Throughout St. Paul’s letter to a church he planted in Galatia, he is trying to impress upon his audience the magnitude of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and its impact on all of humanity. But he was also trying to solve a practical problem: That practical problem was that he was trying to incorporate gentiles into a faith tradition that – up to that point – had been lived and practiced only by Jews. And to some degree he was successful, in that the heads of the early church did in fact recognize these gentiles as part of the faith that would soon be called Christianity.
But that success did not mean there were no issues. One major concern was, as gentiles were incorporated into the faith, would they be required to adapt and conform to the existing culture of the religion, or would the dominant culture of Christianity in fact be the one to adapt and change how it functioned? Would church culture accept being influenced by the experiences of the people it accepted into its body? Or would it stand unbending, expecting only submission to current ways?
The answer is muddled and complicated – as most things are in real life. The church was in fact radically reshaped by its gentile converts, but also those converts did end up having to reorder their lives significantly in order to become part of the Christian community. A both/and situation, in the parlance of our times. And Paul was in the middle of the fray as these things were first being sorted. For his part, he argued that the Jesus event was such an enormous game changer that of course the culture would have to shift: How could it not?
As Paul tries to describe just how a big a paradigm shift he believes Jesus to have been, he writes these two sentences. “Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.”
There’s a lot to parse here, and we won’t be doing a whole Bible study today, but there are two words that I want to focus on because they help us get to the meat of Paul’s argument – which I believe is still relevant to our lives today.
The first word is disciplinarian. Disciplinarian just sounds weird, honestly. The Greek word that is used – paidagogos – is a term for one of the servants of a household whose job it is to oversee the children, and essentially to teach them how to act. They were even sometimes tutors for the children. Some translate the word as custodial guardian – which is more awkward, but also more accurate. Paul is saying that the law – the torah handed down to Israel through Mose – existed as a paidagogos, as a servant of God meant to help train up and teach the children of Israel the ways of their heavenly parent.
The second word in this section that we need to look at is the word “children.” The first thing I want to admit is that I don’t like this translation, even though it is technically correct. The Greek word here would be “huioi” and it literally means “sons”. So the literal translation from the Greek would be “you are all sons of God through faith.” The choice of children is understandable – it is meant to acknowledge that Paul’s use of the word sons would have included women and would not have been heard as gender exclusive the way we hear it today. But we do hear it that way, and it’s important for us to know that Paul’s claim – is clearly and consistently inclusive of people of all genders.
The word children is also correct because we know that, no matter how old you get, you are someone’s child. I am my mother’s child even though I am 45. That being said, I still don’t like the word child because when I hear it, I don’t think of an adult son or daughter, I think of a literal child, a young person. The thing is, while I may never stop being my mother’s son, I am no longer a child, I am an adult. And while we may always be children of God, there is a point when we are no longer children – we are adults, and are meant to live and act as such.
And I think Paul knows this. And he is saying that the law, the torah, the set of codes, commandments, and prohibitions by which God’s people have understood their relationship with God, does not function as something that makes them right with God: Rather it operates as something that guides them for a time as they learn how to live as God’s people in the world. But at some point the people are meant to grow up, to mature, to not be children anymore, and not need a paidagogos anymore. Paul is using “sons of God” here as an affirmation that we are moving from the position of child who needs tutoring into adult heir who has a say in the family business.
Paul is saying that Jesus empowers us to mature into a deeper faith in which we are not simply recipients of the rules: We are now fully grown, fully incorporated members of the family and our voices, our perspectives, our lives matter in the shaping of the overall body. That means the life and experience of the church is not just shaped by our interpretation of Scriptures: Our interpretation of Scriptures is also meant to be shaped by our lives and experiences.
Last week, I wrote about God’s pronouns. In particular, I sought to make the point that a diligent reading of our Scriptures would inform a more expansive understanding of God’s identity. This is nothing new: It’s not all that groundbreaking to suggest that how we read the Bible will inform the way we experience God in every day life.
Sometimes I forget that the influence is supposed to work both ways: That the way I experience God in my every day life should inform how I read the Bible. But this happens and is, I believe, a healthy way to interact with Christian Scriptures. We want to disabuse ourselves of the notion that our relationship with the Bible – and by extension, with God – is a one-way street: The Bible simply speaking and us simply receiving. A thoughtful, authentic, and heartfelt relationship with God in our daily life will change the way we read and understand the texts we have. It is a give and take, not a one-way street.
Last week I made an argument for a more expansive use of pronouns and gender identities when speaking of God. And as I said/wrote then, I believe there is ample reason to do so based on what we see throughout our Bible.
But I would be disingenuous if I were to tell you that it was through diligent word study of scriptural passages that I came to accept the words and testimony of my transgender and nonbinary siblings. I did not read the Bible, decide God was nonbinary or transgender, and then decide it was ok to accept nonbinary and transgender people. No, I learned to accept nonbinary and transgender people by actually listening to them and taking them seriously – by treating them as human and respecting their God-given dignity as humans.
We are living in a time when the humanity and dignity of LGBTQ+ people – especially those who are gender-nonconforming – are being questioned, denied, ignored, or just plain attacked. And “well what does the Bible say about these people?” is not a good enough question – it is only one piece of the larger puzzle. We are grown-ups now. Always children of God, but grown and mature and able not simply to receive God’s word, but to interact with it, talk with it, allow our life and experience to shape the way we interpret it.
The whole of our Christian tradition, as embodied in our Baptismal Covenant, calls us to recognize Christ’s presence in every human being, to serve Christ in how we treat every human being, and to acknowledge and honor the God-given dignity of every human being in our interactions with them.
To do that we as a culture need to listen to our LGBTQ+ siblings. We as a Christian community need to actually listen to them – to take their lives and testimonies seriously. To seek and serve Christ in them as they are, not as we have decided they should be. To work for their full incorporation into our church, into our community, into our lives.
That incorporation isn’t just about being nice and welcoming: Many of the first Christians were willing to be nice and welcoming to gentile converts so long as those gentiles were able to fully conform and submit to the existing culture. As Paul knew, that’s not incorporation – that’s assimilation. To become more fully the church, those early communities had to allow themselves to be influenced and transformed by those who had until recently been outside the community.
So it goes for us today. It is way past the time for Christianity to allow itself to be influenced and transformed by our queer siblings. The church has so much more to learn about who God is and how God loves. This is not an elective, not extra-curricular to our shared life: It is an essential next step in our ongoing growth and maturity as the Body of Christ. The best time for the church to be transformed by its LGBTQ+ members was years and years ago. The second best time is now.
