One Humanity (Ephesians 2:11-22)

Sunday, September 14, 2015

            Well … it has happened again.  This week a story was shared with me and it got me very upset.  A man in Minnesota was waiting for his kids to get out of school.  The school meets in a business park of some sort.  While he waited someone harassed him.  A nonviolent conflict ensued, police were called, and he ended being tased. 

            He had not broken any law.  He was a man waiting to pick his kids up from school and he reacted negatively as you or I would to being harassed for no reason.

            He is black.  All the officers are white.  Much of the confrontation was recorded.  I heard and watched it.  I was upset.

            This is the place where real life, your life and mine, and the Bible and the Holy Spirit of God collide.  It all comes together.

            How many more times in our country must a black person be assaulted by the police who are supposed to protect us?  I read of someone who had been an American citizen for 4 decades.  She moved from Miami to Georgia and someone posted on Facebook, “make sure you bring your flag.”  The reference was to an unfortunate phrase, “Would the last America to leave Miami please bring the flag?”  The inference is that people who look like Cubans, whatever that means, are not as American as white people. 

            Then there is a video, a farce, where a white man, a jogger, sees another jogger, a woman with Asian features, in the park.  Both are stretching.  He says, “Hi,” and she responds.  Then he says, “Where are you from?  Your English is perfect.”  She says, “San Diego.  We speak English there.”  He says, “No, where are you from?  Where are your people from?”  He proceeds to ask dumber and dumber questions. 

            Then she turns the tables on him.  She asks this white guy, “Where are you from?”  He names an American city and she says, “No, where are your people from?”  He says, “Oh, well, I am just a normal American.”  But she presses him until he says, “England, I guess.”

            Aren’t we all just normal Americans?

            When I led a youth group in Arlington in the late 90’s, nearly every kid in the group was either Hispanic or Sudanese.  The Sudanese were actually born in Sudan or in refugee camps in Kenya or Egypt.  Every single one of those tan skinned Latino kids were born in Arlington, Virginia.  How much more American can you be?

            But they didn’t see it that way.  If they discussed a friend at school they might say, “She’s American.”  I’d say, “What do you mean?”  They’d say, “You know, white.  Not Spanish.”  I though not Spanish.  These kids had parents who were Costa Rican and Argentinian and Salvadorian, but some of the kids, Hispanic kids, could barely speak Spanish themselves.  Yet in their minds, a normal American is white.

            Sometimes,  I will meet a person who is Asian or Hispanic.  I will ask, “Where are you from.”  I ask the same question upon meeting someone who is white or black.  It is a way I show interest in the other person.  I want to connect.  Regardless of what they look like, I expect to hear “I am from Detroit or I am from Wilmington or I am from Georgia or I am from St. Louis.”  I see the other as American, but she responds, “I am Korean.”  She doesn’t trust that I see her as American.

            Why should she?  If she has been hit with subtle prejudice or outright racism over and over, why should she believe that this white guy will be a nice one who sees her as a beautiful human being, who wants to celebrate her uniqueness, who wants to hear her story?  Why should she believe my good intentions?  She’s been hurt too many times by people who look like me.

            In the case of the Hispanic youth group kids this is a matter of self-identity.  In the comedy video, it is how we see others.  In Miami, it is a matter of some people deciding that individuals who they think “look Cuban” and probably want to be in this country so much they fought to get here are somehow less American looking than those who had the fortune to be born here.  For the black man who was tased in Minnesota, it is a matter of extreme embarrassment in front of his kids and the unsettling reality that he cannot trust the police to be for him.  In the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the racism that plagues us as a people turned out to be deadly. 

            I said earlier, this where real life, your life and mine, and the Bible and the Holy Spirit of God collide. 

            Ephesians 2 is seen against the backdrop of divided people.  Those called “the circumcision,” the Jews were distinct.  Jewish males were circumcised.  Gentiles males, all men who were not Jewish, did not get circumcised.  Jewish people lived by the Law of Moses.  Those who were not Jewish did not live by the law.  The Jews observed Sabbath.  Perhaps this distinction was the oddest to the Gentiles around them.  Why don’t the Jews work today?  Everyone else does?  What makes today so special?

            These distinctions marked the Jews as separate, holy, the people of God.  But they also marked all non-Jewish people as being not included in the people of God.  Gentiles were vile, unclean, and cut-off.  The division was as dramatic and pregnant withthe danger of violence as are the divisions between people in our country today. 

            It cannot be so for we who are “in Christ.”  Paul would not tolerate two churches – a Gentile Church and a Jewish one.  He insists that in Christ Gentiles are “no longer strangers and aliens but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (2:19).  Were Paul to step onto the scene today, he’d tell churches that divisions are antithetical to the Gospel.  Even if our worship styles are different, we are to be one.  Even if my grandparents persecuted your grandparents, I am to confess and repent, and you are to forgive.  We are to be one in Christ.  Even if our peers don’t seek unity and love, as followers of Christ you and are I commanded to seek unity and love in Christ. 

            In Ephesians 2, Gentiles by virtue of being Gentile are separated from God.  “Remember,” we read in verse 12, we who are Gentiles, “were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”  However, in Christ, by the blood of Christ, we are now brought near.  Jesus, is our peace.

            This word peace is central.  I specifically wish individuals in law enforcement would have the inner drive to seek peace and the imaginative creavity to find peaceful solutions to conflicts.  I am sure in a confrontation a policeman feels disrespected.  And if they don’t respect him, he will lose the authority he needs to do his job.  I am sure that’s how he feels.  It is hard.  There is pressure.  I am sure he feels he must show his strength in order to be respected by. 

But, the effort to project strength is resulting in policemen and policewomen doing awful things like shooting unarmed teens and tasing Dads who wait to pick their kids up from school.  I wish more people wanted peace and worked for it.  In Ephesians 2, the word peace is mentioned in verse 14, 15, and twice in 17.

            Jesus is our peace.  “In his flesh, he made both groups into one and” broke down the dividing wall of hostility.  We cannot stop others from hating or giving in to fear.  But we can offer a new story.  We can help break down the wall of hostility through prayer and acts and words of love which include a willingness to listen as others tell the stories of when they were wounded by racism.  With humble patience we listen as much as the other needs us to listen.  What better act of love is there than to value another by affirming his worth as we listen to his story?

            We have to keep faith in Jesus at the center of this because He is our peace.  Without him driving our words, any steps toward peace come up short.  I know religion is a source of division in the world, but that is bad religion, religion built on the destruction of other.  In Christ, our posture is open, humble, inviting, God-focused, Spirit-powered, and aimed at love and unity. 

            This is why Ephesians 2 is so intent on destroying circumcision as a qualifying mark.  This is why Ephesians 2 insists in verse 15 that Jesus has abolished the law.  In the Sermon on the Mount, we see Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and it is true.  Everything the law intended to accomplish in creating people who worship God and live with each other in peace is accomplished in and through Christ.  So in that sense, Jesus in fact fulfills the law completely.  But when the circumcision and the law are markers that identify some people as insiders and others as outsiders, then law and circumcisions no longer serve God’s purposes.  In that sense, Jesus does away with the distinctions. 

Therefore we see in verses 15-16 that Jesus “creates in himself one new humanity in place of the two, making peace and [reconciling] both groups to God in one body through the cross.”  The next verses insist that Jesus proclaims peace and peace means that we all have access to God.

In Christian faith we see this in Baptism and Communion.  Baptism tells a story that ends with an invitation: I was a sinner, I died in sin, Jesus rose from death, and because I am in Him, I will rise from death; and you can too if you receive Jesus into your life and follow Him.  He came that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life as children of God.  Communion is a share meal and the only requirement for coming to the table is the willingness to acknowledge sin and our powerlessness to defeat sin.  We come to the communion table as everyone comes to it: dependent on God for everything.

Our one humanity is not homogenous and I would not want it to be.  In other letters, Paul brags about his own Jewish credentials.  He is a Jewish man, not an everyman.  In Ephesians 2, he does not want Jews to stop being Jews.  He is not in search of the generic disciple.  There is no such thing.  Our relationship with God is always particular, always personal.  There is no general Christianity.  Christianity is always the story of you, an individual, walking with Jesus, living as his disciple.  It is even inaccurate to say, “The story.”  I cannot tell “the story,” but I can tell my story.

The world becomes beautiful when we hear one another’s’ stories.  I will never say, “Well, black people and Hispanics and Asians and whites – we’re really not all that different.”  We are.  We are beautifully different, but united in Christ. 

I pastored in Arlington for 9 years and I got into a group of friendships with single people or young couples prior to having kids.   Once kids come along and grow into school age you don’t hang out with friends very often.  Everything in life is geared toward baseball practice and orthodontist appointments and PTA meetings.  By the time it is all done each day, you can’t go out to clubs or sports bars.  For one thing, you’re too tired.  For another, it would be irresponsible to leave the house with your children in bed asleep and go out for beers. 

But, years ago, I did have that life and I had my crowd.  We’d go out to eat at Dupont Circle or go to movies in Adams Morgan.  One of the guys in that crowd is married to a woman who is not Caucasian.  I say it that way deliberately because for years, I did not know her ethnicity.  And I was scared to ask.  She is very outspoken, politically far, far to the left of me, and I thought if I ask, “What are you,” fiery laser beams would come out of her eyes and pierce my skull.  So I didn’t ask.

We were part of the same circle, though.  We all even traveled to Honduras together in 2004 when one of our group married a Honduran woman.  So I was around her a lot.  I now don’t remember the conversation, but I remember her figuring out that I had no clue about her ethnicity.  She liked that I didn’t know and that she knew I was uncertain of how to ask.  After teasing me a bit, she finally told me she was Korean.  She had been adopted by a Caucasian family in Ohio.  They had 4 boys and her mother wanted a daughter badly.  So they adopted a Korean girl.

If you go deep enough with people and listen long enough, you get past the uncomfortable issues that plague our world, like the race conversation.  People will find you are safe and they can share their stories with you.  And they do because we all want to share our stories.  And when they do, then the race conversation is no longer uncomfortable.  It is beautiful.

Janessa and I were friends and so when Candy and I were getting ready to adopt, I could talk to her.  I could ask, “Now you are an adult.  What is it like, your relationship with the parents who adopted you?  What do I need to do to make sure my children will want a relationship with me when they are grown?”  And she helped me. 

Maybe it sounds like I am way off topic here.  I have been discussing unity in Christ especially among people of different races and I have wandered off on this tangent about my old crowd in DC.  But this is the point! Janessa and I remained as white man and Korean woman, but as we listened to one another and came to that safe place in friendship, we became something more.  We became brother and sister in Christ, people who listened to one another’s stories and helped each other. 

This is the other story, the alternative narrative.  Ferguson, Missouri is a reminder that there’s a lot of hate in the world.  The body of Christ has another story to tell – the story of the gospel bringing us together, making us one. 

AMEN

Come Together (Galatians 3:23-29)

Sunday, June 23, 2013

            You and I walk into a Wendy’s together.  I want a frosty.  You’re having a fries and a Sprite.  A mom with a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old is ahead of us in line.  She looks haggard.  Carrying the young one, the 6-year-old mercilessly, relentlessly pulls on her free hand and demands a kid’s meal with toys. 

            The two women taking orders behind the counter are named “Cranky” and “indifferent.”  They seem annoyed that this six-year-old is acting like a six-year-old.  Really, they seem annoyed by all customers. 

            Behind us we hear someone cursing a blue streak.  It is a girl yelling at her boyfriend who is not actually there.  She’s giving the cell phone attached to her ear what-for.  It might be funny, her sitting there alone, yelling at someone not present while those who are present stare.  It might be funny if it were not so sad, foul-mouthed, inappropriate, and loud.

            A man in business attire is seated alone, going over charts, as he sips his drink. 

            The mom struggles through her order as the six-year-old goes to the table in tears.  She did not cave.  She did not get that kids meal.  She told him 10 times that he already had three copies of the toy at home and he never eats his chicken fingers.  And he’s upset.

            We step up to order.  Cranky looks at us with dead eyes and says nothing.  “Hi.”  I say.  “How are you?”  She says nothing.  You smile at her.  She gives no expression.  She won’t crack.  She is on the clock for three more hours.  She can play this game.  She won’t reveal a hint of personality.  She won’t affirm our humanity, not for a second.  She knows we want our food and we have to get through to get it.  She’s not going anywhere.  She can wait. 

            In shameful surrender, we order, pay, and slog to our seats, trying to find the joy we lost. 

            How could the trip to the fast food place go differently? 

Were any sins committed?  Any laws of God or laws of men broken?  Did faith fail? 

            In Galatians 3 we see law and faith juxtaposed, set in opposition to one another.  Both are from God.  We read that before faith came, we were imprisoned under the law. 

What does that mean, exactly, “before faith came?” 

            Jesus changed everything for Paul.  After his death and resurrection the ways humans related to one another and to God were forever altered.  This includes the law and our understanding of the people of God.  “Law” refers to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the foundational scriptures for Israel.  Paul calls the law a disciplinarian.  The word he used referred to someone in his culture that saw to the education of wealthy children.

            The disciplinarian was not actually the teacher.  Rather the disciplinarian was the one who made sure the kids went to class.  The disciplinarian was a family’s personal truancy officer.  In most cases this role was filled by a highly trusted slave.

            We humans, even the most grown up and brilliant among us are as children before God.  We’re not just any children.  We’re children prone to misbehave in the worst ways imaginable.  Prior to Jesus, we needed our disciplinarian, the law, to show us how wrong we were. 

            Faith does something different that the law.  Law shows sin.  Faith calls us to holiness.  In Jesus, Paul believed a fundamental shift happened; life moved from law obedience to faith calling. 

I remember a conversation with a friend in which I asked him about church.  He’s a neighbor and he knows I am pastor of HillSong.  We had had 100’s of conversations about parenting, about baseball, about his time as a swimmer at Clemson.  When I asked about church, I just wanted to continue our conversation but on another topic.  I wanted to hear more of his story.  But I am a pastor asking about church.  He had this look on his face, as if I had watched him shoplift a candy bar from a convenience store.  “I know should be back in church” he sighed under a blanket of guilt.  He was afraid of getting caught by the truancy officer.  He was raised in a generally Christian worldview, but he still yields to the disciplinarian, the law. 

            So many Christians talk about salvation by grace through faith but then live in a good-bad, legalistic mindset.  Our actual living, which is law bound, doesn’t match the ideology we speak, salvation by faith as a gift of grace.

            Paul says no, no.  Jesus has come.  Faith has come.  Verse 24: “the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.”  God always intended Jesus, and now he has come, so we don’t live as naughty children held in check by the strictness of the law.  In Christ we are sons and daughters of God called to the holiness of God.

            We are called by God to live out this holiness in our daily lives here and now.  This is not the end-times Kingdom of God.  We are physically in the fallen world that has been corrupted by sin.   But with Christ in us, we are, even while here, full of the stuff of the kingdom and all its goodness.  We are to live into and to share the grace we’ve been given.  It is essential that we bid farewell to the disciplinarian and live into the new life, the life of faith. 

            The law shows sin.  Faith, which is a gift of God’s grace, calls us to holiness.  Law is our disciplinarian.  Faith is a joy producer. 

The law shows what makes for death.  Because of sin, death is our destiny.  But again, faith has come because God has come in Jesus.  Verse 27, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”  When we are baptized, we go under the water, buried, dead in sin.  But then we come out of the water, clean, fresh, clothed with Christ so that our life belongs to Him, and his resurrection becomes ours.  The disciplinarian law which reveals sin points to death.  Christ our savior calls us beyond sin avoidance to something new, something God always intended for us: holiness.  Christ our Lord does not stand over us with a thundering hand but walks beside us, grinning, laughing, making music and giving joy.  Christ our God calls us to eternal, abundant life. 

One more contrast shows we have moved from law to life, from a disciplinarian to a relationship in which God sees us as His daughters and sons.  This was quite important in Galatia and is equally important in church and in a Wendy’s restaurant.

            In Galatian churches, Jewish Christ followers worshipped alongside Gentile Christ followers.  In Christ, slaves were equal members – even equal to their masters.  Men and women were adopted by God on equal terms.  It is hard to say which divide was greatest.  Jews saw non-Jews as being unclean and unfit for relationship with God.  Men saw women as reduced humanity.  Many of the ancients thanked God above all else that they were created male and not female.  And slaves were non-human.  Even when slaves were treated well and given great responsibility, they were still slaves. 

            These cruel categories were not banned in the law.  But they had no place in Christ.  Galatians 3:28 is one of the defining moments of all Paul’s writings.  N.T Wright imagines this great scripture when he says, it is “like one of those symphonic finales where the composer seems to be trying to bring a many instruments into the action as possible, all playing different motifs but somehow combining into a glorious paean of praise” (Justification, p.127).  If you only ever memorize one verse, maybe Galatians 3:28 ought to be it.  We are baptized into Christ.  We are clothed with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek.  There is no longer male or female.  There is no longer slave or free.  In Christ we come together.

            Of course we hold onto what makes us unique.  Christ calls for us to die to self but not to forfeit the things that make us who we are.  When John, in Revelation, viewed the throngs of persons saved for eternity by Jesus, he noticed some things.  There were more people than he could count.  They came from every tribe on earth.  They did not lose their individuality.  He could see that this was a coming together of all people – joined in Jesus.  Note the final sentence in Galatians 3:28.  “All of you are one in Christ.”  In our glorious diversity, we are united in Him.  Women are still women, Jews are still Jews.  But we are all free from sin and joined to one another as brothers and sisters.

            Obviously there is no place in the Kingdom of God for any kind of racial or ethnic prejudice.  God has no sympathy for those who think races should not intermarry.  The notion that people should stick to their own kind is foreign in God’s kingdom for we are all His.  Our differences are reasons to celebrate one another and our likeness is that we are buried in sin and raised to new life in Him.

            Knowing this, does it make a difference when you and I go into a Wendy’s restaurant? 

            Maybe, Cranky and Indifferent don’t know that they are invited to come to Christ and that we are all invited to come together as children of the new age.  In their own minds  you and I are named annoyance numbers 1 & 2.  But, we love them because Jesus has come and with him faith.  Whether or not we have the chance to say they are invited by God, we love them.  By faith we are saved, you, me, and Cranky and Indifferent.  The Kingdom joy we put forth in that Wendy’s may or may not win them over.  They may never crack that smile, but we keep on pouring out Jesus because we know He wants these Wendy’s workers in His kingdom.  They each mean as much to him as any lawyer, pastor, doctor, or CEO.  In him there is no separation between them and us.  The moment the come to him in faith, we come together. 

            So, maybe we help out the mom with the crazy toddler.  We carry her tray.  We say a silent prayer for the young woman cussing her boyfriend over the cell phone.  We smile and hold the door for the lonely, rushed business man who spilled a bit of ketchup on his white shirt.  He needs a smile and a touch of Heaven’s love.  The Kingdom of God is made up of people who used to cuss but then met Jesus.  The Kingdom is made up of tired moms who find energy to continue in Jesus.  The kingdom of God is populated by frustrated fast food cashiers who think their lives are dead-ended until meet Jesus; and business men who discover the bottom line is not all there is; and girlfriends and boyfriends who treat each other with respect, love, and patience.  All these people belong to each other and to us in Christ. 

            Carrying a tray, sharing smile, and maintaining joy are not world-changing actions.  They are though deeds done in a spirit – the Spirit of the one who changed the world by coming and dying and rising and then calling all people together into His body, the church. 

            That’s the end game of grace and the deepest meaning of Galatians 3:28 and the entire gospel of Jesus Christ.  God calls the world together in His love.  Heaven is not a place where we each get our own mansions and get to be with the people we like.  Heaven is where we sit around one table and like and love the people we are with because Jesus is there it could be no other way.

            We begin living Heaven the moment He takes up residence in us.  We thank God for what the law accomplished and we acknowledged that it is finished because Jesus has come and the age of grace and faith has dawned.

AMEN