One People in Christ

Bible Reading

Ephesians 2:11–22 NLT

11 Don’t forget that you Gentiles used to be outsiders. You were called “uncircumcised heathens” by the Jews, who were proud of their circumcision, even though it affected only their bodies and not their hearts. 12 In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. 13 But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. 14 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. 15 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. 16 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. 17 He brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. 18 Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us. 19 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. 20 Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. 21 We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. 22 Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.

Introduction

You’ve probably already heard the story of how I moved to Japan one year after graduating from Uni. However, moving countries, especially back in the early 1990’s before the web existed, is a massive change. There were endless aspects to that move. The aspect I want to focus on today is my “Alien Registration Certificate.”

When I moved to Japan, I needed to get a photo ID to prove I was there legally. This photo ID was called a “Certificate of Alien Registration.” It looked a lot like this, except that I looked more like a terrorist with my Ned Kelly beard, and the photo was in black and white back in the 90’s. If you look closely, you can see the words “Alien Registration” along the top there. The Japanese above it starts with the word “Gaikokujin,” which literally means “outside country person.” It’s usually abbreviated to “gaijin,” or outsider.

And let me tell you, in Japan back then, you really felt like an outsider, an alien. Japanese society was such a collective society, so tribal, that even co-workers who were married to Japanese, spoke the language fluently, and had been living there for more than a decade were still considered nothing more than gaijin, outsiders.

This didn’t bother me too much, because I had no desire to settle in Japan. What did disturb me, though, was when I returned to Australia on holiday, after almost two years, to discover that I was a foreigner in my own land. Japan, and the other ex-patriot aliens I had been hanging out with, had changed me. I found Australia strange and foreign. I still do. A year in the USA and three and a half in Hong Kong have not helped.

But this wasn’t an entirely new experience for me. Moving from the bosom of a country, Christian family to the big city of Brisbane for University was my first experience with a foreign culture. Since I left home I have never found a place where I feel at home (other than my own house or apartment, of course). Except for one.

The only place I feel at home is in the midst of disciples of Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether that group is in a church in Shibuya, Tokyo; a university in La Mirada, California; a church in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon; a church in Charters Towers or Toowong, or this church here. This is where my home is.

Why is that?

Well, that’s what Paul is explaining in the passage we just read. So let’s unpack it a little.

The old division

In verses 11-18 Paul explains how we Gentiles were once separated from God, but we have now been united with the Jews as one people belonging to God by Jesus’ death on the cross. Jesus’ blood removes all need for regulations and human efforts, because we now come to God the Father through the one Holy Spirit.

To Paul’s readers in Ephesus, living only a few decades after Christ’s death on the cross, this would have been a powerful and meaningful realisation. After two thousand years of God dealing exclusively with Abraham and his descendants as his people, he has abruptly thrown open the doors to the Kingdom to all people. That’s pretty amazing!

But for us, I must confess, it lacks the same sense of massive change. Why? Because we live two thousand years away from this event. The church, the new people of God, has been in existence for as long now as the people of Abraham had been at the time Paul wrote. For us, salvation history is equally divided into the era when God dealt only with the Jews, when Gentiles were aliens and outsiders, and the era of the church, when all people have been united in the cross through the work of the Holy Spirit.

It is, therefore, understandably hard to share Paul’s amazement. However, this same dynamic of separation between holy people and condemned people is constantly repeating itself. Throughout the church’s history we have constantly erected barriers against acceptance into the Kingdom where none should exist. The barrier Paul talks about in Ephesians is, of course, circumcision: a physical ritual performed on eight day old baby boys (or much older male converts). The Judaizers were claiming it was still required in order to join with Christ in the Kingdom. Paul rejects this idea, not because he is anti-ritual or because he thinks the Jews never knew God, but because he knows that any time a ritual is needed to enter the kingdom, the effectiveness of Christ’s blood and the power of the Holy Spirit are banished. As Paul says,

Ephesians 2:14–16 NLT

14 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. 15 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. 16 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.

You see, it was never Jewish blood or circumcision that reconciled people with God. It was always Jesus’ death on the cross. And in the age of the church, we can look back at Jesus’ death in history, we don’t need to enact the signs of circumcision or animal sacrifice to point us towards this reality, we can simply explore the historical reality itself. Signs are rituals become barriers, not aids to understanding.

And yet, despite this, people still add barriers between the people of God. Like what, you might ask.

Modern barriers between the people of God

On our way up to Charters Towers we heard an indigenous Uniting Church minister from Victoria on the radio talking about how Aboriginal people needed to integrate their dreaming (their holistic and thus spiritual understanding of reality) with their Christianity. And when he said this, he didn’t mean that their dreaming needed to fit into God’s Word. That would mean that God’s word revealed the true nature of the world. Rather he said that their dreaming got to say how God’s word applied to them. He demonstrated this with a short Bible Study on how to understand Jesus’ encounter with the Cannanite woman from the perspective of a victim of colonisation. Let’s just say that it revealed a very low view of Jesus as, not just a mere man, but a rather bigoted mere man, at that.

Now there is an important distinction to make here. There is nothing wrong with bringing our culture into our Christianity. This minister didn’t need to leave behind his stories, his language, his connection to land, or the priority his culture places on community. But when an aspect of any culture tries to usurp the authority of God’s Word, whether it be via a hermeneutic, that is, a way of interpreting the Bible, or a simple denial of Biblical truths, then our faith has been compromised.

Jesus puts it this way:

Luke 14:26 NLT

26 “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple.

This is hyperbole, of course, and its meaning is simple: nothing must be allowed to compete in our affections with our Lord Jesus! Not even our closest blood! Nothing!

Now, the truth is, we can hardly blame Aboriginal Christians for pushing back against Australian Christianity. When British missionaries started ministering to the Australian Aboriginals, instead of thinking long and hard about how to contextualise the Gospel in a way that would foster the good in Aboriginal culture and draw them into the Kingdom of God as joint heirs of Christ, those missionaries simply tried to make British citizens out of them. As if British culture is the culture of heaven! Our grog and greed is hardly the stuff of heaven, is it? Our ideas of land ownership, private or public enterprise, individualism, the use of nature, and so on were all thoughtlessly bundled in with the Gospel. Sure, many of those ideas have Biblical foundations, but are they really the only way to love God and our neighbour in this world? I think not! But for so long we insisted that they were, and we built an enormous barrier to the gospel that Australian Aboriginals are still struggling to scale.

We cannot allow these barriers to be erected! For they separate us from Christ, but also from one another.

We have built the same barrier within our own culture! When I was very young there were still the remnants of foolish barriers in the Methodist church, such as: no dancing, no playing cards, no going to the movies, no drinking! The Bible forbids none of this, these are merely human laws that separate us from Christ and one another. That’s not to say that you should spend all your time drinking, dancing and playing cards at the movies! No, but if you choose to do or not do any of these things it should only be because that is Christ’s will for your life, not because it’s necessary for your salvation. Jesus has already died for you, he can’t love you or save you any more than that!

Sure, there are commands that Jesus gives us, which we should obey out of our love for him. But never let us think that our obedience wins us any greater position! In fact, it simply expresses our deeper love.

What this means

We are all brought to God through the work of Jesus on the cross. That reality sets us free. It sets us free from the pressure to perform. It sets us free from the pressure to compare ourselves to others, or others to ourselves. It sets us free from the need to justify the good things that God has blessed us with. I am grateful for my heritage as a British settler of Australia. And I would expect my Indigenous brothers and sisters to be grateful for their heritage as much earlier settlers of this continent. And the cross sets us free from the wickedness and rebellion against God that suffuses every human culture. Our cultures no longer enslave us. We are Christ’s slaves. We are free to draw on the good resources that our histories provide us without being trapped by the many evils they contain. We are more than conquerors in Christ.

Because of this reality, the church is the one place where multiculturalism can function. Why? Because:

Ephesians 2:19–22 NLT

19 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. 20 Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. 21 We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. 22 Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.

We are all equally members of God’s family. Our cultures give us rich diversity rather than bitter division. God has reversed the bitter divisions of the tower of Babel in the blood of Jesus.

Because the Church is a community of people who have been transformed, renewed, born again through the Spirit of Christ, we are not defined by what we do or what we were. And so we are free to love one another in the midst of our diversity. We are unthreatened by our differences because what we share in common is so much greater.

Remember how I said that Japanese always considered a foreigner to not be Japanese? Well, despite this, there is a way to become a Japanese citizen. The final step in this labourious and lengthy process is to revoke any existing citizenship and to change your name to a Japanised name. You needed to give up your identity as a foreigner in order to become a Japanese citizen.

The same is true for the Kingdom of Heaven. We must give up our worldly citizenship in order to become a citizen of heaven.

There are so many implications to this that we don’t think of. For example, Mable and I will be husband and wife for mere decades, but because we are citizens of heaven, we will be brother and sister for eternity. Which relationship is more significant? I can be Atalia’s father for decades, but her brother for eternity. Which relationship is more significant? I can be a CEO for decades but a servant of Christ for eternity. Which role is more significant?

How does all this affect how I live my life? How should it affect my life?

Surely our greatest purpose is not to be the best dad, or husband or boss or employee or house owner, etc., but rather to be “carefully joined together in Christ, becoming a holy temple for the Lord, where God lives by his Spirit.”

In a time when many are falling away from the church, disinterested in loving one another, unconcerned for the body of Christ, thanks to the distancing effects of pandemic responses, it is shocking to remember this: The church, the body of Christ, the temple of God, the united people of God, is the most important thing in this world! It is, we are, God’s light to this dark world. Let us love God and one another with such single-minded devotion that the world can’t look away!