Charleston, Pulse, and Power

When the opportunity to preach came a week after the Pulse nightclub killings, and it was also so close to the anniversary of the Mother Emanuel killings, I knew that I must try to elucidate the gospel's relevance to a world faced with mass murder that goes even into the places believed to be sanctuaries.  Thanks to my friends Revs. Herman and Pinkey Graham, pastors of God's Property Church, for the opportunity to work on this message.  It was also a Father's Day Sunday, so that theme winds its way through the sermon.  The association of maleness and fathers with violent power is a cultural pattern that must be challenged, and there is in both Dylan Roof and Omar Mateen an element of the perceived need for men to prove themselves and their convictions through violent acts.

It has been several weeks of travel and staying busy with teaching summer school that have slowed down my posting of this sermon preached on June 19, 2016, at God's Property Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, NC.

1Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die:  “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep.

Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again.

The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.”

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.

Luke 8:26-39

         Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.

When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me”— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)

Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.

Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.

So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.”

So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

The Power that Comes Through Being Clothed in Christ

         The text read from Galatians is one of the great baptismal texts of the New Testament.  Many of us are most familiar with texts, such as from Romans, that compare baptism to being united with Jesus Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection.  Going under the waters is a symbolic death and burial of the old self, and a widely used baptismal statement says we are “raised to walk in newness of life.”  Here in Galatians, Paul uses another comparison to describe baptism.  He says it is like putting on a new set of clothes.  Verse 27 compares baptism to putting on Christ.  The garment we wear, by being put into the waters, is Christ himself.

         This baptismal teaching has far ranging significance.  If we delve into the common uses of the Greek word baptizo, we find that it also was often used with reference to garments.  When a piece of cloth was to be dyed another color than its natural white or off-white color, the process of dipping it into a vat or basin of dye was named by this same word, baptizo.  Having been dipped in the dye, the fabric comes out a different color.  It is changed, and its appearance is different.  The same should be true of us.  Having been dipped into Christ, the dye of his character should change our appearance.  Who we are should become marked by who Jesus is.

         As I already mentioned, Paul takes the garment image further by saying that in baptism we have clothed ourselves in Christ.  Our outward appearance, by this description, takes on the appearance of Christ.  We don’t push the metaphor too far to wonder whether such an image describes a change of the whole person including the inner self.  Becoming clothed in Christ is not merely a superficial façade.  It is a change of our appearance that illustrates the change that has happened in the fullness of who we are.

         The message to all Christians, but especially to Fathers today is that the image our lives show to the world should be the image of Jesus Christ.  What does it mean to fulfill one’s human destiny?  It is to grow in the grace of God poured out to us by the Spirit.  This grace is displayed in living as God intends one to live.

         Paul repeats the language of our unity with Jesus Christ in the next verse.  “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is not male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  Having put on Christ, fathers and mothers, men and women, enslaved and free, in-group or out-group are united to one another in Christ.  What has divided us is now obscured by the clothing we all are wearing—the same Jesus who lived and died to save and transform us.  It is the way of Jesus that shows up in who we are, putting into the background our gender identity, our skin color, our primary language, our social rank--every way that we might classify and divide ourselves from one another.  Having been united to Christ in baptism, we are “in Christ Jesus.”  You are in Christ Jesus.  He is in Christ Jesus.  She is in Christ Jesus.  Each one of us is in Christ Jesus through our baptism.  And because Christ is one Lord, in him we have been united to one another.

         United in Jesus, united with one another, there is no longer any place to pull rank or claim status over one another.  Paul, through his understanding of the way of Jesus, is challenging the patriarchy that is rampant in the cultures of his day.  Greek cultures ranked the property owning Greek men, the fathers who headed households of wealth, at the top of society.  Below them were ninety percent of the people who did not count as citizens:  women, children, slaves, and barbarians.  Not only the Greeks of Galatia, but also the Jews held men to be above women. 

But Paul says that this has changed in the community of Jesus.  Baptism into Christ evens the playing field.  The old saying is right that “there is level ground at the foot of the cross.”  So being a father does not mean pulling rank over everyone else.  Being a father means a partnership with one’s spouse; it leaves a space for sharing equally in the tasks of the household and the formation of the lives of God’s gift of children.

So on Father’s Day, Galatians 3 reminds us that God has brought us together as a team in the church to share in the beloved community.  God didn’t pick winners and losers based on our genes and our genitals.  God holds all our uniquenesses and differences as valuable and good, yet puts them in the background when compared to becoming like Jesus.  United to him in baptism, our destiny is to conform to his image.  Together in Christlikeness, fathers are on the team to make this world the blessed place God created it to be.

Too often, we have created stereotypes that distort the nature of men and women.  Then, as men, as fathers, we try to live up to the stereotypes, no matter how unnatural or how unlike us they feel.  In our culture, no man wants to be thought of as unmanly.  Boys and young men often feel compelled to take dangerous risks or behave erratically in order to prove to their peers that they are a real man.  This kind of overcompensating testosterone driven activity proves nothing other than we can be driven to the point of stupidity by stereotypes and the social enforcement of them in our communities. 

The Old Testament lesson for today from 1 Kings 19 sheds some light on the way that fathers may distort the way they think of their power in the world as men.  It is a familiar story about the Prophet Elijah.  Elijah spent a large amount of his life on the run.  He was under threat of a corrupt king and a highly devoted religious queen, with whom he was constantly in disagreement and conflict.  Ahab despised him for challenging the corruption of the royal court.  Jezebel despised him for rejecting the religion of her family heritage.

Let me chase a rabbit here.  I think we all can agree that Jezebel is not presented to us as a model character in the Bible.  In her commitment to the religions of her family heritage and the power those religious systems should bring, she was a zealot.  She promoted these idolatrous practices and did not take kindly to the resistance she faced from Elijah and others.  Like so many other royal figures in the Bible, when she met with opposition, she felt justified in imprisoning and executing her enemies.

Yet for some reason, many people revel in singling out Jezebel as worse than all the others.  It seems that she gets the worst reputation in this royal court mainly because she is a woman.  Ahab was no icon of virtue folks.  He held the throne, and he shared his power with Jezebel.  She exercised her power with often malicious intent, and so did he.  We need to be careful about how we save our harshest criticism for women who exercise power.  There is no doubt that Jezebel is wrong, but she is in a long line of wrongdoers, most of whom were kings and their courtiers, false prophets and nobility.  You don’t hear people referring to their enemies as an Ahab, however. 

To get back to this story of Elijah, he has won a great victory, yet he fears the revenge of Ahab and Jezebel.  So he runs away.  God sends angels to care for him and strengthen him, but he keeps running away to Horeb, the mountain of God.  When he gets there he hides in a cave.  After he’s rested a bit, he begins a conversation with God that turns out to be mainly whining about how Ahab, Jezebel, and lots of the other Israelites don’t like him, don’t like what he says, and don’t like what he does.  He implies that his problems are God’s fault.  He is in the middle of a bigtime pity party.  He is basking in the glory of his own mistreatment.

He probably want’s God to go blow something up.  He wants to see the royal palace crumble in upon itself and take the king and queen and their minions to an early grave.  Maybe he wants people to be afraid of him like he is afraid of the king and queen.  We may not know the specifics of what he wants, but we do know that he is feeling deeply sorry for himself and wants God to get up and do something about it.

What do we want God to do?  What kind of power do we want God to show?  Human beings like Ahab and Jezebel, caught up in human, worldly power, love to demonstrate their power through threats and violence.  They have no qualms about doing harm to others to make a point.  They love to intimidate, and can’t stand it when someone does not back down. 

Maybe Elijah was wishing for some of that kind of power.  In fact, he had recently claimed for himself that kind of power in the contest between the prophets and their gods at Mt. Carmel.  He arranged a great demonstration of the power of God, and he ridiculed the failure of the priests of the false gods of Ba’al and his pantheon.  But Elijah seems to have been carried away by success.  The God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Milpah, the God of Israel had rained down fire to consume the sacrifice and the altar and the water around it and even burn the dirt on which they built it.  The prophets of Ba’al had no success.  In a fury, Elijah turns the people on the false prophets to lynch and murder them.  Nowhere in the instructions Elijah received did God say to commit mass murder as a sign of victory.  Having taken up violence as the way to victory, Elijah found himself caught up in the unending cycle of violence.  Angry that he had done such a deed against the priests, Ahab and Jezebel vowed to get revenge.  And thus the cycle continued. 

Now, it seems, Elijah thinks he is about to get swallowed up in this orgy of bloodshed.  He doesn’t have an army at his beck and call.  So he is hoping God will intervene with power to confront power.  In that frame of mind, Elijah gets instructions from God.  God says to step outside the cave onto the mountain and await further communication when God passes by the mountain.  So Elijah steps out there.

What did he want from God?  Did he want to see some kind of unbridled power?  Is that what Elijah was believing that the exercise of power should be—intimidation, violence, and destruction?  Far too often, men in our culture have accepted the false belief that real power is demonstrated through rage and violence.  For instance, Nathan McCall tells the story of growing up in Virginia Beach in a community where rage and power were held in awe.  He says that even if a boy did not want to be violent, it was pushed upon him by a culture that tested boys by their willingness to “go off on” somebody.  Gaining respect and surviving, as he tells it, depended heavily on people thinking a boy might just go crazy and lose all control in a violent rage.

Another feature of that cultural milieu, according to McCall, was the understanding that boys could victimize girls at will.  He describes horrible events that destroyed young women’s lives simply at the whim and opportunity of young men to employ violence to get their way.  Such sexual abuse through violent control was part of what the culture told the boys would make them into men.  McCall said it was a terrible way to believe the world should work.  He reports that he lives with guilt for what he stood by and saw happening around him and for the posturing he did to get by.

Like McCall had to learn that power does not have to mean violence and rage, Elijah had a lesson to learn as well.  He stepped outside the cave as instructed.  There on the mountainside, he began to observe a great spectacle of nature’s power.

First he observed a great wind so powerful it was dislodging boulders and breaking them against one another, splitting rocks off the mountainside.  Surely, Elijah must have thought, this is God.  God could send stones crushing my enemies and breaking down their strongholds.  Maybe he wished that he could have a voice like that wind.  A great terrifying, bellowing voice of anger and rage would go far in frightening his enemies.

Too often, fathers get caught up in a rage, shouting and chastising, berating and belittling.  Consequently, too many children grow up wondering if Dad really loves them or if Dad is always angry with them.  Lord, I have prayed in confession and sought forgiveness far too often for the times I let my anger slip over into shouting and rage, intimidating and frightening my children.  To exercise power through rage is not really power, but weakness.  It shows the inability to control one’s emotions and to solve problems with reason and creativity.  It shows the failure of patience and compassion.  Elijah learned the lesson here, because he found that God was not in the great rock-busting wind.

As Elijah continued to wait, he saw, and surely felt beneath his feet, a great earthquake.  The mountainside shook.  The other mountains, hills, and valleys around rumbled and moved.  The power of an earthquake frightens people.  Elijah may have wished to be able to shake the ground in Samaria under the palace of Ahab until it collapsed to the ground.  He probably thought that if God would repeat this back in Israel, there would not be any reason to still be afraid of the king and queen. 

Tearing things up, throwing things down, knocking things over—sometimes we are fooled into believing that this how to show power.  Fathers sometimes reach their wits’ end, that is the end of their creative and rational thinking, and start knocking things around.  Not merely the fear-inducing booming voice, but now also the physical harm becomes a way to demonstrate power.  But such power has no ability to excite love and loyalty.  It is a very limited and toxic form of power that intimidates and undermines relationships. 

I have far too many times overheard the conversation among men that they need to show their families who is the boss, and the implication is that pushing people around or smacking people around is the way a man stays in charge.  But this is not the way of God.  Jesus came as a friend and servant, not as a bully.  There was no place in his world for that kind of harmful interaction.  In fact, Jesus warned the crowds listening to him one day that if they might be inclined to harm a child, they should think twice and figure out how to stop themselves.  He suggested they go down to the grist mill and pick up the two-ton grinding stone and put it around their necks.  He said then they should go over and throw themselves into the sea.  Drowned under a two-ton weight, they would be better off than if they did harm to a child. 

Power does not come from violent behavior toward our loved ones.  Even if we want to blame them for provoking us, Christian virtue says we should rise above the debasing temptation to violence.  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  Elijah realized quickly that although the earthquake was a spectacle, God was not in it.  He was still waiting to hear from God.

Then a fire began to spread across the mountainside.  Wildfires, forest fires, brush fires, do great damage.  Every summer we see news reports of fires in Florida or Texas or California or some other place, pushed by hot winds and fueled by dry vegetation.  They rapidly sweep across countryside, hills, and valleys.  Firefighters get caught in their path and lose their lives.  Homeowners evacuate and return to find charred remains of their homes.  Certainly a fire is powerful through the heat of destruction.

Fire is often a weapon of war.  Setting fire to crops and cities has been a strategy to weaken the enemy through starvation and lack of shelter.  Firebombing industrial cities using carpet bombing as a weapon of mass destruction has left scars and resentment across the world.  Fire is so destructive that the Bible often uses it as an image of the utter destruction that evil brings upon God’s creation and of unending suffering for those who turn against God.

Fathers may be tempted to let loose their anger like a fire to demonstrate power, but when they burn the bridges of their relationships there may be no obvious path to recovery.  Destroying relationships through trying to control or damage the egos of others may seem to be powerful, but it is a self-destructive path.  Driving away those we love destroys us as well.  It isolates us and leaves us stewing in our own self-justifications away from anyone who cares for us.  God did not make us to be lonely, solitary beings. 

Neither Omar Mateen nor Dylan Roof found the path to true power.  They thought power came through destroying others.  Dylan had a moment of uncertainty, he says.  He began to wonder whether it was right to kill people who had been so warm and welcoming to him.  But he still had this distorted, upside-down view of power, so he shouted his accusations and fired his bullets into the gathered people of God in Mother Emanuel AME Church one year ago.  And last week, Omar decided the notoriety of killing a crowd of people was more important than the sustained relationships of his family and friends.  He would show everyone his empty power as a final act of self-destruction.  This is not what God made us to be, and it is not what power is in human relationships.  God made us for community.  Strengthening relationships with love is God’s plan for fathers.  In the wake of these destructive events, when young men thought their path to power in the world should come through violence, the church has a crucial witness of love to offer to all those who suffer from such outrage and violence.  God has made us for love, each one of us, in all of our differences.

Elijah may have thought that a fire sweeping across the land would solve all of his problems.  But as the fire passed by and displayed its destructive power, Elijah realized that God was not in it.  God’s power was not to be demonstrated in destruction. 

The wind, the earthquake, and the fire had passed, each with its semblance of power.  But Elijah was rebuked by their emptiness.  They were sound and fury, signifying nothing.  They were not the way of God.  And when they all passed, all that was left was “sheer silence,” the barest of sounds, a whisper, a breath, a rustle of wind.  The King James Version calls it a “still, small voice.”  The rabbis speak of “the daughter of a voice,” something smaller and more delicate than anything we might bellow.  God’s greatness and uniqueness is such that God has no vocal chords as we do.  God is not possessed of a mouth and tongue as we use for speech.  God is Spirit, and the association of Spirit with wind and breath in the biblical languages gives us an idea of how the Israelites, and Elijah among them, might imagine the Word of God coming to them.  In this blessed quietness, this holy quietness, Elijah must open his heart, his mind, his ears to hear what God will say.  Not through destructive power and spectacle and intimidating noise, but through a faint breeze, a barely-heard whisper, an intimate shared conversation, God speaks to Elijah.

In all his arrogance and self-pity and confusion, Elijah is finally getting the point.  God is finally getting through to him.  So Elijah steps out from whatever protected spot he had sought during the wind, earthquake, and fire.  He wants to be all ears for God’s voice, this still small voice of calm, this tiny wind that has the power to rule all creation.  Elijah steps out to listen.  He covers his face, in awe of the moment of being in God’s presence so directly.

It’s not like he could give up on his self-pity.  He starts in again to whine about his situation.  He thinks he is God’s only asset, God’s only faithful one.  He believes his end is near.  But God doesn’t address the problems Elijah can’t get off his mind.  Instead he starts giving instructions.  Today’s reading only includes the first line, which is telling Elijah to start walking toward Damascus to get ready to do another task.  The story goes on to reveal that from God’s point of view, it is time for all these players to retire.  Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah have reached the end of their days of leadership.  New rulers and a new prophet are about to arise, and Elijah will help anoint them to their task.

But the answer Elijah gets right off the bat is that power comes not from rage and violence and destruction, but it comes from getting down to the work that God has given him.  Instead of running away, hiding out, and plotting for how to destroy his enemies, God want’s Elijah to set about obediently helping to put the torn up world back in order.  God will not be without a witness, and before Elijah is off the scene, there will be a new prophet to arise.  God will not long tolerate injustice, so there must be judgment on the evil that rulers do.  But as far as Elijah is concerned, God has some work for him to get started on, so he needs to get moving.

The power that God has given us as fathers is to do the work of building good relationships.  Sharing in the joys and struggles of others rather than dominating them is the path to a life of joy.  In the Letter to the Galatians, Paul goes on to describe the way the power of the Holy Spirit can work in us.  The fruit will be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Patience, not rage.  Kindness, not intimidation.  Gentleness, not violence.  Faithfulness, not destroyed relationships.  Peace, not conflict.  Self-control, not going off on people or losing it.  Joy, not anger.  Love that builds up and strengthens oneself and all those around us.  That is what we put on when we put on Christ in baptism.

The gospel lesson for today comes from Luke 8.  It is a familiar story of Jesus’ visit to a remote village, the country of the Gerasenes.  When he came on land on the east coast of the Sea of Galilee, he encountered a man living among the tombs, naked, frenzied, wounded, scarred, and enraged.  The man was living the opposite of what God intended for him.  What had driven him to this condition?  Was he mentally ill?  The gospel story describes him as possessed of many demons.  Had he destroyed all his relationships and through violence gotten himself thrown out of town?  Certainly people feared him, for they chained him, although unsuccessfully.  His rage, his violence, had destroyed his life.

But when Jesus comes to him, he heals all that is broken in him.  The demons are driven away.  The man comes to himself.  They help him get cleaned up, and perhaps tend to his wounds.  The get him dressed decently in clothes.  The man is, as the text says, “clothed and in his right mind.”  People did not know whether to trust that or not.  They were afraid of him and of Jesus.  But Jesus comforts the lonely man.  He tells him he has a job to do.  Having turned from his previous destructive ways, Jesus says to share his life and hope with others.  He says to go back to his home.  You know there are some broken relationships.  People are going to be afraid, but they need to hear how God has changed him.  He needs to testify of all that God has done for him.

This is the power that God gives us.  It is not a power of intimidation and threats.  It is a power of joy and thankfulness.  It is the power that comes from knowing who we are and whose we are.  God has work for us to do—to build loving relationships, to serve one another, to bless one another.  There is a way of living in the power of the Holy Spirit.  This is what God has called fathers to do.

As many as have been baptized in Christ have also clothed yourselves with Christ.  You are all dressed up in Jesus.  Your presentation to the world is of the way of life Jesus lived.  Step into that work God has for you.  Step up to love.  Step up to patience.  Step up to gentleness.  Step up to faithfulness.  Step up to Spirit-filled living.  Open your ears to hear the breath of God’s Spirit guiding you to do the work God has called you to do.  Lay aside every encumbrance of empty, false power.  Be clothed with Jesus Christ.  Get decked out with meekness, peacemaking, and hunger for justice.  Gussy up with a pure heart, a humble spirit, and good works.  Rock that outfit with love of God and love of neighbor and love of enemies.  Clothe yourselves in Christ Jesus.  Unite yourselves to him and to one another.  In that unity, we rest and live in true power, in the power of God who loves and made us for love.

Men Claiming Divine Right to Enslave and Rape Women

It's not something new, but it's back in the headlines this week.  With no effort to hide it, the quasi-governmental structures of ISIS have developed rules and institutions to govern and bless sexual slavery of women, better known as rape.  Moreover, they claim that they do so on the basis of the findings of a specific research assignment given to scholars who delved into the traditions of their faith.  Having just noted (in a previous post) Octavia Butler's narration of sex trafficking and rape in a future post-apocalyptic world (not in any way implicating Islam or the Quran in her account), it struck me that her book was again highly relevant for my continued reflection.  To quote from the beginning of the NY Times article

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

This morning I heard a commentator on the radio say, with reference to sex-slavery and other recent stories about ISIS that this is a new kind of entity in history, one we have not dealt with before.  I think that exaggeration was part of an argument to display a contrast between Al Quaeda and ISIS, but it is clearly not true that there have not been other groups who justified ethnic cleansing, rape, slavery, sex-trafficking, and genocide, either in the name of religious beliefs or of political power.

The Times article offers a fairly extensive analysis of the orchestrated and highly organized process by which thousands of Yazidi women and girls in particular have been kidnapped, documented, advertised, displayed, and sold as sex-slaves.  We are rightly appalled.  It tells about very young men who have bought these women and girls as well as bought into the ideology that justifies their rape.  From the outside, it is not hard to offer the criticism that very young, lonely warriors are susceptible the ideological framing of rape as pious duty.  They have given their all to a divine cause which includes establishing a righteous patriarchy.  They are ready to go to their deaths, and this heroic self-understanding can become justification for acts one might not otherwise believe right.

It is very easy for people in our culture to see this as a terror originating in Islam.  Certainly Islam does not escape all critique for justifying slavery or oppression of women.  On the other hand, neither do Christianity or Judaism.  The perspective of any of these faiths toward slavery has not been purely abolitionist, and perhaps for the majority of their histories they at times endorsed and certainly tolerated slavery and men's control over women's bodies and sex.

There is a long (thousands of years) history of writing about men claiming the right to force sex upon women.  Scholars argue about whether such ideas ever existed as codified law or were widely practiced.  Priests or kings seem at times to have claimed the right to first sexual relations with women who would marry, although actually exercising that right would be hard to organize.  It may have been practiced less often than used as a threat to demand a tax or tribute to the ruler.  In ancient Roman times, this was called in Latin the ius primae noctis, or the right to the first night.  The medieval term from from French was droit du seigneur, or right of the Lord.  Scholars of European history have claimed they find no evidence that such a practice was prominent in medieval society.  Yet it certainly shows up among the demands presented in late medieval and reformation era peasant revolts. 

For instance, in a document known as "To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry" (May 1525), the anonymous author cites the abuse of the New Testament to provide theological justification for the oppressive practices of the nobility, including sexual abuse of women (Michael Baylor, The Radical Reformation).

Do not let yourselves be led astray and blinded to any degree because every day the authorities endlessly repeat what the Apostle Peter says in I Peter 2:  "You should be submissive to your lords, even if they are rogues," etc. ... St Peter's view means something very different; for according to their interpretation, we would have to deliver our pious wives and children to them, so that they could satisfy their lust with them (109).

Various peasant uprisings cited this lordly claim to sexual rights as one cause of their revolt.  The existence of this tradition, even if not widely practiced, demonstrates a cultural assumption about the availability of women for sex at the will of men. 

More present for the experience of people in the USA is the recent history of enslaved African Americans.  I need not repeat the theological justification for slavery that emerged in the churches of the US and other European-influenced cultures.  One element of this domination system was the slave-holder's claim over the sexual lives of slaves, especially female slaves.  Extensive testimony from former slaves documents this history, such as the National Humanities Center document "On Slaveholders' Sexual Abuse of Slaves,"

A Washington Post article, "A Tender Spot in Master Slave Relations," reviews some of the literature on the subject of the rape of slave women.  Citing one book by Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879, the article turns to a comment made by Julian Bond, claiming that the book's stories of slave women bearing mixed race children was also his own family history.

Bond said: "I often talk about that history. My great-grandmother was a slave. She had been given to a woman as a wedding present, and when the bride became pregnant, the bride's husband, my great-grandmother's owner and master, exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress. He was a Presbyterian minister. Two children came from that union, James Bond and Henry Bond, and James Bond was my grandfather."

A minister claiming the right to his slave's body gives iconic representation to the abuse of theology to support the sexual will of men in power.

I pray that the despicable practices revealed about ISIS will end, and that good people will continue working to bring them to an end.  They are one part of the horror of modern slavery and sex trafficking including other regional quasi-governmental groups such as The Lord's Resistance Army in East Africa or systematic sex-trafficking along the Interstate Highway System in the United States.  It's a recurrent political dynamic of human societies, and one that any follower of Jesus must refuse to accept.  All human beings are created in the image of God, not only males.  Moreover, in Christ the divisions we would create to build systems of domination are rejected.  "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  I recognize that interpreting that verse would be another long essay.  For now, let it stand as a Christian rejection of domination systems, including patriarchal and classist claims for domination over women's sexual lives.

Kephalé, the English Word "Head," and a Tradition of Misreading the Bible

Recently I posted a short sermon I gave for part of a Men's Day observance in a Baptist Church.  I have long had mixed feelings about Men's Day.  It is not one of those days that fits into the centuries-old church calendar that observes days for the saints and an annual cycle of seasons that brings attention to the anticipation, the birth, the life, the passion, the resurrection, and the reign of Jesus Christ.  It is, however, part of another liturgical calendar that evolved over decades to address certain aspects of church life.  There is a Women's Day, and there is a Men's Day, and in some churches these are big annual events.

These days have significance in a number of ways.  Women's Day has its origin in a 1906 proposal by Nannie Helen Burroughs, who suggested a day when women in National Baptist Churches could lead in educating and motivating the churches for Foreign Missions.  It's purpose then includes promotion of missionary work, fund-raising for missions, and elevation of women to the opportunity to lead, speak out, and exercise gifts in the church.  It was of a piece with the rise of Women's Clubs organized for community betterment, including the kind of work done by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the anti-lynching campaign and the founding of black educational and social institutions.

Men's Day does not have the same specific historical origins, but seems to have grown up in many ways as a complementary observance to address the need for men to take up their part in the work of the church, to serve, to teach, and to lead.  It is not uncommon for it to include a theme around the "missing" men in the life of the churches that seem often to be populated primarily by women.  So Women's Day is on one hand an effort to elevate the place of women in institutions that display a tradition of patriarchy, and Men's Day is on the other hand an effort to draw in and encourage more male discipleship.

Having grown up Baptist, whether among white or black Baptists, I have worshiped and served in institutions steeped in patriarchal tradition.  In my early adult years, I realized the failure of such churches to listen to the message of Pentecost and the momentum of the New Testament writings toward full equality of men and women in families, in church leadership, and in relation to God.  And still today, that tradition weighs heavy in the churches with which I associate. 

I'm not saying there has been no change.  I commune now in a church which has women in all levels of leadership, including ordained ministers and deacons, as well as various offices and roles of influence.  It is not surprising at all to have a woman preach, pray, or lead worship in any way.  Even so, the rhetoric of hierarchy and male leadership still crops up at times, and it remains assumed by many in the community of faith.  Moreover, our church is on the more progressive end of a continuum; we have not had a woman as senior pastor, but women's calling and capacity for leadership is not a question.  On the other hand, many churches with which we cooperate and associate, probably a very large majority of them, continue to exclude women from official recognition in church leadership, such as preaching, serving as a deacon, or receiving ordination.

So I always approach Men's Day and Women's Day with a level of trepidation, knowing how they easily become a platform to recite and reinstate patriarchal structures as if they are the absolute command of God for human flourishing.  The assumed primacy of the male in family, church, and society remains a powerful idea.  I am always thankful, as I was on the night that I preached about the sin of seeking to control the world and the people in it, when the observance does not morph into a rally for boosting the patriarchy.

There is an important agenda in black churches when it comes to encouraging men to rise into their gifts and callings.  The events around the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Travon Martin, to name only a few, symbolize the difficulties black men face in trying to make their way in U.S. society.  The deeply imbedded prejudices and fears which assume to know that black men are up to no good stand in the way of education, jobs, economic stability, and empowerment.  We ought to be encouraging black men to defy the social pressures and assumptions that would try to keep them marginalized.  That's why I believe in the agenda of Men's Day.

Womanist thought seeks to expand our notions of gender politics and community responsibility to avoid pitting some people against others.  As Marcia Riggs has demonstrated, the heritage of the Black Women's Clubs is not elevation of women at men's expense, not elevation of the middle class at the poor's expense.  It's core was the motto, "Lifting As We Climb."  Womanism shares that spirit of believing that the it is not possible for some in the community to achieve what is good for them if they do so by holding down or putting down others.  It must be a general community uplift, a devotion to the common good.  To use biblical language, it is a commitment to having "no one in need among us."

Men's and women's achievement and advancement go hand in hand.  In this way, the church seeks to fulfill the message of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians, when he told them that their baptism gave them a new birth into a new world and a new life.  They were changed beings, no longer defined by the biases of culture from which they had come.  It was a new culture of equality:

As many of you who have been dipped in the dye of Christ have also gotten dressed up in Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (my translation).

Those so-called natural divisions which would divide us are not any longer relevant.  There is a new kind of freedom for living according to the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives freely to whomever the Holy Spirit wills.

The pentecostal faith of the church acknowledges that the first bearers of the gospel of the resurrected Lord were women who went to his tomb on Sunday and discovered he was risen.  Mary Magdalene, one of his companions in life was the one who first met him in the resurrection.  Jesus' followers remembered how he did not care about the disreputable behavior of talking with a divorced and cohabitating Samaritan woman, outcast by her community.  They remembered that he praised Mary of Bethany for her devotion to learning that traditionally was a role assigned to men only.  And Peter preached from the Prophet Joel's words which said that both men and women would prophesy, that is they would preach and deliver a word of God.  Remnants of the early church in the New Testament writings indicate the leadership of women like Lydia, Phoebe, and Chloe.

Not all New Testament texts are so easily wrenched from patriarchal thinking.  Among the ones that is commonly used to justify patriarchy is 1 Corinthians 11.  It contains a formulaic set of parallel statements that seem at first to be a claim on behalf of hierarchy in patriarchal form.  That is because of the word "head" in English, translated from the Greek kephalé.

In English, the "head" man is the one in charge.  We have "Department Heads" and "head linesmen" and most prominently, "heads of state."  In English history, the beheading of Charles I was a public symbol of removing the monarchical authority from over the people.  So the English word "head" connotes hierarchy and authority.  There is a concept of "headship" in English that tampers with our cultural biases when we read verse 3.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ (NRSV).

Greek is not the same.  Certainly Greek culture has its own symbols of hierarchy and a heritage of patriarchy.  Yet the language does not rely on the image of the head to portray hierarchy and authority.  There are many meanings, both literal and figurative, for the word kephalé.  It can mean the anatomical head on a human or other animal.  It can mean a part of a plant that in certain ways is similar to the head on an animal.  It can mean the top piece, or crowning piece of something (not to be confused with the English crown as a symbol of rulership).  It can often mean the headwaters of a stream, and by analogy the source of something. 

Lexicons of ancient Greek language give many possible meanings for the word kephalé, but there seem to be no instances which indicate that Greeks used it to mean the boss, the ruler, the one in charge.  I am thankful for the summary of various sources assembled by Laurie Fasullo of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as she made the case that it is inappropriate to insert "headship" as authority into a reading of Pauline texts and other New Testament texts.  I will not try to duplicate all of her interesting and excellent work. 

If 1 Corinthians 11:3 should not be read to indicate that there is a grand hierarchy in which women or wives are ontologically subordinate and men in authority, then how should we read it.  Fasullo and others convincingly argue that talking about heads here is best understood as emphasizing the unity of the two elements being named.  Christ is clearly not eternally and ontologically subordinate to God.  So some other relationship is being indicated here.  If Paul is speaking in his rabbinic voice, then he may be pointing us back to the Genesis story of the woman's creation from a rib of the man, and thus saying that the man is the source of the woman, and thereby we see that they are made of one substance and inseparably linked.  In the same way, humanity is linked to Christ, who is the true human, the Second and True Adam, and thus the source of the man.  Christ, the beloved, is eternally begotten of the lover, the Father, and is inseparably linked and coequal, fully God.  To say head here is to use the word in its sense of being the source and therefore the same.

Wayne Grudem is the primary scholar in defense of the notion of "head" as "headship."  Scholars who disagree with him have offered a pretty strong critique of the arguments he published in the 1980s.  So in 2001 he published an updated argument to take on various newer scholarly works with which he disagreed.  He attempted to import the popular U.S. evangelical notion of hierarchy equivocally called equality through a conception of "complementarity."  Complementarity is the evangelical/fundamentalist word for equality of status combined with differentiation of roles, with those superordinate and subordinate roles ontologically and essentially mapped onto gender.

Grudem accused his opponents of claiming their sources make arguments that are not actually present, or what one would call an "argument from silence."  Lacking any direct claim, they claim too much for his interpretation.  Yet he does the same, claiming that the misreading by Catherine Kroeger of Chrysostom's comments on 1 Corinthians 11:3 failed to recognize that Grudem's position was required to make sense of them.  Yet Grudem ends up contradicting Chrysostom, not agreeing with him.  He claims the subordination of Jesus Christ as an essential status, taken on voluntarily, and yet by implication from eternity to eternity.  This is exactly what Chrysostom is battling, so it makes no sense that he would have agreed with Grudem's subordinationist theology of the Trinity, even though Grudem believes that it is obvious and entailed in his words.

It seems, therefore, that the traditionalist view, bolstered by its champion Grudem, continues to rely on this equivocal use of the term equality to deny the very coequality of the persons of the Trinity as as way to justify an eternal inequality called equality in the subordination of women to men.

Did Jesus subordinate himself, take the form of a servant, and become like us?  Yes.  And Jesus has been highly exalted.  The subordination of one person of the Trinity to another is shared among all three persons.  This is the nature of the perfect communication of all things between the persons, coeternally existing in coequality, supreme communicability, complete consubstantiality, perfect configurability, and unsurpassable mutual intimacy. 

Can women reasonably respond to Christian faith through similar voluntary subordination?  Could a marriage reasonably allow one person to exercise most or all leadership?  Yes to both of these.  Many blessed unions have appeared in cultural conditions of patriarchy.  Yet the Letter to the Corinthians cannot be used to demand that this is the inherent ontology of God's creation of humanity.  Thus, a marriage can also reasonably allow partners to find their path of mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21) and offer themselves to one another as servants, bucking the cultural expectations so that both live into the image of Christ.  Nothing in this text says a man should claim his right to be in charge. 

What that means is that contrary to their claim to read the plain sense of the text, using a grammatico-historical method of interpretation to find the one meaning of the text, evangelicals are using an allegorical method of interpretation.  This is exactly what I heard recently.  Taking the English use of the word "head" in its symbolism as authority and ruler, the interpreter began to discuss the various features of the head and their significance for leading and being in charge.  In similar manner, the other parts of the body which are not the head were held up in contrast (feet, tail, etc.) to indicate what a person in charge was not supposed to be.  It is an abuse of allegory to do what allegory often does--reinforce cultural assumptions. 

A colleague of mine, Curtis Freeman, has written a scholarly article on 1 Corinthians 11:3, criticizing Grudem's readings of the theologians of the early centuries of the church.  I look forward to reading that when it is published soon, and I will plan to share a link to it or summary of it when it becomes available.

Faith and Faithfulness, Having Faith and Being Faithful

Listening to conversation about Hebrews 11 drove home the need for better training in Bible reading.  The verse under discussion was 11:7:

By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir to the righteousness that is in accordance with faith (NRSV).

It could have been most any verse in this chapter my Dad often referred to as "the roll call of faith."  Here, looking back at the story of Noah, forms of the Greek pistis occur twice, and some translators add a third implied "faith."  The noun is here translated "faith."  The verb form, pisteuo, is usually translated "believe." 

In the contemporary church, perhaps especially in the traditions born of the Enlightenment and the United States "nation with the soul of a church," these terms faith and believe take on a highly intellectual aspect.  That is, we tend to think of faith as believing in something, or in other words, accepting certain statements to be true.  Sometimes this aspect of faith is called "assent" to propositions or confessional statements.  Faith or belief, in this way, is a mental act, a matching of mind to concepts embedded in sentences.  "Jesus is the Son of God" is such a statement.  Popular notions of faith might tend toward, "Yes, I buy that.  I accept that.  That is what I think.  Thus, I have faith in that."

Greek (and Hebrew for that matter, if I were to go into another ancient language of scripture) do not make such an easy distinction.  I'm not going to cite numbers of New Testament and extrabiblical texts to provide statistical support, but let it suffice to say that very few, if any, uses of these words in Greek literature indicate this kind of mental act of assent.  Faith as assent is an emptying out of scriptural reasoning and replacing it with something alien.  For scriptural reasoning, faith or belief takes on richer meaning that may require more than one English word to adequately express.

For those who think I am being excessively picky or misrepresenting the churches' conversations about faith, let me first acknowledge that I would be lying to say that many preachers, teachers, and other church folks have regularly pointed out to me that faith means "trust," and believing means "trusting in."  The Hebrews text above makes this very clear through contextual analysis, without even having to look beyond the single verse.  Warned by God, Noah respected the warning.  That respect was trust in what God had revealed to Noah.  Faith in God means trust in God.  Trust in God means putting one's life in God's hands.  Trust in God means accepting as reliable what God has said.

This is more than simple assent.  It is relying on God.  It is resting and moving within the embrace of God, walking on the ground laid out for us by God. 

And this relying, resting, walking, and moving presses our understanding toward the additional aspect of scriptural reasoning with the words faith and believe.  Trust is nothing without acting on it.  Faith is nothing without faithfulness.  Noah's trust included a confidence to act on God's guidance, even against the conventional wisdom of his day.  As the Hebrews text says, Noah respected what God had said and built an ark on dry land when there had been no rain since who knows when.  The righteousness (or justice, an other word for another post) that comes by faith is not based on a person's knowledge, or intellectual assent.  It is not a mental righteousness.  The righteousness that comes by faith is demonstrated in faithfulness.  It is the confident action that comes from trusting God.  It is the life lived as God has called.

This complexity is why I encourage my seminary students, and my Sunday school classes, to exercise discipline as Bible readers.  When they come to the words "faith" or "have faith" or "believe," they should practice substituting that additional aspect of pistis and pisteuo which does not come through in contemporary English:  faithfulness or be faithful.  Thus, after reading Hebrews 11:7 in the NRSV, I want to go back and reread

By faithfulness Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir to the righteousness that is in accordance with faithfulness (NRSV, adapted).

It emphasizes the acting in confidence based on trust that is crucial for a biblical understanding of faith.  Moreover, the discipline reminds me that Bible reading is more than first impressions.  It is more than making a scriptural text conform to my cultural biases and mean whatever pops into my head.  It is disciplined work, and there are great mysteries to be unfolded as I continue to search this deep sea of divine wisdom passing through and into earthen vessels.

Just for the sake of expanding this point, let me give a few other examples.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who is faithful to him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16, NRSV, adapted).

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who is faithful, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faithfulness for faithfulness; as it is written, The one who is righteous will live by faithfulness (Romans 1:16-17, NRSV, adapted).

Just as Abraham was faithful to God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, so, you see, those who are faithful are the descendants of Abraham.  And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faithfulness, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.  For this reason, those who are faithful are blessed with Abraham who was faithful (Galatians 3:6-9, NRSV, adapted).

How else would Abraham's belief appear than in his faithful obedience to God's call to go to another land?  Those who by faithfulness are righteous shall live.  To do what God commands demonstrates the trust that encompasses the life of faith/faithfulness.

Not What You Show, But What You Sow

(Preached at Mount Level Missionary Baptist Church on July 4, 2010)

Galatians 6:7-16

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.  If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. 

So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.  So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

(See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!)

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised--only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.  Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh.

May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!

As for those who will follow this rule--peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

   

         When the Apostle Paul wrote to the churches in the Galatian region, he did not bother with many of the usual formalities and politeness.  It was not a model of careful diplomatic language geared to avoid insult or hurt feelings.  He starts out calling them deserters; then, he moves on to call down a curse from God.  He accuses them of being people pleasers.  After reminding them that he is not afraid to get all up on someone’s face, no matter what kind of big shot that person may be, the he calls them a bunch of fools who are acting like someone has cast a spell on them and turned them stupid.  And he does all of that by the first verse of the third chapter, in what we might call his introduction.  If a preacher had come and said that kind of stuff in her church, my momma would likely have said that she couldn’t believe he had the “gall” to talk that way.  I can hear the whispering as people leave the service, “Of all the nerve!”

         Apparently the Apostle Paul thought there was something seriously at stake in the problems the Galatian churches were struggling with.  Something was going on that could doom their whole existence as a church of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Somehow they had gotten off track so dangerously that they might end up on the wrong road.

         The symbolic issue at the center of the argument was circumcision. For Israel, the people of the covenant, circumcision was a central mark of their identity and faithfulness.  Paul, an heir of the covenant both by birth and by training, was among the circumcised.  Yet he had learned from the gospel of Jesus Christ that he was a chief among sinners, that his righteousness symbolized in his circumcision was as filthy rags when compared to the surpassing greatness of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.  He was struck down by the power of the gospel, shaken and awakened to the new creation revealed in the government-sanctioned murder of Jesus Christ.  The most pious of the circumcised plotted and shared the ugly deed of putting that kind and loving man to death, and this apostle had previously approved of their agenda one hundred percent.

         In chapter two he wrote of this new creation in words dear to many of us.  “For through works of the law, I died to the law, so that I might live to God.  I have been crucified (I have been executed) with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  (I in him, and he in me.)  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faithfulness to the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  In a new creation, all of us creatures take on a new identity.  Uniting with Jesus relocates our origin, our purpose, and our destiny in the story of God’s redeeming love.

In the new creation, our messed-up order and structures get replaced by a way we did not envision.  It is a way that does not legislate according to bloodline or property or skin color or language or pants or dresses or what is inside them.  Because of our baptism into Jesus, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female.”  In so many ways we try to make it seem that some are better than others, some more deserving, some more beautiful, some more inherently good, some more dignified, some more valuable.  We want to believe that something about us makes us superior and others inferior.  If we don’t feel comfortable just coming out and saying it, we figure out a way to say it in code.

In Galatia, the church people had let circumcision become a code for superiority.  In that kind of thinking, men who had obeyed the law to be circumcised had reached a higher level of being God’s people.  This focus on circumcision encoded all kinds of political structures into a distorted and perverted gospel.  Since it was primarily those born into Jewish families who would have been circumcised, the Galatian church politics divided them by nationality.  Greeks, who were unlikely to have been circumcised, could be seen as residing at a lower level of the faith. 

From Paul’s description, the fascination with circumcision as a sign of faithfulness in Galatian churches clearly was linked to status.  A group who had a reputation as “pillars of the church” were known as sticklers for the legalism when it came to the law.  When others were envious or overly impressed by these pillars, they aspired to be like them in order to share their rank or status.  If they could get the approval of the pillars, get accepted into the in-group, join the popular crowd, then people would look up to them, too.  The confusion brought on by such political thinking is that getting into the popular crowd means for some people that God ranks them above someone else.  They encoded status and rank onto circumcision.

Finally, because the law prescribed circumcision for males only, the politics of gender relations got mixed up in these churches.  As an aside, let me note that these cultures did not practice female genital mutilation, a tradition wrongly labeled as circumcision with very different effects on health and the quality of life.  The circumcision of which Paul is writing about was a mark on the flesh of a man.  Since they had encoded it with bloodline and rank, by implication women could not achieve the higher rank of the circumcised. 

I think Paul was right to see how the controversy over circumcision had become a ticking time bomb, ready to destroy the churches in Galatia, and perhaps elsewhere.  In the new creation, Paul had come to see that things like circumcision and its political meanings had been unmasked as mere showiness, smoke and mirrors, false pretenses of superiority or blessedness.  He wrote, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faithfulness working through love.”

That is why in this closing section of the letter, Paul has tried to sum it up by saying that it is not what you show, but what you sow.  Showing off your skin color, your language, your gender power, your conspicuous consumption, or even your pretentious piosity amounts to nothing.  Actually it is worse than nothing because it is a false gospel leading us to ruin and degradation.  Putting on a show of faith leads to a dead end.  As Jesus said, “Everyone who cries ‘Lord!  Lord!’ will not enter the Kingdom of God.”  The pretentious Pharisee did not leave his loud and self-important prayer justified.  By contrast, he widow who quietly deposited her two pennies gave the greatest offering, drawing forth praise from our Lord.  Paul was suspicious of people in the church “who were reputed to be pillars.”  He suspected that they went about their lives promoting the idea of their own piety and importance rather than giving the glory to God.

Paul was addressing a problem in his time in which circumcision had become a code word for claiming superiority in the eyes of God.  In our day, circumcision is not a very comfortable subject for polite conversation since it brings our attention to private matters concerning genital organs and painful surgery.  Frankly, circumcision is not something churches in our time and place get in big arguments about.  Maybe that means we can just put the Letter to the Galatians aside and not mess with it anymore.  In that case, I guess I must be finished.

Just kidding!  Although we may not be arguing about circumcision does not mean that we are not still finding coded ways of trying to prove ourselves superior to one another and create a false gospel.  What better day than July 4^th to talk about a false gospel?  Frederick Douglass famously called out the white folks in Rochester, NY, in 1852 when they invited him to be their Independence Day speaker.  He pointed out to them the way that the idea of independence and liberty had become empty code for white supremacy.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Douglass could see the idolatry that permeated the celebration of the 4^th.  The idea of the United States as the beacon of liberty and the hope for all the nations was an empty idol.  Salvation built on violent domination is a false gospel.

The Apostle Paul claimed that circumcision had become an idol.  Making a “good showing in the flesh” did not amount to anything else than a big show, just like an idol is nothing but a dressed-up piece of wood, metal, or clay.  Nowadays we make our own kinds of idols.  The flag can become an idol.  I first began to recognize this a twenty years ago when there was a public controversy about burning the flag.  Men who were usually stoically unemotional in church became agitated and passionate to the point of weeping over the flag.  More recently, a citizen questioned a presidential candidate’s loyalty to the nation based on whether the candidate made it a habit to wear a flag-shaped lapel pin.  Making a good showing of loyalty to the flag can easily come to substitute for true love of God.

But making a show will not cut it.  Paul says it is like sowing to your own flesh.  It will be good to remind ourselves what Paul means when he compares flesh and spirit.  “Flesh” here does not mean the body.  In this case, flesh means turning away from what God would have us do, as opposed to Spirit which means turning toward what God would have us do.  Sowing to the flesh is devoting ourselves to something less than God’s purposes for us. 

No national emblem, no nation-state and its pretensions as the means of human salvation, deserves our highest loyalty.  The United States of America cannot save us, nor can the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Liberia, or any other throne, dominion, principality or power.  No pumped up image of a nation can give us what we long for. 

Sowing to the Spirit, on the other hand, devoting our whole selves and highest loyalties to God and God’s purposes, will save us.  When we try to rise above others by claiming superiority over them, it is just an empty show.  When we sow to the Spirit we follow in the way of Jesus by bearing one another’s burdens, by not growing weary in doing what is right, by living in faithfulness that works itself out in love.  Instead of greed, licentiousness, hatred, dissension, jealousy, and factions, sowing to the Spirit replaces these vices with the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Trying to hide our unrighteousness and vice behind a code of self-importance will not make it anything else but filthy rags.  In our day, image has become everything.  Trademarks and brands sell an image as much as they sell a product.  People choose clothing that advertises a brand, announcing to the world, “I’m a Coca-Cola person.” Or I’m an Old Navy, or Abercrombee, or Hollister person.  I’m a Chevy or Ford or Honda person.  I’m an Eagle or an Aggie.  I’m for Duke or Carolina.  We secretly hope that by identifying with a brand we will prove ourselves better than others.  We hold contempt for those who will not come and try to be like us. 

So to be unamerican becomes a grave sin in the eyes of those who sow to the flesh.  Those who speak another language are looked upon with disdain.  Any other nation which would claim for itself a measure of autonomy and dignity that might raise the price of a gallon of gas becomes an enemy.  But “do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.”  Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.  Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  Violence begets violence in a never-ending chain of destruction.  Eventually, the chickens come home to roost.

On this day we may appropriately honor the good done by our foremothers and forefathers.  We may honor ideals of a people without putting our trust in nations and empires.  But more importantly, we may love one another, live in peace with one another, share the joy of human fellowship, be patient with one another’s shortcomings, show kindness rather than claiming superiority, continue doing good to one another without demanding a reward, be faithful to God when the going gets tough, be gentle rather than pushing and shoving our way around, and always keep from elevating ourselves into the place of God.  If we can continue in well-doing, in doing what is right, we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.

May our prayer today be the prayer of the Apostle Paul as he closed out his letter in his own handwriting.  “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”  In praying this prayer, we turn away from the enclosures of race, of nation, of language, of gender domination, and we open ourselves to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.  Following this rule, we promote the peace of God’s people and we allow ourselves to be united to, yea to be grafted into, the Israel of God, beyond all national borders and boundaries, the true humanity.  “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!”  It is the pearl of great price, worth all that we have.  May we sow our lives to the Spirit.  May the fruit of God’s Spirit grow in us.  Not what we show, but what we sow.