Proper 11B, July 22 2012
Rev. Kate Ekrem
"For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups
into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between
us.” That’s from our letter to the Ephesians this morning. And our Gospel says
Jesus had compassion on the crowd because they were like sheep without a
shepherd.
I used to tell a story about the Good Shepherd
to Sunday school children using felt, I still have the felt pieces in my
office. There is felt green pasture and
felt still water and also a felt sheepfold, brown strips of felt. Part of the
story is to set them up like a fence or wall around the sheep, and to show that
the sheepfold has an inside, and an outside, and a DOOR, and then you show how
the door can be opened.
The church has walls. But Jesus
has broken down a wall
in today’s reading. The writer of Ephesians is talking
exactly about who is inside the sheepfold and who is outside. He’s reminding
church members that they were once outside the church, the recipients of this
letter are Gentile Christians, those who converted from other religious and who
were welcomed into the church by the Jewish Christians who founded it. So he’s
saying to them, you used to be outsiders, but you were welcomed into
this church.
Do you feel like an insider or an outsider in your own
church community, or in your town or workplace? I think sometimes we all feel a
little like outsiders, a little like we’re on the fringe or nobody knows us
that well.! My last parish went through a period of growth, and during that
time I remember a newer member said to me that they thought our parish wasn’t
all that friendly. I asked him why and he said, I’ve only been here a month and
the person sitting next to me today didn’t greet me during the Passing of the
Peace. I realized the person he had been sitting next to was a first-time
visitor, even newer than them! He laughed and said he’d be sure to greet the
newcomer next week, since now he was an old-timer!
“Remember that at one time you were aliens from the
commonwealth of Christ” the scripture reminds us this morning. We were all
outsiders once. This reading says, Jesus came to make one new humanity instead
of two. One new humanity. That’s close to the heart of the Gospel.
Reconciliation and unity between all people. Breaking down the dividing walls
between us.
I’m excited because it seems like more than ever in the life
of our church since I became a priest, there is a renewed emphasis on our call
to be the reconciling love of God in the world. In part it’s because so many of
the mainline denominations had their once every three or four year convention
this year, and all came out of that with a determination to leave behind the
debates of the past and focus again on our core faith. Some are even calling it
Mainline Summer – a little bit of a play on Arab Spring, I think, which is a
bit over the top, no one is actually getting free from murderous dictators, but I think people try to get at the idea that
something new is happening, a mood is coalescing that we’re ever so slowly
changing direction, or maybe better to say doing some course correction. Do you know this year Episcopal Church been
in decline for 50 years. 50 years of membership numbers going down. So people are
gathering around the idea that we’re done with the way things have been, with
our self-conscious apologetic stances on things, we’re going to try something
new. One clergyperson I know declared, I’m not going to take it anymore, I’m
tired of watching my words so I don’t offend anyone, I’m going to start
mentioning Jesus in church!
The most important thing at GC was not that we passed rites
for same-sex blessings. It is important that we did it, it’s been coming for
some time now. But that’s the old conversation, about who’s in and who’s out of
the sheepfold. Somehow it always seems to be the only thing the media cares
about, I guess anything even tangentially related to sex sells papers, but it
wasn’t where the energy was.
If anything important happened at GC, which is debatable,
(besides our youth representative Sarah giving a really great speech!) it was
that a resolution to re-structure our national church was passed. The next time
GC meets, it may not have the House of Bishops and House of Deputies as it has
for the last 200 years, we may not have the same kind of Presiding Bishop role
that we do now, we’re going to get lean and mean (but without the mean part, of
course).
What does this mean for our parish? Most of these ideas have
bubbled up from parishes like ours. It’s
not that we don’t care about who is in and who is out of the sheepfold, but
we’re a little beyond needing to discuss it to death, Jesus loves everybody,
can we just take it as read and move on.
We care about boys in Honduras who can’t afford socks or blue jeans, we
care about children starving to death right here in Boston served by the GrowClinic, we care about people in Lawrence having a roof over their heads, we
care about the sick and homebound of our community feeling cared for and being healed,
we care about our children growing up with lasting values and meaning and love
in their lives, we care about coming together in God’s presence each week to
remind ourselves who we are. We care about Jesus. And we care about these
things because we believe they are what Jesus cared for.
So perhaps this mainline summer means maybe we also can get
lean and mean, think about what’s our equivalent of too many bishops and too
many delegates, we can stop talking about what’s not worth arguing about, and focus
in on what Jesus is asking us to do.
Perhaps it means we also can keep looking for ways to open the sheepfold
door, maybe think about what we look like to those outside our walls, and see
ourselves through their eyes for a moment.
Because bringing people together from diverse walks of life
and viewpoints, and together doing God’s work and sing God’s praise, is a big
part of what we’re about. And
every time we do that just a little bit, every time we welcome someone
into this sheepfold who is not like us, what a witness that is to a world
divided by race, by ethnicity, by religion, by nationality, and so many other
things.
But before we start patting ourselves on the back,
like maybe those Gentile Christians in Ephesus were, we should remember that we
aren’t really the ones doing it, we’re not pulling down the dividing wall.
Jesus is. And only Jesus can. Because what we have in common – our love and
care for each other, our interest in mission and what’s going on around the
world – all comes out of our relationship with Jesus. That’s where the unity
is. To be a Christian is to be about Christ. Following Jesus defines who we are
and what we do. And when we do that, the dividing walls do come tumbling down
because those human differences just aren’t important anymore.*
We were all outsiders once. Our relationship with God is not
a right, it’s a gift. We are included in
the saving work of God only by the grace of Jesus. ** There is the inside of
the sheepfold, and the outside, and there’s a door. Which is open to us and to
everyone else. Jesus has torn down the dividing walls. Knowing that truth, and
living by it, is such a gift we can give to ourselves and to the world. “So
then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints
and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the
apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
** “We Are Aliens” by William H. Lamar. IV in Christian Century
*William Willamon, “Christ the Cornerstone”
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