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Reading Other People’s Mail: Part II
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
July 19, 2009
Ephesians 2:11-22
At the beginning of last
week’s sermon I was wondering if I would be able to preach a whole series from
the Letter to the Ephesians. It seemed too much like reading other people’s
mail, too much like preaching other people’s sermons, and the language of the
letter seemed much too abstract. But by the end of the sermon I was describing
the way Christ had called us out of the world and into his church and I found
myself amazed by all that was in this little book. Do you remember the image I
left you with, of us standing barefoot on the sidewalk, blinking in the noonday
sun, dripping wet in our baptismal robes and stunned by all that God had given
us? And that’s only the first chapter! Listen again to the verbs from last
week’s passage: God blessed us, chose us, destined us,
bestowed on us both forgiveness and redemption, lavished on us the
riches of his grace, made known to us the mystery of his will. It goes
on and on like that, and you get the picture that there is nothing God has held
back from the church.
Sometimes we talk about
all the blessings of heaven but after reading the first chapter of Ephesians I
wonder if God has anything left to give. Verse 3 says, “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every
spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” In other words, God has opened up
the floodgates of heaven and poured out on the church every blessing he can
give—every spiritual blessing, that is. It is this writer’s way of saying that
the church of Jesus Christ is as close as you can get to heaven on earth, which
caused me to do a little thinking about heaven.
I remember going to a
meeting of our local Baptist association in North Carolina, years ago, and
finding when I got there that the little church where we were meeting was
already packed. I waited until everyone stood to sing a hymn and then walked up
a side aisle and slipped into the only open space I could find on a pew, without
looking to see who it was I was slipping in beside. This was at a time when the
conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention was at a full boil, when there were
hostile divisions between those Baptists who called themselves “conservatives”
and those who called themselves “moderates.” I would have called myself a
moderate in those days, but the person I slipped into the pew beside was a
pastor who would have called me a liberal, and had on several occasions. I
looked around to see if there was another place I could sit but it was too
late. The second verse of the hymn was beginning. This other pastor glared at
me but then, with a look of resignation, held out his hymnbook. I took one side
and he took the other. And then, at the top of our lungs, as if we were trying
to outdo each other, we sang “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine.”
When I reflected on that
experience later I thought: “It would be just like God, wouldn’t it, to do that
to us in heaven, to make us share a hymnbook with our enemies.” I began to
think of the people I would rather not share a hymnbook with and this pastor was
near the top of the list. He has said some things about me that were unkind and
untrue. He had done some things I thought were downright mean. But he had also
stood there beside me singing “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine,” while I sang,
“Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine.” And if we were both right about
that—if Jesus was his and mine—then chances were good that we would both
end up in heaven, not because of any good thing either of us had done but simply
because Jesus loved both of us sinners enough to die for us. “Imagine that,” I
thought. “Sharing a hymnbook with your worst enemy. Forever!” I’d like to
think that somehow we wouldn’t be enemies there, but if we were there wouldn’t
be anything I could do about it. I don’t get to decide who goes to heaven and
who doesn’t: God does. And knowing God as I do I’m sure there will be some
people there I wouldn’t have let in. With a heavy sigh I realized that if this
pastor and I were going to have to get along in heaven we had probably better
learn how to get along here, and I picked up the phone to call him.
Back then it was moderates
and conservatives who were having a hard time getting along with each other, but
at the time Ephesians was written it was Jews and Gentiles. The good news about
Jesus was good news for everybody, and as the Gentiles responded to the gospel
and streamed into the church some of the Jewish Christians had trouble sharing
their hymnbooks. But instead of scolding the Jews the writer of Ephesians
appeals to the Gentiles to be considerate, reminding them that they had only
recently been adopted into the family of God, while the Jews had been there
since the time of Abraham. He tells them that none of us is saved by our good
works, but only by God’s grace, and how it was that same grace that brought them
into the church. If you’d like to follow along I’ll be reading Ephesians
2:11-22 from the New International Version, the same version found in our pew
Bibles.
Therefore, remember
that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those
who call themselves "the circumcision" (that done in the body by the hands of
men)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from
citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without
hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far
away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our
peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall
of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and
regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two,
thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through
the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace
to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we
both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer
foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of
God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with
Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is
joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you
too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his
Spirit (Ephesians 2:11-22, NIV).
That “dividing wall of
hostility” the writer talks about may have referred to an actual wall in the old
Jerusalem temple. You may remember from Sunday school that there was a “court
of the Gentiles” surrounding the temple that was open to everyone, but between
it and the interior courts there was a five-foot high wall beyond which no
Gentile was supposed to pass. In 1871 archaeologists discovered a plaque that
had apparently hung on that wall. It said, “Let no foreigner enter within the
partition and enclosure surrounding the temple. Whoever is arrested will himself
be responsible for his death which will follow.” Talk about your “dividing
walls of hostility”! But in A. D. 70 that wall, along with almost every other
wall, was broken down by the Roman army, who laid siege to Jerusalem for months
and finally entered the city and destroyed the temple.
The writer of Ephesians
may have had that very wall in mind when he talked about the way Christ had
broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles. And in
the same way someone might have used stones from that old wall to build a new
temple, the writer of Ephesians says that God is using Jewish and Gentile
Christians as “living stones” to build this new thing called the church, and
that Christ himself is the chief cornerstone. “In him the whole building is
joined together,” the writer says, “to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in
him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by
his spirit” (vss. 21-22). All of this makes it clear that it is God working
through Jesus Christ to break down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews
and Gentiles and together make them into the church. So the Gentiles don’t have
any right to feel proud about being there and the Jews don’t have any right to
kick them out. The old hostility that used to divide the two groups has been
nailed to the cross. It’s dead and buried. And the body of Christ that has
been raised up—the body we call the church—can include both Jew and Gentile.
It can include more than
that.
Back in 1942 a man named
Clarence Jordan bought a piece of property down in Georgia where he and his wife
and another couple started a community called “Koinonia,” a Greek word that was
used to describe the fellowship of the earliest Christians in Acts 2:42. These
two couples committed themselves to living out the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on
the Mount through
three basic principles: first, that all people are the children
of God; second, that love is the alternative to violence; and third, that all
possessions would be held in common. For a while they got along fine, but then
in the late 40’s Jordan, who had a Ph.D. in biblical Greek from the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, began to hold interracial Bible studies for some
or his neighbors. In 1950 Jordan and his wife, Florence, were excommunicated
from the Rehoboth Baptist Church for their views on racial equality. By the
mid-fifties people were firing shots into homes in the Koinonia community and a
produce stand by the side of the road was bombed. In 1957 the Ku Klux Klan held
a rally demanding that the farm be sold. When Jordan wrote to President
Eisenhower for support, the president referred the matter to the governor of
Georgia, who ordered the state bureau of investigation to look for possible ties
between Koinonia Farm and the Communist party.
By 1963 there
were only four people left at Koinonia, dozens less than at the height of the
experiment. Jordan, embattled but not embittered, began to translate the Greek
New Testament into a contemporary Southern dialect he called the “Cotton Patch”
version. He thought it was important to translate not only the words and
phrases of Scripture, but also the context, and so, under Jordan’s hand, the
letter to the Ephesians became the “Letter to the Christians in Birmingham.”
See if you can spot the evidence of his experience in this translation of
Ephesians 2:11-13:
So then, always
remember that previously you Negroes, who sometimes are even called "niggers" by
thoughtless white church members, were at one time outside the Christian
fellowship, denied your rights as fellow believers, and treated as though the
gospel didn’t apply to you, hopeless and God-forsaken in the eyes of the world.
Now, however, because of Christ’s supreme sacrifice, you who once were so
segregated are warmly welcomed into the Christian fellowship.
You might imagine that in Georgia, in the sixties, that translation of Ephesians
didn’t go over too well, but Jordan was convinced that Jesus had died for black
people as well as white people, and that because he had they ought to be able to
worship in the same church. As it says in Ephesians 2:14: “[Christ] 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.”
At the
time that letter was written, it was the hostility between Jews and Gentiles
that was being addressed. When Clarence Jordan was writing, it was the
hostility between whites and blacks that was being addressed. In the story I
told at the beginning of this sermon, it was the hostility between conservatives
and moderates that was being addressed. We don’t know what other hostilities
may surface in years to come but in each case the question is the same: Can we
get along with each other in the church? Can we learn to sing from the same
hymnbook? And in each case the answer is the same: we’d better. Because the
church doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to Jesus Christ. But here’s the good
news: there is no wall he can’t break down, no hostility he cannot heal. When
we go to war with each other over who belongs and who does not belong to the
church remember that Jesus died reaching out to sinners on both sides. We have
been brought together by his blood. He himself is our peace.
The
day I realized that conservative pastor and I might have to share a hymnbook in
heaven I called to ask if I could come see him. We sat down in his office and
talked for more than an hour. When we finished we realized that there would be
things we never agreed on, but we did agree on this: that Jesus had died for
each of us, and that each of us needed to be died for. In some way that made us
brothers. And so, before I left, we prayed together. He prayed for me and my
ministry and I prayed for him and his, and it seemed to me that both of us
prayed from the heart. The writer of Ephesians might say that’s part of the
miracle, that God is taking moderates and conservatives, Jews and Gentiles,
Anglo and African Americans, and anyone else who volunteers, and stacking them
like building blocks on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ
himself as the chief cornerstone. Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it:
God is building
a home. He’s using us all, no matter who we are or how we got here. Brick by
brick and stone by stone he’s fitting us into a holy temple, a temple in which
he is quite at home (Ephesians 2:19-22, The Message).
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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