He Has Made Us One

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on July 21, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Ephesians 2: 11-21

It seems as a world we have three overarching challenges. The first is that industrialisation has with increasing pace over the last 250 years come to the point where it threatens to make the earth uninhabitable. The second is that technology hasn’t stopped at jeopardising our climate, but is now through AI threatening our sense of human identity. The third is that we experience profound inequality, between nations and within societies, leading to injustice and resentment and colossal waste of talent and energy.

But there’s one pervasive issue that transcends ecology, artificial intelligence and inequality. And that’s the painful reality of how hard we find it to live together. The most horrifying aspects of global crisis right now are events in Ukraine, Gaza, and to a lesser but still significant extent in Sudan, Myanmar and the Sahel in west Africa. For all the sophisticated analysis of global experts and political pundits, the biggest question we face seems to be one that’s been around a long time: how do we live together?

It turns out this is the question the letter to the Ephesians is addressing. Our passage today is the climax of the letter’s compelling first two chapters, which assemble the whole story of God and creation and humankind to address this question. In chapter one we learn that Jesus is the centre of who God is and of God’s purpose for all things. In the first half of chapter two we learn that Jesus is the answer to our individual human question, How is it that we die? Here in the second half of chapter two we discover how Jesus is the answer to our collective human question, How can we live together?

The people reading Ephesians experienced three kinds of alienation. They were living under Roman domination. They had no overarching framework to understand their lives in the light of eternity. And they had heard of the God of the Jews, but they were not Jews, so they weren’t sure how this news of the Jew Jesus was significant to them. These twelve verses seek to transform these three forms of alienation into profound faith and trust and belonging. What we’re given are five claims about what Jesus brings – five claims that are as relevant today as they were 2000 years ago. All five claims centre around the word ‘one.’ It turns out our struggle to live together is all about how we relate to and find belonging in the word ‘one.’ Let’s look at these five claims now.

First we’re told Christ has made us one new humanity. He has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us. In the context ‘us’ means Jew and Gentile. No one can look at the world today and say that dividing wall doesn’t still exist. But it’s not the only dividing wall. The reason why race, gender and class trip off the tongue so quickly is that they are dividing walls found all over the world. We live with so many dividing walls we can’t imagine life without them. Think of your life in two halves. Half your life is confronting dividing walls, trying to speak across them, build trust in spite of them, in due course dismantle them; the other half of your life is trying to ignore them, distract from them, live with them, find a way round them or at best equip yourself to better address them. I wonder which you’re doing right now. Breaking down dividing walls doesn’t mean pretending they’re not there, but building understanding that creates trust that leads to a common vision that ends up with people taking those walls down and using the bricks to build one another up. So what the world needs are communities committed to being a reconciling presence in the life of their neighbours in this way. One new humanity.

Next we learn Christ has made us one body. We’re told Christ reconciled both groups to God in one body through the cross. There are few more contested places right now than the human body. Everyone experiences significant bodily change, in growth, puberty, sickness, advancing age. For some there are additional characteristics we group under the umbrella of disability. There are loud and incessant contests over issues like a woman’s body when she’s pregnant, or more recently the face of one whom during covid others require to wear a mask. For some there is also a recognition that the designation ‘male’ or ‘female’ doesn’t do justice to who they experience themselves to be. Right now there’s enormous energy being expended on some people trying to create space to explore, discover, grow, name, inhabit, present and alter, while some others are articulating anxiety, threat, anger, suspicion and scepticism about the malleability and vulnerability of gender and sex. Ephesians seems to be telling us some bad news and some good news. The bad news is, none of us will ever be completely at home in our bodies. Our individual bodies are not a static identity. There will never be a perfect correspondence between who we are and what we are. The good news is, we are collectively called to be the body of Christ. Everything Paul says about the eye and the hand needing each other goes against any insistence on conformity or uniformity and towards embrace and acceptance and cherishing of diversity. So what the world needs are not communities that say only one kind of person can belong, but communities in which a diversity of identities can find such a profound sense of belonging that each member can share communion and say, ‘This is my body.’

Then third we learn that Christ has given us one peace. We’re told he has brought peace to those who were far off and to those who were near, a peace made possible through one Spirit. When Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies,’ he’s making an important acknowledgement. He’s recognising we do have enemies. So the way to peace is not to deny we have enemies. The world around us offers us three ways to deal with enemies. We can obliterate them, as the Israeli cabinet seems bent on trying to do to Hamas. We can cancel them, by eradicating their footprint in public life, as seems to happen overnight to anyone who offer unpopular or unfashionable opinions, as if we were in a totalitarian state, just one run by social media rather than an absolutist government. Or we can tolerate them, redirecting our energies to keep out of their way as much as possible. But see that nagging phrase ‘one Spirit.’ This is telling us that the Holy Spirit that’s been at work in our lives since they began has also been at work in our enemies lives. This is hard to believe, because we tend to think the point of God is to validate us and destroy everyone else. But it means that the only way to peace is somehow to build something new out of what is good, albeit no doubt misdirected, in the one to whom we’re opposed. That may include genuine confrontation, that may require mediation, that may entail agreeing to differ in some areas, that may involve passage of time. But anything else isn’t peace, only the postponement of conflict. Peace means asking, ‘How has the Spirit been working in their lives, not just mine, and how can we together enhance our points of convergence and complementarity, and scale back our points of ignition and conflagration? What the world needs are communities where these conversations can take place in a culture of respect, patience, and hope.

Next we learn that we are members of one household. I wonder if we might look back on the period from about 1880 to around 1980 as a unique season in history. From about 1880 most adults worked outside the home, rather than in cottage industries, most children went to school, most marriages went the distance, and, at least while children were small, most parents lived separately from their own parents. So we had the nuclear family. But from about 1980 blended families and same-sex couples became more normal, and today the nuclear family is beginning to seem like a historical peculiarity, mostly seen in breakfast cereal adverts. It can be hard to grasp that the nuclear family is not intrinsic to Christianity. Nuclear families are largely absent from the New Testament. What a household means is for each of us to find out in our own way. One thing the nuclear family isn’t famous for, yet which is inherent to Christianity, is hospitality. Our true citizenship isn’t here but in heaven. Our earthly home is not our castle: it’s a place of nurture and renewal, in which those in transition or distress can find welcome and restoration. We’re all sometimes far off and sometimes near. What the world needs are communities that make space for the displaced, the lost and the isolated, so together we create households that discover new wonders rather than protect anxious privacies.

Finally we’re told that we are built together into one holy temple, one dwelling-place for God. There’s a story behind this. In the years after Moses was given the Ten Commandments, the dwelling-place for God, the tabernacle with the mercy seat, was the tent outside the camp. In the time of the kings the dwelling place was the great tabernacle, the temple. After the destruction of the temple the mercy seat was gone, and it was not clear whether the new temple really was the place of encounter with God. And then Jesus said ‘It is I: I am the new temple, the place of encounter with God.’ And now Ephesians 2 tells us ‘You – you (plural) the church, are the temple, the dwelling place for God, the place of encounter.’ This is a breathtaking statement. You are the place where others will see the glory of God. How can we make sense of it?

Let’s go back to where we started. We’ve got a lot of problems in the world, but one stands out above all others: we struggle to live together. What we’ve discovered together is that what the world needs are communities committed to being a reconciling presence in the life of their neighbours, communities in which a diversity of identities can find such a profound sense of belonging that each member can share communion and say, ‘This is my body,’ communities where conversations across conflict can take place in a culture of respect, patience, and hope, communities that make space for the displaced, the lost and the isolated, so that we discover new wonders rather than protect anxious privacies. The fifth and overarching claim that emerges from these four descriptions is what the New Testament calls church. The church is new reality that Christ makes possible. What Ephesians is saying is that if you want to see the glory of God, the way to do it is to participate in a community where people are made one in precisely these kinds of ways. This is what God wants. This is what Christ makes possible. This is what the world most desperately needs. And, as it happens, this is what we’re doing together, in this very place and at this very moment, right now.