Galatians 3:23-29
22 June 2025
This whole moral leadership and non-anxious presence thing I try to pull off every week is not as easy as I try to make it look. I had another sermon prepared. I didn’t love it, but it was serviceable. The ideas may get recycled, but last night’s events require attention, so you will get a smaller dose prescribed for our current disease.
There is a meme that sometimes makes the rounds, sometimes gets printed on hoodies and t-shirts, that talks about how Jesus empowers women, elevates women, listens to women. I suspect it leans in a bit too much, after all, Jesus was a male in a patriarchy, but in the context of First Century Galilee, it might be fair to call him a feminist. He steps between the men and their intended victim, the woman accused of adultery, placing his own body on the line. This was a kind of lynch mob, lacking in what we now call due process. Jesus himself would be executed by the state at the request of the religious as a mob chanted “Crucify him! We have no king but Caesar!” and demanded the release of the bandit Barabbas.
Dan Brown wrote fiction, despite the deceptive marketing of his books and the subsequent films, and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a modern forgery, but it is reasonable to believe that Mary Magdalene was among a group of women with more autonomy and power within the social movement of Jesus and his followers than they might have had outside of it.
Jesus clearly thinks of himself as a Jewish reformer in the prophetic tradition of that faith, though we have a number of encounters with non-Jews, sometimes uncomfortable encounters, as with the Syro-Phoenecian woman, and sometimes courageous encounters, like today’s reading of the demoniac in the cemetery, a topic we recently covered in the sermon “Pig Flag.”
What we know is that among the dozens of Jewish reforms and other religious movements of the ancient Near East, indeed of the entire Roman Empire, only two survived as meaningful in the modern age. After the Jewish War and the destruction of the Second Temple, surviving strains of Judaism coalesced into what we now know as Rabbinic Judaism, while the Jewish movement inspired by Jesus would morph into Christianity.
There were other religions in other parts of the world, but in that cradle of what we now call Western culture, a vast territory from the British Midlands to the sands of North Africa and east to Palestine, only these two would remain. Here, two millennia later and an ocean away, we have a Rabbinic Jewish community and dozens of churches, and as far as I know, exactly no temples dedicated to Augustus, even if far too many belong to the cult of the orange buffoon.
Christianity survived those first three centuries, spread like wildfire across the Roman world, because one man brought the fervor of a convert and re-wired the faith, freeing it from Jewish cultural practice. You might say he completes the work Jesus started in his reported interactions with Gentiles, in his interactions with women. By the time Paul is writing to the Galatians, a little more than two decades after the execution of Jesus, he can declare that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave or free, but all are one in Christ. This is an authentic text. That is real Paul.
This is why Paul became a bit of a subject célèbre among philosophers near the end of the last century, non-Christians who saw in Paul the first universalist, lower case “u,” a man who refused traditional labels and boxes, who was an agent of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And last night, our war criminal joined another war criminal in attacking a third war criminal that has been in a strategic partnership with a fourth war criminal, all drawing exactly the same idiotic lines that Paul seeks to erase, the fictions of gender and race, the arbitrary lines decided at some treaty table that called this valley part of this nation, that island part of another. Never mind the absurd certainty that their understanding of holy mystery is the only true understanding of holy mystery, that their violence is sanctioned, indeed sanctified.
What is our duty in a time of immorality and evil?
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the law of the land. When John W. Jones and members of this congregation helped the secret travelers of the Underground Railroad, they were an organized crime syndicate.
The Nuremberg Laws were legal. Hiding Jews in your attic was illegal.
I could go on. Dietrich Bonhoeffer played a small role in a plot to kill Hitler. Rosa Parks sat in that forbidden seat. Oscar Romero told the soldiers of El Salvador to refuse unjust orders.
It was law and order in the form of Sheriff Clarence Strider that locked up two of the witnesses to the lynch murder of Emmett Till to prevent them from testifying, for as Saint Ida B. Wells reminds us, the law is meaningless if it is not enforced.
Due process and a fair trial were still the law of the land as sheriffs stepped aside again and again and the lynch mob dragged the victims out of the courthouse, just as due process is the law of the land today as masked men with no badges and no identification disappear legal residents for daring to call Palestinians humans, for daring to seek freedom and opportunity in this land that calls itself the land of the free and home of the brave, but has never lived into that promise.
When the law is evil, we must become lawless. Which is a bit of a problem for me. As a veteran, I remember my oath. I promised to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” I swore a similar oath, to “support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York,” as an elected official.
I pay taxes, receive benefits as a disabled veteran, am bound to the usurious conditions of student loans.
But there is an out. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, also part of that enlistment oath I took decades ago, makes clear the precedent set after the Second World War. You cannot, and must not, obey an illegal order.
“Just following orders” is no longer a valid defense under international law, not after the horrors of that war, the Rape of Nanjing and the Holocaust, though the crimes of the Axis powers were simply unauthorized mid-20th century iterations of the genocide and exploitation of colonialism, of British concentration camps in South Africa, of King Leopold’s personal colony in Belgium, of the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by our own forces at Sand Creek in Colorado.
We do not have ICE raids in Elmira, at least not yet as far as I know, despite the white nationalist posturing of our member of Congress. But first they came for the immigrants. Who is next? When will it be you? When will the United Church of Christ be stripped of our tax-exempt status? When will you be turned away at the polls?
I have no answer, only an invitation. Social media memes got us into this mess. They certainly won’t get us out of it.
What must we do, as The Park Church, in this moment, to bear witness, to live into the Way of one un-credentialed rabbi from Galilee who called for a different kind of world? Amen.