[I grew up riding buses – the old fashioned British ones with the open backs where you can jump on and off while it’s moving. In fact, I didn’t have a driver’s licence until I was 26.
Some of the most memorable bus rides I’ve taken we in Pakistan. I would regularly ride the bus into the capital, Islamabad, - a 3˝ hour bus ride. I would usually sit at the back because the buses had a nasty habit of hitting each other head on and I figured that the back seat might be safer.
So I would sit at the back, looking down the length of the bus, filled with mainly Pushtun men. I was often the only white face on the bus. Probably the only Christian. And I would sit at the back and look at all these guys and ask myself questions like, “How will they ever hear the gospel?” “How will the church take root in a place like this?”
I remember feeling intensely different. Realising that the forces that shaped their lives were radically different from those that shaped mine. Realising that the number of Christians in the land of the Pushtuns was tiny, perhaps a few hundred out of a population of over 40 million. Realising that I was an outsider, separated by religion, ethnicity and language. I didn’t belong.]
I’ve been an outsider in that sense most of my adult life. I left Scotland when I was 20 and I’ve been gone 30 years. More than half of those 30 years I’ve spent in places where the people don’t speak English, at least not as a first language. Even here in Canada I’m a bit strange. No-one would believe me when I told them I played my first game of floor hockey a couple of weeks ago with the junior boys. I’ve spent much of my life on the fringes of other people’s cultures. That sometimes helps you see things that others might not see. But it isn’t usually a comfortable place to live.
People usually prefer to be included, rather than excluded.
Eph 2:12 says, “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.” Separate! Excluded! Foreigners! Without
hope! Without God! These are not words that include.
[I was talking with one of my neighbours this week. He grew up in the neighbourhood and, since his parents have moved back to Italy, he’s back living in the house he was born in. He told us stories of what it was like for his father when he arrived here after the war. How people would call him “spic” and “DP.” How the police on James Street wouldn’t allow more than two Italians to walk together on the street without moving in to break them up. How they weren’t allowed to stand and talk on the street or the police would move them along, sometimes with the help of a billy club.
Then, without missing a beat, he went from talking about how his father was excluded to talking about how terrible the Portuguese are, then he got started on the Hungarians. Apparently oblivious to the fact that he was expressing the same attitude to them as predominantly British Hamilton had exhibited to his father in the 1950s.]
That sense of prejudice is not something new, or for that matter, something that’s restricted to Europeans. In India there is prejudice based on skin colour. Lighter skinned Aryan peoples are invariably higher up the social scale than the darker skinned Dravidian peoples. In the Muslim world Arabs often think of themselves as better than other Muslims simply because Mohammed was an Arab and the Qur’an is written in Arabic. Obviously, other Muslims disagree. In most tribal societies the name that people call themselves translates as simply, “the people.” For instance that’s what “Inuit” means in Inuktituk, “the people.”
In the first century things weren’t any different. To the Greeks, anyone who didn’t speak Greek, really didn’t speak at all. They just made noises, “bar, bar, bar, bar, bar.” So they called them “barbarians.” Jews felt the same way about non-Jews, calling them “the uncircumcised,” which basically meant “unclean.”
This is where Paul starts in Ephesians 2:11.
11 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).
I think that Paul is being deliberately
offensive here. To us “uncircumcised” may sound like it’s just a description,
but it’s more than that. Greeks knew this word the same way that Frankie’s
Italian father quickly learned the meaning of “spic”, or I learned that it usually
wasn’t nice when Pakistanis called me a “gora.” The word translated as
“uncircumcised” literally means “foreskin.” Can you imagine having your entire
ethnic and linguistic identity reduced to that particular part of the human
anatomy? It was a term designed to exclude people.
In Genesis 12 God had told Abraham that he was
choosing him and his descendants to be the means of God’s blessing to all of
humanity. Unfortunately Abraham’s descendants forgot that call to be “a light
to the nations” and instead thought of themselves as God’s favourites, rather
than his servants. Listen to this quote from William Barclay:
“The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentile. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell. God, they said, loves only Israel of all the nations that he had made . . . It was not even lawful to render help to a Gentile mother in her hour of sorest need, for that would simply be to bring another Gentile into the world. Until Christ came, the Gentiles were an object of contempt to the Jews. The barrier between them was absolute. If a Jewish boy married a Gentile girl, or if a Jewish girl married a Gentile boy, the funeral of that Jewish boy or girl was carried out. Such contact with a Gentile was the equivalent of death.”
Paul is simply pointing out the reality that everybody already knew; that Jews and non-Jews
were alienated from each other.
That alienation wasn’t just racial, however.
Paul is using offensive language to make the point that before they came to
faith in Christ the Ephesians were also religious outsiders, verse 12
says they were, “excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the
covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.” You
see, God had revealed himself in a particular stream of history, and the
Gentiles weren’t part of it. Now, you can argue about whether that was God’s
plan or whether it was because Israel lost sight of their call to be a light to
the nations and became self absorbed. But, either way, the reality was that,
prior to the coming of Jesus, the only assured way of gaining access to
God was by becoming a Jew. There is no question that God worked in the lives of
the odd non-Jew here and there in the Old Testament, but the only way to be
sure of knowing God was to become a Jew.
Gentiles, by definition, were not Jews, so they
were excluded from God’s promises. There were promises for them in the Bible,
we just read one together this morning, but they had no access to them because
of Israel’s disobedience. The Gentiles were excluded by race and by religion.
Last week we talked about alienation from God.
We talked about how we are all dead, separated from God, and we saw the turning
point in Ephesians 2, verse 4 which begins with, “But God…” This week we have
another turning point, this time it addresses our alienation from each other
and moves from exclusion to inclusion. In verse 13 it says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who
once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”
Once we were excluded, outsiders, foreigners,
with no hope of knowing God… but now, because of Jesus, we are included.
In fact, we’re brought right into the presence of God. That’s what being “brought
near through the blood of Jesus” means. It’s a reference to the Old
Testament temple and the need for blood sacrifices so that people could
approach God.
No-one can approach God without dealing with
their sins. We saw that last week; that our sins have separated us from God and
made us dead. Under the Old Testament system you dealt with your sins by
sacrificing an animal in your place. The animal died instead of you and you
could approach God. As Christians we don’t rely upon the blood of animals to
cover our sin because Jesus has shed his own blood on the cross and fulfilled
what those sacrifices pointed to. Now, through the blood of Jesus, everybody
has the opportunity to approach God.
It used to be that only Jews had that kind of
privilege. So from the Jewish point of view there were only two kinds of
people, them and us, Gentiles and Jews, and there was no mixing, just
hostility. But Jesus doesn’t only deal with the vertical alienation between us
and God, he also deals with the horizontal alienation between us as human
beings. It says he has, “made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the
dividing wall of hostility.”
[The city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, is
supposed to have some wonderful building and you’d think they might have a
tourist trade, but if you went to a travel agent and asked about tour packages
there wouldn’t be any. You can’t go to Mecca, at least not without converting
to Islam. No non-Muslim is allowed within the city.
The temple in Jerusalem sat on top of a raised
base. Around that base was an open area called “The Court of the Gentiles.”
From here non-Jews could look at the temple, but they couldn’t go in. At the
base of the stairs up to the temple there was a wall, one and a half meters
high, with signs on it in Latin and Greek. They’ve found a couple of these
signs in archeological digs in Jerusalem. They read, “No foreigner may enter
within the barrier and enclosure around the temple. Anyone who is caught doing
so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.” - Very welcoming!]
When Paul was writing the temple was still in
existence and that wall still stood, but even so he says that Jesus has
destroyed the barrier. He destroyed it by, “abolishing in his flesh the law
with its commandments and regulations.”
When Jesus died on the cross he fulfilled the
Old Testament sacrificial system, the system that had been designed as a way to
approach God but which had become a barrier to exclude people. The way to God
through Jesus is open to everybody, regardless of race, gender, social status,
income, background or ability. Everybody is welcome at the foot of the cross.
There is a lesson here for those of us who have been Christians for a while. We need to be careful that we don’t fall into the same trap as the Jews and put barriers in the way of people coming to Jesus. It may not be a wall, or some kind of physical rite like circumcision, but it may be that we expect people to behave in particular way, or dress in particular ways, or talk in particular ways. No; everybody is welcome at the foot of the cross. All that is needed is to turn to Jesus in faith.
Because Jesus is
building something new. He’s doing nothing less than building a new humanity.
When verse 15 says, “His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two” it’s using “man” in the old sense where it refers to the whole human race. Today we would say, “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two.”
This was radical
thinking in the first century, and it still is. All over the world people
divide humanity into two kinds, “them” and “us,” and the “them” are never quite
as good as the “us.” In it’s worst form you get things like the Rwandan
genocide, or the war crimes of the former Yugoslavia, or the Nazi death camps.
But it doesn’t have to go that far.
You see it in the way
that unions and employers view each other as the source of all the problems in
the workplace.
You see it every time
someone excludes somebody else because they’re the wrong colour, or race, or
religion, or class, or because they look funny or because they smell strange.
You see it in any
system that makes one group of people in some way “not quite as good” as us.
Jesus deals with all
of this by reconciling, “both of them to God through the cross, by which he
put to death their hostility.”
What does that look
like? It looks like my friend Kevin McGrady, who at the age of 15 had been a
member of an IRA execution team, worshipping alongside Ulster Protestants. It
looks like former Mujahideen (Afghan freedom fighters) sitting down in our
front room in Peshawar and taking communion with former members of the
communist secret police. And it looks like people in Hamilton, from all walks
of life and all social backgrounds coming together on a Sunday morning, or a
weekday evening, to worship and learn more about this Jesus that they all have
in common. Because, as verse 18 says, it is, “through him we both [we all]
have access to the Father by one Spirit.”
The result of this new
humanity is a new community. Because we belong to Jesus, we belong to each
other too. We are, “no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens
with God’s people and members of God’s household.” That means we need to
learn how to live with one another.
The church is
different from other groups of people who get together for things like
baseball, or bowling, or bridge. In those groups you get together for one
thing, one aspect of your life. If you don’t like each other you either deal
with it or leave. The church isn’t like that. We’re here because we belong to
Jesus. We can’t go back to the outside, because he has brought us in. We can’t
exclude ourselves without grieving God. That’s one of the tough things about
being a Christian – you can’t choose who the other citizens and members of
God’s household are. That’s God’s business, and often he uses our fellow
citizens in his kingdom to help us become the kinds of people he want us to be.
We started off with
two different kinds of humanity – circumcised and uncircumcised – and God makes
them one by making a new humanity “in Christ.” We started off with one group
who were citizens and another that wasn’t. God makes them one by making them
all fellow citizens and members of God’s family. We started off with a temple
that had a wall through it, excluding people from access to God. We end up with
a living temple, made from people, not stones, “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.”
That is our calling,
to be a community of faith that welcomes anybody and everybody to learn more of
God, and to become a place where God lives in the midst of his people.
Last week we saw that the church is the community of the guilty who have
received God’s mercy. This week we’ve seen that the church is the community of
the excluded who have been included in Christ. That includes people from all
kinds of backgrounds. The basis of our community is not that we are like one
another, or even that we like one another, or that we enjoy the same sport or
pastime, or anything other than the fact that Jesus shed his blood for us and
we belong to him. He has broken down the walls that separate us from each
other. Racial walls. Class walls. Age walls. Language walls. Walls of ability
or disability. Jesus has broken them all down.
If we still live as if those walls have not been broken down it’s because we have yet to fully grasp the grace that God has provided for us in Jesus to love one another regardless of our differences. That’s Jesus’ call us to us today; to live out the reality that, because he has loved us, we can now love anybody. He has broken down the walls that separate us from each other. Now it’s up to us to draw upon his grace to live out that call.