July 23, 2006
Text: Ephesians 2:11-22
Prayers of the People:
God of red and yellow, black and white – who views us all as precious in your sight – we give you thanks for your embracing love. We give you thanks for quietly dismantling, stone by stone, the walls we keep erecting; for continually shrugging off the constraints we place on your grace. We are grateful that you invite us to love as widely and joyfully as do you, and beginning with those around us, we enlarge ourselves to make their joys our own.
And reaching out our arms, we embrace the concerns around us, as well, and make them our own. Heal our world, we pray; destroy the countless walls between us, enabling us to see your image reflected even in the faces of our enemies; able to love because you weave a new humanity that includes our thread, but is not limited to it. We pray in the name of Jesus, who taught us to see in this new way. Amen.
Constructive
Destruction
Every spring, according to Robert Frost’s
classic poem “The Mending Wall,” the poet and his neighbor would devote
themselves to repairing the stone barrier that winter had decayed between their
properties. One on either side, they
would heave back into place the stones that had somehow lost their
station. The work elicited from the
friends radically different observations.
The neighbor would quote his father who had taught him that “good fences
make good neighbors.” But Frost drew a
different conclusion. He credits the
swelling ground of frozen winter, acknowledges the plunder of hunters
determined to flush their prey, and playfully imagines the mischief of elves,
but ultimately returns to his basic assertion:
‘Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' [1]
People are forever quoting the neighbor
in the poem, but strangely I never hear them quoting Frost. We keep erecting walls, stone on stone, wire
over wire, improving, we seem to think, our neighborliness. But it is Frost, not his fence mending
partner, who speaks the more prophetic word:
something there is that doesn’t
love a wall, that wants it down.
We
saw that come dramatically true in the autumn of 1989. The Berlin Wall, that 96-mile barricade of
barbed wire and concrete built in 1961 to encircle West Berlin, was finally
breached in November of 1989, and completely torn down a year later. This destruction wasn’t, in this case, the
work of “elves” as Frost had comically imagined; it was the work of frustrated,
freedom-starved people who finally wouldn’t have it another way and breached
the levee with a tidal wave of insistent hope.
Something there is that doesn’t
love a wall, that wants it down.
But some of the strongest and tallest walls are less tangible. Gilbert Tuhabonye is a native of Burundi, an
east African nation bordering Rwanda.
And Gilbert loves to run. Even as
a child people noticed his speed and nicknamed him Tumagu, which roughly means
“one in constant motion.” His good
grades had earned him the privilege of attending secondary school several hours
from home, but his running skills soon earned him his reputation. And in his final year of high school, he was
studying diligently for his exams, anxious to do well enough to attract a
scholarship to a U.S. university.
But
on this one particular morning in 1993, when Gilbert woke expecting to take a
test, something odd was in the air. He
noticed it first when he turned on his bedside radio, as he did every morning,
and discovered that the national radio station was off the air, which was often
an ominous sign. The strangeness
deepened as he emerged from his dormitory and found the campus eerily, unnaturally
still. What he was to learn before the
morning was out was that during the night the newly elected Hutu President had
been assassinated in a coup, and that Hutu rage was about to be unleashed.
Gilbert, a Tutsi, had been familiar with
these historic labels all his life but had never been affected by them. Hutus and Tutsis slept side by side in the
dorm room, studied side by side in the classroom, and ran as teammates on the
track. The former headmaster of the
school had been a member of Gilbert’s tribe, but his replacement was a
Hutu.
Now,
in an instant, that latent dividing wall was about to cut quite literally like
a knife. Fueled by pent up hatred and
ignited rage, his Hutu classmates and teammates, under the direction of the
Hutu headmaster, confronted the confused Tutsi students and teachers with
machetes and stones and concentrated fury, first herding them together, then hacking
and slashing dozens to death, finally forcing those who survived into a small
gas station under construction nearby where they doused their victims with
gasoline and set them on fire. Walls of
hostility, indeed!
Gilbert miraculously managed to survive,
but only by hiding for over eight hours under the smoldering bodies of
classmates whose scorching bones and flesh seared him in the process. Finally, under cover of darkness, and using
the burned and severed leg bone of a classmate as a club, Gilbert broke out a
window and escaped, outrunning his attackers.
After
months in hospitals and therapy and despite continuing threats on his life, forbidding
odds and the discouragement of his doctors, Gilbert began to run again,
eventually receiving a scholarship to Abilene Christian University, a Church of
Christ school in my hometown, where he found not only an education, but a new
kind of world characterized by grace, welcome, encouragement and hope. As he describes it in the new book telling
his story, “As a Christian school, Abilene and its faculty, staff, and students
… put into practice what they preached.
I couldn’t imagine a more life-affirming place.” [2]
This
from a Roman Catholic African whose life desperately needed affirmation. Gilbert now lives in Austin, TX where he
coaches and trains, hoping to qualify for the 2008 Olympics. Something
there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.
Walls of violence and dehumanizing disregard that can’t be seen, but
isolate, nonetheless. Hutus and Tutsis;
Sunnis and Shiites; Israelis and Palestinians; Republicans and Democrats;
Cyclones and Hawks…
…and
in the Bible reading this morning, Gentiles and Jews. As in some of those other dualities, there
was more to their separation than simple prejudice or rivalry. The dividing wall that ran between Gentiles
and Jews was theological as much as anything else – it was born out of an
understanding of God: that God
recognized one group of people, and turned a blind eye to the other; that God
embraced one and rejected the other, which made it almost mandatory that they
do so, as well.
Imagine,
then, gathering as a congregation, opening the mail, and reading this jarring
claim: that now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by
the blood of Christ. 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.
Walls,
of course, are back in the news in recent years, and it’s tempting to employ
this passage in the service of various debates being argued around the world
about whether or not we should erect and maintain them. Israel, for one, is well underway with the
construction of a security fence of their own, lacing through the city of Jerusalem,
dividing the predominantly Palestinian section of town from the predominantly
Jewish. And we in the U.S. are talking fences,
ourselves.
But while I wouldn’t want to say that
these verses from Ephesians have nothing to do with those issues, they are
quite different conversations. In the
Middle East, simple safety and security are the motivators for the wall. People may disagree about the rightness or
the wrongness of the strategy – even its morality – but this literal wall is
finally about a people’s desire to feel safe.
And in our own country, talk of a fence along the U.S. – Mexican border
occurs within a larger conversation about political sovereignty. Sure, some have thrown in some red herrings
about national security, and again, you may believe the fence is absolutely
essential or utterly stupid, but the core of the question is about national
boundaries, and the dynamics of citizenship.
The
letter to the Ephesians, however, is about neither
physical safety, nor about political
boundaries. It is about how we make
sense of the worthfulness of each other as seen through the eyes of God. The time for playing “God loves us better” is
over, asserts the writer. In Christ we
learn an entirely different truth, which calls for an entirely different way of
living – one that proclaims and asserts that “you have a place in my heart
because I know you have a place in God’s.”
Something
there is that doesn’t love a wall, that patiently, persistently, and lovingly
works to bring it down.
More
than frozen ground-swell or hunters or rehabilitating elves in the night, that
“something” is the reconciling, embracing, love of God in Christ who came
proclaiming peace to those who were far, and peace to those who were near, that
one single dwelling place of grace might be constructed for God’s own glory to
reside. Which humbles me to think that
wherever such reconciliation is known, there are the very gates of heaven.