United We Stand

Back when I was a student minister in Cincinnati, our church had a large multi-purpose area that also served as a gym. We almost had a full court, the three-point arch didn’t exactly reach to the outside, but it was good enough for us to get some pretty good basketball games going in there.

We ran a pretty good open-gym program for the neighborhood and we had some really dedicated volunteers for this and it would happen after youth group on Sunday nights. It was every other week and I would stick around for a bit to connect with some of the kids. We had a pretty good mix of kids coming to this thing. Some of them went to our church, others didn’t, some were very good players, and some of us weren’t so great. There were a few girls who would show up and there was someone new almost every week. It was really great. I loved it.

On one occasion, I remember seeing a student I hadn’t met before and I went up to him after he came off the court, extended my hand, introduced myself, told him I was the student minister at church. He said, “nice to meet you, I’m Elijah.” And then I said, “I’m glad you’re here. Where are you from?” And he goes, “What do you mean?”

And I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone. Because for me, this is pretty standard question we ask, right? And it seems like a question that garners a pretty standard response. For instance (do this with someone in the front row)

Pretty simple. But I just kind of stared at Elijah, looked around a little bit. And I don’t feel like it’s easy to catch me off guard, but he’d succeeded and I was just like, “You know, man. Like, where do you live? Where do you come from?” And Elijah looked me right in the eyes and said this, “Oh man. I came from the earth. Just like everybody else.”

I’m not kidding when I tell you I think about this conversation at least once a week and it happened almost 10 years ago.This turned out to be one of the most significant interactions of my life. It was so brief, but it caused me to consider what it might be like for people who don’t think about things in the same ways I do myself. What I didn't know at the time is that for some folks from cultural backgrounds other than my own, this simple question "where are you from” has a tendency to sound like a question meant to push away rather than include.

Now, that’s not what I was trying to do, I was just trying to get to know someone new who had shown up at our church, but it was important that I didn’t wall myself off from learning something new from a person who had a different experience from my own. The truth is Elijah wasn’t trying to be coy or stubborn with me. He was just reacting in a way that reflected his own lived experience. What I learned that day, and still hear echoing in my life even now, is that he was pointing to a simple but profound truth: in God’s story, we all come from the same place.

And that’s a beautiful thing, right? For me, this way of thinking is going to serve as the basis for this new series we’re starting today on unity. I want to start by giving some context about the book of Ephesians, which is where our teaching passage comes from today.

This is an interesting letter because the city of Ephesus was a pretty big deal. It was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire—probably around 250,000 people at the time Paul was writing. It’s not there anymore, but it sat on the western edge of what’s now Turkey, right near the Aegean Sea. It was a kind of crossroads for trade between Europe and Asia, so you had people from all over mixing in one place.

There was some substantial wealth in Ephesus—thanks in part to the Temple of Artemis, which brought in a lot of tourism and business—but that wealth existed right alongside everyday workers, artisans, and enslaved people. One thing worth remembering is that in the Roman world, it was pretty rare to have anything like the middle class we think of today. There were some—like skilled tradesmen and successful freedmen, people who were once enslaved—who had a bit of upward mobility, but for the most part, real power belonged to the elite. And unless you were connected to the Roman government or local temple authorities, you weren’t getting near it.

That meant the divisions between people—economic, ethnic, social—were often sharp, and reinforced by how the whole system worked.

But because of the nature of Paul’s ministry, we can say with some confidence that the church in Ephesus crossed those lines. Paul often preached in synagogues, in public lecture halls, and in homes. That means the gospel would have reached both the wealthy and the working class—people of influence and people without much at all. So when Paul starts talking about unity in Christ, he’s not just offering nice words. He’s trying to hold together a church made up of people who, outside of the church, wouldn’t even be in the same room together.

One of the main tensions being dealt with was whether or not the Gentiles, the people who were not Jewish, had to do what is called “keep Torah.” Which means follow the rules laid out by Moses in the first five books of the bible. And just to cut to the chase, Paul decides to deal with this by introducing a conversation about unity.

In Ephesians chapter 2:11–13, Paul is reminding the Gentiles where they started and where they find themselves now. His main point in these verses serves as a reminder of the way Christ has changed their lives and that the only way they're really reconciled to God is through Jesus. He goes on to write this in verses 14–16,

"for Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.”

Focusing for just a second on the very beginning of that passage “for Christ himself has brought peace to us” we are being called back to the fact that Jesus entered into a fairly hostile environment on a mission to reconcile his people to God with a message of love and compassion. There are many things Jesus is called in the bible. We see Him called the son of God, the son of man, Lord, Savior, the Lamb of God, the King of Kings, light of the world, and the good Shepherd just to name a few. But perhaps the most appropriate name for Jesus in this situation and, quite honestly, the time period in which we currently find ourselves, is found in Isaiah 9:6, where Jesus is called the prince of peace.

What we find in scripture is Jesus teaching us that peace is something much more than a thing we feel. It's something we actively practice and pursue. Peace is not a mood we find ourselves in. It's something we have to constantly work towards. We see Jesus modeling this for us in the way that he lived his life. Jesus was a person of reconciliation, of non-violence, and his hardest teaching on this matter was the fact that as followers of his way, we are supposed to love our enemies. The way our Jewish friends understand this concept is through the idea of shalom, which is a Hebrew word that literally translates as peace. It's commonly used as a greeting, but again it encompasses something much more than just a feeling. It's a concept that involves the presence of justice, living in right relationship with other people, and it's representative of a spiritual wholeness.

We can grab a hold of this understanding of peace, as shalom, and travel to some pretty exciting and uncharted territory. Consider what it might look like to practice shalom in conjunction with the second half of verse 14 where it says, "he broke down the walls of hostility that separates us.” If peace really is about more than chasing a feeling and if Jesus does want us to be participants in this way of living, it means we are not merely negotiating ourselves around the walls of hostility. We're doing much more than that. We are actively working to tear them down.

So what walls are still standing between us—walls that Jesus came to tear down? And let’s just be honest about this…this is difficult terrain to navigate. Because we all know there are varying opinions on things even within the confines of the church, but once we name them out loud, we open ourselves up to scrutiny and we run the risk of being labeled and identified as this thing or that thing. And I don’t know if that’s fair. But then it becomes really important how we approach these things because our witness as followers of Jesus should take precedence over everything we say, do, and think. That doesn’t only apply to our witness to those who don’t know Christ, it applies to our witness among each other, as participants in the church.

Now here's the thing, I spent some time thinking about this last week and what I realized is that you can't have something because of the absence of something else. What I mean by that is that peace is not obtained through the absence of conflict. Peace is obtained by the hard work of being in right relationship with each other. This happens when we're brave enough to step into the arena with other people who might have a different perspective on things. We have a biblical way to guide our understanding that this is the way of wisdom. You might know about Proverbs 27:17, “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.” We become better practicers of the way of Jesus through critical interactions with people we trust who know us well.

One final way to look at this comes by way of a parable I heard once. Maybe you know it too. There's a person who happens to be familiar with the ranching industry who is visiting the Australian outback and they are traveling through a cattle station with a rancher. This person notices there are no barriers around some fairly large grazing lands. Curious about this, the person asks, “How do you keep your cows from wandering off?” The rancher responds, “That’s no problem here because we dig deep wells.”

In our pursuit to become people of peace, we are breaking down hostile barriers and digging deep wells. And I can tell you this: focusing our lives to be people who pursue peace, not only with other Christians, but with everyone we come into contact with gives us access to a well that will never run dry.

This is important work because it sets up an idea later in the passage which calls us to live in a new community together. Let's skip ahead to verses 19-21:

“So now you gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God's holy people, you are members of God's family. Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.”

To the best of my knowledge, this applies to everyone here because none of us are Jewish. What we are learning here is that through Christ all of us are accepted into God's family. We are part of God's holy family because Jesus himself is holy and by the grace of God, He’s invited us into this. The metaphor we are given in this passage is that we represent the building blocks of a house that is built upon the foundation represented by the apostles where Jesus serves as the cornerstone. That house becomes a holy temple in His name.

This home that’s being built in the Lord’s name is a new creation where every nation is invited to take part. It’s not something that’s meant to be for anyone special. Jesus is very clear about His desire for this to be something for “all nations.” Where this starts to come together is that if it's true that followers of Jesus are to be people who are in the pursuit of peace, can we then pair that with the reality that Jesus intended his teachings to be for “all nations” and it’s here where we see our path to unity start to develop. I mean, it says right there in scripture that the thing that divided us was a wall of hostility. This is Jesus breaking down that barrier.

To emphasize another point, just like the absence of conflict doesn’t equal peace, it can also be said that cordial coexistence does not equal peace and it surely doesn't resemble unity. We can expect some level of harmony to exist because we get along with each other, but unless we’re dealing with the deeper revelations of what it’s supposed to look like to live in community with each other, we are not setting ourselves up for success.

So what does this look like? Here are some ideas I compiled to help us think about what it looks like to live in unity with each other.

The first thing is to adopt the practice of mutual care. Living in Christian community comes with the understanding that the well-being of every person matters. There is a call to this in the bible in Paul’s letter to the Galatians 6:2-5 and it’s pretty direct: “ share each other's burdens, and in this way, obey the law of Christ. If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.” That’s a challenging statement and something we might think about taking to heart.

Along with that idea is accepting the idea of universal belonging. We talk all the time about the fact that there aren’t any conditions to accepting the free gift of grace from God though Jesus. If this is something we truly believe, that Jesus paid the cost for our reconciliation to God, then it’s important we remove any conditional acceptance to receive hospitality. If what we have is life-giving in the ultimate way, we might consider ways to share it with people more freely instead of creating barriers that keep people out.

The next thing is practicing non-violence as a lifestyle. I’m not under the impression that any of us are going to leave here today and start physical fights with our neighbors. But I would expect people who are choosing to live the way of Jesus to have a heart posture of reconciliation over retribution. Jesus talks about this with some pretty vivid language in the Sermon on the Mount. If you read Matthew 5:38-47, you find teachings like “turning the other cheek,” “praying for and loving our enemies,” and this banger,

“If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect.”

That’s a pretty steep challenge, wouldn’t you say? And if we layer this underneath the call to be people who are practicing peace, things are bound to get pretty complicated real quick and in a hurry. This just reiterates the point that cordial compliance for the sake of harmony might not exactly be what Jesus is calling us to. Again, this way of being requires the hard work of us breaking down our barriers to see people through the eyes of Jesus.

I want to end today talking a bit about why I think this stuff matters. Maybe it's just the nature of accepting the call to teach, but pretty often, I find myself thinking about how important it is for us not to back down from the hard challenges of what it means to live as a unified body in Christ. I suspect that many of us here have been paying attention to the world around us. It's getting harder and harder for us to find any semblance of unity in anything we do anymore. I try really hard not to be an alarmist, and I think we've likely faced harder times than we find ourselves in today, but it's getting pretty wild out there.

This reality causes me to ask the questions, “What is keeping us separated?” Or “What’s keeping us from peace?” This could be any long list of things that we could come up with here on a Sunday morning sitting here at church, but I heard something on the radio this week that really made me think. Occasionally, I'll listen to a program called “Science Friday.” This week they had a researcher named James Kimmel who explores how revenge functions as an addiction. And revenge thinking is certainly something that keeps us from peace.

Here’s a brief overview of his findings:

When we feel wronged, the brain lights up with the same chemicals that fuel addictive behavior—dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol. Replaying the offense, fantasizing about retaliation, or seeking ways to "get even" can become a kind of emotional high. But like any addiction, the buzz wears off and leaves us emptier, angrier, and more isolated. And then…the feeling fades—and it takes an increasing amount of the same behavior to chase that original high. The same thing is true when it comes to revenge.

But here’s the difference...there is nothing good associated with revenge. This is a quote from Kimmel, “Revenge only has negative consequences. By definition, you can only get revenge by inflicting pain on someone else.” He goes on to talk about the effect of this research as it pertains to social networking websites, explaining the manipulation that takes place within the algorithms produces a scenario that encourages conflict and revenge seeking behavior.

Now, it’s not all bad…because the episode ends by providing the antidote. Just like with other addictions, the playbook that exists for treating those things also could be used for treating this. That could be counseling, certain medicines that are available to block receptors in the brain, and other things along this same thread…but perhaps the most intriguing point of research in the entire scope of this thing is that our urge for revenge can be treated with this…

Forgiveness.

His research shows that practicing forgiveness actually rewires the brain in some pretty powerful ways. He says just imagining forgiveness can reduce emotional pain, shut down the brain’s craving for revenge, and restore self-control.

He goes on to tie this directly to the teachings of Jesus. He references Matthew 18:21-22 where Peter asks Jesus how many times he’s supposed to forgive those who sin against him. And he’s like, “Seven times?” Jesus responds, “No, not seven times. But seventy times seven times!” He doesn’t mean to count our forgiveness up to 490 times and that’s it. This is Jesus’ way of saying the number of times we are to forgive others is the same amount of times God has forgiven us…which is an infinite amount of times.

The countercultural path of Jesus continues to ring true in the lives of his followers throughout the course of humanity. We have to expand our imagination to include the reality that the second we decide to give up our own way and live by the teachings of Jesus we are making the choice to live as if heaven is on earth. We must actively choose to tear down the walls of hostility, to remove the barriers that divide us, to consider ourselves citizens of heaven above everything else, to do as Jesus commands when he says “to lay down our lives for our friends.” To be people of peace, grace, and forgiveness and to strive for unity. Why?

Because we came from the earth…just like everybody else.

The teachings of Jesus lead us to believe that peace leads to unity. And that unity is what makes us the church.

Ephesians, 4:2-4 “Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other's faults because of your love. Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the spirit binding yourselves together with peace. For there is one body and one spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future.”

Let’s Pray