Ephesians 2 : Mark 6 : 30-34, Sermon

Transcription

1 Ephesians 2 : Mark 6 : 30-34, Sermon Look Son, it s like this, the man told me, giving great importance to each word as he prepared in that particularly Scottish way to pass on to me a piece of wisdom which he thought I needed. You can tell this incident took place many years ago because it is a long time since anyone called me son, but that is another story. Look Son, it s like this there is us and there is them, and that is all there is to it. Without the context of the conversation he could have been referring to many things, but I know exactly what he meant. Late on a Saturday night, in one of Edinburgh s less trendy drinking establishments, he had just found out that I was studying to become a minister of the Church of Scotland. And as a protestant himself he therefore identified me as one of his own kind. So the us he referred to was protestants, which, in that setting, should not be confused with a certain kind of faith - as it has more to do with the kind of church you don t attend than the kind you do. And the them were the Roman Catholics, whom he assumed to be some kind of common enemy that would bind him and me together. Perhaps I should have been bolder in debating the point with him, but he didn t seem particularly keen to indulge in such discussion, so I mumbled something about not being sure it was really that simple, and left him to the rest of his evenings activities. What he was saying reflected the particular culture of certain parts of Scotland, but in a sense what he was saying could have been said anywhere in the world. The tendency to divide people into us and them, into those who are like me and those who are different, into those who I like and those who I don t, is a universal instinct. It is what we read about way back in the beginning of Genesis, the human desire to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to take upon ourselves the power to judge between who is good and who is not, to claim for ourselves the right to decide who deserves to be included and who ought to be

2 excluded. It is also what we read of as the Old Testament develops, with the formation of a nation who understand themselves to be God s chosen people, and who then repeatedly start to treat everyone else as if they must be God s enemies. Us and them. It is what we see around the world each day, as people form and cling to national or tribal identities, the one thing which binds them together being the fear or dislike of those whom they deem to be different. Listen to populist politicians in any country talking about immigrants and it becomes clear that the us and them mentality is not restricted to drunken Scotsmen. Perhaps the saddest thing for me is that this instinct to divide people seems to have become associated with religion. The language of fundamentalism is always the language of us and them, it always comes from people who are certain about right and wrong, and always from people with a sense of fear about those who think or live differently. It certainly doesn t stem from a joyous faith in one all powerful creating and redeeming God. Karen Armstrong defines religious fundamentalism as a religiously articulated form of nationalism or ethnicity, which seems to me to be about right. Well the Genesis stories contain huge wisdom about the human condition, and the desire to separate and divide people does indeed appear to be part of our make up. Divisions are so common in our human story that they seem to occur naturally. Barriers crop up so regularly between us that they almost seem inevitable. What does not seem so inevitable is that Christian people should have developed the practice of forming their own divisions, their own barriers. When we read Jesus story we find that he never really fitted in to anyone s group. There were no significant people who would have counted him as one of us, and there were many who regarded him as their enemy. He didn t fit in as a good Roman citizen, bowing down before the power of Empire and Emperor. He didn t go along with what the religious establishment wanted, which would have meant keeping a safe distance from anything which might have tainted his reputation. Nor did he fit in

3 with rebel groups who wanted to bring about their own kind of revolution, even when they attempted to label him the new king ready to lead them into battle. When God appears on the human seen he does so as one who is excluded rather than included, and perhaps that should have informed our practices more than it seems to have. But more than that, Jesus repeatedly goes out of his way to break down the barriers which we create. Indeed this is such a common pattern in the Jesus stories that we can readily overlook it. Or perhaps we overlook it because it is more convenient for us to do so. The story of the Good Samaritan features as its hero - a Samaritan, a man from Samaria, the despised ethnic minority of the time. When we read of him healing ten lepers and only one coming back to say thank you, the only thing we are told about any of them is that the one who did the right thing was not a Jew but foreigner. When we read frequently of him talking to women, though it would have been considered a disgrace for a man to be on his own with a woman, just as we read of him scandalizing people by eating and drinking with publicans and tax collectors and woman of dubious reputations. When we read of Jesus furiously cleansing the Temple of all that it become, his fury explained by him quoting the verse which said that this place was supposed to be a house of prayer for all the nations, while they had put restrictions on who could enter. So we read this morning that Jesus power to heal went out to anyone who came close to him, without him seeming at all concerned about whether these were good upright people or complete scoundrels. And at the climax of his story, three of the four gospels tell us that at the moment of his death, the curtain in the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. This was the curtain which separated the area which foreigners were allowed into from the inner part which only Jews had permission to enter. The purpose of his life and his death was to break down every barrier which keeps people away from God, and every barrier which keeps people apart from one another. It is no wonder that the letter to the Ephesians uses the language of inclusion so strongly. A church which separates and discriminates certainly cannot be called the Church of Jesus Christ, who went to such

4 lengths to reach out and to draw in. 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. For the preacher, and for the reader, it is alarmingly easy to shrink this message into something much smaller. It is alarmingly easy to domesticate it this message into something less significant than it is. We can talk about the church, and how we ought to be open and welcoming and inclusive. That in itself is a worthwhile message. In a world where it is so tempting for congregations to look inwards and become defensive, to rarely move our focus beyond promoting our own programmes and trying to build up the size of our client base. (I mean build up the size of our faith community) We need to be reminded that the gospel was never meant to be any kind of private club, not even a private club with a friendly face and a ready welcome. That in itself is a message we need to hear - but this is more than that. This is much bigger than that. For it tells us that the church is not any kind of club not even a club with an open door policy. Rather it exists to be a movement of people who believe in Jesus enough to do the things he did. The church is not the place in which God loves people, rather it exists to bear witness to the fact that God loves everyone. The job of the church is not to bring people in so that they move from being them to being us. Rather we are being the body of Jesus Christ when we follow him in reaching across every barrier, every label, every distinction, to celebrate the good news of the love of God for all his people, love which we find expressed in the life and the teaching and the example of Jesus Christ, love whose power is demonstrated in his death and resurrection. The job of the church is to joyfully proclaim and practice the good news that before God there is no us and them, that there are no divisions and no barriers, that Christ has broken down the dividing wall and made us all one. The last time I looked John 3:16 still said For God so loved the world that he gave his only son This is our message, this is our purpose, this is our mission. This is what it means for us to be faithful to our finest traditions. This is what it means

5 for us to be faithful to Jesus Christ. And there is no greater purpose in life than that, nothing more glorious than that, nothing with more ultimate significance than that. Us and them may be safe and comforting. Strong walls may make us feel cosy and at ease. But Christ came, not to create a new group with its own walls to keep people seperate. He came to be a foundation stone, something which we may all build upon, as we let go of our fears, and put our faith in him. And when we are most truly being the church, that is what we are doing. Not building a church, but serving a kingdom and building the kind of communities which are truly pleasing and glorifying to God.