The Waves

The beach is all about anticipation. I imagine that I'm Odysseus coming from the waves on shore where Nausikaa and her maidens are bathing. Once again I have escaped Poseidon's wrath and emerge from the briny depths salty and barnacled. Paleocartographers speculate that Odysseus found the land of the Phaacens around present day Turkey - what was earlier called Galatia - the homeland of the Gauls or Celts.
I'm writing a sermon on the last chapter of Galatians. Charlie Cousar said that verses 11-17 are the most important in the epistle. They certainly nail down what Paul is trying to say. When you read these last verses you realize that Paul has created a narrative of struggle: between an old way of life and a new way of life. To see this narrative in its proportions realize that the society that Paul wrote to is very different from American society. That ancient society (and the Middle East continues to be like this - we've grown away from it in the West, but this continues to hold for this area and is part of the reason that we don't understand how to engage with them except through violence, apparently) was a community oriented society, very stratified with many boundaries. People acted in groups that they belonged to - our notion of individualism would be a very foreign concept to them. What matters most to them is honor and shame. We think of shame as embarrassment, but they think of shame as a branding. Shame and honor are definitions of character: a person either has shame or honor in relation to another person. And so, in the communal system of shame and honor there are boundaries that are not crossed, except by persons who have that honor. To transgress a boundary brings about shame. So in Galatians, when Paul says that there is neither male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek - he is saying that these boundaries no longer determine who we can accept, love, advocate for or befriend. In the context of that culture this is a startling thing to say. What possess Paul to say this? It is his experience of the crucified Christ. He met the crucified Christ on the road and it changed his way of being. The ultimate shame back then, for Jew and Greek was hanging on a cross: it was a naked, disgusting death - we may be shocked by the sadism of the event, but Jesus' contemporaries were scandalized by the shame (just as with the Abu Gharib photos, what seems to shock us [and rightfully] is the sadism involved, but what scandalizes people in the Middle East is the shame brought to these men [as well as the sadism, but I understand the shame to be more important in arousing anti-americanism]). Imagine Paul's shock when he meets the crucified Christ. This is a conundrum of honor and shame - in fact, in Christ the very distinction of honor and shame is subverted. So in these last verses Paul reiterates what he has said earlier, In Christ the world was crucified to him and he was crucified to the world. Paul could no longer go on living the way he had been living. To go on gaining honor and avoiding shame was an impossible way of living. Paul describes this experience of Christ as a new creation. This new creation is the goal of the whole letter. This new creation is the truth of the gospel that you walk toward. In Paul's confrontation with Peter earlier in the letter, Paul tells the story of how Peter waffled between living on either side of honor and shame boundaries without realizing that the boundaries themselves, and not the practices they symbolized, were what was harmful. The NRSV translates Peter as "not living consistently with the truth of the gospel." But the Greek more nearly reads that Peter "was not walking straight towards the truth of the gospel." Peter wasn't inconsistent, he was off course. So throughout this letter, Paul hasn't been admonishing the Galatians about their inconsistencies but about their going in the wrong direction. They were heading still deeper into the old creation with its rules and patterns. What exactly is this new creation? When Paul says "a new creation is everything!" his expression is similar in emphasis to the moment earlier when he says that "the only thing that counts is faith making its power felt in works of love." Between these two statements Paul describes the life of the Spirit versus the life of the Flesh. Under the old creation the flesh was held in check by the boundaries between opposites of gender, nationality and religion in the system of honor and shame - but these boundaries and this system did not really free people. Instead people were imprisoned. They were trapped in their roles and held captive to the approval of the group. But if the restraining force of boundaries and honor and shame are removed, what restrains people from giving into the basest inclinations of greed and lust? Paul tells us that it is the Spirit of Christ that has been sent into our hearts. This Spirit is at once a spirit of prayer and a bringer of faith. It is the Spirit that puts us in right relation to God. It is the Spirit that grows and sustains faith in us. It is the Spirit that sets us on the road to the truth of the gospel and it is the Spirit that will see us there.
This is the freedom of the new creation, a freedom where the believer subverts the system of honor and shame by crossing boundaries. These boundaries are not crossed by violence but by acts of love that spring from our faith, the faith in Christ that the Spirit is gestating in us, reforming us according to the image of Christ.
In the gospels we are given images of this love crossing boundaries: the good Samaritan - between Samaritan and Jew; the syro-phonecian woman - between gentile and Jew; the prodigal son - between the honored and the shamed; and many stories of people on the margins being brought back into honor.
We are not an honor and shame society. We are in a culture that venerates self reliance and individualism. Yet we find boundaries. Boundaries of race, gender and religion continue to represent a system that typifies the old creation, that resists the new creation, and that holds men and women captive, imprisoned. Our freedom is a freedom that is spent on the flesh and not the Spirit - which Paul also warned the Galatians about. Thankfully, we have the Spirit and we can tell when we're on course or not for the new creation by whether we privilege these boundaries as absolute or whether we subvert them with acts of love. There are many boundaries today besides race, gender and faith: there are also boundaries of legal and illegal residence, left and right, rich and poor, and many more, let your imaginations free - and these people, trapped in these boundaries, need our love and advocacy. When we are guided by the Spirit this way, we can be sure that we are on course for the new creation.