Proclaiming Peace

Ephesians 2:14-22

For World Communion Sunday

“For Christ 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” (Eph. 2:14).

Both groups into one.  The groups Paul has in mind are Gentiles and Jews. The Gentile question preoccupied the early church.  Can Gentiles follow Christ?  Or, must Gentiles first become Jews, that is follow the Jewish Law, to follow Christ?  Jesus was Jewish after all, and he certainly wasn’t Christian. Was Jesus sent only for Jews or did God have the entire world in mind?  Are Jewish followers of Christ bound to Jewish Law? 

These questions permeate Paul’s writings, the debates over these questions were intense and fierce.  Paul’s answer is clear, especially here in Ephesians.  Paul writes—and pay close attention to what he’s proposing—Christ “has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances”— toward what end? —“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” (Eph. 2:15).

This is a remarkable window into Paul’s grace-filled imagination.  He understands God to be doing a new thing in and through Christ, “to create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.”  A new humanity in place of the two, making peace.  At the risk of oversimplification, what we have here is a summary of Christ’s ministry and a beautiful description what happens when we are in Christ.  It’s an arresting image:  Christ at work breaking down walls of division to form something new.  You see, Christ is always at work breaking down walls of division, if we let him. Between God and humanity; between ourselves and God; between ourselves and others.  And, Christ’s people are continually being formed into something new, as disparate groups of people, not only two but three or four and more, are forged into a new humanity, with a new identity rooted, not in an ideology or group or ethnicity or even nationality, but in Christ.

“So [Christ] came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:17).  Not either-or, both-and. This is the way of Christ. This is the way of Christ’s people.  This is how you can identify the work of Christ today, wherever this pattern is enfleshed in the world. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Mt. 5:9).

And, so Paul, being a practical pastor-theologian, invited Christ’s people to re-imagine themselves. He gave them a new vision. “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. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (Eph. 2:19). What an image.

In several weeks, we’ll commemorate the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation. When we think of Martin Luther (1483-1546), we think of passages from Romans, such as "the just shall live by faith" (Rom. 1:17). However, I was struck by a comment made by Susan Jaeger, several weeks ago our adult education class.  She cited N. T. Wright’s observation that the history of the church since the Reformation would have been very different had Luther, instead of focusing on Romans, turned to Ephesians with its image of Christ as our peace, tearing down dividing walls. If only.

In place of walls and fences and divisions, Christ offers us peace.  And one of the best expressions of this peace is Christ’s people gathered around a table.  It’s been said, “In a place of privilege, it is better to build a longer table than a higher fence.”  Our ultimate privilege is who we are in Christ.  We are God’s “new creation,” God’s “new humanity,” rooted and grounded in love (Eph. 3:17).  Our lives are to reflect the Lord of love, who came not to divide but to bring God’s children together, declaring peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near.  As Paul came to know personally, when we are in Christ, all these categories of near and far, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, friend and stranger, indeed, every category, breaks down.  Dividing lines begin to blur as disparate groups, disparate identities, disparate nationalities, disparate ethnicities merge to form something new—a new humanity that lives in the community of Christ’s people, the Church.  And the symbol around which the community gathers is none other than a table, not a cross.  Yes, Christ’s death on the cross changes us; Christ’s suffering transfigures human suffering and transforms our lives.  But the symbol of the new humanity in the early church was not the cross, but the table. A table.

Catacombs of Priscilla

Go down into the catacombs outside Rome and you won’t find a single fresco of Christ on the cross.  You don’t find the cross anywhere.  Remember, the cross doesn’t become a Christian symbol until the fourth century, when the Roman Empire coopted Christianity.  But what you will find in the catacombs are frescoes of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples gathered around a table. The meal was central. We know that the first Christians worshipped on Sunday evenings and shared a meal together.  They not only remembered Jesus, they encountered his real presence in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, they affirmed their commitment to one another, they shared their lives, they held all things in common (Acts 2:44), they prayed together, they sang psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, making melody in their hearats to the Lord (Eph. 5:19), and they offered thanksgiving to God.  Thus, they came to know what being a living temple of the living God looks like and feels like; they realized that the community had become a dwelling place of God—not in a building, not even in a sanctuary (as beautiful as this one is), but in them and in the community, the koinonia.  We are the temple.  Christ dwells both in one’s hearts and hearts united in Christ. 

On this World Communion Sunday, as followers of Jesus we know that tables matter more to the Lord than fences or walls—and we need to affirm this especially today in a world obsessed with fences and walls, that prefers to instill divisions between peoples and races and groups.  And, friends, do not underestimate the counter-cultural power of the Lord’s Table; do not underestimate what we are about celebrate here.  The table calls us into a radically different way of living, a subversive way of being, which imagines an alternative way of being human, of being in relationship. Just consider the early church in Rome, above ground the Romans were crucifying enemies of the statement, while below ground, underground, we have images of Christ's people around a table.  The contrast couldn't be more striking.

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“To participate in the Eucharist [or Communion] is to live inside God’s imagination.  It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.”[1]  We are being drawn into that body.  For, the Lord welcomes us, in all our wild diversity, to participate in his life; he invites us to lift up our hearts into the life of God.  

And this new life is symbolized in what happens here at this table, when we experience Christ in the breaking of the bread—which is Christ in our breaking and in those places where the world is breaking; when we experience Christ in the sharing of the cup—which is Christ sharing his life with us and our lives with him, sharing in the life of the world. And because of this mystical participation, this sharing, of suffering and life, we experience unity, we discover that Christ is our peace.  And, because Christ has welcomed us here, we extend that welcome to everyone. We make sure there are plenty of place settings, that no one is excluded.  We make sure that every barrier is removed, that everyone has free unencumbered access to the abundance of this table, to the presence and peace of the Lord.

So, come, taste and see that God is good (Ps. 34:8).  

Know again—or, maybe for the very first time—the gifts of God are for the people of God, for you.  For the world.

Thanks be to God!

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[1] William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 279.

Feeling Anxious?

Exodus 16:2-21

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I hate to be a kicker,

I always long for peace,

But the wheel that squeaks the loudest,

Is the one that gets the grease.[1]

At this stage on their journey out of slavery, the Israelites were definitely squeaking—man, were they squeaking. They were murmuring, complaining, grumbling, whining incessantly to Moses and Aaron.  Not some, not even half, but, we’re told, “The whole congregation of Israelites complained again Moses and Aaron in the wilderness” (Ex. 6:2), which means they were also murmuring, complaining, grumbling, and whining at God—which is what triggers God’s response.  God doesn’t rain down fiery judgment from heaven; instead, God rains down bread from heaven.  But this bread, this “manna,” is really judgment, a judgment by bread.  It’s a test, as we’ll see.  And because God’s ways are always righteous and just (Deut. 32:4), this test, too, is an expression of God’s righteousness, an expression of God’s covenantal faithfulness to Israel, of God’s deep compassion for God’s people.

We find the Israelites in the severe wilderness of Sinai.  They are people on the way: on the way from Egypt to a land of promise, on the way from slavery to freedom, on the way from scarcity to abundance in a land of milk and honey, on the way from an oppressive past toward a hopeful future.  And the exodus road—exodus, a Greek word meaning, “the way out”—the way out of slavery, the way toward freedom, and this holy way cuts right through the wilderness.

The exodus from Egypt was the defining event in the history of Israel. Yes, the dramatic departure of God’s people through the Red Sea, but also the long forty-year trek around Sinai. The wilderness wandering should be understood as central to the exodus experience.  It’s not just a fruitless, empty in-between time between leaving Egypt and eventually crossing the River Jordan.  The wilderness experience was essential for the Israelites; it was formative and foundational.  In some respects, the wilderness is not unlike Holy Saturday, situated between Good Friday and Easter Sunday; a lot is going in that space in-between, that liminal space, that threshold space between what was and what shall be.

In time, the wilderness becomes the birthplace of Israel as a people: their theological identity is tested and formed there.  In the wilderness, they come to know Yahweh—the God of Abraham and Sarah—who was before then really a stranger.  They come to know God’s way, and will, and style.  They come to know God personally, not just beliefs or ideas about God.  They come to know God experientially, they encounter the holiness of God, they face the presence of the living God, they are confronted by the numinous, the Holy.  The wilderness is necessary for a knowledge of God.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religious traditions that emerge from desert, wilderness experiences.[2]  Moses learns Yahweh’s name, not as a boy growing up in the empire of Egypt, but as an adult in the wilds of Sinai.  One could say that the wild God of Israel is most profoundly known and experienced in wild, dangerous places—whenever we find ourselves in what feels like a wilderness, when we find ourselves in the holy, scary threshold space between what was and what shall be, between the past and the future, between death and resurrection.

This is where we find Israel in Exodus 16. And, to no one’s surprise, their anxiety level is running very high. Wilderness wanderings, wherever or whatever the wilderness might be, often generate considerable anxiety in us. This was a perilous, life and death situation for them.  They were running low on food, starving.  In the middle of nowhere.  They could not imagine a way out, an exodus, out of their crisis.  They began to panic.  They had difficulty envisioning a future that included enough food to live on.  A promising future was eclipsed by absence in their present, the absence of food. They envisioned only death.  And they didn’t have a lot of trust in Yahweh, either. They were beginning to think that God was against them, that it was all a cruel joke, that God brought them there to kill them—because that’s what all the evidence was pointing to.

“If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt,” they cried.  Why didn’t God kill us in Egypt, “when we sat by the fleshpots,” with kettles full of stewed meat, “and ate our fill of bread” (Ex. 16:3)?  Back in Egypt, sure we were in slavery, life was difficult and cruel, but at least our stomachs were full.  Life was so much better back in those days, back there in slavery, compared to this suffering at the hands of Moses and Aaron and their God.  “For you have brought us out into this wilderness,” they shouted, “to kill this whole assembly hunger” (Ex. 16:3)!

They are fearful.  They are anxious.  Two different emotional responses, similar but not the same.  Fear usually has an object, whether it’s the fear of flying or spiders or starving.  Sometimes a fear is rational, when there are good reasons for being afraid.  Sometimes a fear is irrational.  Anxiety, though, is something different.  Anxiety, often, does not have an object.  We can feel anxious and not know why we are anxious; it sits deeper than fear in the psyche and can, therefore, have a fierce hold over us.  Of the two, anxiety is probably more destructive.  Anxiety, when it’s activated, especially by trauma, and becomes operative, constricts.  The word, itself, has its root in the Sanskrit ang.  In Greek, ánkhō means “to choke.” From ang we get angst and anger and angina, the constriction of blood vessels around the heart. 

Anxiety is often a secondary response to something else, whether what is perceived is true or not is beside the point.  Take, for example, the question of scarcity. Is there enough to go around? Whether it’s oil or money or time or love, or, for the Israelites, food, whether we perceive scarcity and abundance is a direct correlation with how we perceive the rest of reality.  An attitude of scarcity often generates considerable anxiety in us. 

How does this relate to Exodus?  Walter Brueggemann, the brilliant Old Testament scholar, reminds us that Egypt was an empire, an extremely powerful economic and military force, the mightiest empire of its time in this part of the world.  Empires are often built to secure the resources necessary for its own survival.  This is why empires need slaves; this is why Pharaoh needed to keep the Israelites in Egypt.  The narrative that fueled Pharaoh’s empire was the myth of scarcity—the fear of not having enough, the need to have more just in case because they assume there's not enough.  The Pharaoh narrative, the narrative of empire, Brueggemann says, the story that empires tell themselves and want to make others believe, goes like this: resources are scarce, scarcity yields anxiety, the anxiety of not having enough leads to accumulation, pathological accumulation leads to monopoly, and the need to maintain monopolies inevitably lead to violence.[3]

This is the narrative that Israelites are used to.  This way of being had been embedded into their psyches for generations.  Read through the book of Exodus and you see that Israel is always whining and grumbling and complaining and worried…it’s tiresome.  Even with all that God had done for them, they had difficulty remembering, they assumed the worst, they couldn’t trust, they couldn’t live with confidence and hope.  Anxiety—anxiety and fear, but mostly anxiety—is informing everything. 

When we’re anxious our perceptions of reality become distorted, our lives constrict, it’s tough to make wise decisions, it’s easy for us to (over)react to what’s going on around us, we choose scarcity over abundance, we become defensive.  Anxiety hinders the Israelites's ability to move forward.  Overwhelmed by anxiety, they want to go “home,” even if “home” was slavery.  When anxiety becomes intense there is often a tug to go back to the past, to "the good ol' days," to the way things were, to the familiar and the known.  You can see why there’s often a connection between anxiety and nostalgia, which literally means “a painful longing for home.”

And, so, the daily bread from heaven is given as a test: will they learn to trust in the daily provision of God? They were forbidden to, collect, or accumulate for a later date, behaviors often fueled by anxiety and an inability to trust in the benevolence of God.  They were not allowed to take matters into their own hands, they were not free to manage or plan for their future, they were not free to control the desired outcomes.  They had to learn to trust in God to provide for them.  Not once, but day after day after day.  This test might appear harsh, but it was designed to change their lives, so that they would stop being fueled by anxiety.  Stop grasping.  Stop trying to control the future.  Stop accumulating in fear or anxiety, as if God is not God.  It took more than two generations to change their attitudes, and even then, it was difficult for Israel to really trust in God.  They had trust issues—that’s what being sold off into slavery will do to a people.

As any psychologist can tell you, every human being has trust issues.  It starts early, as an infant slowly determines whether one’s parents, one’s family, and the world are safe.  And if our trust has been betrayed, once or countless times, it takes a long time for trust to be recovered.  If you’re watching the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War, you see how the American government betrayed the trust of its people, a trust that has yet to be full recovered, a trust that continues to be betrayed. 

God wants the Israelites to learn to trust. But is God trustworthy? The viability and vitality of faith depends upon the image of God we hold deep in our heart of hearts. Your image of God is critical.  If you see God essentially as a judge, then don’t be surprised if you become excessively judgmental.  If you’re not sure that God is trustworthy, faithful and good, then don’t be surprised if you’re obsessed with gaining control over your life, taking matters into your own hands, fending for yourself, living defensively, living with the myth of scarcity…what if God won’t provide, what if the manna won’t show up, what if there’s not enough?  I need to do something about this.  What am I going to do?  I.  I.  I.

To counter these egocentric faithless pieties, God comes to us as the generous one.  Here, and later in Jesus’ ministry, we come to see that God is known for God’s liberality, God’s excessiveness, God’s prodigality.  This is the image of God that should fill our hearts and minds.  John Calvin (1509-1564), writing on Exodus 16, said it beautifully, “God so far extended [God’s] liberality as abundantly to satisfy them, …not less was given than was amply sufficient for them.”[4]  This image was at the center of Calvin’s piety because he knew God to be liberal and prodigal with love for him.  And, Calvin knew, this manna is really something else; it’s not like the food we obtain through planting and harvesting, it doesn’t come through the fruit of our labor.  It doesn’t come from us.  This daily bread, the kind that really sustains us is pure grace.  It’s unearned. It’s freely given from a generous God.  It all flows from God’s bounty.

We know we are living in anxious times.  And fear abounds. It feels as if we’re in a wilderness.  Earthquakes: three in Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.  Devastation from hurricanes in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Puerto Rico, most of the Caribbean.  Weekly talks about nuclear annihilation. Pathological narcissists with fragile egos playing with the lives of millions of God’s children.  On Wednesday evening here at CPC, Robert Jones, author of The End of White Christian America, shared disturbing data about trends in American society pertaining to religion, values, and unacknowledged racism tearing at the fabric of society.[5] We are living through a time of fast, unprecedented change. These changes, too, are yielding considerable anxiety. 

So, what can we do?

We can either resist anxiety, deny it, self-medicate, run from it, try to run “home,” go back to an imagined past, somewhere called “again.”  Or, knowing that God is faithful, we can stay with the anxiety, really feel it, enter it without succumbing to it.  This is not the usual response to anxiety, I know.  But it might be the more faithful one.  Isn’t this what the Israelites came to know in the wilderness? In fact, our anxiety, our unease, Walter Brueggemann goes so far to say, is a holy thing or can be holy.[6]  Why?  Because we can discover in our anxiety a new experience of the Living God.  We can discover something of the beneficence, the liberality, the abundance of God. 

Moses and Aaron summoned the people in the wilderness, in their anxiety, saying, “Draw near to the LORD, for he has heard your complaining.” And as Aaron spoke, we’re told the whole congregation looked toward the wilderness—they looked out over the hot sands of the Sinai, they saw the barrenness all around them, they became conscious of their situation, caught between the past and the future. And what did they see there?  

The cloud!  

The glory, the presence of the Yahweh appeared in the cloud.  Then, Yahweh spoke to Moses and said, “I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your God” (Ex. 16:16:12).  

Then, indeed…that morning and this morning and tomorrow morning and the next morning and the next, on and on and on, forever and ever. Amen.

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Image: Anton Koberger (1440-1513), "Gathering Manna," German Bible, Nuremberg, 1483.

[1] Attributed to the American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-1885), around 1870.

[2] See Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[3] This is a theme found throughout Brueggemann’s scholarship, but cited here.  See also Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012).

[4] John Calvin, Commentary on Exodus.

[5] Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).

[6] From Walter Brueggemann’s interview with Krista Tippet at OnBeing, “The Prophetic Imagination,” aired 19^th December 2013.