Sermon Given at Oak Grove United Methodist Church (Carrollton, Va.)
and Riverview United Methodist Church (Rescue, Va.)
July 22, 2012 (Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time)
New Testament Lesson: Ephesians 2:11-22
I want to talk today about a disturbing fashion trend. It actually has nothing to do with clothes, though there are plenty of clothing trends which alarm the Church. It has to do with words, one word in particular: religion. It has become alarmingly fashionable to separate ourselves from this word. “I’m not religious,” we proudly tell our friends. “I’m spiritual.” “It’s not about religion, it’s about relationship with Jesus,” the catchy slogan goes. If any of you are fans or users of these buzz phrases, I don’t want you to feel under attack. But today, I want to show how silly such statements are if we really understand what religion is and what it means to us as Christ-followers. There are Christian sects who have eliminated the image of the Cross from their churches, saying it gives the wrong idea by overemphasizing Christ's suffering. Some even refrain from celebrating Christmas or Easter because the meaning of these holidays, they say, has been hijacked by our consumer culture (I don’t think they’re wrong about that, but I disagree with their response). Hearing about these groups, we usually feel that the problem isn’t the Cross or Christmas—it is these groups’ understanding of the true meaning of these things. We defend the Cross. We defend Christmas. Well today, succeed or fail, I’m going to try to defend religion.
Religion itself is not that old of a word. The oldest form of it is from the Latin language, and as languages go, Latin isn’t that old. It’s nowhere near as old, for instance, as the Greek or Hebrew the books of the Bible were first written in, and even those languages aren’t nearly as old as ancient Egyptian or the Sanskrit language of ancient India. Still, the word religion is old enough that very smart people disagree about its original meaning. Now, most of us know enough English words that start with the prefix ‘re-’ to know what that means: recreate, refinance, recount, redo. “Re-” just means that you’re doing something again, repeating something, usually something we didn't do very well the first time. It’s the second part of the word “religion” that we have to scratch our heads about.
Some think it comes from the word legere (“to read”); think of our word "legible." So then religion would mean "re-reading." By that, some think “religion” originally meant “stuff that’s so important, it should be read and re-read over and over. This fits many religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share some Scriptural topics and focus on the written word for their religious truth. Hinduism, Confucianism, and a whole bunch of other –isms rely heavily on reading and re-reading their respective scriptures.
The other possibility, and the one I favor, is that the second part of the word “religion” comes from the word ligare (“to connect” or "to bind"); think of our words "ligament," "obligate," and "league." Reading it that way, religion is a means of reconnecting, of recreating a relationship where one used to exist but, for whatever reason, doesn’t any longer. That's how St. Augustine thought the word had first originated, and I'm going to go with it, frankly, because it suits the point I want to make today.
When we define religion that way—as a process of reconnecting to something or someone we’ve lost—we don’t have too much trouble reading further into what that means for us as Christ-followers. We, as humans, from the moment our life begins, are cut off from God by sin. King David cried out to God, “Surely, I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). Our relationship with God is broken from the time we are created. Before we can have a true relationship with him, a “reconnection” must take place. And what is the word for that reconnection? Religion.
This reconnection has taken a lot of different forms. The idea of sacrifice occurred to human beings very early. Giving things up to a god by setting them on fire is a very old practice. Up until a thousand years ago, it was still common for several religions around the world to practice human sacrifice, and a few still do. By offering up other human beings or animals or crops as burnt offerings, people have sought to reconnect with their god or gods, spirits in nature, or even their ancestors. That's how their reconnection, or religion, works.
Our faith, Christian faith, is supposed to be a reconciling faith, a faith of reconnection. Really, all religions go back to this simple goal: to reconnect human beings with the divine. And in its goal, Christianity is no different. We are people who recognize how far we have fallen as a species, how far we have fallen as a human race, and know we need to be reconnected with our Maker. But if all religions have the same goal, why should we be Christians? What makes Christianity so much better than other religions? If I had no good answer for that question, I wouldn’t be here today, and if we can’t produce a good answer for that question, we need to be earnestly searching for that answer or we need to go home.
I used to find it maddening at William & Mary when I would attend a lecture or a sermon and all I came away with were a bunch of scary questions and no hint of how to get to the answers. That’s not what I want to do today. I do have a reason in mind for why Christianity is better for me than any other religion. Just like most religions, Christianity is about reconnection. But instead of people reaching out for their god with blood and sacrifices, we see ourselves as the ones reached out to by God. Our God made the first move to reconnect with us, and he used his own Blood, not that of children or animals.
St. Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians what this reconnection looks like, and how awesome it is that God starts the process. We don’t have to make the first move in reaching out to God, we don’t have to clean ourselves up before he’ll be able to love us—he died for us when we were at our worst. He reached out to us. He wanted to reconnect with us. If you’re not sufficiently awed or amazed by that simple fact, then look with me at the state humans were in before Christ died for us.
We were “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel.” We were strangers to the promises of God, stuck on the outside looking in at the covenants. We were hopeless, we were without God in the world; a wall of hostility, a wall of our own making, separated us from our Creator and from the rest of his creation.
If that sounds sad, good. That means you’re either out of that separation and appreciate what a gift you’ve been given, or you’re still there and you know you want something better. In either case, God has already started working on you and with you. He has already reached out to you. Even if your current reality is that you are separated from God and have no desire to reconnect—even if that’s you—Paul’s words to the Ephesians are words for you.
The real miracle of our religion, and the reason I don’t want us to cringe or shy away from the word religion, is that God began our religion. What is religion, again? Reconnection. Who started the process of our reconnection? God. God began our religion. The process by which we reconnect with God doesn’t start with us at all. It starts with him. He reaches out to us. We take his Hand, but before we even seek that Hand, it is already extended in our direction.
Now that’s all lovely and maybe it’s convincing enough for us to start saying the word “religion” with a smile again, but stopping at the God-Us aspect of our religion reminds me of a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. My great-grandfather used to quote it often: “Some people are so heavenly-minded, they’re no earthly good.” I don’t wholly agree with that statement. Heaven is more important than earth, just as spiritual things are more important than fleshly things. But one day, heaven and earth will be the same place. We will have new, glorified bodies and even though they will be real, fleshly bodies, they will be radiant with God’s spirit. So everything must be kept in balance and we can’t stray too far toward focusing on heaven and forgetting there’s an earth or the other extreme. To the Thessalonians, who were convinced Jesus was coming back any second and so they quit their jobs and just started sitting around waiting, St. Paul said,
In fact, this section in Ephesians is mostly talking about their relationship with other people, especially other Christians. Something you should know about the Ephesians is that their city, Ephesus, was home to an enormous temple to the Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of animals and hunting. It was so big and splendid that it was known not only as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but the most wonderful of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. So not only did these people worship a false goddess, they did it in style. As such, all the good Jewish Christians looked down on the Ephesian Christians—it didn’t matter that they had been baptized and received the Holy Spirit, they were uncircumcised ex-idol-worshipers and, for some Jewish Christians back then, giving up your idols and receiving the Holy Spirit just wasn’t good enough to be a “real” Christian.
When St. Paul wrote this letter to the Christians at Ephesus, he wanted to remind them that, as they used to be, they really were pretty bad off. But through the blood of Jesus Christ, all that was over. “You who once were far off, have been brought near” (Ephesians 2:13). The wall of hostility that used to separate the Ephesians from their fellow Christians, especially Jewish Christians, was gone. Now, the wall Paul is talking about would definitely have reminded his audience about various walls in their lives. The Temple at Jerusalem had a five-foot stone wall separating the “Court of the Gentiles” (where anyone could walk) from the rest of the Temple area (where only Jews could go). If you can believe it, some early Christians continued to practice this separation, mistrust on both sides led to walls of hostility in the earliest congregations. As you can imagine, Paul, even being a former Pharisee, did not believe this was the way for worship to be carried out. Walls like that only serve to create and sustain hostility between different groups of people. God nailed that hostility to the Cross, and killed it. There was to be no more separation, “for through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit” (Ephesians 2:18).
If you have ever visited the Holy Land, this “wall” talk is especially moving for you. The state of Israel has, since the 1990s, been constructing a wall to separate Israeli territory from Palestinian territory. There are serious security concerns in that part of the world, obviously, with bombings and other atrocities against the innocents of both sides smattering our headlines every week. However, the “security barrier” cuts deeply into Palestinian territory and represents little more than an illegal land grab condemned by every country in the world, including the United States. But even more heartbreaking than the fact that land is being taken from Christians, Muslims, and others is the experience I had on either side of this wall.
On the Israeli side, we met a Jewish settler named Bob. He grew up in New Jersey and moved his family to Israel by the right of aliyah, which allows any Jew in the world to move to Israel, and the state of Israel helps pay for the relocation and helps find housing (as long as they can prove they are racially Jewish and have not converted to Christianity). Bob showed us his beautiful home and his wonderful family. His wife was cooking and his kids were fighting over the computer because it was Friday, and once the sun went down, they would be observing Sabbath rest (no cooking, no computer). Bob sat us down in his living room and talked to us about the Jewish-Arab problem. He said it broke his heart. He said he doesn't want them to split up into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. He wants them to live together in one state with equal rights for everyone, all races, all religions, and no walls. But, he said, "none of the Palestinians want that.”
The last few days of our time in the Holy Land, we worked on a Palestinian farm planting olive trees. The owner, Daoud, an Arab Christian, has been fighting in the Israeli Supreme Court to keep Israel from seizing his family’s farm because it is prime real estate, high ground between several housing settlements created for Jews moving into the country. But most heartbreaking of all, Daoud told us one day, that though he favors the two-state solution, he wishes it didn't have to be that way. He said he would prefer not to split the land into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. He said he would rather they live together in one state with equal rights for everyone, all races, all religions, and no walls. But, he said, "none of the Israelis want that.”
Can you imagine what could happen if these two men could actually meet each other? Can you imagine what could happen if everyone on both sides who thinks this way (and there are lots of them on both sides) was actually allowed to meet each other? What a difference that would make in the world? But they are intentionally kept separated, literally, by a wall of hostility. The wall Paul was telling the Ephesians about used to seem like such an abstract image before I met these two men, two men who agree but will never meet, because agreement would upset “the way things have always been.”
Now we don’t have to make ending the Israel-Palestine conflict our life’s work. There are plenty of walls of hostility right here at home, not just on the national level and the state and county level, but on our personal level. Someone did us wrong, we don’t like the way they look, we don’t like the way they dress, we don’t like the way they talk, and we sure don’t like the way they worship. Uh-uh. Christ nailed all that to the Cross. The miracle that God stretched his Hand out to reach us, to die for us when we were yet sinners, is supposed to inspire us to reach our hands out to others, usually to the ones we’re least enthusiastic about reaching out to.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the graduation address at William & Mary in 2006, just months before I arrived on campus as a freshman. I remember, once I had settled on going to William & Mary, I visited their web site and they had an audio recording of his speech. I listened to the whole thing and it was one of many confirmations that I was going to the right school. One thing he said I will never forget is that “God doesn’t feed the starving by raining hamburgers down from heaven. He feeds them through you.” Likewise, St. Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish nun from the 1500s, wrote,
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
We are the ones God will use to reach out to the lost, the aliens, the ones cut off from the covenants of the promise. That’s supposed to be our religion, and we’re not supposed to apologize for it or say “I don’t fool with that religion stuff.”
That’s how we reconnect with God—by connecting and reconnecting to others. And we don’t wait until they’re good enough for us or they impress us or they reach out to us. God didn’t wait for that when he sent his Son to die for us. He didn’t wait for the human race to get better. He sent Christ at a time when, given the chance to know God in the flesh, all human beings wanted to say was “Torture him! Beat him! Crucify him!” And when Christ was nailed to the Cross, all the hostility that exists between human beings was nailed with him. If there’s still hostility, it’s because we’ve recreated it. Sometimes we reconnect to the prejudices and hostility that were supposed to be nailed to the Cross, we sometimes make that our reconnection, we sometimes make that our religion.
Paul was telling the Ephesians about something so much better! Because of what Christ has done, we are not only reconnected with God, but his saving acts have destroyed the dividing wall of hostility between us and other people. We are no longer foreigners to each other, but fellow citizens with the Saints in heaven. We are not a bunch of people separated from another bunch of people by a wall of hostility. Christ has broken that wall, and made the many one. We are a house, built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, and Christ Jesus himself is the cornerstone.
Perhaps most exciting is that the building project is ongoing. In him, we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. If there is hostility between you and others, don’t wait for them to knock that wall down. God didn’t wait for you. And I know you people are capable of this with God’s good grace. I’ve experienced it! I feel like many of you have known me for a long time, but some of you, I remember the first time I ever met you, and I remember that, without knowing anything about me, you smiled, shook my hand, hugged me, and called me “brother,” and since then, that’s how I’ve felt. I have seen the face of Christ in these encounters with his people. That’s true reconnection. That’s true religion. Thanks be to God!
NOTE: At the conclusion of the sermon at Riverview UMC, this video was shown to the congregation. It is the Virginia Tech Wesley Singers' rendition of Mark Miller's "Christ Has Broken Down The Wall."
-Aaron Gregory, 2012, s.d.g.
Some think it comes from the word legere (“to read”); think of our word "legible." So then religion would mean "re-reading." By that, some think “religion” originally meant “stuff that’s so important, it should be read and re-read over and over. This fits many religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share some Scriptural topics and focus on the written word for their religious truth. Hinduism, Confucianism, and a whole bunch of other –isms rely heavily on reading and re-reading their respective scriptures.
The other possibility, and the one I favor, is that the second part of the word “religion” comes from the word ligare (“to connect” or "to bind"); think of our words "ligament," "obligate," and "league." Reading it that way, religion is a means of reconnecting, of recreating a relationship where one used to exist but, for whatever reason, doesn’t any longer. That's how St. Augustine thought the word had first originated, and I'm going to go with it, frankly, because it suits the point I want to make today.
When we define religion that way—as a process of reconnecting to something or someone we’ve lost—we don’t have too much trouble reading further into what that means for us as Christ-followers. We, as humans, from the moment our life begins, are cut off from God by sin. King David cried out to God, “Surely, I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). Our relationship with God is broken from the time we are created. Before we can have a true relationship with him, a “reconnection” must take place. And what is the word for that reconnection? Religion.
This reconnection has taken a lot of different forms. The idea of sacrifice occurred to human beings very early. Giving things up to a god by setting them on fire is a very old practice. Up until a thousand years ago, it was still common for several religions around the world to practice human sacrifice, and a few still do. By offering up other human beings or animals or crops as burnt offerings, people have sought to reconnect with their god or gods, spirits in nature, or even their ancestors. That's how their reconnection, or religion, works.
Our faith, Christian faith, is supposed to be a reconciling faith, a faith of reconnection. Really, all religions go back to this simple goal: to reconnect human beings with the divine. And in its goal, Christianity is no different. We are people who recognize how far we have fallen as a species, how far we have fallen as a human race, and know we need to be reconnected with our Maker. But if all religions have the same goal, why should we be Christians? What makes Christianity so much better than other religions? If I had no good answer for that question, I wouldn’t be here today, and if we can’t produce a good answer for that question, we need to be earnestly searching for that answer or we need to go home.
I used to find it maddening at William & Mary when I would attend a lecture or a sermon and all I came away with were a bunch of scary questions and no hint of how to get to the answers. That’s not what I want to do today. I do have a reason in mind for why Christianity is better for me than any other religion. Just like most religions, Christianity is about reconnection. But instead of people reaching out for their god with blood and sacrifices, we see ourselves as the ones reached out to by God. Our God made the first move to reconnect with us, and he used his own Blood, not that of children or animals.
St. Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians what this reconnection looks like, and how awesome it is that God starts the process. We don’t have to make the first move in reaching out to God, we don’t have to clean ourselves up before he’ll be able to love us—he died for us when we were at our worst. He reached out to us. He wanted to reconnect with us. If you’re not sufficiently awed or amazed by that simple fact, then look with me at the state humans were in before Christ died for us.
We were “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel.” We were strangers to the promises of God, stuck on the outside looking in at the covenants. We were hopeless, we were without God in the world; a wall of hostility, a wall of our own making, separated us from our Creator and from the rest of his creation.
If that sounds sad, good. That means you’re either out of that separation and appreciate what a gift you’ve been given, or you’re still there and you know you want something better. In either case, God has already started working on you and with you. He has already reached out to you. Even if your current reality is that you are separated from God and have no desire to reconnect—even if that’s you—Paul’s words to the Ephesians are words for you.
The real miracle of our religion, and the reason I don’t want us to cringe or shy away from the word religion, is that God began our religion. What is religion, again? Reconnection. Who started the process of our reconnection? God. God began our religion. The process by which we reconnect with God doesn’t start with us at all. It starts with him. He reaches out to us. We take his Hand, but before we even seek that Hand, it is already extended in our direction.
Now that’s all lovely and maybe it’s convincing enough for us to start saying the word “religion” with a smile again, but stopping at the God-Us aspect of our religion reminds me of a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. My great-grandfather used to quote it often: “Some people are so heavenly-minded, they’re no earthly good.” I don’t wholly agree with that statement. Heaven is more important than earth, just as spiritual things are more important than fleshly things. But one day, heaven and earth will be the same place. We will have new, glorified bodies and even though they will be real, fleshly bodies, they will be radiant with God’s spirit. So everything must be kept in balance and we can’t stray too far toward focusing on heaven and forgetting there’s an earth or the other extreme. To the Thessalonians, who were convinced Jesus was coming back any second and so they quit their jobs and just started sitting around waiting, St. Paul said,
Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. (2 Thessalonians 3:6)Yet to the Colossians, who had a different set of problems, he wrote, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). These verses aren’t contradicting each other; they are showing a need for balance between two extreme forms of religion. True religion, true reconnection, is not just about our relationship with God—it is just as much about our relationship with other humans.
In fact, this section in Ephesians is mostly talking about their relationship with other people, especially other Christians. Something you should know about the Ephesians is that their city, Ephesus, was home to an enormous temple to the Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of animals and hunting. It was so big and splendid that it was known not only as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but the most wonderful of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. So not only did these people worship a false goddess, they did it in style. As such, all the good Jewish Christians looked down on the Ephesian Christians—it didn’t matter that they had been baptized and received the Holy Spirit, they were uncircumcised ex-idol-worshipers and, for some Jewish Christians back then, giving up your idols and receiving the Holy Spirit just wasn’t good enough to be a “real” Christian.
When St. Paul wrote this letter to the Christians at Ephesus, he wanted to remind them that, as they used to be, they really were pretty bad off. But through the blood of Jesus Christ, all that was over. “You who once were far off, have been brought near” (Ephesians 2:13). The wall of hostility that used to separate the Ephesians from their fellow Christians, especially Jewish Christians, was gone. Now, the wall Paul is talking about would definitely have reminded his audience about various walls in their lives. The Temple at Jerusalem had a five-foot stone wall separating the “Court of the Gentiles” (where anyone could walk) from the rest of the Temple area (where only Jews could go). If you can believe it, some early Christians continued to practice this separation, mistrust on both sides led to walls of hostility in the earliest congregations. As you can imagine, Paul, even being a former Pharisee, did not believe this was the way for worship to be carried out. Walls like that only serve to create and sustain hostility between different groups of people. God nailed that hostility to the Cross, and killed it. There was to be no more separation, “for through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit” (Ephesians 2:18).
If you have ever visited the Holy Land, this “wall” talk is especially moving for you. The state of Israel has, since the 1990s, been constructing a wall to separate Israeli territory from Palestinian territory. There are serious security concerns in that part of the world, obviously, with bombings and other atrocities against the innocents of both sides smattering our headlines every week. However, the “security barrier” cuts deeply into Palestinian territory and represents little more than an illegal land grab condemned by every country in the world, including the United States. But even more heartbreaking than the fact that land is being taken from Christians, Muslims, and others is the experience I had on either side of this wall.
On the Israeli side, we met a Jewish settler named Bob. He grew up in New Jersey and moved his family to Israel by the right of aliyah, which allows any Jew in the world to move to Israel, and the state of Israel helps pay for the relocation and helps find housing (as long as they can prove they are racially Jewish and have not converted to Christianity). Bob showed us his beautiful home and his wonderful family. His wife was cooking and his kids were fighting over the computer because it was Friday, and once the sun went down, they would be observing Sabbath rest (no cooking, no computer). Bob sat us down in his living room and talked to us about the Jewish-Arab problem. He said it broke his heart. He said he doesn't want them to split up into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. He wants them to live together in one state with equal rights for everyone, all races, all religions, and no walls. But, he said, "none of the Palestinians want that.”
The last few days of our time in the Holy Land, we worked on a Palestinian farm planting olive trees. The owner, Daoud, an Arab Christian, has been fighting in the Israeli Supreme Court to keep Israel from seizing his family’s farm because it is prime real estate, high ground between several housing settlements created for Jews moving into the country. But most heartbreaking of all, Daoud told us one day, that though he favors the two-state solution, he wishes it didn't have to be that way. He said he would prefer not to split the land into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. He said he would rather they live together in one state with equal rights for everyone, all races, all religions, and no walls. But, he said, "none of the Israelis want that.”
Can you imagine what could happen if these two men could actually meet each other? Can you imagine what could happen if everyone on both sides who thinks this way (and there are lots of them on both sides) was actually allowed to meet each other? What a difference that would make in the world? But they are intentionally kept separated, literally, by a wall of hostility. The wall Paul was telling the Ephesians about used to seem like such an abstract image before I met these two men, two men who agree but will never meet, because agreement would upset “the way things have always been.”
Now we don’t have to make ending the Israel-Palestine conflict our life’s work. There are plenty of walls of hostility right here at home, not just on the national level and the state and county level, but on our personal level. Someone did us wrong, we don’t like the way they look, we don’t like the way they dress, we don’t like the way they talk, and we sure don’t like the way they worship. Uh-uh. Christ nailed all that to the Cross. The miracle that God stretched his Hand out to reach us, to die for us when we were yet sinners, is supposed to inspire us to reach our hands out to others, usually to the ones we’re least enthusiastic about reaching out to.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the graduation address at William & Mary in 2006, just months before I arrived on campus as a freshman. I remember, once I had settled on going to William & Mary, I visited their web site and they had an audio recording of his speech. I listened to the whole thing and it was one of many confirmations that I was going to the right school. One thing he said I will never forget is that “God doesn’t feed the starving by raining hamburgers down from heaven. He feeds them through you.” Likewise, St. Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish nun from the 1500s, wrote,
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
We are the ones God will use to reach out to the lost, the aliens, the ones cut off from the covenants of the promise. That’s supposed to be our religion, and we’re not supposed to apologize for it or say “I don’t fool with that religion stuff.”
That’s how we reconnect with God—by connecting and reconnecting to others. And we don’t wait until they’re good enough for us or they impress us or they reach out to us. God didn’t wait for that when he sent his Son to die for us. He didn’t wait for the human race to get better. He sent Christ at a time when, given the chance to know God in the flesh, all human beings wanted to say was “Torture him! Beat him! Crucify him!” And when Christ was nailed to the Cross, all the hostility that exists between human beings was nailed with him. If there’s still hostility, it’s because we’ve recreated it. Sometimes we reconnect to the prejudices and hostility that were supposed to be nailed to the Cross, we sometimes make that our reconnection, we sometimes make that our religion.
Paul was telling the Ephesians about something so much better! Because of what Christ has done, we are not only reconnected with God, but his saving acts have destroyed the dividing wall of hostility between us and other people. We are no longer foreigners to each other, but fellow citizens with the Saints in heaven. We are not a bunch of people separated from another bunch of people by a wall of hostility. Christ has broken that wall, and made the many one. We are a house, built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, and Christ Jesus himself is the cornerstone.
Perhaps most exciting is that the building project is ongoing. In him, we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. If there is hostility between you and others, don’t wait for them to knock that wall down. God didn’t wait for you. And I know you people are capable of this with God’s good grace. I’ve experienced it! I feel like many of you have known me for a long time, but some of you, I remember the first time I ever met you, and I remember that, without knowing anything about me, you smiled, shook my hand, hugged me, and called me “brother,” and since then, that’s how I’ve felt. I have seen the face of Christ in these encounters with his people. That’s true reconnection. That’s true religion. Thanks be to God!
NOTE: At the conclusion of the sermon at Riverview UMC, this video was shown to the congregation. It is the Virginia Tech Wesley Singers' rendition of Mark Miller's "Christ Has Broken Down The Wall."
-Aaron Gregory, 2012, s.d.g.
