“The Myth of Bootstraps”

Rev. Dr. David A. Davis

 

World Cup Soccer fans are crazy. You don’t have to watch game after game to see it. You don’t even have to be a soccer fan to notice it. With a quick glance at a game, or maybe catching a highlight on the news, or reading some coverage in the newspaper or online, these fans are nuts; all the team and national colors, the outfits, the facepainting, the flags, the hats, the wigs. Go to a hockey game fans may be wearing the sweaters of the home team. Watch basketball and everyone has a Lebron or a Kobe jersey on. American football fans may tailgate and fly a banner. But football fans around the world, for international soccer fans wearing it on their sleeve doesn’t begin to do it justice. There’s no hiding your favorite team. It becomes your identity. You put it on. You put it all on. Ghana. Brazil. Italy. Imagine all the colors, the nationalism, the spirit that must be rushing through the airports, the restaurants, the highways and byways of South Africa.
Last September I arrived in the airport at Johannesburg after a 12 hour or so flight from London. We flew all night. It was early morning when I stood in line at passport control and then waited for luggage. It only took about a 45 minutes and I headed out into the crowded main lobby of the airport looking for my host who was to pick me up. It’s a strange feeling walking out of a tunnel into a sea of faces; like they’re going to clap for you or something. I couldn’t see my friend in all the chaos. So I kept circling and moving about the crowd hoping he would see me. Finally, I stood smack in the middle of the room and just waited. Wasn’t much else I could do! He arrived an hour and a half later. He was late because of the mess of traffic caused by all the construction getting ready for the World Cup. I was still there in the middle of that crowd, and for one of the few times in my life, I was nobody. I was completely anonymous. I had a passport and I had money, but for that brief time, I wasn’t pastor, I wasn’t father, I wasn’t husband, I wasn’t Dave, I wasn’t American. Nameless. Faceless. For that brief time in an airport far away, it was like I had nothing to cling to. I was just another face in the crowd with nowhere to go but to stand there and hope someone was coming to come get me. For that rather fleeting moment, when it came to identity, I was the complete opposite of the World Cup fan whose got it all on, got it all going on.

Identity; who we are, it is so often determined by what divides us. Rivalies. Nationalism. Ethnic heritage. Economic status. Education. Gender. Sexual Orientation. Religious practice. What we cling to defines who we are. So to give up a difference between us, to shatter a boundary between you and me, well, it could be a challenge to who I am, or who I think I am, or who I perceive myself to be. The politics of identity. An always relevant topic of conversation more than just in a classroom somewhere on the campus behind me: whether talking about the “small people in Louisiana”, or writing a 10th grade history final paper arguing pro or con on Affirmative Action, or reading about the Harvard undergraduate detained at an airport because he has no immigration status having been born in Mexico yet living in this country since he was 4, or seeing the crazy World Cup fans in all their glory.

Identity politics is all through Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. You will remember Paul writes to the Galatians with an urgency and passion unlike any other of his epistles. He bags the formalities, passes on the thanksgivings, and gets right to the point: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.” It is the Jewish-Gentile divide that has Paul’s attention. Apparently the “different gospel” refers to those Jewish Christian leaders who were suggesting that a Gentile must first become a Jew in order to become a follower of Jesus. “You should be circumcised and live according to the law” was the expectation even though the recipients of Paul’s letter knew that their own faith came not from the law but from the Spirit. “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews” Paul argues. According to the Jewish Christians in Galatia, the dividing line between Jews and Gentiles could be broken down easily as long as all the Gentiles would live and act and practice like Jews, be “just like us”.

Paul’s readers, the church, can then conclude that the intent here is to welcome the Gentiles, to eat with them, to see the Gentiles as worthy colleagues, brothers and sisters, in the kingdom of heaven. The goal is a kind of “big tent” congregation where diversity abounds, difference is celebrated, and you all get along across this age old barrier of Gentile and Jew. Toss in slave and free, male and female and the infamous verse from Paul is lifted from the page to serve not only as corrective to Paul on women in leadership. The verse serves as the descriptor, the vision of the multi cultural community where the church is a sign of the coming reign of God where we all get along like lions who lie down with lambs. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female.
But a closer reading of Galatians points to an even deeper matter. Paul is not willing to settle for just Gentile inclusion when the problem is how the Jewish Christians understand themselves, how they define themselves by the law, their lingering romance with the law, their backtracking on the gospel because their own identity is still so wrapped up in the law. It’s not just a Gentile problem. It’s a Jewish Christian problem. Or in Paul’s own words, “You foolish Galatians!”   
Dr. Martin Luther King, in a sermon preached at the National Cathedral in 1968 just a few days before he was murdered, offered this famous quote questioning the bootstrap theory of empowerment, the pull yourself up by your bootstraps understanding of justice. “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps” Dr. King preached,  “but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.” The reference was to the generational effects of slavery and poverty so deeply ingrained that a person’s very identity was crushed. Those who have some bootstraps have the boots to build on, not just some economic boots but boots of self worth and dignity and personhood. Remember the slogan of the garbage workers that Dr. King went to Memphis to work for, “I am a man.”  The image of the self made bootstrapping man forever praised in this world still assumes some form of identity that comes with the boots of who you are, or what you have, or where you’re from, or where you were born. When you reach down deep there is something about who you are and what you are, something to cling to. The boots of nation, heritage, status, education, gender, orientation, religion. Something like Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. Or course the Jewish Christians in Galatia reach down and cling to the vestiges of the law. It’s part of who they are.   

In Galatians, Paul takes on the myth of any bootstraps, the clinging to any form of identity other than that which is in Jesus Christ. “Now before faith came”, Paul writes, “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.”  Until faith came; until faith would be revealed. Until faith. That’s not your faith or my faith, not the faith of the Christian Church. Last week I sided with those scholars who translate the phrase “faith in Jesus Christ” in Galatians with “the faith of Jesus Christ”. It comes from the Greek grammer; not faith in Jesus Christ, but the faith of Jesus Christ. “A person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faith of Jesus Christ;” his faith, his obedience, his righteousness, his death on the cross.

So when Paul writes about faith coming, faith being revealed, when Paul writes “until faith”. it is the faith of Christ Jesus. Before the faith of Christ, we were imprisoned by the law; guarded by the law until the faith of Christ would be revealed. The law was our disciplinarian, our tutor, a watchful eye over our childish ways until Christ came, so that we might be justified by his faithful obedience (and nothing else). Now that the faith of Christ Jesus has come, we are no longer subject to the tutoring of the law. For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through that faithfulness of his, that righteousness of his, that obedience of his, that cross of his. As many of you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. You have put it all on, You have put him on. You have got all of him going on.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” As the New Jerusalem Bible translates it: “There can be neither Jew nor Greek. There can be neither slave nor free. There can be neither male nor female.” It can’t be. It just can’t be because you are all children of God in and through and by and because of him and his faithfulness (and nothing else). It’s the only boot, the only thing to cling to, the only part of your identity that matters now and forever. Belonging to Christ. An heir of God’s promise. You are child of God. Point, set, match. You are a child of God. Period. You are a child of God. End of story. You are a child of God. That’s all. That’s ALL.  

It seems to me that Paul and his identity politics here in Galatians, it would all be simpler if the messages was just about inclusion. Because the reader can then assume that the descriptor Paul offers, neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, the reader can assume that the descriptor is always about someone else and as a white, heterosexual, educated, upper class, married, father of two, that’s okay with me. That all the boundaries would be easily broken down if everyone else would be just like me. Paul doesn’t settle for inclusiveness in his redefinition of identity. This infamous verse from Galatians, before it is about anyone else, it is about me, it is about you, it is about a single, solitary encounter with the faithfulness of Jesus Christ; and coming to understand that you are a child of God, clothing yourself in nothing other than Jesus Christ. When that’s all you are, when that’s ALL you are, a child of God, the view of the world must become very different.

It’s the season of weddings here at the church. I stood here yesterday evening with a couple making their solemn vows one to another. We stand here, but with no center aisle, the bride comes in there, and the couple goes out over there. A colleague of mine now retired served a church in Saverna Park Maryland for many years. A bunch of pastors were visiting just after a major renovation to the building. Our host was showing us the sanctuary. Down there near Annapolis, there were plenty of nautical themes in the symbolism around the room. There was a columbarium for the interment of ashes right there in the back corner of the sanctuary. Lots of beautiful exposed wood in the chancel area. The baptismal fount was right in the front of the chancel, a few pews back, smack in the middle of the center aisle. One of our group joked with the pastor, “So what about weddings, you move the font out of the way for the bridal procession?” The pastor said “You’re not looking close enough” and he had a rather impish look on his face as he pointed to the floor. The fount was bolted to the floor with three huge bolts. “So I can say to the bride, sorry, it just doesn’t move.” And we all chuckled at the clergy humor.

But then he went on, “What a better time to remember that you belong to Christ and Christ alone then when you are pledging your love to another?  What better time to remember your baptismal vows then when you about to say another set of vows? What better time to know that you are child of God, and you have put on Christ, you have got ALL of him going on.

For in Jesus Christ you are all children of God through his faithfulness, his obedience, his righteousness, his cross. So there can’t be, of course there can’t be, there just can’t be male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

 

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