Ephesians 2:11-20
Breaking Down Dividing Walls
James Sledge June
21, 2020
Shortly
after the murder of George Floyd touched off waves of protests around the
country, I began to see people on Facebook and Instagram posting lines lifted
from the Confession of Belhar. For those who have no idea what that is, it is
the newest confessional statement in our denomination’s (the PCUSA) Book of Confessions.
We
Presbyterians love well-crafted and carefully articulated statements on what we
believe and what that leads us to do and be in the world. Our Book of Confessions begins with ancient
Creeds, the Apostles’ and Nicene, moves to a number of confessional statements
and catechisms from the time around the Reformation, then jumps to the 20th
century.
Even
though Belhar is new to our Book of
Confessions, it isn’t all that new. It took shape in South Africa in the
early 1980s when apartheid was still the law of the land there. It was written
by members of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, originally the denomination
for those labeled “coloured” in the system of apartheid. This denomination was distinct
from the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, the white church.
The
Dutch Reformed family is one of our theological cousins whose roots go back to John
Calvin just as ours do. But I don’t think Calvin’s theology had anything to do
with the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa developing sophisticated
theological justifications for apartheid that cited biblical evidence for a
divinely ordained separation of the races.
Of
course we Presbyterians did exactly the same thing during the times of slavery
and segregation. When I attended Union Theological Seminary in Richmond (now
Union Presbyterian Seminary), Dabney Hall was a residence for some students.
Robert Dabney was a professor at Union who served as a chaplain in the
Confederacy, and who wrote stirring theological defenses of slavery and the
noble cause of the South well after the Civil War.
His
views held sway long beyond his time. My brother and I once found some of the
my father’s school work in a box in my grandmother’s attic. Amongst the papers
was some sort of quiz or worksheet where the correct answer labeled Blacks as
the accursed descendants of Ham from the biblical Noah story, part of the
rationale Dabney used to justify slavery and the marginalization of people of
color.
The
Belhar Confession correctly calls such foolishness sin and insists that the
Church is called to precisely the opposite sort of activity, to ministries of
reconciliation and justice. Even so, it took us Presbyterians until 2016 to add
Belhar to the Book of Confessions.
Like
many of you, I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about racism, about reconciliation
and justice and how we in the church are called to such work. It’s not a new
realization, but one of the things hammered home by recent events is how little
white Christians have done to end the scourge of racism. Oh we’ve been against
it, and we’ve talked a fair amount about it, but we not done very much. And I
wonder if we don’t have some theological deficiencies that abet our lack of
action, deficiencies that the Belhar Confession may help us name. Belhar says,
We believe
·
that Christ’s
work of reconciliation is made manifest in the church as the community of
believers who have been reconciled with God and with one another;
·
that unity is,
therefore, both a gift and an obligation for the church of Jesus Christ; that
through the working of God’s Spirit it is a binding force, yet simultaneously a
reality which must be earnestly pursued and sought: one which the people of God
must continually be built up to attain;
Unfortunately,
American Christianity has often been highly personalized and individualized. When
I was young and Christian faith was still expected of people, Christianity
typically meant being a reasonably good person and going to church on Sunday.
The idea that faith required people to make known the reconciling work of
Jesus, that it called Christians to earnestly pursue and seek reconciliation both
with God and with our fellow
human beings, was not something I heard articulated.
Nowadays, a time when there is little
expectation that people will go to church, Christianity is less associated with
“good citizenship,” but it is still highly personalized, often about feeding spiritual
hunger or nurturing some sort of connection to the divine. And as with the
Christianity of my childhood, there is no necessary requirement to pursue
reconciliation with others.
________________________________________________________________
The
first century of the Christian movement did not know the sort of racial
divisions that we do. Slavery in Roman times could certainly be cruel, but it
was often not permanent and was not racially based. The division that did
fracture the early church, however, was the one between Jews and Gentiles.
We
often forget that the Jesus movement considered itself a part of Judaism for
decades. Jesus was a Jewish Messiah and all his early followers, before and
after that first Easter, were Jewish. Early Christians went to synagogue. But
eventually, Gentiles were attracted to the Jesus movement. They were welcome to
join, as long as they converted to Judaism first.
As
more and more Gentiles joined, some, like the Apostle Paul, argued that this
was not necessary. Gentiles could simply be baptized into Christ and made one
with him. No Jewish conversion necessary. This led to huge fights and animosity
between Christian groups, a division that took decades to heal. But eventually,
the Church embraced Paul’s thinking.
In
the scripture we heard this morning, the writer reminds Gentile Christians that
they are now part of one body, saying that Jesus has broken down the dividing wall,
that is, the hostility between us. For this writer, the cross is a
reconciling event, an event that puts to death the hostility, the divisions
between Gentile and Jew. This is why, later in the letter, he will call the
faithful to work for unity and peace between one another, to utilize the gifts
Jesus has given for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.
Wait
a minute. The cross is about reconciliation? Calling people to a ministry of
reconciliation? Working for unity among peoples who once were viewed as a “them,”
even as enemies? I don’t remember hearing this when I grew up in the church.
And if this is so, why is it that most congregations are groups of like-minded
people from similar educational, cultural, economic, and racial backgrounds?
How can we be the body of Christ if we are not engaged in the work he came to
do, breaking down dividing walls and hostility between peoples?
The
good news is that Jesus has already broken down the dividing walls, the
hostility between peoples. As the Apostle Paul writes, There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all
are one in Christ Jesus. In our baptisms, we have been joined to Jesus
and joined one to another. And now we are called to ministries of
reconciliation that make this unity visible to the world, So the question to the
faithful is much more than “What do you believe?” It is, “What work of ministry
are you engaged in, what work are we the church engaged in, that breaks down
dividing walls and reveals the way of Jesus to the world?
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