16.07.06 Michael The Unity of Peoples
Ephesians 1:1-14
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The
prehistoric peoples and their Nuraghic settlements in Sardinia were a
reminder to us on our summer holiday this year of our ancient origins
as Europeans. But much of what we saw was also reminiscent of other
continents and cultures – Zigurats as in Iraq, goat masks like
those found in parts of Africa, holy wells like those in Ireland,
round houses arranged along ancient pavements like ancient round
houses in many other parts of the world including the brochs of
northern Scotland. While we were there we enjoyed watching Italians
watching the World cup and their team winning for the fourth time in
the history of the World cup. I have little interest in football –
I was hopeless at it as a child and never had any sense of supporting
a local team, though confessed to supporting Crystal Palace when
forced to by earnest enquiries at boarding school. Both human
prehistory and the modern World cup are reminders that we humans are
not all that different from one another and they both seem to
indicate that there is a kind of primal unity towards which events in
our history point backwards, and also forwards.
The idea that history of humanity is one of an original unity which is broken by the Fall into sin is of course very much a biblical one. The original sin of Adam and Eve, the murderous story of Cain and Abel, and the Tower of Babel, in which God is said to have distinguished peoples by languages, are three classic stories all of which indicate that in the beginning humans descended from one family and had one shared story of origin. Modern genetics and archaeology also seem to confirm this and point to a likely origin of humanity in North Africa or the Middle East. Our experiences in Sardinia – even though our Italian was so poor – in so many ways confirmed this sense.
But when we arrived back in England and I read the headlines in Stansted Airport that sense of a peaceable unity between disparate peoples was shattered by the terrible news of the bombing of Lebanon, its peoples and civilian infrastructure by the American fighters and bombers of the Israeli air force. European leaders have called it a disproportionate response to the rockets and incursions of Hizbollah into Northern Israel. This is a serious understatement – the Israelis have initiated a technological massacre of Lebanese and the near destruction of their nearest neighbour. This is not just a response – it is all out war and it is a terrible reminder of the continuing legacy of conflict and violence in the Middle East whose roots can be traced back to the British decision to establish a Palestinian protectorate in the nineteenth century which American and British Christian Zionists were the first to suggest should become the new Jewish homeland.
The next few weeks our sermons are going to focus on the Epistle to the Ephesians. A remarkable letter, written by Paul from prison to the churches of Asia Minor bordering the Black Sea. Unusual in style – many long sentences and distinctive words and phrases – the subject of the epistle is the unity of the Church. Paul the Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles is overwhelmed with joy in prison by the news of the flourishing of the churches in Asia Minor and writes this letter not as a polemic to correct some false teaching but as a paeon of praise to God for his plan in bringing about a united Church which presages the plan of God – from before the foundation of the world – to bring back together all peoples, and even all things in heaven and earth, into one original unity, just as God had intended from the beginning. In this Epistle the divine plan is said to have been realised in Christ and the true course of world history is finally revealed. This teaching is entirely consistent with Paul’s teaching elsewhere for Christ is the one who represents the whole of humanity and who, as the seed of Abraham and the son of God, restores the unity which in Adam had been lost. In the OT the original primal unity is lost by the division between Israel and the Gentiles. Israel are the remnant, the chosen ones who alone are to mimic and represent the justice and holiness of Yahweh. But Isaiah reveals God’s ultimate will which his that all peoples should come to worship Yahweh and not just the Hebrews and Paul reveals that this is precisely what has happened as a result of Christ’s redeeming life, death and resurrection. The key word is adoption – the Israelites were the chosen children of God, the ones originally destined to be restored to covenant relation to the creator but now in the fullness of time the Gentiles too are adopted into the new covenant ‘ by the riches of his grace lavished on us’ and this is the mystery hidden from before the foundation of the world that according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to gather up all thing s in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
THIS is the purpose of God from before time and for the end of time and now revealed already in history – that enemies become friends, that the dividing wall is broken down, that the root of hate and violence is removed, that unity, peace, communion between all peoples and God is revealed and restored by the representative character and history of Jesus Christ the Saviour of the whole cosmos.
He does this by calling together the new people of God who represent both Jew and Gentile in the new Church which is united across all cultural and linguistic and gender and racial barriers. The purpose of this unity is that having been sealed with the holy Spirit ‘we might live to the praise of his glory’. The key to Paul’s thinking here is that Christ is a ‘corporate personality’ as indicated in Galatians 3.16 where he is identified as Abraham’s seed’.
This phrase is particularly telling, for the other kind of unity which one experiences in a place like Sardinia is the cultural hegemony imposed on so much of the globe by the modern corporation – McDonalds, Esso, Nestle. This corporate unity is a false – even an idolatrous - takeover of the Messianic representation which St Paul celebrates in this wonderful epistle. And let us not be fooled. The strength of the military industrial corporations and the partnership between them and the most powerful nations on earth is also at the root of so many of the divisions and wars that the world still experiences, including those in the Middle East. Israel is not just invading Lebanon as a reprisal – many Arabs believe it is after Lebanon’s natural resources, and not least its water, to keep going its heavily water dependent consumer society.
This Epistle is a wonderful rapturous hymn of praise to what God was already doing in Christ, by the Spirit and through the Unity of the Church in the first century to heal the divisions of humanity and the creation that the sin of Adam had originated.
But in the context of the events of the last few days we must also read this as a ‘proleptic’ epistle – we still live between the times, the purpose of God is a final unity but we are not there yet. Only the final return of Christ will see that purpose come to pass. But like the first Christians we are called to live against the times and as if the future is already breaking in – the world still does not understand the things hidden from before the foundation of the world. Only Christians know this secret and it is that we are one, that the original unity of all humankind is being restored, and that in the age to come all creatures in heaven and earth will join in united praise of the creator. Beethoven’s great concluding hymn in the Ninth Symphony declared the brotherhood of man a human achievement, memorializing a great new Enlightenment moment in the history of Europe. But this too – like the ersatz unity of the World Cup and Macdonald’s – was a false hope as the wars of the twentieth century tragically revealed. No, our only hope for redemption from our original disunity is the unity of all humans in the body of the one man Jesus Christ who, chosen from before the foundation of the world, gathers into one all things in heaven and earth. Praise not the brotherhood of man, or the sisterhood of woman, not the love of the game or the corporate logo – praise Him who is able to unite all things for he is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people.