Eph. 2:11-22: Good Fences

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 were once 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. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the 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 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.

Good Fences

You have, perhaps, heard Robert Frost’s excellent poem “Mending Wall.” Snippets are quoted with some frequency, namely its bookended “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In the poem the narrator surveys the fence dividing his property from his neighbors. In the off season he patches holes caused by freezes and hunters. Then, come Spring, he calls his neighbor over to fix the thing altogether, to “set the wall between us once again.” As they walk along the fence, the narrator becomes wary of its implications. There’s a natural boundary caused by their trees, his apple trees, the neighbor’s pines. Perhaps they should tear the thing down?

The neighbor responds, without hostility or anger, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” “Spring is the mischief in me,” recalls the narrator, “and I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: / ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it / Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. / Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense. / Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”

Every time I see a wall I remember that line. I sort of huff and puff, “something there is!” There’s an instinct to distrust walls, a sort of libertarian streak, a childlike urge to trespass,  to go beyond what is acceptable in the hopes that some incredible thing is being held within. But for a people who distrust walls, we’ve done an excellent job of erecting them. We’ve seen the Berlin Wall which, though no longer standing (except of course as memorial), still reminds us of the vast differences between East and West. And the Iron Curtain, that spectral wall built of mutual distrust and suspicion that remains today. And of course the Great Wall. And the proposed and extant border walls between the United States and Mexico. The tall, high gates that protect the Governor’s Mansion from the hooligans of Princeton and the perimeter around the White House. And the little white picket fences that populate our nostalgia.

When I was young I went on a vacation with one of my closest friends. It was a delight until about the third day, when there was a property dispute over a piece of clothing. It resulted in a line drawn right down the middle of the room and, confoundingly, continued in pillows down the middle of the double bed we shared. We were so concerned with the structural unity of our makeshift wall that we slept without pillows that night—it was more important that we be separated than that we sleep. She was a thief and I honorable. She belonged on the outside of the perimeter and I on the inside. It was the right thing to do.

The truth is that we are a people who love boundaries and walls and the categories they silently announce. We learn who we are by the boundaries we create and, negatively, by the categories in which we find ourselves bounded by culture. Some of them are geographic. I am a Southerner, and according to everything I learned when I was growing up, each and every one of you are Yanks. But there are identity markers far more profound, and the author of the letter to the Ephesians has spent some time noting them by this point in chapter 2. Recall: you were children of wrath, sinners or, conversely, you were adopted, chosen, inheritors. These identity markers define who we are. They help us understand who our people are and who they aren’t.

The interesting thing about the letter to the Ephesians is this designation “Gentiles”. By the time this letter was written, the energy around the Jesus movement had shifted from pockets of Jewish disciples in Palestine to non-Jewish communities in the Mediterranean. Strictly, these communities were Gentiles, goy, people of “the nations” who were neither geographically nor ethnically Jewish. Now when I moved to New Jersey I learned that “Yankee” means something different here. Ask a native New Jerseyan to identify a Yankee and they’ll either point to a baseball club or a New Englander. Ask a Brit and they’ll point to any American. Addressing this community in Ephesians as “Gentiles” makes about as much sense as my calling you all Yanks from this pulpit. For though it’s true that in my context every person above the Mason-Dixon is a Yank, it is not a marker by which you would identify yourself. Likewise, time and space and tradition removed the people who heard originally heard the letter from the primary identifier “Gentiles”. It was a meaningless term.

So Paul, or whoever, reminds the hearers (and by extension, us) of a heritage they may have forgotten. Their congregation is rooted in an irrevocable, mysterious promise to Abraham and his descendants to which they, the Ephesians, have no necessary claim. Salvation first belonged to the Jews. So when Paul reminds them that they are Gentiles, two things are happening. First, he is creating a unity out of this multiplicity. He’s calling a bunch of folks together and giving them an identity, in so doing, reminding them of a wall. You, all of you, Mets and Red Sox, damnable Braves and, yes, Yankees, you’re all this other thing—Gentiles. Italians and Irishmen and Poles? You’re still (and as far as salvation goes, primarily) Gentiles. You are all this one thing, so hear this accordingly. United in non-Jewishness you are not inheritors to the promise given to the Jews by the God of Abraham. The secondary purpose is thus theological, to draw the hearers into the orbit of strangeness where, by virtue of their ethnicity, they are outside of the promise of God.

From this devastating twofer things only escalate.

You’re uncircumcised, the uncircumcision (imagine the worst thing you can call someone outside of your ethnic group, that’s what Paul means to convey). Separated bodily from the promise of God. That not enough? You’re aliens from the commonwealth, strangers from the covenant. Separated geographically from the scope of salvation. Still not enough? You are without hope. You are atheos, literally, without God. God-forsaken. Separated existentially, fundamentally, ontologically from the reality of the God event. Remember that. Paul expands the language from the specific cultural identity of the Jews outward, first employing language of religious distinction (uncircumcision), then of citizenship (aliens and strangers) and, in one final blow, language of primordial lack (atheos).

The Ephesians may not have understood what it meant to be “Gentiles” but they knew well what it meant to be “aliens”, non-citizens of the empire. Writing concurrently with the little letter, Dio Chrysostom, a Greek philosopher and historian, suggested that “to the disenfranchised, life seems with good reason not worth living, and many choose death rather than life after losing their citizenship.” To be an alien within the Roman empire, was a death-wish, a disgrace. The Ephesians know that, they’ve seen it the same way we Gentiles have seen the vitriol surrounding illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States. It’s the way things were, and are, in the kingdom. And their relationship to God’s promise stands in comparison, Jews::Gentiles, Citizens::Alien-Sojourners, Real Americans::Itenirant Mexican farmers. God’s promise was as far from Gentile Ephesus as the hope of a fruitful life was to a non-Roman living in the bounds of the Empire. And without that promise, they were without God entirely. And without God, they were without hope.

Remember that this is who you are: you are not, by virtue of birth, or goodness, or anything else, one chosen by God. From Ephesus to New Jersey, the promise is rightly elsewhere.

Paul (or whoever) builds up a mighty wall. He weatherproofs it and puts an electric fence around it. He brings in armed guards to stand watch on the towers.

But then, strange for a mason, he brings in a bulldozer. And, just like last week, he begins his work at this one mighty conjunction: but.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Jews and Gentiles. With and without God. Alien and citizen. With and without hope. Paul builds up this wall, a historic wall, a meaningful, material, real wall. And for what purpose? To tear it down. You are a Gentile! Remember it! But. It doesn’t make a lick of difference.

“But now in Christ Jesus you who were once 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.”

Paul widened the scope of our alienation from God only to pull us back in in this one, sweeping, impossibly beautiful affirmation: you have been brought near. Because we are indeed what God has made us, and God, from before the foundation of time, destined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, therefore we have, over the course of history, according to the promises made first and always for the Jewish people, been brought near.

All divisions, divisions then and divisions now have been erased. Because Christ is already our peace, our unity, our bond. Jews and Gentiles. Republicans and Democrats. Americans and Mexicans. Rich and poor and poorest. The LGBT community and the defenders of “traditional” marriage. “Welfare queens” and urban farmers. Christians and Jews and Muslims. Christ is our peace. A peace that has been achieved already, a peace born of gruesome violence. A peace that tears down walls, leaving their pieces in an otherwise empty tomb. It is an astounding, empire-shaking, paradigm-shifting reality. Christ is our peace.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” We define ourselves by our walls. I’m Southern, you’re Yankees. I’m English, you’re Irish. But here’s the thing: God has transcended all that with this one divine category: adopted. Thereby chosen. Thereby destined. Before all time and eternity. One and for all Jesus Christ has done this. For we Gentiles, for they Jews. For all of us.

And that thing in us, that thing that wants only to cross every dividing line, to take a hammer to every wall, it is perhaps the Spirit, seeking only to manifest the work already accomplished. In the Kingdom of God there are no walls, no moats, no dragons. No fences, no guard posts, no railings. It is not a boundary by which we define ourselves, but a membership accomplished on the cross for all. 

Good fences may make good neighbors, but we aren’t just talking about being good, we’re talking about love. And love, when it’s modeled after God, never excludes, never builds up division, never closes off but is always open to becoming and being that thing for which we have been created—the dwelling place of God.

Love itself has called us together. Not for our own sake, but that we might become a dwelling place. And not any dwelling place, but a house for God. Chapter two ends with an admonition to become a house, to fit ourselves together that God might dwell among us. It’s not just ending hostility. It’s standing side by side with those we once hated, those “them” to our “us”. It’s not tolerance, it’s collective action, spiritual upbuilding. Friends, Yankees, countrymen: God has brought us near. And God will not tolerate a wall. Amen, hallelujah. 

 

Eph. 2:1-10: We Are What God Has Made Us

This has been a dark week. A seemingly God-forsaken week: the bombing at the Boston Marathon, the horrific explosion in West, Texas, the failure of the Senate to act meaningfully for gun control (despite the overwhelming will of the populace) and a 7.0 earthquake in Sichuan, China. A child is dead, a police officer is dead, a college student and a young woman are dead. Scores of others have died. The master of death has collected a mighty ransom this week, and from those of us left behind, he has exacted a tax on our faith, our sense of security and our trust in the goodness of this world.

This has been a week of Good Fridays, and inasmuch as Ephesians has something to say about death, it has something to say about Good Friday. But not just Good Friday. God won’t leave it there, Ephesians has something to say about Easter Sunday, too. “Evil,” writes Markus Barth, “is incidental, not essential. It is disorder, not order.” God has created the world good and God has created we humans very good. The evil that pervades the world is not God’s, but God, through Jesus Christ, has entered its very heart and is everywhere enlivening what sin has put to death.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today’s text comes from the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 1-10:

“You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

We Are What God Has Made Us

The following obituary appeared in the Vallejo Times-Herald. “Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing […] There will be no service, no prayers and no closure […] So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM.”

The first verses of Ephesians 2 read like a postmortem. Time of death: unknown. Cause: sin, both hers and the world’s. Known associates: the ruler of the power of the world, whoever that is. And the obituary, our obituary, ignominious and callous reads thusly, “All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.” That’s it. That’s our postmortem and our obituary. And here you thought old Dolores had it bad.

Ephesians 1 proclaims unequivocally that we have been chosen. God, who is exuberant and overflowing with love, has destined us for adoption through Jesus Christ. There’s not a thing in this world that can stop up God’s love. That’s at the core of the church’s word. But our being chosen is not some antiseptic that leaves us “neutralized” (a word I heard all too often on Friday evening). We’ve got a past to rekon with. And that’s the content of the “despite all of this”. Despite our sin, we were chosen, adopted, called. Because if we’re honest, we have to admit that things aren’t good with the world and they aren’t good with us. In fact, we’re dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a coffin nail? If we’re going to take resurrection seriously, resurrection here and now in our own lives, and if we’re going to take the work of Jesus Christ seriously, then we have to come to terms with what we’ve done and with the consequences of our actions.“You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically,” like Marley the Ghost we find ourselves dead.

There’s a scene in King Lear where the old king, mad from grief and hubris, stands on an English heath in the middle of a wicked rainstorm. He’s stuttering and spitting and cursing the wind and finally, in a moment of inverted insight at the end of a nonsensical monologue, Lear shouts “I am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning.” The readers recognize a truth in it, but he’s proven himself a mighty sinful man. Yet still the world has prevailed against him. The powers, the internal structures of feudal life have sinned against him.

When the author of Ephesians talks about “the ruler of the air” we might be tempted to see a little red devil and his minions, but it’s far more pertinent that we see the sins of the structures in which we participate. We are bound up in systems that sin against us and our world. We participate in a cycle that perpetuates poverty and racial injustice. We participate in an economy that overwhelmingly benefits greed and self-interest. We participate in a society that legislates and restricts love and fosters hatred toward those we consider “other”. CNN, Fox News demand that we turn our attention anywhere but the human beings in front of us. The atmosphere, both literal and figural, is toxic. We are a people sinned against.

But we are also mired in our own sin and we can’t forget that. Certain groups have co-oped the term “flesh” as something inherently evil. There’s none of that here. God created us in the divine image as very good. Our enfleshed experiences are not sinful in themselves. “Flesh” here points to something deeper, to a truth about our profoundly self-centered lives. We follow what suits us and advances our position. We are sinned against, yes. But we are also sinners. And those two things have stripped us of the life for which we were created.

Now here’s where I start to get nervous, because there’s a tendency in fundamentalist circles to focus so heavily on this death that we forget the life that everywhere precedes and follows it. Fundamentalists forget that before there was death there was creation, which God proclaimed without reservation to be good. We should take joy in that proclamation, but we must also take stock of the world at our feet. That’s where fundamentalists got it right. “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” Where the fundamentalists go wrong is the unrelenting focus on death in order to guilt us into some realization about Jesus Christ. Where they have it wrong is the failure to recognize that we are not trapped in cycles of sin but everywhere freed from them, and everywhere expected to fight them.

Ephesians 2 isn’t about guilt. It carries within it that same hymnodic joy of Ephesians 1, the joy of having been chosen, the glory of offering praise and thanksgiving to the God who has given us life and bid us live. Indeed, right after we read of our death, we have this one great conjunction, a conjunction that changes everything: but.  But God is rich in mercy. God, out of great, immeasurable love has resurrected us, has lifted us out of the domain of the “prince of the air” and into the world for which we were created. 

But changes everything. Yes, we are dead. But God will not settle for our death. We have sinned, yes, but God, who in Jesus Christ experienced the unimaginable death of being, has made us alive. This isn’t about guilt, it’s about recognizing an incredible, impossible act of salvation. It’s about realizing the all-inclusive, everywhere-encompassing love of God that chooses, adopts and calls every one of us.

And here come some of the most recognizable verses in the canon: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

“We are”, says the author, “what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” We are what God has made us. God has made us in the divine image to enjoy, to participate, to engage life. We are what God has made us, co-creators in the divine image that every Spring renews itself and the world with it. We are what God has made us, and God has made us in love for love. We don’t deserve it, we don’t even want it half the time, but it has been made ours, because God is a God of unrelenting mercy and overflowing love.

And we too (and we must hear this in light of the unimaginable events of Friday evening) are called to be a people of unrelenting mercy and overflowing love. We are called to bear witness to this great act of God’s by living into the life of good for which we have been created. We have been made for the good, for good acts, for good works, for good living.

If you read carefully that might seem contradictory: “For by grace you have been saved through faith […] not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” When I’m talking about the works for which we were created, I’m not talking salvation by works, I’m talking about the stuff of life. I’m talking about participating in the world’s redemption. Redemption from forces of evil, redemption from injustice, redemption from hatred. I’m talking about works of love emanating from a life resurrected by God.

What’s the difference between the “works” that parrot salvation and the “good works” that bespeak true living? Well, we’ve seen politicians stage photographs at soup kitchens and women’s shelters when they aren’t open, and we’ve seen anonymous men and women run toward a bomb to bind up the wounds strangers. What’s the difference between the “works” of v. 9 and the “good works” of v. 10? Well, I’ve seen folks standing on the corner yelling damnation in the name of an unfamiliar God and I’ve seen brothers and sisters of different faiths and tribes and ethnic groups offer comfort in times of trouble.

Evil is incidental; God is purposeful, overflowing, brimming with love. We needn’t be burdened under the yoke of sin because God has entered into history in the person of Jesus Christ. God suffers alongside the suffering, God rejoices with the rejoicing, God prays with the angry, God consoles the lost. God does not encroach our freedom, oppressing us with as rulers of the air, but transforms us from death to life by the sole power of the unfolding, unfurling, living Good.

Patton Oswalt, a hilarious comic who is not, to my knowledge, particularly religious, posted a moving response to Monday’s attacks. I won’t quote it in full, but it ends thusly:

“So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.'”

This has been a hell of a week. But it’s Sunday. And we’re here, together. God has created us for better things than bombs and guns and hatred. God has created us for life and love, and nothing, no power in the air, no society on the earth, can halt that very good creation. “The good outnumber [the evil], and,” and here I’ll amend Mr Oswalt, by the overflowing, resurrecting, transforming grace of God “we always will.”