Text: Galatians 3:23-29.
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot North
Dakota
The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge
A very famous preacher and theologian, Karl Barth, who
addressed his Christian sisters and brothers during one of the darkest times in
the history of our world—that is, during the Second World War—taught
seminarians that they should preach with a Bible in one hand and the day’s
newspaper in the other. He believed
that people in the pews had the right to expect that what they heard on Sunday
morning would help them gain perspective on what was going on in the world.
Today’s sermon is the fourth in a series based on St. Paul’s
letter to the Christians in the region of Galatia, in what is now Turkey. There’s a danger in planning such a series
that the newspaper will drop out of our hand while we’re considering the Bible,
chapter after chapter, passage after passage.
But there’s also a magnificent challenge to us as readers of the Bible
and servants of the God that that Bible reveals. It’s the challenge of seeing that God speaks
to us today, through a sacred book that is two thousand years old, about events
that are endlessly on the news, on the internet, in the newspaper.
Somebody said to me earlier this week that they were just
sick of hearing about the shootings of a hundred people in Orlando at the Pulse
Nightclub a week ago this morning, resulting in the deaths of about half of
those shot. We have all heard and seen
commentary on the shooter, his background, his troubled past, the sexual
orientation he struggled to come to terms with.
We’ve heard the arguments about how his religious background played into
his behaviors; we’ve heard arguments about how the easy availability of
semi-automatic weapons and the Florida law that forbids concealed carry of
handguns into bars and clubs may have affected the outcome. We all know that this horrific event took
place within a week of the anniversary of another terrible, awful mass shooting
at a Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston,
South Carolina.
Most directly relevant to the news cycle, certainly, is the
story we heard read this morning from St. Luke’s Gospel of the man with the
unquiet mind, who met Jesus and the disciples when they were traveling through
the wilderness in the region of Galilee.
This man was deeply troubled; he was crazy; he was dangerous. He could no longer live in civilization;
houses didn’t feel like home. Something
inside him was so dead that he felt more at home in the silence of the tombs of
a cemetery, with neighbors who would not look askance at him. He was so miserable in his skin that clothing
felt too confining, too defining, perhaps.
The local residents knew him and feared him, kept him under guard,
shackled him with chains. What a
nightmare life! (That is what the artist
Tissot tried to communicate about this man’s life in the painting on the
bulletin cover: its utter hopelessness, the man’s sense that he did not fit in
the community, the sense that he was trapped and chained in his misery.) In our civilization, in our day, there are
also people whose mental suffering is so severe that they, too, feel utterly
trapped, whether there are physical restraints or not. And when the frustration reaches a boiling point,
something snaps. And when guns are easily
available, if the rhetoric of hate comes pre-mixed from white supremacist groups,
from a homophobic culture or religion, or even if the inner voices of
self-hatred can’t be silenced—there is terrible danger, and unspeakable tragedy
can result. It is significant that the
man in Luke’s Gospel told Jesus his name was Legion. The voices, the influences in his head, were
many and confusing and terrifying.
Jesus set the man free; he drove the demons out of the
man. When he was well, he sat at Jesus’
feet, he put on clothes, he was ready to return to the community that had
feared and rejected him, and encouraged to share the news of what God had done
for him, to tell the story of how God had set him free. He was not set free to
be a loner, but free to enter into community, as a now useful, appreciated, and
trustworthy member.
After the clamor of all those voices inside the man called
Legion, the presence of God, loving him, welcoming him back home, must have
sounded like the blessed sound of sheer silence. That was where Elijah the Prophet knew God’s
presence. Not in the wind, not in the
earthquake, not in the fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.” And Elijah stood at the entrance of the cave
where he had been hiding, clothed, with his mantle, the garment that symbolized
his prophetic call throughout the stories about him in the Books of Kings, wrapping him as safely as cloth could do. He heard God ask: “What are you doing here,
Elijah?” It was a moment of divine
re-orientation. Then God sent him back on the mission to proclaim God’s truth
in the dangerous and troubled civilization of his day.
So here in the reading from the book of Galatians that we
heard this week, we also hear about clothing.
It’s a stunning metaphor that St. Paul uses. He says we have put on Christ as a garment;
we are, by virtue of our baptism, wearing
God. The essayist and Episcopal
priest, Lauren Winner, recently wrote a book by that title: Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and
Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God.
Clothes come between us and the world. They protect us, keep us warm, they cover the
most secret parts so we are not so directly vulnerable or threatening. (That’s what the man, Legion, lost or cast
off in his madness.) Winner talks about how what we wear tells others who we
are. When I wear a clergy collar, it
changes how people relate to me. When
you wear a suit people treat you differently than if you’re wearing jeans and a
t-shirt. What I wear is at least a
little bit about how I define myself.
What if our understanding of God’s presence in our lives was like that,
so that people could see Jesus? What if
we understand that Jesus’ presence in our lives, like Elijah’s mantle, clothes
us with God’s power and strength and protection and love? It is a magnificent way of thinking about that
boundary place between our skin and the world’s pain, the world’s ability to
hurt us. If we have been baptized, Paul
says, we are wearing Jesus. Ideally, the
world looks at us and sees us clothed in Jesus. When we are clothed in Jesus, the world sees
in us the truth of Jesus, the justice of God, the love of God, the mercy of
God.
When you and I consider the terrible pain and suffering of
last Saturday night at Pulse, I wonder what we can do to prevent another attack
like this from happening. We can teach
our children, clothed in Jesus, to take the enormous risk of loving others,
knowing that we are so safe, clothed in Jesus, that no amount of pain inflicted
by one with a shackled and unquiet mind, not even a lethal bullet, can separate
us from God’s love.
These two paragraphs from Paul’s letter to the Galatians
contain another truth that we need always to remember. The very next thing that Paul writes, after
this stunning metaphor about wearing Jesus is this: “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” (Galatians 3:28).
The divisions we human beings create, and deploy as we draw circles with
People Like Us safely on the inside and the enemies on the outside? Paul says that because of Jesus, they don’t
exist! The tribal differences, the
gender differences, the differences in wealth and power and social class—they
aren’t there in God’s eyes. We are one
in Christ Jesus. Jesus died, Jesus gave
his life for all!
One word summaries each of the first three sermons in this
series:
·
Week
one: Freedom… Paul said God through
Jesus Christ sets us free from our sins, sets us free to serve others in
Christ’s name.
·
Week
Two: Conversion… God takes us and
our plans and turns us around, to become who he calls us to be. Sometimes it is slow, sometimes it is a
Damascus Road experience. But it is
authentic when we love better, when others praise God because they see God at
work in us.
·
Week
Three: Grace…God freely enters our
lives and transforms us, not because we deserve it, or are even looking for it,
but because God is God, and God is Love.
·
This
week I would add: Unity. We are all converted by God’s grace into this new life of freedom
to serve. We are in this new
Christ-clothed life united, together.
The old divisions aren’t there as fences to keep our tribe (People Like
Us) inside and their tribe (THOSE people) out.
God is at work and can transform us all.
We are called to share in the birthing of a People of God, a
people whose rhetoric is not governed by hate and exclusion. There is no place for hatred of
Muslims. There is no place for
homophobia. There is no need to carry an
AK-47 for self-protection or the protection of personal property. (We will talk
about the possibility of Christians participating in a just war and the defense
of their country another time.) There is
nobody out there for whom Jesus did not die.
We who are baptized wear Jesus as a garment: a garment of
protection, and a garment of identity with one who gave his life for our
sake.
Today is Father’s Day.
Fathers, in the very fiber of their being, at their noblest and best,
love and protect their families. We are
so deeply grateful for the day in, day out everyday love of the fathers in our
lives. We appreciate their hard work,
their affection and love, their way of teaching us to fish and hunt, to play
ball, to barbecue, to hold a howling toddler with patience. We are thankful; we are in awe at the joyful
mystery of fatherhood. We are thankful
that, at their best, fathers love in ways that reflect and channel the love of
God. It pains me terribly to have needed to
consider the horrible twistedness of one father’s actions early last Sunday
morning, and the devastation they brought about—the shooting of a hundred
people! In some confused way, Omar
Mateen thought he was protecting his child against danger. It seems likely that Omar Mateen was angry
and conflicted about his own sexuality, and he conveniently hid behind the
intolerance of the religion of his family tradition as he sought a way to
justify his self-hatred. How sad that
he never learned that Jesus lived and then gave his life to show us that God
loves everyone—no exceptions. Gay and
straight, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian; good and wicked, young
and old, Republican and Democrat, lazy and hardworking, male and female; white
or of color, Native American and immigrant.
God loves everyone—no exceptions.
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