Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's July 23, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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I discovered this past Tuesday night that one of the best kept secrets in East Tennessee is the Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, which is owned and operated as a kind of retreat and conference center by the Children’s Defense Fund, which, as many of you know, is probably the major and most effective private advocacy group for the rights of children anywhere. Long before the federal government came up the “No Child Left Behind’ slogan, that idea had been invented and advocated by the Children’s Defense Fund, and their work exhibits a meritorious record of working to save children from gun violence and assorted other social ills.

And so, Tuesday night, just a stone’s throw from Anderson County High School, I found this conference center: tucked into the rolling countryside, 157 acres of small cabins, lush green and trees, and huge tents to handle the 1000 or so people there from all over the country. I bumped into some other Presbyterian clergy who said, “why go anywhere else for continuing education when we’ve got this in our backyard?” “This” was the summer conference with morning worship, daily devotions, Bible studies, a large bookstore, and small group connections with people concerned to stand up for children and their rights. I went, particularly, because I had heard that for three nights running, the organizers had scheduled national acclaimed preachers to speak in the ark, a large, open-ended sanctuary, built out of long wood planks in the shape of an ark.

The preacher of the night was James Forbes of New York City, an elderly African-American American Baptist minister whose name I quickly recognized. Drawing upon an always entertaining blend of showmanship and theatre, social criticism and scriptural exegesis, and at every step of the way playing to the congregation, he preached for 45 minutes or so about a word he coined to describe the besetting sin of our age: “versus - ism.” His text was the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, and he talked about the versus-ism in that day: followers of John vs. followers of Jesus, Israel vs. Samaria, Jew vs. Samaritan, worship on Mt. Gerizim vs. worship in Jerusalem, righteous vs. sinner, even man vs. woman. And if you know that story, you know that, though the dividing walls seemed impenetrable that day, that somehow, living water seeped through and brought joy and purpose to this woman Jesus encountered.

The point made by Jim Forbes, and the point I’d make too, is that versus-ism has not gone away. It still seems to be our world’s predominant organizing principle and grounds for self-justification in everything from the perpetuation of personal animosities to national policy decisions. And no matter how much we might glamorize the days of the earliest church, versusism was there too.

So, in the text from Ephesians, written probably about a generation after the life of Christ, versus-ism persists. Here, it pitted circumcised Jews against the uncircumcised Gentiles, and the Jewish claim that circumcision was an essential outward mark – that you couldn’t really belong to God without having passed through this rite of initiation, or to borrow a phrase from a TV commercial, males shouldn’t leave home without it. Some Jews, including the Apostle Paul and some Gentile converts as well, contested the exclusive implications of that claim, believing that the necessity of male circumcision had been superceded because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross.

Thus, the stage was set for a battle over whether or not this ritual practice should remain a religious requirement. We may sometimes think our society has a lock on highly-charged debates regarding human sexuality, but sexual and reproductive matters, though treated much more subtly in the ancient world than in ours, still represented important symbols and realities. Thus, it was hardly a foregone conclusion that the practice of circumcision, at least in Christian circles, should suddenly disappear. Those debates lingered for at least a generation after the time of Christ.

To prove that these kind of issues persist, even in the church today, we need look no further than our own denomination, which as recently as the early 1960s, lost members and member churches largely over whether women could be ordained to pastoral ministry, and of course, more recently, we Presbyterians, along with several other Protestant denominations, have been debating and disagreeing over sexual orientation and what role it should play in determining fitness for ordained leadership in the church.

A compromise, of sorts, was reached at the June General Assembly in Birmingham, a decision to allow local governing bodies, that is, sessions and presbyteries, leeway to make their own call regarding fitness for ordination, without a particular mandate from the denomination itself, but even then, there are those on both sides of the issue who are not satisfied. How the acceptance or rejection of persons of homosexual orientation will ever finally get resolved, God only knows, but on an issue that by and large, nationally anyway, divides Presbyterians into thirds, - a third “agin it,” a third “for it,” and a neutral third who say “get over it” and “let’s move on,” one wonders what compromises are left when the center threatens to crumble and the feelings of anger and betrayal are felt so strongly from opposing viewpoints. Versus-ism.

Whether it’s ideology, stereotype, or actual practice, we know that versus-ism persists as a way to define, sometimes even to demonize, the “other” in our human experience. Dr. Seuss largely hit the nail on the head when he wrote the children’s story, The Butter Battle Book, which is the story about two different races that live on opposite sides of a brick wall. Why is this wall separating the two? Because the Yooks and the Zooks are fighting about what side should have the butter when they eat their bread. The Yooks ate their bread with the butter side up and the Zooks ate their bread with the butter side down. And before long, this difference of opinion mushrooms into the threat of all-out war to defend the right to butter bread in a particular way, with walls coming to define relationships.

Not all walls are bad, of course. The world, in fact, is full of walls: fences, gates, partitions, and other ingeniously constructed barriers – all aimed at keeping something or someone in or out. On the one hand, we need walls, walls in homes to protect us against wind and rain; walls to keep livestock safely in and predators out; walls to help us separate spaces and improve organization and efficiency. But one does not have to be a sage or pundit to see how walls, both literal and spiritual, can lead to grief, division, and even violence. All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God. (“Wrecking Crew,” CC, 7/11/06)

It, therefore, has to be among the most radical of all thoughts contained in scripture when we read in Ephesians that Christ has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” It’s difficult to understand how this can happen, especially today, when hostility appears to be the bread and butter of human relating and living. But we know that we have helped to build the walls of hostility. We’ve built them not out of bricks and mortar, but out of the raw material of sin and division. Then we’ve cemented them with the mortar of name-calling, labeling, and prejudice.

Sometimes, I think, like the poet Robert Frost, we like the idea reflected in his poem, “Mending Wall”, that is that “good fences make good neighbors,” but what with all the examples of walls separating Palestinians and Israelis, metaphorical walls between the races and along socio-economic lines, as well as ever new walls along borders between nations, I wonder if the poet actually had it right. Do, “good fences make good neighbors?”

The Apostle Paul would have us understand that there is one wall that can’t be allowed to stand: the wall of circumcision that blocked Gentile outsiders from becoming Christian insiders. Ephesians declares that God has set aside Jewish rites that regulated who could have access to God -- and the cross of Christ became proof positive that the old wall had crumbled. Somehow, mysteriously, salvifically, mystically, the crucified flesh of Jesus has made all this possible. The covenant was not to be limited only to the circumcised.

There is a word Ephesians uses to describe this new reality. Peace. Four times the word appears in our text. Jesus is peace; peace results from the one new humanity that replaces divisions within humanity; peace is the word proclaimed both to insiders and outsiders, those nearby and faraway.

Much more than the absence of war, which I fear is the main definition that seems to enjoy wide favor in our day, peace in scripture served many purposes: it was rooted in the Hebrew salutation, “shalom,” and expressed a conventional greeting, such as “Peace be with you,” a wish for health, wholeness salvation. Then, in early Christian usage, to proclaim the word of peace was to celebrate the reconciliation brought between Jews and Gentiles. It meant relationships between enemies had been restored and made right. And it also came to mean the state of the soul’s inner calm and serenity that overcomes fear.

For me, I think, peace is something I will forever associate with Jesus the Peacemaker, and his nonviolent ethic of love which, ultimately, is the only way forward to overcome all the walls we humans erect and support. Perhaps the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best: “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

Colman McCarthy, at one time a columnist for the Washington Post, took on a kind of second career as teacher, a career which began as a volunteer in the District of Columbia public high school called School Without Walls, a school which specializes in experimental and theoretical learning. After his initial day of volunteering, the English teacher wondered if he’d like to come back and offer an experimental course that fall. What would I teach? he wondered. You could teach writing, she said. Impulsively, McCarthy remembers, impulsively, I replied, “I’d rather teach peace,” which in fact became the title of his memoir about his long and fruitful experience with teaching young people about peace, non-violence, and the ethic of love. He realized, after having taught some 5000 students in various classes, that I really emphasize just one theme: “alternatives to violence exist and, if individuals and nations can organize themselves properly, nonviolent force is always stronger, more enduring, and assuredly more moral than violent force” (I’d Rather Teach Peace, xiii)

It’s a message that goes right to the heart of the gospel. Whereas two, divided, who once were enemies, Jew and Gentile, had existed before, God promised in scripture to build one new humanity, established, yes, upon what God originally promised through the Jewish people, but now expanded into a much larger temple with Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

I had the chance to visit Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall when I went to the holy land in 1984. Positioned along one side of the temple mount known as the west wall, part of the temple rebuilt during the days of Ezra and Nehemiah making it 2500 years or so old, there is probably no more vivid or emotional symbol of prayer and hope within any religious tradition; men, even Gentiles such as myself with head properly covered, could go down past the Israeli soldiers to the wall and slip prayers written on small pieces of paper into the cracks of the wall, and then, still jostling for position, stand there for as long as you wanted in order to ask the almighty to receive the prayer. It’s hard to remember all the emotions I felt, standing alongside orthodox Jews and other tourists, but I do recall praying for peace and feeling overwhelmed by the cacophony of vocalized prayers and the feeling of utter smallness standing beneath this towering, ancient wall with the weight of sacred history and the world’s history of intractable conflicts and bloodshed somehow reflected in those massive stones.

One would hope that the ritual of prayer, whether at the Wailing Wall or whatever sacred space we might find or create, would be a way to discover peace. .. and hope . . . and the kind of love Jesus taught and lived . . . a way forward through all of the versusisms of our own time. As the environmentalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams has said, “The eyes of the future are looking back at us, and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time” (Americans Who Tell the Truth, p. 25).

IN Christ God has created one new humanity . . . breaking down the dividing wall . . . putting to death hostility . . . proclaiming peace to those far off and peace to those nearby . . .

May we, who dare call ourselves followers of the Christ, so honor our baptismal vows and live at peace with all of God’s creation. So let it be. Amen.

Our hymn of response to the Word proclaimed is #408, Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life”