Already, But Not Yet

“There is no longer Jew or Greek…

for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Galatians 3:28

One summer during my seminary years, I worked for a cooperative ministry group in West Virginia. Along with a food bank and clothing closet, that organization provided, at no cost, needed home repairs for the poorest residents in that county. Each week during the summer, church youth groups would come in to work. My job was to coordinate their efforts by assembling the tools they needed and then ensure they got to the job site. As part of that latter responsibility, I would visit ahead of time with the homeowner to see what tasks they needed done. Many of the people we helped lived in isolated parts of the county so my supervisor would often accompany me on the initial visit to make sure I didn’t get lost.

One day, the two of us went to see an older woman who lived by herself far from the main road. She greeted us warmly at the door and then led us inside to point out the jobs requiring our help. Her home was filled with all kinds of old things, but I was still surprised when we stepped into the kitchen and saw a wood stove in the center of the room. It was clearly in use and looked to be ancient. It had been years since I had seen a stove like it and can remember thinking how quaint it was that she still used such an old-fashioned device for cooking.

Those thoughts stopped when the three of us turned to leave the kitchen and there on the counter was a microwave oven! Seeing that appliance generated some internal embarrassment over my suburban mindset. I was SO glad I had kept my initial reaction to myself as clearly she was aware of changes in cooking equipment. Later, I learned that keeping a wood stove was a practical decision as power to her home was often interrupted during the winter. She was living in a new day, but had not fully left behind the old; experiencing the future, but only in part.

It’s a pattern we can know, too. When a senior gets her college acceptance notification, she begins thinking about life there, even with months of high school yet to complete. When someone accepts a new job, but hasn’t yet started (something true for me), his mind turns to what is ahead even as he sits at the same desk. One can organize life with a digital device, but still maintain a paper calendar. In all kinds of ways, we can have one foot in the future while the rest of us remains in the present; an ongoing characteristic of our life as Christians as well.

Our Scripture lesson names that reality.

It comes from a letter where Paul repeatedly speaks about unity in Christ. Most first-century Christians were Jews and thus the writer says to them “Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law.” The law he referenced were the instructions from God received by Moses. Paul added “the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.” The Greek word translated as “disciplinarian” refers to a household slave in that era who supervised and guarded children. “His responsibility was to walk them to and from school, to see that they behaved properly and stayed out of harm’s way.” (Hays, Richard B. The Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XI, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000, p. 269). 

“Now that faith has come,” Paul continues, “we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” The Apostle is addressing how the church had expanded to include the Gentile, or non-Jew and that all former distinctions were insignificant. To drive the point home he says “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.”  If making the same point to us today, he might have said, “There is no longer black or white, Asian or Hispanic, no longer Democrat or Republican, Independent or Libertarian, no longer gay or straight or bi-, for all of you are one in Christ.”  It’s not nearly as poetic, but proclaims still how all labels are meant to fade away in Jesus.

Paul knew that such earthly distinctions continued, just as they do in 21^st century America. Yet he was declaring that in Christ we are already one in the most significant way—before God.  The fact that he had to name just some of the ways humans long ago sought to distinguish themselves from one another revealed that the world then had not yet caught up with the unity already found in Christ. That remains our reality, too.

Thus, our task still is one of working to diminish human-made distinctions because of the divine unity we already celebrate. To give our attention to what we share with one another instead of what divides.

In the meanwhile, feel free to hold onto your wood-burning stove!     

Source of all unity, help me to celebrate that gift again this day and lessen the “not yet” in all of my dealings with your children. Amen.