The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin’s Church
July 19, 2009
Proper 11 B
“For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has…broken down the dividing wall,…the hostility between us…He came and preached peace to those who were far off and to those who were near…so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
It’s a funny thing – this sublime passage from the letter to the Ephesians comes up every three years right around the time of our General Convention. We hear this powerful exhortation calling us to what is both our birthright as Christians and our principal Christian vocation – the ministry of reconciliation given to us because we have ourselves been reconciled in Christ. Our call to actively seek reconciliation with and for others is the fruit of the reconciliation that has been given to us through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. You can’t separate one from the other.
General Convention is part family reunion, part grand theatrical spectacle, and part a vast and complex legislative process. The legislative process works pretty much the way Congress does; various resolutions proposed from around the church get funneled into legislative committees that hammer them into shape for the floor, and then those resolutions get debated and voted on in both the House of Deputies, and the House of Bishops. And just like in Congress, there’s lots of debate strategy, lots of lobbying, and lots and lots of back room politicking.
It’s hard to see sometimes, in all the confusion of parliamentary posturing, spin and disputation – that at its heart, the Convention is really trying to put flesh and blood on the ministry of reconciliation. How shall we – in the everyday life of individual congregations, dioceses and the national church, how shall we be instruments of reconciliation in everything from worship, to ordination, to governance, to budgets, to mission?
Beginning back in the 1960s, General Convention began to wrestle in a new way with the ministry of reconciliation. The civil rights movement made new demands on the Church – forced the Episcopal Church to think in new ways about how the church and the world are related and how the church’s policies affect and are affected by changes in the surrounding culture. After civil rights, came the campaign to open ordination to women, and then – the struggle to fully include gay and lesbian persons in the life and work of the Church.
And each one of those challenges is fundamentally about the ministry of reconciliation. How shall we so live our corporate lives that the world might see and know, that the dividing walls have been broken down, that human divisions do not exist in Christ, that we are no longer strangers and aliens to each other, but fellow citizens with the saints, and all – all of us – members of the household of God.
One of the themes of Ephesians is God’s intention to gather the whole world, the whole entire cosmos into the healing reality of Christ. As members of the household of God, as citizens of God’s kingdom, as those who have already experienced that healing reality – we are called to be part of that cosmic reconciling work. We have experienced reconciliation – we have seen that dividing wall torn down – we have at least glimpsed what God intends for all creation – and that gives us a distinctive, specific role to play in the divine healing of the world.
And the Church has been at this distinctive, specific role since its very earliest days. It is hard to overstate how much the early Church struggled with how to incorporate Gentiles into the Christian community. The enmity between Jews and Gentiles was deep. One of the ways that Jews survived centuries of exile and oppression was to keep up a very clear and rigidly maintained religious and ethnic identity. It’s easy for us to scoff at all the rules about table fellowship, about dress and ritual behavior and dietary laws, but they were all ways for the Jewish community to identify itself, to retain essential values and to preserve its integrity. The pagan world of the Gentiles was regarded as unclean because it was a threat to Jewish integrity and identity. Even today I find myself envying the Orthodox men and women I see in my neighborhood – earlocks, prayer shawls, modest dresses and covered hair all proclaim so strongly “I know who I am.”
But the barriers Jews put up to protect their holiness were also harsh and punitive. When Jesus visited the great temple in Jerusalem, he would cross from the Court of the Gentiles into the Court of Israel, and on the wall that separated those two areas of the temple was this inscription: “No outsider shall enter the protective enclosure around the sanctuary. And whoever is caught will only have himself to blame for the ensuing death.”
This is the “dividing wall” that the author of Ephesians declares has been broken down. It’s a very specific reference to something that Gentiles who visited the temple would have seen every single day. That unforgiving inscription, with its threat of death to anyone crossing the boundary, told Gentiles that they were forever excluded from the covenant community.
And Gentiles did visit the temple in Jerusalem and associated with synagogues around the ancient world. Although Jews were often dismissed as puritanical, intolerant and smugly sure of their own superiority, there were many pagans who were attracted to Jewish morality, to that radical clarity of identity. But there was only one way to become a Jew, and that was to be circumcised and to submit to the 613 commandments in the Torah. Without circumcision, Gentiles had to stay on the wrong side of the dividing wall.
And the very early Christian church, which began as a Jewish sect in Jerusalem, struggled mightily with that dividing wall. It made sense that any one who wanted to follow Jesus would have to become a Jew first; Jesus critiqued and reformed his religious tradition, but he never abandoned it. St. Paul declared himself the apostle to the Gentiles, and his zeal and passion for that ministry forced the Council in Jerusalem to study, debate and finally declare that circumcision was no longer required for converts. Now those seeking life in Christ did not have to become Jews first – they could be baptized directly into something new, that threatening dividing wall had been torn down by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The author of Ephesians persuades us that in Christ, in that new reality, all ethnic and tribal identities are wiped away. We are made into something that has not existed before, we are not just observers, we are, by virtue of our baptism, participants in a new, existential truth. Unity in Christ is not just something we long for, something that will come in the fullness of time – it is the very context in which we live and move and have our being.
The dividing wall has been torn down – and that is a terrifying thing. Dividing walls make us feel safe – they make things clear – they draw boundaries that protect. If that dividing wall comes down, then things get messy, confused and unpredictable. We can no longer tell who are our friends and who are our enemies – and that, Ephesians tells us, is the whole point. Those divisions and distinctions no longer exist.
Unity and reconciliation have already been established in Christ, says Ephesians – now live as if you believed it. Now that Convention is over, you can expect another round of finger pointing about how the Episcopal Church has torn the Anglican Communion apart. Because General Convention affirmed that we will minister to all people because of the unity and reconciliation given to us in Christ, we will be accused of promoting schism in the church.
The Episcopal Church this past week chose to proclaim the faith that the dividing wall between us has been torn down. But there are many people who think that the dividing wall of human sexuality cannot be torn down – who believe that dividing wall is ordained in creation and that tearing it down means we have abandoned the faith.
I can’t help hearing, in the flood of accusation and counteraccusation pouring out in post convention analysis, an echo of that first conflict between those who believed that Gentiles must be made Jews first, and those who believed that they could be directly incorporated into the Body of Christ. As much as I can tell in the New Testament record, theology followed practice.
I mean, Gentiles were already being baptized without circumcision by the time the Council in Jerusalem decided it was OK. The historical record has certainly been cleaned up by New Testament authors, so we can assume it was far messier and more contentious than anything we read in the book of Acts. Surely, Paul – who lacked proper apostolic credentials and tended to irritate everyone he met – didn’t wait for the appropriate resolution to be approved. He found Gentiles whose hearts were set on fire by the Gospel, and he said – “there’s room here for you, too”
When Paul started bringing Gentiles into full membership in the Body of Christ, the council of elders in Jerusalem was not happy. Who was this upstart who thought he knew better than they what Jesus would do? Why was he not waiting for everyone to be of the same mind? Why was he sowing these seeds of dissension and discord?
That’s pretty much what’s being said about the Episcopal Church right now. We should wait for the rest of the communion. We should remain faithful to past interpretations of Scripture, and the tradition of the church. We should not be creating a conflict over this non-essential matter, when so many more important challenges are before the Church.
Well. Personally, I think General Convention’s actions are long overdue. We’ve waited for the communion, tried to be in conversation, allowed ourselves to be scolded like naughty children – and that seemed to move no one’s heart. We believe that we are indeed being faithful to Scripture – by honoring its most powerful vision of the reconciliation and salvation of all God’s holy people. And perhaps there is nothing more essential to the Christian faith and life, than to proclaim that the dividing wall has been torn down, that all our human divisions and hostilities are healed, and that we are longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints, members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus being the chief cornerstone.
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