Good morning, everyone. Before we dive in, let’s take a moment to center ourselves. Take a deep breath and remember we are here together, united in Christ’s love.
This summer Carter and I along with a few guest preachers decided not to preach a series but rather we are listening to the Spirit at work and letting God guide us to the texts that we will use in worship that Sunday. Mostly, God has been guiding us to use the texts from the Revised Common Lectionary, or the assigned texts for a Sunday as part of a three-year cycle. Specifically, we’ve been using the Gospel text and the Epistle text the last two weeks, so we are continuing that today. And I do believe the Spirit led us to this week’s text, as our Epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, we find a message that resonates deeply with us in the wake of the political unrest and violence we’ve witnessed.
Paul is addressing the Gentiles, a predominantly Greek community in Ephesus, asking them to remember their roots as a people of faith. The Gentiles were exploring their faith in Christ, but they did so in opposition to their Jewish neighbors, leading to separation and conflict. Paul reminds the Gentiles that they were once “the other,” strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope in the world. But God brought them into the kingdom, not to now exclude the Jews, but to unite all of God’s people together.
Paul’s message is clear: there should be no separation between Jew and Gentile. God intends for all people to be united as one. He emphasizes that in Christ, those who were once far off have been brought near, creating a new humanity out of the two groups. In Ephesians, he’s writing this message to the Gentiles but this message is ultimately for both the Jews and the Gentiles.
Because in his letter to the Galatians, where Paul is writing to a predominately Jewish community, Paul echoes this same message, saying, “In Christ, there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.”
Paul continues this In Christ message in all of his letters. In Christ, we are made fully alive. In Christ all things hold together. In Christ, Paul writes, you have been built into the household of God, which includes Jews and Greeks. In other words, people who are like you and people who are not. In Christ. You have been built into the very dwelling place of God, a place that has no dividing walls that separate us and create strangers.
But you’ve experienced these dividing walls, haven’t you? We all have. And we’ve all met someone different than us, failed to see the imago dei within them, and created a stranger out of them. History shows that we can easily build these walls inside the church. The church was once perceived as just for the chosen, just for the Israelites and Jews. Before the Reformation, it was for the educated and wealthy, those who could pay for their salvation. At one time, the church supported slavery and resisted integration. We still see churches with closed communion tables, baptism for only the worthy, solely men in leadership roles, and calls for repentance from LGBTQIA+ individuals. The church has plenty of dividing walls. And if we can do it in the church, we can do it oh so easily everywhere else.
These dividing walls separate us and create strangers out of one another. And unfortunately, we find comfort in these walls. We find comfort in what divides us; not in Christ who unites us. This comfort is where the damage is done.
What we forgot or choose to ignore is that God first set apart the Israelites, and they were symbolically marked at set apart by circumcision as Paul references in the opening lines to today’s passage. But this distinction was never meant to create an exclusive “us versus them” mentality. Instead, Israel was set apart for the sake of the other nations. They were called to be a light to the Gentiles. When the Israelites were at their best, they embodied this calling, creating a vision of unity where everyone was part of an “us” together.
Churches filled with good-hearted Christians don’t intend to create strangers. What they – what we – intend to do is protect holiness, or at least our idea of holiness. Paraphrasing a sermon from The Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes, he wrote, “We all have some cherished idea of the holy. Maybe it comes from a transformative religious experience, years of studying theology, or an inherited tradition that gives us a sense of identity. Whatever it is, we cherish it so much that we build a wall around it to protect it. And as soon as we do that, we create a stranger. So it has always been.”
The temple of Ephesus had walls the kept the Greeks in and the Jews out, the temple in Jerusalem had walls that kept the Jews in and the Greeks out. All temples had interior walls that separated men from women. And there was even this great, great veil that separated the Holy of Holies, protecting the sacred from the profane But all these walls ever did was create strangers. Greeks were strangers to Jewish worship, Jews were strangers to Greek worship, and all of us were strangers to holiness.
All the liberals over here, all the conservatives over here. We keep the people who are righteous up close, but the sinners off in the margins. We love the people who are like us, and we judge those who are not and we keep them as strangers over there. We refer to them as them and not us. This is not the way Christ built the church.
And God wouldn’t put up with this. At the death of Christ on the cross, the veil in the temple that separated the presence of God from those deemed unworthy was torn from top to bottom, so the holiness we tried to contain could rush out into every broken part of the world. In Christ, it’s all made holy again.
These dividing walls can come down anytime we are ready to repent of our sin of dividing Christ’s body. The church cannot be fully alive in Christ if we have any strangers within it.
The recent assassination attempt on former President Trump at a political rally is a reminder of the dangers of these dividing walls. Political violence is on the rise, fueled by an “us versus them” mentality.
As the body of Christ, we are called to say a definitive “no” to political violence and be peacemakers in our communities. This involves confessing and confronting the violent tendencies within ourselves and our society, resisting dehumanizing language, building bridges of curiosity and compassion, and cultivating practices of nonviolence in civic life. As disciples of Christ, we are called to a higher standard, one that breaks down these walls and seeks reconciliation.
And it starts by confronting the stranger within our own hearts. The stranger we are often most afraid of is the stranger within ourselves. We build dividing walls in our hearts, showing our neighbors only the parts we are proud of, while hiding our shame and fears. This divide between our best and worst selves causes hurt to others.
Have you ever found yourself saying something that was so mean and absolutely devastating to someone that you truly love? That comes from the stranger inside your heart. I did that this week to someone I care about; right now I am so mad at someone (and don’t worry it’s none of you) that right now I see them as an “other” and not a person I care about. I am hurting, and I am upset. But I forget that the person is also hurting. And I know where this hurt comes from. It comes from the stranger that we created when we divided our heart between the good and the bad, the sacred and the profane; when we walled off some parts of our heart to keep it protected or contained. You can try to ignore this stranger in your heart if you want to, but it’s not going to go away. In fact, by ignoring it, it only strengthens the stranger within us, leading to more broken relationships.
We often fear the parts of us that are broken, lonely, and afraid. We try to compartmentalize our lives, separating the good parts from the bad parts. We compartmentalize the person we know ourselves to be from the person others expect us to be. But we must let our faith in Christ break down dividing walls and to be the Redeemer for every part of us. Not just the parts we love about ourselves, or the parts that make us feel the most worthy and full. But also we must let Christ be a redeemer for the parts of us we want to hide or run from; the parts that make us strangers to ourselves.
Otherwise, what’s going to happen is that the part of you that you fear the most is inevitably going to be projected onto the other around you. This is one of the reasons that the church and the world is so divided, because we each fear the brokenness that remains in our own hearts, and it’s so much easier to work on that in somebody else rather than ourselves.
So for the sake of the divided church and the divided world, break down the dividing walls. Whatever it is that makes you a stranger to yourself and that sees a stranger in another, it all has to be surrendered to Christ. All of it. God doesn’t just love the part of you that is already holy. Jesus wasn’t dying just to save the part of you that’s already righteous. The loving salvation of God has to embrace all of you, the good and the bad, the holy and the profane. It’s the only way break down the walls we have built. And if we can do it within ourselves, we can do it in another.
In God’s Church, there are no strangers. So let me be clear: In this community of faith, there are no strangers. In Christ, you belong here.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
