The Wrecking Ball of Grace--November 28, 2023

The Wrecking Ball of Grace--November 28, 2023

"But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 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. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it." [Ephesians 2:13-16]

If it's right to say, "Don't put a period where God put a comma," then maybe it's also true to say, "Don't go rebuilding walls that God has pulled down."  

And to hear the New Testament tell it, in particular passages like this one from Ephesians, God has torn down a whole lot of walls--both the ones between us and God, as well as the ones between us and each other.  In fact, from the perspective of Ephesians, God's act to "bring us near" in Christ has also brought us closer to one another in the very same motion.  The wrecking ball of grace that demolished whatever barriers kept us apart from God has also smashed apart the partitions we humans set up between one another to keep "insiders" apart from "outsiders."  Knocking down one pulls the other down for good.

It's rather like that children's game, "Don't Break the Ice."  Do you remember it? I was just playing it recently with my daughter, and all the old memories came back.  You set these little white plastic cubes (meant to be ice cubes) into a tightly fitting tray suspended a few inches above your table top or floor, and in the center is perched the figure of a sitting person.  Then you each take turns tapping on these cubes, knowing that you'll start knocking some of them onto the ground as you do.  The goal, as the name suggests, is not to be the one to send the plastic person crashing onto the ground--you want to make it so your opponent is the one to make all that ice come crashing down, rather than yourself.  But the trick is that once you start knocking out ice cubes, they come faster and more frequently than you might have planned.  Knocking one block out of place loosens others, and sometimes your strategic tapping over in one corner sends more blocks falling at the same time and brings the whole thing down.  Get the idea?

If you can picture that, then in a way, you've got the letter of Ephesians down, too: the Gospel's claim is that Jesus hasn't just knocked out one little block over here with little to no effect on the rest, but rather that the cross punched a hole in the barrier that removed both the estrangement we had with God and the estrangement we had with each other.  Gentiles and Jews no longer had to see themselves as opponents or enemies.  Nobody has to hate anybody else anymore.  Nobody has to see their welfare as coming at the expense of somebody else's livelihood.  And of course, nobody gets to say, "Me and Jesus are cool, but I can still treat everybody else like they're garbage, because my relationship with God is hermetically sealed off from my relationships with everybody else."  Not according to Ephesians, it isn't--God used the cross and resurrection of Jesus to pull both of those walls down like a hammer knocking out ice cubes in the kids' game.  God "put to death" the hostility between us!  What an image!  It's not that God executes the wicked, sinful outsider bad-people, but that God executes the hostility that held us apart from each other in the first place!  God ends the conflict, both the divine-human one and the ones fracturing us into a million little factions against each other! So if the boundary between me and God is forever taken down and overcome by God's love, then the boundary between me and the groups I've treated as "less than" or "unworthy" or "unacceptable" is also just as permanently dismantled.  If God's love for me (and each of us) is never-ending, then the love that pulls us together with one another, even across old enmities and dividing lines, is also never-ending.  It's the same love--and it's all from God.

Taking that seriously is going to mean a big shift in our lives, to be honest.  We are more comfortable with religion that siloes our communion with God away from our conflicts with each other.  My goodness, for how many centuries in the supposedly "Christian" churches of America did White-led congregations sing about being "washed in the blood of Jesus" while keeping out Black folks from their pews, not to mention their businesses, schools, neighborhoods, and communities?  How often do we still imagine that Sunday mornings get me right with God while leaving me free to exclude and overlook people I've told myself are "less than me" because they are different from me? We still need to hear this word from Ephesians that if God's love for me is never-ending and not open to debate, then the same love which pulls me toward all others is equally unending and indisputable.  If the wall that separated me from God has been pulled down, then so has the wall I put up between me the ones I deem as "other," too.  They've both been razed to the ground permanently by the great divine bulldozer operator, Jesus.

And it means, too, that we who like to talk about being assured of God's love (which is a good and right thing to talk about) are also going to have to look at what ways we still might be trying to leave up the walls between us and other people--or to build them all over again after God has gone to the trouble of knocking them down.  It's worth asking: for all the ways we might say God's love is for everybody, how might our actions be silently adding, "But not for you!"  For all the ways we talk about God's unconditional, unfailing love for us, how are we still trying to stack bricks into barriers to keep back love between us and other people?  Because if the letter to the Ephesians is right, then both are meant to be unending--the love that pulls us to God is the love that brings us into relationship with the ones we treated as "other" before.  And Jesus has come to knock all those partitions down for good.

What if we lived like it were true?

Lord Jesus, we do believe that your love for us is unending and unlimited; help us to come to grips with the way that same love crosses boundaries and removes barriers between us.