When did I ask for a house?
The Readings for Proper 11 (16) Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary
2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:11-22
Matthew 5:14-19 (from the Eastern Rite for today)
For he 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. He 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.
OW I’VE Heard tell of how some Christian commentators read this passage to mean that God has abolished the Jewish Law (which God said would never pass away – and which Jesus said he would fulfill, but not destroy). There are other Christians in Paul’s time, just as today, who insisted that all Christians, Jewish and Gentile, must follow some or all of the Jewish Law. Paul, himself, might have waffled at times, but seems to have settled on the idea that Jews should obey the Jewish laws such as they had been doing while Gentiles should not be made to take on any other observances. The disagreement in this regard was one of the main issues in the early Church. Christians, from Paul’s time at least as late as the 4th century, didn’t feel that way. They wrestled with how to treat the Jewish traditions they picked up but no one thought they were to be totally done away with.
So if they do not mean the total destruction of the Jewish tradition we’ve inherited, then what do these verses mean?
Paul is speaking something very radical here in Ephesians. While other passages of this book have been read by various political and “culture war” sorts (of all sides) to harmful ends, this passage dictates one of the most radical, earth shaking things offered, and the most hopeful. It’s holds it’s parallel in another passage of Paul which I’ll come to in a minute, and it has, by a careful read, ideological antecedents in the passages from Samuel & Jeremiah we heard today. And all of this to bring it to the Gospel, I promise.
There were, in the time of Jesus and Paul, a group of Gentiles known in Hebrew as “Gerim”, the Righteous Gentiles, sometimes translated as “Proselytes”. These were Gentiles who had foregone idolatry and were actively worshipping, by their own lights, the God of Israel. They had an allotted but separate place to stand in the synagogue and in the temple. There was a wall or screen – the “Wall of partition”, of division – between Jews and Gentiles in these places of worship. If you read about them in the Book of Acts, even through they might make donations to build a local synagogue, they did not enjoy fellowship with Jews, persons born Jewish. There was no (or very little) table fellowship here.
Even Jesus seems to have, mostly, respected this division: I will not risk theological missteps here, I think, by saying that there was perceived to be a sort of ontological difference between Gentiles and, even, the most heretical or lapsed Jew. To go further than that would be to risk such missteps. But as several of my friends point out: Samaritans and Tax Collectors and even the Prostitutes cited in the NT stories are Jews. There are a few stories that might be read otherwise, but we have to reach for those readings.
So Paul seems to be saying something that even Jesus didn’t: the allotted place in the Jewish World for the division between Jews and Gentiles is no more. For Paul and many of his readers this division was a primary part of reality. This division defines where you can shop, where you can eat, where you can sleep. It marks not a line in the sand, but rather one carved in marble: Jews and Gentiles may travel this far towards each other and no further.
But, reasons Paul, if Jesus is the unification between God and Man then he must also be the unification between Jews and Gentiles. IN his person, Jesus has broken down that wall.
Now, even though there are no stories of Jesus fellowshipping with Gentiles in the texts that we have, I proffer that the absence of those stories does not mean it didn’t happen. Otherwise Paul seems to make a huge theological leap here.
How does that come to us, today?
Backwards in time, now. God speaking to David through the Prophet Nathan. God asks, “Who are you to build a house for me? I’ll build a house for you!” Some can see that as David’s “long house” – his tomb. Others have seen it as a prophecy that Solomon, not David, would build the temple. But Solomon’s throne didn’t last for ever. The throne that lasts forever is Messiah’s. Paul says that in Jesus, God has finally torn down the Temple he never wanted and built one people, one “household of God built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
It’s not the Temple in Jerusalem – or even the individual human heart – but rather this humanity united in Jesus, neither Jew nor Gentile, but both, that is 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.
This united humanity is becoming the Temple of God.
God says, “Are you the one to build me a house?”
Cardinal Newman said, “Our Lord expressly said that the Church was to be like a net, which gathered of every kind, not only of the good, but of the bad too. Such was His Church; it does not prove then that we are not His Church, because we are like His Church… We cannot make His Church better than He made her.”
But we want to build our houses very small, I think. We like partitions. We like divisions. We like to know we have the pure ones in the house… with the impure outside.
How do we define impure?
I’ve been having this discussion on my blog right now. As a gay man in a partnered relationship, how do I stand in relation to those who would rather I not be in the Church?
Paul’s statement that Jesus has, in his body, broken down the wall of division does NOT mean that the Church was ready willing or able to make that transition. In fact, I think they failed 2000 years ago and we’re still living with that failure today in a church that is nearly only gentile with no Jewish roots at all.
As clergy in a church body committed to the inclusion at all levels of gay men and lesbians, how do I react to the God who calls everyone to his table – even those who might disagree with me on this stance?
In the Eastern Rite, today is the commemoration of the Fathers of the first 6 Ecumenical councils. The hymnody for today celebrates some of these divisions:
Glorious Fathers, you overthrew Pyrrhus and Sergios, with Honorius, Eftyches, Dioskoros and dread Nestorios, saving Christ’s flock from both sheer cliffs by radiantly proclaiming Christ one by hypostasis, but double in natures, revealed by energies alone; as we also worship him as man and perfect God, with the Father and the Spirit, we now glorify you.
And again:
You became strict defenders of the apostolic traditions, Holy Fathers, for correctly teaching that the Holy Trinity was consubstantial, you overthrew in council the blasphemy of Arius. After him you also refuted Makedonios, the opponent of the Spirit, you condemned Nestorios, Eftyches and Dioskoros, Sabellios and the Leaderless Severos. Ask that we, de livered from their error, may preserve our life unspotted in the faith, we beg.
Strangely I bet few of us here (including me) can name the heresies here that make all of these men condemned. And, centuries later, we’re beginning to realise that at least one (Nestorios) wasn’t as “Dread” as the hymnography makes him. And he was, ultimately, just someone more afraid of change than his compatriots. His own hesitation at using new titles for the Mother of God caused him to miss the boat. This division (between those called the “Nestorian” churches and the “Orthodox” and Roman churches is now being healed).
Why do we think we can make his Church better than he, himself, set out to do? how are we to build God a house?
Today the divisions about sex, about ordination, about political issues, seem to all of us as dreadfully important as the issues of Arius, Makedonios, Nestorios, Eftyches… some even use the same words to describe the sexuality issues today.
How do we overcome the tendency of the past, the tribal, isolationist, violent vision of the institutional church (where Santa Claus is said to have punched out Arius) and come to the peaceful, loving diverse Kingdom God calls us to?
Who are we to think we can build God a house better than he wanted?
