One People
Sermon preached on Sunday, July 18, at Deer Isle Sunset Congregational Church …
Have we ever been more divided? I mean, we don’t even agree on who won the last presidential election! We don’t even agree whether or not it is a good thing to be vaccinated against a deadly disease. We don’t even agree on what we should be teaching our children about who we are as a nation.
In the latest issue of The Atlantic, George Packer argues there are four Americas, four distinct and competing and incompatible visions of what it means to be American. There is, as he names it, “Free America,” those who espouse a “Don’t Tread on Me” libertarianism, who want to do whatever they want to do unfettered by government regulation and unimpeded by folks “dependent on the system.”
There is “Smart America,” those who believe in the value and profitability of education, who believe they deserve everything they have earned and both pity and disparage those who somehow lack the will or the skill to succeed.
There is “Real America,” those for whom the real Americans are “the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland,” while the enemies of America are the “treacherous elites and contaminating others [that is: non-whites and immigrants] who want to destroy the country.”
And there is “Just America,” those who divide the country into oppressed and oppressors, privileged and unprivileged, for whom the only way forward is to turn everything upside down.
Packer writes: “I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.”
Dialogue among these groups is useless, because we don’t have the same facts (we can’t agree on what is real and what is fake) and we don’t speak the same language — freedom and justice and fairness and truth mean entirely different things in the different Americas to which we pledge our allegiance.
The last time I remember a real sense of a commonly shared American identity was in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. We were all mourning together, lamenting together, both the loss of life and a never before experienced feeling of acute vulnerability. We were not at first angry or bitter, not seeking revenge, but comforting each other and reaffirming our dedication to what we loved most about our country: its open-armed welcome, its commitment to equal opportunity for all people, its affirmation of right over might, of law over lawlessness. And the world mourned with us with a generous outpouring of goodwill and affection.
But that good will quickly dissipated, both outside and inside our borders, as we mounted a dubious and ill-fated invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush became a lightning rod for Democratic mistrust and anger and the nation was more divided than it had ever been.
Barack Obama reaped the fury of a Republican backlash as Congress’ sole agenda became thwarting his proposals whatever merits they might have and the nation became even more divided.
And the just past president came to power precisely by stoking the fires of division, making no pretense of governing a united country, but finding pleasure instead in pitting Americans against each other, those who, as he claimed, love America, against those who, as he claimed, hate America.
Have we ever been more divided? And we are not merely divided into this camp and that camp, but fragmented, splintered into a myriad of tribes delineated not by shared values or principles or dreams, but by “identity.” We define ourselves and align ourselves by our blackness or our whiteness, by being gay or straight or bisexual, male or female or transgender or non-binary, blue collar or white collar, heartland or coasts, Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or Jew or none. Even being a None is a thing.
Have we ever been more divided? We believe our identity wholly determines our destiny, rather the the other way around. Think about it! We believe our identity wholly determines our destiny, rather the the other way around.
But enough already! I am not called to be a Cassandra, to bear bad news, but to be a minister of the gospel, to proclaim good news. This is why we gather here in this sanctuary, week after week, not to bemoan a crumbling world, but to hear the gospel, so we might be believe and be made glad, and so we might live what we believe.
And this is the gospel: We are one people.
We are one people. I had a seminary professor who liked to say that in the gospel, the indicative precedes the imperative, that is, what we must do only comes after what God has done. It’s not that we must try to get along, try hard to bring people together, do our best to overcome the divisions among us. We are one people. God has made us one people. Oneness is not something we achieve, but something God gives.
We are one people. Who is? Who is included in this one people? All those who believe as we do, walk in the light as we do, share the same stories and values and religious commitments as we do?
No! We are one people. We — look around you, look all around you, and see the “we!” Whom do you see? Whom can you name? This is the gospel and this is what Paul boldly declares in his letter to the Ephesian church: God has made us one people. God has made us one people in Christ Jesus.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a wonderfully expansive and audacious and thrilling letter. Eventually, he will turn to practical matters, counseling wives and husbands, parents and children, even slaves and masters about honoring and respecting each other, urging them all to live lives of purity and piety, truthfulness and kindness.
But here, at the beginning of his letter, he is occupied with the big picture, with a cosmic reality. He writes about God’s plan, what he calls God’s “secret plan,” — a plan that is certainly no secret because he tells it! — God’s secret plan to “bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth” in Christ.
All creation! Not just human beings, but all creation! This is Christ’s mission: not to judge, not to divide, not to separate sheep from goats, not to start a new religion or discredit the old, not to carve out a faithful remnant from among rebellious humanity, but to reconcile, to bring people together, to bring people together back to God, to bring all creation together and back to God.
This is what God wants, this is God’s dream, this is God’s plan — to bring all of us and all of creation too into the arms of God’s loving embrace, to bring us and all of creation into shalom, into peacefulness, into wholeness, into fullness of life, into joy, our joy and God’s joy.
Paul is writing in particular to Gentile Christians, non-Jewish believers. The early church struggled with the division between Jews and Gentiles, insiders and outsiders, people of the book and the heathens, people with entirely different histories and cultures and religious practices. But Paul declares there is no division: “Christ himself has brought us peace by making Jews and Gentiles one people.” Jews who have studiously kept themselves separate from non-Jews, and Gentiles who have habitually disparaged Jews, are one people!
How? By Christ’s blood: “You, who used to be far away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”
The blood of Christ. You look upon it every Sunday. It is the focal point of our worship, at the center of the gospel we preach — the cross, the cross on which Jesus was executed, the cross on which he poured out his blood, poured out his life.
The cross is not the emblem of an unwarranted and untimely death. The cross is not the remembrance of a failed martyr. The cross is not even a model for us of ultimate sacrifice. It is the emblem of victory, God’s victory, the victory of grace over sin, of God’s love over human rebellion, of life over death. At the cross, God wins, which means we win.
“With his own body,” Paul writes, “with his own body [Christ] broke down the wall that separated them.” The wall is down. The wall is down! We don’t need to tear down the wall,. The wall is down!
The wall is down — between you and me, between Jew and Gentile, between black person and white person, between Muslim and Christian, between gay and not so gay. Really! We are one. We have been made one by the death of Christ. His death is the death of all division, and his life is the promise of life together, as one people.
This is who we are: one people, all of us children of God, created for joy, and God gave us Jesus so that we, so that none of us, would be denied that joy.
So what are we to do? We are called to live as if we are one people, because we are. We are one people! We are called to live in the peace, out of the peace, for the sake of the peace, making the peace that God has gifted us in Christ. The walls are down, but for God’s sake, don’t try to rebuild them!
I speak especially to those of us who are Gentiles, non-Jewish believers, and that is most of us in this sanctuary. How dare we, how dare we, build walls between anyone else and ourselves? How dare we presume to judge any neighbor and draw a line between ourselves and them? How dare we ever talk about “us” and “them?”
We Gentile Christians must never forget that are the outsiders! We are the foreigners! We are the ones who don’t belong, who had no part in God’s promises, who were not counted among God’s chosen. We have been grafted into God’s family tree, adopted into God’s family, welcomed home by nothing other than sheer grace, utter gift. So how can we be anything but gracious, anything but generous, anything but welcoming to other outsiders, other strangers, other lost ones?
We are called to live as one people, to embrace our identity, our true identity, which is ours in Christ. I am European-American. I am male, cis-gendered as they say. I am heterosexual, married to my wife. I am college-educated. I am a retired professional. All of these parts of who I am matter, and all the parts of who you are matter, but none of these matter more than my identity, your identity, our identity, as one people, children of God, children together in a family made by Christ.
We have never been more divided as Americans, as Christians, as human beings, and yet, we are not. We are not divided. We are one people. And all the bitterness, all the contention, all the lying, all the hatred do not make it any less true.
This is the gospel … we were created in joy for the sake of joy, to live in peace for the sake of peace, to embrace each other as God has embraced us, to join ourselves to Christ in his death — putting to death our pride, our prejudices, our pretensions — so we might be joined to Christ in his life, living in love as he lived in love. We are one people, so let’s live that way!
Rachel Simons lives in Galati, Romania, a field worker with Word Made Flesh, an Christian organization committed to “serving Jesus among the poorest of the poor.” She works with Galati’s street children, providing them educational and recreational and spiritual programs, and interacting with them on a daily basis in their own context on the streets.