This sermon was preached by Randy Harris at the 99th meeting of Salem Presbytery on August 6, 2013. It is based upon Isaiah 43:1-7 and Galatians 2:11-21.
It’s a tough time for this beloved church of ours. The statistics are trotted out before us with regularity: another decline in membership, another congregation declaring the PC(USA) unfit and thus seeking dismissal, another decrease in giving that leads to another reduction in support for the church’s mission. As we face so many challenges, those of us who remain struggle and disagree with one another about what it means to be the church and to live the Christian life in our time.
I blame John Calvin for all of this. Calvin, with his notion of the importance of sanctification, suggests the Christian life is about growth—growth in holiness. And with the Spirit’s help, that’s what we are trying to do, all of us. Only, our notions of holiness aren’t necessarily the same, so we’re seeking growth in different ways. We are all struggling for a more pure and holy church, but our vision differs as to what this purity and holiness means.
The following typology is based on Jack Haberer’s work in “GodViews: The Convictions that Drive Us and Divide Us.” The irenic tone of Haberer’s work has informed much of this sermon.
For some, purity means greater fidelity to the Truth of the church’s classical understanding of orthodox faith. For others, purity means growing closer to God in prayer and devotion. For still others, it is seen best in the “big tent” breadth of a church that more purely embodies God’s grace, mercy, and peace toward one another, and toward the world. The witness of Scripture in its fullness encourages us to grow in each of these different ways, yet instead of celebrating these different manifestations of ministry, too often we find ourselves pitted against one another. In frustration and consolation, we end up huddling together with like-minded folks, and have less and less interaction with those whose thoughts, ideas, or experiences may differ from our own. The tragic result is that the trust and love upon which our fellowship is founded is at risk (see G-1.0102).
When we ordain and install teaching elders, ruling elders and deacons, we ask them a question: “Do you promise to further the peace, unity, and purity of the church?” A wag in the church once noted that it’s pretty easy to get two out of three of those at any given moment: purity and peace, at the expense of unity; peace and unity, at the expense of purity; unity and purity, at the expense of peace. Holding all three together is harder, but I think the church is called to stand in that messy, middle place; and I take my cue for that from chapter 2 in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Here’s what’s going on: the Galatian churches are made up of members who were originally Jewish and Gentile, but who now find a new, common identity as those whom God has called together as followers of Christ. The challenge is that they are struggling with what to make of their past and what to bring forward into the present. Are they to stay true to their Jewish origins and continue to keep Torah — and thus follow kosher laws that govern what they eat, where and with whom? Or shall they adopt the Gentile practice of eating anything they desire, where they desire and with whomever has come to their gathering? Must Gentiles effectively become Jewish in order to be Christian?
This was not a simple issue. After all, for those who had been Jewish, such a way of life is all they had known! So here’s what they did: they set up two different tables: one for Jewish Christians who were willing and able to keep kosher and one for Gentile Christians — which is everyone else. Unfortunately, at the time of Paul’s writing, those who sat at the Gentile Christian table had become a sort of second-tier church in the eyes of the others — a “church” that was for the less able or the less committed. The creation of this second-tier church was the work of the “false teachers,” who taught that faithful obedience to God’s Law was what made a person right with God. Peter, a Jewish Christian, was going back and forth between the tables, fully associating with the Gentile Christians until a group from the church in Jerusalem came to visit, at which point he re-segregated himself to the Jewish Christian table only.
When Paul hears of it, he knows that nothing less is at stake here than the unity of the church, for a church that cannot gather at one table together isn’t going to make it. So he goes to work to establish in the hearts and minds of the Galatians a foundation that can truly hold the church together, calling Peter out for perpetuating this “separate but equal” (but not really) system that undermines the church’s fellowship and mission. And while he has high expectations for how the church will carry on as it follows Christ together, Paul does not center the church’s unity in the purity of its witness and obedience. In other words, according to Paul, neither the purity of our beliefs nor of our actions has the power to hold us together. If they did, then there’s no need for the cross of Christ. As it stands, Paul knows all too well that any hope we have of our own purity is itself deeply broken and flawed, and that our only hope is the grace of God.
I heard that message loud and clear from a saint of the church whom we lost last summer, Will Campbell. Campbell was a renegade Baptist preacher, teacher, farmer and writer who was deeply involved in civil rights work in Mississippi, and later served as a chaplain for the Ku Klux Klan (not because he shared their beliefs, but because he wanted to share in the transformation of those beliefs).
Campbell recalled that he preached his first sermon from a pulpit Bible donated to his Mississippi Baptist church by the KKK and recounted a conversation he had in the 1960s with a Klansman who asserted that the organization “stands for peace, harmony and freedom.”
Campbell asked: “What means are you willing to use to accomplish those glorious ends?”
The man replied: “The means we are willing to use are as follows: murder, torture, threats, blackmail, intimidation, burning, guerrilla warfare. Whatever it takes.”
Campbell wrote, “And then he stopped. And I stopped. I knew that I had set a little trap for him and had cleverly let him snap the trigger. But then he started again. ‘Now, Preacher. Let me ask you a question. You tell me what we stand for in Vietnam.’”
“Suddenly,” said Campbell, “I knew a lot of things I had not known before. I knew that I had been caught in my own trap. Suddenly I knew that we are a nation of Klansmen. I knew that as a nation we stood for peace, harmony and freedom in that war, that we defined the words, and that the means we were employing to accomplish those ends were identical with the ones he had listed.” You may not agree with Campbell’s estimation of the Vietnam War, but I hope you recognize his point: it is easy to assail the obvious shortcomings of others, while being oblivious to our own. Sinfully easy.
In our Presbyterian tradition, we speak of “total depravity.” That doesn’t mean that we are totally depraved. No, it means that we can’t get away from our sinfulness, no matter how hard we try to be good and pure and spotless. Having knocked Calvin down earlier let me lift him back up now. As Jack Haberer sums it up in his book “GodViews,” Calvin contended with the latest version of a group known as the Montanists. Their motto can be boiled down to this: “You can join the church when I am 100% sure that you are 100% pure.” Over against that Montanist desire for a pure church, Calvin suggested that we are brackish at best, every one of us a little bit saint and a little bit sinner. (I grew up in a family that spent vacation time sailing in the central section of the Chesapeake Bay, so I get that “brackish” image. Brackish describes the place where the salty ocean water and fresh river water meet; what you get is a mixed bag, neither purely salty nor purely fresh.)
The reality is that the church is like that, Calvin said. “Some fault may creep into the administration of either doctrine or sacraments, but this ought not to estrange us from communion with the church. For not all the articles of true doctrine are the same sort. Some are so necessary to know that they should be certain and unquestioned by all [people] as the proper principles of religion. Such are: God is one; Christ is God and the Son of God; our salvation rests in God’s mercy; and the like.” Beyond that, Calvin suggests, we should bear with one another, recognizing that our efforts to establish a pure church will ultimately lead to an empty church. What we Reformed, Calvinistic folk are left with, according to Jack Haberer, is a brackish church: a church that is “a little bit sinner and a little bit saint, and thus is ever in need of reformation. In the process, that church simply matches up to the real world; sinners are welcomed into their fellowship of Christ — solely on the merits of his holiness — and are miraculously declared saints, yet know that their lives fall short of that regal title.”
So then, in this day when our culture encourages us to flock with increasingly smaller and smaller circles of people like us, where is unity to be found — a unity that is larger than the false sense of purity that comes from associating only with like-minded people?
Paul points again and again to the same place, to the same person. Our unity is to be found in Jesus Christ. Not in our faith in Christ, but in Christ’s faith in us, in his actions for us. If you have studied these verses, you may have noted all those footnotes in the NRSV through this passage in Galatians, in which the phrase “faith in Jesus Christ” can also be translated as the “faith of Jesus Christ.” “Faith of Jesus Christ” is the better translation, as it makes clear the very point that Paul is seeking to make here, namely that it’s not what we do that makes the difference — it’s what God does for us in Christ that matters. And most importantly for Paul, this “faith of Jesus Christ” is embodied in his saving death.
Again and again, Paul looks to Jesus as the source of the church’s unity:
- Jesus, the Son of God who has called an odd, eclectic group of folk to follow him, just as God has continually done through the ages.
- The Jesus who reaches out to the very folk from whom we would keep separate — even those we may consider obvious sinners, like Will Campbell’s KKK members. Indeed, the Jesus who draws together in his fellowship the Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female whom his society would otherwise separate.
- The Jesus whose faith and love leads him to the cross, and to whom God says an unwavering “yes” in the power of his resurrection.
That’s what Paul wants these Galatians to know. The irony is that the Galatians’ efforts to separate themselves from one another for sake of purity are undermining the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the one Lord in whom their lives are held together, Jewish and Gentile Christians alike. Again and again through the course of his letter, he works to bridge this separation — not on the grounds of a smothering sameness, but because they belong to the same family, God’s family, chosen and adopted in love and thus drawn and held together.
My teacher David Bartlett tells of friends who have a wonderfully mixed family, mixed because one of their sons is their biological offspring and the other children are adopted. A few years ago they were explaining to their youngest son, Tommy, what it meant to be adopted — how he had been chosen, waited for and welcomed with joy. As part of the story they also had to explain that Mark, the brother, was their child biologically. When they had finished explaining what it meant to say that Tommy was adopted, he cried out: “Oh, that’s wonderful. Can’t we adopt Mark too?”
That joy in belonging is what I hope we know as we gather at our Lord’s Table: that the unity we share as a family isn’t because we’re like-minded — nor is it because we’re all the same. We’re not. It’s because in Christ’s faith, we are chosen, loved, adopted into God’s family. We are a mess — to be sure, broken and brackish — but loved nonetheless, with good gospel work to do:
- Treasuring the faith of the church and reaching out to make new disciples as we continue to establish new worshipping communities — 1,001 of them!
- And growing in our love for God in prayer and praise and devotion;
- And deepening the reach of our hospitality to vulnerable folk near and far;
- And striving for a more just world.
All of this, as we bear witness to the Living God who holds us all together. This multifaceted ministry of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is one of the great gifts we offer to the larger church and to the world into which God sends us. Lord knows, it’s not easy, but Presbyterians have historically believed that we hear and respond to this good news best when we do so together — particularly with people whose patterns of hearing and responding may be a little different from our own, for all of our hearing and responding is imperfect at best. To be our most faithful selves, we need each other.
A friend reminded me recently of one of my favorite African proverbs: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It is in that spirit that we brackish, sinner-saintly folk hang on to one another as we witness to the unity of the church, so that ours may be a lasting witness to the unfailing love of God, the Living God who holds onto all of us in Christ and who won’t let us go. Amen.
RANDY HARRIS is pastor of Highland Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
