All in the Family
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 2:11-22
When you get married, you marry not only your spouse but you marry into their entire family. It’s a package deal, and in an ideal world that package is marked “Special delivery” and not “Return to sender” or worse yet “Warning: toxic materials inside.” Before I married Sandy, I received a word of caution from my future mother-in-law. This was about two months before the wedding, at a birthday dinner in honor of Sandy’s mother. Aside from me, everyone there was immediate family. I somehow ended up seated next to her mother.
Now, Sandy’s mother speaks limited English, but she did her best to convey to me what she considered a highly important message. Placing her hand on top of mine, she looked me in the eye and said, “John, I worry for you. Sandy, she have temper.”
I reassured her that this assertion—I’m not saying “fact”—this assertion was something that I was certain that I could handle.
Clearly believing that I had not received her message as intended, and looking at me with greater intensity, she added, “John, you high class. Sandy, low class.”
There are rare moments in life where inspiration strikes like a lightning bolt and you come up with just the right line at just the right time. This was one of those occasions. In my halting Korean, I replied, “어머니, 괜찮아요. Mom, that’s OK. Together we will make middle class.”
It’ll be twenty-five years for us this October, and I’ve never experienced a more beautiful wedding ceremony or a more roisterous reception. Not to mention the afterparty karaoke! One of my favorite aspects of the wedding was the coming together of these two vastly different cultures. You had my fun-loving musician friends, enthusiastically enjoying the open bar, their sweaty dress shirts untucked and ties loosened, next to these dignified older Korean women, some of whom had come all the way from Korea, who were wearing a hanbok, a multilayered traditional Korean dress. It was East meets West. White bread and kimchi. Budweiser and soju.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes of another unlikely coming together of two completely different cultures—Jews and Gentiles. In our multicultural society, especially here in Rockland County, which has a sizable Jewish population, we may not think of Jews and Gentiles as being all that different, with the exception of the Hasidim who intentionally separate themselves. We shop in the same stores, celebrate the same secular holidays like the Fourth of July, and participate in the civic life of our communities. And besides, nobody uses the word “Gentile” unless they’re quoting the Bible.
But in the Eastern Mediterranean region of the middle of the first century, when Paul was writing this letter, the distinction between Jew and Gentile was much more meaningful. To Jews, Gentiles were outsiders—people who did not know the one true God and who were not part of the covenant. To Gentiles, namely the Romans, Jews were that peculiar sect that would not pay homage to the Roman gods despite living under Roman rule. They wouldn’t even eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols.
Paul writes this letter to the church in Ephesus, which was a city in Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey. The church there was multicultural, made up of both Jewish and Gentile converts. You might be surprised to learn that they didn’t always see eye to eye, and they could sometimes clash over their competing understandings of how to practice their faith and what was essential versus purely incidental. I know, divisions within the church? Unheard of!
Whenever I hear Christians long to return to the halcyon days of the early church, a time of supposed peace and universal understanding among Christians, I want to ask, “Have you read the New Testament?” The disputes between Christians practically leap off the page. That’s not quite the case with Ephesians, however. Paul doesn’t go into specific details in this letter, but you can read between the lines.
In churches that were made up mostly of Jewish converts with a smaller Gentile minority, like in Galatia, that Jewish-Christian majority could set the agenda. For example, they could and did sometimes insist that Gentile converts first become Jews in order to be Christians. The men needed to be circumcised, and everyone needed to keep the dietary laws laid out in the Old Testament.
You didn’t pick yourself up by your bootstraps and make it here on your own, Paul is saying. It was the arms of Jesus Christ, stretched out on a Roman cross, that carried you.
The Ephesians seem to have had the opposite problem. The church appears to be mostly Gentile-Christians, probably with a small Jewish-Christian minority. The Gentile majority seems willing to jettison any trace of Judaism from their understanding of the faith. This passage today is Paul’s reality check to this Gentile majority. He’s essentially telling them, “Remember where you came from.” You were outsiders. You were “the uncircumcision.” You were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise.” You were without God and without hope. To paraphrase 1990s gangsta rapper Ice Cube, “Check yourself before you wreck yourself!”
But Paul doesn’t end with an admonishment. Paul is not writing to scold the Ephesians but to remind them of the good news, which he does by saying, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” You have been brought near. In other words, you didn’t come of your own accord. You didn’t get here by being born into the right family, through your personal connections, or by your own heroic effort. You didn’t pick yourself up by your bootstraps and make it here on your own. It was the arms of Jesus Christ, stretched out on a Roman cross, that carried you.
“For he is our peace,” Paul writes. He is our peace. The one who suffered the violence of crucifixion…he is our peace. The one whose crucifixion was a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles has made the two into one in his flesh and has broken down the dividing wall between them.
Speaking of dividing walls, I grew up in the waning days of the Cold War. There was perhaps no greater symbol of the divide between East and West—literally—than the Berlin Wall. The wall not only separated East Berlin from West Berlin, it marked the dividing line between Communist Eastern Europe and free Western Europe.
I remember President Reagan giving a speech in West Berlin in 1987 in which he exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Sixteen-year-old me thought how stupid that was, as if Gorbachev would say, “You know what, Mr. President? You’re right. I’ll get right on that.” Only later did I appreciate the moral pressure that Reagan was bringing to bear on his Soviet counterpart.
Surprisingly, miraculously, it was just two years later that the citizens of both Berlins took matters into their own hands and with hammer and chisel hacked away at this symbol of a divided city and a divided people. I was a freshman in college and was enraptured by the images I saw on television. The Berlin Wall went up ten years before I was born. Presidents spoke in front of it. The Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello sang about it. James Bond infiltrated it. It was the backdrop of history, politics, and pop culture. I thought that it would always be there, but then overnight it was suddenly gone.
The power of the cross is the power to create community where before there was only mistrust and misunderstanding.
It is with a similar suddenness that Jesus demolishes the walls that divide us—not only Jew from Gentile but also male from female, slave from free, and rich from poor. Precisely because of its boundary-breaking nature, in the early days of the church the gospel was especially appealing to those outside of traditional power structures—namely, women, slaves, and the poor. As recounted in Acts 2, when Peter preaches one of the first Christian sermons, which happens on the Day of Pentecost, he quotes the prophet Joel through whom God said, “Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:18).
Unlike the law, which was an external standard by which we defined our performance, the cross is the great leveler. On the cross Jesus gives his life for us all equally, not more so for this group or less for that group. The rich do not require less mercy nor do the poor require more. The lifelong citizen and the recent immigrant stand side by side, as do the pastor and the prostitute, the corrections officer and the convict, the MAGA diehard and the Black Lives Matter activist.
Jew and Gentile. Male and female. Slave and free. Rich and poor. Republican and Democrat. The power of the cross is the power to create community where before there was only mistrust and misunderstanding. It’s the power to transform foes into friends, adversaries into advocates, outsiders into insiders, strangers and aliens into fellow citizens and members of the household of God. And when it comes to the household of God, we are all in the family. Boy, the way Glenn Miller played!