The Divine Wrecking Ball

The Divine Wrecking Ball—November 29, 2017

“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.” [Ephesians 2:14]

The people who run the garbage trucks on our street want me to separate my plastics from my metal cans into separate bins for recycling.  That’s probably a good idea to improve efficiency for their employees.

The makers of my washing machine want me to separate dark colored clothes from white undershirts and tube socks when I’m doing laundry.  That’s probably a good idea, too, in order to avoid turning all my socks pink on account of one rogue red pair of sweatpants.

The same thinking is everywhere: the staff at the library insist that it is more orderly to keep non-fiction books in one section, kept separate from the novels and the children’s books in other areas.  The little dividers in my kitchen utensil drawer are designed to keep my spoons from touching my forks.  The algorithms on Facebook, too, all have figured out that everybody can live in a pleasantly blissful ignorance if people are kept in their own echo chambers of thought, getting only articles, “news”, and posts from people who will reinforce what they already think.  Just all makes things so much… simpler… neater… less messy… that way.

And then there is Christ.

In a world full of seemingly sensible, purposefully placed barriers, Christ is the wrecking ball of God.  The messy messiah.  The One who fulfills his divinely ordained task by taking all of our neat and orderly separate piles and shuffling them all together like a deck of cards.  And this, at least according to what we call the book of Ephesians, is God’s surprising kind of peace.  Jesus does not make peace by putting walls between us and cutting us off from one another, but by smashing down the wall and saying, “My love makes you all belong.  You’re part of this family, and you are blessedly stuck with each other!” 

Parents may well separate their arguing children from one another for a while, by sending them to their own rooms, but that’s not peace.  That’s at best a cease-fire, and it is neither a long-term strategy nor a real solution.  It just lets brother and sister keep fuming at each other from a distance.  Believe me—the stewing bitterness keeps on simmering, and sometimes the shouting keeps on going with a hallway between them.  Separation isn’t peace—it is sometimes the least-worst option, if it is what keeps two warring siblings, or two warring sides, cooled down enough to think rationally.  But separation is not peace. Genuine peace comes when I am able to embrace the ones I use to feel hostility toward, and they embrace me honestly, too.

That means peace is decidedly messy.  The breaking down of walls always is.

But it might just take us aback to consider that this is precisely what the book of Ephesians is daring to say about Christ.  Christ is messy.  Christ has broken down the wall that kept humanity separated into orderly piles.  Christ brings this kind of peace… and this is what God intended all along in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  

In the first century, the division in mind was the separation between “Jew” and “Gentile,” within the Christian community, categories which brought with them all sorts of differences in language, culture, background, and original religion.  The early church truly wrestled with the question of whether one had to become Jewish first in order to belong to the body of Christ—did you have to keep kosher, have your sons circumcised, and follow all of the other instructions of the Torah, or could you keep your old customs, diet, language, and culture and be a Christian?

I’ll be honest with you here—it would have been a lot less messy if the answer had just been, “Yes, you have to keep all of those regulations and leave behind the old culture if you want to be a Christian.” It would have kept things uniform, regular, orderly, and streamlined.  No exceptions, no variation, no different categories—just everybody having to learn the same religious customs, speak the same religious language, and follow the same daily regimen.  There would only have been one pile—but it would have been homogenous… and therefore, nice and tidy still.  Instead, Ephesians says, God did the messy thing. Christ broke down the barrier that separated Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, and Christ allowed them to both coexist, and to stay in the same one collective pile.  That meant—inevitably—the Christian church has had to live, from the beginning, with the messier arrangement of people who speak different languages, wear their hair in different styles, eat different foods, come from different countries, have different complexions and shades of color in their skin, and even think differently on big questions.  And it means that—by God’s design and intention—God deliberately chose not to avoid all of that mess, but rather to break the old barriers down.

This is how God does things. Our history as human beings is marked by time after time of separating in the name of neatness—keeping “white” water fountains away from “colored” water fountains… keeping “undesirables” out of “our nice neighborhoods”… keeping my mind from ever having to digest a piece of information it didn’t already agree with.  But God has never been fooled into thinking that you could have “separate but equal” or even “separate but peaceable.”  Peace does not come from putting spoons in a separate compartment from forks.  Real peace comes when we are brought face to face with “the other”—as messy as that makes things—and learning truly to listen to one another, knowing that God already says we all belong because of Christ.

I wonder—what differences would it make in this day for you, to consider the way God has chosen to make peace, versus the way we tend to settle for “order” and “neatness”?  What barriers around you might need a wrecking ball?  What ways have we continued to keep ourselves separated when God has put us all in the same pile?

What could be different… starting today?