Thanksgiving Sunday
October 12, 2008
Jodie Boyer Hatlem
I. Intro
The task set before me for this week as a member of the “preaching team” felt complicated. I like lectionary preaching because I hate making decisions. This week I had decisions to make. This week I am suppose to speak on: the “New Paul”, about the church, in a service set aside for Thanksgiving, and– I am suppose to choose the text—myself—out of the entire Pauline corpus.
Ephesians seemed like an obvious choice—the epistle, if not written by Paul is clearly written by a close associate– CHECK the whole letter is about the church, CHECK
and the letter is infused with Thanksgiving. CHECK. Indeed, of all the Pauline corpus it is the letter that most consistently follows the grammatical structure and tone of one of Paul’s prayers. Paul like most of us became increasingly wordy and highfalutin when he prayed. The whole letter—and especially the first three chapters function as a prayer of Thanksgiving.
Thank you for the church!
Thank you for the gift of new humanity in Christ!
Thank you for becoming our peace!
Yet, I had my misgivings. Ephesians is not my favorite of the Pauline epistles. There is all that murky stuff about slaves and masters and husbands and wives. There is all that militaristic imagery– girding in armor, swords, breast plates of righteousness, fiery darts—imagery that was so beloved by the “onward Christian Soldier” congregation of my youth. Finally, there is the consistent language of election and predestination language that haunted me my entire time spent at Calvin College. And then there was Doug… who kept suggesting, that perhaps, I could find another book to preach on… And yet, for all my misgiving about election I feel destined to preach on this text and have no intention of submitting to Doug on the matter.
It just seemed that this was a text for our time:
A time when we are in the midst of a visioning process.
A time in which we have named our church “Home.”
A time in which we have committed ourselves to “Welcome.”
Our text for today speaks evocatively of church as “home!” And expressively of the mission of Welcome. The epistle was clearly written by a Jewish Christian to a congregation of Gentile Christians. The writer minces no words. WE (Jews) had formerly considered YOU the Gentile: “the uncircumcised idolaters, strangers to the covenant of Israel, aliens …” EXCLUDED
Yet, he goes on to present one of the most evocative statements of welcome in the scriptural witness.
Indeed, a line from this passage is found in a hymn that is well beloved by our congregation.
We are strangers no more…but, members of one family… strangers no more… but part of one humanity…
The welcome is worth repeating:
Remember that at one time you were Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcised”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he had made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments in dogma, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you were far off and you who were near; for through him both of us have access in one spirit to the father. So then you are no longer stranger or aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,
The text moves from we vs. you. To both of us. To a newly defined “we.” It is an incredible statement of welcome by a Jewish Christians to Gentile Christians. And yet this text and others like it has a bitter and ironic history. It was written to suggest that there is no longer any hostility between Jewish Christians who keep the law and Gentile converts who do not. In fact the barrier that separated these two groups has been broken down. It was written as a gracious and costly act of welcome by a Jewish Christian to Gentile converts. However, It wouldn’t be long before the gentile converts were using the logic of radical welcome to exclude their erstwhile welcomers. Using the logic of the text in order to argue that Jewish-Christians who kept the law –in the words of Justin Martyr – are neither Jews or Christians but are instead strangers to the covenant, aliens from the promise. Without hope and Without God in the world.
The walls that Paul had so evocatively claimed were torn down were built anew.
Before we talk furt
her about this new wall
Before we talk about renewed exclusion
Let us talk about the gloriousness of the welcome
II. Welcome
Paul writes: so he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.
Here the author of the passage is quoting the prophet Isaiah “Peace, peace to the far and near sayeth the Lord.”
The original context of the Isaiah passage is return from exile—homecoming! a call to return for both those who are “far”—those who are literally in a physical exile in Babylon and those who are near—those in figurative exile to idolatry at home in Israel.
The scriptural allusion is telling. Scholars have begun to pay greater attention to the use of OT allusions and quotations in the letters of Paul. For people who were used to… not so much—reading scripture but hearing it. Who like Paul know scripture intimately … scripture is not quoted as just some kind of proof text… instead Paul often evokes the context of the original passage when he quotes a snippet of text from the LXX.
If this is what Paul is doing here, he has chosen a generous text to recite to his gentile readers. This particular phrase “peace to the far and the near” is located in the midst of a scathing indictment of Israel’s idolatry. You that burn with lust among the oak, under every green tree; you that slaughter you children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks…. Wrote the prophet in the same oracle! It is certainly not a text chosen to remind gentiles of Jewish covenantal superiority. It is a text in which Israel is called children of a sorceress, offspring of an adulter, of a whore. The text suggests that even Jewish Jesus people should be able to relate to the former idolatry of Gentile converts.
Both Jew and Gentile have had to confront a God who in the words of Isaiah:
Dwells in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit.
A God who declares Peace. Peace to those far and those near.
The far and the near is dramatically re-read to mean Jews (the near) and Gentiles (the far off), as if the Gentiles had only been in a rather protracted state of exile. Exile that differed in duration but not in essence from the exiles that Israel has experienced. This welcome of the Gentiles into the people of God is really a welcome home. You are aliens no more. You are a brother and sister long estranged. It is a radical dynamic. The Jews are welcoming home the Gentiles but in another clear sense the Gentiles need to respond by welcoming home the Jews.
The Jews need to be welcomed too! Israel as a historical, particular community and an ethnic and national group comes to know who they are, the nature of their mission and the secret meaning of their collective life in this remarkable moment. The author realizes that the Jews too need to come home. Ephesians is famous for its use of body language. The church is the body of Christ. The Fullness of Christ. But the text is just as replete with language of home. Indeed in the original language the text functions as a poetics of “oikos”… the Greek word for household. You were once “Paroikoi” –aliens—outside the house [PAR oy koy]. You are now “Oikeioi”- Members [OYKE ee oy].
Jew and Gentiles are being: Sunoikodomeisthe_ Built together (with the root word for domestic included here) [SOON oyke oh dome ICE thay] into an “Oikodome”-structure
[OYKE oh dome ay]
Welcome Home! The language may be homey, even homely. But Paul suggests that the significance of this welcome home is cosmological. This home is the locus of Gods work, the place where God is reconciling all things to himself. This home is a sign; it is a dramatic sign of what God has in store for creation. Of God’s master plan to restore all things to himself finally. This home is atonement. Here—in this home—in this body—humanity is being made one with Christ. This home is church. Paul was claiming that what must have seemed to the church in Ephesus as the rather tenuous, negotiated, peace between two ethnic groups—was the purpose of all creation! What a home. What a homecoming. What have we gotten ourselves into by calling our church home. And we thought we were being humble.
I wonder if some of these first century readers rolled their eyes when they read this. There that Paul goes again. Just because Matthias and Miriam now worshiped with Alexandros and Doris… This isn’t exactly the be all and end all of creation… I mean there are times… when they clearly can’t stand each other… I would suggest that there probably was this kind of eye rolling. It makes sense of Paul’s instruction later in the text to: Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander and malice… and silly and vulgar talk
Yet, it is precisely because this letter probably elicited some groans and eye rolling that we can understand it in our current context. This language of the fullness of God, the body of Christ, a cosmological transformation of the world… all this is used to refer to the rather homely, everyday experience of congregations struggling to be inclusive, to give and to receive welcome.
III. Exclusion
Now that we have talked about the welcome, let us discuss how this text of welcome was transformed into a text of exclusion. Central to this transformation is the verse that is translated in the NRSV and NIV as—He abol
ished the law with its commandments and ordinances.
This text was used to teach that the law has been made null and void. Moreover, it is now a sin to keep the law. A crime against the very grace of God. The reality that Paul celebrates, here the joining together of the circumcision and the uncircumcision of law keeping Jewish converts and Gentiles who do not keep the law, Is later renounced as an impossible marriage.
It was this text and texts like it that led to the forced exclusion of Jewish Christians as neither Jew or Christian. A sort of dangerous hybrid who should not be welcome. Because ironically their very existence undermines a particular theology of welcome.
Many commentators most notably Markus Barth and Thomas Yoder Neufeld have argued that the text should not read he abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances but that He has abolished the Law of Commandments in dogma. The Jewish Christian writer is stressing that the law is abolished not in the sense that it is an expression of God’s will for humanity but insofar as ordinances had been used as an ethnic marker to exclude the gentiles. What is abolished is not the law but the function of the law as condemnations for the gentiles.
For the writer of Ephesians, In the new messianic age the law as dogma would no longer be necessary because the law would be written on hearts. This reading makes better sense of the fact that the whole second half of the books of Ephesians is obsessed with issues of purity and of renouncing formerly pagan ways.
If that is the case then early Christians made a dastardly misuse of this text. They had used inclusion to be exclusive. Welcome was transformed. It was not longer a mutual process where Jews welcomed Gentiles back from Exile and Gentiles welcomed Jews just as certainly into a new humanity. While the Jews had claimed the gentiles did not have to become Jews. Gentiles now claimed that Jews had to become Gentiles.
And in so doing They rejected the cosmological significance of a new humanity. Rejected the claim that Paul was making that God’s dynamic plan for a new humanity is to be witnessed precisely in a community of Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians, the circumcision and uncircumcision.
IV. Application/Conclusion
How shall we take this as those who think of TUMC as, in some sense, home.
First are we able to welcome with the fullness with which the Jewish author of Ephesians welcomes. Are we ready for such a radical call of inclusion? It is an exciting call, indeed. As Paul presses it, is there any other way of discovering the depth and the height and the breadth of the love of God? But, it also makes us acknowledge that we perhaps are not quite home. Is there still work of reconciliation that needs to be done within our church? Then we are not yet fully home. Are there groups excluded from our midst? Then we are not yet fully home? Is there strife amongst us? Then we are not yet fully home? It is also forces us to accept that we are perhaps still in need of welcome ourselves.
I think that one community that understands “welcome” in the kind of deep way expressed in our text for today is Sanctuary. IF there is any division in our society that bears anything like the dualism that divided First Century Jews and Greeks it is the division that separates the rich and poor in our society. Sanctuary has been so successful welcoming the poor because they recognized in a robust way that the rich desperately need to receive from the poor: to receive their fellowship, blessing and welcome. This is a truth we have embraced in theory and have recently rededicated ourselves to make true in our life together.
Second, how are we going to avoid our welcome itself becoming a means of exclusion:
The irony of the reception of our text for today is that the logic of inclusion was used toward the goals of exclusion. Indeed in every act of welcome there is always the possibility of a dark side. It is much like an act of Thanksgiving. I am sure you have all had moments like this. You are sitting around the dinner table and you say “thank you” God for you rich blessings. But, does that imply that those who are hungry are not blessed by God. You thank God for your friends and family… does that mean that those who are lonely are not loved by God. This is a trap we must avoid. And I can’t help being flat out forthright here.
Doug and I came after the long process the church had on homosexuality. We both have sensed the hole that has been left by those who are now gone from this church that were here before we came. We can see that it is meet and right and good to work toward being more robust in our welcome and breaking down the walls that divide us in this regard. But, I fear that that welcome could well become, a wedge dividing older from younger, progressive from traditional, urban chic from those who working with their hands, immigrant and foreigner from iconic Torontonian.
And so I’ll end again by invoking the experimental community at Sanctuary. There, poor and broken and powerful people from Toronto’s transgendered and transvestite community eat at the same table as bikers and schoolteachers and staff who spent time as child sex trade workers and immigrants and people who have not quite left behind the conservative religious communities that nurtured them. There are those who have disabilities and those with social-psych issues, bankers and would be pastors. And many of these categories overlap and move and, yes, at times come into tension. But the table is spread for all, and all find welcome.
It is somewhat hard for me to say as a budding academic … but one of the major reasons Sanctuary works in this way is that the staff has decided that they don’t
have to get the theory right … on paper … in total agreement with each other … change the minds of those who ‘still don’t get it.’ They have accepted that they have serious disagreements in terms of what is and isn’t allowed for Christians sexually. Much more important is that they have a common vision of what it means to care for people in precarious forms of life. And all of our lives are precarious. So that we all also need to be able to accept care… and to accept welcome
In short, the cosmological vision of welcome in Ephesians demands constant attention to how welcome works in practice … over time. When we extent our welcome we must persist in asking. But what about those who don’t have the same level of education as we do; who don’t or can’t or refuse to work; those who struggle, or not, when it comes to keeping up appearances? Will we become members of the same household with and allow ourselves to be welcomed by the sort of people who were formerly “far off”?
I hope so! And I pray that we will increasingly be rooted and established in love, and that we might have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Because we trust that it is God who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. Amen