Partners and Promise: Breaking Barriers

Last week, as we began our four week series in Ephesians, I mentioned to you the general consensus among theologians that this letter was not written by Paul. For some of you, this may be a little unsettling. Yet, we know that this was a way of doing things in the first century. We also know that this letter was used widely in the early church and was accepted as authoritative by church leaders when the canon - the collection of writings that make up our Christian Bible - was decided.

One of the reasons that it has been determined that this is not Paul’s letter is because the author of Ephesians goes a little further than Paul in a few areas. One of these relates to Christian baptism. Both authors write of baptism as a death and resurrection. That in our baptisms we die to an old way of being and are raised to a new person in Christ. Paul is careful to locate that resurrection with Christ into a future time - at the fullness of time. We heard this today in the Romans text: “we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

The Ephesians author goes further than Paul - saying that Christians have already been raised with Christ. And, therefore, are already part of Christ's heavenly kingdom. Just a few verses before our reading today, the author to the Ephesians writes these famous verses: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” The writer continues: “so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” 

This idea, that through our baptisms we are already part of Christ’s heavenly kingdom then sets the stage for our reading today, which begins to unpack the mystery of God’s plan mentioned last week. The mystery of the new thing that God is doing.

We read today in Ephesians, chapter 2.

11Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—12remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14For 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. 15He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, 16and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. 17So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; 18for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 21In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; 22in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. --Ephesians 2:11-22 (CEB)

Who is your enemy? That may be a startling way to begin. But, who is your enemy? This is really the question that is being asked here.

To understand this, we need to grasp the huge divide between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. The Gentiles to the Jews were anyone and everyone who were not Jewish. There was deep hostility between Jews and Gentiles - hostility that was bound up with the law, which created personal and social antagonism between them. The laws, for example, that made eating with or intermarrying with Gentiles often led Jews to have contempt for Gentiles, regarding them as less than human. In response, then, Gentiles would often regard Jews with suspicion, considering them inhospitable and hateful to non-Jews. They would engage in prejudicial acts against the Jews.  This mutual animosity was one of the uglier elements of the first century world.

We might think of the relationship between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. My family is half Lutheran and half Catholic. When I was young, my aunt, who was Lutheran, fell in love with and married my uncle, who was Roman Catholic. It was scandalous in my family. So scandalous that my grandmother did not speak to my aunt for decades. Perhaps something like this has happened in your family. Where the barriers - the divisions - that arise, that we create, deeply harm relationships. 

But, the Ephesians author argues here - but Christ has demolished this law, this barrier between Jews and Gentiles, between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. To take it further, between black and white, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, and on and on. By demolishing the law, Christ has made each person part of the heavenly kingdom. Taking two divisive elements and creating one new person that transcends the two. A new creation. This is the claim of Ephesians.

And going further, the Church is the place where the results of this peacemaking by Christ, this embodiment of peace by Christ, is to be seen. Verses 15 and 16 from today’s reading: He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” 

If Christ has done this for Jew and Gentile, then Christ has done this wherever there is division, whether that division is caused by tradition, by class, by color, by nation, by groups of nations or by whatever it is that divides us. And we, in the Church, in this temple where God dwells, are called to be the example of what it is to embody peace. To move into the places in relationships that are uncomfortable. To cross the barriers that exist. Through our relationship with Christ and our relationship with one another, we are being shaped into a sanctuary that is fully fit for God.

So, back to my opening question. Who is your enemy? What are the relationships in your life that are characterized by division. Whether that division comes as a result of color or class or even just personality? Christ calls us to move beyond the division, to work to repair these relationships in our lives and in our church.

This morning, I invite you to sit silently for a few minutes before we sing our hymn of the day. What are these relationships that need tending in your life? Make a note in your bulletin of one of them. Then, add one step you can make, one uncomfortable step you can make, that begins to bridge the divide in that relationship. And trust that Christ will be in the midst of it overcoming the barriers that exist. Amen.

Preached July 18, 2021, at Grace & Glory Lutheran, Goshen, and Third Lutheran, Louisville.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Readings: Ephesians 2:11-22, Romans 6:1-11, Psalm 84

Persistance and Resistance

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  Matt. 5:38-48 (NRSV)

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today, this last Sunday after Epiphany before Transfiguration Sunday next week. This last green Sunday before Lent. Today is the last reading we have from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew until much later this year. 

Last Sunday, I laid out how we got to this point. How Jesus, after his baptism, began his ministry of healing throughout the Galilean countryside. How the crowd following him continued to grow. How Jesus moved to a higher place, where he began to teach. And to lay out the vision of God’s kingdom--as set forth in the words of the Beatitudes. A vision so different from the current culture. 

And then, from last week’s reading, the examples Jesus gave from the law and the prophets, examples that Jesus reinterpreted for his day.  These reinterpreted examples that give us a vision of what it looks like for us to work to carry out that kingdom and to live in relationship with one another. Whether that is one-on-one or more broadly within our community of faith. And we reflected upon how hard, sometimes, living in relationship can be and how important it is to God that we stick around, even in those times when we don’t want to.

Then, we come to our reading for today. Once again, Jesus gives us examples. More examples of ancient laws that he reapplies for his day. Laws that are not narrowed, but reinterpreted for a new time. And, even though reinterpreted, they are laws that have at their very core the same principles of love and reconciliation as those from ancient times.

Today’s examples, unlike last week’s, push us out into the world, beyond the bonds of our community, past the walls of our church. They teach us how to live and respond in the midst of an evil world. They teach us how to respond to our enemies.

Who are your enemies? 

Who are the people you hate or who persecute you so much that you call them “enemy?” Who are the people in our world who seem to personify evil?

Who are your enemies?

That’s a hard question, isn’t it? 

Last summer, I was teaching 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in Vacation Bible School. At my teaching station, we shared a snack together and, at the same time, wrote thoughts and ideas in our journals. Thoughts and ideas that came out of a discussion of the Bible lesson for each day and from questions that I asked them. 

On one particular day, our lesson centered around the verses in Mark 12--those verses that sum up the Ten Commandments--that we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and love our neighbor as ourself. To love our neighbor as ourself. It’s the same words that come from the last verse of our Leviticus reading today. 

The children and I had a long discussion about who our neighbor was and, as part of it, a broader question about whether our enemies were also our neighbors.

When I asked them the same question I just asked you--”Who are your enemies?”--there was a collective grown. “We’re not supposed to have enemies,” one of them said. “God wants us to love everyone,” said another.

I challenged them to be real. To be honest. To admit that, yes, they had enemies. That we all have enemies. Whether it’s the bully at school, or the bully at work. Whether it’s a terrorist group in the Middle East or a terrorist group here at home. We all have enemies--those people that seem to us to personify evil. 

Having enemies is the result of sin and a broken world. Whether it is across the world in another continent. Or right here at home in our backyard. We all have enemies.

So, who are your enemies? 

And, going a step further, how are we to respond to our enemies?

In each of the examples in today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us how to respond to our enemies. How to respond to and resist evil in a non-violent way. Whether it is to offer your other cheek to someone who “slaps you in the face,” someone who seeks to dishonor or humiliate you. Or whether it is the poor person who offers up his undergarments to the one who has already stripped away his outer garments--the creditor who has already taken away everything else. Or whether it is one who is powerless in our world, one who chooses to go one mile further than that already demanded by one with power, the one who sits on a higher rung of the societal ladder. Whatever the example, Jesus teaches us how to respond to our enemies and how to respond to the presence of evil in our world. And that is to resist it in a non-violent way.

In this month of February, as we, as a country traditionally lift up and honor the history and experiences of African-Americans, it is hard not to think of images from the Civil Rights movement. Those images that give us an example of resisting evil non-violently. Whether it is the image of resistance at a Woolworth’s counter, or that of being knocked over by force of water from firehoses in response to a peaceful, non-violent march across the Birmingham bridge, or even the image of the three African-American women at NASA, whose story is captured in the current movie, Hidden Figures--a story of their quiet resistance to evil carried out by a society that sought to keep them from fully using their mathematical genius simply because of the color of their skin. 

Whatever the image is, it is through non-violent resistance that evil is exposed. Evil is unmasked. Evil is named as evil. Resistance names what you see, exposes what might not want to be exposed, especially for the sake of someone who is vulnerable.

As we move further in Matthew this year, we will see how angry God gets with a world where people are routinely victimized or made to serve the ends of the more powerful. We will hear that God promises judgment to such a world. And, we will see, how important it is that we, as God’s people and messengers of the Good News, stand with those who are vulnerable and who are on the margins. To be salt and light for the world.

This is the message for us in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a hopeful vision of an amazing world in which there is wholeness and equality, peace and reconciliation.  It is a message of shalom. And it is a call for us--the church--to persist. To stick around. To be God’s messengers of this vision and to work with God in bringing this vision of hope to completion in our world. 

God, give us the courage and strength to carry out your vision. Amen.

Preached February 19, 2017, at Grace and Glory Lutheran Church, Goshen, KY.
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.
Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Psalm 119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew 5:38-48.

A Border Story

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”   Luke 17:11-19 (NRSV)


Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

“On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.” It is with these words that our Gospel lesson begins today. “Through the region between Samaria and Galilee.” The region between. This is our story for today, this 21st Sunday after Pentecost. It is a story of that place between. It is a border story.  

I think it’s different for you all here in Texas, with so much of your southern border a national border between the U.S. and Mexico.  It’s different at this border. 

I grew up on a ranch in north central South Dakota. And, even though we were only about 300 miles away from the border between the U.S. and Canada,  it wasn’t until I moved to Southern California that I really began to be aware of the U.S.-Mexican border and all of the politics surrounding our southern border.

You see, traveling over the border into Canada was never a big deal. Maybe it's because not many people drive through the Dakotas to get to Canada, so lines were never an issue. And security never seemed to be much of an issue either.

It was different at the border between El Cajon and Tijuana. There, even years ago, security seemed tighter and the lines at the border waiting to go through the INS station--which is what ICE was called back then--well, waiting at that southern border, the security lines seemed to be endless. 

I remember my first visit to Mexico one Memorial Day weekend. It took us 6 hours of waiting at the border checkpoint to finally cross back into California. And yet, even though waiting 6 hours could have been horrible, well, instead, it kind of became a party. People parked their cars and were mingling about. Local people from Tijuana were trying to sell pottery, blankets, candy and other goods. Waiting that 6 hours was, believe it or not, kind of fun.

And then, 9/11 happened. And things at the border were much, much different, weren't they? After 9/11, boundaries tightened up dramatically. And, then, cartel violence, which had always been there to some degree, got so much worse and became headline news.  

I remember a few years ago doing work in several cities along the Rio Grande, thinking how much I wanted to drive into Mexico to explore this northeastern part of the country, yet being strongly advised by the people I worked with that it was not safe. Not at all. That, because of the violence, they, themselves, who had so often travelled back and forth across the border, were no longer traveling to Mexico. 

No more sense of community. No more party atmosphere. Only separation. 

Like our southern border today, there was no party atmosphere at the border that separated the Samaritans and the Jews. In fact, there was a history of hostility between these people. 

At one time, they had been one nation. Yet the Babylonian exile and the return of the Jews from captivity had brought about changes and tension. The Samaritans and Jews were at odds about many things--beliefs about scripture, their worship, what it meant to be holy, and on and on. So, one has to wonder why, as our story tells us--why would Jesus be traveling in and among these border villages? On his way to Jerusalem, where he knew he would die, why seemingly tempt fate and put himself at risk, there, along the border?

Well, it’s because for God, there are no borders. The human borders we surround ourselves with, whether they be borders between nations or between people of different ethnic backgrounds or race or color or, even, religion; or borders between genders or generations;, or any other visible or invisible borders we place between ourselves and others--well, for God, they just don’t matter. God’s mercy is offered freely to all people. No borders. No divisions. No human convention about who is inside or outside, even when the outsider is an enemy, real or perceived. There is nothing that limits God’s mercy.

And this was the case in today’s story. As Jesus was entering into one of those small towns along the border, he was approached by ten lepers. Ten men who, by virtue of their disease, were considered contagious. Unclean. Who were banished to the border--a nowhere place where neither Samaritans nor Jews would choose to live, yet the place where these ten lepers, outcast from their communities, could keep their distance according to the law, according to the norms of society.

It was here, in the midst of this nowhere place with this nobody people, that Jesus was at work. Here in this barren borderland, in response to their pleas for mercy, Jesus sends these ten, diseased men on their way to their priest. And, on the way, our text tells us, they were healed. Along the way. Healed of this disease that had been a barrier for them. That had kept them apart from those they loved. That had kept them apart from their community.

And, then, one of them, realizing he has been healed, recognizes the presence of God. And what is his response? Well, he turns back and he offers praise and thanksgiving to the One who has healed him. And, this man, well, our text notes, he was a Samaritan. A foreigner. An outsider. An enemy. 

As he offers thanksgiving to Jesus for his healing, well, the other nine Jews, the ones who should have known better. Who should have gotten who Jesus was. Who should have turned back to offer their own thanks and praise. Whose people, because of their own lack of sight and lack of understanding, ultimately rejected Jesus…. While the other nine Jews continue on, it is the foreigner, the outsider, the enemy, the Samaritan, who is the one who turns back in gratitude. And, it is the Samaritan to whom Jesus says, "Get up and go! Your faith has saved you." Not that his faith has made him well, but that, more accurately, his faith has saved him. Salvation.

This is what God's salvation in Christ Jesus looks like. It is a salvation that restores us and reconciles us back into community, that turns us to see God in our midst, that returns us to worshiping God. It is a return that is focused on God, that recognizes that our God is a God who works in unexpected ways through unexpected people, bringing life where there seems to be no hope. Who turns human expectations and worldly systems upside down and, as is the case in our Gospel story and also in Naaman’s story this morning from 2nd Kings, it is a return that recognizes that God works through the lowly, the least, and the last of us to bring about healing and salvation, restoration and reconciliation. With God and with all people.

So, who are you in today’s story? Are you one of the nine? The entitled? Unable to see God at work around you among the least and lowly?

Or are you the tenth? The foreigner? The outsider? Even, perhaps, the enemy?

Regardless of who you are, God offers healing and mercy, life and salvation to all people.  No borders. No divisions. No insiders. No outsiders.  Life and salvation, offered to all people.

May our response then be that of the tenth--to turn back and give God thanks and praise. And to hear the promise in Jesus’ command to “get up and go,” that it is God-given faith in a resurrected Jesus that has saved us and that empowers us to step across boundaries and borders, to share mercy with outsiders, to pay attention to things that are worthy of praise, and to move forward into the future with the assurance that God is with us and that there is more to God’s story than meets the eye.

Get up and go, then. Go and witness to the saving love of God in Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Preached October 9, 2016, at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Bastrop, TX.
21st Sunday after Pentecost
Lessons: 2 Kings 5:1-15c, Psalm 111, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19.