How to Tear Down a Wall

First Presbyterian, Fort Scott, KS                                                           

Ephesians 2:11-22  

Psalm 118:19-29

There’s a wall in our house I want to tear down.  But I haven’t done it.  Because I DO know that you shouldn’t move immediately from the thought – “Maybe we should tear that wall down” – to actually swinging a sledge hammer into it.

We love our house.  It’s an old house.  And the kitchen is fine, but it’s a little tight. There’s a wall dividing the kitchen from the dining room.  In the kitchen you feel kind of “walled off” from the rest of the house.  And everything would work better if we tore out that wall and made it open between our kitchen and our dining room.

Now tearing down a wall might not sound complex.  But I’m betting that it is.  I’m betting that tearing that wall down is not only going to take lots of energy and hammer swinging.  I’m betting it’s also going to take some wisdom and skill.

It would be good to know whether the entire second story of our house is resting on that wall.  It would also be good to know whether there are pipes and wires running through that wall.  And it would be good to know what to do after the destruction phase.  After all, we don’t want to end up with a pile of rubble in the middle of the floor. 

The passage we read in Ephesians alerts our attention to the walls that exist in our own lives.  There are walls that block us off from God.  And there are walls that divide us from each other. 

In the opening prayer of Ephesians we learn that God has a plan for the world, and that we’re part of it.  The “mystery” long hidden, but now made known in Jesus Christ, is that God is bringing all things in heaven and on earth into unity in Jesus Christ.  And God had chosen us to help make that plan visible and believable.

Now the wall between our kitchen and dining room really doesn’t matter.  But there are walls or barriers in our lives that do.  If you feel walled off from God, cut off from God’s presence, or far away from God, that’s a problem.

If there are negative feelings that are like a wall between you and others, that’s a problem.

But you and I, and everyone else, have been invited into God’s plan to tear down walls.  When Jesus Christ takes on flesh and lives an ordinary human life like ours, he brings God close to us.  When he dies bearing our sins, he changes us from God’s enemies into God’s friends.  He brings us back from our lonely wanderings and makes us citizens of this new kingdom.  He rescues us from our loneliness and sets us in a congregation with friends.

The experience of faith in God feels like getting rid of a wall dividing us from God.  It feels like having a kind of open access to God you didn’t have before.

Psalm 118 enacts a lively scene familiar to any Jewish person.  This is a joyous, singing prayer voiced when entering the Jewish Temple.  The psalmist is going with the assembly through the Temple gates and into the courts and up to the altar, to make sacrifices in the presence of God.

There is nothing wrong with Psalm 118.  The worshiper is doing exactly what she or he should be doing.  Singing songs of praise to God upon entering the holy Temple in Jerusalem where God was pleased to dwell.

There’s just one problem.  The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem excludes everyone who is not Jewish. And in the Temple there was a “wall” that separated the outer courts where non-Jews and women could gather, from the inner areas where God’s presence dwells.

I hope you noticed that our text today begins with a reflection on circumcision.  If you were drowsing, that should have startled you.  God commanded Abraham to have all Jewish males circumcised as a sign of belonging to God’s people Israel. 

Most males are circumcised, and it’s done by nurses in a hospital with what looks to me like a little cigar cutter.  But what is for us a normal medical procedure just after birth is an ancient marker of Jewish identity.  It was a rite of initiation that ritually marked your body as belonging to Israel.

“Circumcision” was a kind of wall or boundary line.  It separated Jews from Gentiles.  But it also separated Jewish males from females in a hierarchy of importance. 

But the walls that divide Jews from non-Jews and men from women have been done away with for all of us.  And it happens in the life of Jesus Christ, and in our baptism into his resurrected life.  The practice of baptism is our new rite of initiation, and it no long alienates or excludes.  Now all persons are welcomed into God’s new family, and women alongside men.

This is God’s plan, worked out in the life of Jesus Christ and now enveloping our lives as well.  Now all people have access to God through the same Spirit.

I said last week that God has a plan and you’re part of it.  But it’s not enough to hear this and nod in agreement.  Because God’s plan is a congregation hard at work, tearing down dividing walls.  And for this to become a visible reality, God’s peace will have to work its way down into our hearts.

Ephesians says that Jesus Christ has come into our midst to tear down these dividing walls.

“For he himself is our peace, who has . . . destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14).

Now I want you to call to mind the face of someone you don’t like.  It can’t be someone like Tiger Woods or Lady Gaga or a national politician you don’t like.  It has to be someone who orbits in your ordinary life.  It might be someone in this congregation.  Or someone in your family.  Or someone at work.  (If you have a spouse, it’s probably them.)

There will be a sliding scale of negative emotions, maybe for some of you this is just a mild dislike – it’s a person you don’t get along with, you have little in common, you fear having to make small talk.  Or, at the other end of the scale, maybe this is a person you secretly hate.

Maybe they tend to ignore or slight or disrespect you.  Maybe they have done something to hurt you in the past and never acknowledged it.  Maybe they said something to you or to others that hurt or angered you.  Maybe you do not like their personality, their way of dealing with you and others.  Maybe you don’t trust them, and suspect them of being dangerous to you and others.  Maybe they’ve disappointed you.  Maybe they have a different agenda and vision than you do, and so they feel like a competitor.  Or maybe there are negative feelings but you don’t even fully know why they’re there or how they got there.

You might be thinking, why do we have to bother with this?  I came to church for an uplifting experience and a little encouragement.  I wanted to have a positive experience today, and now you’ve got me thinking about this person I don’t like.

I’m asking you to take this person-you-don’t-like into your heart as part of the work that God has given you to do this week.  I’m not asking you to go to lunch with them.  I’m not asking you to try to become best friends.  I’m asking you to try to get yourself in a place where you want what’s best for them.  I’m asking you to begin praying for God’s blessings on them in a way that will require you to open and soften your heart towards them. 

There were basically two different kinds of people in the earliest churches.  There were Jewish people and non-Jewish people.  They were all Christians.  They had all signed up to follow Jesus Christ.  But they had different backgrounds.  They had different experiences, and values, and family histories.  And their differences divided them, and functioned like walls of hostility.

And here we are – all of us are either followers of Jesus Christ, or we’re here because we’re putting our toes in the water, we’re checking this out, to see if it’s a way of life we want to pursue.  And yet we’re all very different in our backgrounds.  And these differences are some of the potential walls that divide us.

1.     we’re different ages

2.     men and women

3.     different personality types

4.     different levels of education

5.     different political opinions

6.     different kinds of work

7.     some have plenty, some barely getting by

8.     powerful/influential and marginal

9.     visible gifts and less visible gifts

10. “successful” and not

11. happy and grieving

Remember, God’s plan is to bring everything in heaven and on earth into unity in Jesus Christ.  And that plan is beginning to get worked out in us, the church.  So this  church is to be a place where people who used to not get along, now get along.

Maybe it would be helpful to reflect on how you got here.  Maybe you’re new, like me.  Or maybe you’ve been here ten years.  Or sixty.  My question is the same:  Who made room for you?  Who welcomed you?  Who made you feel wanted and welcome here in this place?  It’s important for all of us to think about that a little bit.  We’re here because we want our lives connected to God’s life.  And we want to be connected to others in friendship as we live this life of faith.

What if the congregation had said to us, “Well, some of us are quite close to God and we’re not sure you’re the right kind of material”?  Or what if someone pulled us to the side and said, “You know, I don’t think you’re the kind of person who’s going to fit in well with the rest of us.  Let me point you down the street to a different place where I think you’ll feel more at home”?

People will come here wanting to find the presence of God.  They will want access to God – to feel God’s presence, to pray to God in times of need.  And God’s plan is that we would welcome them gladly into our midst.

This is good news that will change our lives and free us to live out God’s calling for us.

“His [Jesus Christ’s] purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two [Jew and non-Jew], thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Eph. 2:15-16).

This living Christ is present in each of us to “put to death” our hostility.  The problem is, of course, that we keep feeding our hostility towards others.  And so this work of the Spirit can sometimes feel agonizingly slow.  But we cannot look away from our hostility, acting as if there’s something more important to be doing.  According to Ephesians, inviting God’s peace into our hearts IS the point.

In Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, Jayber is a small town barber in Port William, Kentucky.  Through the course of his life, Jayber finds himself dealing with two enemies -- Cecilia Overhold and Troy Chatham.

Cecilia lived her whole life looking down on everyone else in that little town.  She thought she was too good for it.  She wanted to be somewhere more important, with better friends.

Troy was a small time farmer who was ashamed of his work.  And so he set out to become someone important.  He bought farm after farm and leveraged himself to the eyeballs so that he could look successful to his neighbors.

In the end, things go badly for both Cecilia and Troy.  Cecilia’s children eventually took her to Los Angeles (she did get somewhere important) to put her in a nursing home, where she died alone and angry.   Things go bad for Troy, and he loses all he has and harms his family and his community.

The novel ends with a parable that Jayber entitles, “The Man in the Well.”  He imagines a city dweller who has taken a vacation day to hunt alone in the farmland around Port William.  By chance he steps on the rotten boards covering one of the many deep wells and falls to the bottom.

How does this story end?  Does he save himself?  Is he athletic enough, maybe, to get his boots off and climb out, clawing with fingers and toes into the grudging holds between the rocks of the wall?  Does he climb up and fall back?  Does somebody, in fact, for a wonder, chance to pass nearby and hear him?  Does he despair, give up, and drown?  Does he, despairing, pray finally the first true prayer of his life?

Listen. . . . A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost.  He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. . . . He believes that . . . the man like Troy whose work has come to nothing [is not lost], nor is the old woman like Cecilia forsaken in a nursing home in California.  He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray from the cross, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.  (356-7).

Jayber Crow had real enemies.  These were people who made his life a living hell.  Every time he saw them, his blood boiled.  And yet, he had done the work of prayer in his own heart that enabled him to wish for a good end for them.  He did not want them lost forever, destroyed and beaten.  He understood himself as rescued from a pit, and he wanted God to rescue his enemies as well.

According to Ephesians, church is nothing but a life-long prayer for God to remove the hostility in our hearts. 

Can I give you a little practical advice on how to begin praying?  Start by speaking to God with as much honesty as you can muster.  It will sound irreverent at first.  But it is, as far as I know, the only way to begin prayerfully working on our hearts.

It might need to begin like this.

“Lord, I hate so and so.  He tells dumb stories at work and his breath stinks.”

“Lord, I hate so and so.  Every time I share something she one-ups me, stealing the spotlight.”

“Lord, I hate so and so.  When we were in 7^th grade she thought she was better than me.”

“Lord, I hate so and so.  He criticizes me behind my back and acts polite to my face.”

(Of course, in a group our size, it’s also likely that there are people here who have been abused – emotionally, physically, or sexually.  And your route to recovery might also involve the help of professional counselors or therapists.)

And then it might continue with an admission of our need for help:

“Lord, what do you want me to do with this hostility and anger?  It’s sitting here on my chest like a ton of bricks.  I can’t budge it.  I am afraid of letting it go and giving it up.  Because it has become a part of who I am.  But I am also afraid of what it will do to me if I hang on to it.”

“Lord, help me to experience the peace-making love of Jesus Christ down in the middle of who I am, down in my heart where I have to deal with people whom it is hard for me to love.”

That kind of honest praying is the work of the Spirit in us.  And as we learn to pray like that, we begin to get a sense for the work God is doing in us.  Jesus Christ is teaching us how to tear down walls, so that he can build us together into a dwelling place for God’s Spirit.