One Overwhelming Identity in Christ
In the beginning of January 1863, the Homestead Act went into effect. This afforded an opportunity for people with an interest in becoming farmers on their own property to acquire land from the United States government. Of course, this required the displacement of Native Americans, who were sent to reservations to make room for the settlers. In the land around the Platte River, thousands of new land owners made houses from sod and began farming. Some of this land has remained within families even to this day.
With the increase in population from homesteaders, newly settled areas became eligible to apply for statehood. This exciting time is captured in such things as the musical “Oklahoma!” but the same process was also true for our home state. On March 1, 1867, Nebraska became a state. Its borders were clearly set. Its capital was moved from Omaha to Lincoln. Nebraska began taking on its own unique identity, similar to, but distinct from other states in the Midwest.
Years later I was born in Nebraska. By virtue of my birthplace, I am a Nebraskan. Perhaps I will always be. Even if I move to a different part of the country and spend the rest of my life outside of the Cornhusker State, my childhood is locked here. My teenage years and undergraduate experiences will always remain Nebraskan. I am inescapably a child of the 37th state in the union. Not that I would want to escape. There is a lot to love in Nebraska, but it is interesting that at least partially because of a law passed over a century and a half ago, I have this particular component of my identity that I share with others. Because of the actions of powerful people who lived long before my grandparents were born, I have a marker of identity that makes me distinct from other people. I belong to a fairly exclusive group.
Again, this isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t always feel quite like a Nebraskan. What does it mean to be a Nebraskan? Do I have to get really excited about college football? Do I need to know how to harvest corn? Do I need to passionately ask my neighbors about how much rain they got after the most recent storm every time I see them? If that’s what makes a Nebraskan, then I could hardly be called one. I don’t do any of those things. You might say there is a shared experience to being a Nebraskan, but I don’t even know what that is. Tornado drills in schools in the spring? Riding four wheelers in harvested fields and on gravel roads in the late fall? Wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans, and cowboy boots to church even if I’ve never been anything close to the work of a cowboy?
Perhaps this doesn’t really mean much, but I can’t help but wonder how being a Nebraskan affects me. Surely, someone from New York or Los Angeles would have assumptions about people from Nebraska and life in this state. If I were to meet someone from the coast, how would their knowledge of my home affect our conversation? It's strange to think that this identity is granted to me because I was born within particular boundaries established well over a hundred years ago, but then that is also true for most of our identities.
I was born male, which means the cultural expectations around masculinity were assigned to me throughout my life. Of course, masculinity has changed over the years and will continue to change, and I don’t always fit into the accepted norms associated with it. I was never really interested in sports, and I don’t know much about cars, but I love musicals, and I work in childcare. To some degree or another, this dissonance between who we understand ourselves to be and who society expects us to be as a result of our identifying features is an experience we all share. No one perfectly fits into the stereotypes that their culture would assign to them, and we often try to resist stereotypes. For all the ease of functioning they may provide our overworked brains, they also lead to dangerous discrimination and abuse of scapegoats. We are right to resist being typecast and pigeonholing others. However, in Galatians 3:27-29, Paul seeks to do something even more radical: a complete dissolution of those boundaries upon which stereotypes are based.
Paul imagines a church so united in Christ that there are no longer distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, or male and female. I think that many of us have heard this passage enough that we no longer recognize the bold statement being made, and while two sets of distinctions here are not as important for us today, we can focus on the other to imagine the full magnitude of this statement. Imagine the dissolution of gendered boundaries.
People in Jerusalem before the fall of the temple would have been very aware of gender distinctions. Men could go deeper into the temple then women could. There were places that women simply couldn’t visit. Traditions and norms within the religious sphere were enforced along gendered lines. Furthermore, for most people, a woman’s place in society was distinct from that of a man, and because of other writings in the New Testament, this remains true in many churches today. Many denominations deny women the opportunity to become ministry leaders or even clergy at all. Only men are deemed worthy of fully bearing the role of leadership in the church. The strict enforcement of gender roles persists.
However, if we take Paul seriously here, there is no distinction. Men and women are effectively the same. Neither is more equipped for anything than the other. All are one in Christ. If God determines that a woman should speak in front of a congregation, so she will. If God determines that a man will bake the bread while his wife makes decisions for the house and the church, so it will be. There is no distinction between men and women in the body of Christ.
Long before Paul wrote this, long before any of the women who were alive at the time of Paul were born, societies had made decisions about what the roles of women and men would be. To be born into such a society was to take on the burdens and blessings of your identity regardless of your choices or how you felt about it all. The same is true for us today, whether we like it or not, but Paul imagines something different. Paul views a world in which our identities in Christ are so life changing that everything else washes away. There is no meaningful distinction based on gender, race, home state or anything else anymore. Who we are as children of God made new in Christ is all that matters.
