No Longer Strangers

 "No Longer Strangers"

Proper 11 (16) 

Ephesians 2:11–22

July 21, 2024

Burnt Hills United Methodist Church

Video from Livestream (starts at 20:30)

You Nations must not forget that before you knew the Chosen One you were not natural-born members of the tribes of Wrestles with Creator. You were called “the outsiders” by the ones who called themselves “the insiders.” But remember, the sign that marks them as insiders is cut into their flesh with human hands.

You Outside Nations did not share in the promises or the peace treaty that the Great Spirit made with those tribes. You were out from under their special care and protection—unaware of and apart from the Chosen One. You shared no common hope and were outside the help Creator gave to them in this world.

But no more! Even though you Outside Nations were far away, you have now been made close by the lifeblood offered by Creator Sets Free, the Chosen One. He is our great peace, who has brought the people of all Nations together with the tribes of Wrestles with Creator, making them into one new people by removing the barrier that separated us. 

In his own human body he removed the hostility between us when he did away with the rules and requirements of our tribal law that separated us. This is the way he recreates people—making one new humanity out of the two. This brings us all together on the path of peace.

Even though we behaved like enemies, we are now friends with the Great Spirit and with one another. When Creator Sets Free died on the cross, those things that made us enemies died with him. We are now joined together as one people in one body. He brought this good story of peace and harmony to people who were far away from him and to people who were close to him. Because of him we both have a clear path, through one Spirit, to the Father from above.

Now we are all his holy people and members of one new nation. No one is on the outside of this great family that our Father is creating. We are all related to one another and initiated into Creator’s lodge that is built together with wooden poles—the message bearers and prophets of old. Creator Sets Free is the main pole binding us together, like branches being weaved into his sacred lodge. Joined together in this way, we become a dwelling place for his Spirit.

—Small Man to the Sacred Families in the Village of Desire, Chapter 2, Verses 11 through 22; First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament 

Now we are all his holy people and members of one new Nation. No one is on the outside of this great family that our Father is creating.

How much does a polar bear weigh?

Enough to break the ice.

Oh, icebreakers. Having spent the past five years working with college students, these ancient rituals have been a steady fixture of my professional life. Every semester, like clockwork, professors and administrators would dust them off and our students would spend the first solid week of their time at school answering the same rotation of questions:

Hi, my name is Ian. My pronouns are he/him/his. My major is such and such and I’m in this grade and my favorite ice cream would have to be from this small local frozen custard shop that we had back home in Rochester—it’s called Abbott’s, and their chocolate almond frozen custard is just the perfect blend of creamy and sweet and salty and crunchy and yeah if you’re ever in Rochester, you’ll have to give it a try!

If I had a nickel for every time I had to tell a group of strangers what my favorite ice cream flavor was during my time at SU, I could buy a lot of Abbott’s. 

And, I’ll confess here that, in spite of the fact that I always hated coming up with some fun fact about myself—things like my first job was as a little league umpire or I’ve been to 18 countries or I almost destroyed the entire United Methodist denomination back in 2016 with one vote—I did subject my own students to these silly questions on day one of the classes that I taught. 

My go-to ice breaker question would be “if you could have any superpower, what would it be?” Because, I confess, I’m a bit of a superhero junkie. For as long as I can remember, some of my favorite movies have been superhero movies. Ask me what my favorite movie is, and my answer will always be 2008’s Iron Man. And I still remember being twelve years old, coming out of Sam Rami’s Spider-Man 2 and pretending to be Spider-Man for weeks.

Unfortunately for Jo, I don’t know that I ever really outgrew pretending to be Spider-Man.

But when we make a conscious effort to peel back the layers on these kinds of icebreaker questions, I do believe that they have the potential to reveal deeper truths about participants in a new group setting, things like the source of some of our cherished values and behaviors. Take my answer to that ice cream question above. 

My favorite ice cream isn’t just chocolate almond frozen custard. It’s chocolate almond frozen custard from a very particular place in a very particular time in my life. It’s chocolate almond frozen custard from a tiny little shop that is exactly one point zero miles from my childhood home. A shop that has no interior; you can only walk up and order and eat outside. A shop that didn’t have a real closing time except for when the customers stopped lining up on warm summer evenings. A place we would go to after soccer or baseball games, win or lose, because our triumph made it taste sweeter and it took the edge off the sting of defeat. And every time I visit home during the summer (because, oh yeah, my Abbott’s is only open from like April to November), you better believe I’m making a stop at Abbott’s for chocolate almond frozen custard in a waffle cone with chocolate sprinkles.

But that’s just the thing, we have to make the choice to peel back the layers on these kinds of questions and the answers we provide. We miss out on so much when we just take them on their surface.

So let’s go back to that super power question. “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” Yeah, I like to use it because of the whole “I like superheroes” thing, but also, what is this question really asking? 

It’s not “who’s your favorite superhero?” 

It’s not “what’s your favorite superhero movie?” 

It’s asking: “hey, wave a magic wand and you, yourself, can have any superpower you want. What are you choosing?”

I believe that the answer to that question has the power to tell us more about some of our anxieties and insecurities—what we might feel lacking within ourselves—or our own sense of vocation and calling itself—that thing, to quote Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon, which is the work that our soul must have. Because my answer to that question is not “I want the powers of a spider”, nor is it “I want a suit of armor that I can use to fly around”. No, my answer to that question oscillates between the ability to manipulate the flow of time—the ability to speed time up when bored and slow time down when I want a moment to last—and the power set of Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy—the ability to feel what others are feeling and heal the emotional state of others with a simple touch. 

I want the ability to manipulate the flow of time. Because man, it would certainly be nice to make the 9 minutes that elapses when I hit the snooze button actually feel like another few REM cycles sometimes. And I want super empathic abilities. Because there are a lot of hurt people who are hurting people and being able to help others work through their pain and carry those stories is something that calls to me.

I want to heal what’s been hurting, but there’s not enough time in the day to heal all the hurt.

They are my sense of calling, and the obstacle to fulfilling that call.

Some of the earliest Christians struggled with this too.

Now we are all his holy people and members of one new Nation. No one is on the outside of this great family that our Father is creating.

For as much as we might like to believe in some mythic age when all the Church was of one mind on everything, when we even just lightly scratch the surface—or, start to peel back the layers—of our New Testament scriptures, we quickly discover that, if such an age ever existed, it was really, really short lived. It was a real mess, and it was the source of some of these earliest Christians’ anxieties.

So, what anxieties do you think we’ll find when we peel back the layers of our text from Ephesians this morning? What obstacles do you think we’ll discover that were a hindrance to this community living out its calling?

Right off the bat, we see a clear division within the assembly. The First Nations Version that I read earlier identifies the division as being between “the insiders” and “the outsiders” and “the insiders” can be identified with a mark “cut into their flesh by human hands”. It’s the division that plagued the early Church of Jesus Christ as soon as it started to spread beyond its Jewish origins in a backwater province of the Roman Empire: the division between the Jewish Christians—that is, the followers of Christ who were ethnically and culturally Jewish—and the Gentile Christians—every other Christian. That is to say, was this Jesus Movement going to be another sect of Judaism, meaning its adherents would be expected to follow Jewish laws and customs? That mark “cut into their flesh by human hands” was a big deal, after all—it was the outward and visible sign of the ancient covenant made between God and Abraham. Now that Gentiles were becoming Christians, would they be expected to go through that procedure?

So yeah, there were divisions within the assembly. That, in and of itself is a clear anxiety that we can see in the text. But also, look at the way verb tense is used throughout this text. 

You have now been made close.

He is our great peace, who has brought the peoples of all Nations together.

He removed the hostility between us.

Even though we behaved like enemies, we are now friends with the Great Spirit and with one another.

We are now joined together.

Now we are all his holy people and members of one new Nation. No one is on the outside of this great family that our Father is creating.

The verb tenses shine a light on another anxiety that this community was likely also struggling with: the problem of waiting. In the immediate years and decades following Christ’s resurrection and ascension, the dominant understanding was that Christ would be coming back literally any day now. Like, this Tuesday any day now. And, when Christ returned, he would complete the work he started. When Christ returned, then he would reconcile all of creation back unto himself. Then he would erase all division and strife.  But as the years went on and on and next Tuesdays came and went without Christ’s return, the divisions and strife and conflict within this new movement persisted. How could the Church continue to endure if Christ didn’t come back and finish the job?

The author is, over and over again, telling us that the work has already been completed. It’s done. It’s finished. All has been reconciled. The strife is over, the battle won, to quote that great Easter hymn,

This text clearly tells us what the problem was: there are divisions in this assembly. People are not treating each other equally. 

When we peel back the layers of the text, we are clued-in to the problem behind the problem: why hasn’t Christ come back yet to finish what he started?

And this text offers the clear solution to both problems: When Creator Sets Free died on the cross, those things that made us enemies died with him. We are now joined together as one people in one body.

Christ, through his suffering, death, and resurrection, has already broken down the walls that divide you.

But the text also takes us one step further, in a sort of “blink and you miss it” kind of way that I think might be especially important for this community, this Burnt Hills United Methodist Church community, to hear this morning.

As I was preparing to arrive here at Burnt Hills, Pastor Amy was telling me the story of our rainbow rock. How we had this rock that was hand-painted by one of our members. How this rock had another outward and visible sign of an ancient covenant God made with God’s people on it, a rainbow. How that rock sat right outside our office entrance, showing to all who came through those doors that, no matter what they had been told by churches in the past, no matter who or how they loved, they were welcome to bring their full, authentic selves here. That they didn’t have to hide or cover up a part of what made them who they were. That, in this church, their relationships would be celebrated and proclaimed to be good and holy. And how that rock was recently smashed and broken into three pieces.

We don’t know who our rock-breaking friend is. We don’t know what motivated them. We don’t even know if it was a premeditated act or if it was random.

But here is what we do know.

Our resolve to love and include all of our LGBTQIA+ neighbors is steadfast. Our resolve is steadfast, not in spite of the Word of God, but because of the Word of God. Because we believe in a God who is love, and that love knows no bounds.

And so, if you’ve been paying attention to us on Facebook this week, you’ll know that our rainbow rock has been repaired, and it is back where it was, though, slightly different. Because, in what we can only understand as a Holy Spirit-inspired moment, Pastor Amy found a local artisan who deals in the art of kintsugi—a Japanese medium of repairing shattered pottery with golden lacquer not to hide the brokenness, but to highlight it. To take the very thing that made the piece broken and use that to make it beautiful.

Did Christ already break down the walls that divided that first century Christian community well-before that first century Christian community formed? Yes. Absolutely, 100% yes.

And.

Did that reverse the circumcision of the circumcised? Did that circumcise the uncircumcised? 

No.

Though the reconciling work had already been done by Christ, the physical, outward and visible signs that had divided them remained.

Put another way, though their division was erased, their diversity remained.

This text is telling us that Christ united all of creation—you and me and me and you and everyone within these walls and outside of these walls, young and old and man and woman and everyone beyond and in between the binary—it’s done. Finished. We can’t undo what has been done. Christ united all of creation together and reconciled all of creation unto himself, but in so doing, did not make us uniform.

Because, friends, though Christ has already saved us and saved this world, this world still bears the scars of our brokenness. It’s so easy to retreat into our silos and our echo chambers and take comfort in uniformity. And there are those who would seek to use our diversity as a wedge to drive us apart from one another to hold onto their own power, their own status, their own wealth. There are those who would seek to erase all diversity to make everyone look like them and talk like them and act like them and think like them and love like them, but that is not of Christ. Christ breaks down the walls that divide us and keep us apart, and blesses us with the richness of all the diversity that exists within creation.

We can wait for the world to be saved. We can wait for someone else to come along and save us. Or. We can live into and proclaim the truth that is the core of our Christian faith. In more ways than one, we are no longer strangers. Sure, you now know my favorite ice cream flavor and the superpowers I would like to have. But we ceased being strangers long before I stepped into this pulpit or was given a key to this church or was assigned here to be your associate pastor by our Bishop. Christ did that hard work of reconciling us long, long ago. Christ has already done the hard part. Christ has already saved us. We just have to live like it.

Now we are all his holy people and members of one new Nation. No one is on the outside of this great family that our Father is creating.

May it be so. 

Amen.