Proper 11, Year B | Ephesians 2:11-22
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
July 21, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“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.” – Ephesians 2:14[1]
My message today is, as it was a few weeks ago, exceedingly simple: love one another.
It's hardly worth saying that we live in a time of great division. It doesn’t take a scientific poll to tell us our nation is almost irreconcilably split. We’ve cut ourselves off from one another socially and politically, and it seems like hostility and fear are only ever increasing. While it’s easy to say that this isn’t how things should be, that “a house divided against itself, cannot stand,”[2] we find ourselves in the same position day after day, unwilling to compromise or make any substantial effort to explore the possibility of common ground or even to consider our own responsibility and need to change. So we villainize and demonize and dehumanize one another as some sort of justification for our own unacknowledged self-righteousness and rigidity. In the process we’ve encouraged a subtle drifting apart which has become so substantial that even though we use identical words, it’s nearly impossible to understand what the other is saying.
It may be a small comfort to know, but we aren’t alone in our madness.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians reveals a church divided, culturally and socially. In Galatians, one of his earliest letters, Paul had argued that people don’t need to adopt foreign customs in order to follow Jesus—in a day when most people spent their entire lives within a few miles of where they had been born, there was no need for the ethnically Greco-Celtic people of what is now central Turkey to adopt the unfamiliar formalized traditions of people a thousand miles south of where they lived. Ephesians seems to be the other side of the coin, encouraging a powerful Greek majority within a different congregation not to coerce people who grew up with “foreign” customs to abandon their practices for the sake of a uniform appearance—or to intentionally make them so uncomfortable that they feel the need to leave.
His argument comes down to “Jesus”—Jesus as the one who has broken down the walls that divide us. Paul’s language here reminds me of when Jesus presents himself as “the gate for the sheep” in the book of John,[3] an image that is, in most English translations, slightly misleading.
When we think of a gate, we think of a semi-mobile barrier, a sort of smaller, temporary divider within a greater, permanent wall. A gate allows its owner and their associates the freedom to go in and out while preventing unauthorized parties from accessing certain objects or areas. That can lead us to think Jesus’ function is to maintain our own security and comfort, keeping those we don’t approve of out while allowing those already like us to come in. The reality, though, is that Jesus wasn’t claiming to be “the gate” so much as “the gateway”—the actual opening in the wall. He isn’t a barrier that controls and manages access or some sort of highway check point intended to prevent entry or limit movement[4]—he’s the gap itself, “the way” that allows any interaction to occur in the first place.
The image Paul gives us today is actually more assertive than Jesus’ own. For Paul, Jesus isn’t simply “the gap.” Jesus is one who actively makes the gap. Jesus, as love incarnate, sees the barriers that divide us, no matter how long-standing or fortified they may be, and marches straight through them, tearing them down as he goes. In this way, Jesus allows for authentic unity within a divided landscape, a unity that recognizes our differences and distinctions yet still offers the opportunity to communicate with one another, to trust one another, and to work together. Neither Jesus nor Paul wants us to settle for a sort of forced uniformity that denies or quashes difference for the sake of appearance. Instead, God’s love has shattered the sort of permanent stand-offs we misunderstand to be peace, introducing a means of genuine reconciliation through honest interaction with and encounter of one another despite our differences.
And that—the quest to find true unity within God’s anointing—is part of our journey of love. We make the choice to accept one another where we are and for who we are, not as a passive means of preventing conflict but as an active expression of love. When disagreement arises, we offer one another the benefit of the doubt and trust God to lead and guide each of us through the direction of the Holy Spirit. We choose to step past our own fear of difference and misunderstanding, knowing that “there is no fear in love” because “perfect love casts out fear.”[5] We come together to eat at one table, sharing in one body and one blood. Recognizing that Jesus himself is “our peace,” we decide not to allow ourselves to rebuild “the dividing wall…the hostility between us” but together continue the work of clearing the rubble that still causes us to stumble. And as we feast together and labor together, individually and collective the Image of God in this world, we recommit ourselves, day by day and moment by moment, if need be, to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.”[6]
“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.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Abraham Lincoln, address to the Illinois Republican Party on June 16, 1858, drawn from Mark 3:25
[3] John 10:7
[4] For those unfamiliar with Las Cruces, our city is set in the “Borderlands” region of the United States. While we can travel freely to the east (which remains within the Borderlands) anyone attempting to travel west or north must pass through non-border highway checkpoints set up to prevent immigrants from illegally accessing the rest of the country.
[5] I John 4:18
[6] Ephesians 5:2 | 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pg. 376