Dear Church: Be United First Baptist Richmond, July 22, 2018 The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost Ephesians 2:11-22

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1 Dear Church: Be United First Baptist Richmond, July 22, 2018 The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost Ephesians 2:11-22 So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth were 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 once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Let s begin today s sermon with an exercise: In your mind, draw a circle around yourself, a big circle, about twenty feet in diameter. Better yet, build a wall, a brick wall, about ten feet high. Now, think about the people you would want to have in there with you your best friends, certain family members, a celebrity or two and then think about the people you would want to keep out. Hmmm. That list could get long, couldn t it? There you are, standing by the door when someone knocks and says, May I come in? But it s the guy from work who borrowed twenty dollars from you one time and never paid you back. Nope, you say, and slam the door. And then there s another knock. May I come in? someone asks. But it s that woman who came by your house campaigning for the other candidate in the last election. Sorry! you say, and slam the door again. May I come in? someone asks, right after that. But it s your new neighbor who moved in across the street, the one who doesn t look like you or sound like you. You ve got nothing against him, but really, does he belong in your inner circle? Not today, you say, and gently close the door. In some ways it would be nice, to be the king of your own little kingdom, to get to decide who was in and who was out, but in other ways it would be exhausting, always having to look people up and down and decide whether or not they belonged.

2 God s people settled this problem in the wilderness. After Moses brought them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea they came to Mount Sinai where God said, It wasn t Moses: it was me. I am the One who brought you out of slavery, and I am the One who will bring you into the Promised Land. If you will be my people, I will be your God. And they all said that they would. And then, for the next few books of the Bible, God goes into great detail about what will distinguish his people from all other people on earth: they will not have any other gods before him; they will not make any idols; they will remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. And then he begins to get specific. They must not eat any pork. They must not round the corners of their beards. They must not wear garments made of mixed fibers. And they must circumcise their male children on the eighth day. In fact this circumcision thing, which had been around since the time of Abraham, became far more important to God s people, especially as they entered the Promised Land and found themselves surrounded by foreigners. Strange as it seems circumcision was the sign of the covenant, the evidence of their special relationship with God: It was what distinguished insiders from outsiders. In Hebrew, the word for outsider is goy. And you can imagine, especially as they moved into the Promised Land and got settled, that some Hebrew mothers would tell their children not to play with the goy boys and girls. They re not like us, they would say. They re different. They eat pork. They are not circumcised. And that s all it would take for those Hebrew children to put up a wall between themselves and those others. It doesn t take much, does it? To draw a circle, to build a wall, to decide who belongs on the inside and who doesn t? And through the centuries God s people kept on putting up walls between themselves and the outsiders. In fact, when they built the temple in Jerusalem, there was an actual wall separating

3 the Court of the Gentiles from the Court of the Jews, and beside each entrance to that inner court a plaque that read: No foreigner is allowed past this point on penalty of death. So it s a little surprising to hear Paul say, in today s reading from Ephesians, that now because of what Christ has done on the cross, such dividing walls no longer exists: there are no longer outsiders and insiders. It s especially surprising coming from Paul, who was once so proud of the difference between himself and the outsiders. In Philippians 3 he brags: If anyone has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews. But now, he says, those old differences have been done away with. The Gentiles have been brought near by the blood of Christ. He is our peace, Paul says; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. Where did that idea come from? How did it become a cornerstone of Paul s theology? I m not entirely sure, but as I look through the Bible for clues I think it may have started as early as his conversion in Acts, chapter 9, when he is commissioned by Jesus as an instrument to bring his name before the Gentiles (Acts 9:15) And that was new. The God of the Jews was reaching out to the goy. In the very next chapter Peter is napping on a rooftop in Joppa when he has a dream about something like a sheet being lowered from heaven with all kinds of non-kosher animals in it. A voice says, Get up, Peter. Kill and eat. But he says, By no means, for nothing unclean or non-kosher has ever entered my mouth. But the voice says, Don t call unclean what God has made clean. The vision is repeated two more times and then there is a knock on the door, and Peter finds messengers from a man named Cornelius, a Gentile living in Caesarea, asking him to come with them. A coincidence? I think not. When Peter enters Cornelius home he says, You know it s against God s law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God

4 has shown me that I must not call anyone non-kosher or unclean. Shortly after that, as Peter is sharing the gospel, the Holy Spirit falls on Cornelius and his entire household, and Peter says, Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have? In these two episodes you can see that God was up to something new. The God of the Jews was enlarging his family by reaching out to the Gentiles. In Jesus Christ he was breaking down that dividing wall of hostility and showing his once-proud people that now, because of what Jesus had done, no one could be considered unclean. The blood of Christ had the power to make the non-kosher, kosher. The baptism of the Holy Spirit had the strength to wash away all uncleanness. And the water baptism that Peter offered was a sign and symbol that those who had been aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12) were now among God s chosen. It was the new sign of the covenant. And it wasn t as if the Jews had suddenly decided to let the Gentiles into the temple. This was God s doing. In Christ God had broken down the walls that had formerly kept insiders in and outsiders out and built something new. Paul calls it the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. It s a place where Gentiles are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God. In him the whole structure is joined together, Paul writes, and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in which Jews and Gentiles are living stones, built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. In other places in this letter and in his other writings Paul calls that dwelling place for God the church, and holds it up as a kind of ideal for what our communal life is supposed to look like.

5 But life in the church isn t always ideal, is it? In the centuries since Paul wrote Christians have often drawn circles around themselves, built walls, and decided who could come in and who should stay out of their churches. In the middle of the last century, in this country, most Christians in the South had decided that black people should stay out of white churches. They put up a dividing wall of hostility, with a sign that read: whites only. But a Baptist preacher from Georgia named Clarence Jordan understood that attitude as a rejection of all God had done in Christ Jesus. Even in those days, in the American South, he began to talk about desegregating the church, and one of the ways he did it was by translating the New Testament into the everyday language and images of the people in his part of the world. Wherever the text mentioned Jews he translated it as white people, and wherever it mentioned Gentiles he translated it as Negroes (which, in those days, was considered the politically correct term). So in that story about Peter and Cornelius, Jordan begins, Now there was a man in Augusta by the name of Cornwall, a negro captain stationed at Fort Gordon. And when Peter has that vision on the rooftop Jordan says he saw something like a big four-cornered tablecloth being let down to the ground. In it were all kinds of meat, seafood, and fowl. Somebody said, Come on, Rock, sit down and let s eat! But Rock said, Oh no, sir. I ve never eaten anything that was inferior or not kosher. And then the voice said, If God makes something kosher, don t you treat it as dirty. So, when Rock came to Cornwall s house he said, Y all understand how uncustomary it is for a white man to socialize or stay with people of a different race, don t you? All right, but as for me, God has made it plain as day to me that I m never to think of any man as inferior or no good. And when Cornwall has finished telling the story of why he sent for him Rock says, I am convinced beyond any doubt that God pays no attention to a man s skin. Regardless of his race, the man who respects God and practices justice is welcomed by him. i

6 This was pretty radical stuff for 1960 s Georgia. But before you decide that Jordan was some wild-eyed socialist twisting the Scriptures to fit his own liberal agenda let me assure you that he was, in fact, a careful biblical scholar, trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, who translated his Cotton Patch version of the New Testament from the original Greek language. Which is just what the Reformers did people like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli: they translated the Bible into the everyday language of their people and suddenly the old, stuffy verbage of the church sounded like something off the front page of the newspaper. It started a revolution or maybe just a reformation. It shook the foundations of the established church and called it to live up to New Testament standards. Which is what Clarence Jordan was doing. Listen to how he translates today s passage from Ephesians 2, beginning at verse 11: So then, always remember that previously you Negroes ii 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. He himself is our peace. It was he who integrated us and abolished the segregation patterns which caused so much hostility. He allowed us no silly traditions and customs in his fellowship so that in it he might integrate the two into one new body. In this way he healed the hurt, and by his sacrifice on the cross he joined together both sides into one body for God. In it the hostility no longer exists. iii Let me just ask: how do you think that language about integration went over in 1960 s Georgia? How many white churches do you think read Jordan s new translation and

7 immediately opened their doors? Our church was an exception, voting to integrate three years before the Cotton Patch version was published, iv but even here, in the enlightened Commonwealth of Virginia, it took a while for the truth of Jordan s message to take root. But it was true. If God could break down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles through the blood of Christ Jesus he could surely do the same between whites and blacks. We might ask ourselves today what walls still exist between insiders and outsiders in the church, and what it would take to bring them down. I talked last week about the division between Red Christians and Blue Christians in these politically charged times but there are plenty of other divisions we could point to. The fact remains: God doesn t seem to want any divisions in his family. I sometimes think about the cross, about its vertical and horizontal axes, and think about Jesus reaching up with one hand and down with the other to pull us together with God, and then reaching out to the left and then out to the right to pull us together with each other. He died for this! Paul says. He died so that there wouldn t be any separation between us and God and no division between us and each other. So, let s end today s sermon with an exercise: in your mind build a church, with strong, brick walls all around and a heavy wooden door on the front. Think about the people you would want in there with you and the people you would want to keep out. But then imagine that every time someone knocks on the door Jesus gets up to answer it. Who is he going to welcome in? Who is he going to keep out? And whose church is it anyway? Jim Somerville 2018 i Clarence Jordan, The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp

8 ii I ve left out the more offensive part of this verse, which Jordan translates as follows: you Negroes, who sometimes are even called niggers by thoughtless white church members It s offensive, but it is a pretty fair translation of the Greek text, where Paul talks about the circumcised (the peritome) belittling the uncircumcised (the akrobustia). Akrobustia is a mongrel word not found in the Greek language and meaning something like uncut when compared with peritome: cut (literally, to cut around ). iii Clarence Jordan, The Cotton Patch Version of Paul s Epistles (New York: Association Press, 1968), pp iv Richmond s First Baptist Church voted to welcome black members in January, 1965.

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