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He has Destroyed the Dividing Wall
Ephesians 2:14-22It takes little time and almost no effort to see divisions in our world. This week alone witnessed the rise and fall of protesters in Burma trying shed the oppressionexercised by the ruling government. Leaders continue to struggle for any possible answer in the conflict between Palestinian and Israeli. September recorded the lowest U.S.casualties in Iraq in over a year though the number still stood at 70 deaths with totalclimbing closer to the 4000 mark. The total number of casualties in Iraq are at anestimated 80,000. Closer to home this week included protestors descending on JenaLouisiana as an incident that happened one year ago continued to build in mediaattention. The story follows that a black high school student asked the principal if he wasallowed to sit under a certain tree in the school yard which he was of course granted. Thetree in question was known to students as the “white tree” as only white students gatheredthere. The boy sat there and the next day nooses were hung from that tree in response.Later in the year a white student was beaten by a group of black students. This has againtriggered the hardly latent racism embedded in American culture. In Caledonia Ontario, just outside of Hamilton, legal and police action continues in the dispute over land claims between an aboriginal community and local land developer. Some of these stories dropoff the news headlines but the divisions that they cause in people’s lives continues.Let’s look for a minute at our day to day life. Our youth and children in schoolcan offer a flawless of presentation of what it means to live with divisions. There have been different names over the years but you can be pretty sure that there will be a groupof students who are athletic, dress well and have typically good looks. There will beanother group that does well in school but feel a little more awkward around people or
2sports. Another group comes off as a little more rough around the edges and don’t seemto care too much about school at all. Others just like to have fun and party a little more.And some just tend to be alone. Even in the younger grades I remember the division between the town kids and the country kids. Most of us when we were in school andmost of us that are in school now know more or less if we are in a cool group or at leastwhich group is the cool one. Now it may be that there is little to no explicit conflictaround these groups but that does take away the reality and potential of the divisionsamong us.And as we know we do not shed our sense of division when we leave school.They enter into every level of our lives. What is it that continues to drive division, whatgives it its fuel? Division begins and is sustained not primarily from the antagonism of another person (though that too drives division). Division is primarily a matter of howunderstand ourselves as individuals and also our group or social identities as acommunity, church or country. To our shame we know that most often how wedistinguish ourselves from other churches is by what they are wrong in doing. If we donot actively assess our sense of self as individuals and as groups we will passivelyreceive prejudices and divisions which will define us against other people.One of the essential means through which we understand ourselves is quite simpleas we continue to use the basic categories of ‘winner’ and ‘loser’. Here again, it is theschool yard and classroom that clarifies this for us. In competing for grades or havingstudents pick teams for sports we instill a framework of distinction between those whocan and those who cannot. Then we further accentuate this by giving greater attentionand praise to arbitrary things like sports or math while leaving the gifts and skills like
3hospitality, listening and patience unacknowledged. And we define ourselves, we defineour identity on the basis of the categories of evaluation that we are given. Are we popular, are we smart, are we athletic? It so happened that I was usually on the side of the winners growing up and now my heart continues to break as I recall more and morescenes of division from my childhood, especially those that I participated in.As we get older we clean up our language a little and refer to the winners assuccessful and the losers as unsuccessful. We may not call ourselves losers but we maycertainly feel like failures. We are compulsive in our pursuit of being winners. But for there to be winners there must be losers.In the book of Ephesians this is essentially what Paul criticizes in the Jewishsegment of the church. Their individual and group identity is based on performance. Werecognize who are God’s people through their actions. These are the winners. Just prior to this morning’s verse we read that “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no can boast.”Paul recognized in this Jewish group the tendency to accept only those that got the mostright answers, wore the right clothes or figuratively speaking scored the most goals or were the most popular.Then there were the Gentiles and Paul saw that they too had a way of definingthemselves. Rather than trying to form and maintain a “winning team” like the Jews didPaul saw the Gentiles as giving in to whatever their nature desired. If we are not able or not interested in joining a winning team then some of us will drop out entirely from socialsettings and become isolated. We believe that our identity is a part of our inherent natureand that only our personal experience will be a trusted guide. We absolve ourselves and
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