"Through God's Grace": Jesus, Paul, and Will

Sermon Text: Galatians 1: 11-24
 ¹¹For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; ¹²for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. ¹³You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. ¹⁴I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. ¹⁵But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased ¹⁶to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, ¹⁷nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. ¹⁸Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days; ¹⁹but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. ²⁰In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie! ²¹Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, ²²and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; ²³they only heard it said, “The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.” ²⁴And they glorified God because of me.

Well, my friends, today we are eavesdropping on an argument between the first factions within Christianity.  I don’t know if overhearing their disagreement will discourage or console you.  You might find the early infighting St. Paul documented—and probably contributed to—a reason to despair. After all, how can folks like us ever find common ground if the saints of old were quarrelsome?   However, you might see in these historic squabbles evidence that it’s human and sometimes even helpful to disagree, that expressing differences can be clarifying and generative, that there comes a time to take a principled stand, and that every theological trajectory needs to make course corrections over time.  Paul’s course correction moves us toward grace.

First some context. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Galatia demonstrates that, from the start, there were competing versions of Christianity. Paul wrote this particular letter to one of the churches he’d founded but which had fallen away from his teachings after Paul had moved on.  Although Paul had insisted his new converts in Galatia did NOT have to adhere to the Mosaic Law, Jewish Christians later visiting the Galatians insisted that Jesus followers must be circumcised.  

They must have felt what we at Open Table would feel if a persuasive visiting preacher insisted that gay Christians had to become/behave as straight men and women to be real Christians.  The Galatians must have experienced the confusion and turmoil we might undergo if someone convinced us that women could not be pastors or church leaders. Or that real Christians had to believe every word of the Bible is literally true. I suspect the visiting preacher would have to pour some potion into our communion wine to get very many folks here to accept a narrower Gospel, but we can imagine the havoc this alternate teaching would cause.

Paul is writing this letter to reiterate a freer Gospel upon which his church was founded. And he’s ticked. He’s angry that other Christians had undermined the work he’d done to welcome those skittish Gentiles and insist upon a Gospel of Grace, not a Religion of Requirements.

Paul, himself a circumcised but also very Helenized Jew, had established churches far beyond Jerusalem—in Galatia, for example, in what is modern-day Turkey. As a missionary to the non-Jews in pagan cultures, he understood the core of the Gospel differently than Peter and the other original disciples still based in Jerusalem.  Paul—like many whose theology changes after getting to know people of other cultures—came to believe the Gentiles should not have to follow Jewish practices of circumcision and dietary law, for instance, to experience the loving God he’d encountered so powerfully in Christ Jesus.  

 But Jerusalem-based Christians like Peter and James feared that such a Christ-centered religion was taking Jews away from the Torah and might leave them without their moral anchor. Despite Paul’s boasts that he was the most Jewish of the Jews, his detractors worried that Paul was taking people away from the core of Judaism with his focus solely “on Christ’s inclusion and the love of God”.[i]

Anyone placing bets back then would have put their money on Peter and the more conservative Jerusalem Christians winning this contest between competing Christianities. Peter et. al. seemed to have more credibility since they were the original apostles.  They had walked the shores of Galilee with Jesus.  How could Paul claim authority to teach about Jesus if Paul had never met Jesus?  Indeed, Paul had cruelly persecuted the first Christians before his conversion. He had been the enemy! How trustworthy could his interpretation of the Gospel be?

Paul had an impossible case to make in this first fight for Christian orthodoxy.  Brazenly, Paul took a liability and made it seem like an asset.  When accused of not having met Jesus or been thoroughly instructed by the “real” apostles, he insisted he had experienced the Christ in a superior encounter of the mystical kind:  

“¹¹For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; ¹²for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”  

And since those stories about Paul persecuting Christians were still circulating, he tackled that bad press directly, again transforming scandal into testimony:

“¹³You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.”

Not good credentials for a church leader. But Paul added:

“God was pleased to reveal God’s Son to me,” which changed him forever.  Like South Carolina’s forgiving fans of Congressman Mark Sanford, the early Christians loved a good scandal, particularly when followed by public repentance. 

To further bolster his case, Paul insisted he was not de-emphasizing the laws of Judaism because they were too difficult for him to follow. He bragged, 

“¹⁴I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.”  

So it’s not as if Paul couldn’t cut it in traditional Judaism. Instead, he felt chosen for a powerful experience with the forgiving Christ.  From then on he, a saved sinner, preached the “infinite love of God, which he believed had been revealed in the life of Jesus,” a love he could experience only by grace.  Paul’s previous experience of trying to earn God’s approval through religious observance was “just another form of human slavery” (Spong, chapter 33).

What we see in Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a fervent fight for “the heart of what he believed was the Christ experience” (Spong, chapter 33). Paul is defending the gospel of grace with a passion that verges into arrogance, defensiveness, and disdain for differing opinions. 
 

But if he loses points with us for losing his temper, he gains our appreciation with that compelling story, told in more detail twice in the book of Acts, about his Damascus road conversion.   

A good story can trump religious rules and it’s hard to beat Paul’s testimony that he was convicted of his misguided religiosity after hearing the voice of Jesus and being blinded by the Light of Christ. Personal experience can beat stolid tradition. Lived faith bests received beliefs. Love over law.

Since we are the heirs of Paul’s story, it’s hard for us to hear this letter to the Galatians objectively.  Our tradition names the first theologian of Christianity as the hero of this contest.  By holding Paul too highly, we might miss his angry tone and forget that Paul nearly lost this battle which would have left Christianity a sect within Judaism.  Way has led on to way, but by going all the way back to the mid-1^st century, we see these different emphases within Judaism did not represent two distinct religions.  Not yet.

Which makes me consider our role in choosing our battles, in deciding when to make a big deal out of differences in beliefs.

Was Paul right to draw this line in the sand in Galatia?  Are you sometimes justified to raise your voice, and blood pressure, to make points of disagreement? When should you make very clear that you disagree with sisters and brothers—and how?

 

The death of Will Campbell this past week guides my own response today.  If you have not heard of Will or read his books, I encourage you to read Friday’s tributes to him in the Mobile Press-Register or New York Times or The Tennessean.[ii]  He was one who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.  A former Southern Baptist preacher born in Liberty, Mississippi, in 1924, Will became convicted of his racism and converted to a Gospel of inclusion and love while a young man.  When his very first congregation accused him of preaching only two messages--against racial segregation and McCarthism--he left pastoring to be the chaplain at the University of Mississippi--until his integrationist efforts cost him that job.  At that point he became a “free agent for God” whose Gospel was Paul’s: inclusion, love, and grace.  He marched with civil rights warriors but also ministered to members of the KKK (the "Kluxers" as Will called them) whom he came to see as fearful victims of classism, poverty, and ignorance. What Will did better than anyone I’ve known personally was to stand against injustice while having compassion for both the victim and the (often racist) oppressor.

His shocking summary of the Christian Gospel:  “We’re all bastards but God loves us any way.”  

I met Will first through his books and then in person when he accepted my invitation to speak to my students to whom I’d assigned his book Brother to a Dragonfly.  I was thrilled and terrified the first time he addressed my class because I knew Will did not suffer fools gladly, enjoyed his bad boy persona, and was entirely unpredictable and outrageous.
 

The first time Will visited my English class, one of my students, a religion major and aspiring preacher, seemed agitated.  During the Q and A, he chided the good Reverend for including 4-letter words in his book and repeatedly “using the Lord’s name in vain.” 

I half expected Will to snap back that he used those words “to shock preacher boys like you.”  Instead—and I should explain this took place during Desert Storm, our first war in Iraq—Will redefined what it means to “take the Lord’s name in vain.”  He explained, “’Taking God’s name in vain’ is when we pray to God to make our bombs land on other people. That’s using God’s name for a vain and awful purpose.”  

The young blonde preacher boy in the back of that college classroom showed no sign of understanding what Will meant.

Days later I received a letter from Will.  The note asked me to share an enclosed letter addressed to the young blonde preacher boy.  “He seemed so bright and earnest,” Will wrote me. “I hate to lose him to the right-wing meat grinder.” Over several gentle pages, Will spoke to that young preacher boy about his own commitment to Christian pacifism and matters more important than religious scrupulosity.  

I’d like to know if/how my former student received the news of Will Campbell’s passing.  Perhaps the blonde preacher boy is now a balding pastor who preached this morning against “the gay agenda.” Or perhaps he has had his own conversion to a Gospel of peace, of love, of grace.

While traveling the road to Damascus to hunt down early Christ followers, Paul heard an accusatory voice from heaven asking, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” 

Will Campbell often spoke an accusatory word to the religiously superior or naïve with a similar question: “Why are you deciding who is and who isn’t covered by God’s grace?”  But after stunning the complacent, Will offered care and support, even for the KKKer, even for the pious preacher boy.

What I recognized in Will was a measured choice to err on the side of defending the underdog all the while noticing that the oppressor is afraid and wounded, too. 

Paul and Will’s authority derived from their own conversion from early prejudice and exclusion. Paul had first felt his Judaism threatened by a band of alternative Jews living a simple religion of love, but he became captured by the faith he’d once tried to exterminate.   

More amazingly, the ones he had persecuted started seeing God’s glory in him.  He became the Christ encounter for the next generation of Christians.  And neither Paul nor Jesus nor Will Campbell aimed to oppose their religion—just to expand it.

Let us stand for inclusion, love, and grace.  But let’s remember the big issues are as complicated as the people these issues affect. Take a stand--without polarizing the issues or disrespecting those who see things differently. If you can still regard your opponent with compassion, take a stand. Speak your truth emphatically. But above all, receive and give God’s grace.

God bless Will Campbell.

---

[i] John Shelby Spong, Re-claiming the Bible for a Nonreligious World. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

[ii] http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2013/06/bootleg_preacher_will_d_campbe.html

www. 55/Civil-Rights-leader-preacher-Will-Campbell-dead-88

Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Sermon Text:  Ephesians 2:14-22

Friday before last, George and I crossed the Alabama River into the city of Selma by way of the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Suspended beneath the steel archway glinting above us and the water flowing darkly below, we were crossing into another place and time to do some bridge building of our own.

Named for a Confederate officer, the Edmund Pettus Bridge was constructed to connect people on opposite banks of the Alabama River. But on a day in 1965, a day that would become known as Bloody Sunday, that bridge morphed into a wall.  On one side of the wall were peaceful citizens marching for the right to vote.  On the other side of the wall was the highway to the state capital and the powerful ones who could grant them this right.  In the middle, armed law enforcement officers blocked the civil rights marchers on the river’s east side, closing off access to the Montgomery highway and beating women and men trying to cross that bridge--trying to BE that bridge--to a united Alabama.  It would take two more attempts later that month and even more bloodshed before the Edmund Pettus Wall was “broken down.” Only then could the Edmund Pettus Bridge be a genuine sign of God’s eternal enterprise that is making us into--using words from Ephesians--“one new humanity in the place of two.”

One does not easily cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Even 47 years later. Especially if you grew up in Alabama.  Especially if you grew up in Selma. 

So there we were, 47 years after Bloody Sunday, 40 years after George graduated from Selma High School. We had traveled to Selma to attend the first real high school reunion the class of 1972 had ever held.  We came mainly because we learned the class reunion organizers were aiming to bridge some lingering divides.

  

Apparently a few partial reunions had been held over the years, but they’d been small and (intentionally or not) racially segregated affairs.  Maybe this was because in pre-Facebook times there was no easy way to contact alumni, many of whom had moved away, and because the alumni had thought of themselves as a “class” only briefly.  The white and black students who graduated together in 1972 had attended racially segregated schools until 1970, so the Selma Saints of ’72, 60 percent black and 40 percent white, had planned their senior prom together and played on the football team together and served on the student council together, but their togetherness looked at times like a carefully negotiated treaty or an awkward if mostly polite social experiment.

We know that Selma, Alabama, did not invent racism; that prejudice is found in all regions of our country; that hatred hides in every human heart.  But in 1965, Selma became the poster city for racism.  George and his classmates have carried the legacy of their hometown history with them—on their professional resumes, into casual conversations with strangers on planes —and have borne the judgment that sometimes follows.  You experience it, too, don’t you--when you travel to Boston or San Francisco and your accent betrays you and you finally disclose you’re from Alabama?  But just try naming Selma as your hometown. Selma happens to be both an ignominious symbol and a very real place inhabited by all kinds of people, good and bad and in between.

George learned this reunion was being planned mainly by African American classmates.  He also heard that few white classmates were planning to attend.  To be more accurate, he heard that most of the white classmates who still lived in Selma were opting out. Now there are lots of good reasons not to attend a high school reunion.  And it's impossible to know another's motives.  But some white classmates who’d moved away—who’d permanently crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge themselves—began making plans to attend the reunion.

It became important for George to be a part of that kind of reunion.

But to be honest and to get straight to my point—breaking down those dividing walls is hard and unending work.  Despite our best intentions, we who attended the festivities did not always engage in that work successfully.

Unfortunately, George and I may have accidentally triggered plans for what became an all-white pre-reunion dinner on Friday night.  The reunion itself was to kick off with light refreshments and drinks at a reception at the historic St. James Hotel at 7:00.  We wanted to have dinner first, so George invited a former classmate to meet us at a restaurant before the reception.  Soon that person invited others and eventually someone reserved a private room for twenty former classmates. All white. We hadn’t intended to be a “whites only” group.  But forty years ago the white kids had been friends with white kids.  Ironically, the only place in Selma for such a group to dine was a private dinner club, the tired but pretentiously named “The Tallyho,” whose purpose forty years earlier was to provide Selma’s white citizens with a legal way to maintain a segregated restaurant. 

  

We gazed around the table that evening to find only white faces in an establishment historically associated with segregation.  As that irony was dawning on some of us, we wondered aloud why the white classmates who still live in Selma weren’t planning to attend the reunion.  Our tacit assumption as the white out-of-towners—maybe not a fair one—was that some of the people who had stayed in Selma had retained old prejudices. One woman at dinner theorized that only those who’d moved away from Selma were able to get enough distance on the culture to reject racism and return in a spirit of reconciliation.  Another countered it had been their racial integration experience in high school that had itself caused a major shift in their worldview, which in turn caused them to leave Selma all those years ago. Which might have been a cause and which an effect?  Recognizing racism or leaving Selma?  Our analysis came to a pause as an African American waiter refilled our glasses.  We drank in the realization that, however inadvertently, we had begun the reunion by re-constructing a wall.

Upon arriving at the St. James, we consciously sought out African American peers.  George and I listened to stories of personal successes and well-lived lives and felt happy for folks who had risen above the expectations of those times. As we gathered on a balcony and looked down on the Alabama River below, words and feelings flowed easily, genially.

In some conversations among the former Selma High Saints, we lamented that only about thirty white classmates had decided to come. But as we did so, we’d looked up from a freshly formed conversation group to realize we had moved back into the old race-based groupings, as if the black and white classmates were the proverbial oil and water.  We would create that night a mixed-race conversation group for a while, but soon a new person would enter our group and another person would leave it and before we knew it, we had separated again into all black or all white groupings.  Over and over we saw before us the evidence that it is a harder engineering feat to build a bridge than a wall.  

Some segregation, based on fear and prejudice, is methodically deliberate and hurtful. Some segregation-- born of habit, convenience, legitimate need, or chance--is unintended, even inevitable and morally neutral.  I’m not saying we should have engineered a social event into a human resource workshop.  High school reunions are not the way to right personal or societal wrongs. And I admit that, as a spouse to a Selma Saint, I was an outsider to an event I'm oversimplifying now to express what I personally needed to understand more deeply: a not-so-new realization about the intransigence of racism..  

We at Open Table aspire to be a multiracial church where all feel welcome. There IS great diversity among us.  But wouldn’t we all want to see even greater racial and ethnic diversity here?

The writer to the church at Ephesus urged those Jesus followers to bring together Jews and Gentiles as one humanity.  Glance back at today’s focal scripture. I’m going to gloss it as if it were written, not to Christians in Ephesus in the first century, but to Christians in Selma in 1965 or 1972—or to Mobilians in 2012:

¹⁴Jesus Christ is the embodiment of peace; in his flesh—that is, in his body, in the disparate parts of the body of Christ, which is the church--he has made both groups (black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, citizens and undocumented immigrants) into one. The Jesus way of peace has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between you.  ¹⁵The Spirit of Peace took away the old hostilities supported, for instance, by Jim Crow laws that kept you segregated. God made you into one humanity, and the ongoing experience of the living Christ continues to teach you that you can experience the peace of God within and without because you have access to one and the same Spirit.  Begin by knowing God's peace within. Only then can you live in peace with others. ¹⁶And Christ reconciled both groups in one body within God's love through the cross—the cross being one of those places where God-directed ones side with the marginalized and refuse to return violence with violence. Jesus' cross was nonviolent protest on a cosmic level. Thus Divine Love put to death that hostility through a radical symbol of love—which, unfortunately, the KKK later set afire to create their symbol of hate. ¹⁷But Jesus proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to you who were near; ¹⁸for through him both groups have equal access in one Spirit to the Source of Love. ¹⁹So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are all equal in God’s eyes. You are equally Selma High Saints and, more importantly, you are all also equal members of God's family, living in a house ²⁰ whose foundation was built by God lovers who’ve gone before you and with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The cornerstone does not create barriers; instead, it brings people together. It joins a structure²¹ which then grows into a sacred site ²² where we are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. When we can come together, and put aside hostilities, and give up the categories of black and white, us versus them, gay or straight . . .  we become that place where God takes up residence!

It’s not easy.  Even when we stop overt hostilities, we must, by God's grace, give up the cruelty of indifference, the selfishness of inertia, the assumption that someone else will build the bridge, the delusion that racism or the other evil isms and phobias are gone. Building bridges takes intentionality, responsibility, courage, vigilance.  

And it takes time.

Contrast, if you will, the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the Living Bridges of Meghalaya, India.  

As this video will explain, for hundreds of years the inhabitants of this remote region have trained trees to grow into bridges that cross raging rivers otherwise unbridgeable during the monsoon season. 

http://www.wimp.com/livingbridge

With constant cultivation, the trees’ tangled root systems keep the banks of the rivers from washing out.  Villagers bend and intertwine roots that sprout above ground level so they eventually connect to trees on the opposite bank and so form bridges that can hold the weight of 50 adults.  This network of dozens of living bridges connects the valleys of Meghalaya. The bridges can last up to 500 years if maintained.  But maintaining the bridges is never-ending work.  The video shows a man teaching his young niece the art of tending and guiding the roots. He tells her, “Your children will use it and your children’s children.  It will grow for generations.”  He explains that it is she who must continue building this particular bridge after he is gone because no person can complete the task in one life time. 

 

No one person and no one generation will ever complete the bridges our culture needs.  We must show our children how to be bridge builders.  We must be spiritual engineers and architects throughout our lives:  breaking down the walls, creating living bridges, making of our collective lives a temple where Christ is the joining cornerstone and where the Spirit of Love dwells.

PRAYER

God, let us be a bridge of care connecting people everywhere.

Help us confront all fear and hate and lust for power that separate.*

*from Ruth Duck's hymn "Diverse in Culture, Nation, Race"