I was the guest preacher in a church on the Sunday before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. My sermon was titled, “One in Christ Jesus,” based on Galatians 3:26-29. Perhaps you remember Paul’s conclusion: “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.” In the sermon I said that was a dramatic statement for Paul to make.

The sermon I gave as the guest preacher on the Sunday before the MLK holiday was a revision of a sermon that I had given to my own congregation when I served as pastor of Village Baptist Church in Bowie, Maryland. I included that original sermon in Chapter 8 of my book, Preaching for the Long Haul: A Case Study on Long-Term Pastoral Ministry. Since it was unlikely that anyone in the congregation of the church where I was the guest preacher had read the book, I felt it was safe to revise the sermon for that occasion.

My point in the sermon is that as Christians, we are called to create a new paradigm of race relations, based on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the principles of “Spelunking Scripture” is that not all passages of the Bible are of equal value. Some passages of scripture are more important than others. To me, Galatians 3:26-29 is one of those most important scripture passages. In fact, I have preached on that passage many times. In my book, Spelunking Scripture: The Letters of Paul, I offer three additional sermons based on that passage from Galatians 3:26-29. I was able to preach so many different sermons based on the same passage of scripture because the text continued to speak to me (and to us) and to offer fresh insights for our time.

The introduction to Chapter 8 of Spelunking Scripture: The Letters of Paul begins:

We are one in Christ Jesus. We are not divided by race, or social status, or gender, or any other demarcation. Our baptism into Christ creates a radical unity. Human distinctions no longer separate us.

In the sermon I gave on the day before the Martin Luther King holiday, I said:

My predecessor at Village, pastor Dan Ivins, grew up in segregated Tennessee. Dan remembered seeing signs in businesses which said, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Dan turned that around and coined the slogan, “We reserve the right to accept everyone.”

I think the apostle Paul would have agreed with that slogan: “we reserve the right to accept everyone.”

Jews in Paul’s time were extremely racist. Most Jews would have nothing to do with non-Jews, with Gentiles, with Greeks, and especially they would have nothing to do with Samaritans. But Jews who became Christians began to understand that racism is wrong. Jews who became Christians began to understand that Jesus reserved the right to accept everyone.

And that’s what Jesus did. Jesus accepted all kinds of people, even those the religious leaders of his day would not accept. Jesus came for all people, and Jesus died for all people. Jesus came to show everyone of us how much God loves us. And Jesus came to show us that God wants us to love each other too.

The early Christians came to understand that the church was based, not on race, but on faith. And they began to share the gospel with people of every race and ancestry and national origin. Eventually the Christian church became a worldwide community of faith because we are one in Christ Jesus.

The reason I could write so many sermons on the same passage of scripture is because I was moving from the “what” question to the “so what” question. I was moving from what does the passage say, to so what say to us, and to so what does it mean for us.