But when the time was right, Creator sent his Son, who was born of a woman and born under our tribal law. He came to set free the ones who were under the law, so that all of us could take our place in Creator’s family as mature sons and daughters. Because this is true of you, Creator has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out from within us, “Abba! My Father!” So then, you are no longer slaves to the spiritual powers of this world that use the law to accuse you and bring you under bondage. You are now taking your place as mature sons and daughters ready to share in the family blessing promised by the Great Spirit…Aha! May it be so!
—Small Man to the Sacred Families in the Land of Pale Skins, Chapter 4, Verses 4 through 7; First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament
Picture it. Christmas in 1980. And boy what a year it has been.
A hostage crisis in Iran has been raging for over a year.
Mount St. Helens erupted a few months ago—53 deaths and $3 billion in damage.
“Call Me” by Blondie is Billboard’s number one song of the year.
We were introduced to the insatiable, dot and cherry-eating, ghost fleeing, yellow video game character and his incessant wacka wacka wacka wacka wacka…
Within days of each other, The Empire Strikes Back and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining were released in theaters—can you imagine what that Barbenheimer campaign might have looked like?
A month ago, former California governor and movie star Ronald Reagan won the presidency in an electoral college landslide and he’ll be inaugurated in just a few weeks.
And, in the midst of all of this, another former movie star and his friend decided to give their friends, family, and neighbors, bottles of homemade salad dressing, mixed up in a giant vat with what can only be described as a giant canoe paddle, in old wine bottles as Christmas gifts.
Salad dressing for Christmas.
I know, I know it’s the thought that counts, I guess.
But stay with me, because everybody who received a bottle wound up coming back to their house, pounding on their door, and clamoring for more in the weeks to come—the dressing was that good.
Over the course of the next two years, this former movie star, Paul Newman, would decide to go into business and sell this dressing to the public under the label “Newman’s Own". In 1982, its first full year of operation, Newman’s Own would rake in over $300,000 in profit.
When his friends and family asked what he would do with the profits, Paul uttered five words that would become the company’s slogan:
Let’s.
Give.
It.
All.
Away.
Let’s give it all away!
Since then, the Newman’s Own Foundation has donated over 570 million dollars worldwide to organizations that bring joy to children facing serious illness and advance children’s nutrition security. An admirable mission and accomplishment to be sure. Forty-one years of giving it all away. Not bad.
I first heard this story a little over a month ago from science communicator, author, and YouTuber extraordinaire, Hank Green. And ever since, I’ve really been captivated by it—by this idea of “let’s give it all away”. And not just because my mom is in the process of packing up her entire downstairs to get ready for a major renovation, flabbergasted by all this stuff we’ve managed to acquire in that house over the past 32 some odd years—I’m sure that if we’re all being honest, she’s not alone in that quandary. Let’s just give it all away!
No, I think it has more to do with the fact that forty-one years ago, Paul Newman managed to sum up in five simple words what I have come to understand a core tenet of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be.
Let’s give it all away.
This idea has come to be so fundamental to my understanding of the Christian life that, as I reflect back on the sermons and speaking engagements I had over the past summer, I could have probably called the whole thing the “Let’s Give It All Away Tour”.
Yeah, probably not quite as fun as the Eras or Renaissance tours that were also going on this summer, but hey! Ticketmaster didn’t charge you an arm and a leg for it either!
And, let me be clear, I’m not just talking about material wealth or possessions here—though, I’m also not not talking about material wealth or possessions here either. Rather, I believe that this call to give it all away goes far deeper than that. It goes right to the heart of our very social order and systems—walls that we’ve built and maintain that keep us from the truth of our creatureliness. That, no matter how much status and power and privilege we manage to accumulate for ourselves, we cannot escape the fact that we are, and always will be, dependent beings.
This is the reality that Paul is speaking into as he’s just laying into the Church in Galatia from our passage this morning.
Understand that at this point in his ministry, Paul is in a bind. The early Church has been wrestling with a major question that was dividing it clean in two—thank God we’ve all progressed from such silliness.
See, this early Jesus movement—followers of “The Way” as they called themselves—had clearly Jewish origins. Jesus and his twelve disciples were all Jewish after all, and their ministry was primarily taking place in and amongst a Jewish context. But it wasn’t long before this early movement started to expand beyond its Jewish context and started to spread amongst the Gentiles—among everyone else in the Roman Empire. As far as everyone who mattered for our purposes was concerned, that was the clear, distinct binary. You were either Jewish or you were a Gentile. The Jews had their own customs and way of doing things and the Gentiles had their own customs and way of doing things.
And so, the question that was dividing the early Church as it started to take in all these Gentiles was just how Jewish did these Gentiles have to become.
Did Gentile Christians need to keep sabbath?
Did Gentile Christians need to follow kosher dietary laws?
Did the Gentile Christian men need to be circumcised?
Put simply, did Gentile Christians need to follow the teachings of Moses—the Torah—or not?
For Paul, a Jewish Christian who saw himself, first and foremost, as an apostle to the Gentiles, the answer to that question was a clear and unequivocal no. It’s not that the teachings of Moses were wrong or false or anything like that. It’s just that they did not impart righteousness in and of themselves.
As Paul understood it, they pointed to the righteousness imparted on all creation—Jew and Gentile alike—through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. And we could spend forever diving into and exploring the nuances of that distinction together, but that will have to wait for another sermon. For today, just know that for Paul, our salvation does not, no, our salvation can not come through any one of our own individual actions or our own individual righteousness. For Paul, salvation comes through Christ’s righteousness and Christ’s righteousness alone.
That’s the message he’s been preaching all along throughout his ministry. That’s the message he had shared with nascent congregations throughout the Roman Empire, including the region of Galatia. And that’s the message that all of these congregations were, supposedly, ordering their collective lives around. And so Paul is, of course, going to be more than a little ticked off when some other preacher visits Galatia and tells them the exact opposite thing. That, actually, if you want to be a real Christian, all you Gentiles are going to have to start following the teachings of Moses. You’ll have to start keeping the sabbath. You’ll have to start keeping Kosher. And, yes, sorry gentlemen, you’ll have to circumcise yourselves.
That would annoy Paul enough, but what really set Paul over the edge was that the Church in Galatia started to take this message to heart, follow it, and order their collective lives around that message. As far as Paul was concerned, if any one Gentile Christian wanted to follow the teachings of Moses in that way, that was fine. But putting it up as a requirement for others to join in the movement was way, way over the line.
And why was this intolerable for Paul? Because Paul knew that coming into the fold of the early Church already meant giving it all away.
Understand that the entire Roman social order was built on one institution: the familias. As it happens, it’s where we get the English word “family” from, but in our context, it’s probably better understood as “household”. That is, the familias was not the nuclear family we think about in our 21st century context—two parents, two and a half kids, a dog, all living in a single dwelling place on their own plot of land surrounded by a white picket fence. Rather, the familias was much larger, consisting of parents and their children, their children’s partners and their children, and any slaves they had and their partners and children too. And they all lived in together in one household—think La Casita in Disney’s Encanto.
These familias were also extremely hierarchical in nature, with everyone in the household existing to serve and give honor to the singular (male) head of the household: the paterfamilias. In any given household, the paterfamilias was Lord.
Did someone in the household close a good business deal in the market? That brought honor to the paterfamilias. Did someone accomplish a heroic feat in battle? That brought honor to the paterfamilias. Did someone get appointed to a prestigious political office? You guessed it! Honor for the paterfamilias. Heck, did a steer breed with a neighbor’s livestock and produce strong and sturdy calves? Even that brought honor to the paterfamilias. In Rome’s patron-client economic social order, the honor a paterfamilias had was as good as gold. And when the paterfamilias died, that title (and all the honor he had accumulated) would pass on as his inheritance to the next one in line (typically the oldest son). In turn, it was the duty of the paterfamilias to ensure that all those within his household had all that they needed to live and flourish in the social order.
As long as the members of your household continued to serve you and honor you through their actions, that is.
Because, you see, the entirety of the Roman imperial social order and culture could also be understood as one giant household—as one giant familias. And there was one singular, male, head of the household of Rome: the Caesar. The emperor.
Throughout Rome, there was one Lord above all other lords: Caesar.
And so you can understand why this upstart movement that had its origins out in the outskirts of the empire, who worshiped a homeless, impoverished, itinerant preacher who was brutally tortured and executed on a Roman cross and proclaimed that, in actuality, that man, Jesus, was Lord above all other lords—not Caesar—might not be well received by the powers that be.
Proclaiming the lordship of Jesus meant denying the lordship of Caesar, and that would not bring honor to your household—that would not bring honor to your paterfamilias. And that, in turn, could close off potential business dealings or political appointments or upward mobility for your household.
It wasn’t uncommon, therefore, for the paterfamilias to completely cut out any members of his household who started to experiment with this whole Christianity thing.
Becoming a follower of The Way—joining that early, first century Church—meant giving everything up. It meant giving up your social security. It meant giving up your safety net. It meant giving up your place in your household. It meant giving up your inheritance.
Paul was keenly aware of this reality. I think it’s why our passage this morning is so rich with familial imagery. For early Christians who gave up all they had to join this movement, their Church became their new familias. Their Church became their new household. And their Church had one paterfamilias too, and that paterfamilias was the crucified and risen Christ—a paterfamilias unlike any other in Rome.
A paterfamilias who did not come to be served, but to serve.
A paterfamilias who did not hold onto the power and privilege he had from being equal with God, but rather emptied himself, becoming nothing, and gave up all he had to dwell among us.
To be born of a woman as a true human. Not the son of a king and queen, but that of an unwed teenage mother and a day laborer. Not in a palace bedchamber waited on by maids and servants, but in a dirty, messy feeding trough and visited by the farmhands and shepherds in the field.
That’s who their paterfamilias was.
That’s who our paterfamilias is.
Our paterfamilias offers us no material inheritance. Our paterfamilias does not promise us individualized safety and security. Our paterfamilias has already given it all away for the sake of breaking down the walls that separate us from each other.
That’s what I tell my students just about every week: through Christ, we have been given the greatest gift of all, we have been given the gift of each other. We have been given the gift of looking upon our neighbors and seeing the face of Christ.
That’s our inheritance as members of the household of God.
And the good news, friends, is that to claim it, we only have to do one simple thing. We have to let go.
We have to let go of everything we’re holding onto that keeps us from fully embracing and loving our neighbor as they are.
We have to let go of everything we’re holding onto that keeps us isolated in our own safe and secure four walls so that we can live in beloved community with our neighbors.
We have to let go of a vision of the past that never was so that we can embrace and tell a healing and honest story.
We have to let go of the idea that we, alone, are right so that we can embrace and learn from the God-given wisdom that exists all around us.
For two thousand years, this is what Paul has been screaming to us through our holy scriptures. I am not the source of my salvation, thank God. Instead, my salvation comes through the one who gave it all away and beckons me to do the same for the sake of a weary world in need of that good news too.
Not a lot has changed since Christmas, 1980. It’s Christmas, 2023, and we’re looking back on a year that has been hard and looking ahead at a year that will be even harder—full of unknowns and struggles in our life together as a country, a denomination, and, yes, as a congregation.
Genocide continues to be waged against Palestinians living in Gaza, with military equipment paid for with our public funds and no ceasefire in sight.
We’re entering an election year that promises to, once again, be the most important and most contentious election of our lifetimes.
And right here at home, on Christmas Eve, a Rochester Police Department officer shot and killed Todd Novick, one of our neighbors during a foot pursuit.
We cannot afford to stay isolated. We cannot afford to keep following the same patterns and expecting different results.
Maybe in 2024, we can try something else.
Let’s give it all away.
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