9th Sunday after Pentecost

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In my sermon, I am going to focus on today’s section from the Letter to the Ephesians. It addresses the challenge of how the young church could be a unified body of Christ when it was made up of both Jews and Gentiles.

These two groups were so vastly different from one another. Jews worshiped one God, Gentiles worshiped many gods. Jews had kosher food traditions, Gentiles ate whatever they wanted. Jews wore kippahs and kittles with fringes, Gentiles wore togas.

These two groups of people might do business with one another, and they saw each other in the streets, but they would never sit at the same table together, would never seek friendships with each other, had absolutely no interest in sharing any aspect of life. The two groups lived their own separate lives in their own separate circles.

At the time this letter to the Ephesians was written, Christians were still part of the Jewish community. Jesus and all the apostles and all the early believers were Jews. Not until after the Jewish War in the years 66 to 70 did the followers of Jesus realize how different they were from traditional Judaism and separated from the Jewish religious community.

So the early church was mostly Jewish. But now all these Gentiles began following Jesus’ gospel. They wanted to join the church. What should the church do? How could these pork-eating former pagans possibly be absorbed into the new covenant people of God, the body of Christ?

That’s the challenge today’s reading addresses.

It answers the conundrum with the assertion that all are welcome in Christ; that Christ is our peace; that even those who used to be far off are now invited into his presence. In his death and resurrection, Christ broke down the wall that used to divide people. He brought very different peoples together and created out of them one new humanity.

As a visual aid for this new reality, the letter describes Christ as a keystone. Our Bible translation reads cornerstone, but what is actually meant here is a keystone. A keystone is the wedge-shaped stone at the pinnacle of an arch that holds the whole structure together. You can see such keystones in this sanctuary, at the top of the four arches above the altar. The keystones are the white stones at the very top.

Since the Bible uses this illustration for Christ and his mission, I did a little dive into architecture this week. As I was reading about keystones, I found myself underlining sentences right and left. I was amazed how much of the architectural description of keystones reflected directly on Christ.

Here are a few examples:

The keystone is strategically positioned at the summit of the arch where the two sides meet. It is because of Jesus that the two sides, Jews and Gentiles, meet at all. The gospel has brought them together. The good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ has messed up their little independent circles and has forced the two sides to engage with one another.

The keystone is pivotal in bridging spaces, both literally and metaphorically, facilitating the creation of doorways, windows, and other passageways. The keystone makes it possible for walls to have openings. Keystones hold up the arches that allow people to come in and go out and encounter one another. Christ makes it possible for us to engage with other people no matter what race or religion they come from.

The architectural significance of the keystone lies in its role in distributing weight and tension. It absorbs the pressure from both directions and in turn supports the structure around and above the archway. Bringing vastly different people and cultures together, creates tension. Christ absorbs that tension. With his love and forgiveness and limitless compassion, Jesus models for us how to live peacefully with each other and also takes upon himself the cost our animosities and hatreds and sins have created; Jesus took them to the cross.

All the other stones lean on the keystone; it relieves the weight they would otherwise bear. What a beautiful image for Christ’s ministry to all people: we are allowed to lean on him. He helps us carry our burdens. Built into the arch with other believers and with Christ as the keystone, we do not have to struggle with the weight we carry by ourselves. Jesus and Jesus’ followers are around us absorbing some of the load.

When Paul wrote the letter and described Christ as the keystone that holds diverse people together in Jesus’ love, his audience could see such arches all over the place. The Romans used them in their whole empire to build houses, temples, bridges, aqueducts, and more. The illustration was perfect: Every time Christians saw such an arch, they were reminded of the promise and calling to be united in Christ.

We still have such arches with keystones all around us. They are an enduring design in architecture, strong and stable. Often, when you go to tour ancient ruins, it’s the arches that are still standing. They are that stable.

This is good for us to keep in mind these days when we struggle once again with unity, in the church and in our nation. It feels like our populace is developing into two separate groups or circles or tribes, like Jews and Gentiles in the early church. The two sides watch different news channels, wave different flags, desire different court decisions, have different ideas about the rights of women or minorities or LGBTQ+ folk.

How can we live together in harmony and unity?

Our scripture today tells us how the early church manages it. We can be inspired by their example.

Paul writes about circumcision as an issue dividing the congregation and then asserts that Christ abolished the law. One theologian urges us to think about this abolishing of the law not so much in terms of rules, but in terms of identity markers. Circumcision marked Jews are members of the covenant people of God. Their fringes, their kipas, their dietary customs, they were all giving them identity as God’s children.

Now Paul is asking them to accept other people into God’s family who do not share these identity markers. Notice that Paul is not saying they should stop circumcising and eating kosher, but they should stop expecting everyone to follow those laws. On the cross, Jesus took down all ways we keep score and decide who is in and who is out.

Jesus is creating a new humanity that is based not on our past or our culture or our opinions or our wealth or our political affiliation, but solely on the grace of Jesus Christ offered to us in our baptism. As the letter says, Jesus proclaimed peace to those who were near and to those who were far away, to those who were circumcised and to those who were not. All are welcome as they are.

Which means that Christ does not require or expect uniformity. Rather, the gospel celebrates unity with diversity. The grace of Jesus can bring nations, tribes, parties, genders, and ethnic groups into relationship, can build them into one arch by absorbing their tensions, can invite them into a new kind of community, one described by a commentator as: where they can live together as a new eschatological community whose DNA is belief in God, faith in Jesus Christ, and unity in and through the power of the Holy Spirit.

How that worked in the early church is beautifully expressed I the words of Justin the Martyr, who lived around the years 100 to 165 in Rome. He wrote: “We who once took most pleasure in accumulating wealth and property now share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with men of different tribes because of their different customs now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them and pray for our enemies.” The church was a new creation in Christ.

God is in the process of forming us into that kind of new community. The verb in the last verse of our reading is present tense: You are being built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. This is an ongoing process; a process of growth in faith and love enabled by the Holy Spirit; a process that changes people and invites them to become part of the dwelling place of God.

In our tense and divided days, this is a wonderful vision to hold on to. We are in community not because we are all alike or because we all agree, but because we are all beloved children of God. We were all once far off, but have been brought near by the grace of Jesus Christ. He is the keystone who brings us together, absorbs our tensions, and bears our loads.

Jesus calls us to live and rejoice in this new reality. And he calls us to share the good news of this reality with the world. Wherever we go, especially in the tense situations we encounter, let us carry the message of unity with diversity, of mutual respect, and of the call to live in peace with one another so that together we can build something beautiful, a world of blessing for all people, a dwelling place for God. Amen.