(Psalm 96; Colossians 1:1-14)

One of the great temptations of the Christian life, from the very beginning, has been to add to it. C. S. Lewis talks about one aspect of this in The Screwtape Letters, dubbing it “Christianity And”; and while he focuses there on one particular form of this temptation, he sets out its essence very clearly: to add anything at all to the gospel is to nullify it altogether, to “substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.” We can be tempted into this error out of the desire to serve a particular cause—“Christianity and the Hot-Button Issue,” “Christianity and Your Chosen Political Party”—or the desire to please others, or spiritual pride, or the desire to have God on our own terms, or the fear that Christ really isn’t enough, or even a misunderstanding of what the gospel of Jesus Christ really is and means. There are a lot of reasons, but the mistake is the same: believing that Christ plus something else equals more than Christ alone. As Paul is at pains to tell the Colossians, that’s exactly wrong. To add anything to Christ is to lose Christ, but to have him alone is to have everything.

In the church in Colossae, the issue was accommodation to Judaism. This was a common problem in the churches of the first century; you had Jewish leaders working overtime to pull people back from the church to the synagogue, and others within the church, known as Judaizers, who wanted to stay in the church but bring the synagogue along with them. Their attitude may seem strange to a lot of us, but it’s really quite understandable when you think about it. For the early church, how they were supposed to relate to their Jewish roots was a real question—what should they keep, and what should they leave behind? And if there were those who wanted to throw out the entire Old Testament as outdated and irrelevant, it’s no surprise that there were also those who firmly believed that Christians had to keep on being fully observant Jews—circumcision, food laws, the whole nine yards. Tell truth, they had some reason for their position—after all, hadn’t Jesus said that he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it? What they missed was the way in which Jesus had fulfilled the Law, and its consequences for their position.

Now, in the church in Colossae, Paul wasn’t dealing with the usual sort of Jewish influence; rather than the Judaizers he’d fought in the Galatian churches and elsewhere, the Colossian church seems to have fallen under the sway of a mystical strain of Judaism that promised its followers a spiritual ascent into heaven, into the presence of the celestial throne of God. This, too, taught them that obedience to the Law was necessary for salvation in addition to Jesus, but it added another incentive: if you’ll just go farther, do more, obey even stricter rules, then you can have a special experience of God that ordinary folks don’t get to have. If you want to really know God, to experience his fullness and feel his presence, you can have that in your life, if you just jump through all these hoops that we tell you to jump through. Again, Jesus alone is not enough, this time to know God and have a relationship with him—legalism is the only way.

In response to this, Paul tells the Colossians that if they really want to draw close to God, they’re going the wrong direction. In starting to follow this teaching, they’re moving away from Christ—they’re assuming that Christ is not enough, that they have to add these other rituals and religious observances if they want to know God—and in so doing, they are trading in the freedom of God for slavery to worldly ideas. The root of the problem here is that they don’t really understand who Jesus is, or what he did for them, much less what that means for their lives; they don’t take him or his work seriously enough, because they haven’t gotten their minds around the staggering reality and significance of his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. They have not truly grasped that their extraordinary efforts are unnecessary, and even counterproductive, because everything they’re trying to earn, they’ve already been given. That’s why they’re going off the rails, and that’s why Paul sets out in this letter to make all this clear for them.

Now, from his thanksgiving, we can see that there’s still a lot to be said for the Colossian church. They’re not in the kind of shape the Galatian churches were in, where Paul skipped the thanksgiving in his letter altogether and just started yelling at them right off the bat; here, he gives thanks for their faith in Christ and their love for each other, which were bearing fruit in growth—both in numbers and in spiritual maturity. This is telling; for all that they’re starting to follow some false teachers, their hearts are still very much in the right place. They simply need to be taught to recognize error when they see it. Note, by the way, the reason and foundation for their faith and love: “the hope laid up for you in heaven.” As will become clear over the course of the letter, that hope is nothing and no one other than Jesus Christ himself.

As we typically see in Paul, and as we talked about last week with Philemon, his thanksgiving for the Colossians is joined to prayer for them, and indeed moves him to prayer for them. And notice what he prays—if you were here last week, this might sound pretty familiar. Paul tells Philemon that he’s praying for him so that the communion of his faith—the community, the body, of faith of which he is a part, which shaped him and which he has shaped—would be effective in the full knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ; in other words, that Philemon would be used by God to help bring about what Paul has been praying for the church in Colossae as a whole. As we saw last week, in the biblical mindset, knowledge isn’t just a head thing, it’s active and experiential: you can’t really claim to know something until you’ve integrated it into your life, until it’s reflected on a daily basis in the choices you make and the attitudes in which you make those choices.

The flip side to this is that it means that what you know, the content of your understanding, matters; if you get the head stuff wrong, you’re going to get the life stuff wrong, too. We can see, given that, why Paul was so concerned in his letter to Philemon, because the Colossians have started to buy into something that is very, very far from the truth—not knowledge, but anti-knowledge—and though for now, their hearts are still in the right place, that will change over time unless their false understanding of God is corrected. They’re seeking the right things, spiritual wisdom and understanding and the knowledge of God’s will, but they’re looking, and moving, in the wrong direction. Paul’s prayer, then, is that they would be turned around, that they would set aside their pursuit of false knowledge through false experience and allow the Spirit of God to fill them instead with the true knowledge of God and his will—so that they would then do God’s will, leading “lives worthy of the Lord,” lives that give honor to him by faithfully representing his character and his will in this world.

Of course, Paul recognizes that this requires strength beyond our own merely human capacity, and so he prays for the Colossians that they might be filled, not only with the knowledge of God, but with the power of God—power to do his will, power to stand firm in the face of opposition and difficult times, and power to remain joyful and grateful to God no matter what may come. The Christian life is not meant to be a life of grim endurance through the struggles and sorrows of this world, but a life of joy and peace—of victory, not necessarily over them, but in their midst. This is something the world cannot give—only God can; it’s only possible by his power. It’s only possible because we have been given something the world doesn’t have: a share in the inheritance prepared for the saints in the realm of light, the hope laid up for us in heaven. Christ has conquered the power of darkness—by his sacrifice on the cross, he has bought our freedom from the power of sin—and through the work of Christ, God has rescued us from that power and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

With this statement, Paul strikes the note that will ring through this entire letter—a note which indeed can be heard throughout all his letters: every aspect of our salvation, and indeed, every aspect of the life which God gives us, is contained in Christ. Nothing is lacking in his work—nothing more is needed; nor is there anything our own efforts can add to what he has done. There is no space for spiritual pride in the Christian life, because there is nothing to our own credit in our salvation, nothing we’ve earned and nothing of our own deserving; there is only room for gratitude and praise to Jesus, because he’s done it all. Yes, he calls us to live life in a new way, different from the way the world lives, but not in order to earn his favor or to repay the debt we owe him; both are beyond our power. Rather, he calls us to live in accordance with his will because that’s the logical working-out of the new life he has given us, and out of gratitude for that gift. We live differently, or should, because we know differently, think differently, believe differently, love differently—our motivations have been changed, and that changes the way in which we live our lives. But we do so not out of duty, but out of love and gratitude; and not in our own power, but in the power of the Spirit of Christ who is within us.

(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

As we talked about last week, Onesimus had a problem, and that gave Paul an opportunity. Or rather, Onesimus had two problems. The first was that he was a slave. Legally, though everyone agreed he was human, he didn’t exactly qualify as a person—he was instead a living, breathing, walking, talking, two-legged piece of property who belonged to a person named Philemon. Onesimus’ second problem was that he had dealt with the first problem by escaping from his master in the city of Colossae and running away to Rome. This obviously got him away from the day-to-day consequences of being enslaved, but it also left him in a dangerous position, because the Roman policy on fugitive slaves was simple and inflexible: if caught, they were returned to their master, who could do whatever he wanted to them. And I do mean whatever.

The good thing for Onesimus was that by the sovereign grace of God, he fell in with the apostle Paul and ended up part of Paul’s household as the apostle was under house arrest in Rome. This was good for him spiritually, as Paul led him to Christ during that time; it was also good for him physically, as Paul was the man who had led his master to Christ, and thus could be an advocate for him with Philemon. As we saw, this gave Paul the opportunity, when the time came to send a letter to the Colossian church, to send Onesimus back with it, with his own letter to Philemon to give him protection; it gave Paul the opportunity to rearrange Philemon’s thinking, and through him the thinking of his whole congregation, about Onesimus specifically, and about slaves in general. It gave him the chance to confront Philemon with the fact that this slave of his, this man whose body and blood he owned, was now also his brother in Christ, and as free in Jesus as Philemon himself; and in so doing, it allowed him to force Philemon to consider very carefully the consequences of that fact.

To what purpose? Well, to understand that, having looked last week at verses 15-16, let’s go back and start with the beginning of the letter. Paul opens it in typical fashion, with a greeting, a thanksgiving, and a prayer, but it’s worth noting a couple things here. First, it’s a personal letter, but not only a personal letter. It’s addressed to Philemon—clearly someone whom Paul holds in high regard—to a woman named Apphia and another man, named Archippos—beyond the fact that both are Christians, we don’t know who they were—and to “the church that meets in your home.” That’s very interesting, because it means that while this letter is to Philemon, with requests and persuasion for Philemon, the whole congregation is going to be reading it over his shoulder, if you will, as he reads it. Partly, that might be to encourage Philemon to do what Paul wants him to do, since if he doesn’t, he’ll look bad in front of everyone; but more than that, I think this tells us that Paul isn’t only concerned about Onesimus and Philemon here. He has some things he wants to teach the whole church in Colossae through this episode.

Sometimes in Paul’s letters, the thanksgiving and the prayer are pretty clearly separated; here, they’re interwoven. He starts off, “I always thank God as I pray for you,” and then he finishes that sentence one half at a time. First, in verse 5, he says why he thanks God for Philemon: because of his faith and his love. The way this is structured in the Greek makes it clear that his love is not just for the people of the church, but also for the Lord Jesus, and that his faith isn’t just for himself, but that in fact his faith is a source of strength for the church.

And then look at verse 6—what do you see? “So that.” The NIV isn’t very helpful here; they have it in the middle when it should be at the beginning. You see, the verb “to pray” isn’t in this verse; that verb is back in verse 4. The interesting thing about verse 6 is that it doesn’t actually give the content of Paul’s prayer, strictly speaking—it begins with “so that” and gives the purpose of Paul’s prayer. It’s a small difference, but it’s an important one for us in understanding this letter. You see, Paul isn’t just saying, “I’m praying this for you, I’m thankful for you, Amen, now let’s get down to business.” Instead, he’s saying, “This is why I’m praying for you, this is what I want to see happen in your life and through your life, and it’s for that reason that I’m going to say what I’m about to say to you.”

What we need to understand here is that when we see “so that” in the Scriptures, we need to pay attention, because this is going to answer the “why” question. I may have said this here before, but the preacher’s question is “so what?” As a preacher, whenever I tell you something, I have to consider that you have the right to say—not in a nasty or disrespectful way, but as an honest question—“so what?” So what’s the reason you’re telling me this? So what’s the reason I should care? So what difference does this make to me in my life? And when you ask “so what,” the answer should come back, “so that”—and so it does here. This is Paul’s purpose for Philemon, it’s what he wants to see happen in Philemon’s life, and so this is the other pole of this letter. I said last week that verses 15-16 are the keynote of this letter, the keystone of its argument, and so they are; but verse 6, the purpose of his prayers for Philemon, is also the purpose of this letter toward which that argument is focused.

That, I’m guessing, is why Paul layered this sentence six feet deep with theologically loaded, meaning-full words, as he’s clearly trying to express something powerful here. Unfortunately, one of the things he succeeded in doing is in making this verse all but impossible to render into English. I feel sorry for Bible translators here, because they can’t explain it, or turn it into a whole paragraph—they have to put just a line or two that makes at least minimal sense in English and captures, as best they can, what Paul is trying to say. That’s why the NIV takes the “so that” from the beginning of the verse and moves it to the middle—I think it’s a mistake, but they’re just trying to get all the pieces to fit into the box in a way that lets people see more or less the right picture. For preaching from, though, it’s not so great, so if you’ll look up at the screen, you’ll see my translation of verse 6. It’s not great English, but like I said, this is a tough verse.

He starts off with the phrase “the communion of your faith.” In the Greek, this is koinonia tou pisteos. Koinonia is the word we most often translate “fellowship”; it’s from the word koine, meaning “common,” and it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together and being involved in one another’s lives. It’s hard to translate in the simplest of cases because it’s a much richer word than just “fellowship,” with a much deeper meaning than we usually give that word; but here, when it’s combined with “faith”—and specifically, Philemon’s faith—what does that mean? There are, I think, two parts to that. The first is that Philemon’s faith isn’t just his own, but is a faith held in common with the whole Christian church, and indeed that it came to him through the Christian church; he is one who has received this blessing from the church, and thus is indebted to it. The second is that in living out his faith, and especially in serving as a leader in the church, he has expanded that communion, that circle of relationships—his faith has formed a community, and there is a koinonia which has resulted from his faith, including perhaps people whom he personally has led to Christ. The communion of his faith is the communion, the part of the body of Christ, which has shaped him and which he himself has shaped in his turn.

Paul’s hope is that that communion might become effective—this is the word from which we get our word “energy”; in fact, one commentator translates this, “might be a source of energy.” The idea is that the communion of Philemon’s faith, that this community of which he is a part and which he is responsible to lead, would be energized to produce results, to accomplish things. But to accomplish what? The aim here, Paul says, is “full knowledge of all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that sounds strange, in the first place because we’re used to thinking of knowledge as a head thing. You go to school, you read books, you listen to the teachers and the professors, and you learn things, and then you take tests and put those things down on paper to show that you know them. In the biblical mindset, though, knowledge isn’t a head thing, or at least not purely so. Sure, it has intellectual content, but it’s more than that. First, it’s active—you don’t actually know something until it’s reflected in how you live your life each day. Second, it’s relational—to know someone is not simply to be aware of facts about them, but to experience them and be in relationship with them.

Thus, when Paul talks about “full knowledge of all the good that is ours,” he’s not talking about possessing a set of facts about what’s good and what isn’t, he’s talking about experiencing in our own lives the good which Christ has given us—experiencing God’s work in our lives, and living accordingly, and so embodying that good in a way that the whole world can see. This is what Paul wants Philemon’s faith to produce, in his own life and also in the broader church, through his leadership of the communion of faith of which he is a part. This sort of witness is what he wants to see in Philemon’s life, and what he wants to see Philemon lead others to through his teaching and example. The desire to see this is the reason why Paul writes this letter.

Now, that doesn’t quite finish verse 6, of course, but don’t worry, I’m not leaving Jesus out of this sermon; I’ll come back to this verse in a minute. Before I do, however, I want to point you to perhaps the most interesting feature of this letter. Look at verse 8: “Therefore”—because this is what I want to see happen in your life—“although in Christ I have every right to tell you what to do here, I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do this out of love.” Out of love for whom? Well, partly for Paul, clearly; but this is also more general—out of love for Christ, out of Philemon’s love for the church, out of the love that is chief among “all the good” that he’s just been talking about in verse 6. He goes on to ask two things: first, that Philemon welcome Onesimus as he would welcome Paul himself; and second, that he would send Onesimus back to Paul—and perhaps even first set him free from slavery; I think that’s what Paul’s hinting at in verse 21—so that he could once again help Paul in his ministry in Rome. But where Paul could have simply ordered Philemon to do all these things and been certain of being obeyed, he doesn’t; instead, he just asks him. Why?

Paul doesn’t spell this out, of course, but I think we can see the answer to that in the letter. It’s all about love, and about the communion of Philemon’s faith becoming effective in the full knowledge of all that is theirs into Christ. For Paul, this isn’t just about Onesimus being protected, or getting Onesimus back; there’s something larger at stake here as well: the growth of the Colossian church, which now includes Onesimus. Paul doesn’t just want Philemon to do the right thing, he wants him to do the right thing for the right reason—because if you know the love of Christ in your life, this is what you do; this is what it means to live out that love, first toward Onesimus, and then toward Paul—and he wants him to do it in full view of the church (that’s the main reason this letter is supposed to be read to them as well) so that in doing it, he will set an example for them as they go out and live their own lives.

This, I think, points us back to the end of verse 6, where Paul talks about “all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that’s a literal translation, and it’s bad English, but I think it’s important for us to catch the meaning of that little preposition. You can just take it to mean “in,” as the NIV does, and just talk about the good that is ours in Christ; or you can translate it as “toward,” as other commentators do, and focus on the fact that the good that God does in us is supposed to focus our attention on Christ, and move us toward him. It seems to me that we need to hang on to both those aspects and remember that we’re still in process: we’re already in Christ, and in Christ we have all this good that’s beginning to be realized, but it’s only beginning; we still need to be closer to him, and we’re still being drawn closer to him. We need to remember, as Hannah sang earlier, that it truly is in Christ alone that our hope is found, not in anything else. We need to remember that we find our true life in Christ alone, for Christ alone, and that the hope and the goal toward which we live is Christ alone. Let’s pray.

(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

This morning, we’re starting a sermon series on Colossians; we’ll be working our way through the letter to the Colossians over the course of the fall. Now, as I say that, some of you might be wondering what I’m talking about, since we didn’t read Colossians this morning; wasn’t I listening as Dr. Kavanaugh read Philemon? Well, yes, I was listening, and I didn’t make any mistake in what I asked him to read; we’re starting a series on Colossians by looking at the book of Philemon. I’ll grant, it’s not the usual way to do things, but I do have reasons for putting things together this way. Some are just reasons of scheduling, minor practical matters; of greater importance is the fact that this letter is part of Scripture, which means that while it’s usually ignored because of its size, we ought to stop and consider what God wants to say to us through it. If we’re going to do that, then, the logical time is to put it together with Colossians, because these two letters are related. In fact, they’re quite closely related, as you can see if you flip over to Colossians 4:9, where Onesimus is mentioned along with Tychicus as one of the people carrying that letter; you’ll note there that Paul explicitly says, “he’s one of you.”

We don’t know a lot of Onesimus’ story, but we do know that he was a slave. That’s a loaded word, and rightly so, but it’s important to realize that slavery in the Roman world was very different from American slavery; and while it could still be a terrible thing, on the whole it was far better. Yes, slaves were owned by another human being and under that person’s absolute authority, and yes, some masters were cruel and exploited their slaves; but most, it seems, treated them at least decently. There was certainly societal pressure to do so, partly on moral grounds (for they knew full well that slaves were human) but more on practical grounds: it was unwise to provoke slaves by ill-treating them, for one thing, and for another, it was uneconomical, because it reduced both their ability and their motivation to work. Indeed, unlike in America, it was quite common to teach slaves and train them so as to increase their productivity, and some slaves became quite important people in their own right. Slaves were allowed to work on their own, though their owners took much of the money they received, and to own property—some even owned other slaves. In a society which was rigidly structured by class (which was rigidly determined by money), slaves who belonged to an owner of social standing who took good care of them were better off than many who were free but poor. There were even people who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to improve their lives, usually because they were too deeply in debt to get themselves out of it.

Still, even given that Roman slavery was generally a far better thing than American slavery, especially in the context of unjust Roman society, the fact remains that it’s intrinsically a bad thing; people shouldn’t own other people. As such, Paul’s response to slavery is obviously a central concern for us as we read this letter; and to understand the response he offers here, we need to get the details straight, as far as we can. We know that Onesimus belonged to Philemon, a man of some importance in the city of Colossae who was one of the leaders of the church there. As we’ll talk about later on, the church in that time period met in the homes of members, and each house church was under the direction of overseers (we would call them elders). Philemon was rich enough to have a house big enough for the church to use—no surprise, since he was rich enough to own slaves—and as such was probably one of the overseers of that particular congregation.

We also know that at some point, Onesimus escaped from his master and fled the city. He was almost certainly still young enough to be unmarried, so he had no one but himself to worry about; that made escape easier. He may have taken some of his master’s money or valuables with him; that’s not clear, but it might well be part of the financial harm done by Onesimus which Paul has in view in verse 18. You can understand why Onesimus would have stolen as much as he could carry on his way out the door, since he had a long journey ahead of him. A slave who had run away could never feel completely safe as a fugitive; it wasn’t like in America, where there was a safe place to run to. The best chance of safety lay in fleeing to one of the great port cities of the empire; the nearest of those was Ephesus, down the Lycus valley a ways from Colossae, but that would be far too close for comfort. Instead, Onesimus made for the greatest city of all, and the one that offered the greatest hope for a better life: the capital city of Rome.

Now, we don’t know anything about his journey, or what might have happened along the way; but we know that somehow, he fell in with Paul, who was under house arrest in Rome at this time. He may well have known of Paul as one of his master’s friends and someone Philemon held in high honor—indeed, he may actually have known Paul already—or maybe not, we can’t really say; but however it happened, he became part of Paul’s unorthodox little household, and Paul led him to Christ. This was a critically important thing for Onesimus, not just for his spiritual destiny but for his daily life, because under Roman law there were only a couple ways for a fugitive slave to regain some sort of legal status. One was to go to a temple that could offer asylum to fugitives and appeal to the priests; they would then contact the owner and try to broker a safe return for the slave. The other was to go to a friend of the master, an amicus domini, and appeal to them for asylum and assistance. If that person was willing to intercede on the slave’s behalf, and if they were willing to write a letter to that effect in the slave’s defense, then under Roman law the slave was no longer a fugitive.

This gave Paul an opening. He gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He’s simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work. Instead, he does what he can to undermine slavery in and through the church, beginning with this letter.

You see, Paul writes this letter to Philemon as the amicus domini for Onesimus; and in it, he does several things. We’ll look at a few of them next week, but now, I want to focus your attention on the most important one. Look at verses 15-16. Paul writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what we call the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.

To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you and he’s your equal.

This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.

And everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work, everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Christ Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters. Everything else is just details. Everything else. We are God’s people—that’s the bottom line.