5-17-2024

Good Morning All,

         Ephesians 2:14; “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.”

      For many people, working with or spending time with someone who is different than you are is a difficult task.  We see it when immigrants try to settle into a neighborhood.  Our first reaction is often “there goes the neighborhood.”  In the sporting news a while back, there was a lot of talk about a professional basketball player who was fined for criticizing a referee.  The referee was one of the very few women to referee professional basketball.  They are trying to decide if it is a sexist comment, a racist comment or if it is just a ballplayer complaining about a foul that was called. 

    We look for lots of ways to place people into categories.  We use age, sex, skin color, wealth, height, weight, level of education, national origin, and religion, just to name a few.  We can pigeonhole and divide a whole roomful of people into a whole lot of groups, sub- groups, and sub-sub-groups.  We can have balding, overweight, myopic, left handers in this corner.  We can have poor, skinny, old men who worship trees in that corner.  We tend to look for the differences that we can use to divide and separate us.  Even if we have nothing in our history that causes us to think we are right.

    But God has intervened in Christ.  He has reconciled us to Himself, breaking down “the dividing wall of hostility.”  He has opened the path to rapprochement.  He has taught us and shows us the beauty of atonement of being “at-one-ment” with God.  God is at one with us because of Christ.  Our alienation is removed.  We are at one with our heavenly Father, we are united with God.  This is what Jesus brought about by his death and resurrection; we have unity with God.  We are one with God through faith in Christ.  We are no longer separated; the division is healed.  We are reconciled.  Our God, Immanuel, comes to be with us, to dwell with us, to make his home with us and in us.

    Now that we are reconciled with God, the path is clear for us to be reconciled with one another.  Paul points this out in the next verse after ours, in verse 15 Paul writes, “His purpose was to create in Himself one man out of the two (Jew and Gentile), thus making peace.  There is no distinction in God’s eye, we are all the same.  Through faith in Christ, we are one.

   So those differences should be celebrated as part of the joy of diversity.  They are ways to bring new thoughts and ideas to old problems.  We are reconciled to God so we can be reconciled to one another.  We are free to see our diversity not as a source of division but rather as a source of delight.

Heavenly Father, you reconciled us to you so that we would have the path to reconcile with one another.  Give us the strength to heal the wounds between our brothers.  Help us to provide the balm to the wounds that exist.  Guide us by your Spirit to bring about hope in this broken world.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret