servitude, so that she would be a freedperson, and her children would be born free people, rather than being born into “slavery.” She could never be a “free person,” even if freed. But her children could. And then compare this, again, to Paul. Slave or free, all those who were baptized were heirs of Christ. There were, among the Christians in Galatia, enslaved people who could never own or inherit property, who were themselves treated as property to be inherited; yet they would inherit the very kingdom of God as beloved children and heirs.

And you don’t need me to tell you that “male” and “female” were understood and have been understood as a life-long binary division between two sexes, two genders, two distinct sets of rights and roles. The division goes back beyond any one individual’s birth, to creation itself, to the Book of Genesis, when God “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:26) This binary between male and female was an eternal truth, part of God’s created order. And yet… “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” “Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female.” This is not a stylistic variation. It’s a quotation. In Genesis, “male and female” he created them. In Christ, “there is no longer ‘male and female.’” In Christ, that eternal gender binary on which the whole ancient Roman household structure was built, into which human nature was itself supposedly divided, is… transcended. In fact, it’s not just transcended. It exists, Paul says, “no longer.”

In Christ, in other words, the primary distinguishing markers that structured the hierarchies of life in Paul’s world—ethnicity, slavery, gender—are undone. All that hierarchy has been flattened. Through baptism, we are members of one family and joint heirs of one Lord. And in fact it’s the earth-shattering power of this theological vision of equality that leads us to question Paul’s own inconsistencies, the moments in which he seems to make much of distinctions between men and women, in which he reiterates the distinctions between free and enslaved people.

So, two things should be clear. First, what Paul says is true in God’s eyes. In Christ, our distinctions of race and ethnicity and gender, of Jew or Greek, slave or free, Black or white, male and female, are no longer. But, second: we act as though they are still real, and we have structured our society in such a way that we have and we do make these distinctions and build hierarchies upon them. Like Paul, we have applied this vision of equality imperfectly at best.

It can be tempting to take Paul’s words here and simply say: “I agree! I don’t see color. I don’t see race or ethnicity. I don’t see gender. We’re all just children of God.” But the world sees color. The world sees race and ethnicity. The world sees gender. And the world has structured itself—we and our ancestors, really, have structured our world—along exactly those lines. And if we are to live into God’s vision for the world, we’d better start seeing them, and we’d better start paying attention. If we don’t see color or race or ethnicity, we can’t see that we live in one of the most strictly segregated neighborhoods in one of the most segregated metro areas in America. If we don’t see gender, we can’t see why it’s a problem if our boardrooms have nine men and one woman in every meeting; we can’t see how much of the Church still keeps women silent. And if we pretend not to see these differences, we can’t do anything to change them, and Paul’s vision of equality will remain only a dream.

So perhaps we need to buy a pair of Pauline sunglasses. Perhaps we need to practice seeing things as the world sees them; and then putting on our shades and seeing things as God sees them. Perhaps we need to keep noticing the difference between those two visions of the world, and wondering where it comes from, and cultivating curiosity about what we might do to bridge that gap, step by step, until one day, our world is structured like the kingdom of God, in which

“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.” (Gal. 3:28)

I sometimes like to imagine the following word problem taught in a Christian-school physics class:

Jesus ascends into heaven 40 days after Easter, traveling at a velocity of 0.99999999999c (i.e., 99.999999999% the speed of light). Please answer the following, showing your work:
a) What % of the Milky Way Galaxy has he traversed to date?
b) What day of the week does he think it is?”

Answers:
a) Roughly 1-2%.
b) Sunday.

The universe is very, very big. (And special relativity is very cool.)

I offer you this word problem because today is, of course, “Ascension Day.” In his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells the story: after his resurrection, Jesus spends forty days with the disciples, before ascending again into heaven.

In a three-tiered ancient cosmology, this makes perfect sense. The world as we know it, the place where we spend our whole lives, was in the center. The underworld was a shadowy realm of spirits beneath the ground, where we buried the dead and where they remained. The heavens were the whole celestial sphere above us, a luminous place of divine beings we could not reach, although some mortals like Orion could be brought there by the gods. So when Jesus rises up into the sky, he is returning from earth to heaven.

But anyone with a basic grasp of modern physics or astronomy will have some questions about this story. We know now that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the universe, nor is it qualitatively distinct from “the heavens.” It is but one planet in but one solar system in but one galaxy in a truly massive universe.

Luckily for Jesus, “heaven” is not a place located within beyond the bounds of the known universe, or even just our galaxy. It is a separate and overlapping realm, one that is hidden within and behind and beneath and inside all of creation as we know it. Jesus is born, “descending” from heaven to earth. He dies, “descending” from the world to the underworld. He “rises,” ascending from death into life, and breaking the chains that keep the souls of the dead trapped there. And he “rises” again, bringing the souls of our ancestors with him to heaven, bearing human nature itself back into the dwelling place of God.

As physics, it makes no sense. As theology, it does. Jesus descends into the depths. He is with us in the hardest, and the scariest, and the most painful parts of life. He doesn’t always fix them. You can’t always sense him there. But he is in them, bearing witness to and redeeming them, and bringing them with him back to heaven.

And in the ordinary, holy parts of life, he’s inviting us to come and meet him. We can’t travel the trillions of light-years it would take to escape our universe to somehow get to heaven; it simply can’t be done, and in fact that’s not where heaven is found. But by the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit, we can sometimes catch a glimpse of the heavenly reality that is hidden everywhere.

Since I began with a joke about special relativity, I guess I’ll close with a poem. This one’s a sonnet for Ascension Day, by the British poet Malcolm Guite:

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heavencentred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.