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.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. (Rev. 21:1)

I’m a coastal person by nature. While I’m not a sailor, and I get rather seasick under any but the calmest conditions, I’ve never lived more than ten miles from the shore. Salt water and decaying seaweed smell like home to me. There is no more comforting sound than a seagull’s cry over the pounding of the waves. And, yes, I’ve been known to swim in the icy Atlantic off the coast of Maine on more than a few Memorial Day weekends. (Although “swimming” is perhaps a generous term.)

So I’m always somewhat dismayed when I read, in the chapter of the Revelation to John that we’ll be reading this Sunday, that John “saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,” but “the sea was no more.” (Rev. 21:1)

It’s the kind of baffling throw-away phrase on which scholarly careers in Biblical studies are made, and I’m happy to say I once wrote a twenty-page term paper on exactly that question.  So if you’re a sea creature like me, perhaps you’ll enjoy a few short reflections on what John means when he says that in the new creation, “the sea was no more.”

Like most things in Revelation, it’s operating on four or five different levels all at once:

1. On the ordinary level, the sea is a place of danger. While small-scale fishing voyages, coastal travel, and island-hopping were possible and relatively safe, the open Mediterranean was a stormy and dangerous place, and shipwrecks and mishaps were common and deadly, especially given most sailors’ inability to swim. This danger led directly to the…
2. The mythological level: the sea symbolizes the chaotic, destructive powers of the cosmos. Many ancient Near Eastern creation myths include a battle between a god or God and the sea, or often a sea monster, in which the god must subdue the chaotic powers of destruction to make a safe and stable creation possible. And in fact, there are traces of such an idea throughout the Bible, with references to God struggling with sea monsters or holding back the waters of the deep to prevent them from overcoming life. In the “new creation” of Revelation, God has finally won an ultimate triumph over the powers of chaos, and this victory is symbolized by the absence of the sea.
3. On the historical/political level, the sea is a highway for the spread of Roman authority. The author and audience of Revelation are not Roman citizens, but subjects whose homelands have been conquered by Roman armies sailing over the sea. John the Divine himself receives the vision while in exile on the island of Patmos: he has literally been separated from his own community by the combination of Roman power and the sea surrounding the island. So the abolition of the sea symbolizes not only the end of chaos on a mythological level, but the overthrow of the Roman imperial power of Caesar in favor of the peaceful and loving kingdom of God.
4. This overturning of exploitation extends to the economic level, as well. Elsewhere the Book of Revelation envisions the destruction of the city of “Babylon” (a coded stand-in for Rome), and the grief of “all shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea” as they watch it burn. (Rev. 18:17) And they “weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, [… the list goes on …] horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.” (18:11-13) This is not a generic anti-business screed. The sea is a highway for human trafficking: soldiers go east to conquer, merchants return west with cargoes of enslaved prisoners and plundered wealth. John envisions these enslavers and looters weeping at the loss of the sea that has enabled their exploitative practices to thrive.
5. On the ritual level, the sea is a symbol of purification. Water, salt, and fire are often associated with rites of cleansing and renewal, and indeed the container used for priestly ablutions in the Temple in Jerusalem was a giant bronze vessel known as the “Molten Sea,” (1 Kings 7:23) combining salt water and fire in one vessel! In earlier visions in Revelation, the human seer is separated from God by “something like a sea of glass mixed with fire,” (Rev. 15:2; cf. Rev. 4:6) That “the sea is no more” suggests that there is no longer a need for purification, no longer something to be washed away that separates the human being from God.
6. Finally, on the community level: for all its chaos, danger, and opportunities for exploitation, the sea brings people together. John writes from the island of Patmos to churches in seven cities in Asia Minor, the western coastal region of what’s now Turkey. In a region defined by mountains and archipelagos, travel by sea is often much easier than travel by land, and the sea connects John to these small communities scattered in different cities around the area. In the new creation, though, God brings a new and holy city out of heaven, in which they all will dwell. The Church that has been scattered throughout the world is reunited in one place. The Church that has communicated through letters sent across the sea can now live together, face to face.

To be reunited in that heavenly city, living in a community of love with one another and with God, with chaos and empire conquered, with ritual impurity gone forever, is the greatest joy the angels can show to John.

Although, for my part, I think I’d still probably miss the seagulls.

This morning I welcomed a local friend to St. John’s, who’s a retired librarian and Episcopalian with a great interest in working with church archives, to begin sorting through and categorizing some of our very old books and historical documents. In the process of showing her around, I found a small book that was mailed to me by Tom Mousin a few weeks ago, after he found it among his papers: a notebook kept by the Rev. Wolcott Cutler from April 1964 to May 1965, several years after his retirement from St. John’s and in the time immediately before his death. It is a treasure trove of wisdom and insight, and I thought I might share a few excerpts “From an Old Rector” with you over the next few months. (I will try to keep the private portions private, and will beg Mr. Cutler’s forgiveness in heaven as necessary for sharing what I have.)

This week’s selection contains a reflection on the unhappiness we can often feel in the midst of seeming success and fulfillment, especially in retirement—and maybe a hint of a solution!

Cutler writes, on June 30, 1964:

“I heard such a surprising fact today about one of the most highly honored and intellectually prominent bishops in the Episcopal Church that I feel moved to speculate about the reasons for it, not that my conclusions will have real validity. I was told that Bishop Y, who retired from one of the most important centers of national as well as church life a very few years ago, and who divides his year between two of the most desirable locations, is bored and unhappy in his retirement. I can understand that as a retired official he is not looked to for favors by distinguished or by ambitious persons any more; but if he still reads significant books, if he still cares for what happens to humanity, or if he likes to do for others, why is he not even better able to carry out his interests than when he was bound down by the mechanics of administrative responsibility?

I praise the Lord that I can now, as this very night, devote two hours and a half to a single troubled brother, and not begrudge the time.”

May God give us all the gift of a few hours’ free time, now and then, and of the wisdom to use it with joy and compassion, for our own spiritual growth and, above all else, for the love of our neighbors.