Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tatou, katoa
Our history and biblical history show us that as soon as we are separated from God in his fullness, a hostility of sorts enters in. Think of this, the first family act after Adam and Eve leave the Garden fratricide happens – a brother kills his brother in an act of anger against God and his sibling.
So how can we reconcile our history? Is it possible to comes to terms with centuries of hate, centuries of injustice and centuries of hostility? Well if you look at the story that history is telling us, if you look at the horrors of the genocides of last Century, not only the deaths of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled by the Nazi regime in WW2, but also genocides in Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, Rwanda, the Congo and Darfur, history is telling us that reconciliation cannot occur through our works. History is telling us that it must occur by the means of something else – grace enters in.
The answer to the horrors of hostility is in the Bible. In the Bible, we learn how we have created walls of hostility between us. In the Bible, we learn how God desires true reconciliation and unity. This can only happen through covenant relationship with God. So, before we jump into Ephesians fully let us back track in the great Biblical narrative of covenant, or promise, relationships. One of the first covenants we learn about in the Bible is that between Abram and God. In Genesis 12: 1-3
The LORD said to Abram: Leave your country, your family, and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you. I will bless you and make your descendants into a great nation. You will become famous and be a blessing to others. I will bless anyone who blesses you, but I will put a curse on anyone who puts a curse on you. Everyone on earth will be blessed because of you. (Gen 12:1-3 CEV)
We see here one man being given both a terrifying challenge and an amazing promise. Leave what you are familiar with, go into foreign places and I will bless you and through you I will bless the entire earth. However, even before Abram sees his life out, a massive division will occur in his own family which would see the beginnings of two great nations who share a story of conflict, division and hostility which continues to this day.
You see in Genesis 15 Abram is growing old and has no children. So, the earlier promise of a great nation to Abraham is just not going to happen. God then reaffirms his promise. Then in Chapter 16, Abram’s wife Sarai doubting that the promise will come through her, has Abram lie with their servant, Hager and they have a son Ishmael, many of the Arab nations today claim a whakapapa to Ishmael. Abram and Sarah would late have Isaac. The nation of Israel has a whakapapa directly to Isaac. These two nations were born in a divided house. The hostility between Arab and Jew continues to today.
Later, God would make a further Covenant with Moses which you can read about in Exodus and Deuteronomy. This Covenant which involved laws and commandments would enable the Covenant made between Abram and God to be fulfilled. Israel would become a great nation and would bless the nations around it because it would be set apart and an example of God’s desire for a relationship with all people.
But this didn’t happen. Israel struggled to keep its part of the Covenant deal and it fell further and further away from God. By the time Jesus was born, out of the twelve tribes, only three really identified as being a part of Israel and within this Israel was broken into fractions with the Sadducees claiming authority through the priesthood, the Pharisees claiming the authority through the law, and the Essenes claiming authority through a yet-to-come messiah. Israel saw itself as the chosen people, all others, called the gentiles, were outsiders. And given that Israel itself was colonised by Rome and was, in itself, an outsider, the Jewish people held onto their identity even further by claiming its God-chosen status and hoping that the forces who oppressed them would be killed by their God.
The racial hostility that existed at the time was so strong that on the Temple grounds a physical stone wall separated the Court of the Gentiles from the Temple Proper. Now this was in the original design. Gentiles were confined to the outer courts; Jewish women could enter but not into the temple proper. But what was not in the original design but has been found both in historical records and archaeological research was the inscription the Jewish people put on the wall to enforce the separation between God’s chosen Israelites and the Gentiles.
Francis Foulkes notes in his commentary that these words physically “forbade any foreigner to go in, under pain of death.”
And this really plays out in the story of Paul and the Ephesians when we read in Acts how Paul was arrested because he was suspected of bringing a Gentile, an Ephesian, into the Temple proper.
When the period of seven days for the ceremony was almost over, some of the Jewish people from Asia saw Paul in the temple. They got a large crowd together and started attacking him. They were shouting, "Friends, help us! This man goes around everywhere, saying bad things about our nation and about the Law of Moses and about this temple. He has even brought shame to this holy temple by bringing in Gentiles." Some of them thought that Paul had brought Trophimus from Ephesus into the temple, because they had seen them together in the city. The whole city was in an uproar, and the people turned into a mob. They grabbed Paul and dragged him out of the temple. Then suddenly the doors were shut. (Act 21:27-30 CEV)
Can you hear, can you feel, the racism and hostility to the Ephesian Gentiles here? Let us face it. If we understand the Jewish people and the Gentile people as separate races (which they were), there was real hostility going on at the time Paul was sharing the gospel with the Gentiles. Not only did the Jewish people experience racism but they used their privilege as God’s chosen nation to inflict judgement and racism on others. God had made a Covenant with them that should have enabled them to demonstrate to the world that God desired a relationship of peace with all people. But this was something that they couldn’t achieve through their works alone. They/We needed a Godly intervention. If we come to Ephesians, especially Ephesians chapter 2 verses 11-22 with this kind lengthy background story, and we hold that story in our heart with not just knowledge but an understanding that our history is not one of unity but conflict, injustice and disunity, then we just might understand what Paul was impressing on the Ephesian church:
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those who call themselves "the circumcision" (that done in the body by the hands of men)--remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.
His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Eph 2:11-22 NIV)
Now let’s be frank. Most of us in this room, would probably whakapapa back to the Gentile races. Now, think, what it would have been like back then. Most of us would have been the exception, not the norm of this new gospel story. And in these early days, like these verses refer to, the new gospel story was part of the larger Covenant story we talked about.
For the Ephesian church back then, Paul is clearly telling them – remember how it felt. Remember how it felt to be excluded from the promise. Remember how it felt to be labelled and treated as an outsider to the promise. Remember how it felt to held at a distance. Remember what it felt to see those words physically on the wall in the Court of the Gentiles telling you – come any closer to the Holy of Holies and we will kill you. Paul is a man of knowledge and understanding. It is no mistake that he actually refers to a “dividing wall of hostility”. It existed. It was real.
To cut to the core, Paul is telling his Gentile audience, remember what it felt like to be born into the wrong family. Simply because of your birth, you were excluded; you were not born into the privileges and opportunities given to the Jewish people as God’s Chosen People. You, my friend, were born at a distance from this privilege.
And even in the hard times, and Israel had its fair share of hard times, Israel could always live in hope. They were the nation in which God had promised a messiah would arise from. For the bulk of us here, for us Gentiles, we were not born into this promise. We were “foreigners to the covenants of promise.”
And those of us here in retrospect know the greater story. But I don’t know if we live it. And if we take ourselves back to the time of this letter, we just might understand the deepness of this message. We would have known that there would be no way for us to be as one with the people of Israel, not by their efforts nor by our own. We would know that our differences define us, and we would be caught up in the power play of power which we seen throughout human history.
And here is where Paul comes in – the great leveller is not the actions of ourselves but the sacrifice of Jesus. His blood makes it possible for both Jew and Gentile to come near to God. And the crazy thing that happens in this, is that as we become near to God, we become near to each other. The previous covenants found their fulfilment in the sacrifice of Jesus; in his blood spilled out for us. The divisions that existed between us would not be resolved through any action but God’s grace.
In this story, Jesus is the ultimate reconciliation between our differences. He is our Prince of Peace. This whole passage is about reconciliation. Reconciliation first to our Creator through his Son and then with each other. In this act we become a living organism of diversity. Each of us plays a different part but we are together, and we are strong. In this space, God’s Spirit can dwell. And where God’s Spirit dwells his glory covers the surface.
This is about community. The concept of God’s spirit dwelling in us is not about a personal relationship with God. It is about our relationship with each other and how we reconcile ourselves together with the Father through the Cross. When we do this together, then God ‘s Spirit can and will dwell within us.
But I think, no I know, that we could be doing this better. There are two ways I could do this. One way would be to challenge us with judgement-based questions – questions that look at who we exclude and include. The rules and the practices that we put on ourselves as Wainuiomata Baptist Church which keep most of us together but also exclude others.
The second way is to actually speak to the hearts of individuals here. Church we cannot have an impact on our community, in a community that experiences divisions of the highest, without first having an impact here in this space – in the dwelling of God’s people. Remember that together we are that dwelling, the church is us together as one (not as individuals and not the building that we occupy).
All of us come with stories, with histories; all of us here have experienced those words of exclusion written on a physical or spiritual wall which has created a distance between us and the cross. So, if the basic principle of Ephesians 2:11-22 is that the sacrifice of Jesus has removed that distance and if we are reconciled with Christ. Then the next step is to reconcile with each other.
History is full of walls of hostility – both visual and non-visual. All of these walls, walls of brick, walls of words and walls of hurt have driven divisions between us all.
Slide show stopping on te Tiriti
You know I wrote this sermon on February the 6th. This is the day that we remember Te Tiriti. The story of the Treaty is deeply tied up in our Church History. It was the missionaries that wrote the original treaty – in both translations. It was the missionaries that translated, and mistranslated, the document and it was the missionaries that persuaded the Maori people to sign. The chiefs that signed did because they saw the Treaty as promising something completely new. For the chiefs, the Treaty was a promise of protection written in the form of a Biblical Covenant. It promised one thing, unity. That yes, Maori would retain their rights, but they would share the same access to the protection from the sovereign of England as the English settlers had. It was a Biblical promise of unity. It broke down a wall of potential hostility and enabled partnerships. And it saddens me deeply that this has not resulted, instead we do have a divide in our church between te Ao Pakeha and te Ao Māori – the Pakeha and Māori world.
It makes we wonder; most people would argue that the church has moved culturally from being an institution reflective of eastern culture to one that is westernised and has shifted with western culture of the centuries. Most of you here would have noticed that as we work our way through Ephesians, each preaching person has reminded you that the word ‘you’ in Greek is plural – it does not refer to the individual – but to the household, the community and the people. So, I wonder whether we have the lost something in the gospel story and the metaphors that we use to share the gospel. Let me give you an example:
The metaphor that is often used to talk about God’s love and the cross is the concept of a bridge. We were separated from God and trapped in death and God’s sacrifice enabled us to have eternal life. All of this is true, but it is missing some of the story. It also shows our relationship with God as an individual one. Of individuals, not households or communities, coming to repentance and reconciling not just with God but with each other; hear that, ‘with each other’. And this is the story of Ephesians. The walls of hostility between us come down – we can all draw near to God and become one with him. But this requires us to see the Gospel is more than a story of me and God, it is about seeing a story of reconciliation between ourselves as a divided creation of God. A divided humanity that God, our Father, wants to bring closer both to him and to each other.
So, I want to suggest that a different metaphor – a metaphor that acknowledges our separateness but also our reconciliation is a powhiri – a cultural welcoming. You see, in both a powhiri and a reconciliation with the Father, we have to gather together and recognised ourselves as manuhiri (outsiders, alien to God), we then have to be prepared to accept the wero (the challenge) and the karanga (the call) of the spirit to come in peace and be one with the people of the marae, in our case the father. We have to accept that just as in a powhiri, a karanga, or call, is a spiritual call, it is a spiritual call to ourselves.
Once we have entered into the house of our father as manuhiri (outsiders) we have to be prepared to respond and to give ourselves together to him as an act of koha (giving) acknowledging that the act of welcoming us is one of grace and mercy; our gift of ourselves does not match the grace and mercy of the Father. We then have to be prepared to hongi, to breathe the life of the father into ourselves and become one with him. We have to be prepared to hongi with each other. To hongi is to not only share the breath, but to share the lifeforce and become one with each other.
Tihei – Mauri Ora – for the breath is the substance of the spirit; the breathe is the substance of life.
Christ’s death of the cross is the act that brings peace to both parties. It enables the wall to be broken down and for mauihiri to be tangata whenua. People of God’s house and God’s nation. For just as in the Kingdom. It is recognised in te Ao Māori, that the marae is not a building but the living parts of its body – it’s people who are one with each other.
A powhiri is a process to enable people to be no longer foreigners and aliens to a space and place. A powhiri is a process that enables everyone to be as one, to be members of one household and citizens of on nation. A powhiri joins us to the spiritual marae or temple that is being built in Christ Jesus. With him as the stone – the first word, the first call, the first karanga that called us back into relationship. When we are joined together then God’s Spirit can dwell.
And what brings us finally together in a powhiri is the breaking of bread. So just as Christ broke bread with his disciples just over 1000 years ago. We will join with the disciples and the prophets and break bread together now.
Communion
No rei ra, Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tatou, katoa
