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From the Pastor’s Sermon . . .
Our Church has been reading from the letter to the Ephesians, but interrupts that cycle this weekend to read from Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians as we prepare for the Feast of the Holy Cross next Sunday. And this is a lovely coincidence as we are baptizing new members of the Church this weekend, and the anthem we just sang—“All you who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ”—comes from this letter to the Galatians.
The letter to the Galatians is relatively short, probably written around the year 58, and may have been Paul’s first reaction to news of some developments in the congregations he established in Galatia, modern day Turkey. He would take his ideas and develop them more fully in his letter to the Romans. Because this letter was an immediate reaction to a situation that alarmed Paul, it is a letter in which we see Paul’s temper flare; he has no tolerance for what is going on in Galatia.
When Paul left Galatia, other Christians who believed that one had to observe the whole Law of Moses to be a Christian at all came into the area and began to upbraid the new Gentile Christians for not keeping the Mosaic Law. In an apparent reply to the new coverts’ excuse that Paul told them they did not have to do so, these “vigilante missionaries” called Paul’s authority into serious question: “Paul?—but he’s a nobody, he’s just another missionary and not an apostle. After all, he wasn’t part of The Twelve to whom Jesus entrusted the Gospel. What does he know?”
This explains Paul opening salvo, his shot across the bow, his bold statement of his credentials: “From Paul, whose call to be an apostle did not come from man or by means of man, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father.” There it is; his credentials, his badge. He was appointed to his ministry by Jesus Christ, and he is what he claims, so let no one else dismiss his authority or his teaching.
Paul then gets to the heart of the matter. “These ‘vigilante missionaries’ pretended to be fellow believers and slipped into our group in order to spy on the freedom he have in Christ in order to make slaves of us. But we did not give them an inch!” Paul is in full throttle. But then he turns to the Galatians and one feels the heat of his anger. “You stupid Galatians! Who cast a spell on you?” How could you listen to these people?
What was at stake in this controversy, and how does it affect us today? Paul taught that grace and salvation do not come from an institution. They may come through an institution, but it is ultimately God in Christ that is at work in a person directly. That is why no one is born in the Faith. We must join it, one by one, in our baptism. And as we are baptized it is God who writes our destiny, provides us with our opportunities and lavish on us particular gifts. As Saint Augustine quips in one of his sermons, “It is not I who baptize, it is Christ baptizing through me.” It is not a question of replicating something established once and for all in the past but rather of Christ working over and over each time in the Sacraments, making every baptism something fresh and new. This means that each of us becomes—as Paul says so ardently—a new creature in our baptism. We are individual and therefore unique. And Paul takes this notion further: we are all of singular and unique worth. No one in the community of believers has any more intrinsic value than any other; all are radically equal because all are Christ. “You who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
So there is no intrinsic difference in worth between male or female, Jew and Gentile, free-born or slave—all are the same in Christ, Paul thunders. .
But you might object, we have a hierarchy, we have a pecking order. Yes, Paul agrees, but that is a result of the variety of gifts and it is no indication of intrinsic worth. There are many gifts but one Spirit, so the fact remains—and has been proven over and over—a housewife attending to her family, or the child we just baptized, may be far more pleasing to God than the bishop or the priest.
If Christ made us truly unique when he baptized through the ministry of the clergy, we must respect his work—both in ourselves and in others. We must take the talents he entrusted to us as a member of his Church, his body, and use them to his profit, his gain. For Christ has begun something new, something unique, in each one of us, and God grant we never disappoint him!