Sermon on Ephesians 2:11-22

The 8^th Sunday after Pentecost | 18 July 2021 | A Sermon on Ephesians 2:11-22 | by Samuel Zumwalt | 

Ephesians 2:11-22 © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers]

 

¹¹ Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— ¹² remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ¹³ But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility ¹⁵ by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, ¹⁶ and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. ¹⁷ And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸ For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹ So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, ²⁰ built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, ²¹ in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. ²² In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

 

THE WORD OF GOD: JOINS TOGETHER

 

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

I’m going out on a limb here by saying I bet that, on August 22, not a lot of preachers will take on the Ephesians 5 text that begins “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord….” The best excuse will be that we have five weeks of texts on Jesus the Bread of Life in John 6 that are just too rich to pass up. Others will say, “Well, that’s not even in our lectionary, because, you know, Paul and women….” But I suspect that a lot of us preachers are cowards when it comes to challenging texts that might possibly disturb the zeitgeist despite our delusions of grandeur about being prophetic, which is usually an occasion to beat up conservatives with the “love” of God.

 

Today’s epistle lesson takes me back to my teenaged years and a favorite anthem for “Youth Sunday,” you know, that Sunday congregations put their youth front and center for one weekend each year. So, what’s the name of that song? If you’re over sixty, you know it was “Get Together” by Jesse Colin Young (born Perry Miller) of the Youngbloods and written by Chet Powers (who went by Dino Valenti) of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. If you’re under 60, you were probably subjected to a summer road trip with your baby boomer parents or grandparents singing along to all their favorite songs while you ignored them. But I digress.

 

As hard as it is to believe (and not just for baby boomers), it’s not about us. We are not the center of all things despite having been taught that now for hundreds of years. Preachers are not umpires calling balls and strikes when it comes to the Word of God despite having been taught that by seminary professors with their own issues with God and the Church. Indeed, we are not in charge of faith, spiritual development, or enacting change despite our longing to be like God. We have nothing to offer God but our sin and our death, and we live in a time that celebrates both… as if the quest for power that drives even many Christians could lead anywhere else.

 

The antidote to sin and death is the cross of Jesus, where God’s Son in human flesh became the Lamb of God who shed His Blood to make peace with God the Father. The heart of the Christian faith is not the sovereignty of God. It is rather the death of God’s Son for sinners. Yes, God is a holy God in whose presence sin cannot abide. But the love of God in Christ Jesus is the down to earth move to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Doubtless the Church in Ephesus with their obsession with the identity politics of that day needed to hear that both Jews and Gentiles had more than a hostility problem with each other. God is hostile towards sin.

 

Because of sin, our age-old rebellion and not just an accidental fall, we are under God’s death verdict. That we make lousy gods is self-evident by the results of all our governmental, ecclesiastical, and personal do-it-yourself improvement projects. An old friend, who has been in recovery since 1981, used to say, “I roll out of bed on my knees every morning to remind myself who is God.” Or, as I like to say to the foolishly arrogant, “Being your own god only works if you can pull off living forever.” We die, because God hates sin. It was never God’s plan. And so our hostility towards those not like us comes from our being able to see our own brokenness in them. Those to whom we are hostile, or they to us, remind us that we are born in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.

 

Pelagius, that British monk on the losing end of a debate with Augustine about the efficacy of our own salvation projects, resides in every heart and mind that still holds out, like the hapless character Fredo Corleone in The Godfather Part II, for our own piece of the pie: “I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!” We keep attributing to ourselves something other than sin and death and keep insisting, like Pelagius, that we can cooperate with God in our own salvation. That’s what all the TV preachers tell us: “You can do it if only you say this little prayer and call this toll free number afterwards. Jesus died for you, but now it’s your move.” First, the cross, but, then, get busy cooperating or else.

 

So, the Jewish men in the Church of Ephesus could point to the mark of the covenant cut into their flesh and say, “I’m in, and you’re out,” to the Gentile men among them. And Paul reminds the Gentiles that, yes, they were once separated and strangers to the covenants of promise. But now they are not two but one in Christ, an argument he will return to in Ephesians 5 as he talks about Christian marriage. The scandal of the cross, yes, the scandal of particularity that the cross of God’s Son in human flesh proclaims is that neither circumcision or uncircumcision matters beyond death: Jew, Greek, male, female, slave, free, and all those other identities that we cling to in this life, finally, count for nothing before the judgment seat of Christ.

 

The Gospel is not according to Olson Johnson in Blazing Saddles, a movie written by African American comedian Richard Pryor and Jewish American comedian Mel Brooks about the stupidity of racial prejudice, a movie that could never be made in our humorless culture today: “We’ll give some land to the Blacks and the Chinese, but we don’t want the Irish.” When the response is, “No deal,” Johnson replies: “OK, everybody!”

 

So, if your gospel is the made-over Marxism of Critical Race Theory, you still think it’s all about your skin color and ethnicity and who is the oppressed and who the oppressor. And even if you wear a purple shirt with a clerical collar and teach and preach that stuff, you’ve so confused Law and Gospel, and spit on Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr. along the way, that you just don’t get what the death of God’s Son Jesus does. On the cross, the Lord Jesus takes His Father’s hostility to sin upon Himself in order to destroy that power of sin, death, and the devil to keep on dividing us. We won’t be saved, and the world won’t be saved, by putting on a tee shirt emblazoned, “Good White Person,” who has confessed “white supremacy.”

 

When the Lord Jesus returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, all the race hustlers like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan aren’t going to get a pass. Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah Jones, and Ibram Kendi aren’t going to get a pass either. Because if you preach a gospel of salvation by skin color and damnation by skin color, you don’t want or need God’s Son in human flesh to save you. And if you don’t need Jesus, then you will sadly get your way. There’s a place where hostility endlessly seethes. There’s weeping and gnashing of teeth there.

 

In Christ’s Church (and not this church, that church, or everywhere a church-church), Baptism into the Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection is the death of the old me and the old you. Skin color, ethnicity, language, sex, socioeconomic level, and all the other labels that create hostility between people and engender God’s hostility anew: none of those matters anymore when you are God’s child and no longer strangers and aliens in the household of God. So, nota bene: If you preach otherwise you are preaching hostility and begging God’s hostility towards you. Fuggedaboutit!

 

In both testaments, God is the Husband of His people. The Bible begins with a marriage and ends with a marriage. Despite our perennial temptation to take a large pair of scissors to the parts of the Bible we don’t like, you and I still aren’t the subject. We are not the center. We are not God, which means we are meant to get greatly uncomfortable when a holy God bumps up against us, who are, by nature, an unholy people. If we want peace with God and with each other, it can only come through the death of God’s Son Jesus and, uh oh, by our daily death with Him. There is a word that applies to a lot of wives and husbands who cannot stop trying to be in control of the other: Divorced. My dear wife used to tell her middle school confirmation girls, “Marriage is not a mission field.” She learned the hard way. Many of us have learned the hard way that we cannot save or change another. There is only one Savior. That’s not you or me!

 

Jesus, the Living Word of God, joins together those who were once far off and those who were certain they were near. He does that by dying the innocent death none of us can die, by letting His Father’s hostility to sin kill Him. Now, we the baptized are being built up by the Holy Spirit, working through Word and Sacraments, into a holy temple in the Lord, built for God’s own habitation. There is no need for a temple in Jerusalem, for the Blood of the Lamb has been shed once and for all, and there is forgiveness of sins in no other name than the name of Jesus.

 

This old world is passing away. Can’t you hear its loud death rattle? Sin and death will be no more. So what about you? Will you renounce the devil, his works, and his ways today? Will you confess the one true God, a community of persons within Himself, Father-Son-Holy Spirit, as your only hope today? Our hands are empty. Only Jesus can get us sinners together right now!

 

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

©Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA

 

 

The Word of God: Joins Together

 

Praying

 

“Look in mercy, O Lord, upon your family and pour out upon us the gifts of your grace, so that, aflame with faith, hope, and love, we may always watch and pray, and walk in the path of your commandments; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.” (The Daily Prayer of the Church, 617).

 

Listening

 

Ephesians 2:12 “remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated….”

 

St. John Chrysostom [Late 4^{th –} early 5^th century Patriarch of Constantinople, Turkey]: “Many are the evidences of God’s love of humanity. God has saved us through himself, and through himself in such a special way, remembering what we were when he saved us and to what point he has now brought us” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Ephesians, 136).

 

Ephesians 2:13 “… in Christ you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

 

Tertullian [Late 2^nd – early 3^rd century theologian in Carthage, Tunisia]: “They were once far off from the Christ of the Creator, from the way of the Israelites, from the covenants, from the hope of the promise, from God himself… the Gentiles now come close in Christ to the things that were once far off” (137).

 

Ephesians 2:14 “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one…”

 

St. John Chrysostom: “I think that the wall between them is common within both. It is the hostility proceeding within the flesh… The midwall was the enmity that God had both toward Jews and toward Greeks. But when the law came this enmity was not dissolved; rather it increased” (139).

 

Ephesians 2:16 “…reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”

 

St. Gregory [4^th century bishop of Nyssa, Turkey]: “Taking up the enmity that had come between us and God on account of sins… and becoming what we are, he joined the human to God again…” (140).

 

Ephesians 2:21 “…being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”

 

St. John Chrysostom: “See how he joins himself to us. Sometimes it is as if holding together and unifying the whole body from above. Sometimes it is as if joining the edifice from below, as if supporting the building with underpinnings and being its root” (143).

 

Ephesians 2:22 “… being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”

 

Marius Victorinus [4^th century African theologian]: “All souls made spiritual through Christ are joined and built up into a holy temple, where God dwells. As Christ is in all and God in Christ, all are a temple of God through Christ” (144).

 

Reflecting

 

1. Am I convinced that the only way to have peace with God and humans is through Jesus Christ?

 

Learning

Christian Questions with Their Answers [from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism]

 

After confession and instruction in the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the pastor may ask, or Christians may ask themselves these questions:

 

5. Do you hope to be saved?

 

Yes, that is my hope.

 

6. In whom then do you trust?

 

In my dear Lord Jesus Christ.

 

7. Who is Christ?

 

The Son of God, true God and man.

 

8. How many Gods are there?

 

Only one, but there are three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

Doing

 

1. Pray for every unbaptized child you know and for the child’s parents, too.

 

1. Pray for your unchurched loved ones and friends. Invite one or more of them to worship.

 

1. Discuss with your spouse, your family, or a friend the importance of and great need for self-examination before receiving the Sacrament of the Altar. If you have never considered making a private confession before a pastor, please do so… not for the pastor’s sake but for your own.

 

1. Set aside time daily, preferably first thing, but when you are able to focus, to hear the Word of God, to reflect upon that Word, and to ask the Holy Spirit to grant you grace to be shaped by and conformed to that Word. Daily Bible readings may be found at www.stmatthewsch.org. New Portals of Prayer devotional booklets are available in the narthex. Daily lectionary readings are on p.183 in the front of the Lutheran Book of Worship (Year One, Week of 8 Pentecost).

 

For Husbands and Wives

 

Repeat daily: “I (name) take you (name) to be my wedded wife (husband), to have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish until death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge you my faith.”