No Other Place to Be

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
August 17, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

John 17:20-24
Galatians 3:23-4:11

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Sometimes…most times…I feel as though my mind is standing on tiptoe to peer into the new world announced between the covers of this book. The world we know is so radically other than the world God’s Word incarnates in the person of Jesus Christ, so contrary to the world God’s written word describes in letters and poems, in parables and prophetic visions. But it is also the case, in some books more than others, that the world of the Bible is just plain strange!

Galatians, at first glance, offers a case in point. To circumcise or not to circumcise was the issue: whether to endure in adulthood the slings and arrows of this outrageous procedure in order to be full-fledged members of Jesus’ tribe…or to refuse this outward and visible sign of election in favor of the inward and invisible grace Paul identifies as our freedom in Christ. Let’s see: tribal identity through circumcision or freedom from the law? To Paul’s horror and our consternation, circumcision apparently was winning the hearts and minds and other body parts of adult males in Galatia. What in the world has this ancient controversy to do with the world we know?

To answer this question, we must begin with the current place we occupy in the world we know, a world that continues to resist the place staked out for “being human in” [Paul Lehmann] by Christ’s coming. Our ability to see the place we occupy is constrained, of course, by our angle of vision. We see in part and need more than our own eyes to arrive at the truth of our situation. The eyes I propose we borrow this morning are the eyes of conservative columnist David Brooks and the eyes of liberal novelist Barbara Kingsolver. Each has unknowingly addressed, from perfectly opposite vantage points, the crux of what the Galatians believed to be their dilemma.

“The world,” began David Brooks this past Tuesday in the New York Times, “can be divided in many ways—rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian—but one of the most striking is the divide between societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality….The individualist countries tend to put rights and privacy first,” he goes on. “People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty.”

Brooks traces the origins of our society’s individualistic mentality back to the ideal of heroism in ancient Greece; in contrast, he says, cultures that construe the world collectively have their beginnings in tribal philosophies. Moreover, the narrative of individualistic societies connects the development of reason and conscience during the Enlightenment with the flourishing of capitalism. Having remained relatively untouched by the Enlightenment, collective societies are marked, not coincidentally, by economic stagnation. The bottom line is this, says Brooks: the more societies develop economically, the more individualistic they become with one glaring exception. The exception is China where we will turn in a moment.

Barbara Kingsolver sees our place in the world in similar ways but with a critical slant toward individualism. “Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these,” she notes. “Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It is called your coefficient of Drag….This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency.”

Kingsolver goes on to link the Rule of Perfect Efficiency with what she calls the Rule of Escalating Isolation. “I see our dream houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you’re successful, it will be a large, empty-ish office you don’t have to share….This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation.”

Kingsolver is not so much interested in the origins as she is in the consequences of an individualistic mentality. Speaking to the graduating class of 2008 at Duke University, she commences, “We find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency….We’re a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another….We’ve responded by following the rules we know: Efficiency, Isolation. We can’t slow down our productivity and consumption, that’s unthinkable.”

Angles of vision notwithstanding, these two analyses of the place we occupy in the world are about to arrive at the very same conclusion. Back to China, to the tribal mentality and the opening of the Olympics: for Brooks the most striking features of the ceremony were “the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one—drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before,” he writes, “but this was collectivism in the present—a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China’s miraculous growth.” Here is a tribe that is highly developed economically. “The ideal of a harmonious collective,” says Brooks, “may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.”

He concludes this not simply on the basis of the Chinese collective but because scientists now believe our so-called reasonable individualism is the product of a brain wired to “mimic the neural firings of people around them.” Individualism, in other words, is a lie we have told ourselves for centuries. “Relationships are the key to happiness,” Brooks incredulously continues. “People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.”

Likewise concludes Kingsolver with words that will sound familiar to those who were in worship a few weeks ago, “Community is our native state….This is not a guess, there is evidence. Scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs….The happiest people are the ones with the most community.”

I know you are thinking that I have forgotten Paul and the Galatians, but rest assured: they have been the cause of these neural firings! Two worlds were colliding in first century Galatia: the world whose origin was the tribe and the world made new in Jesus Christ. On behalf of the former, teachers had come to town with the message that Gentiles could join the tribe, become children of Abraham, full members of the people of Israel, if only the men would submit to the law and so marked with the sign of the Covenant. Apparently the men of Galatia had lined up for the procedure. They simply wanted to be part of a harmonious collective, to belong to the tribe of Jesus.

Paul counters by recalling the Galatians to the gospel that once had set them free from the law. From the place we occupy, it would seem that the choice was between a collectivist mentality and an individualist mentality! Freed from the law, were they not cut loose to define for themselves the details of their discipleship? Consider the freedom inherent in the coincidence of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism. Consider the founding principles of our own denomination that reject the binding of one’s conscience before God and insist that truth is not a timeless monolith but is in order to goodness and to be discerned by its fruits.

Yet like the Galatians of old, we miss the radical consequences of Paul’s claims in this letter if we continue to see the world either through the legal restrictions of the tribe or an individualistic freedom of our own choosing. According to Paul, both of these world views have come to an end in the “world obliterating” power of the gospel. “It is not just life in the world of the Law that is obliterated,” writes New Testament professor Beverly Gaventa, “and this is where much reading of Galatians falls short. Other worlds also come to an end: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is no slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’

“As the gospel’s arrival obliterates the Law, it also obliterates those other ‘places’ with which people identify themselves, even the most fundamental place of ethnicity, economic and social standing, and gender. The only location available for those grasped by the gospel is ‘in Christ.’” That is to say, we were made neither for the tribe nor for rugged individualism nor for an identity staked out by the rights that accrue to station or sex; but we were made for the freedom that serves others, a freedom that knows it owes its existence to him “who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age” said Paul to the Galatians; to set us free from this present evil age says Paul and now not so strangely to you and to me.

Yet note who is doing the liberating. This is not a human achievement; this is not a political arrangement; this is not an economic accomplishment or a socially engineered construct. The thousands of Chinese moving as one—drumming as one, dancing as one—may have achieved oneness politically and socially but have missed the radical freedom that can only be a gift of the God who has given us, in Christ, a place “to be human in.” So too the astounding individualistic drive of Michael Phelps, who removed himself from the Olympic Village and took upon himself a monastic life for the sake of eight gold medals [surely embracing the ideal of the hero from the Greeks], has missed the radical oneness that can only be the gift of the God who made us for community.

Later Paul writes to the Galatians that the marks of the gift of this freedom for service include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. There is, he says with what I imagine to be a wry smile on his face, no law against such things. The only place for us to be, then, is the place where these gifts are given: the place staked out for “being human in” by Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

“The arc of history,” concludes Kingsolver “is longer than human vision. It bends.” And every time it bends it has taken “a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules [who could not imagine abolishing the law, could not imagine God’s election of Gentiles or the emancipation of slaves or the suffrage of women], and those who said [here I am recasting her words by way of Paul] ‘God already has. God has made the world new.’ The hardest part,” she said to the Class of 2008 “will be to convince yourself of the possibilities and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes….You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.” Once upon a time, they were known as Christians.

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