Galatians 3: 23-end   Who do we think we are?

Who do you think you are? Is that an easy question to answer? How do you introduce yourself to people, what do you say about yourself? In my experience, men will tell you what they do for a living while women talk about their families. I wonder if, like me and Alasdair you enjoy watching the family history show on TV called ‘Who do you think you are’? In which various celebrities go off in search of their roots and sometimes discover astonishing things about their ancestors that add depth to their perception of themselves.

Today I want to talk about Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he makes a revolutionary  assertion about himself and other Christians. We are so far away in time from the first century now that it can be hard to think ourselves back into the Jewish mindset of the time.

Paul, or rather Saul, of Tarsus started out life thinking he knew exactly who and what he was. Carefully, strictly, exclusively, not like other people. As he put it himself in his letter to the Philippians:

‘Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee; as to zeal a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.’ (3: 5-6)

But Paul’s well-developed sense of his own place in the world did not long survive his encounter with the risen Lord. And further exposure to the work of the Holy Spirit resulted in turning his exclusive world view upside down. How else can we explain

‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave or free, for all are one in Christ Jesus.’?

The implications of this vitally important discovery are still being worked out in human societies to this very day. In a world where racial divisions are causing riots, where many societies still oppress women, where slavery is still being perpetrated, the world needs Paul’s message more than ever.

I think we all understand very well the distinctions Jews made between themselves and other races at this time in history. The dietary laws that made pigs unclean, unfit for human consumption and so on. But we have perhaps lost sight of the place of slavery in the Roman Empire. It has been calculated that a third of the entire population of the Mediterranean world at this time were enslaved. The middle classes used slaves the way we use white goods: our washing machines and fridges. Everybody used them, no one thought it was wrong or unusual. And yet Paul has come to see that in Christ, there is no distinction to be made between them and other human beings.

As you can see from today’s reading, when these first Christians were baptised, they were given a new white robe to wear which symbolised their new identity, their new dignity, taking away any former social distinction in terms of their wealth or status. And it is this which links the Galatians reading with today’s gospel from Luke.

Where a gentile community saw a frightening madman they needed to drive away in the hope he would go off to die somewhere out of the way, Jesus saw a man who needed help. In driving out the demons, Jesus restores the man’s dignity, his humanity. It’s interesting that he is not allowed to follow Jesus. It is important that he is restored to the community, given back the place in society out of which he should never have been forced.

But to return to Paul and his question to the Galatians: who do we think we are? His answer is that Christians are the people of the Messiah. The people who look for the resurrection of the dead with a fresh hope and confidence, because they belong to Jesus who has already been raised.

But that was then. This is now. You may have a well-established sense of identity by this stage in your life. But it’s more difficult when it comes to defining who we are as a church. Who do we think we are?

Some of you will know that the Province has been carrying out a survey of this question in an attempt to form a new strategy for ministry at local levels, and your vestry has been labouring away to fill out the form and send it off. We had to answer questions about how we saw ourselves, and how we thought the Episcopalian church was seen more generally.

In the light of our reading from Galatians, I hope you will be pleased to learn that we came up with words like ‘welcoming, inclusive, accepting, accessible’. We see ourselves as a gathered family from disparate traditions.

And that is all very encouraging. But I fear that the question ‘who do other people think we are?’ has darker edges to it. And this is because, at least in part, the architecture is not on our side. I didn’t invent that expression. I heard it in a sermon preached by an American presbyterian minister called Paul McLaren. He was speaking of a church in Memphis Tennessee that had had the insensitivity to build a church that looked like an Egyptian temple: as if to remind the local black population that they were still in slavery.

Now our church architecture has nothing as sinister as that going on. But it does come from a bygone age. Those of us who know about churches and how to interpret what goes on inside them feel right at home. But we are a vanishingly tiny minority now. In the minds of nearly everyone round about ‘church’ means a musty dusty set of old hypocrites judging and condemning everyone else as sinners who are going to hell. Or, it is a building they associate with the trauma of a big funeral when there has been an untimely death in the community. Not something they wish to go near at other times as it will only bring back evil memories.

And the fact that so many Church of Scotland buildings are being closed now adds to the problem: on all sides Scots may view empty decaying buildings which only reinforces the message that formal, organised religion is now an irrelevance.

So, what can we do about this? Encourage one another to be cheerful, hopeful people for starters. People who know that the church is made up of its people, not its buildings. Worship sites have been changing, evolving as human needs change since the dawn of time. I bet if we could get back to the neolithic age in Galloway we would come on a bunch of people building a new stone circle down the road from the place they used to go because they have fallen out with the priestess or they think the altar is aligned the wrong way.

Buildings cease to be useful, but our religion doesn’t. Our religion continues to provide consolation, inspiration, comfort, hope, the joy of belonging to millions of people round the world. Here we can show our wider community what it means to belong to a church family that loves and supports one another. A family that lives in anticipation of the glory of a fully restored humanity. The Messiah’s people, with our fresh hope in the one whom God raised from the dead.

Amen

Kirsty Anderson (Lay Reader)