Ephesians. 2:11-20
Rev. Nick Cheek / Trinity Presbyterian Church
When I was 21 I backpacked through Europe. One of the stops was Berlin. All throughout the city remnants of the Berlin wall still remain. In 1961 the Berlin wall was built. Its official purpose was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state. But it was really intended to stop folks who resided in the socialist east from defecting to the west. The wall did what any wall does. It created a division. It separated families from each other and kept people from jobs and opportunities in the West. Over time, East German officials replaced the makeshift wall. The new one was made of reinforced concrete 12ft tall and 4 ft wide. Instead of barbed wire the top of the wall was replaced with a giant pipe that made climbing over impossible. On the east side there was an area adjacent to the wall infamously given the nickname “Death Strip”. The ground was purposely made of soft sand to slow down any run-aways to and to reveal foot prints. The area was monitored with floodlights, attack dogs, patrolling soldiers and even trip-wire machine guns. Soldiers were ordered to fire upon anyone who was caught trying to cross over. Hundreds of people were killed trying to get through the wall. The wall stayed up for almost 30 years.
The thawing of the cold war, international political pressure and the leadership of Gorbachev is what finally brought it down. In our passage this morning… Paul is talking about a dividing wall.
Scripture and Prayer
Over centuries, humanity has been obsessed with building walls. The walls which fortified the legendary city of Troy still stand after over 3000 years. The Great Wall of China began construction over 2000 years ago. With the authority of many Dynasties it was completed centuries later with a final length of over 13,000 miles. The longest wall in Europe is located in northern England. It was built in the first century by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep out the Scotts from the North. This Hadrian wall extended from coast to coast, almost 80 miles. Made from limestone, in some places the wall measures 10 feet thick and 20 feet high. All of these walls share some commonalities. For one, they were built to provide protection. Walls make us feel safe – safe from whatever might be on the other side. Many of our own homes have fences to provide protection and privacy. Walls are also built to identify borders and boundaries. Just like the fences around our yards, walls reveal where one person’s property ends and the other begins.
Another commonality about these walls is that they share negative side-effects. Walls divide. They separate. They seclude others. Walls hinder communication and interaction between neighbors and nations. Walls have even been known to cause psychological problems for the people who live near them.
In the 1970’s an East German psychologist, Dietfried Müller-Hegemann, found that people who lived close to the wall suffered from shared disorders. They showed higher rates of psychosis, schizophrenia, phobias, depression and anxiety. It wasn’t until the wall finally came down that those disorders began to disappear.
Even so, we like walls. We like to surround ourselves with them and not just walls of stones or cement. We also construct walls that are made of ideologies. We build walls that no blueprint can measure—walls of fear, walls of pride, walls of pain. Some are built out of jealousy. We lay them brick by brick when we allow our differences—of skin color, culture, language, or nationality—to become dividing lines instead of markers of God’s beautiful diversity.
We put up barriers when we let religion or politics become more important than compassion, or when our need to be right overtakes our call to be kind. The thing about walls is that they don’t just keep others out—they keep us in. They limit our ability to listen, to learn, to love. They block our path to reconciliation. They obscure our view of what’s possible when Christ is our peace.
In our passage this morning, Paul writes about two groups in the early church who had walls to overcome – the Gentile and the Jew. Being a large port city with trade and commerce, Ephesus was a draw for people from all over the Roman Empire. They came from Greece, Egypt and Rome to settle in Ephesus and make a living. Therefore, the church in Ephesus was fairly diverse. This wasn’t your average American church. The Gentile Christians who lived there not only looked different in appearance, they also shared a different history than the Jews. Gentile Christians didn’t grow up with the Hebrew books of the Torah. They didn’t celebrate all of the Jewish feasts. They may not have even ever heard about Moses. This early Christianity that the Ephesians were wrestling with was birthed out of Jewish tradition. It was held, nurtured, grown and transformed through Jewish leadership and practice.
And so when the Gentiles began to fill up the early churches, these differences were amplified. These differences caused aggravation and even animosity between the two groups. In some locations where Paul visited, Gentiles and Jews were even known to use derogatory statements towards one another. Paul realized that these two groups had walls to overcome.
In today’s Scripture, Paul mentions a wall. He calls it the dividing wall. At first glance the reader would assume that he is speaking metaphorically – but he is also referring to an actual wall. In the Temple in Jerusalem there was a tangible dividing wall made of stone. This dividing wall was there in order to separate, Jew from Gentile.
It was placed strategically in the temple so that the Jews would be able to worship in the inner court and the Gentiles in the outer court. This particular dividing wall not only prevented the two groups from gathering together as one body… it also sent a clear statement to the gentiles about who God loved more. This dividing wall made it so that the Jews were actually closer to the presence of God … in the inner courts… the inner circle), while the Gentiles were forced to be farther away… in the outer courts.
It taught a fabricated story… it taught people that The Gentiles were not allowed to be a full member of the group and they were not allowed to cross over that wall. It is no wonder there was bitterness between these two groups.
If you think about it, this is not so different from what American Christianity has gone through over the centuries. The church has a history of building dividing walls. Not so long ago we constructed walls that were there to prevent congregants from having to open their doors to people of a different race. Not so long ago, we built walls that kept women from leadership in the church – walls that still remain in many denominations. We also built dividing walls in order to discourage people of a different gender or orientation from feeling welcome, accepted and loved. Even today you’ll find dividing walls that still remain in the church. And some of these walls appear so thick to the people out there that they would never think about braving the arduous climb over them.
I try to understand why we build these dividing walls? Is it because of fear? Perhaps. Perhaps we are afraid of what might happen to our nicely constructed belief systems and ideas if we started chipping away at these walls. Maybe we’re afraid of what might be taken away from us if we removed the bricks – what would we have to sacrifice? The walls we create, they take time and effort to build… there is a lot of hard work that goes into them. Why should we just start breaking them down? If I start to take these walls down in my life… the walls around my mind and my heart… then I might have to change something about myself. I might have to open up to other ideas, other possibilities, other people, other perspectives…and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Because these walls, they are there for a reason… a good one… right?
Marcelo de Cintio is a Canadian writer who wrote an award winning book entitled, “Walls: Travels Along Barricades.” This book documents an idea he had. Beginning in 2008, he decided to travel to some of the world’s most unfriendly edges of the world in order to meet the people who live by walls.
He visited Israel, Palestine and the divided capital of Cyprus. He traveled along India’s fenced frontier with Bangladesh. He also visited the American Mexico borderlands. Through his research and conversations with locals, he found a few common themes. One theme was this; where there is a wall, people will always and no matter what, try to get over it… and they will risk much to do so.
In the Sahara Desert, he met a Saharan poet who carefully walked around landmines and avoided Moroccan soldiers to cross over a desert wall. He also found a young Pakistani man whose family gave all they had in order to send him over a fence into Europe. Through his experience, Marcelo also found that wherever there were walls, there are folks protesting their existence. In Palestine, he ran into a young man who organized a protest against the wall dividing his village’s farmers from their fields.
He also met musicians, artists and poets who wrote songs about the walls or painted murals on them that spoke of peace and unity.
In concluding his research Marcelo writes, “I discovered that the walls replace the blurred nuances between communities with a cold, medieval clarity. With the Walls, there is only Here and There. Only Us and Them. I learned that the walls everywhere infect those that live in their shadows…”
Paul’s passion for the message of the gospel compelled him to work against these dividing walls, too. He reminds us of the one who tears down the dividing wall. To both the Jew and the gentile Paul writes, “Christ… is our peace; and through him he has made both groups into one… and he has broken down the dividing wall… he has broken down the hostility between us.” Christ is the great wall breaker. Through him there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus. There is one promise no wall can stand up against – the promise that we are children of God. We may look different, we may speak other languages, we might come from other countries, but even so, we all share in the same love of Jesus – It doesn’t matter which side of our manmade, or ideological walls we live on.
After the Berlin wall finally came down, the entire west side was covered in art. Artists from all over the world visited in order to make their mark. The spray-paint was used to shout their causes. They painted about peace… and justice. Some of the phrases on the wall read – “The world is too small for walls.” “There is life behind the wall.” “When you start treating people like people, they become people.” By the 1980’s the entire West side of the wall was covered in artwork and words of hope.
Friends, If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in the world then you know there are walls. Some are physical. Many are emotional or spiritual. They show up in relationships, in communities, and in the way we respond to people we don’t understand, don’t agree with, or don’t know.
I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do know what it feels like to see people hurting. I know what it feels like to feel helpless in the face of division. And I believe that Christ calls us—right in the middle of that helplessness—to respond not with fear or retreat, but with love.
Maybe the dividing walls we have created and continue to create us won’t come down overnight. But how we treat the people on the other side of those walls—how we see them, speak of them, pray for them, reach out to them—that matters. It matters to the heart of God. And how we treat one another will become part of our story. [Pause]
There’s a piece of art I once saw—a painting of the heavenly banquet. People from every background, every language, every kind of story gathered around one table. One table, no barriers, no categories. That’s where the story ends in God’s kingdom. A family united, not by sameness, but by grace.
Church, what about your life? What walls need to be overcome? Between you and a friend… a spouse… a coworker… a stranger? What small act of grace can you offer to start chipping away at what divides?
Don’t wait for someone else to make the first move. Don’t wait for another brick to be added. Pick up the tools Christ gave us—faith, hope, and love—and start dismantling the wall, one piece at a time.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.