Paul on Baptism—Galatians 3:23-29

 

              It’s a common set of verses to throw out there—but that’s because it expresses the uncommon unity we have in Christ. We’ve been welcomed into the family of God’s righteousness, not primarily as students, let alone slaves, but as children, as adopted into one family. It is a family linked together because we trust that God is for us and not against us.

              It is hard to trust in, sometimes, that link amongst the faithful. Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and many other divisions threaten to seep into the soul of the Church. It was so at the congregation in Galatia as well. Paul had come preaching a gospel that adding anything to the faithfulness of Christ diminishes the faith. The particular dividing line the Galatians were worried about was the division between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. The Apostle Peter, Jesus’ right hand man, agreed with Paul’s assessment the (Jesus+ < Jesus Alone) formula… until things got real. Outsiders insisted the divisions of the wider world—the distinction between Jews and Gentiles—must be practiced at meals, and Peter went so far as to refuse to sit with non-Jews. To this situation Paul writes of our baptized life together; the only division is between Spirit and Flesh, the only one who makes us right and unites us as one is Christ Jesus.

              And this holy formula—Christ Alone, no division within the body of Christ, despite the divisions the wider world offers us—is still tested. It was tested in Apartheid South Africa, segregated and before that enslaving America, at every moment when nation and church intersect poorly, anytime national borders break Christian fellowship, every instance where hierarchies pervade a Christian assembly, any moment when a bigotry or prejudice is baptized as a faithful division.

Siblings in the faith, those divisions, so easily embraced, are why we constantly need to go back to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and crawl back to the font—finding ourselves again dunked and drowned, coming out as one body formed through faith in Jesus Christ.