A Meditation on Ephesians 2:19-21

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 apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. ~ Ephesians 2:19-21

 

The Anglican tradition, being a historic tradition with a lengthy track record, has many sins for which she needs to repent. In a sense, the more I have grown in my love for this tradition, the more aware I am of the deep sin within human beings, even those human beings who seek to follow Christ as Anglicans (thank God we can confess and receive forgiveness so often in this tradition). In my opinion, one of Western Anglicanism’s greatest sins of the past several hundred years is the belief that we enter into the Anglican Church through what I would call “good breeding,” instead of through, as with any Church, the grace of God.

The Anglican tradition of worship through Word and Sacrament is one which has, in the Western World, been far too limited in the scope of who gets to be “in,” a problem which is felt locally and throughout our own Western Provinces. Anglicans of a certain age can remember a time in their life when Doctors or Lawyers received their advanced degree, and in doing so practically became de-facto members of the nearest Episcopal/Anglican Church. Those days are long gone, and while many of my colleagues lament this fact because their parishes are no longer growing, I can not help but feel something of a sense of relief that the advancement of secularism in Western nations is forcing a tradition like ours to examine some of its own prejudices, be they unique to Anglicanism or simply a product of fallen human nature. Perhaps Sunday morning in America is indeed even more divided than previously thought.

Thank God, we are far from the first Christians who have needed to reckon with a church built along artificial, human-centered boundaries in order to better honor God in our lives as Christians together. The Ephesian Church who received Paul’s pastoral guidance in the form of a letter crafted in a prison cell was experiencing the classic division of the New Testament Church, division along the lines of Jew and Gentile. While ethnic division sounds an awful lot like what contemporary church and society wrestle with, the means by which Paul addresses them is nothing like the way contemporary church or society tend to address any form of division. Paul reminds the Ephesian Church, Jew and Gentile alike, of two things: the depth of their sin before Christ, and the height of their salvation in Christ. While salvation came first to the Jews through the covenant (Ephesians 1:11-12), in Christ, all the nations are welcome to participate in the restoration and reconciliation of all things in Christ Jesus our Lord. This shared story of fall and redemption wrapped up and perfected in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the sole, exclusive means for human flourishing in this world, so that we can confidently say, “Christ himself is our peace.”

Paul’s approach to this particular manifestation of a universal human tendency to exclude is neither to ignore the problem of ethnic divisions plaguing Christians in Ephesus, pretending to be blind to the divisions in the church as a means of avoiding confronting them; but it is also not to allow those divisions to so thoroughly guide the life of a Christian community that it loses its center in Christ. Christ is the answer to the problem of communal, corporate, even systemic sins, which inevitably plague us, not because we are particularly villainous, but because we are people.

While it is not technically advent (though if we understand Advent rightly we know that every day is Advent), the great Advent hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel points us in the right direction, “O come, O King of Nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind. Bid all our sad divisions cease and be yourself our king of peace.”

In Christ,

Fr. Matt