Galatians 3:23-29
“One in Christ”
June 19, 2022 – Second Sunday after Pentecost
Japanese Americans told stories and showed us mementos of their service in the American military even while their families were confined to internment camps during World War II. The next morning, we got on a bus and rode to a storefront church near an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma. We heard a young South American tell of his struggle to come to the United States and gain legal status.
The following day, we got on the bus again and rode to central Washington and the huge Yakima Native American reservation. Indigenous people explained their struggles with prejudice and poverty. We went to a pow wow that night where, alongside their native dances and other activities, people whose ancestors and fellow tribes had suffered so much at the hands of white soldiers celebrated their own military service.
Our bus ride the last day took us to Portland where we had dinner in an African American church and heard the pastor tell us about that congregation’s work to revitalize their neighborhood and give young people there hope in a society where so much seems to be stacked against them.
If you haven’t picked up on it, the unifying factor in all those stops on our bus tour was that those we met were Christians, fellow believers. I was on what our Pacific Northwest Conference of Covenant churches calls, “Journey to Mosaic,” an in-person, direct exploration of what Paul says here in verse 28, “for all of you are one in Christ.”
I’ll come back to that idea of “mosaic” in a bit. For now, take a look at the whole of Galatians 3, maybe the entire letter. Paul was a little upset as he wrote to churches around what is now the central region of Turkey. The apostle was concerned that Christians there in Asia Minor had gotten off on the wrong track, were believing a false gospel, as he suggested right at the beginning in chapter 1, verses 7 to 9.
In Galatia some had decided that anyone who came to faith in Jesus needed to conform to the lifestyle, the religious law of those who first heard about and believed in Christ. The Gospel came first to Jewish people. So they thought that Jewish custom and practice set the standard for everyone coming later, whether Jewish or not. One huge part of that was the practice of circumcision for male Jews. Now the old guard was contending that the new folks, even Gentiles, must do the same. To follow Jesus, you had to live like a Jew, even if that was not your heritage.
According to some scholars, this is the first of Paul’s letters, the first epistle to people he had discipled in Jesus but was no longer near to give guidance. He’s worried, as he said in chapter 4 verse 11, that all his work preaching the Gospel to them may have been wasted. They’ve headed off, it feels to him, in some other direction. So, taking up a theme he will come back to as he writes to other churches, Paul tries to get them to see the difference between following some aspects of Jewish law and following Jesus, the difference between coming to God on the basis of customs which marked out their ethnic identity and coming to God on the basis of faith.
As you can see right at the beginning of our text, Paul’s worry was not that the law, the set of commandments God gave the Jewish people, was bad. Jesus Himself said that He did not come to abolish or overturn that Law, but to fulfill it. The problem was that those Jewish Christians had been brought up as Jews with the idea that their identity as people of God depended on certain very visible practices which were part of that law, things like circumcision, diet, and the observance of particular holy days.
Back up to verse 21 and you hear Paul ask rhetorically, “Is the law then opposed to the promises of God?” He immediately answers emphatically, “Certainly not!” The problem was not the law as a guide to righteous living and even for relationship with God. It was that some Jewish people imagined that those visible marks of identity God gave them in the law were the substance of what it was all about. Yet as Paul says about Abraham at beginning of the chapter, the substance was not about customs and ethnic identity. It was about faith.
So in the first verses of our text, Paul pictures the Jewish law, given through Moses, as a kind of stand-in guardian for children, keeping them safe and on good behavior. It sounds harsh in verse 23 when he says, “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith could be revealed,” but verse 24 goes on, “Therefore the law was our disciplinarian.” But the word in Greek is pedagogos, our “pedagogue.”
Now “pedagogue” and “pedagogy” in English basically have to do with teaching and instruction, but in the ancient world the pedagogue was more. He was a slave assigned to a young boy from a wealthy family as something like nanny, tutor, and protector all in one. He went wherever the boy went, taught him good manners, accompanied him to school, and helped him practice his lessons when he got home. He watched over the boy and helped him stay in line until he grew into a man. That’s what Paul said the Jewish law was meant to do for His people, to guard and guide them until Jesus came.
The final purpose of the law’s protection, when “Christ came,” at the end of verse 24, is “so that we might be justified by faith.” In verse 25, Paul says that justification by faith in Jesus makes the “disciplinarian” that watchful, protective “pedagogue,” no longer necessary. The children are growing up now by faith in Christ. But that’s not just true of Jewish believers. Verse 26 goes on, “for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Jews and Gentiles together in Christ are the children of God.
That is Paul’s whole argument here in chapter 3 of Galatians. Earlier in verse 8, he wrote “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the Gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’” In other words, Jesus leveled the playing field for coming to God, for what it means to be God’s child. Everyone gets there the same way, by faith.
Jewish marks of spiritual and ethnic identity were only accessible to some. That particular rite of circumcision, of which they were so proud, had always only applied to half the Jewish people. But now Paul in verse 27 begins “As many of you as were baptized into Christ…” Baptism in the name of Jesus is a mark of spiritual identity which is not just available to Jewish men, but to anyone who comes by faith to God through Christ His Son.
Notice Paul’s words, “baptized into Christ.” We often talk about inviting Jesus into us. We ask Him to live in our hearts, want to receive Him. And Paul in Colossians 1:27 does speak of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” But much more often the apostle spoke of Christians as being “in Christ.” By faith, marked by holy baptism, we are incorporated in Jesus, brought into His Body, which is what “incorporation” literally means.
That incorporation, that bringing into Christ, is why verse 27 goes on to say those baptized into Christ “have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Paul may have been referring to the fact that, in early Christian baptism, as Debbie shared with our Confirmation students a couple weeks ago, the new converts coming out of the water were given white robes to signify their new life in Jesus. They literally put on a sign of the fact that their lives were now totally wrapped up in Christ and in the Body of Christ which is the church.
Which all sets the stage for the incredible statement of verse 28. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ.” In the early church, and in the ancient world as a whole, those were the three big differences: ethnic, social, and gender difference. They are still huge differences between people in our own time. And Paul suddenly says those differences no longer exist because “all of you are one in Christ.”
It should be obvious, but I’ll still say it. Paul did not mean verse 28 literally. Paul did not imagine that faith in Jesus had or would erase the differences between ethnicities and cultures, or that social differences between rich and poor, masters and slaves in his time, would simply disappear. He could not possibly have thought that human differences between men and women would vanish. What he did mean was that, in Christ, in the church, those differences would and should no longer matter in the same way. In Christ, all are to be equal. No one is to be regarded as superior and no one as inferior. All those differences are taken up into an overarching and overriding unity, like in a mosaic.
A mosaic is a piece of art created by placing bits of different colored, even different shaped, stone or pottery into a pleasing pattern. Individual and distinct pieces fit together in a relationship with each other that is beautiful. That’s why our conference called our bus trip “Journey to Mosaic.” We went to view and experience how God wants to fit together the human mosaic of all our differences into one whole and beautiful Body of Christ.
The oneness and unity of a Christian mosaic is different from other ideas of unity. One of the most vivid memories I have of actual mosaics was on our visit to Greece twenty years ago. Our daughter Susan was fascinated by Alexander the Great. So we went to his birthplace in Pella. Excavations there only in the last century had uncovered gorgeous mosaic floors still in place where buildings once stood. I think they’ve since all been moved into a new museum, but at that time many of them were still outside. There were abstracts and murals of mythical events, all painstakingly created by cementing down different colored stones.
Now as I remember those mosaics, I consider how Alexander went about unifying the ancient world of the Mideast. As he conquered, the different cultures remained. But the language and culture of his own people, the Greeks, the Hellenes, began to dominate languages and cultures of all the different places brought into his empire. It was what historians called “Hellenization,” the “Greekification” of the ancient world. It’s why our New Testament was written in Greek rather than Hebrew like the Old Testament.
Alexander may have played as a child on one or more of those incredible mosaic floors, but his empire did not reflect that experience. He saw his own culture as best and everyone else as “barbarians” who needed to be brought up to his level. He created unity, in part, by making people more the same, more alike than they were before.
Our own nation partly saw itself the same way. Instead of a mosaic of all the different languages and cultures that were here before and that came later, America was seen as the great “melting pot,” where all those distinctions were smelted down into a single culture and a single language and all the old differences disappeared. But that is not Paul’s idea about the Body of Christ, not the meaning of “no longer Jew or Greek,” in the Christian church. That’s why our denomination prefers the image of a mosaic.
No, the negation here in verse 28 is not the negation of difference, a disappearance Jewishness and Greekness or maleness and femaleness in some great apocalyptic fusion. It’s a vision of a people where those differences do not divide them, where our human distinctions do not make one group of people inferior to another.
The vision of the Body of Christ as unity in difference reflects that great Christian truth we celebrated last week. God’s own self is unity in difference. As the ancient formula goes, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father. But the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. They are one God. Likewise, Jews are not Greeks, Black people are not white, men are not women. Yet they are all one in Christ, all children of God as Paul says here.
That vision for how we live together in Christ is one that keeps being renewed and deepened through the centuries. Those ancient mosaics in Pella had to be carefully uncovered and refreshed. Each little piece needed to be cleaned and preserved so that the whole could be renewed. For Christians, that is why it took so long for us to realize that slavery had no place among God’s people, that baptism into Christ did, despite early laws in America, make a slave absolutely equal to the one who supposedly was his master. And, finally, that there could be no more masters or slaves in the Body of Christ.
It took even longer for most Christians to begin to realize that in Christ women too are equal to men in status and respect, that they should be able to vote, and in the church that they should be able to teach and lead and serve as pastors. Some churches, like the Southern Baptists who wrangled about it a bit just last week and the Catholic church still haven’t caught up with Paul and Galatians 3:28. Our own denomination, the Covenant church, only figured it out in 1976, when we first approved the ordination of women.
Thank God we no longer have that master-slave distinction to worry about and incorporate into the mosaic of Christ’s Body, but we still have glaring social distinctions. Just last week our guests out in the trailer were verbally abused by someone who came onto our church property and berated them because of where and how they live, calling them names and saying they were inferior human beings. We as children of God, as the church and Body of Jesus, stand against all such division and hatred, whether it’s race or social class or gender that becomes the dividing wedge. We are all one in Christ.
In the final verse, 29, Paul returns to the ancestor of the Jewish people, Abraham: “if you are in Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Some branches of theology will talk as if this new oneness in Christ, the unity of the Christian church, has somehow replaced the Jewish people as children of God. Not at all. What Paul says here and throughout what he wrote about these matters is that Gentile believers, all the rest of us who are not Jewish, have simply been added, “grafted on” like branches on an existing tree, in Romans 11, to children of God who are descended from Abraham.
And, like Abraham, we all now come to God in the same way, by placing our faith in Jesus Christ, trusting God to save us through His Son. That’s exactly how Abraham came, says Paul. Think about it. Abraham was not Jewish when God came and spoke to him. There was then no such thing. Abraham met God and responded in faith. That’s how he became the father of the Jewish people and now the father of all who trust in God by faith. That’s how we are Abraham’s offspring and now “heirs of the promise.” Part of that promise is the mosaic vision of differences brought together in Jesus.
So in this next-to-last sermon here, I want to urge you to keep being a mosaic, to be one in Christ in a way that incorporates and preserves important and beautiful differences between you and between the people God has yet to bring into the picture here. I’ll even tread a little toward what I’m not supposed to talk about and suggest that you don’t look for a pastor who is just like you or, God forbid, just like the old one. Instead, be open to difference, to the mosaic, to the true, reconciling gorgeous unity of Jesus.
Keep seeking and preserving that unity in relation to the differences of people not only within this congregation but around you. It’s one of the best witnesses we have for Jesus, that here in Christ all those differences which separate people can be important, even key parts of the picture, but with oneness and unity. When the opportunity for that Journey to Mosaic is offered by our conference again this fall, think about getting on the bus. Besides me, Debbie and Takayo have also taken that journey. Maybe you should too.
And lest this all sound like I’m scolding you for something you’re not, let me correct that impression if that’s what you heard. One of the huge joys for me of serving this congregation has been the overall spirit of unity and oneness in Christ here from the beginning. The pastor before me set that tone and helped encourage that spirit. You have been faithful to it ever since. Yes, there have been some conflicts, but there has also been here a blessed cooperation in Jesus. You have loved and honored people of all sorts, even, when given opportunity, of all races, young and old, men and women, well-off and unhoused. I thank God for how you have honored Paul’s vision for a mosaic community, a Body of Christ with many different parts but always one in Him.
May God bless now your faith and your faithfulness and keep you always one in Christ.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj