It might have been the moment that epitomized not only Vacation Bible School this year but the gospel itself.
The VBS program this year was Saddle Ridge Ranch. Lots of cowboys and cowgirls poking around, don’t you know?! Monday’s theme was Wonderfully Made. Our ranch foreman, Mark Wingfield, was riding the range and counting the cattle or something. He entered Elsa Sanchez’s classroom, where she was teaching preschoolers. The little ’pokes were fishing with poles that had magnets at the end of their lines. They were catching paper fish with words written on them. One boy caught a fish that said wonderfully made. Now understand, Elsa didn’t learn her English from the Queen. She picked the paper fish off the boy’s line and read the line to the boy with great enthusiasm: “Wonderful made,” she declared. Then she asked him, “Who is wonderful made?” and she answered her own question: “You are! You are wonderful made!”
Mark thinks she got it right, even if her grammar was suspect. Not only are we wonderfully made; we are made wonderful by the work of Christ. We are indeed “wonderful made.”
When Paul gets to chapter 3 of his letter to the Galatians, he wants them to see themselves as “wonderful made.” They have been told otherwise by the world, and even now that they have become Christ followers, some want to keep them thinking they are second-class citizens, not so wonderful made.
When Paul lists these three pairings of Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, he is challenging what he was taught. Jewish men prayed: Blessed art thou, Hashem our God, that thou hast not made me a Gentile. Blessed art thou, Hashem our God, that thou hast not made me a slave. Blessed art thou, Hashem our God, that thou hast not made me a woman.
I’ve spent a little time this week reading some Jewish reasoning about why it is that things are phrased this way. Why, for instance, these prayers are phrased in the negative—not a Gentile … not a slave … not a woman—instead of the positive Jew, free, or man. It’s an interesting exercise, defending the “humility” of these privileges and how they are not really as harsh as they sound. Then I read defenses from some Christians commentators that sound exactly the same, especially when it has to do with male/female relations. In this case, they want to make sure we see that there is no difference between men and women in value, but the distinctions mean that women have defined roles given by God, and that men are always in the authority position. Men lead and women follow. Men make decisions and women carry them out in humble obedience. Men rule churches and families, while women serve in nurturing roles befitting their assignment as child-bearers.
They make so much of the distinctions, though, that they really amount to differences. Every time I hear Christians claim that these three pairings of Jew/Gentile, male/female, free person/slave are not meant to go to equal essence, only to different role, I have to ask then why is it that the ones who make those claims are almost always in the power position. If you want to test yourself on this, ask yourself whether the argument you are making would sound and feel the same if you traded places with the other one. If you yourself were to move from the privileged position to the unprivileged one, your reading of the Bible might be different.
We all like to think of ourselves as completely unbiased. We have purged all our prejudices and treat people as equals. When we look at other people, we just see people. But is that really true, or do we not see some people as more people than other people?
A lot of Baptists still do not know just how much was at stake in our break from the fundamentalism that overtook the Southern Baptist Convention a quarter of a century ago. In 1985 the convention met in Dallas. We formed a so-called peace committee to see whether we could find common ground. The late Cecil Sherman was one of our representative Moderates. At a break in the meeting, he approached a prominent Memphis pastor who was the godfather of the takeover movement. He and his wife had been leading meetings all over the country stressing that while men and women are equal before God, men are to be rulers in the home and church, exercising godly authority over women and children. Women, for their part, were to be graciously submissive to their husbands’ authority over them, because while men were accountable directly to God, women were accountable directly to their husbands. He claimed that this was the Bible, and that was that, and that anyone who believed differently was a liberal who just didn’t believe the Bible.
Cecil found this remarkable and asked him about it. He reminded the pastor that in all three places in the New Testament where a wife’s submission to her husband is mentioned, the next thing said is that slaves are to submit to their masters. “If you are being consistent about literally following the Bible, what do you say about that?” he asked. The Memphis pastor paused and then said, I believe slavery is a much-maligned institution. If we still had slavery, we wouldn’t have the welfare problems we have in this country today.
I’ll let you catch your breath. Of course he’s right. We wouldn’t have welfare because we could rely, as we did 200 years ago, on the kindness and care of plantation masters over their Negro slaves. Right.
Listen, Paul is much more radical than that because the gospel is much more radical than that. Paul himself may not have understand the full import of all he was saying, but isn’t that what makes it Scripture? Isn’t that why the church believes it is God’s word and not just Paul’s word? It’s always strange to me how people say that unless something is clear in the Bible, we cannot support a change in our social relationships. But Paul also tells us to pray for the emperor because rulers have been put in place by God. That’s clear. Paul apparently never imagined democracy to be an outcome of the internal logic of the radical equality of the gospel. But today, how many of you want to point to the Bible to say that America defied God’s will by opposing the King of England and creating this republic?
Listen again to his argument. In Christ we are all of us equally children of God. In our baptisms, we are all clothed with Christ.
When we are baptized, we put on white robes in order to show that we are equally clothed in Christ rather than being clothed by the distinctions of the world that are really meant to be differences. We don’t reinforce how people are unlike in baptism; we make clear that all of us are one in Christ. We don’t let rich people wear expensive robes and poor people rags. We don’t let people wear robes of their African or Latin or Oriental or European culture. We don’t have pink robes for girls and blue for boys. We drop our claims to being anything more or less by the world’s standards when we wade into the water. We wear the same robes. This is a profound act of identity change: we are saying that the way we are willing to be viewed by each other is by the way God views us. And then we begin to structure our relationships in the church the same way.
This is Father’s Day. I love being a father and now a grandfather. But being a father is not my primary identity—even with respect to my children. I love to tell youngsters in front of their parents when they are considering baptism that something big is going to happen, not only between God and them in baptism but also between their parents and them. Up until then, their parents have been authorities over them. They have been sons or daughters to their fathers and mothers. But after their baptism, they will be viewed the way the church sees them, which we believe is the way God sees them—they will be their parents’ brothers or sisters. The children get wide-eyed and look at their parents with smiles that make them feel so big.
And that’s the point. God has made us all equally children. We are all sisters and brothers now in Christ. And therefore we have to stop making differences among us out of things that are only distinctions. Distinctions are good. They made us uniquely ourselves. But distinctions do not mean differences of kind or value. Every snowflake is unique and special, but snowflakes are all still snowflakes. Likewise with people. We are Jews and Gentiles, males and females, employers and employees, but we are people just the same—if not the same people.
Now let’s be specific about this. When Paul says there is no longer Jew or Gentile in Christ, he means that we have to stop treating each other on the basis of how we view Christ from our religious background or ethnic heritage. We have to stop viewing one as superior to another. Just because Jesus was a Jew doesn’t mean that Jews are superior to Gentiles in the church, and that Gentiles should have to become like Jews in order to be Jesus followers. Nowadays we have to be reminded that if Jews or Muslims begin to be followers of Jesus, they should be able to bring their own style and approach to that, which will differ from the way many of us go about following Jesus. Likewise, the church in Africa or Asia or South America doesn’t have to become more American to be authentic. We can maintain these distinctions and even celebrate them, because there is no superior and no inferior in Christ; there are only equal children of God.
Likewise, when Paul says there is no longer male or female in Christ, he doesn’t mean to blur biological distinctions; he means to challenge our making those distinctions into eternal differences. He means to undermine our up-and-down way of reckoning things by seeing us side by side in Christ. And from that we can’t imagine women being prohibited from preaching or teaching or serving alongside men in the church.
The slavery question is probably best addressed today in terms of employment. The only way slavery could ever be justified is by saying that some people were inferior to others by nature. There could be no other way to justify it. The fatal blow to slavery in America occurred when masters taught their slaves about the Savior Jesus. Once they were brothers and sisters in Christ—worshiping the same liberator Christ—the institution of slavery was doomed.
In the same way today, we should no longer tolerate treating unemployed people as inferior, treating low-income workers as inferior, or treating homeless people as inferior. They are too often invisible to us. People in the service business are often nameless to us. They exist only to serve us. Here’s a test: do you know the names of our Wilshire custodians and food service persons? They are valued members of our community and deserve our attention in Christ.
Each of us is wonderfully made and made wonderful by Christ. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone knew it?
