Almost everywhere I looked while preparing this sermon I found a reference to Robert Frost’s wonderful poem, “Mending Wall.” He begins it with the famous line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The poem then goes on to tell of two neighbors who meet at the wall between their two properties to repair it, to replace fallen stones and repair any other damage that might have occurred since the previous spring. They’ve done it for many years, but this time one asks the other why they have the wall in the first place.
"And on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each,
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls we have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We wear our fingers tough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, one on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it where there are cows?”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense."
Why do we need walls? Are they always bad? Is breaking down a wall always good?
How many of you remember – back in 1989 - when the Berlin Wall came down? What rejoicing there was! It had been built by the Soviets back in 1961 because the Germans caught by the luck of the draw in the Russian sector were leaving by the droves to live under American, or French, or British rule instead. The wall had divided families for generations, and many who tried to cross it died for their pains. It was built to keep people in.
Another wall was in the news a few years ago, the wall the Israelis built between Palestinian and Israeli areas. Palestinians thought it was a bad thing, Israelis thought it was - if not a good thing, at least a necessary thing. This wall was being built to keep people like suicide bombers out. And the continued hostilities between the two tend to support the Israeli position.
There was a wall in Jerusalem when Paul wrote this letter to the church in Ephesus. Actually, it was within the temple itself. The outer court, the Court of the Gentiles, was open to everyone, but the most important part of the temple, the Court of the Israelites, was separated from it with a wall with signs posted on it in Latin and Greek, warning the Gentiles not to come in under penalty of death.
Why did they do this? Pretty obviously, it wasn’t there to keep the Jews from escaping to the Gentile parts of town. And it wasn’t there to keep the Gentiles from blowing up the building, either. But it was there for protection. It was there to protect the Jewish way of life.
You see, from the time Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the Israelites had been required to observe a lot of pretty complicated rules in order to come near to God, and their access to God was the most important thing in their lives. You’ve all heard the stories of how upset the Pharisees got when Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, because that was considered work, which wasn’t permitted. But that’s not all. There were over 600 separate regulations Jews had to observe to come into God’s presence, and obviously Gentiles weren’t following the rules. They didn’t even know most of them! And so it wasn’t just prejudice, or mean-spiritedness that kept the walls up, it was to protect their special relationship with God. So we don’t want to be too hard on them, even though the rules almost got Paul killed when the crowd accused him of bringing a Gentile into the temple.
All walls are built to create boundaries of one sort or another. Sometimes it’s for good reasons - like keeping people safe, from weather or from robbery or from armies - or for clarity, so that people can live up to agreements they have made. Any psychiatrist or therapist can tell you that healthy boundaries are good. In fact, they’re absolutely essential for good relationships. But healthy boundaries are always porous. That is, you can move from one side of the boundary to another, with permission, for good reasons. People who have been wounded often have damaged boundaries: sometimes they have none at all and they get into what are called co-dependent relationships, and sometimes the walls are so high that they can’t develop relationships at all.
The Jews of Paul’s day were extra touchy about their boundaries because they’d been religiously abused over the previous few centuries by - in turn - Samaritans, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Idumeans, and now Romans, as each empire in turn fought for dominance over this vastly important land bridge between the Mediterranean and African and Asian worlds. They were scared: not only of losing their access to God, but of their very identity as a people. And so the wall in the temple was duplicated in the culture itself, with most Jews refusing to so much as drink water from the same cup as a Gentile.
So when Paul tried to convince the Jews that it was time their wall came down, it was very hard for them to swallow. When you’ve spent your entire life believing that another group of people is not only inferior, but actually unclean, it takes more than a ribbon-cutting ceremony to change things.
How did Jesus do it? What is it about Jesus that made it possible for Jews and Gentiles to not only eat together, but to worship together and maybe even see their sons and daughters marry each other? How does following Jesus change the way we relate to one another?
There are two answers to that question.
The first answer has to do with our relationship with God. You see, the Jews believed that there was only one way to get into God’s presence, and that was by being an observant Jew, starting with circumcision and then going on to keep all of the laws. They weren’t about to give up their access to God just to develop relationships with people they didn’t much like anyway. But Jesus changed all that. The book of Hebrews was written in part to explain how that works, how it is that Jesus’ death and resurrection made it possible for non-Jews to enter the Presence of the Almighty.
But we already know that, don’t we? We’re in a culture which has been largely Christian for 2000 years. So how is this relevant to us? We know that all Christians have equal access to God. At least our Book of Order used to say so. But that hasn’t kept us from fighting with each other – sometimes literally. The worst conflicts since the first few centuries have been between Catholics and Protestants, but even now you can find Protestants who won’t darken the door of another denomination. Especially one that has split from the majority one, whether they’re Baptists or Methodists or Lutherans or Episcopalians or even - gasp – Presbyterians!
Unfortunately, many people have a bad habit of judging whether or not someone is really a Christian by the wrong set of standards. I’m glad that in this house it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing jeans or a suit and tie. I think we could even handle tattoos and piercing and purple hair. But that’s just externals. I’m pretty sure we all understand that this is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints.
But the second answer to the question “How does following Jesus change the way we relate to one another?” is a little more complicated. Because it has to do with how our changed relationship to God affects the way we see pretty much everything, but especially other people.
Look again at all the different kinds of walls we build. Almost all of them are about fear, and about power. The Berlin wall was built because the Russians were afraid of losing their power. Israel built its wall to protect themselves from Palestinians trying to regain their power.
The difference that it makes to come into a relationship with Jesus Christ is that the only person with real power over a Christian is Jesus Christ. There is no reason for one Christian to fear another, and no Christian should ever seek to get power over an-other. And yet denominations fight and split and badmouth one another all the time. Why is that?
Think about it. The only reason for the violin to be in conflict with the French horn in an orchestra is if they don’t trust the director. If Jesus is in charge, and we’re all listening to him and doing what he says, why can’t we trust him to put the pieces together so that it works? Paul explains the unbreakable unity of Christ’s body most explicitly in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ….Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.” [1 Cor 12:12, 15]
“Body of Christ” not the only metaphor used to describe God’s people. Peter calls us a royal priesthood. Paul described us variously as both a field and a building. Jesus himself quoted Psalm 118 when he told his followers that his church is built on "the cornerstone that the earlier builders rejected," who is Jesus Christ himself. But from the very beginning we fallible, quarreling, self-centered humans have had trouble seeing beyond our own limited vision of what God’s dwelling place should look like. The many mansions were just for us, not for those other, inferior people. “They should all look like me,” is usually the subtext. But God builds with materials that we might overlook or even throw away. And can you imagine arguing whether the wall-paper room is better than the paneled one, or the painted one, or the brick one? Or the roof boasting that it’s better than the window? Just being part of the house ought to be honor enough! And the builder Himself is the only one who knows how many rooms he needs, and how they should be furnished.
As every home owner knows, buying the house is only the beginning. You then have to maintain it. If there is a leak in the roof, or a window gets broken, you fix it or find someone who can; you don’t shrug and say, that’s someone else’s business. Making sure God’s building is in good repair is our job. We may even have to remodel. Sometimes we need to move, or even remove, walls of distance and ignorance, or of habit and prejudice.
In God’s family there are no “strangers and aliens,” as Paul puts it, but only brothers and sisters we haven’t yet met. We may not have met the Nigerian Christian watching his church burn, but we are one with him in trusting God to build anew from the ashes. Every time a Sudanese Christian is sold into slavery, every time a Chinese Christian is hauled off to prison camp to make Christmas lights for the export market, every time a Pakistani Christian is beaten up or imprisoned for preferring Jesus to Mohammed, a cold wind blows through the house of God.
But accepting the fascinating and exotic stranger is easier than loving the estranged family member. When the PCUSA split a few years ago, the hostility between the divorcing parties often got very ugly. And it is equally unbecoming for a Baptist to dismiss a Catholic, or a Lutheran to criticize a Pentecostal, or – you pick your own example. This is self-destructive, if not suicidal. We are all one building. We do not have the power to declare ourselves separate since there is only one Jesus, and he has only one body, and only one house. And we are it. We are
"…citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Je-sus himself as the cornerstone. 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." [v. 19-22]
The whole building is both us and ours. There are many rooms in this mansion, but there is only one building. Let us make sure that whatever walls we build are not sound-proofed, to keep us from noticing one another’s presence, but load-bearing walls, to hold each other up in the storms.
