Of One's Right Mind

Text: Galatians 3:23-29
Other texts: Luke 8:26-39

We are each one of us a person of a thousand voices. In each of us: Clamoring and soft. Disagreeing, disagreeable, seductive. Each voice making requests, making demands: each seeing the world in a different way, each telling a different truth, each trying to prevail. A thousand thinkers inside of us. Some always present, some lying low in wait for a more opportune time.

Not demons, exactly, but maybe demons. Not usually sending us off to caves, not usually making us tear off our clothes, but sometimes, some people. Not usually leaving us locked up in chains, but sometimes, yes. Or sometimes it feels like we are.

The demons come out of the man into the pigs. How do all those demons agree enough to send all the pigs into the sea at one time? Why don’t they run this way and that, like our own demons do?

There are a thousand voices in the man. More than a thousand, really, since a legion was 6,000 soldiers. The man had so many voices in him that there was no room anymore for his name. What is your name? Jesus asks. “Legion” is my name, someone answers. The man was so fragmented that there was no more person left. Just the many voices left.

Jesus heals the man by driving all those voices out of him. Maybe when all were driven out a new voice emerged. The voice of the man as he was, as God created him before he was occupied by every other voice.

The voice of the man in his right mind, it says. It means of one mind, one heart. Being restored to one mind, one heart, the man is made whole. That is how Jesus heals him.

The purpose of the law, Paul writes to the church in Galatia, the purpose of the the law was to tutor us. The word tutor is unfortunately translated in our Bibles as “disciplinarian,” a word with difficult connotations. Disciples are students, and what guides and forms students are disciple‑formers—that is, teachers, tutors. The Message, a free Bible translation, has Paul saying: The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for.

The law was guide, a path to the right place. It was healing in the way that Jesus healed the man in Luke’s story. It formed a right-minded community out of a legion of diverse directions and desires. It scripted a single voice that could be spoken by the many people of the community. That guide, says Paul, though still good, is no longer necessary. Something about Jesus makes another way possible.

We are unified in the body of Christ—or maybe here we should say “family of Christ,” since Paul in this letter says that in Christ we are all children of God. One family. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus, as we heard and as we pray here every Sunday.

Before we talk more about this, which we will do in second, we should remember how strange this by now-familiar reassurance was. And is, in practice. It is a fine thing to talk about the unity of Christ, and to imagine that unity extending to all Christians and to all people, as we do. But if you look around the world, you do not see much unity. You see a lot of fighting and biting. Maybe we want to be Jew and Greek. Maybe we do not want to be united. Maybe we do not want to be equal but rather we want to be better than the rest. Unity is fine as long as I get to be at the top. We value cooperation only when either it does not matter or when it helps us—our group—to better compete. You might wonder whether we got to where the world is now because we actually have wanted it that way.

Paul has a vision that he presents in all his letters but especially here. The approval and blessing of God that was once available to only one group of people is now, through the presence of Christ, available to all. We are brothers and sisters of Christ and therefore children of God and therefore brothers and sisters of one another. We are clothed in Christ, Paul says. We are all wearing the same outfit. We are all wearing outfits made out of Christ-cloth. Christ-suits, so to speak.

Because of that, no one can tell whether we are Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. This does not mean that everything and everyone is the same. It does mean that none of those things that differentiate people are significant. They do not signify anything. They are not signs that give us—or give God—clues about how to treat them. They do not convey important information.

But:; this clothing of Christ is really more like anti-clothing. It is like a disguise, but in reverse. It is as if we were stripped of all the manufactured decoration—which like high fashion marks us out as better, richer, meaner, cleverer—as if we were stripped of all the surface skins with which we have adorned ourselves. And then stripped of even our features and shape. The Christ-suit is no suit at all. And that all that is left is our divinity and our humanity.

If we are all so clothed, then it changes the way we see one another. This is not so supernatural; it is common. It is what happens to you when you see your friends. All your friends are great-looking. Right? How did they get that way? Especially since when you first met them they were so funny-looking. But you no longer see at all those attributes that seemed so obvious about them. You no longer can see their decorations, their presentation. You see them. One like us.

Paul argues that through Christ we are able to see all others that way. As beautiful to us as our friends are. That we can even see those who used to be invisible to us, like our enemies, or strangers.

The promise of Abraham of which Paul speaks is a promise of favor by God: blessing, peace, abundance, companionship. A special relationship with God. Now this relationship is available to all. Paul sees a division in the discordant world that is repaired by the healing work of God in Christ.

Christ does for the world what Jesus did for the man. To restore to us our true names. Our true names: brother and sister.