Rick Olson, July 8, 2007
“If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.” Ok, ok . . . so I didn’t write that . . . It’s from a letter by one Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah, and it became famous when it was read the documentary The Civil War, and it’s made all the more poignant because he was killed a week later at First Bull Run . . . and whenever I think about the lost art of letter-writing, I think of his letter, even though it probably wasn’t typical of the time—Ballou was a lawyer and speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives before the war . . . but still. Any of us who are of a certain age remember when letter-writing was on the curriculum at school—is it still?—and we were expected to write our aunt Tilly and Grandpa Bob.
But with email, text messaging, IM and undoubtedly some other new things I’m not up on, letter-writing is fast going the way of the dodo . . . and that’s too bad, in a number of ways. Writing letters is a meditative art, you have time to think, you can tear up or scribble-out stuff you don’t like . . . people regularly wrote letters over a couple of days or even weeks, so they could get the stuff just right. Even though you can do that with electronic communication, nobody does . . . the whole point is that it’s fast and easy and you can get on with your day. Of course, this in itself leads to problems . . . it’s really easy to zip off an email or text-message and press that “enter” button before you’ve even had time to think, I’ve done it before, and the results aren’t always pretty.
Another problem with the death of the letter is that for modern folks there will be much less “paper trail,” much less documentation about their lives. And this definitely won’t be a problem for me—when I’m gone, nobody’s gonna care about my personal reasons for deciding to go this place or that, or sing this hymn or that—but historians are already beginning to moan. If you’ve ever read a biography, you’ll know just how many details of an historical figure’s life are provided by personal and public letters.
And I have to wonder just where us Christians would be if instead of composing letters to his churches, Paul had sat down and ripped off terse emails . . . we wouldn’t be where we are now, that’s for sure . . . Paul’s letters are the earliest writings we have in the New Testament, predating even the Gospels, and as I’ve said before, we’re all to one extent or another Pauline Christians, whether we like it or not. If Paul hadn’t written letters to his churches—laboriously dictated to a scribe—if he’d emailed them instead with a smiley face, the ecclesiological and theological insight they contain would have been lost to the ether . . . instead we have preserved seven letters—and six more that we’re not sure he wrote—filled with instruction and advice on how to get along with each other in our Christian communities, how to “do church” in the broadest sense of the word.
Our passage from Galatians is a great example . . . it contains the closing of the letter, and one thing Greek letter-writers often did at this point was offer advice—what the Greek-letter-writing experts (yes, there actually are such people) call paranesis. And it’s important to say right off the bat that all of this is aimed at the community, not individuals. For instance, he says, if someone is caught doing something they shouldn’t they should be restored by “you who have received the spirit,” in other words, the community . . . And oh by the way . . . bear one another’s burdens while you’re at it, and oh yeah, and worry about your own stuff and let your neighbor take care of hers . . . after all, everybody’s have their own responsibilities in the community, everybody’s gotta carry their own loads in the church. Finally, whatever you do, pay those who teach you the word of God—and this is dear to my heart at least—because of all things this is the most important to the community of Christ, and it detracts from the mission to have your preachers scrabbling around for food.
And to me, at least, this list seems just a bit . . . scattered, it seems like a group of unrelated stuff that Paul came up with, stuff that he’d forgotten to say earlier in the letter. Oh, they’re all about getting along in community, all right, almost everything Paul ever wrote is about that, but they seem last minute, thrown-together, after-thought . . . but New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa notes out that there is a subtle theme running through . . . they all point to the importance of mutual responsibility in communal life, the responsibility of one member of the community for another . . . restoring a member who has done wrong “in a spirit of gentleness” recognizes that each member is vital to church function, and that without her or him, there is a gaping hole in the system . . . Bearing “one another’s burdens” involves the understanding that members of a Christian community have a connection between them that requires mutual responsibility. What befalls one member of the community affects every other . . . Even saying that “all must carry their own loads” does not contradict this theme . . . he’s speaking, I think, of responsibilities within the community, sweeping the floors, cleaning the pews, showing up for work days . . . if you carry your own load, it means that somebody else doesn’t have to. Everyone within the community is allowed to do the work that they were called by God to do, and that they are uniquely gifted to perform.
Paul is saying that each member of a Christian community—be it a church or a monastery or a group tied together in common mission—is responsible one for the other, connected one to another . . . it’s like a multi-dimensional web, where threads of interaction and accountability and love run between each member and every other one as well . . . and I wonder . . . does this sound like our churches today? Beverly Gaventa contends that there is “isolation that runs through much of our church life” and that although Paul doesn’t view the church as a bunch of nosy parkers, intruding where they’re not wanted, “he does understand Christians to be profoundly connected with one another in ways that require mutual admonition and responsibility.”[1]
Mutual admonition and responsibility . . . one of the things I’ve noticed about the main-line churches I’ve been associated is they tend to be tolerant of the misdeeds of their members—and that’s good . . . church is after all for sinners, and forgiveness should be a way of life. But what I don’t think we’re so hot at—and I may be wrong, but I don’t think so—is gently admonishing one another, gently correcting one another, and restoring one another to the community . . . and this is important, because it’s not always easy to know what to do in living an ethical Christian life . . . and this is hard for me to talk about, because conflict avoidance is my middle name . . . I think that’s an occupational hazard for pastors, we generally are eager to please . . . I’d rather take a pair of pliers and a pick-axe and pull my molars out by their roots than “gently admonish” anyone.
On the other side of the fence, churches that tend to be less tolerant and perhaps less forgiving—at least initially—are often ironically much better at mutual correction, they often have formal procedures for it . . . and does that make them stronger communities? I truly don’t know . . . they do tend to be the larger ones—but they’re generally more conservative theologically and more evangelical as well, so there are a lot of confounding factors, as we used to say in the science biz . . .
Over in First Corinthians, Paul writes the “God is faithful, and will not let you be tested beyond your strength”[2] and we usually think of this in terms of personal trials, as in the death of a loved one, or some financial calamity, but this—as is 99% of what Paul writes—is said in context of the community . . . it’s a plural you, in Greek, as in “you-all” or “you the community” won’t be tested beyond your strength, and if you think about it in terms of our passage today, where the connectedness and mutual responsibility of each and every one of us is lifted up, it makes sense. A Christian community is—or it should be--a network of care, a web of love, and the more connections there are, and the stronger the connections, the more resilient the community will be. What affects one member of the community affects us all. Bear one another’s burdens so each one of us can bear our own loads.
Well. Paul continues his letter on a personal note—“See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!” and we know that the formal conclusion of the letter has begun—he’s taken over for the scribe in writing the last few lines in his own hand . . . and a personal, more intimate tone is set for the last part of the letter . . . and in it, he recaps the reason he’s sending the letter in the first place . . . and that needn’t concern us here, Galatians is a letter written to combat what he views as false teaching about the necessity for following the mosaic law, exemplified by the requirement that all males be circumcised. But in the course of recapitulating the argument, he makes a stunning statement . . . “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything,” he says, it doesn’t matter one way or another, it doesn’t matter a whit in the kingdom of God but “a new creation is everything!” and in the Greek it’s just two words “new creation,” but they mean a mouthful . . . new creation encompasses the whole of God’s redemptive act through Jesus Christ, the whole coming of the kingdom on earth, the redemption of the entire cosmos . . . and, pertinent to our lesson for today, the Christian community we call the church.
Brothers and sisters, right here at 113 Hargrove Road God is doing a new thing. We are a new creation, whether it seems like that or not, and it’s a good thing, too, because what we are called to do, what Paul is calling us to do, the kind of mutual cooperation and responsibility in this passage, is so counter to our radically-individualistic culture. But be assured that even though we sometimes feel old and creaky and out of date, God is continually working in us, renewing us, creating us anew every day. I say these things in the name of God the creator, God the redeemer and God the comforter and sustainer of all that is good, Amen.
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