Sunday, July 19, 2015 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Place for Me?

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–18
Ephesians 2:11–22

“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.”
Ephesians 2:14 (NRSV)

The Holy Spirit calls us toward an all-inclusive attitude, a theology of the wind, a relationship to God and the world that does not try to make things easy by ruling out whole areas of human experience and whole groups of human beings. When one goes out to fish, one does not dictate to God what may or may not be attracted to the bait.

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

“Is there a place here for me?” he asked as he sat in my office. Well, that is not actually the question that he asked. He asked other questions about my understanding of preaching and what it was and was not to be about. We talked about my hopes for this congregation, and I shared with him some of what Session and staff have been discussing over the last couple of months. We exchanged ideas about the freedom of the pulpit, politics and prayers, being advocates or activists, and how often it is not what you say necessarily, but how you say it, that deeply affects people.

I asked him about some of the hard subjects he has seen this congregation wrestle with during his long history with this place. He began coming during the Dr. Davies years, and we both acknowledged Dr. Davies was not one to shy away from the social justice issues of his day. So I told him about some of the possible fall programming being planned by the Adult Education and Mission Committees, programming centered on issues such as mass incarceration. It was a good discussion, a powerful discussion. I was so honored he chose to trust me enough to come to me with his wonderings and concerns. But in the end, as he walked back out into the Chicago summer, I realized the question at the heart of the whole thing was “Is there a place here for me?”

“Is there a place here for me?” she asked as we got ready to pray. Again, that was not the actual question. Rather, we talked about her need to hear challenging words in worship to keep her awake to the struggles of the world. She wanted to hear her pastors speak their truth in sermons and in prayers, she said, even when she did not like what she heard. She was a preacher’s kid, so she inherently trusted that church folk and pastors could disagree without being disagreeable. She had watched her own father do it. But life was complicated enough that she needed to know her church leadership walked into the time of worship with scripture in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And yet, she continued, all of it must be based in love. Church as the space of love, she remarked, is the only thing that will get any of us through this world. The primacy of love, she said, must be what is at the center of all the church’s life—not shame, not guilt, not a bunch of oughts or shoulds, but rather invitation after invitation to participate in God’s making of new creation. Was that what we were about? she wondered. After all, she was tired of leaving worship angrier than when she arrived, an experience she had at other churches. But at the heart of it: “Is there a place here for me?” she wondered, as she let me into her struggles.

By the way, it is important to me that you know I got permission from these folks to tell you about our conversations. I don’t want any of you to think that if you have a pastoral meeting with me, you will inevitably end up as a sermon illustration. But I wanted to share their reflections with you because these conversations are not surprising. In one form or fashion, they are conversations I have engaged all throughout my fifteen years of ministry. It does not matter the size of the church or its location. It does not matter if the church is full of those who claim to be conservative or progressive or somewhere in between. It does not matter how diverse or similar members of a congregation appear to be. At the heart of many pastoral conversations I have had throughout my ministry, one foundational question is always “Is there a place here for me?”

I understand the question. I think we all carry it around within us, maybe because the feeling of being home is hard to come by on some days. But when it comes to church, this question often does not surface until we hear something in a Sunday School class—or in a Coffee Hour conversation or in a sermon—with which we disagree, mildly or strongly, politically or theologically. Sometimes that disagreement leads us to wonder if our viewpoints or our interpretations of scripture are so different from the clergy’s or from our other church members’ that we are not sure we have a place anymore. And yet we are also not always certain we can be honest as to how we feel or what we think, because we do not want to offend someone, or perhaps we don’t want to have to defend ourselves. Depending on one’s perspective, sometimes folks start to wonder if even church is too much Fox news or MSNBC for one to be genuinely welcomed for who they are. Welcomed, not just tolerated. I’ve been a part of congregations where I have asked these questions. “Is there a place here for me?” many of us ask in one form or fashion.

The world around us does not help. The public air feels heavy with cynicism and bite. “You are either for us or against us” continues to be the mantra of our day. We have gotten exceedingly efficient at immediately defining someone else on the basis of what they look like, what they do, whom they love, where they live. We make snap judgments about whom we will like and whom we assume we don’t want to be around since they might make us uncomfortable. We can indeed turn on our favorite news channel or go to their website and hear a take on things we are more open to hearing, all the while learning how to more adeptly build up the walls that can separate us from that other side—the side who is obviously so wrong, whatever side it might be. Our culture seems to relish nurturing enmity and hostility. I imagine we could do a quick study of political campaign commercials as an exercise to spot embodied hostility. But I could choose from untold examples of television shows and movies, video games and music, news stories and even some church services, in which enmity and hostility are carefully cultivated and then purposefully unleashed into our world.

Though it probably will not make us feel any better, you might want to know the culture was not any kinder back in the days of the early church. It was worse. When Paul wrote this encyclical we call the letter to the Ephesians, the air that surrounded Paul and his contemporaries was quite heavy with enmity and violence. As a biblical scholar describes, during this time “to the Jew, the Roman or Greek was an idolater; to the Roman, the Jew was an atheist who refused to acknowledge the gods or the divine authority of Caesar.” The hostility was thick. And when this turbulent air exploded with the Jewish rebellion in 66, the Romans immediately followed with a bloody and horrific war that was “no polite reassertion of Roman authority.” Most scholars now agree that it was this violence, this political crisis, that prompted Paul to write what he did.

The enmity and the violence, the ways the walls between diverse peoples were being built even higher and even stronger (probably both literally and figuratively), threatened the central accomplishment and a crucial part of Paul’s ministry: the unity in Christ of Jew and Gentile as a gift from God. We hear this focus on that unity in just about every letter Paul wrote to these early Christian communities:

Romans 12: For as in one body we have many members, and not all of the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another.

1 Corinthians 12: For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Galatians 3: As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Those are just a few examples. This revealing of the unity all people have in Christ was a central, crucial part of Paul’s ministry. And that is why, in this letter called Ephesians, Paul expends great effort to remind his people, us, the problem they are experiencing is not due to difference but enmity, that the solution is not violence but what God is up to in Jesus Christ, and that the plan of God is not uniformity but peaceable difference (Allen Verhey and Joe Harvard, Belief: A Theological Commentary—Ephesians, p. 11). Peaceable difference. I find that to be a powerful, quite countercultural phrase.

As a friend of mine said, at the time when Paul wrote this letter, the culture was attempting identity theft (Verhey and Harvard, Belief, p. 12). The culture was trying to make the Jewish and Gentile Christians think they could not pray in the same worship space, sit at the same lunch counter or around the same table, live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools, be church together, because they were too different. Jews and Gentiles were different. They had different stories, different rituals, different histories, different diets. How could they be one? How could they live out any kind of unity? No, culture said. No, no, no. You cannot. You stick with your own kind. You watch only the news that will support what you already think. You read only the scriptures that are your favorite ones because they buttress your theology. You eat meals only with the people who either won’t talk about hard things or who agree with you as to what to do about hard things. You don’t invest energy in nurturing friendships with people who might wear you out with difference. The proposition of Jews and Gentiles together, the culture claimed, is not only ridiculous but dangerous. Like kids in a middle-school cafeteria, it is just plain better and easier if you simply stay with your own people, whatever that means for you. There is not a place here for you both. That’s impossible. And Paul heard that message his churches were receiving, and he knew it was an attempt at ancient identity theft.

But Paul refused to let this cultural attempt at identity theft go unchallenged. He refused to let hostility, enmity, violence, and separation dominate the conversation. Wrong, he counters in this letter. First of all, unity between Jew and Gentile is not a proposition. It is who you already are. “For Christ is our peace” he writes. “In his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us.” We need to notice that nowhere in that sentence does it say, “Now, if you want to, you can be one in Christ.” Or “If you are willing to try and get to know each other and see if you can overcome your differences, then you will be one in Christ.” That is not what he claims.

Rather, Paul reminds the early church, “Guess what: regardless of what is or is not comfortable for you; regardless of whether you would choose to be together as church or not; regardless of whether culture says this can work or not—God has already done it. Christ is our peace. The dividing wall, the hostility between us, has already been broken down and destroyed. This is not an optional reality one can or cannot choose. It has happened. There is a place here for all. That is exactly what God is up to in Christ, creating this stunningly new humanity of which you are already a part.”

It is amazing, really. It does not fit within our larger cultural narrative that would much rather split us up and keep us apart. But it is who we are. So our challenge is to summon the kind of courage it takes to live it out in a culture that does a great job nurturing enmity and hostility. Our challenge is to be a congregation, a part of Christ’s body, that works hard to live out our unity, not uniformity; that takes the time and spends the energy to actively embody a community of peaceable difference, not “you are for us or against us.” As my father preached year after year in Waco, Texas (a line he borrowed from William Sloane Coffin), “We are called to be a church that practices and celebrates that as long as our hearts are one in Christ, our minds don’t have to be.”

It is a marvel and a gift that you and I can disagree about how we understand a particular scripture or about the ways a church should or should not be engaged in larger social issues or something that I preach or pray. And yet we both have a place here. Both of those folks who sat on the couch in my office this week have a place here. All of us have a place here. This is your place. This can indeed be your home. But not because I say so. Because God has said so. Jesus Christ has destroyed any dividing wall, any hostility, between us. Isn’t that incredible? And do you know that living that out, embodying peaceable difference, is one of the most radical, countercultural things we can do in our world? But that is what we are to be about as the body of Christ. It is our call. It is our invitation. It is our challenge.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu says wall-breaching activity is why we Christians are here. The church is to be the word visible, an audiovisual aid for the world. The place where all the walls come down and all people are accepted and included and loved simply because they are accepted and included and loved by Jesus. No ifs, ands, or buts. No votes need to be taken.

Fourth Presbyterian Church—this gift of a congregation—is to be a witness to the one new humanity, reconciled not only to God, but also to one another. This congregation is called to live out the reality of our Peace who is Jesus Christ, God’s love made flesh. We are to embody peaceable difference with each other. And that is not easy. It is messy and often challenging. This kind of love takes a lot of courage and relies heavily on God’s grace, but it is who we are. So if you have been wondering lately, is there a place for me here? God’s answer is Yes!

Notes
I am aware of the arguments of the disputed authorship of Ephesians. For the purpose of this sermon, I have decided to take seriously the new scholarship that suggests Paul was indeed the author and these were indeed the surrounding historical circumstances. (I am strongly influenced by the work in the Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible series and its Ephesians book.) But even if the author was a Paulist and not Paul himself, the content of this sermon does not change.