Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on July 21, 2024. Based on Ephesians 2:11-22.
In this passage of Ephesians, Paul talks about a dividing wall of hostility that separated Gentiles and Jews. Why? What caused this division? Well, it all went back to the Law of Moses as it was understood and practiced. I’m going to assume that you are all aware of kosher laws in some general way but not in the particulars. There are obvious and easy rules like no pork or shellfish. But truly keeping kosher requires a whole lot more effort than that.
For example, there is a verse in Exodus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I don’t think anyone knows where that rule really comes from. Maybe it was some pagan ritual that God outlawed through Moses. Whatever the origin, this is an important part of the kosher laws. It’s hard to know what cow provided the milk you drink, or that you used to make a particular block of cheese. So, to be safe, Jews never boil any meat in any milk, or otherwise allow dairy products to contact their meat. OK, fair enough, no cheeseburgers. Well, how clean do you get your pots and plates and silverware? Is it possible that a little bit of meat residue remains, or a little bit of dairy residue remains? Well, we don’t want to take a chance. So, a fully observant orthodox Jew will have completely separate kitchen items, maybe even a completely separate kitchen. They’ll have pots and pans and plates and silverware that they use for meat dishes, and a completely other set that they use for anything that has dairy.
This is just one of the many rules that cover both the letter of the Law as reported in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and the “fence around the Law” that rabbis developed over the centuries. So let’s imagine you’re an observant Jew in Paul’s time who is striving to follow all of the rules in every circumstance. Suppose a Gentile invites you over for dinner in a show of hospitality. You get there, and first you see that there is meat and cheese on the table. Whoa, hold on. We can’t be eating those together. Then you ask your host how the animal was killed. The kosher laws include lots of details on how animals should be butchered. Your host says, Oh, I don’t know, they took care of it down at the Temple of Artemis. Now hold on. You can’t be eating meat that was sacrificed to some other god. It just keeps going from bad to worse.
So what do you do? You don’t eat anything you’re served. You can’t be sure it was prepared properly, so instead of taking a chance, you refuse the hospitality that is offered to you. You think to yourself, These God-forsaken pagans can never know my Lord if they won’t try to learn God’s rules. Now, not every Jew had this reaction, and there were and are a diversity of ways that Jews observe the Torah, but at least some Jews would have reacted this way.
Now imagine you are that Gentile host. You went to a lot of trouble and expense to offer the best you have to a potential new friend. And what do you get in return? They turn up their nose, say that your food isn’t good enough for them, refuse your hospitality. Well fine. Let them keep to themselves and we’ll keep to ourselves.
This scene played out enough times to establish that Jews and Gentiles just aren’t compatible. In addition to not eating together, which of course is kind of a big deal for hospitality, Jews and Gentiles would not mingle in the same social circles. They maintained completely separate cultures. The separation between Jews and other religions persists to today.
But Paul said, “In his flesh [Jesus Christ] has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” How can the dividing wall be broken down? Only by breaking down the Law of Moses. As long as the Law remains, there will always be a reason for Jews and Gentiles to stay separate. There will always be conflict and resentment. So Paul said that through Christ, the Law has been made ineffective, allowing Jews to freely mingle with Gentiles as one people, members of God’s household.
Before Christ, there was an “inside” and an “outside”—Jews were insiders and Gentiles were outsiders. Now that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, there is only “inside.” Jews and Gentiles alike are part of God’s family with equal access through the Holy Spirit. Easy to say, hard to do. After centuries of living separate lives and developing separate cultures, simply saying, “The distinctions don’t matter anymore,” isn’t sufficient to bring people together. Our natural inclination is to develop factions. We tend to congregate with people who think alike, who look alike, who act alike.
What divides people today? In Paul’s context, the important division was between Jew and Gentile—a religious and cultural difference. Those divisions exist still today. There is hostility between Christians and atheists. There is hostility between different kinds of Christians, whether Presbyterian or Catholic or Baptist or whatever. There is hostility between American Christians and Christians in Africa and the Global South.
But looking beyond the church, there are lots of other ways we divide ourselves. It seems like politics is the strong undercurrent that drives so many disagreements, especially in a presidential election year. Things have gotten particularly heated and even violent last week with the assassination attempt. Violence is never acceptable, but is the natural result of the apocalyptic rhetoric and our culture of glorifying violence. We don’t really know what drove the shooter, but perhaps a desire for fame or notoriety. Regardless, I’m not looking forward to the next six months of campaigns and election aftermath. Whoever wins, it’s going to be ugly, potentially violent, and relationships will certainly be damaged or broken.
What else? What other ways do we find to divide ourselves? Ethnicity. Language. Gender. Age. Class. Wealth. The list goes on and on. In some cases, the formal divisions have ended, but the damage persists because, like the Jews and Gentiles, simply saying “there is no reason for conflict” doesn’t eliminate it. For example, it was IN MY LIFETIME that women were given the right to get loans in their own names. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974 and prohibited discrimination against a loan or credit applicant for reasons related to sex, marital status or familial status (as well as race, religion, and other reasons). I suspect that there are people here today whose lives would have been different if the rules had changed earlier. I also know that a decade later, probably two or three decades later, probably even today a half-century later, women still had and have trouble getting salesmen to respect them as individuals capable of making independent financial decisions. This is just one of the many ways that artificial divisions exist in our society and persist even after laws change.
We may be Presbyterians, but we are also Americans. We spend an hour or two each week focused on our church family, but the other 160+ hours living in American culture. We cannot help but inject our American attitudes into our church life. We cannot help but develop a church culture that looks an awful lot like American culture, but hopefully with more love of God and love of neighbor than most people.
So the question I would put to you is this: What aspects of our American culture and congregational culture have we imported into God’s kingdom, that inadvertently create barriers that keep people out? I believe that God’s realm is a state of universal human flourishing—universal, not just for a few people, but for everyone. God’s love is on offer to everyone who seeks it. What do we do that creates barriers? Do we actually have “open doors”?
When I look out at this congregation, I mostly see middle-class, educated Baby Boomers. That’s not a value assessment—that’s just a factual statement of who we are. Problems arise when we take our perspectives as the norm and expect others to conform to us. For example, in 2016, we had our Christmas Eve service at 5:00 pm. I didn’t think much about it, because I have never had to work past noon on Christmas Eve. Schools are closed, so teachers and other staff are off. Of course, if you’re retired, then you’re not tied to a work schedule. But there are plenty of jobs for which Christmas DAY is a holiday, but Christmas EVE is not. This was a decision that was made without any malice or exclusionary impulse, but that did in fact exclude certain people from attending worship.
In what other ways do we take our own lifestyles, attitudes, and family situations as normative? On the one hand, we should adapt to the people who show up, but on the other hand, we should meet people where they are. We all have a particular vision of what it means to worship God, and what a sanctuary should look like, and how the liturgy and music should flow, and so forth. For most of us, that vision has been shaped by many years or decades of worshipping in this church, or perhaps in other similar churches. But none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God. In talking with my family members and friends who attend other churches, there is a ton of diversity, a wide range of ways that people can authentically worship the same God that we do.
Now, you might say that having a worship service that looks like the broader culture is giving in and abandoning our principles. But again I’ll say, none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God, and we are called to meet people where they are and invite them into God’s family, not to force them to become like us first.
Once we meet people where they are, our goal should be to enable them to connect to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to live in shalom, just like the banner says. Paul repeatedly uses the word “peace” in this passage: For Christ is our peace, who proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom, but it means far more than the absence of violence. In the book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Christian author Cornelius Plantinga described the biblical concept of shalom:
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.
Think about that: shalom is the way things ought to be. Life in Christ is universal flourishing, wholeness, the way God intended for life to be. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that something you want everyone to experience? The promise of the Gospel is that shalom is available to everyone if they choose to participate. But how can they choose to participate if nobody offers them that choice? If a person thinks that they are unworthy of God, or thinks that all churches are full of hypocrites who can’t possibly point them to God, or wants to participate but doesn’t know how or where to start, then it is incumbent on us to reach out to them, meet them where they are, identify whatever barriers they are encountering, and break them down.
In a recent discussion about spirituality that I attended, we talked about challenges on the spiritual journey. The biggest one that came up was fear. Too many people who were raised in a church were raised to fear God’s wrath, rather than welcoming God’s love. They were raised to fear that if they do something wrong, they’ll burn in Hell in eternal conscious torment. This fear is reinforced by cultural messages that seem to say that all Christian churches preach “fire and brimstone.” But I saw this Justin Buzzard quote circulating on the internet: “Christianity should feel like ‘My chains fell off’ not ‘I better not screw up.’” There is reconciliation through Christ, forgiveness and love and healing and wholeness. We should radiate that love to all who enter our doors.
Another challenge that came up is one that I struggled with for many years. I thought that I was self-sufficient and that I didn’t need God. This whole Christianity thing didn’t make much sense anyway, so why bother? I know there are lots of young people out there, by which I mean people younger than me, who feel the same way. But someday, they may have a life event that shows them that no, they really aren’t self-sufficient and they need something else in their lives. How can we be that something, a hospital for the spiritually sick, a place where people can turn when they have nowhere else to go?
The core of the Gospel is this: The kingdom of God is at hand! Shalom, peace, healing, wholeness, and flourishing are all available to everyone. Let us seek God’s guidance and wisdom to see the barriers that people encounter and then do our part to remove those barriers, to enable them to welcome Christ’s reign in their lives. Amen.
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