Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (8C), June 30, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

You know, I nearly always begin a sermon or homily with that bidding. My daughter Laura once noted that it helps me find my preacher voice. It’s my paraphrase of a prayer attributed to Phillips Brooks, who was ordained to the priesthood in 1860, the same year that Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston was established. Later, he was the bishop of Massachusetts, after he had served as rector of the downtown parish that then moved during his Episcopacy to Emmanuel’s backyard in Copley Square – what’s the name of it? It’s a prayer that one of my most important preaching mentors at Immanuel-on-the-Hill Church in Alexandria, Virginia, always said before he preached and I decided long before I was ordained to adopt it as my own. Sometimes I think that I don’t pray it as much as it prays me. And it’s the “cost what it will” part that rings through our scripture readings today in my ears.

All three of the scripture readings today speak about the costs of seeking after truth – of following great teachers, of listening to prophets, of following and listening for God’s very Self. It’s the cost of discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it. Or as Walter Brueggemann says in more contemporary terms, “Discipleship is no picnic.” And speaking of no picnic, I want to spend some more time talking with you about the Apostle Paul. Last week I offered a modest defense of Paul. This week I want to continue that effort. I was encouraged when a few of you whispered to me after the service last week that you like him too. Thanks for that! I feel sure that he would like Emmanuel Church. He would fit right in!

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he is writing about the relational cost of freedom. I was thinking the other day that the whole Epistle to the Galatians is a like a Declaration of Independence. But it’s really more of a Declaration of Interdependence. “You were called to freedom,” Paul writes, “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (which is Leviticus 19:18) The freedom of which Paul writes is not personal liberty. It’s freedom to shoulder one another’s crosses, to bear one another’s burdens – through love to become slaves to one another.

Paul’s summation of what counts is so familiar to us as the central teaching of Jesus that many Christians don’t know that even before Jesus, this was a well-known summation of the Law or Torah or the Word of God. The Babylonian Talmud contains a story of a Gentile who sought the wisdom of two Pharisaic teachers: Shammai and Hillel. The Gentile asked them to teach the whole Torah standing on one foot. The story goes that Rabbi Shammai shooed him away with a stick, but Rabbi Hillel said, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.” (Shabbat 31a).  Paul and Jesus before him were quoting a prominent Pharisee, Rabbi Hillel, who lived in Jerusalem before Jesus was born. Love of God and love of neighbor as oneself are essentially, radically, and primarily handed down to us from the Torah – the Law – the Word. We should treasure this inheritance and claim it for our own, but we Christians must stop claiming it as uniquely ours just because Jesus said it. (Jesus was citing it.)

Paul is arguing that the Galatians are free from the burdens of conditions of membership that other Jesus followers were trying to place on them. Paul is encouraging the Galatians, who were Gentiles, to be free from ethical and ritual codes that other Jesus followers were asserting. This isn’t a Christian vs. Jew argument; it’s one of a group of Jesus missionaries (that is, Paul and his companions) arguing with another group of Jesus missionaries (Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, and their companions). The term Christian applied here¹ would be anachronistic because it didn’t really exist until the second century as anything but a vulgar appellation. The point is that Paul is asserting the irrelevancy of the codes and conditions for membership that Peter and James’ people are trying to impose. Furthermore, Paul says that he thought they’d agreed that Peter would be entrusted with the Gospel for the circumcised and Paul would be entrusted with the Gospel for the uncircumcised (here, the people in the churches in Galatia – which is now central Turkey) as long as they all maintained primary concern for those who were poor. The only thing that counts, according to Paul, is fidelity to the Holy One, made effective through love. Paul is asserting that it’s all for, and only for, loving one another that we have been made free in Christ. Loving one another is the great benefit, and loving one another entails great cost – even slavery.

Christians have a long history of abusing Paul’s argument that the “Law is nothing” to Gentiles to disparage Judaism. And Protestant Christians have a long history of disparaging Jews and Roman Catholics by abusing Paul’s “faith vs. works” argument. We must acknowledge and repent these complete and deadly misunderstandings of Paul’s arguments. I have to say that I don’t find evidence in Galatians or any of Paul’s other writings that he was trying to convince Jews that they did not need to follow the Torah. When he is writing to men that they do not need to be circumcised, or to people that they do not need to keep kashrut, that is, they do not need to observe Jewish dietary practices, he’s arguing that he doesn’t believe that one must become Jewish first to be in Christ. In fact, in the verses omitted from our reading today, Paul writes that “every man who lets himself be circumcised…is obliged to obey the entire law.” If you are not circumcised, you do not. Are you getting why this might have made other Jesus followers mad? Can you hear the cries of, “hey that’s not fair!”?

Adherence to laws is not a peculiarly Jewish theological issue – Christians, might I say Episcopalians, have struggled with this since our beginnings and we still struggle. (We call our laws canons.) Some address questions such as: Can anyone belong? What must someone do/what must someone believe? What are the minimum requirements? How must one behave? What are the limits? These are questions that seek to justify the community’s exclusions or expulsions. There have to be some – and yet Jesus is always challenging us to stretch in our competence, our compassion and our capacity to love. Last fall, upon observing a worshipper enter the sanctuary on rollerblades, a visiting family member asked her Emmanuelite brother, “Is there anything that would be considered out of bounds here?” (The answer is yes.) But that reminds me of another teaching that I made my own as a young adult. One of the wise women of Immanuel-on-the-Hill was fond of saying that, “the measure of the presence of Christ in any community is its tolerance for deviancy.”²

So what about this long list of Paul’s works of the flesh? I don’t know about you, but when I look down that list I know that I have engaged in every one of them at one time or another (well maybe not sorcery – I haven’t needed to resort to that yet). And I know that some of them I will engage in again – possibly before the sun sets today. First, the Greek word, sarx, that gets translated “flesh” can mean at least eight different things. I had to look that up to satisfy my feminist ire at what appears to be a body=sarx=bad, spirit=pneuma=good duality. That is not what’s going on here. I think Paul is talking about the sarx as the part of human nature that desires to separate from or hide from the Holy One and the pneuma as the part of human nature that desires to enter into, to cooperate with the Holy One. He is also taking advantage of a word play that we miss in translation – but we might get it if we focused on the word member for one who belongs and also the male body part which would be circumcised. (I didn’t bring up circumcision, Paul did.)³

Second, in 1^st century Roman culture, all the words on this list refer to violence to others and to self, treating others and self in very debased ways. In some ancient copies of the Epistle to the Galatians, murder is also on this list. This is really not Paul as a party-pooper or as forefather of the Puritans. This is a horror show of a list of evidence – of the rotten fruits of the natural urge to separate from the Love of God.⁴ This is what happens, Paul is saying, when people do not accept the gift of God – which is Love — in humility and fidelity and then pass it on. And people who engage in this kind of violence do not inherit the realm of God – it’s not just a prediction of the future; it’s a description of the consequences whenever we reject the gift of Love.

“By contrast,” Paul writes, the evidence, or the wonderful fruit of the natural urge to receive the gift of God and then pass it on, is Love: joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity or faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s how we know that we are receiving Love and passing it on. That’s how we are known as a community when we are receiving Love and passing it on. It is the essential teaching of the Sh’ma – Listen deeply to love and you will love. This is the essential teaching of Jesus Christ. This is how the people of God will thrive. Sarah Ruden, in her recent book about Paul, writes, “There is nothing trite about this program. On the contrary, it set out a new way of thinking that must have been quite exciting, a hope for something beyond exploitation, materialism and violence – a plan not for competing in purity and the denial of life, but for the sharing of life in full.”⁵ Sounds like just what we need. Let’s belove one another.

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