Ninth Sunday after Pentecost: July 21, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
2 Samuel 7:1-14a | Psalm 89:20-37 | Ephesians 2:11-22 | Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Last week, we heard the opening blessing from the letter to the Ephesians where the writer extols God’s blessing for the work God has accomplished in Jesus Christ. In the context of that blessing, we discovered that God chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless, to live as a redeemed people to God’s glory, to be a demonstration of the grace given us in Jesus. The writer also outlined the mystery of God’s drama of salvation, revealing the divine plan for the fullness of time to gather all things up into Christ. Between the passage we heard last week and the one we just heard this morning, Paul goes on to offer a prayer on behalf of the Ephesians, that God would give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation that they might perceive the hope to which they were called, the riches of God’s inheritance bestowed upon them, and the immeasurable greatness of God’s power demonstrated in God raising Jesus from the dead.
This prayer opens to an explanation that the recipients of the letter were once counted as dead through transgression and sin but that in God’s mercy and grace are made alive in Christ. Paul reminds them that their new status as alive in Christ is not an effect of their own will, work, or decision, but is a gracious gift of God. They are a new creation in Christ, made for good works which God had prepared for them so that they may walk in newness of life. For this reason, Paul calls his hearers to remember. Remember that you were gentiles; remember that you were once far off from God and from God’s covenant people; remember that you were without hope and without God. This exercise of remembrance is not an exercise in self-defamation or degradation. Remembering who we were before Christ orients us to the extraordinary and astonishing thing God does for us in the gift of grace given us in Christ.
It can be uncomfortable for us today to associate with the “you” of this passage. We often do not like to consider ourselves sinful, ever having been estranged from God and God’s promises. In our particular expression of progressive faith, we tend to brush off scripture’s descriptions of sin and death as little more than metaphor. But the witness of the letter to the Ephesians challenges us to recognize that sin and death are very much a part of our existence as creatures in this world. Sin is manifest in the variety of ways that hostility and isolation, that segregation and separation shroud our ways of being in this world. Sin is the undercurrent that leads to division and hatred, to oppression and injustice, to broken relationships and broken systems. The brokenness that we observe when we look at our world, at our communities, at our own lives is not unique to our time and place. The hostility that separates us from one another and from God is the very thing that God destroys in Jesus Christ, in whom God establishes a new humanity characterized by peace and holy love. This is the salvation that we are offered; this is the salvation in which we are called to walk.
To remember who we were before Christ also orients us to a particular understanding of salvation. There is no place in our faith tradition for “bootstrap theology,” for notions of salvation that suggest that “God helps those who help themselves,” for a salvation earned or deserved. We do not attain to salvation, we are not entitled to salvation based on the good that we do, on what we achieve, or the decisions that we make.
Salvation, says Paul, is purely gift. It is by grace we have been saved through faith and it is God’s doing, not our own. In God’s utter freedom and steadfast love, God has offered us a way of reconciliation: first with God and second with one another. Salvation is not otherworldly, nor is it individualistic; it is not about heaven or hell. Paul is clear that salvation is cosmic and communal – it is about the renewal of the world, the renewal of humanity, as all things are being gathered up in Christ.
To remember who we were before Christ is to remember the shocking new reality that God creates in Christ. Jesus destroys the dividing wall, literally kills the hostility that separates and segregates, that divides and conquers. Again, it is easy to observe this hostility in the world around us. In our present moment, there are examples upon examples of heated and violent partisanship, of warring encampments across social, political, and religious divides. This division is so prevalent in our world and our society that it is nearly impossible not to be caught up in it all. Even for those of us who profess the primacy of God’s love for all, who seek to be welcoming and inclusive, we still find ourselves differentiating ourselves from those Christians whose faith expressions we find intolerable and distasteful. On the one hand, we are called to denounce versions of Christianity that are antithetical to liberating force of the gospel. But when we do so by adopting the violent mechanisms of division, we resurrect the hostility that God destroys in Jesus.
When we forget who we were before Christ, we forget that peace isn’t something we build, that salvation is something we earn or to which we’re entitled. We forget that we are called to live a life worthy of the hope we have been given. We forget that we are a new creation, called to be holy in love, to be a people in whom God dwells and through whom the vision of God’s good future is demonstrated. We forget that the “church” is not a building, not a place for Christians to come on Sunday mornings.
To remember who we were before Christ is to remember who we are in Christ. It is to remember that we are a reconciled people who exist to be a dwelling place for God and a demonstration of the peace of God. We are a people who have left behind the enmity of division, who are united to God and to one another in God. The peace that characterizes us as people of God is not a spiritual or metaphorical peace but a peace that is wrought in the flesh of Christ and it is enfleshed in us as a demonstration of the power of resurrection. It is a peace that is embodied in our lives, in the relationships we have across difference, in the destruction of the social, political, and religious barriers that separate us from one another and from God.
To remember who we are in Christ is to remember that we are no longer strangers to one another, no longer estranged, but are fellow citizens and members of the household of God. We are members of one another, and together, we are growing into a holy temple. This is God’s work, building us into the beloved community of God that we might be a living, tangible example of peace that transcends understanding, of holiness that is embodied in love, of a new humanity in which difference is not obliterated but is reconciled in unity.
Friends, in our parish context we have recognized this call and articulated it in our mission to be a fearless and welcoming community that provides an inclusive and caring space for reconciliation and transformation. In so many ways, we are living into this mission – we are a community of difference, a multicultural congregation living as a demonstration of the destruction of hostility and the peace of God. And, it is something into which we continue to grow as the world around us continues to change, as we encounter new neighbors and as we discover anew the hostilities that exist in our community. Our mission is both a reality and a challenge. It is a reality to be celebrated as we name the work God has already done in our midst, as we offer our praise and thanksgiving for all that God is doing among us. It is a reality given to us as blessing that compels us to offer our blessing to the God of resurrection and new life and that calls us to name the healing and restoration that Jesus has already worked in us.
And, it is a challenge to us – a challenge to remember who we were before Christ, to remember the history of struggle and estrangement that we have experienced both in our own lives and in the life of our community. It is a challenge to consider our present context, our relationship to the place at which we gather, the community in which we worship, and the neighbors of this place who desperately need to see God’s power of resurrection in a community that embodies a peace that destroys hostility.
Today, let us heed the call to remember – to remember who we were, to remember who and whose we are, and to remember who God is transforming us to be. Amen.