Breaking Down the Walls: Ephesians 2:11-22 (NIV)

a sermon preached by Michael Hawn, October 6, 2024 (World Communion Sunday)

 I recall the event as if it were yesterday, even though it was almost thirty years ago. I was on a study leave that took me to six Asian countries to learn and experience Asian Christian music. At the invitation of a former student from Singapore, I attended a workshop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The workshop was sponsored by the Christian Conference of Asia, an ecumenical body of Asian pastors and professors from more than twenty Asian countries. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but I soon realized I was the only non-Asian observer in the group of around one hundred. The theme of the conference sparked my curiosity: Can We Be Asian and Christian?

 Though I was familiar with this kind of theological discourse, somehow, amid the diversity of these Asian siblings, I realized that I had not asked myself the corresponding question: Can I be an American and a Christian? I guess I just assumed that there was no inherent conflict. [I should have been more tuned in since I was aware of the provocative 1989 book by Duke professors Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, with the description, “a provocative Christian assessment of culture and history for people who know that something is wrong.”]

 Keep in mind that I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist congregation in  Des Moines, Iowa, where dirt is very black, corn is very tall, pigs are very fat, and all the children are above average. My idea of cultural diversity ranged from my Italian Catholic classmates, referred to by names I would be ashamed to repeat, to Polish Catholics and German Lutherans who shared the common value of their love for accordions and polkas. Despite the numerous towns named after Native American nations and the name of the state itself, derived from the Ioway tribe, I never considered the descendants of the indigenous people. I assumed that God was from Iowa—Eden of the Midwest.

 So, I found my world turned upside-down at the Malaysian workshop. The Asian Christians were grateful to the missionaries who brought them the Gospel. I learned that the first missionary to Asia was St. Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, who was martyred in Madras, India, in the year 53 CE. It occurred to me that by the year 53, it was unlikely that Christianity had reached North America. St. Patrick didn’t make it to Ireland until the fifth century. The missionaries, in many cases, arrived with the assumption that most Asian cultural practices were pagan and could not be redeemed for Christian use. [A parenthetical note: I am not one to bash 18th, 19th, or even early 20th-century Christian missionaries for their insensitivity to local customs. The overwhelming sentiment was one of appreciation for the courage and commitment of the missionaries from the West. As Asian Christians, they were the ones who must recognize the gifts and graces of their diverse Asian communities and wed them to the Gospel.]

 The discussion floated on a somewhat theoretical level for some hours. Finally, a Malaysian pastor stood and seized the floor. I could tell that this broke the usual decorum of Asian gatherings. First of all, the pastor was a woman—a younger woman. Second, she showed no deference to the male leadership of the group. Third, she was frustrated and angry at the lack of pragmatic strategies that she could take back to her congregation. For her, the discussion still indicated too much deference to Western ways. Her congregation needed to find its own cultural voice. After a few minutes of voicing her concerns, she concluded with this: "We must never forget. Jesus was born in Asia—Asian Minor or far Western Asia—and sought refuge in northern Africa." Then she stopped, and I swear she looked right at me— "and never made it to the United States!" Not only did she turn my world upside-down, but the conference took a more productive turn in its efforts to embody its theme.

 This passage from Ephesians 2 challenges our worldview, especially one prevalent today in the United States—that it is impossible for people from differing cultural perspectives to flourish together. A few years after I was in Kuala Lumpur, Collyn and I took a Mediterranean cruise that included a day in Ephesus—now a magnificent archeological site in western Turkey. The city was located strategically by sea routes, though the water has now receded over two miles due to deforestation and erosion. Ephesus was a center of academic study—the façade of the marvelous Library of Celsus still stands as a tribute to learning. The 25,000-seat amphitheater was an artistic hub for Greek plays and music. Ephesus was a major center of commerce drawing merchants from northern Africa, southern Europe, and the far reaches of Asia. Ephesus was a spiritual center. The Temple of Artemis dwarfed the Parthenon in Athens in the centuries before Christ. Later, Ephesus became a place for Christian pilgrimage and a primary location that nourished the early Christian movement. Talk about the confluence of cultures, commerce, learning, the arts, and faith traditions, Ephesus had it all.

However, as the letter to the Ephesians indicates, the church had some problems. According to Jewish Christians, uncircumcised Gentiles were not in a full covenantal relationship with God. Gentiles were excluded from spiritual citizenship by Jewish Christians and thus were foreigners or aliens to God’s promises. The good news is that Christ came to bring peace among these cultural groups and destroy the barrier between them—employing a strong metaphor—breaking down the dividing wall of hostility. This passage has much to unpack, but I want to focus on breaking down the wall of hostility.

When I was younger, I thought the destruction of the dividing walls of hostility would be like Jericho—the walls would come tumblin’ down in one grand collapse—when John Kennedy passed the torch to a new generation in his inaugural address in 1960;  when Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of breaking down the walls of segregation in 1963, and LBJ championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; when a human landed on the moon in 1969; when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; surly when an African American was inaugurated as President of the United States in 2009. However, these turned out not to be monumental Jericho moments, but markers in time where perhaps a bit of mortar was chipped away and one of the bricks of the dividing wall of hostility was loosened just a bit.

The story from Kuala Lumpur that I told you earlier is an example of how God has been working on me to break down the dividing walls that I have erected between myself and others, especially those whose ethnic, socio-economic, gender identity, cultural assumptions, and faith formation differ from mine. Regretfully, sometimes I am resistant and slap fresh mortar on the bricks rather than chip away at the massive dividing wall I have inherited and reinforced. My dividing wall has mortar with bits of arrogance, fragments of ethnocentrism, chunks of privilege, scraps of prejudice, more than a tad of stubbornness, and a whole lot of other stuff that makes the cement holding in the bricks of my wall extremely resilient.

I have become a part of this congregation because I sensed that it has an abundance of people who are working on breaking down their dividing walls. I can't deal with my dividing walls alone, but I need lots of help. Every Monday morning in our Walk-in program, some of our folks are chipping away at dividing wall of food insecurity. Every Tuesday morning, some of our folks are chiseling away at the dividing wall for those who have been denied a basic human dignity—the right to be clean. Our steeple bell tolls each month, reminding us that gun violence is a dividing wall that plagues communities, decimates families, and destroys lives. Our church houses a preschool program that offers us the opportunity to participate in the nurture of children, regardless of economic resources, breaking down the dividing wall of educational privilege. Our Advocacy program alerts us to the dividing walls in our state legislative process and how we might petition our representatives to whittle away at these. Many of us have a passion and wisdom for the care of the earth—as demonstrated in the marvelous Earthcare Fair last month. Numerous individuals in our congregation break down dividing walls in their workplaces, in their volunteer activities, in their personal commitments to exposing systemic structures in our community that separate us from each other and deny all of us the right to live with dignity, secure in safety, surrounded by beauty, and thriving with hope.

This list sounds great—and it is admirable. But it is not enough. Numerous forces surround us that are very adept  at shoring up the dividing walls of hostility. I am an eternal optimist, however. I have not given up on the possibility of Jericho moments in our community of faith. Maybe I have been looking in the wrong places. Rather in the grand forums of government and society, perhaps the event that had the most Jericho potential was, paradoxically, the murder of George Floyd. How many of us thought that this horrible travesty in a south Minneapolis neighborhood as a pandemic was spreading would have reverberations on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, and we—in our lifetime—would all be liberated from symbols that celebrated the bondage and degradation of enslaved people? I’d like to think that our congregation may be poised for Jericho moments in the not-too-distant future.

As the Body of Christ, the church never arrives but is always on a journey. We come to the table on this particular day to acknowledge that we travel this journey with a cosmic crowd—as our communion liturgy reminds us—with the hosts of heaven and the faithful of every time and place—innumerable souls. Something happens at this table that suspends time and space—as Celtic spirituality suggests—a thin space where heaven and earth meet, and we become one—indeed a Jericho moment where for a time, the walls have come down. We need a sign out front on Fifth Street that addresses the presence of this cosmic crowd—seen and unseen—that is among us right now. That sign might say: Welcome All y'all! Billions worship here!

This liturgy is an opportunity to include the voices of some others throughout time and around the world in our celebration of the One who brings peace, obliterates dividing walls, and eliminates the barriers between strangers and aliens, embracing all in full citizenship with the communion of saints. In this service, the musical sounds of the broader human family blend with musical heritages and cultures that are more familiar to us. The ways that other Christian siblings pray in the ecumenical community enhance our ways of praying. By ecumenical, I am not referring to ecclesial traditions, but to the whole inhabited earth, including all its creatures—indeed celebrating God’s creation as a sacrament of grace for all that breathe. I apologize to you. This liturgy should have come with a warning: Beware! Your worldview is about to be turned upside-down. We might find ourselves moving outside our “comfort zones.” We may feel insecure. We may wonder what will happen next. But we might also take a brick out of our dividing wall and be caught up in the wonder of being in community and communion with the faithful of every time and place.

In this spirit, I invite you to share in a creedal statement that attempts to capture the cultural beauty and theological perspective of the Spanish-speaking community.

Hispanic Creed

We believe in God, the Father Almighty,

Creator of the heavens and the earth;

Creator of all peoples and all cultures;

Creator of all tongues and races.

 We believe in Jesus Christ, his Son, our Lord,

God made flesh in a person for all humanity,

God made flesh in an age for all the ages,

God made flesh in one culture for all cultures,

God made flesh in love and grace for all creation. 

 We believe in the Holy Spirit

Through whom God incarnate in Jesus Christ

Makes his presence known in our peoples and our cultures; 

Through whom, God, Creator of all that exists, 

Gives us power to become new creatures;

Whose infinite gifts make us one people: the body of Christ.

We believe in the Church Universal because it is a sign of God’s Reign,

Whose faithfulness is shown in its many hues

Where all the colors paint a single landscape,

Where all tongues sing the same praise.

We believe in the Reign of God – the day of the Gran Fiesta

When all the colors of creation will form a harmonious rainbow,

When all peoples will join in joyful banquet,

When all tongues of the universe will sing the same song.

And because we believe, we commit ourselves:

To believe for those who do not believe,

To love for those who do not love,

To dream for those who do not dream,

Until the day when hope becomes reality. Amén!

(Cuban-American Church Historian, Justo Gonzáles, 1996)