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As many of you as were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ.
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 Jesus.
Mark 7:24-30 – The Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith
Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre
(in what is now Lebanon, 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee).
He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.
Yet he could not escape notice,
but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit
immediately heard about him,
and she came and bowed down at his feet.
The woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin.
She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
He said to her, “Let the children be fed first,
for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
But she answered him,
“Yes, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Then he said to her, “For saying that,
you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Sermon:
In November I preached from this same passage in Galatians,
which says that in the Spirit, there is no longer Jew or Greek,
no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.
I said that this is one of the fiercest expressions
of the Good News to be found in the Bible.
Paul proclaims here that Jews are freed from obedience to the law
and the arrogance and separatism of tribalism.
This means that religion is not defined by sacred books
or the claims of temple or church authorities,
or by the power of kings or political leaders.
This was revolutionary in the history of the world.
I learned this in seminary from a commentary on Galatians written in 1921,
By Ernest DeWitt Burton, and I will read it again:
“Religion, Paul says, is not conformity to statutes,
but a spiritual relation to God
expressed by the word ‘faith,’
and an ethical attitude toward others,
summed up in the word ‘love’.
Morality, Paul affirms, is not achieved by keeping rules,
but by living in fellowship with the Spirit of God
and in consequent love towards people,
issuing in conduct that makes for their welfare....
Paul makes religion personal rather than ecclesiastical,
and he makes morality a social relation grounded in religion...
This is not today the real creed of any great part of Christendom.”
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But – I just read a book by a Bible scholar I know, Stephen Patterson,
called The Forgotten Creed.
He is speaking of these very words from Galatians.
He says that right there hiding in plain sight
is the first creed or statement of what the early Christians believed.
Re-building the text, he thinks it was used in baptism and read originally:
“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free,
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”
The Apostles’ Creed we use tells us
what to believe about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
It was written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
The Apostles didn’t know it.
Every phrase in it is there because
of an argument in the church in the 200 years after Jesus.
But this earlier, forgotten creed is simpler and easier to remember:
No Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.
This forgotten creed doesn’t mention Jesus or God.
It is about peoples’ lives.
It is about life and death.
It’s about the difference Jesus made in the lives of his earliest followers,
It’s about us and how we should relate to each other.
It’s about people, our differences, and what we do about it.
First, it’s about the different races and ethnic groups people belong to.
We know a lot about that.
It’s about slaves and free people.
That sounds more like history than anything we know about first hand,
but maybe not because it is about class.
It’s about male and female.
We know a lot about that!
The book subtitle is: Christianity’s Original Struggle
against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism
This first creed opposes the blessing Jewish men recited to have been born
“A Jew and not a Gentile, a man and not a woman,
a free man and not a slave.”
Foreigners, slaves, and women were most contemptible everywhere.
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Think about NO JEW OR GREEK
Everyone thought that “the other,” foreigners, were barbarians.
Patterson writes “Jews othered non-Jews, Greeks othered non-Greeks,
Romans othered non-Romans.”
The “others” were often thought to be dirty, stupid,
idolators and sexual deviants.
Patterson tells a lot that I did not know
about the hatred between Jew and Greek in the ancient world.
About the time of Paul’s vision of Jesus,
mobs of Greeks had killed thousands of Jews in riots
in Alexandria Egypt.
Three years later thousands were killed in riots in Antioch, Syria
where Paul would in a few years debate Peter
about whether or not Greeks could become Christians.
(close to where Russia has set up their major base in the last few years).
There is always contempt, fear, and loathing of the Other.
Today the Other is Black, Muslim, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian.
And we rich, white, North Americans are Other to them.
The stories of riots in Alexandria and Antioch sound a lot like the riots
against Blacks in NYC during the Civil War,
Tulsa, OK in 1919,
and the Black towns burned to the ground
by good citizens in the South,
and the riots against Mexicans in LA during WWII.
We should be thankful that there is as little killing of each other
as there is today.
Paul offered something new: table fellowship of Greeks with Jews,
in communities of reconciliation gathered around
the memory of a Jew, Jesus.
It’s difficult for us to understand that Paul was a Jew
who never intended to start a new religion.
His question was never “How can I, a miserable sinner, be saved?” but
“How can Gentiles be included in the promises of God?”
Everything he wrote was argument about the inclusion of Gentiles
in the promises of God, not doctrines for us.
Patterson says Paul “became convinced that the spirit of the person
who had taught – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you,
turn the other cheek –
lived on and had come to in habit him, to direct him, to control him.”
All the words in the New Testament against the Jews
were put there in the next 100 years
when Paul’s churches had become mostly Greek churches
With the beliefs we have inherited.
Think about NO SLAVE OR FREE
Slavery was so common in the first century
that it is not mentioned as such in the gospels.
But everyone called a “servant” was a slave.
Slaves were “servi.”
If you weren’t a slave, you sold your labor on a daily basis,
and may have lived worse than a slave
who may have been fed and housed.
In such a system what must it have meant for Jesus to say
that we should be slaves of all.
Romans called slaves “bodies” and “things”
Many thought slaves were not people, not human,
because if slaves were human you couldn’t treat them as animals.
Most slaves were people captured rather than killed in war.
We might picture slaves as Black,
but that was just a convenience of the past few hundred years
so they would be visibly different to whites.
But in Rome you could be white and be nothing more than a slave,
told what to do, abused by your owner, sold to another.
A lot of what is said about slaves in the gospels makes sense
only if the gospel writers were slaveowners!
Some Biblical scholars think Jesus was a slave.
There is no evidence that Jesus or Paul thought
that there should be no slaves!
Slavery was so normal it wasn’t talked about.
But early Christians who must have known this forgotten creed
formed “common funds” in their churches
from which they would buy the freedom of one of their own.
We know this from writings describing the practice, in passing.
We think we do not know slavery, but we do.
Writers are more and more drawing parallels
between the prisoners of our legal system to slaves of old.
In the US prisoners work to help pay for their incarceration.
We have the largest number of prisoners in the world, and
when a prisoner is released, his or her life is severely limited,
like slaves of the past.
Whenever we speak of class distinctions or differences,
we are speaking of the same social and economic issues
of slavery in the ancient world.
Slavery was the primary class division of the ancient world.
Poverty is the equivalent today.
To be poor is to be like a slave.
Think about NO MALE OR FEMALE
We are caught up in the struggle of women to be equal to men
and to end male dominance in social, business, and political life.
Paul would have understood the Me Too movement,
because he made many women to be ministers of his churches.
An analysis of the names of all the women in his letters says that it is so.
Patterson argues that Phoebe mentioned in his letter to the Romans
was his boss.
This helps unravel the mystery at the end of the Gospel of Thomas.
Thomas is the gospel found 70 years ago in Egypt,
which shows a different kind of Jesus community,
based on Jesus’ teachings, not his death and resurrection.
Here is the last verse of the gospel of Thomas:
Simon Peter said to Jesus and the other followers:
“Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.”
Jesus said: “Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male,
so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you.”
“Every woman who makes herself male
will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
What on earth does that mean?
Patterson explains that in ancient Greece women were not thought to have
soul or mind which were believed to be masculine.
The Greeks argued that women, therefore, could not be leaders, or Guardians.
Socrates disagreed.
He said women too had THUMOS,
the courage, presence of mind, spirit, and spunk
to speak up and articulate ideas and reasoned proposals.
Until the time of Jesus, most thought THUMOS was the property of men,
but in Thomas, Jesus taught that women had “living spirit” like men.
Patterson says that this meant that
“Women have the same inner makeup as men do.
The spirit, the divine element breathed into Adam at the dawn of creation,
can reside in women and in men.
Mary, it turns out has the same male power, the same THUMOS as Peter.”
Women, not Peter, figure as the real leaders of the Jesus movement
in our scriptures.
The the woman at the well, women at the tomb, the women in Paul’s letters,
they are the grassroots leaders of the early church.
There are many other stories of the prowess and bravery of women leaders
in the early church, but they didn’t make it into the Bible.
Some of these stories are strange,
and to read about sexuality in the Roman world can be shocking.
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So, I gave you the story from Mark of the Syrophoenicean woman.
She is a Greek, a slave, and a woman.
She illustrates the forgotten creed.
But Jesus treats her as men treated women
and as Jews treated Greeks and slaves,
and she calls him on it.
She has THUMOS and Jesus himself is changed by this woman.
[Another blogger pointed this out to me.]
Until this time Jesus has only reached out to Jews, but now
Jesus realizes that Gentiles don’t have to wait for his message.
Now Jesus sees that bigotry, slavery, and sexism
are all tied together and are wrong.
This may be the moment of the creation of the “forgotten creed!”
In Mark, after this incident he travels through Greek territory teaching,
healing, and feeding multitudes.
END:
This forgotten creed hasn’t really been forgotten.
I became a Presbyterian because the Confession of 1967
had the theme of reconciliation as the core of the gospel,
the same as the forgotten creed in Galatians.
I put some of those words in the call to worship and prayer of confession
this morning.
We should know after 2000 years:
There is no black or white or brown or yellow or privileged.
There is no Jew or Muslim or atheist or Sikh or Hindu or Buddhist.
There is no rich or poor, blue or white collar; low, middle, or upper class.
There is no immigrant or illegal; no superior or more entitled male.
“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free,
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”
