What better way to take a break from writing this week's sermon, than to write about last week's? In all seriousness, this second half of Ephesians 2 is a text that has captured my imagination for quite some time. The theme of Christ's power to unify is perhaps most intense in this section of Ephesians. It's a theme prevalent throughout the entire epistle, and yet here we find imagery that brings life to the rhetoric. Centuries before President Reagan stood in Germany and pleaded with Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall", Paul was pleading with Christians to begin the work of dismantling the barriers that divide us. A brief survey of history shows us that while we acknowledge the past necessity of walls in some instances, we never look back on the time in which they were built as banner periods for human relations. It is true that we marvel at the engineering feat that is the Great Wall of China, but if we were to travel back to the time when it was built, the people would probably react with amazement when told that the wall would become a huge tourist attraction. They didn't build the wall to attract tourist, they built it to keep tourists (in the form of nomadic raiders) out. The Great Wall is no exception, walls are the very symbols of divison. Hadrian's Wall was built to keep the Picts in the northern part of Britain during the Roman occupation. At Fredericksburg, Confederate soldiers stood behind a stone wall and mowed down attacking Federal troops, while at Gettysburg northern troops stood behind a wall and returned the favor by annihilating the southern troops mounting Pickett's charge. And yet the usefulness of walls is not limited to their ability to keep things out, they can also be used to keep things in. The Berlin Wall was constructed to keep people in the eastern bloc, not keep them out. The American poet Robert Frost addresses this topic of walls in his poem "Mending Wall" (an example I am shamelessly stealing from one of my former churches worship committees, which I fully disclose in an effort to give credit where credit is due). There is a line in the poem that I think we as Christians should identify with. Frost states:
"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down."
That something is God. Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians that God takes such offense at walls that he gave the life of His very Son so that all the barriers separating us from God, all the barriers separating us from each other, could be torn down. Just as Jew and Gentile were formerly seperated by the mark in the flesh we know as circumcision, now they both have the common experience of being ransomed by the human flesh of the living God. As the church, do we stop to ask ourselves what it is we are walling in, and what it is we are walling out, when we set to putting up barriers? I feel that if we did, we would find that sometimes our fears drive us to a point of tragic irony, where we feverishly begin to rebuild the wall that Christ tore down, walling in God's love, and walling out those who need it most in the process. Like Frost, may we ask serious questions of ourselves before we put up barriers to the Gospel. In the words of Frost, may we remember that we serve a God who "doesn't love a wall, that wants it down".
Good post, I told you more poetry would expand your overall literary knowledge,(more so than history and biographies).
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