A Blessing to All.

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 2:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

January 5, 2020

I.

The other day I saw a Christian leader quoted as saying that when people complain about and criticize white supremacy they are really attacking Christianity.  It was a very striking and revealing thing to say because it indicates something about the way many American Christians unfortunately think today.  

It seems that many of us have this sense that at some time in the past, maybe up to about 50 years ago, America was a “Christian nation,” and one of the characteristics that made us Christian was supposedly our European, especially Anglo-Saxon, culture and people.  Then, in the ’60’s, we started giving rights to other people and everything went haywire.  When segregated schools were made illegal in the South, many white people went off and started their own segregated private schools.  You know what they called them?  “Christian academies.”

This explicit connection of Christianity to the ascendancy and hegemony of one particular ethnic group above all others goes against everything Jesus and Christianity are essentially about.  Because if the Christian message is anything from the very beginning it is what Paul writes here in Ephesians as a summary of the gospel itself.  When he says, “the Gentiles have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus,” he means that being a child of God no longer has anything to do with your nationality, your ethnicity, your ancestry, or your DNA.

In other words, Jesus Christ comes to obliterate the various divisions of humans into invented, arbitrary categories like race, class, or gender.  This is not an incidental by-product of the gospel; it is the gospel.  We see this in Galatians 3:28, which I repeated for 6 months when I filled the font at the beginning of every Sunday service.  There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female, for all are one in Jesus Christ.  And we see it here in Ephesians.  Jesus comes to make us all one; to reveal our essential oneness before God.

We also see this here in the well-known gospel story about the three magi who see the star in the heavens portending a new king.  Those three magi who recognize and come to worship Jesus are foreigners, pagans, and even enemies.  They come from Persia, which is now Iran.  They represent the universalism of who Jesus is.  He is not just a local, national figure: the creation itself proclaims his birth and leads these distant, utter non-Jews to him, long before Jesus’ actual ministry begins.

We often forget what a radical challenge this story and this idea offers to every culture.  In the time of Jesus and Paul many Jews would have taken for granted their own exceptionalism as the chosen people of God, and thought of  everyone else as defective, deficient, debased, disgusting, decadent, and degraded Gentiles.  

II.

But the Hebrew story has always included the wider understanding that if the Israelites were special it was only because they were destined to overcome their own specialness, and show in themselves God’s intention for all.  God chooses this one family as a way to welcome and unite all families.  The chosenness of Israel is a representative election in which they act as a kind of vanguard of a new humanity.  They are chosen, not for themselves, but for everybody.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way, and by the time of Jesus the people had managed to see their chosenness in a self-serving, exclusive way.  They took it as privilege and license.  They rejected and excluded Gentiles, non-Jews who were mostly polytheists, and Samaritans, who even worshiped the same God and had the same Torah, but were considered ethnically impure.  They based God’s salvation on race, ethnicity, nation. 

Indeed they had for 500 years carefully developed institutions to preserve and defend their own nation and religion.  They learned to stress its uniqueness and differences from others.  Hence all the detailed laws of what to eat and what to wear and when to worship and when not to work and so forth.  They survived by emphasizing their distinctness.

But for God the survival of the nation isn’t the point.  God gives the purpose and mission of the Israelite people to Abraham back in Genesis 12: “In you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed,” God says.  The people of God exist not for themselves but to be a blessing to all.  Survival isn’t enough.  If they were not a blessing to everyone, their survival, however unlikely and remarkable and even miraculous, was pointless.  Their chosenness was not something they should keep for themselves and preserve in a hermetically sealed container like a priceless heirloom.  It has to be shared.

If we cannot separate our faith from our ethnicity, nation, and religious laws and institutions, we have a big problem.  This is what gets Paul so apoplectic in Galatians: people trying to say that converts had to be accepted into their nation and race in order to be considered righteous before God.  They insisted that people to join their family, their nation, and their religion to be saved.  Paul is strenuous in his rejection of this view.

From time to time I have had the opportunity to look through the opportunity lists of churches seeking pastors.  In the paperwork they submit, churches are supposed to indicate their ethnic makeup.  It seems like almost all Presbyterian churches are over 95% a single race.  They are either 95+% white, or black, or Hispanic, or Korean.  We have very few churches that have any kind of significant ethnic diversity.  We say we are diverse; we say we are welcoming of everyone.  But in reality we still reflect what Martin Luther King said 60 years ago: that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.  This situation is exactly the opposite of what the Lord Jesus and the apostles intend when they invite the Gentiles in.  They want a multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-racial church.  

III.

But when we stop following Jesus and decide to gratify our own ideas, desires, and feelings, motivated mainly by fear and anger, we fall away from God’s vision.  When we go along with the demands of our particular culture, State, economic system, and other influences which have a stake in keeping us divided and at enmity with each other, we end up with the well-deserved  reputation Christians now have for being self-righteous, exclusive, judgmental, and intolerant.  We end up imagining that God is on the side of our nation, our race, our economic system, our religion, our sexuality, and our culture, when nothing could be further from the truth.  

For what Jesus reveals, and his followers realize, is that God is not the private mascot of one particular nation, race, and family.  Rather, under God all the nations are already one.  Paul says that it doesn’t matter what nation, race, gender, or class we come from; they are not relevant.  They are trivial distractions.  These categories are superficial, incidental, circumstantial, and ultimately meaningless as far as God is concerned.

Jesus Christ reveals the true humanity we share with every human being, and in him we are all one.  We are to love one another as he loves us.  He gives his life for the life of all, and in so doing makes us all one.  

Our job, our only job, is to witness to God’s all inclusive love for the whole world and everyone in it.  That’s it.  That’s what Jesus does.  That’s what we are called to do.  Love God, love people.

We start by doing that together in our gospel communities, our local congregations.  This is where souls are remade.  We identify and isolate these tendencies to latch onto other things to supposedly give our lives meaning.  Instead, we find our true identity and meaning in the One who created us, and saved us, and keeps us alive.

This is then extended into our love for all.  Paul talks about it in terms of "the wisdom of God in its rich variety” being “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”  He means that God’s love in our hearts outshines and drowns out all other allegiances and influences.  This happens in our identification with and service to others, especially the needy, the lost, the broken, the fallen, the failures, the excluded, and the outcast.  We start by following Jesus Christ, which we do when we demonstrate humility, compassion, forgiveness, welcome, and healing to everyone, even enemies.

Paul understands the gospel community as a crucible where people’s toxic reflexive nationalism and racism is dissolved in a mutual affection that creates one new body, that of Christ himself.  This unity, this oneness, exemplified in their conscious and intentional obliteration of the distinction between Jew and Gentile, and welcoming people of all nations into the biblical story through Christ, is the primary way we witness to God’s reconciling love.  The witness is that people could give up a self-serving, self-righteous exceptionalism that was a cancer corroding the core of their faith.

IV.

Jesus says his disciples are the light of the world.  Isaiah says the nations will be drawn to that very light.  If we’re going to be the light of the world, we’re going to have to get over our addiction to things like nation and race, that block that light.  For to be the light of the world means to function as Jesus calls us: to be where we are a beacon of compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, and joy.  Because we know that in Jesus Christ we are all one, we are, as Paul says, “fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”  Because we are that here together in the gospel community, we can be that shining God’s love into all the world.

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