Walls Broken Down

Scriptures:            Jeremiah 23:1-6           Psalm 23

                              Ephesians 2:11-22       Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

The American poet Robert Frost is famous for his poem “Mending Wall”, which opens with the line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  He speaks of how the winter elements always create gaps in the wall between Frost’s property and that of his neighbor large enough for two to walk through side by side – and so every spring, he and his neighbor agree on a day on which to come out, walk together the property line and replace the stone that have fallen out of the wall onto each side of the property line.  Frost again repeats the line for emphasis, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” He reflects that since his neighbor’s property has pine trees while he has apple trees on his property, the wall is hardly needed to protect the trees – Frosts apples won’t eat his neighbor’s pine cones.  But the neighbor says only “Good fences make good neighbors.”  Frost muses, “Why do they make good neighbors…Before I built a wall I'd ask to know  What I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offence.. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down."  But at the end of the poem, Frost’s neighbor only repeats the line, which had been handed down to him from his father, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”  In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul is also questioning the value of walls.  He’s writing to a congregation in which there are many Gentile believers, perhaps even a majority of Gentile believers.  We know from the book of Acts and from Paul’s other letters that there were tensions between the Jewish followers of the way of Jesus, which would have included Jesus’ first disciples along with those converted by their ministry – tensions between these believers and the Gentile believers converted largely through Paul’s efforts.  There were questions within the church as to whether Gentiles first had to convert to Judaism, be circumcised, and obey the Jewish ceremonial laws before becoming Christians, or whether Gentiles were free from these requirements.  There actually had been a council of the church, called the Jerusalem Council, described in Acts 15, in which the apostles agreed that Gentiles were not subject to the full requirements of the Jewish law…..and yet questions persisted as to how Jewish and Gentile believers should relate to God and to one another.

In his letter, Paul takes a strong stand.  He reminds the Gentile believers that at one time they were far off from God’s promises.  But, Paul writes, “For he” – that is, 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.”   It may be important to remember that when Paul wrote of a dividing wall, he may have been thinking of the Temple in Jerusalem, which actually had physical walls dividing different groups of worshippers, with a large space for the Gentiles in the outer perimeters of the Temple, a separate space for Jewish women closer to the center, and another separate space for Jewish men still closer to the center – and of course, at the center was the Holy of Holies, where the priests offered their sacrifices.  So at the Temple in Jerusalem, there were literally physical walls separating Gentiles from Jews, separating women from men, separating ordinary believers from the priesthood – walls upon walls upon walls.   These physical walls reflected the spiritual values of those who decided that for God to be properly worshipped, Gentiles should be separated from Jews, women from men, priests from ordinary worshippers, and so forth – a case of architecture mirroring attitudes.  Paul is calling for an end to all that, as he goes on to write, “He” – that is, Christ – “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.  He concludes, “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 chief 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.”  So instead of a physical temple with lots of dividing walls, Paul saw the believers at Ephesus as a living temple among whom no divisions should exist, among whom and within whom God would dwell.  It is because of Paul’s attitude of openness that we are here at Emanuel Church worshipping today; without Paul’s outreach to the Gentiles, Christianity might have remained a minor sect within Judaism or perhaps broken with Judaism to become a fringe religious sect such as the Mandaeans, who to this day revere the teachings of John the Baptist.

The questions as to whether Jewish and Gentile believers could coexist have long been resolved.  And yet, throughout church history, over and over, there have been questions about the limits of inclusion – of racial minorities, of women in leadership position, of LGBTQ persons – and different faith communities have resolved these questions in different ways.  At every stage, there have always been those calling for walls and for limits – and these calls for walls and limits have usually been grounded in fear, fear that terrible things will befall us if we let them in – whoever we define as “them”.  But, eventually, the Gospel truth that perfect love casts out fear, the gospel truth of God’s radically inclusive love wins out. 

Our little congregation has its own story about inclusion.  We were founded in 1861 as a German Reformed church, and this congregation had a strong ethnic German character.   According to the church’s history, it was not until after World War I that Emanuel Church offered services in English, and not until roughly the beginning of World War II that services in German were discontinued.  And we were hardly unique in that respect; on Allegheny Avenue you can see Irish, Polish, and German Catholic churches located within a block or two of one another.  But, eventually, while our church treasures its German heritage, we opened our doors to the wider community.  Had we not, our doors might not be open at all.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  These days, our country seems to be taking up the response of Frost’s neighbor, who said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”    In our country today many call for walls, walls of brick and stone reflecting walls of spirit.  But we might also consider Frost’s comment, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.”  It’s an important question to ask, because walls that keep others out also keep us in, and might the walls we build for defense eventually be transformed into prison walls, as the Berlin Wall kept so many imprisoned and apart even from fellow family members for the nearly 30 years from its erection in 1961 until it came down in 1989.  Meanwhile our bridges nationwide are crumbling – here in Pennsylvania, of the state’s roughly 23,000 bridges, 5,200 are considered structurally deficient and 4,300 are considered functionally obsolete – and I wonder if this isn’t another case of architecture mirroring attitudes, that we no longer care for our bridges, at least in part, because they’re not as important to us, because we are also becoming increasingly isolated, less willing than we once were to build bridges of friendship, to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zones.   Physical bridges crumble if not maintained.  Bridges of friendship and relationship likewise crumble if not maintained.

I’d imagine it was difficult for the church at Ephesus to act on Paul’s words, to break down the walls of misunderstanding between Jewish and Gentile believers. It’s easy to take shelter in a holy huddle of like-minded true believers.  It’s much harder to work together across lines of difference.   It takes leadership to make it happen, leadership such as that of Paul, leadership such as that of Jesus, who proclaimed himself the Good Shepherd, and then said, “I have other sheep not of this flock. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah gives us a warning of what can happen when that quality of leadership is not present; as Jeremiah wrote, because the shepherds didn’t care for the people and only served themselves, the people were like sheep who were scattered and destroyed.  Jeremiah wrote this in the runup to the exile of the Jews to Babylon, and in that exile the flock of Israel was scattered indeed for decades, until they were at last allowed to return home.   Bad leadership drives people apart, drives wedges between people, but good leadership brings people together.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  We know from Paul’s words that God doesn’t like walls that divide, but does want his people built into a spiritual house in which he can dwell.  May Emanuel Church be that spiritual house, with our members joined together, with no daylight between us, into a holy sanctuary in which God dwells.  Amen.