Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

July 19, 2009

Scripture:         Ephesians 2:11-22

Sermon:           “Of Fences and Neighbors”

            The very first people to call themselves Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, believed something very radical.  Radical, indeed.  They believed that the entire creation was being redeemed, renewed, made whole again, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Everything.  Not just some of it.  Not just part of it.  Not just some people.  But, everything and everyone was being re-created.

            One of the first believers in the movement, a man named Paul, tried to get this point across in a letter that he wrote to a church in the city of Rome.  “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage.”

            Now the evidence of this was the resurrection of Jesus himself.  He was resurrected from the dead.  And so all things would follow according to God’s time.  That is how Paul wanted the followers of Jesus to see the world.  God was at work redeeming the whole thing.  One day every knee would bow and every tongue confess.  That’s another way that he put it.  Not some.  But, every.

            The trouble with such grand visions for the world is that when you get right down to the details of life, the picture is more clouded.  The message of forgiveness through the grace of God appealed to some of Jesus’ own people, and it appealed to many others that had never experienced the God of Israel.  In this new community of Jesus, there were increasing numbers of Jews and Gentiles.  And there were so many differences between them that it was hard for them to understand how they were now one people.

            Into this tension, Paul wrote a letter trying to break down those differences.  The church in a city called Ephesus was having a very hard time leaving their past identities behind in order to live together as one new people.  This is what Paul wrote to them…

            So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the diving wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.  In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

            Dividing wall.  Hostility.

            These are the terms that Paul used to describe the state of his world.  There was a barrier separating people, one from another.  You lived on one side or on the other.  And that’s the way it was.

            Now, for Paul the line was drawn somewhere between being a Jew and not being a Jew.  He was a Jew.  So, in all of his life experience, that’s where the line was drawn.  He was a Jew living in a world where most people were not Jews.  That made most people Gentiles.  The world of all human beings could be seen in these two categories:  Jews and Gentiles.

            Gentile is how we interpret an old Hebrew word, goyim.

            Now when the Bible first uses the word goyim, it is simply a way of identifying other people.  It’s not so much a value judgment.  The goyim of the world is like “the nations of the world”.

            The reality for Paul was that Jews and Gentiles, Jews and goyim, were most likely understood as “us” and “them”.  We who bear the mark of circumcision on our bodies, and “them” who do not.  Us and Them.

            Us and Them.  Jews and Gentiles.  A dividing wall of hostility.

            So, what happens when the followers of a Jewish Messiah believe that the salvation he brings is meant for the entirety of God’s creation?  What happens when the Jewish followers of a Jewish Messiah begin to convince Gentiles that this is, indeed, what the Living God is doing?

            So, Paul had to say to them: the two of you are no longer strangers and aliens.  Jesus has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility between us.  And you can read between the lines.  This community of Jesus was struggling to come to terms with the implications of a new human family.  They just might have to think of one another as equally loved, equally blessed, equally members.  And in all of their life experience that’s just not how any of them had come to see the world.

            Growing up in the Deep South, you know, there were ways that I witnessed this playing out.  Even though I was born after the days of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, I didn’t have to look far to see dividing walls, hostility.  Many of you witnessed these things first hand.

            There was a movie house down the street from where I grew up.  Kind of tucked in behind an old drug store.  The Rhodes Theater.  And remember when I went to see Star Wars with my dad when it first came out.  What was that?  1977?

            My dad worked at the old Rhodes when he was in high school.  And when we got our tickets and popcorn and headed in to see the show, I remember saying, “I want to sit upstairs in the balcony.”  He grinned and we walked to the stairs going up.

            There was a sign on the wall of the stairway that said “No Smoking”.  It was right there at the bottom of the stairs.  It used to be that you could smoke in a movie theater.  But, my dad said, “It wasn’t that long ago when this sign us to say something different.  And you and I wouldn’t dare go up these stairs.  This is where it was reserved for ‘Colored Only.’”

            Colored Only.  Now, I grew up in the South so I didn’t have to have anyone explain that to me.  But, right there in my neighborhood.  It struck me as odd.  It was like the ghosts of the past could still haunt us in a place where white folks wouldn’t let black folks do certain things, sit in certain places.  Colored Only.  White Only.

            Jews.  Gentiles.  Dividing Walls. Hostility.

            Paul said that Jesus had broken down those walls.  But, they were still there in the Rhodes Theater, walking distance from my house, just a few years before I was born.

            And I was in the Middle East a few years ago.  I was somewhere between Israel and Palestine.  I had gone to the eastern part of Jerusalem, the holy city, the city of peace.  There was a soccer match at the university there and so I went to the game.  And there in East Jerusalem, where Arabs still live and where more and more Jewish folks are moving all the time, there was growing up in between them…a wall.  A concrete wall.  Nine meters high.  Almost 30 feet of concrete.  A dividing wall.  Stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction.  A lot like that wall they built once in Berlin.

            If you are one of us, you see, you are over here.  And if you are one of them, well, you stay over there.  Us and Them.  It’s an easy way to see the world.  Us and Them.

            I don’t want to understate this.  What Paul is saying is that there are real and difficult implications for what this gospel of Jesus Christ means.  Folks will be drawn together in ways that they never before imagined.  You wouldn’t believe the boundaries that the church is going to break between folks.  But the reality is, too, that people are going to be drawn together in ways that, frankly, they may not have wanted.

            Church, there is a deep spiritual truth that we have to understand to the best of our ability.  It is a painfully difficult thing to do, but we are challenged by God to become one new humanity here in the community of faith in Jesus.  Those are the words that Paul used.  One new humanity in place of the two.  There cannot be us and them.

            There was a Trappist monk that used to live down at the monastery in Bardstown, Kentucky, Thomas Merton.  And on the seventeenth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Merton took a trip to the big city of Louisville.  1958.

            Now, you can go down there and see the plaque if you want.  They’ve recently named this place Merton Square.  The corner of Fourth and Muhammad Ali.  It used to be the corner of Fourth and Walnut.  And fifty or so years ago Thomas Merton stood there and got hit right square in the face with this reality of what God wants for us—no Us and Them.

            He said, “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It was like waking from a dream of separateness…”  He said, “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race… God himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race.  A member of the human race!  To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.”

            He said, “I am a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate…And if only everybody could realize this!  But it cannot be explained.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

            We are all walking around shining like the sun.  Do you believe that?  Believe it about yourself?  You should.  Believe it about everybody else?  Hard to do, isn’t it.  God became a member of the human race.  Merton really says it well.

            Now, here’s the thing.  And I don’t want you to miss this.

            What God is trying to do with the church, what God is trying to do with you and me, is exactly what God intends to do with the entire world.  You and I are just a microcosm of God’s designs for redemption of everything.

            The church, you see, is the embodiment of the kingdom of God.  Let me say that differently.  What is true here.  What is true between you and me.  When are at our very best in being what Jesus calls us to be, what is true here is a picture of what God intends for all of creation.  We are a portrait of what could be in the world.  At our very best we are.

            Kind of a big responsibility, isn’t it?  Walking around shining like the sun.  Being the living witness of what God is trying to do in the entire world.  Big responsibility.  You who would call yourself a follower of Jesus.  Big responsibility to live that way.

            May you see with the eyes of faith and know that you are shining like the sun.  May you see with the eyes of faith and believe that you are the evidence of God’s redemption.  You are.  And may you see with the eyes of faith that Christ Jesus has broken down all of the things that keep us all at odds with one another.  We are all shining like the sun.  By the grace and love of God.  We are all shining like the sun.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)