You Are No Longer Strangers and Sojourners, Eph. 2:11-22
We are called by Jesus to bring God’s peace into the world.
We are all very intimately and painfully aware of the reality of all kinds of divisions in our world. They take on many forms, and appear in every level of society, even the family and the church. We don’t have to look very far to see them. The daily news explodes with the consequences of these walls of division and enmity created between us. They exist between cultures and countries, such as Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia. The walls and enmities of political and ideological division are painfully present in our country. Saddest of all, such walls of division and enmity exist within the Christian community. All of these contradict God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.
For a Jew at the time of Christ, the greatest division, the greatest enmity was that between the Jews and the Gentiles. And this was an ancient enmity. The Jews understood themselves to be the “Chosen Ones,” God’s own. Their laws required them to remain apart from all Gentiles, not to mix with them socially, but especially not to worship their gods. They were the ‘circumcised’, and the Gentiles were the ‘uncircumcised’. But in this passage, Paul, who Christ chose to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, is revealing that it is God’s wisdom and desire for us to be one, to be “members of one household” in Christ.
Our problem is not our differences, no matter what they are perceived to be. Our problem is that we choose to make those differences the reasons for our prejudices and hatred. This is not of God. The proof of this is that Jesus came into the midst of all of this human disunity and hatred to heal it. And he did it by taking it all upon himself on the Cross. He shed his blood to set us free from the sins of our divisions. And he did it in a radical way. He did not come with an army of angels to force peace upon us. He did hurl fire and brimstone, or a great flood upon us. No, Jesus came among us in the flesh and willingly took it on, he absorbed all of our sins of hate and division, in his own body, pouring out his blood on the Cross with divine forgiveness, in an act of love that conquers all of our foolishness and false pride.
Yet we remain divided. Why? Could it be because we all too often take our eyes off of Jesus and focus all of our attention rather on the things of the world? The great paradox of our faith is this: If we focus our eyes, our hearts, our minds, and our wills on Jesus and his way, his truth, and his life, then the things of the world that cause all of our painful divisions would fade away into insignificance and forgetfulness through the same grace and power of forgiveness that Jesus modeled for us.
Is not the end of all division and enmity what the Father, in Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, desires for us? “I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one, as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me” (Jn. 17:21-24). That we Christians remain so divided is a matter of great sadness, for we are failing in our calling to be witnesses of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ in the world. We are called by Jesus to bring God’s peace into the world, not to contribute to its further divisions and enmities with our earth-bound prejudices and hatreds. We are challenged by Christ to keep our eyes on him and, in doing so, to see and respond to the world and one another through the light of Jesus who is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from True God” (Nicene Creed).
Let us all pray for the wisdom and the courage to turn our eyes toward the things of God, rather than the things of the world. That we may open our hearts and our minds to receive the outpouring of God’s abundant graces of courage, forgiveness, and love that we might begin to reconcile all our differences in our families, our society, and, yes, our church communities, and to desire more and more to be one in Christ, so that we can say with Paul: “You are no longer strangers and sojourners (aliens), but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2: 19). Amen.
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