forest hill 
June 22, 2025
Second Sunday after Pentecost
"Advice to a Young Church"
“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.” (Galatians 3:28)
It’s a pretty sweeping statement! But what exactly does it mean? Does it mean simply that God loves you, whether you’re a Jew or a Greek? Or does it mean that we shouldn’t treat one set of people as having more worth than the others, any more than God does?
In other words, is this just about how God treats us, or about how we ought to treat each other? The scholars don’t agree, and we can’t just reach out and ask the author what he meant! But given that big swatches of the letter to the Galatians are criticizing Paul’s opponents who insist that people have to become Jewish in order to be Christian, I’m siding with the scholars who think this ought to be as much about us as it is about God.
The towns where Paul founded churches were almost as intercultural as Toronto. His churches had a broad mixture of Jews and non-Jews (of all sorts of ethnicities), men and women, slaves, freed people, and people who were born free. The churches tended to meet in people’s homes (so we know they couldn’t have been much bigger than our own congregation!), and all those categories of people would have been included.
Just like in Toronto, putting all those different sorts of people in the same room must have created conflicts as well as friendships, and sniping as well as supportive conversations. After all, human nature doesn’t seem to have changed much in 2000 years! No wonder he spends so much ink in his letter arguing that non-Jews should be included; you can only imagine how his opposition must have been running them down.
And since Paul also sets up these other comparisons, we have to assume that people were equally unpleasant to women and to slaves … counting them somehow as less worthy than men and free (or freed) people.
Frankly, that would have been normal for Roman society. It has been for most of history. We’ve always built societies where some classes of people had more weight or influence than the rest. And unless we’re called on it, we almost always carry on with the “normal” behaviours we learned as children. So for Paul to insist that this brand new community of Jesus followers should be so different from the Romans around him (and different from most societies since too) must have been pretty challenging.
How sad that church has struggled to live up to this ideal through most of our history! How shameful that we still make distinctions between men and women; that we separate people by class or education level or profession or the level of their giving. Every church I know claims that it’s a welcoming place – and most of them are, as long as the people who want to be welcomed look and talk like the insiders. But radical hospitality – hospitality that’s more than just lip-service – hospitality that truly values the people that the rest of society discriminates against? That’s rare. And hard. And likely none of us do it perfectly.
How do we live up to that ideal? What would change if we took to heart this advice that Paul has for the youngest of churches? How could we integrate this way of thinking into all that we do, and all that we are, and all that we hope to become?
Join us on Sunday as we reflect on what it might look like if we could truly be a community where none of the ways that we divide people from each other made any difference at all.