Jeremiah 23:1-8
Ephesians 2:11‑22
Rev. Dr. Howard W. Roberts

Centuries ago a search was undertaken to identify a group of people who would be God’s people. God approached the Romans and said to them, "I am in search of a group that will be my people.  What do you have to offer?"  The Romans said, "We have built magnificent highways that connect all of the Roman Empire.  If we are your people, we can provide a road for you to get anywhere in the world."  God said, "I will consider that."  Then God approached the Greeks and told them, "I am searching for a group that will be my people.  What do you have to offer?"  "Oh," the Greeks responded, "we have beautiful buildings.  We are great architects and can build a magnificent temple for people to worship you."  God thanked the Greeks and told them he would consider their offer.  Then God approached the Jews and told them, "I am searching for a group that will be my people.  What do you have to offer?"  The Jews responded, "We will tell your story."  God said, "I will take you to be my people."  And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. 
           
The Jews have been great storytellers, and the main subject of their stories has been God's involvement with people.  The Jews have sought to tell God's story.  The first disciples of Jesus were Jews and at its inception Christianity was a sect in Judaism.  Our task as followers of Christ is to carry on the tradition of our Jewish religious ancestors and join with them to tell God's story.  This is the task, role, and responsibility of the Church, to tell God's story. 
           
God's story begins with the formation of a people.  Not only did God create the world and all that is in it, but God also created people with the need and the ability to relate to one another and to God.  Out of relationships people became aware of the importance and significance of relationship with God.  As they meditated on this need they began to experience themselves being changed, moving from being no people to becoming a people, from nobodies to some bodies because of their consciousness of God's love, care, and interest in them.  It was a bunch of Hebrew nomads wandering around in the desert and wilderness of what we now call the Middle East whose consciousness about God began to be raised and through their interaction with God began to tell God's story.  Written down for us in what we call the Bible are parts of the story.  We need to learn the story of those who have gone before us and then add our part to the story.  The text in Ephesians relates to our part of the story and the importance of our building our part of the story onto the story that those who preceded us have constructed. 
           
Just as God formed a people out of the people who responded to God’s love and acceptance of them and they became known as the children of Israel, referred to as God's chosen people, not because they were the only ones that God chose or wanted, but because they were the ones who willingly responded positively to God. Because of the Hebrews and as a result of their responses to God, many other people have responded positively to God as well. 
           
The responsibility of those who choose to respond positively to God and become God's chosen people is they are to be the redeeming people of God.  They are to tell God's story in an inclusive, inviting way.  Often that has not happened.  There have been times in Judaism when they have offered a closed rather than an open door.  Jeremiah is an example of one who urged his people to be open to others, to plant crops, to marry, and to have children in Babylon where they were in Exile.  Many years later when Nehemiah and Ezra returned to Jerusalem from Exile and found the city still in ruins fifty years after it had been captured, much of the blame was placed on the marriages of Jews with non‑ Jews and people were urged to divorce their non‑Jewish spouses, a rather harsh reaction but one that occurred within the context of fear of extinction.  God's people and God's story always are only one generation away from extinction.  The theme that continues to be repeated in telling God's story is the need to tell the story rather than to keep the story, to live open lives rather than closed ones, to build bridges rather than walls. 
           
In writing to the Christians at Ephesus, Paul grasped a powerful illustration that continues to be potent to all who will hear it and implement it.  He stated clearly and specifically that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth had been embodied the formation of a new people.  These new people were new because the former categories and boxes into which people put each other were destroyed.  Jesus came with a revolutionary idea that decisions and distinctions between people were no longer to be made on the basis of outward appearance, keeping of rules and regulations, or religious preferences. 
    
The environment in which Jesus lived was fraught with prejudices.  Decisions were made for or against people on the basis of their nationality and their race.  Basically, there were two races Jews and Gentiles.  A person was one or the other.  Whichever one was, the others tended to feel and express contempt for him if not out right hatred and animosity.  Even in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem there was clear evidence of this distinction.  The Temple area was divided into courts.  The court of the Gentiles was open to everyone, but there was a wall that separated that court from the remainder of the Temple area.  Inscribed in the wall was warning to all Gentiles that if a Gentile wandered beyond the wall into one of the other areas of the Temple he did so at the risk of his own life.  If he were killed, he would be responsible for his own death.  That sounds so cruel and exclusive to us and it was.  However, before we become too smug, we need to become more aware of the ways that we exclude people and are cruel to them with our attitudes of contempt toward them because they aren't the same color, the same socio‑economic standing as we, because they are unemployed or hungry or homeless, or because they belong to another denomination or to another faith or to no faith.
           
Being invited to be God's people never has meant and does not now mean that we are given the task and responsibility to determine who has been accepted by God and who hasn't, who is a citizen of God's world and who isn't, who is a part of the Church and who isn't.  Those decisions and judgment calls are not ours to make.  Our responsibility is to tell God's story as it has taken root and borne fruit in our lives. 
           
Paul wrote that Christ has shown us what God is like and by our discovering God's acceptance and love of all people we are to love and accept all, permitting, inviting Christ to tear down the walls that would separate us from others.  The result is that God's people come from all nations and are fellow citizens of God's world.  Modern technology has reduced the world to a global village or as one person has stated it has turned the world into a neighborhood.  This is what God intended when the world was created, but it has gotten far away from God's intention.  As partners together with God, our task is to develop brother and sister relationships with all people so that we are a neighborhood, one community of faith. 
           
What we are about here is building the Church.  Access to God is available to all people and always has been.  This is nothing new.  Jesus' ministry made explicit to people what always had been true, that they could and did have access to God and that God cared about them and wanted to be involved in their lives.  The Church will realize unity when it becomes aware that it does not exist to propagate a point of view but to give a dwelling‑place for the presence of all people in relationship with God.   
           
There is never an easy time for building the Church.  There are those in every generation who are convinced that the Church is irrelevant.  Invariably there are those in the Church in every generation who function in such a perfunctory manner that their efforts are irrelevant to the needs of people.   
           
Certainly, when the Church appears to be almost as fragmented as the world to which it is called to minister, the Church has a credibility problem.  It was evident when people in churches supported slavery.  We’ve seen it in our lifetime when people in churches said that people with AIDS were not welcome.  We’ve known it when people on the inside of a church made requirements that those outside of the church had to meet in order to enter.  We’ve seen it when church leaders have closed their eyes to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse committed against people by church leaders.  
           
There are some lessons in those events that we must not miss if we are going to continue our task of telling God’s story and building the church.   Those of us inside the church often hold some misconceptions about the church that keep those outside the church outside.  We tend to throw up cultural barriers that make it difficult for people to be accepted.  There have been barriers of appearance, barriers of accent, barriers of ethnicity, barriers of lifestyle, barriers of economic and social standing.     
           
One of the major sins and difficulties of the church is for people to act like the church is a club.  The Church must never be a club because the club mentality quickly takes over and becomes exclusive.  The Church belongs to God and God has thrown open the doors of membership to any and all who want to join.  That is threatening.  We have mistakenly seen ourselves as gatekeepers or bouncers who are to determine who is acceptable and who is not, who can come in and who cannot.  But our calling is not to be gatekeepers or bouncers of the church.  We are called to be partners together in telling God's story.  God's story is one of inviting people to become God's people.  When we tell that story, there is no way to control who may hear the story and no way to control who may discover that God's story is their story.  People discover they are loved and accepted by God.  Anybody that God loves and accepts, God's people are to love and accept.  The person who is acceptable to God is to be acceptable to us.  That is a large inclusive circle excluding no one. 
           
On a dangerous sea coast where shipwrecks often occur there was once a crude little life‑saving station.  The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost.  Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its work.  New boats were bought and new crews trained.  The little life‑saving station grew in numbers.
           
Some of the members of the life‑saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped.  They felt that a more comfortable place, a more attractively aesthetically designed building should be provided as the first refuge for those saved from the sea.  They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building.  Now the life‑saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely, because they used it as a sort of club.  Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life‑saving missions, so they hired life‑boat crews to do this work.  The life‑saving motif still prevailed in this club's decoration, and there was a liturgical life‑boat in the room where the club initiations were held.  About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boat loads of cold, wet and half‑drowned people.  They were dirty and sick and some of them had black skin and some had brown skin.  Some were Asian and Hispanic and Arabs.  The beautiful new club was in chaos.  So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.
           
At the next meeting, there was split in the club membership.  Most of the members wanted to stop the club's life‑saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club.  Some members insisted upon life‑saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life‑saving station.  But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life‑saving station down the coast.  They did.
           
As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old.  It evolved into a club, and yet, another life‑saving station was founded.  History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore.  Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown. 
           
The mission of the church is to continue as partners with God to draw the circle of inclusiveness and acceptance ever larger.  The temptation continually comes to the church to be a club rather than the body of Christ.  We must strive every day to include others with us in the Church, the body of Christ.  In this way we are building up the Church by adding our story to the stories of those who have preceded us and thus joining as partners with others and with God in telling God's story of love, grace, forgiveness and acceptance.  Our task does not involve discerning who is acceptable and who isn't.  Our task is to tell God's story.