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Why Walls Must Come Down

16th Sunday : 22 July 2012 Ephesians 2: 13-18

In all the doom and gloom news coming out of Europe there is one forgotten success story to be quietly thankful for. The reunification of Germany has worked. There were fears that it would bankrupt West Germany, and that the economically beleaguered parts of East Germany, with their high unemployment rates, would become a breeding ground for the rise of neo-Nazi movements. But that is not the way things have turned out. Now Germany is the most economically powerful nation in Europe, and is relatively at peace with itself.

So the Berlin Wall, the most powerful symbol of the cold war, and a source of misery to many divided German families, is now just a tourist attraction. Still, the wall has lodged itself in the world’s imagination as a particular way of trying to solve humankind’s political, economic and social problems. And it is a method still being tried in other parts of the world - most notoriously in Israel, as the new Jewish settlements are ring fenced by a supposedly suicide bomber proof barrier.

How keen we are on walls. Rabbis in the time immediately after Jesus spoke of the Torah, the law enshrined in the first five books of the Bible, as the fence around Israel. Jews in Jesus’ time lived by a holiness code of ritual purity that discouraged them from eating with outsiders, or having them under their roof. Romans were offended by their standoffish behaviour, and Jews in turn thought that they were arrogant. This was a fundamental division running through the ancient world.

How much difference can we cope with? When I think about what it was like to grow up in North Canterbury and Christchurch what I remember is the homogeneity of that world. It was as though one was sheltered and protected from the alien otherness of the many different ways of being a human being that were out there in the big wide world. Much of the journey through adulthood has been about coming to terms with peoples, and cultures, and varieties of the Christian religion that operate on radically other assumptions to mine.

Even within the Anglican family I have been drawn into association with varieties of Christian belonging that formerly repelled me. One thing I have learned is - never say I will never work with that group, or have anything to do with them - because as surely as the night follows the day God will arrange for exactly that to happen at some unspecified future date.

To take one example, during my ten years of ministry in Wellington I recall with particular pleasure being befriended by an Evangelical Anglican priest when I suggested that he become the University Chaplain at Victoria University. Looking out at the Anglican world through his eyes I saw contours of our ecclesial world that had never occurred to me. I heard a version of how the Anglican Church took root in these Islands that was news to me. I had not known for instance that the Church Missionary Society spent much of the 19th century in the dog box after its run in with Bishop Selwyn, and was only brought in from the cold after an historic concordat was achieved in which the Anglican Missions board was set up, and CMS was given an honoured place in its counsels and resource sharing.

When different worlds meet it isn’t all sweetness and light. It is only in Hollywood movies that people meet across great divides, and melt into each other’s arms as romantic music soars in the background. Closing with the alien otherness of even close neighbours can involve coming to terms with unpleasant aspects of reality that we would rather not know about.

What Jesus did about the fundamental division of his time was, in the words of G B Caird, to "deliberately draw off onto himself the hostility between law abiding Jews and those whose contaminating company they avoided, that this hostility brought him to the Cross, and that, because he refused to return it, it died there with him." Like a mother who draws into a clinching embrace a berserk child, until his flailing arms fall exhausted, Jesus drew into the beating heart of God the hostility of divided humanity until it was neutralised there.

The "good news of peace" we heard about in that wonderful vision in Ephesians flows from the resurrection of Christ in which he became the "last Adam," the head of a new humanity and the beginning of God’s new creation. Here is G B Caird again: "Before that all men belonged to the old humanity of Adam, dominated by sin, death and the powers of darkness. Divisions of all sorts, of race and religion, of class and sex belong to that old dying world and have no place in the new humanity of Christ. Those who identify with Christ must allow themselves to be identified with one another."

Which is why I am so dismayed about our three-tikanga constitution. It is perfectly true, that there was plenty of separatism going on in the so-called good old days of the New Zealand Anglican Church. But just as the Maori renaissance was creating an interest in Maori language and culture among Pakeha Anglicans, and a with that a genuine desire for the Anglican Church to be deeply informed by Maori cultural resources, we were ordered off into our separate ethnic jurisdictions. We are now a disgraceful example of a divided humanity within the new humanity of the last Adam. The epistle to the Ephesians with its reminder of the reconciled humanity we are called to be is a standing rebuke to the three parallel jurisdictions we have become. It is time that this wall, like the wall in Israel/Palestine, came down, because Jesus is in the business of breaking down the barriers that used to keep us apart.

Andrew Lincoln has a wonderful description of today’s Ephesians reading: "The Church is where men and women experience a sense of being at home, of belonging, not only to one another in a unified humanity as fellow citizens, but also to God himself as part of his household or family. This new society is also a building, a temple, where humans are the building material which God the builder has already made into his dwelling place…The Church is already the temple in which God dwells. Yet, it is at the same time a building under construction, where, through their relationship to Christ and to one another, believers are still being shaped into a fit sanctuary for God. It is to be characterised by growth and holiness as it becomes what it already is…The readers of this Epistle are to see themselves as the building material God has chosen to utilise for his temple of the end-time pervaded by the Spirit, and thereby to gain a greater sense of their identity as those with a privileged role to play in the working out of God’s purposes in the world."

We are fortunate to be living in a time when the gospel has now reached around the world to enter into just about every section of the human family. One of the reasons why this missionary task matters so much is that as the gospel takes root in a new culture group, or ethnic identity, a different aspect of the gospel comes into high focus, is revealed, perhaps for the first time, in all its richness, and in its power to confer life. So even if a Church planted by Christian mission is quite small in relation to it’s surrounding population it has a significance out of all proportion to its numbers, because that particular people of God in that particular place in that particular time in the human story open up a new perspective on the totality of the good news that hadn’t been seen before. While we know the gospel in outline, in the lineaments of its orthodox content, not all of its aspects have been fully deployed yet. It is like a jewel that is being polished by different parts of the human family to reveal its full beauty. It is as though each Church has a particular part of the treasure of the gospel that it uniquely has a deep insight into, which it can share to the enrichment of all the other parts of the Church.

Which is why it is important that the Church in its totality is interconnected and interdependent and united in the way that Ephesians speaks of. Because only then can this fullness of insight into what the gospel is be communicated to each part of the Church to their greater benefit. Churches that live unto themselves, sealed off from the rest of the Church, doing business with the other parts of it on only the most pragmatic and superficial grounds, are churches that become impoverished, and complacent, and arrogant, and claustrophobically short of life giving gospel oxygen. As they selfishly hog unto themselves that small part of the gospel treasure that they have, it slips through their fingers, because it is for sharing, not for keeping.

If we take the message of Ephesians seriously, and put our roots out deeply and widely in the worldwide extent of the Christian church, that wont happen to us, and we will be the richer for it.