by Rev. Sean Amato

Greetings, friends. Below is a sermon I preached on 06/22/25 – and at the request of several congregants, it will serve as my “From the Pastor’s Desk” for this month. God be with you; see you on Sunday!

SERMON: “All of You are One in Christ Jesus” (06/22/2025)
SCRIPTURE READING: Galatians 3:23-29

During my first few months working here, I found myself at breakfast with another pastor – a man who does not belong to our denomination, a man who had originally reached out to me in the name of ecumenicism: that is, friendship and cooperation between those who belong to different Christian denominations. Considering how many of us have come from different churches, different strands of our faith,
and from outside Christianity, this idea of ecumenicism seemed like a natural thing our church should consider, right? This pastor noted the similarities in our stories: we’d both been raised Catholic, only to
become Protestant pastors; we’d likely have much to talk about. I agreed.

So we met, made small talk, and placed our breakfast orders; I remember ordering a lox bagel with cream cheese, and him remarking on it. “I knew you UCC folks were a little funny.” And I chuckled, because UCC folks *are* a little funny, aren’t we? He and I talked a little about that funniness – that UCC tendency to color outside the lines, to follow a Congregationalist urge to speak out of turn, all tempered by how we “do” church: through discussion, through conversation – by listening to God, as God speaks through each member of our congregation. For “God is still speaking, ” isn’t He?

And this pastor, he had some good to say about how we do things. “That’s as local as you can get,” he said. And, we agreed, local is good.

We talked some theology, reflecting on our different approaches to baptism, to prayer, to seminary – and at some point, I’d mentioned that  our church was one with many women in leadership. I compared our lay leaders to Phoebe, a 1st-century Roman Christian and associate to the Apostle Paul best known as the “first” documented female worship leader, or deaconess – a woman who made things work when nobody else would stand up. My mentioning Phoebe seemed to shake a thought out of the pastor’s head; he paused and then spoke. “You know, I feel for you. You’re smart. You’re young. You know your scripture.
Went to seminary, all that. You go look for a job, and then your first church is one with a rainbow banner up in front. I pray you’re able to get out of there without too much of a headache.”

I asked the pastor what he meant. He reiterated that I knew scripture – and that if I knew scripture, I knew that concepts like “pride” were sinful; that God had spoken at length in the Old Testament about same-sex relations as not “bearing fruit” for the people of God – and that I, as a well-read younger pastor in godless New England, would struggle to “bring those people” – my congregation – out of the “fever” that led a
rainbow banner to be placed in front of our sanctuary.

He’d brought up the banner a few times, so I bit the bait. So I asked: what about that banner was so torturous to him? His answer, quoted directly from the King James Bible, is our scripture reading for today. “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” He went on to explain to me, the pastor of this church, that “my folks” had gone against the directive that “all should be one in Christ”: that putting up any banner or sign that indicated welcome of one group, of being explicit in our support of the LGBTQ+ community, was corrupting our witness. “I’m colorblind to this stuff,” he said. “And so is God. So you gotta drop those colors.”

And then I surprised myself: I asked him a pointed and unrehearsed question, one I’ve proceeded to ask every person who’s ever critiqued the banner outside or sanctuary. “Have you gotten close enough
to the banner to see that there are words on it?” He said he hadn’t.

So I pulled out my phone and read to him what’s written on the banner that hangs outside the house we built for God. “Protect the environment. Care for the poor. Forgive often. Reject racism. Fight for the
powerless. Share earthly and spiritual resources. Embrace diversity. Love God. Enjoy this life.” I asked him my question again, more specifically: “Really, what’s your explicit concern?” My friend then he did
a very pastoral thing: he restated his initial point. “The words are fine. The rainbow is too much. Don’t ask me, go ask Paul.” I told him I had a different mind on the subject; he informed me that a different mind on this topic was a sacrilegious one. So I extended my sacrilegious hand, and he shook it in his holy one. And we departed.

What bothered me about this interaction wasn’t just the ease with which he critiqued an entire church on such a flimsy basis – how he passed judgment on me, and on our congregation, without ever having stepped into this sacred space. What really bothered me was how readily he used Paul, who fought to make the church more accepting of others, as a crowbar – a tool for prying things apart.

I shouldn’t have been totally surprised. Many Christians use Paul in this way, cherry-picking specific words while ignoring the context in which he wrote them. Christians who don’t affirm women in ministry use Paul to do so, ignoring context if it means sounding authoritative. Some Christians even use Paul to justify anti-Semitism, quoting criticism of his Jewish peers and conveniently ignoring Paul’s self-identification as a Jew.. People twist Paul’s words every day; I’ve spoken about that more than once. But until that breakfast with the pastor, I’d never heard today’s passage as a tool to disqualify other Christians, Christians like
me and many in my congregation wrap themselves around people other Christians get queasy around.

Paul was, himself, the kind of person who straddled awkward lines: he was Saul, until he became Paul; he was a Jew aligned with Rome, until he became a Christian apostle. Paul lived in the gray area, a place where many of our Christian peers – straight or gay, married or divorced or widowed, cisgender or transgender – reside today. And living in that gray area, that unsettled middle, a place we might call “real life,” where nothing is cut and dry, it gave Paul perspective: the perspective he needed to write today’s passage. Because this passage, cherrypicked from its home in scripture, was part of a longer letter in which Paul fiercely advocated for the admission of Gentiles into the body of Christ; a letter in which Paul critiqued his Jewish Christian peers for failing to see that those who were not of Jewish descent could be Christians, too.

How many of you are Christians, but not Jewish Christians? If Paul’s opponents had their way, you would not be considered a legitimate Christian. Paul, who was working his tail off to widen the church – he fought for people like you and I, so that we could hold the same beloved statutes as he did. No more, no less. He fought for decades to accomplish this work, and guess what? He did it. He pulled it off. He advocated for a group of people who were not en vogue; he did so under threat of criticism and expulsion from the church. Under threat of violence. And he did so to make space for *you*. Which makes my pastor friend using Paul to question our church family even more ridiculous.

Church, hear me: God isn’t colorblind. God created every one of the colors that our eyes may or may not perceive – and in this same sense, God wove each one of us into being as we are, and loves us for our complexity. It’s us, here on Earth, that struggle to perceive the many colors God has woven into us, into the grand body of Christianity, of humanity. My pastor friend, in claiming colorblindness, was telling on himself: just like all of us, he has his preferred colors. His just happen to be black and white. But that’s not how God works.

I’ll dispel one more rumor: that God doesn’t like when we pick sides; or that picking sides is, in fact, against the rules of Christianity. God Himself picked sides, and He picked sides based on how we humans treat one another. It wasn’t just by chance that God sided with the poor, the foreigner, the downtrodden, the orphan: it’s because they were treated horrifically, betrayed by society. And who did God threaten, on account of such cruelty? The powerful, the stingy, those without compassion, those who stepped on others. Those who found reasons to pry people apart and dehumanize them.

And like His Father, Christ picked sides, too: he supped with and traveled alongside people who even his Apostles struggled to find communion with, at least at first. And he didn’t just dine alongside them, did Jesus: he loved them. I don’t know about your Jesus, but my Jesus wept in the face of human suffering; He got angry in the face of injustice, and yet he healed those who would hurt him. Jesus looked at this world, our world, and He chose sides.

And Paul picked sides: instead of demanding conformity from the Gentiles, instead of denying them access to God, he forced open the church doors for them, for us, and set a standard that this church has chosen to live into: that all are welcome at God’s table. And he was explicit about it: he said what he believed, and did not back down in the face of an ornery neighbor. And now, look at us: some of us are Jewish Christians, and some of us are Gentiles; some of us are bright and shining threads, while others prefer black and white. All called to the same table. And yet we still struggle to set up fair seating.

Paul spent his life advocating for people like you and me, so that we could become Christians. And in 2019, Slatersville Congregational Church voted that they’d do so, too: this church voted to become Open & Affirming, a welcoming and supportive space not just for the wider community but an explicitly welcoming place for LGBTQ+ people – those shining threads on the Christian tapestry, those *people* who somehow still lack a place at the great table of Christianity, of humanity. In 2019, this church made the difficult and explicit decision to wear its Christianity in a way that others don’t have the theological courage or compassion to do. Here, we unite our unique threads into something new: here, we are all one in Christ Jesus.

This is the heart of Christianity – and as Christians, we’re taught to build a bigger table. It’s a spiritual obligation, in my opinion, and a spiritual privilege. It’s just right. And I am sick and tired of people finding whatever excuse they can, whatever mangled cherry-picking of scripture to which they can grasp, to better justify a smaller table. Because that’s not what my Jesus taught.

I know I’m always daring you, my friends, but here’s another dare: I dare you to be a Christian, to be the kind of Christian that Paul was, the kind of Christian who knows that we’re all in this together. The kind of Christian who has no use for paltry excuses, or half-answers, about the matter of being Open & Affirming. No, we’re called to be Christians like Paul. And Paul fought for *you*. And one good turn, as they say,
deserves another. So who are you fighting for? No excuses. Be explicit. Be a Christian.