1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—  just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—  so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Matthew 3:1-10

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.’ ”

Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him,  and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance,  and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

The Basic Mistake

The main point of this sermon.

1. Conflict originates because of a basic mistake, that is, the concept “us versus them.” Human beings create conceptual divisions that do not actually exist. Earth is essentially whole and complete. The division of “us versus them” is an artificial construct. This is the basis of all conflict. But at their best, Christian teachings bring us back to wholeness, to seeing the essential unity of life, that there is no “us versus them.” There is only us.

This morning, I included the reading from 1 Corinthians as a contrast to Matthew’s Gospel simply because I want to remember with you that the New Testament is made up of letters and Gospels. When these texts were written, there was no such thing as the New Testament. The first Christian writings were letters that Paul wrote to churches. Generally speaking, the letters were written first, and then the Gospels. When these things were written, they were not written as scripture. But gradually, with use and circulation, they became accepted as scripture, and eventually combined together in what we now call the New Testament.

This morning we continue to focus on Matthew’s Gospel with this reading from Matthew chapter 3, that is, the first ten verses of the chapter in which John the Baptist first appears. So we are looking at this story again this week. Now, most of you have grown up in church and you are familiar with this scripture passage. You know about John the Baptist, his wild clothing and wild diet, his strong preaching, how people come to him to repent and be baptized, and how Jesus came to him to be baptized. So can I say anything new about John the Baptist here? And that is what I want to do this morning. Let me see if I can bring your attention to something new, something you may not have thought about in all your readings of this familiar text.

So there are a couple things. First, notice how John echoes Isaiah. He quotes from Isaiah. And John is a wild man who makes us think of Elijah. In this way, Matthew identifies John as a prophet by associating him with Isaiah and Elijah. Isaiah is a prophet, Elijah is a prophet, and John is a prophet, and this provides a context for Jesus’ appearance. Jesus, too, is identified as a prophet in this line of Jewish prophets. So, you probably have already heard this idea.

But now notice, in verse seven, John the Baptist goes into this rant with the Pharisees and Sadducees, and he really hammers them. “You brood of vipers!” he says. So here, Matthew portrays these Pharisees and Sadducees as the enemy number 1. They are the bad guys. They are coming to John to be baptized, but John calls them out. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” He is calling them hypocrites. He says their repentance is not real, it’s fake repentance.

And what is this wrath John the Baptist is talking about? In verse 10, he says, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Many Christians later would interpret this line as a reference to hell, as if John is saying to all people everywhere, “if you don’t shape up, if you don’t repent of your sins, you will go to hell when you die.” But there’s another way to read it. Many scholars read this as a reference to what happened in 70AD. Remember we talked about 70AD last week? The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Temple in 70AD, and in this line, Matthew is talking about this event. That’s why scholars think this Gospel was written after 70AD, because of this reference.

Now, what is going on here? The Pharisees and Sadducees are leaders in the Jewish community. And yet, they have allied themselves with the Roman power structure. And this is the way Matthew portrays them. Matthew wants his community to see the Pharisees and Sadducees, along with the priests and the scribes, as Jesus’ opponents. In this speech, John the Baptist  denounces all these Jewish leaders. He criticizes them for being two-faced. They come to John supposedly to repent and be baptized, but John says, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” In other words, their repentance is not genuine because of the way they have allied with Rome. They are not living according to God’s will because they have gone over to the Roman side. Remember, the Romans are occupying Judea, and they are ruling Judea through Jewish puppet leadership.

It’s like when the Nazi’s invaded France during World War 2, remember? The Nazis occupied France, but they got the French leadership to help them govern the country. It was called Vichy France, a period when the French government became a “client state” of Nazi Germany, collaborating with the Nazis.

So this is what was going on in Judea. Some of the local Jewish leadership was collaborating with the Romans. Remember we talked about Herod the Great. Herod was one of these collaborators. Judea was a “client state” of the Roman Empire, and the local Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, Sadducees, priests and scribes, were helping the Romans. This is what John is referring to.

Now, our question is, Why does Matthew want his community to know this? Matthew has placed this speech by John the Baptist here for a reason. And the reason is, again, what we have talked about, that Matthew is writing this Gospel for a particular community, probably in Antioch, a particular community of new Jewish-Christians who are separating from the local synagogue. They are in a big fight with the synagogue leadership. Matthew portrays the Jewish leadership as the enemy. And he does this throughout his Gospel. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Pharisees are the bad guys. In fact, the word Pharisee eventually became synonymous with “hypocrite.” Even today, if you call someone a Pharisee, it’s a way of saying they are hypocritical. It’s largely because of Matthew that “Pharisee” became a derogatory term, a label, a bad name. “You Pharisee!”

So Matthew had this particular agenda in writing this text. But the problem is that in later generations it was generalized. The meaning shifted, and this text about the Pharisee’s was used as the basis for Christian antisemitism. In other words, on the basis of this text, and some others like it in the book of Matthew, some Christians justified their anti-Jewish views. Let’s be clear. Antisemitism means hatred of Jews. “Antisemitism” is kind of a nice way, a neutral way of saying hatred. Antisemitism is racism, its hatred based on racial prejudice. So let’s be clear about that. And the thing is, Christians who justify antisemitism, hating Jewish people, on the basis of this text in Matthew, are reading it completely wrong.

Now, we are Congregationalist, and we allow for freedom of interpretation. But there are some interpretations of scripture that are just wrong because they go against everything else that Jesus taught. So when we are interpreting scripture, an important thing to look for is “coherence.” Coherence means that the particular interpretation needs to make sense in the overall picture. For our faith to work in a practical, everyday sense, it needs to cohere. It needs to make sense. Otherwise, it’s just nonsense. It’s nonsense to read, on the one hand, that Jesus said, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself,” and on the other hand to believe that Jesus wants us to hate Jews, or to hate anyone one else for that matter. This is just absolute nonsense. So you see what I mean here. Our interpretations need to cohere, they need to make sense with the overall message of Christ’s teachings and example.

Now, I’m running out of time here, and I know I promised you that I would talk about the East-West division. And we will get to that. (While I’m writing one sermon, I end up with enough material for fifty more sermons.) But the main point I want to drive home today is this bit about racism and the incorrect reading of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew was criticizing, through the mouth of John the Baptist, a specific group of Jewish leadership in a specific time and place. He was not criticizing all Jews. He was not making a general statement about the Jewish people. In fact, he was Jewish himself. He’s not talking about “the Jews.” In fact, there’s no such thing as “the Jews.” He’s talking some of the leaders in that particular community.

But here is the basic problem. And it’s a problem across the board when we start to look at racism. The problem begins with the way the human mind works. The human mind, the intellect, divides up the world. We try to understand reality by dividing it up into pieces, for example, “us versus them.” But this “us versus them” mentality is not found in reality. There is no “us versus them.” In reality, there is only “us.”

Now, here is where we might get to something you have never thought about. And it blew me away when I first thought about it, too. There is no genetic basis for race. Let me say that again. There is no genetic basis for race. Race is a social construct. In other words, human beings have created race. Race is an idea in the human mind. But there is no scientific evidence at a cellular level that identifies a person as Jewish, or black, or white, or whatever. Race is socially and culturally defined. Race is not biological.

Take skin color, for example. There are so many varieties of skin colors. But where is the line between black and white? There is no such thing as a “black” person or a “white” person. There is no such thing as “black” skin or “white” skin. There is no genetic marker for black or white. There are variations in skin color, variations in cultural background, variations is languages and accents, there are variations in geographic location, but there is no genetic material in a human being that defines a person as Jewish, or Islamic, or Hispanic, or Black or White or Italian or Irish. These are socially defined differences. There is no lab test for race. You can’t look in a microscope and find race. Race is socially constructed.  And on the basis of these differences, people divide the world into “us versus them.” Just take a look at the meaning of “white.” It used to be that people immigrating through Ellis Island in the 19^th century, coming from Italy or from Ireland, were not considered “white people.” But now, they are. But actually, it gets kind of murky. Southern Italians tend to have darker skin that Northern Italians. Are they white? What is white? So you see what I mean here. Race is socially defined.

Now, I want you to think very carefully about this, because it is the foundation of the enormous suffering that is hatred. But this hatred is based on a mental construct. It’s based on our ideas, it’s based on the conceptual mind, the way people think. It’s not based on reality. People are so confused. They don’t see the forest. They only see the trees. They don’t see what is right in front of them. They only see their ideas, their judgements and prejudices, about what is right in front of them.

 So, I will leave you with a story about Ron Garan.[1]

Ron Garan is a retired NASA astronaut. He flew the F-16 on combat missions in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Later as an astronaut, he spent “178 days aboard the International Space Station,” an experience which “transformed his understanding of humanity.”[2]

Something happened to Ron Garan while he was orbiting the Earth. It’s what astronauts call “the overview effect.” He saw that, “from orbit, Earth doesn’t look like a collection of countries, borders, or competing interests. It appears as a single, radiant blue sphere suspended in darkness. No lines divide continents. No flags mark territory.”[3] There are no divisions.

This overview effect is the realization that we are all in this together. Earth is like a spaceship, a living spaceship. And we are all on this spaceship together. Earth is one interconnected and unified living organism. This is a profound cognitive shift reported by many who see Earth from space.

Garan’s experience gave him a new perspective. He calls it a planetary perspective. “Because when you truly understand that we’re all riding the same fragile spacecraft through the universe, the idea of “us versus them” quietly disappears — replaced by a single, unavoidable truth: There is only us.[4]

This is the way out of hatred. This is the way to correct our basic mistake. Hatred will never cease by more hatred. We must realize that there is no us versus them. There is no Jew, no Gentile, no black person, no white person. These are all artificially constructed divisions. There is just human beings. There is no us versus them. There is only us. And we are all in this together. Amen? Amen.

[1] https://www.rongaran.com/

[2] “Informatify” Facebook page, December 22, 2025 posting, accessed on January 17, 2025

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.