On Ethnic Heritage Churches

Today’s post is from the blog section of Theologyweb. The author’s name is indicated as elysian and it appeared under the title Connected in Community.

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 12:12-13 (NRSV)

Today’s question:
How does remaining connected with Christ, the Head, solidify your fellowship with others in the body, the church?

I have to admit that one of the things that turned me off to being part of a church when I took a hiatus from church involvement several years ago, was the whole socio-political aspect of most churches. I was already playing the status-to-win game professionally, and by the time I got home from work I was tired of people, and weary of office politics. I didn’t want to go to church and end up playing politics there too.

The one organization that should be relatively free of the cut-throat competition and dirty politics that permeates the world is the church. However, the church is made up of sinful people- people who put “me” first, people who don’t hesitate to use others for their own purposes, people who must be “right” at all costs, and people who seek the esteem of others to make themselves look and feel good.

The church where I was confirmed was an example of this. That congregation had once been exclusively a heritage church, which essentially meant you were of German ancestry, your parents belonged to that church and you were baptized in that church. The new pastor who had come to the church when I started going there in high school was trying to evangelize- to invite people to worship, to come to classes, and to participate in the community, but not everyone supported the pastor and his outreach.

The church became divided between the old-school faction who took a dim view of anyone who was not of German ancestry and/or not baptized into that particular church in infancy, against the pastor along with the evangelization faction who welcomed newcomers with open arms.

Since I was one of the newcomers, some of the old-school members weren’t terribly thrilled I was there. Neither of my parents are Lutheran, and most of my ancestors came from either England or Scotland. My English surname didn’t help endear me to the old-schoolers either (though I do have some German ancestry too.)

The battle in that church came down to a sad struggle: keep the community a small, ever-dwindling faction of ethnic Germans, OR open the door to the greater community. I am glad to say that the pastor, and ultimately the community itself, won out. Today it is still a small congregation, but it is comprised of a greater variety of people- people who are ethnic German, people who aren’t German at all, people who came to Christ as adults, and people who grew up in different traditions.

God never meant for the church to be a genealogical preservation society or an exclusive club. He meant the church to be a place for ALL people who are seeking, knocking, asking and striving to follow Christ.

I adhere to a very specific way of interpreting Christian faith. I am a confessional Lutheran. I belong to and participate in a Lutheran church that is a vibrant community that embraces people of all backgrounds and situations. I might not agree with everything my church does, but by and large it is a God-honoring community. The Gospel is proclaimed, the sacraments are given, and the congregation is committed to serving God.

My church is not perfect. I can’t say that I agree 100% with either of our pastors all the time. Just as in any other organization containing sinful humans, we have obnoxious people. I’m one of those obnoxious people. But the grace of God and the love of Christ are central in our church. Slowly I am learning that loving people is more important than being able to agree with them all the time.

The more that I stay focused on Christ, the more I realize I have in common with believers of other traditions. The more I stay focused on Christ and rooted in His word, I realize that I can forgive people who are sinful humans just like I am. I can love people and be gracious toward them even if I don’t particularly like them. I may not agree with all of the other Christian traditions’ doctrines or practices, but I can acknowledge their faithfulness to Christ and join them in loving and serving God. I can embrace other believers not only in my own congregation, but in the greater church as well, because I know that’s what Jesus would do.

I pray that God will keep me aware that there is no such thing as a “lone ranger” Christian, and that I need the greater community to grow in faith and grace.

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Blog Flashback:

From two years ago, here’s a post for worship leaders and songwriters on taking a Biblical passage and “making it sing.”  Click here to read.

He Is Our Peace: Blood Tears Down a Wall

The reconciliation of God’s people

¹¹ So remember that once you were Gentiles by physical descent, who were called “uncircumcised” by Jews who are physically circumcised. ¹² At that time you were without Christ. You were aliens rather than citizens of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of God’s promise. In this world you had no hope and no God. ¹³ But now, thanks to Christ Jesus, you who once were so far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

¹⁴ Christ is our peace. He made both Jews and Gentiles into one group. With his body, he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us. ¹⁵ He canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person out of the two groups, making peace. ¹⁶ He reconciled them both as one body to God by the cross, which ended the hostility to God.

¹⁷ When he came, he announced the good news of peace to you who were far away from God and to those who were near. ¹⁸ We both have access to the Father through Christ by the one Spirit. ¹⁹ So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. ²⁰ As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹ The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. ²² Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.

~Ephesians 2:11-22 (Common English Bible)

Another longer post today.  Maybe we should rename this Christianity 401. The blogger we feature today is Morgan Guyton, a United Methodist Pastor. I encourage to read this — and other posts — at his blog, Mercy Not Sacrifice, where it appeared under the title, How can blood tear down a wall? Sacrifice in Ephesians 2:11-22

This past weekend, I preached on Ephesians 2:11-22. It’s one of my favorite passages because it talks about how Jesus tears down the walls between us. And at first glance it would seem like a great opportunity to talk about how important it is for the church to fight racism and take on all the “us vs. them” conflicts in our day that build walls between people. But there was a line that confronted me in the passage that I felt like I couldn’t just treat as a rhetorical flourish as I’d so often read it before. I needed to be able to explain it. Paul says, “You who were far have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” That line doesn’t make any sense unless you read it with some understanding of the central purpose of sacrifice in the community of the ancient Israelites. Only through the lens of sacrifice can we understand how the blood of Jesus can tear down the wall that had kept the Gentiles out of the Jewish temple.

The Jerusalem temple in the time of Jesus was defined architecturally by a series of walls that only certain people were allowed to go inside. The outer area of the temple was the court of Gentiles, where money changers and animal vendors could come to sell their wares to Jewish pilgrims who traveled long distances to sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple and weren’t able to bring cattle from their own flocks with them if they owned cattle. Another group of Gentiles who would hang around the temple were called “God-fearers.” These were Gentiles who believed in the Jewish God but were unable or unwilling to go through the process of fully converting to Judaism.

The “dividing wall” that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 2:14 is the wall separating the inner temple complex from the court of Gentiles. Archaeologists have found several signs that originally hung on this wall around the inner temple saying: “No foreigner is to enter within the balustrade and embankment around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for his death which follows.”

Notice the way the sign is written. It doesn’t say that the Jewish authorities in charge of the temple would kill any foreigner. It is simply indicating that people who enter do so at their own risk of imminent death. The Jews believed that strongly that the divine power inside the temple would be enough to kill someone who was not properly prepared to face it. So what in the world happened in their temple that would cause them to feel this way?

We go to our temples and houses of worship today to sing, pray, read scripture, and hear sermons. We do not ritualistically slaughter and burn an animal as the centerpiece of our worship act. But that’s what the Jewish people did. Animal sacrifice was the means that God gave His people in Leviticus to make their people clean.

It’s important to understand that the ancient Jewish understanding of cleanliness was completely different than the modern understanding of cleanliness. In modernity, we define cleanliness according to biological terms. Being clean means you wash your hands with antibacterial soap and wipe your countertop to avoid attracting ants. In ancient Israel, cleanliness referred to the social chemistry of the community. Things were unclean that would disrupt the social chemistry and create conflict between people. In order to stay clean, the people had an elaborate “law with commandments and ordinances” that Paul references in Ephesians 2:15. At the center of the law was the ritual of sacrifice.

Sacrifice as well had a completely different meaning for ancient Jews than it does for us. Today it means “giving up something for the sake of a greater good,” like sacrificing on my weekly food budget for a few months so I can save money for an airline ticket to Hawaii. Though the Israelites were commanded to offer the best 10% of their flock to God, the primary meaning of the word sacrifice for them didn’t have to do with the loss of giving something up, but with the violence within the ritual of sacrifice. It was through the violence and hideousness of slaughtering an animal that the unnamed violence in the air of the community could be named, laid out before people, and then put in God’s hands through the fire of the altar. Using the violence of sacrifice that God had provided for them as a resource, Jewish people were able to clear the air of their community and dissipate any bad blood between them through the blood of the animal on the altar.

In this context of a society that depended upon the cleanliness created through a powerful violent ritual, it seems reasonable that Jews would worry about what would happen to the transformative space they experienced in their temple if Gentile tourists were given permission to walk through. So they told them they would have to sign on fully to the Jewish covenantal system before being allowed to enter. Note that this dividing wall wasn’t about separating races; it was about drawing the boundaries without which a powerful ritual could not occur.

The problem was that the temple cult gave too much power to the religious authorities in charge and they became corrupted as anyone would in their position. It turned into a sacrifice industrial complex. Then a young rabbi from Galilee named Jesus rolled into town and caused a ruckus in the court of the Gentiles throwing all the money changers out, calling the whole place a “den of thieves.” When the chief priests decided to arrest and crucify Jesus, they did not realize that they were creating the means by which their own vocational function would become obsolete. They didn’t make the connection between the lambs that they slaughtered and burned on the altar every week and the innocent man they were putting on the cross.

But because of the chief priests’ unwitting complicity with God’s plan, Jesus became “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). His blood became the violence that absorbs every other violence named and unnamed throughout the world. A very common misunderstanding of sacrifice is that it’s something that is done to “appease” God’s anger. This may have been true about other ancient gods, but Israel’s God YHWH makes it pretty clear through His prophets (Isaiah 1:10-17, Micah 6:6-8, etc.) that He didn’t get any pleasure out of sacrifice except insofar as it served as the system by which His people were made clean of sin so they could do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.

Jesus’ sacrifice makes peace between us and God the same way that the animal sacrifices of the ancient Israelites did for them, but it’s not because there’s any obstacle on God’s end of the relationship to His full, perfect love for us. Our sin simply keeps us from entering His presence with any degree of integrity or confidence without the assurance of the sacrifice that He has made on our behalf. We hate the light and flee to the darkness when our deeds are evil (John 3:19), so God provides a means through Christ for us to walk into His light without shame and with a purification that we don’t have to provide for ourselves.

The dividing walls that keep us out of God’s temple today are not anything that humans have built. They are rather walls within our hearts that keep us from coming clean before God. Many different walls are possible, but there are basically two types. Walls of pride are built out of our accomplishments and acts of piety when they serve the purpose of proving our faithfulness to God and hiding our sin and inadequacy. Walls of shame are built from the piles of our failures and obvious embarrassments; they keep us from believing we could ever be worthy of God’s acceptance.

Both walls of shame and pride share a basic misconception: that God expects us to be good. No one is good except for God alone. We are only good to the degree that we have allowed God to overpower us and accomplish His good through us. God doesn’t expect us to be good; God longs for us to be clean. He wants to take away all the bad blood and hidden ugliness that we have accumulated by washing our hearts clean in the blood of Jesus. Yes, it is a bizarre concept in our science-shaped world: that blood could make people clean, but there’s a truth to the logic of ancient sacrifice that has been proven through the witness of millions of Christians throughout history whose lives have been changed utterly by Jesus’ sacrifice.

How does Jesus’ blood tear down the walls of the Jerusalem temple? By changing the entire concept of temple from a place where you go to make yourselves clean before God using His prescribed ritual sacrifice to the place in all of our hearts where Jesus comes to take our sins away and make us clean again. It is only because of Jesus’ sacrifice that Paul can say, “He is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14). Peace is not something that can be established on the basis of rational discourse. We will always be able to come up with reasons why our adversaries are the ones who will not make peace with us. Peace is made between people who have been made clean by God, and that kind of piece makes all of us into one body and one temple where the God who we were created to enjoy can be glorified through our worship.

~Morgan Guyton

Related Post:  June 15, 2012: The Ground is Level at the Foot of the Cross