I Samuel 7:1-14a    II Samuel 7:1-14a     Psalm 89:20-37     Ephesians 2:11-22

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56    Psalm 89:20-3    Ephesians 2:11-22     Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

 

 

I don’t usually preach from the epistles.  I usually base my sermon on the gospel text, or perhaps the Old Testament text for a particular Sunday.  I do that for many reasons, not the least of which is that Paul’s writing can be a difficult read. But today I am going to use the epistle text, which is from the second chapter of the letter to the Ephesians.  Ephesians is a wonderful read.  In it we hear what is almost poetic language describing the faith and exhorting the faithful to ethical living.  It is called by some, “the Queen of the Epistles.”  Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it “the divinest composition of man.”  It is only six chapters long and can be read in a short time. 

If you can this week, I encourage you to read through it a couple of times.  

 

 

PAUL

 

Paul is credited with writing a good deal of the New Testament.  Paul’s original name was Saul of Tarsus.   Tarsus was Roman provincial capital in southeast Asia Minor.  He says that he is of the Tribe of Benjamin.  By tradition, Saul is thought to have been a Pharisee under the tutelage of Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem.  Saul was a persecutor the Christians and was sent to Damascus to continue that mission.  It was on the road to Damascus that Paul had a revelatory experience, being struck blind in the road and hearing a voice saying “Saul, Saul, Why do you persecute me?”

 

AUTHORSHIP

 

Paul is credited with having written 12 of the 27 books of the New Testament.  However, we do have some reason to believe that not all of the works accredited to Paul came from him directly.  Authorship in the ancient world was a different concept than authorship in our own time, that it was not uncommon to use the name of a wise predecessor to honor them and to give credence to the work. 

Vocabulary is different from Paul’s other letters, a lot of his usual language is missing and a significant amount of new terminology as well.  Paul usually comes out in a torrent, here we have a smooth flowing stream.  If Paul is usually like Steinbeck, this is more like Faulkner.

But some say, since this is supposed to be one of the prison letters, so Paul would have had time to refine and edit.  His usual style is more like un-reviewed dictation.  If it was one of his later works, it might very well show new ways of expression. 

However, this letter sounds like it is closely related to the destruction of the Temple and the jewish nation in 70 A.D. and the problem of how to assimilate non-Jewish new Christians.  So authorship is contested.

 

 

TIMING, GEOGRAPHY and AUDIENCE

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Ephesians is reputed to be one of the Prison or Captivity letters, written when Paul was in prison in Rome.  The other two are Colossians and Philemon.  Ephesians is closely connected with Colossians. In fact, 55 verses of the two are absolutely identical.  In all probability, Colossians is either a summary of Ephesians, or Ephesians is an expansion of Colossians.      

One thing we can be sure of is that, whoever wrote Ephesians, it was NOT written as a letter to the Ephesians.  The oldest and best manuscripts of this work do not contain the name of the church at Ephesus in its salutation.  That place is blank.  Paul had spent more than three years in Ephesus, a city on the Western coast of Asia Minor, on the Aegean Sea.  He had a very close and personal relationship with that church and its leadership.  This letter, for all its beauty and flow, is highly impersonal, and in fact mentions the fact that Paul and the recipients do not know each other.  There are no personal greetings in the opening or the closing of the letter.  Paul always mentioned those in the church whom he knew but there is none of that here.  Lastly, this is a letter that is specifically written to appeal to Gentiles.  The church at Ephesus was primarily made up of Jews.  This letter

^[1], but is thought mainly to be a letter meant for general distribution among the churches.

           

THEME OF UNIVERSALITY

 

In the letter that have that is known as the Letter to the Ephesians, the writer brings forward this new concept of the universal faith.  We are used to hearing and thinking about Christianity as a universal faith.  But this was not always so.  Paul had successfully argued that the new faith should not be limited to those who first became jews.  Now with that debate over, the idea of universal church gets some fleshing out in this letter to the Ephesians, and this idea finally takes on a more familiar shape.  Another purpose of the letter was to show the nature of Christianity and the Christian life, particularly to those of gentile/pagan origin.

 

JEWS AND GENTILES

 

The beliefs and laws of the Jews were extremely peculiar in the pluralistic and tolerant Greek-based culture that was the Roman Empire.

The Jews were seen by other Roman citizens as intolerant in their adherence to their own law and their concepts of clean and unclean.  the circumcised and the uncircumcised.  Non-jews, that is, Gentiles, were suspicious of the Jews and their peculiar laws and customs.  They thought of them as separatists who would not socialize with non-jews and who seemed intolerant of others, showing contempt of the Gentiles who were outside the law and the covenant.

The Greeks had maintained a cultural barrier between themselves and “barbarians”–people outside of Greek citizenship who did not possess Greek culture and ideas.  To a Greek, a barbarian was almost subhuman. 

In turn, the jews considered all gentiles to be “the un-circumcised:” people who had no hope of Messiah; who were not citizens of God’s chosen nation, and who had no hope without God in the world.

^[2] 

Conservative Jewish thought on Gentiles at that time  was that they all existed just to be fuel for the fires of Hell.  They thought that the best of the Gentiles should be crushed like serpents.  A jew could not legally aid a Gentile woman in childbirth because it was bringing another gentile into the world.  If a Jew married a Gentile, the jews held a funeral for the jew getting married.  Even going into a Gentile house rendered the jew temporarily unclean.

By these definitions, almost all of us would be Gentiles.

Jewish identity was build around this idea of being separate and different.  To them, being a jew as special.  To be a Jew was to be one of God’s chosen people, to have a holy citizenship in the kingdom of God.  They were in the covenant.  Gentiles were strangers to the covenant.

This identity of separateness was practiced by putting up barriers, the most obvious of which was the physical wall that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the Court of Women on the Temple grounds in Jerusalem.  After the destruction of the Temple, the Jews had to make their psychological and cultural distinctions even more pronounced, because there was no longer this physical barrier.

 

THE BARRIER - THE LAW OF MOSES

 

The main barrier that remained was the law.  The Law of Moses.  The pentateuch, the Torah.  The Ten Commandments, and all that stuff in Leviticus and the additional explanatory additions that had been added.  If you were a Jew, you were at least trying to keep God’s law, but if you were a Gentile, you were outside the law and doomed to condemnation.   

Another barrier was the hope of Messiah.  Jews always lived in hope of the Messiah, but Gentiles of the time had no such concept.  So Jews saw them as being without hope. 

 

THE BARRIER IS GONE -- OUR PEACE, A NEW RACE

 

Ephesians says in its explanation of the history of man we read today, that there is disharmony in the world due to man‘s sin.  Christ ends all this disharmony.  His sacrifice for our sins erased the need for our error-free adherence to the law and for the meticulous regulations that had come to be the law. 

Some in the early church thought that “no more law” meant no more rules, and Ephesians spends part of its later chapters in a specific rebuttal of that idea.   The abrogation of the law does not mean that we are without rules because we have been forgiven, but that we demonstrate our faith by our attempt to comply with ethical law. 

 

Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we have:

 

I. RECONCILIATION TO GOD

Jesus is the end of the law--He replaces Moses’ law with the love of God and love of each other.  The law is gone, but there still are moral guidelines.  That space between us and God has been shortened so much that we have been “drawn near to God.”

 

II. RECONCILIATION TO EACH OTHER

Now, because of Jesus, we can communicate across lines of culture and tradition and prejudice.  That barrier between each other, whatever it was, is gone.  Jesus is our peace–our love for him becomes our love for each other despite our differences.

Jesus creates a new kind of person out of both Jew and Gentile.-racial characteristics are blotted out.  It is as if he took a person made of lead and another of tin and another of silver, but well melt down to gold.  Neither race (jews and gentiles) exist any more.  We are the same stuff.  

 

Both Jews and gentiles, in losing their old identities, gain something in return that is much more valuable than what is lost, namely a place in Christ’s body.  Jews and Gentiles are now one in the body of Christ.  We are friends of each other because we are all friends of God.  “He is our peace”

 

Ephesians tells us that no only is the church a building to house the people of God.  All the churches are one church building that goes on and on, made up of the building blocks of its imperfect members all connected to Jesus the cornerstone.

 

CHARGE

 

We are called as Christians to love our neighbors and to love our enemies.   We are called to have no barriers and to tear down the walls that we and others have created between us and everybody else.  We are called to have no “them”.  All are us.  We are them.   We live in a society that appears to be fragmenting around us.  Our country seems to be divided along many lines.  Presbyterians are accustomed to practicing tolerance toward others, but we too still have our barriers.  Can we tear them down?

There are still BARRIERS OF RACE-Jim Crow laws are gone, we now have an African-American President, but racism remains.  Some writers have said that the issue of race was the central issue of the United States in the 20th century.  Even now in the 21

^st Century, we still have school systems embroiled in desegregation.  A man just recently went on trial for a cross-burning in Scott County.   

There are still BARRIERS OF MONEY-Do we treat people differently because they are poor?  Do we have the physical barriers of walled communities, walled homes, or a walled country; the mental barriers of us against them.  Money barriers tend to be more about personal security than anything else.  We use them and build them to keep out those who we believe would take what is ours or harm us or our families.  But what other barriers do the walls then create themselves?  When we separate ourselves from other peoples with walls, we instantly paint them with the brush of suspicion.  If they don’t belong within our walls, they must be up to no good.  With suspicion come the walls fear and the de-humanizing of those we call intruders.

There are still BARRIERS OF POLITICS in which we believe that those who disagree with us are unpatriotic, stupid, or evil.  There has been and continues to be a tendency in public debate to paint our opponents as inept or malicious, with secret agendas and hidden goals.

 

 

There are still BARRIERS OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE-especially now that a new wave of immigration has come to Arkansas.  Do we draw lines outside of which people do not deserve the same rights as all other human beings.  Was it so long ago that the signs read “No Irish need apply?” 

There are still BARRIERS OF DENOMINATIONS (WITHIN AND WITHOUT) between us and those who worship differently and between us and those who believe different things about Christianity.  We are also called to accept in the faith our brothers and sister who practice Christianity in ways different from our own.  Can we do that, effectively?

There are still BARRIERS WITHIN CONGREGATIONS.  Are there some barriers in this room here today that have been built up, some over time, others overnight?  Is there an us and a them here in this sanctuary?