Galatians 4 Paul 2025
Galatians 3:26-29
July 13, 2025
If we were going to
have a test of faith . . . or a creed . . . what would you think is the bare
minimum that we would ask of new Christians?
What would be the absolute minimum that you have to believe this? Or you have to do this to be a Christian? (seek out answer from congregational
members)
Ok,
I want you to hold on to that to see how that compares to the apostle Paul as
he tries to figure out how to negotiate faith in First Century Rome and what
his response is to the Roman gospel. And
then, how repeats, within his letter to the Galatians, the earliest Christian
creed, the thing that is said to newly baptized Christians as they are taken
into the community of the church.
As
I begin all Bible studies, whenever we
study Bible, we should ask ourselves, “What is the macro-story? The soup in which people swim? The environment or matrix in which people
live?” In the Gospel of Luke, the birth
story of Jesus, the Christmas story my dad would always read on Christmas Eve
began with “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the
world should be enrolled . . .” And you
know, in that moment, Rome and its Caesar run the show. Caesar is instituting a census to set up a
system of taxation that will make sure that all wealth flows from him and to
him.
The
ancient world was a religious world and religion was strongly tied to
politics. We knew and learned what the
macro-story was in the ancient world by looking at their art and architecture. Tons of money and effort were poured into
these huge structure to spell out power, to tell a story, to tell you who was
in charge.
The Attalid dynasty
within the Greek empire set up an impressive structure called the Great Altar
of Pergamon. That massive structure is
now on display in a Berlin museum.
And what that
impressive piece of art said was that the Greek gods had participated in
defeating all rivals to their throne.
The Greeks brought law and order, civilization to these defeated
barbarians. The Great Altar told us who
was in and who was out, who deserved to be killed, who had the backing of the
gods, and who was human and who was beast.
Paramount and central to all the enemies of the Greek Empire were the
Galatians—thought to be the universal barbarians.
I want to make sure
you know that from a Christian perspective this ordering of the world is
unnatural and untrue. And that is why so
many resources are invested in the lie told by the Romans and all conquering
peoples. So many resources are invested
in the lie.
When the Roman Empire
ascended in place of the Hellenistic or Greek Empire, they took the Great Altar
of Pergamon as their own and continued with the understanding that the
Galatians were the people of terror and tumult.
So much so that Manlius Vulso, a Roman military commander, did a
preemptive strike committed a genocide on the Galatians, slaughtering over
40,000 people in just one spot. When the
Roman senate called Vulso before them to explain what many might consider to be
unjustified, Vulso referred to the Galatians as a mix-breeds, a vulgar race,
people who you better hit first because by their very nature they would
certainly hit you.
So the most iconic
and popularly known art form was the “Dying Galatian” or “Dying Gaul.” That oft-repeated figure represented the
popular posture before Rome, that the conquered showed their nobility in the
way they collapsed and died before their conqueror, before the victor.
Rome justified this
by pushing a regular cultural button, by saying to everyone, “Well, what do you
expect, these people are barbarians after all.
Any violence, any murder, any destruction we might wreak on these people
is justified. They are less than human.”
These past three
weeks I have repeated this story again and again because I want to make it
clear what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a response to—it is a response to
genocide—first carried out against the Galatians and then, as Jewish revolt and
rebellion continues, carried out and justified against the Jews. Rome and its Caesar believed that their gods
handed the Jews over to them—to crush them.
While Rome pointed their finger at others and declared them as
fundamentally violent and barbarians, it was Rome that defined peace as war,
did everyday violence to the populace through debt and slavery, and required
absolute loyalty to Caesar as divine.
Rome violently crushed their opponents, made military victory central to
their foreign policy, and made all knees bend and all tongues confess that
Caesar was the prince of peace, the lord and savior of all.
As with the Greeks,
Rome pour tons of money into its structures, its monuments, its rites and
rituals to tell the lie again and again and again that their gods had handed
over all of the other peoples of the world over to them as slaves, subjects,
and servants. There was an order of
being. And Rome, using brute force as
course of fare, enforced and re-enforced that order of being.
That first week of
this series you may remember this cliché I shared with you.
Ethnocentrism or
racism was common at the time, not only among the Greeks or the Romans but also
among the Jews as found in this quote from Rabbi Judah.
Ancient Rome was a
slave society. Out of the 60 million
people in the Roman Empire, up to 15 million were probably slaves. Patriarchy was common. In many areas, men were the only people
allowed to have any public power—to make laws, to speak freely, and to buy and
sell. Scholars are now saying that what
really defined a prostitute is a woman who had no family, no husband, no son,
no property to provide protection and status for her.
So I don’t think I
can convey how radical the earliest Christian creed truly is. And to translate it makes it even more
radical. You can see how Paul changes
the wording of the last phrase to make it not man or woman but male or female
to take us all the way back to the Genesis creation story and how it was worded
there. Paul is taking it all the way
back when he repeats what would be said at every Christian baptism, as someone
is brought into this loyalty or allegiance to a way.
“There is no longer”
is how it is translated. But what New
Testament professor, Dr. Stephen J. Patterson says is that the better
terminology would be “these do not exist,” they are impossible. What the translation actually says is that
Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female are fictions. Race is fake.
Class is a conceit. Gender is a
construct. They have no basis. We are all one. Baptism is a public
declaration of what they know privately.
Baptism states what we know to be true.
So this was the early
litmus test for Christians. It was not
to believe the heavily produced lie—to not believe what Roman rulers and Roman
religion told you.
Think about how
radical that early baptismal statement, that first Christian creed is. It says that there are neither differences in
race or ethnicity, neither differences in class or social standing, neither
differences in gender or sexuality that have any basis in reality. That is not only radical for the First
Century. That is radical for our
time.
I also want you to
see versions of that early baptismal formula as translated by our Galatians
study class. The wise and learned Nicole
Gibby, using the incredible Octavia Butler book, Parable of the Sower, as
a foil wrote:
“You are all seeds of
the Sower through your belief, for all of you who were drenched in the waters
of the Sower contain the potential to yield a holy crop. There is neither leafy
nor root, bulb nor stem nor fruiting vegetable for you are all beloved seeds of
the Sower.”
And the wise and
learned Monica Parker used the incredible study and analysis she brings to
everything.
She first began by
asking about her privilege in society as a way of knowing her own place in
society and that we might see all as siblings, as part of our group. Following with the formula, she used three
statements as a starting point. She referenced
her privilege as where she puts her allegiance, where are her location,
community, and cultural identity ties? In
doing so, she asked what community she identified with and what traditions help
build her values.
She asked about her
on economic location in society. What “value” or status have others placed on
her based on her education and employment?
Her race?
And finally, Monica did
self-reflection on her personal identity.
What is her place at home? To
those closest to her?
She went on to write
that we must assume good intent with these statements, choosing to say there is
NOT the other is choosing to keep your unspoken biases hidden from
yourself because all can be flipped. And
then she restated the baptismal formula:
“For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put into Christ. There is no____nor____filling in the blanks
of identity with
Christian-Secular.
Western-alien.
Colonizers-Indegenous
Educated-slacker.
Billionare-Homeless.
Employeed- starving artist
Cis-outside the Binary.
Childless - parent.
And
the learned and wise Mary Ann Anselmino summed it up powerfully by saying, “We
are all one in God.”
The question is, do
we believe the heavily funded lie? Are
some necessarily the conquerors and others the conquered? Some blessed by God and others cursed? Some gods and others barbarians? Or do we give our loyalty and allegiance to
the early Christian baptismal formula?
In my study of one of
my heroes of the Church, Bartolome’ de Las Casas, I learned how he came to the
“New World” in the 16th Century to be a plantation owner but was
converted by the faith of the Nicaraguan bishop who gave his life trying to
protect the indigenous people of the Americas.
Las Casas said he saw Christ in the eyes of the indigenous peoples. He became known as the defender of the
indigenous.
But my friends, the
lie always seeks to devour and consume, and always seems to be
well-funded. At the University of
Salamanca they used the teaching of the Greek philosopher Aristotle to say that
“some are born slaves and some are born slave owners.” All done to take their wealth, their labor,
and their children.
That same turn of
phrase was then used in our own Declaration of Independence to refer to so many
peoples decimated as the barbarians, as “the merciless Indian savages.” We set up residential schools to civilize Native
peoples to take their wealth, their labor, and their children.
And today we are
actively seeking to exclude this witness to so much suffering, so much death,
and to continue the profit of the lie.
I was honored to
listen to listen to a conversation with Bishop William J. Barber this
week. He is the President and Senior Lecturer of
Repairers of the Breach; a Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and
Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School; Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. He spoke of the great suffering going on in
the world right now. And how hard it is
to watch. And he said, “Every
crucifixion needs a witness.”
Every crucifixion
needs a witness—to tell us the violence of the empire so that we do not believe
that the people they call murderers and rapists are murders and rapists. The people they call barbarians—that they are
the perpetrators of violence. That lie
is heavily funded. So many resources are
invested in the lie.
Every crucifixion
requires a witness to recognize that we are not merely after a flipping of the
script where, after we have suffered genocide, we strive after power ourselves,
to be the top dog so we can be the ones who bite, consume, and devour. We can now be the ones to perpetrate
crucifixion and genocide. The cross is a
stumbling block to all of that. And we
preach Christ crucified.
Now Christian
friends, I need your help to affirm the first Christian creed we have, to say
it out loud with me, to not lose your voice, to remember who you are down
deep. For we are all one.
Friends, they may try
to tell you that you are not worthy . . . that you do not belong, that you come
from the wrong side of the tracks or do not fit. But today God says the truth that
We are all one.
Friends, you may hear
that some by birth or by economic status or by race and clan have a right to
the spoils, that they are the rightful conquerors and that their gods justify
violence and death against others. This
is a lie. Today God says the truth that
We are all one.
Sisters and brothers,
siblings and cousins, we continue to hear that some people are not fully human
as a result of their gender or sexuality, that God made easily divided
distinctions. You may have heard that
the creative and creating God does not love this diversity. This is a lie. Today God says the truth . . .
We are all one.
Friends, we are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. In full affirmation of our baptisms, say it
with me now:
We are all one.
We are all one. So now we know. And the question put before all of us, as
people who walk a particular way and show a loyalty and allegiance to a
particular walk. What are we gonna
do? For we are all one.
Paul’s great solution
to genocide is solidarity, that we might see Christ in the eyes of others,
particularly those who are not like us.
That other path, that lie, is heavily resources. Sisters and brothers, siblings and
cousins, this is our first Christian creed! We are all one. Praise God!
Amen.
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