Sermons

---

Outside In
July 27, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Series on Ephesians
Ephesians 2:11-22

It’s good to be together this morning. The week before last, I spent the whole week over in Spokane at the Whitworth College Institute of Ministry. Fabulous time…listened to Eugene Peterson teach on the Bible each morning. Listened to Marva Dawn each day in the middle of the morning. And each night we worshipped together and the preacher was Craig Barnes, the former pastor at National Presbyterian in Washington DC. It was really good to be there.

But you know, you put 250 pastors in one place…it’s sort of weird. You get in these strange conversations over dinner like: “How do session meetings run at your church?” or “Did you hear we got new banners for our sanctuary?” I mean…it’s dinnertime!

There were lots of Seattle area pastors there, mainly Presbyterian, and I did get a lot of interesting questions about all of you! I don’t know what people talk about with Bethany, but it seems we have a reputation that is a little unusual. “Oh, you’re from BETHANY…I’ve heard about you!” One person even said, “Is it true some people raise their hands in worship?” Well…yes.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back with you. To be worshipping together, and to continue our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. You’ll remember that I gave you the outline of the book from Watchman Nee, a pastor from China who calls it “Sit, Walk, Stand.” He thought it was both an outline of the book and of the Christian life:

1. we sit and rest in Christ learning what He has done on our behalf
2. we walk in living life on earth with Christ;
3. we stand against evil.

This morning we continue to sit…being grounded in the work of Jesus, trying to soak in what has been done for us…and so Lynne preached last week on the foundational word of Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.”

Join me as we read Ephesians 2:11-22.

Once there was a man who built a wall. It was hard and painstaking work. Block by block, he built it…mixing mortar, spreading it, leveling, adjusting the plumb lines until the wall was quite high. When he finished, he smiled with satisfaction. “Now,” he thought, “I am safe and secure. I am protected from other people encroaching on my space or trying to get things out of me. I don’t have to deal with people who are strange, and do things differently than my people. I’m safe.” And he sat down on his side of the wall. And immediately…he began to wonder…what was on the other side.

The history of the world is full of walls. I stood on the Great Wall of China, built to keep enemies out. We’ve lived through The Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall. You’ve undoubtedly read recently in the newspaper…that Israel is constructing a new wall on the West Bank, between Israelis and Palestinians.

There are other kinds of walls as well. In Korea, there is a 2-mile-wide “Demilitarized Zone” between North and South Korea. On that border there are ONE MILLION troops ON EACH SIDE! (37,000 of them U.S.). It’s been that way for years.

There are walls around our gated communities…built to keep enemies out. And there are what I would call “people walls.” There are walls of economics, of race, of gender that are harder to spot but every bit as effective in keeping people out. We are amazingly comfortable with people who more or less look like we do, think like we do, act like we do. We are amazingly uncomfortable with those different.

Once there was a group of people who went to China. I was in that group, and so were eight of you. One night in Beijing, we slipped into cars and drove somewhere to the outskirts of town, and quietly got out of the cars in the pitch black and were whisked inside an old building, and taken down hallways into the inside to meet with Chinese Christians. There was an uneasy tension on our side. These people didn’t look like us, didn’t act like us, didn’t speak our language. There are walls outside of us…and there are walls inside of us. The world is full of walls. I wonder what is on the other side of them.

Walls really just have one purpose, don’t they? To keep people apart.

In Paul’s day, when the Christian faith was brand new and fresh, when the personal remembrances of Jesus’ presence on earth still lingered…there were walls. God’s chosen people, the Jews, pretty much saw the world as broken into two groups: US…and THEM. The JEWS…and everybody else, the GENTILES. Those who lived within the community of faith…and all the rest, strangers and aliens. The Insiders and the Outsiders.

And the Outsiders: Lord have mercy.

Paul tells us what they once were: “without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”

William Hendricksen put it far more concisely: they were “Christless, stateless, friendless, hopeless and Godless.” They were FAR OFF.

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem accentuated this. The courtyards that ringed the main temple were only for certain people…but they were on the same level as the temple: the court for the priests, the court for the men of Israel, the court for the women of Israel. From there, you could walk down five steps, and there was a wall, and then walk down 14 steps and there was the Court of the Gentiles. If you were not Jewish, even if you were a believer in God…you stayed there. Outside, looking in. And if, by some chance, you forgot, you could just read the sign on the WALL: “Trespassers will be executed.” FAR OFF. We…were far off.

And what Paul wants to claim is this: The world is not broken down into just Jew and Gentile. Through the cross of Christ, there is a third answer: Christian.

“In his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

“He created in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace…through the cross.”

In his death and resurrection, Jesus did this: “He came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off AND those who were near.”

The interesting thing is that this is NOT just theology that Jesus taught, it is what He lived. Jesus came along and turned it all upside down, inside out. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God ( in words and his life) shocked the people in his day. Why?

1. Because those who were NEAR, who thought they knew God, were challenged to consider…that they too might have become a long way off.
2. Jesus set about…bringing the OUTsiders…IN.

I’ve been struck by these things as our Men’s and Women’s groups have studied in John this month. Four “Encounters with Jesus.”

In the first, Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, comes and finds out he is not as near the kingdom as he thought.

In the second, Jesus talks with the Samaritan (read that “outsider”) woman at the well…breaking apart walls of race (Samaritans were as “outside” as you could get) and gender (even Jesus’ apostles said, “Why are you talking to that woman?”).

In the third, Jesus deals with the woman caught in adultery…bringing someone on the outside because of her sin…back to the inside in forgiveness.

And this week we’ll finish with the story of the man born blind, and how Jesus would not allow him to remain outside the community of God because of a physical blemish. Jesus living out his priestly role of bringing people back into community with God…and other people.

Jesus confronts, Jesus challenges, Jesus forgives, Jesus loves…and the one who was outside…moves inside. The Kingdom of God gets bigger. So big, in fact, that the wall is broken down into rubble. It can’t hold the Kingdom. It’s too big.

My seven-year old nephew Cal was in town a few weeks ago, and he wanted me to read him a book, and lo and behold, what did he bring me but Dr. Seuss, and the story of the star-bellied sneetches. I love Dr. Seuss. Do you remember that story?

The sneetches were all basically identical creatures, BUT a few of them had stars on their bellies. These became the aristocrats. They were arrogant and pampered because of those stars. All of the sneetches wished they could have stars too. And one day a little guy came with a machine that could CREATE stars for their bellies. Now EVERYONE had stars. But the original star-bellied sneetches couldn’t handle this development, and they hired the same guy to REMOVE their stars, and made it the desirable thing to have no stars. So, those newly-starred went and had theirs removed. This happened several times, back and forth. It was cool to have stars. No stars. Stars. No stars. Eventually, everybody got so confused they figured out…it just didn’t matter. A sneetch was a sneetch! There was only one kind. The wall had been broken down.

In Christ, God has declared…no walls. Near by? Far off? Both have received Christ Jesus. Both have received grace and peace. There are no divisions in the family of God. And as Kingdom people…we are called not only to enjoy what God has declared to be true. But the tough part…to live it out. And you and I both know…this is going to take a lot of work. Walls that have been put in place…are difficult to remove.

Let me ask you a question: Who are the people you hang around with, even here at Bethany? The odds are very, very good that they are people like you. Skin color, nationality, economic class, you name it…they are probably very similar to you. It would take intentional WORK to change that. Hard, hard work. It is built into us. Stay with those like you. Us and them, our kind and that kind.

“No,” Paul says… “there’s just one kind in God’s family.” God has declared it so…and so we are called to live it out. It’s hard work. It’s not efficient.

Come to a Wednesday Night Dinner sometime. Some of the people find it hard to talk to folks who live on the street, who are ill or addicted or struggling. But don’t forget…some of the people there find it just as hard to talk with teachers or families or engineers…folks who don’t understand their world, or who are perceived as cold or arrogant. The thing is…in Christ…one family.

Go and worship where you are the minority racial person sometime. NOT because you’ll be comfortable! When I stayed overnight in China at the underground school so that I could teach the next day…I’ll still remember the moment the only translator left for the night. There I was, outside Beijing China, staying with 25 people of a different race, none of whom spoke English. Somehow we figured out and were able to communicate…that we shared Jesus. It was delightful.

Within your family, your workplace, your neighborhood, your church…where might God be calling you into the demolition business? The walls belong to us, not to God.

Friends, the world is putting up walls as fast as they are knocked down. Within the church, it is our calling to not be Wall people. Just One people.

The poet Robert Frost says it like this:

“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.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”

It’s God who wants it down. “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”

In the space of 11 verses, Paul has moved US, you and me from being:
Christless, stateless, friendless, hopeless and Godless…into being the dwelling place of the God of the universe. That is a an absolute miracle.

Once there was a man living on one side of a wall. He had lived there quite contently, even enjoying the presence of God. Yet he wondered about the other side of the wall. And one day when an earthquake knocked the wall right down to the ground, he was almost glad. And as he greeted the surprised people on the other side of the wall, he was amazed to know that his God had also been with them. Let’s pray.