Sermon: “Redeemed and Adopted”

Text: Galatians 4:4-7

1^st Sunday after Christmas (B)

December 28, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is taken from Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, located in what we would now call central Turkey.  Having founded the church and moved on, Paul in his letter argued from a distance that the Galatian Christians, who were largely gentile, were not required to conform to the Jewish law.  In our passage today Paul argues that gentiles and Jewish believers were once under the requirement of the law, as slaves are under the control of their masters.  However, through Christ Jesus they were no longer slaves in the family of God, but now were part of the family by adoption.

Galatian Christians may have appreciated this sense of belonging to the God of the Jews even more than other Mediterranean gentiles because the Galatians came from a racial and cultural stock different from their neighbors.  They were Celtic—the same as the early inhabitants of England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland.[1]  The Romans, who had gradually subdued these fierce warriors—most notably under the military leadership of Julius Caesar—called them Gauls.  Long before Julius Caesar—about three centuries before Paul founded the Galatian church—several tribes of Celts (or Gauls) moved eastward from their homelands.  Some invaded Macedonia, in northern Greece, and others moved across the Hellespont and into central Turkey, where they settled.  Before long this area became known as “Galatia,” a term which is obviously related to the word “Gaul.”  They must have maintained their cultural integrity for many years; as late as the fourth century after Christ, St. Jerome wrote that these Galatians, in addition to Greek, spoke a language that was very similar to that spoken by the Gauls in Switzerland.  And so it is that Paul’s audience in this letter would have had much in common with the racial and cultural forbears of those of us who come from English, Scottish, and Irish stock.  I imagine that some members of Paul’s church were blondes and redheads!

Sermon.  As I reflected upon this passage, the thing that seemed so remarkable to me was not so much what Paul wrote, but much more, what he did not write.  I don’t mean in any way to de-emphasize Paul’s powerful arguments and theological reasoning.  So much of our theology comes from Paul, and the letter to the Galatians is one of the first places we see it really coming into focus—especially Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  But as important as that is, I found my mind going in a different direction.  Maybe it’s the fact that we have just been through Advent and are now in the Christmas season.  My mind is on the Christmas story, as we are so familiar with it from Luke—with the angels and the shepherds—and from Matthew—with the angel and the Wise Men.  The more I thought about this passage, the more notable it seemed to me that Paul doesn’t mention any of what we are accustomed to hearing as the Christmas story—no angelic announcements, no John the Baptist, no shepherds, no manger, no star of Bethlehem, no virgin birth, no Magi.  For that matter, Paul never refers to Mary the mother of Jesus.

This seemed such a curiosity that I did some searching of the other Pauline letters, just to be sure that I was not overlooking some other place where Paul was more explicit about the Christmas story.  All that I found was the very familiar passage in Philippians, in which Paul probably quoted an early Christian hymn.  In that passage Paul wrote that Christ Jesus, though in the form of God, nevertheless emptied himself, taking human form.[2]  Of course, this has no more of the familiar Christmas details than does our passage from Galatians.  One can imagine several explanations for this omission from Paul’s writings.  Paul wrote very early in the Christian movement, and as an evangelist he was almost always in non-Christian territory.  It’s possible that he was so often away from other Christians and only with his own disciples that he never heard the stories about Jesus’ birth.  However, this seems unlikely to me because before he set out on his missionary journeys, Paul spent a considerable amount of time with other Christians in Palestine.  Indeed, since he had not been a follower of Jesus until after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, someone had to teach Paul the basic outlines of Jesus’ life and ministry.  If he did know the stories, perhaps he did not use them because he thought they would seem fantastic to non-Christians and might hinder their acceptance of the gospel.  It may even be the case that he knew the stories but decided they were not central to the gospel message.  My point this morning is not to figure out why Paul did not use the Christmas stories, but rather to note that his work as an evangelist was successful without the Christmas stories.  The gospel Paul preached required only the facts that Jesus was God’s Son and that Jesus was also human—born of a woman.

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I’m currently reading a fascinating book by Philip Jenkins called The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died.[3]  Jenkins has opened my eyes to a huge part of Christian history about which I previously had only a superficial and, it turns out, incorrect understanding.  I had heard isolated stories of Christianity reaching as far as India in the first century.  I had even studied the rich culture of Christianity that existed in Ethiopia before the rise of Islam.  What I did not realize was how extensively the gospel had spread in Asia and Africa.  Christianity, of course, began in the Roman province of Judea and quickly spread throughout what we would now call Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.  Through the missionary efforts of Paul and others, it then went north to Turkey, to places like Galatia and Ephesus, then south to Egypt, and then pushed over into Europe, as churches were formed in Greece and Rome and beyond.  I have mentioned in earlier sermons how in the earliest years, Christian doctrine was unsettled.  Persons had different accounts of exactly how Jesus fit into the structure of God, angels, and humans.  For example, some understood Jesus Christ to be the highest and best creation of God—but a creature nonetheless.  By the year 325, at Nicaea, a majority of the bishops and other leaders of the church decided on what we now accept as the doctrine of the Trinity—that Christ was not a creature but was a part of God and had existed with God forever.  Afterward the believers who lost the debate were viewed as heretics; and because the Church by that time was supported by the Roman Empire, the heretics were suppressed and eventually eliminated.

Once the important doctrine of the Trinity had been agreed upon, however, another crisis of theology confronted the church.  If Christ was divine, and not a creature, then how would the church understand the humanity of Jesus?  How was it that Jesus was both human and divine?  Soon someone came up with the idea that, while ordinary humans have one “nature”—human nature—Jesus had two natures, human and divine.  So far, so good.  But there were still arguments about just exactly how these natures were distributed in the person of Jesus.  A man named Nestorius taught that the natures were quite separate, divided, as if Jesus had a split personality.  The broader church did not accept this view—called “Nestorian”—which was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431.  Then other persons, in their zeal to avoid the Nestorian heresy, considered the two natures of Jesus to be mixed together—homogenized, we might say.  This, too, was declared a heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451.  At Chalcedon was developed what in our church is now considered the orthodox view—that Jesus had two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine, which natures were neither separate nor mixed.

Unlike those persons who had been declared heretics a hundred years earlier at Nicaea, the Nestorians and others whose beliefs had been outlawed at Chalcedon did not die out.  True, they were suppressed and persecuted within the Roman Empire; but they simply moved to the east, to the Parthian Empire, which was centered in what we would now call Iraq and Iran, where they were beyond the reach of the Roman Church.  What I learned from Jenkins’s book is that the church in the east grew at an amazing rate, rivaling the church centered at Rome and at Constantinople.  Missionaries went as far as India and Ceylon and China—maybe even as far as Vietnam and Indonesia.  There were Christians among the advisors and family of Genghis Khan.  Emperor Kublai Khan of China protected the Christians within his realm.  According to Jenkins, by the year 1000, there were as many Christians in Asia and Africa as in all of Europe and Russia.  What’s more, most of the Asian and African Christians had been Christian for many generations—going back in a continuous line to the Early Church—whereas by the year 1000 many European Christians had just converted from paganism.

The tragedy for worldwide Christianity is that the divisions which occurred at Ephesus and Chalcedon in the 400s were never healed.  These two great halves of Christianity—east and west—never were able to patch up their differences.  Sadly, during the crusades the European soldiers and priests considered the eastern Christians as much their enemies as the Muslims.  So, when the rise of Islam began in the 600s and continued in the following centuries, the eastern church gradually died.  It was not nearly as fast as we might imagine.  Indeed, much of the scholarship and preservation of classical culture that we often attribute to the Muslims was actually done by the eastern Christians, who continued to work within Islamic power structures.  In fact, there were substantial communities of eastern Christians as late as the 1300s.  Afterward, Islamic persecution intensified; and now there are only tiny remnants of a once great church, such as the pitiful community of eastern Christians in Mosul, Iraq, who are desperately persecuted even today.

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My parents have enjoyed traveling all over the world.  But when they returned from Southeast Asia, I remember what they told me.  As they traveled in places where there was almost no Christian presence, they realized just how small the differences among the various Christian denominations are, when compared with the differences between Christianity in general and the other religions.  This impressed upon them the great need for Christian unity.  What might have happened during the rise of Islam if the Christians in the east had been able to count on support from the Catholic and the Orthodox churches?  What opportunities might we be missing today because we Christians focus too much on what separates us and not enough on what we have in common?

The apostle Paul proclaimed a gospel that did not even include the Christmas story as we know it.  Somehow he managed to preach a gospel that would encompass Jews and also peoples as different as the Celtic Galatians.  No one could have been more concerned with doctrine than Paul, yet he showed great flexibility.  And the church grew.  Doctrine is important; theology is important; our own traditions are important.  After all, we are who we are because of a long line of beliefs and practices.  But we need to discover how to cooperate with other Christians whose doctrines and beliefs are somewhat different.  If we do not succeed at this, it is a scandal to the church and a hindrance to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Particularly at this time of year—when we celebrate the coming of Jesus, the Prince of Peace—may we learn to live and work hand-in-hand with other believers.  If we can, perhaps we will point the way even for persons of different faiths, showing how all the world can live together in harmony and peace.