We Are Manumitted

We Are Manumitted
Galatians 3:23-29;
1 Kings 19:1-18; Luke 8:26-39

January 1st of this year marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln. The 1863 executive order was issued to all segments of the Executive branch (including the Army and Navy) and proclaimed that all those enslaved in the ten states in rebellion – the Confederate States – were to be forever free. The order applied to 3.1 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S.

The stroke of a pen had a mighty effect on history, on the lives of millions of people alive at the time, and future generations through our own and beyond.

A few slaves had been freed prior to that near-universal decree. Some had bought their freedom. Some were freed from slavery through the last testaments of their owners. The act of freeing a slave is called manumission. The owner would write – manually, by hand, in those day – a legal document declaring that the named bearer was freed. Manumission has historical roots in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Judaism legislated manumission. In Exodus 21, just after the first reading of the tablets of the Law, the “Holiness Code” says,

“When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him.” (Exodus 21:2-3)

Manumission of a Canaanite slave was seen as a religious conversion, and involved an immersion in a ritual bath. The Talmud made many rulings which made manumission easier. The price to buy freedom was reduced from the value of a hired servant over the entire period of service to the original price for which the servant was purchased, pro-rated for the amount of service already worked. If the servant had become weak or sickly, and worth less in the market, the price of freedom was to be reduced further. Increase in strength or skills by a servant was not an adequate reason for raising the manumission fee.

Paul says that before Christ, we were slaves. We were “imprisoned and guarded under the law.” That cuts two ways. The religious laws of the Hebrew scriptures did restrain and protect the people from hurting themselves and others. But the religious law also imprisoned people, preventing them from thinking and assessing their lives on their own.

Paul uses the image of a pedagogue to describe the law’s application. A pedagogue is a school teacher or a disciplinarian. In Paul’s time it was a slave who was like a nanny, having supervision of the children. Part of the pedagogue’s job was to see that the children got safely to and from their tutors. The protective custody of the pedagogue was temporary, until the children came of age and no longer needed to be supervised.

In terms of the history of faith, Paul says that we were guarded under the law which served as our nanny “until faith was revealed.” For Paul, that revealed faith was Jesus Christ.

Paul probably understood very well what it meant to be a slave, to be owned, to be oppressed, to be under the thumb of someone or something superior. Paul came from Tarsus. By whatever cause, he was a Roman citizen. But he was also a Jew who lived in a Gentile setting. The Tarsus Paul lived in had three millennia of Greek history. It was a Hellenistic city appropriated by the Romans to be the capital of the province of Cilicia. It was a prosperous seaport and was known for industries such linen weaving and sail and tent-making. It also achieved fame as a center of learning. It was as Paul observed, “no mean city” (Acts 21:39). However, the size of the Jewish population is unknown and was likely to have been only a small minority.(1)

Minority groups find many means to survive. Jews adopted their religious traditions as their way of confirming their identity. We do not know whether Paul became an ardent Pharisee in Tarsus or later in Jerusalem. In either case, however, he would have been considered an outsider, first in Tarsus as an ardent Jew meticulous about keeping the law of Moses, and then as a Hellenist in Jerusalem with an accent and an attitude. Whenever he met a Christian community in his missionary travels, he found at a safe haven. This reality shines through this high point in his letter to the Greek-speaking Christians of Galatia.

The passage contains Paul's most decisive statement that faith in Jesus Christ has removed all barriers to a relationship with God and with one another for all who believe. We are manumitted. We are set free. As he writes later in the Galatian letter, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1).

We are not set free on a whim. We are set free for a purpose. We are manumitted to be free from the oppression of ourselves. The gospel does not begin with us. Nor does it end with us. Unfortunately, we are happiest in churches that are just like us, so that no one disagrees with us. And if no one disagrees with us, then we don’t have to think about our faith. We just put our dollar in the plate and go merrily on our way, convinced that all is right with the world and with God.

We shun diversity and difference and disagreement. We forget that the Spirit thrives in diversity. Remember the Day of Pentecost’s United Nations list in the second chapter of Acts? People from all over the then known world were present when the Spirit struck. And the Gospel was understood not in a common language but in all the languages that were present. The most profound differences between people known to Paul, like the differences between people known to us, are nothing compared to the power of Christ to reconcile all things. God in Christ was reconciling the world to God’s self. Christ has made one body out of an infinitely varied tapestry of believers.(2)

What we need to be set free from is our stubborn tendency toward self-centeredness. Paul had written several sentences before today’s reading: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2;19b-20a).  We nod in agreement with Paul’s words, and then lustily sing “We shall overcome someday,” with the emphasis on “we.”

Yet the kingdom has already come in Christ. It was not our doing. It was not according to our timetable or our design. Eugene Peterson puts Paul’s similar words to the Ephesians this way: “We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! . . . God does both the making and the saving” (Ephesians 2:8-9, The Message).

The core of the gospel for Paul is this: “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.” We are set free from our Jewishness or our Greekness, our slaveness or our freeness, our maleness or our femaleness. Carol Holtz-Martin extends the analogy this way:

“In the midst of complex immigration controversies, ‘There is neither native born nor illegal immigrant.’ In a society dramatically divided by income, ‘There is neither monied nor working class nor poor.’ In a society polarized by race, ‘There are neither people of color nor people of no color.’ In the season of elections, ‘There is neither Republican nor Democrat nor Independent...’ And to repeat Paul’s own words: ‘There is neither male nor female.’ For you all are one in Christ!”(3)

We all are one Christ because Christ has set us free from all the divisions and categories you and I and everyone else love to imprison ourselves in. We are manumitted, set free to be together as one, to be heirs of the promise, to be Christ’s own. We didn’t do it. We didn’t earn it. We are graced with it. Take your freedom seriously and allow Christ to dwell in you, making you one with him and with all whom he shares his grace.

(1) John Shearman, “Opening Comments for Sunday June 23 2013 which is the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 7. Year C,” midrash@joinhands.com, Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 10:34 PM.
(2) Carol E. Holtz-Martin, “Galatians 2:23-29–Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word Year C, Volume 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p. 163.
(3) Ibid., p. 165.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.