Ephesians isn’t easy to
read for for a couple of reasons.
Greek didn’t have
punctuation so the sentences
tend to go on a ways.
Plus Ephesians is
actually not so much a letter
as a medley of Paul’s greatest hits,
a gospel stew of Paul’s ideas from elsewhere.
After his death ,Paul’s
followers strung together a lot of key phrases
to express his basic message to the churches in that time
& place.
The first churches were
always dividing up into factions
over this issue here; over that issue there.
In Corinthians, some folk
spoke in tongues and some didn’t.
Some ate meat and some
didn’t.
Paul told the Corinthians
they each had different gifts,
but they were all part of the same Body, the Body of
Christ.
In Israel and Syria, most
of the Christians were ethnically Jewish
and still practiced Judaism.
For them, Christianity as another party within Judaism,
For them, Christianity as another party within Judaism,
like the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Essences.
But things were different
around Ephesus.
There were Jews and some
of the Jews were Christian.
But most of the
Christians were gentiles.
So the division was
between Jew and gentile.
There had been a real
blowout in Galatia, not far from Ephesus,
over whether you could even be a Christian
if you didn’t convert to Judaism first,
and for men that meant getting circumcised.
That’s the kind of
division Paul was writing into.
I have seen Christians
divide up over all sorts of things:
women’s ordination, dancing, drinking, movies on Sundays
–
whether the born again experience is essential to
salvation,
whether
baptism in the spirit with tongue speaking
is essential to salvation;
whether the promised millennium of peace and justice
is to come before or after the rapture;
whether there will be a rapture;
whether the virgin birth is literal or symbolic.
We have divided over
incense, prayer book revision,
abortion, LGBTQ inclusion, background checks for gun
buyers,
and
whether it is too Catholic to put candles on the altar.
You name it.
If we ever run out of
issues to divide up over,
we’ll get busy inventing some new ones.
What is true in the
church is especially true in the wider
society.
In his landmark book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop lays out the
facts.
America as a nation is
more diverse than ever.
But we have divides
ourselves up as never before
to
insure that we only interact people like ourselves
---
people who look, think, and even eat like we do.
We live in neighborhoods
of people like us.
We go to churches where
we all think alike.
We watch news channels
carefully programed to offer facts
that support whatever opinions we already hold.
The social and political
impact is obvious: division and discord.
We have redrawn the
congressional districts into conservative
or liberal
so candidates do not have
to campaign across ideological lines.
That’s why there are no
longer any moderates to broker deals
and Congress
no longer works.
Our divisions also have a
personal impact.
Robert Putnam, in his
book Bowling Alone,
shows that we are increasingly
isolated.
And philosopher Martha
Nussbaum, in her book,
The New Religious
Intolerance, says we are losing
our very ability to imagine how things look to someone
else.
That makes our world
smaller. It shrinks our lives.
We can divide up Black
versus white,
English speaker versus Spanish speaker,
liberal versus conservative.
The categories don’t
matter.
What mattes is the very
act of dividing up
in a way that breaks relationship,
isolates us, and narrows our minds.
It was into just such a
division that Ephesians was written.
So you can substitute any
of our contemporary divisions
for the division of Jew and gentile in this letter
and we’ll see how the message plays.
Paul said, “Now . . .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 dividing wall,
that is the hostility between us.”
My bishop in Georgia used
to have a saying.
When people would ask him
if he could work
with some person or group of people, he’d say,
“I haven’t met anyone yet that Jesus didn’t die for his
sins.”//
And that, my friends, is
where it stands.
There may be somebody we
don’t agree with.
We may not even like him
very much.
But you know what: Jesus
went to the cross for him too.
Jesus shed his blood for
him too.
We drink that blood in
the Communion
as a ransom price to make us one.
We lay down our grudges
and animosities
in order to take Jesus into our hearts at the rail.
There are so many
standards
by which
we judge each other as right or wrong,
wise or
foolish, good or bad.
There’s a term for those
standards in the New Testament.
It’s called “the law.”
The law is the standard
of judgment we use to set ourselves apart.
But Paul says,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law with its commandments . . . ,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law with its commandments . . . ,
that he might create in himself one new humanity;
in place
of the two, thus making peace,
and might reconcile both groups into one body through the
cross.”
One speaks Spanish; the
other, English.
One is black descended
from slaves; the other, white,
descended
from slave owners.
One is straight; the
other, gay.
And we all got a law to
make us right and the other guy wrong.
But the Bible says,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law . . .
that he might create in himself one new humanity.”
How did he do that?
It wasn’t easy. He went
to the cross for both sides
of every division we can invent.
Paul says Jesus
“create(d) in himself one new
humanity;
in place
of the two, thus making peace,
and . . . reconcile(d) both groups into one body through
the cross.”
When Jesus brought us
together in the Body of Christ,
he did not abolish our differences.
He did not make us all
alike.
He left us different.
But he gave us something
in common that runs deeper than our differences.
He gave us grace.
He gave us salvation.
He gave us the love of
God.
We may have religious
differences or political differences
or different spiritual styles.
And that’s a good thing.
How bland it would be if
we were all alike!
How dull life would be if
we didn’t know people
who saw the world through different eyes.
We get to enjoy each
other’s differences
because we have something deep in common.
We act out that something
in common at the communion rail.
“The gifts of God for the
people of God.
Take them in remembrance
that Christ died for you
-- died to make all of us one body –
and feed on him in your
hearts by faith with thanksgiving.”
