God’s Promise of Love for All
Galatians 3:27-28 reads, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Saint Paul wrote this as he was trying to convince the Galatian believers that their salvation, their relationship to God, is not based on who they are or what they do, but on who God is and what He did. But this passage is especially poignant today as we consider the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. His mission was to pursue equality for all people, especially in a world where people in their sin treated each other horribly based on superficial differences–in particular skin color. His message was that God’s truth, His love, is for all, just as Saint Paul said in Galatians 3. In those two verses I quoted earlier, we hear the promise of God that there is only one thing that matters about you, is Jesus Lord of your life? Have you received His gift of baptism and been made righteous? If the answer is yes, then God’s radical inclusivity means that His overwhelming love is yours. (If you want to hear more about this, I preached a sermon a few months ago on the topic of God’s inclusive exclusivity you can watch here.) Paul hammers his point home by pointing out the primary ways his readers would have divided people (and valued some more than others), and shows that God’s love overrides those divisions. The distinctions between our genetic makeup (“male and female”), our station in life (“slave nor free”), or even our historic connections to God’s people in the past (“Jew nor Greek”) are not relevant in terms of God’s promises. God values and welcomes all people equally because of His great and overwhelming love for us. And so today we celebrate both Martin Luther King Jr. and all others who have worked to bring an end to the injustices of our sinful world, and to share God’s promise of love for all.