PRAY

I was born in a little town called Mena, Arkansas. Mena is nestled in a valley surrounded by the Ouachita mountain range, just a few miles from Oklahoma, about half-way between Missouri and Louisiana. In the early fifties, when I was a small child, Mena was much like many other towns in the heartland of America. It was the county seat and had many thriving businesses. It was the place where everyone in the county came to shop on weekends. About 3,000 people lived there back then … and all of them were white. It was a friendly place to live … if the color of your skin was white like mine. When I was a child growing up in Mena, Arkansas, people of color were not welcome. They weren’t allowed to live there. They weren’t even welcome to stop for a meal or for gas, if they were passing through.

When I was six years old, our family left Mena and moved 80 miles north to the city of Fort Smith. Fort Smith was much larger than Mena. With over sixty thousand residents it was the second largest city in Arkansas. It was in Fort Smith that I first saw a person with skin color different from mine.

I can still remember going shopping with my mother in downtown Fort Smith. I loved to go to the five and ten cent stores. We had three of them on Main Street – McCrorys, Kresses, and Woolworths. I don’t remember which one had the drinking fountains on the back wall near the restrooms, but I can still picture it in my mind. There were two drinking fountains, two white porcelain drinking fountains affixed to the back wall. One was marked for Whites. The other was marked for Coloreds. And there was a restroom for white men and a restroom for white women. I remember asking my mother where the colored people went to the bathroom. She said they had to wait until they got home.

That didn’t seem right to me, but I was only six or seven, and I just accepted it. After all, that’s the way things were with us and them.

And it wasn’t just drinking fountains and restrooms. Colored people, that’s what we called African Americans back then, could only ride on the back of the bus. They had their own grade school and their own high school. I remember driving by their schools with my parents. Their schools weren’t nearly as nice as the ones my brothers and I attended. And they had their own swimming pool near the government projects where many of them lived, but it was much smaller than the giant pool at Creekmore Park, where the white families went to picnic and swim and ride the train. I remember going to the movie at the Malco Theatre. At the Malco white people came in by the front door and we could sit on the main floor or in the balcony. People of color had their own entrance which led to a second balcony above the first balcony, high above and behind the white patrons. That’s the way it was when I was a child in the fifties. That’s the way it was with us and them.

When I was a boy in the fifties, I went to church every Sunday. I learned songs like “Jesus Loves the Little Children, all the children of the world”. You probably learned it, too. And I knew that God loved me. And I knew that God loved the black family that lived across the street from us. But I never stopped to question why things were the way they were. That was just the way it was with us and them.

I wonder what preachers back then did with Scripture passages like the one we read this morning. I suspect they focused on the difference between Jews and Gentiles and how Christ came to break down the walls that divided them. But I wonder how many of them thought about the barriers we erect between people in our own time. We are still guilty of that. Oh, I know some people think about it. Even in the fifties some people were thinking about it and beginning to do some-thing about it. The winds of change were blowing across the south. But change comes slowly. That seems to be particularly true in the church.

It wasn’t the church that stood up to demand civil rights for all people. In fact the church remained very quiet on the subject. It was the federal government that finally stepped in. I remember the year 1957 – the year they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. That year President Eisenhower activated the National Guard. He sent troops to Little Rock to insure the safety of the black students who were chosen to attend the white school. I remember that year, because I was in the sixth grade studying Arkansas History. My oldest brother Bob was in his first year as a school teacher in North Little Rock. My brother Bud was a member of the National Guard. He was among those standing guard at Central High School. And I went to church every Sunday, and I studied my Bible, and I sang songs like “Jesus Loves the Little Children”. But I never made a connection between what I was learning on Sunday and what was going on in Little Rock. That was just a dispute between us and them.

Now I want you to think back even further in time. Let’s go back to the time of Jesus. Let’s go back to the time of Paul. Jesus and Paul were Jews of the first century. The us and them of their childhood were different from ours. The us were the Jews. Them was everybody else. All non-Jews were lumped together and called Gentiles. In the culture of first century Judea there were only two possibilities. You were either born a Jew or you were not. If you were a male, born into a Jewish family, when you were eight days old you were circumcised. That little surgery marked every Jewish boy as a child of the covenant, a permanent reminder that you were chosen by God. Those without the mark were doomed for eternity, forever separated from God. It was a source of great pride for the Jews and the cause of great enmity between their race and all other peoples.

No where was the separation more evident, more vivid, than at the Temple in Jerusalem. The very layout of the Temple dramatically marked the separation between Jews and Gentiles. Inside the temple walls were a series of courts. The innermost court was the most sacred place, the “Holy of Holies”, the dwelling place of God. Only the high priest was permitted to enter and that was limited to one time per year, only on the Day of Atonement. Outside the Holy of Holies was the Court of Priests. Beyond that the Court of Israelites, the male Jews, then came the Court of the Women. Finally, far removed from the Holy of Holies, far away from the priests, separated from the men of Israel by the Court of the Women, was the Court of the Gentiles. There was a low barrier that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the Court of the Women. Signs were posted on this wall in Latin and in Greek, warning that death would come to any Gentile who sought to advance further toward the Holy of Holies.

Paul said Christ came to break down those barriers. Through the blood of Christ, the warning signs were smashed, the enmity between Jew and Gentile was abolished. On crucifixion day, not only were the barriers between the outer and inner courts destroyed, even the curtain isolating the Holy of Holies was torn in two from top to bottom.

In Jesus Christ, the door was opened for all people to be reconciled to God. But even more, Paul says through Christ we are to be reconciled to one another. Paul says:

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. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it (Ephesians 2: 13-16).

The Good News of the Gospel is that there is no barrier that can separate us from God and there should be no barrier that separates us from one another. The Good News of the Gospel is that because of Jesus Christ there is no longer an us and a them. The barrier between Jews and Gentiles was one of the most obvious barriers in history. If this barrier has been set aside, can any barrier be justified? If God does not show favoritism, if all people are created in God’s image, if God’s purpose is unity, if we are to love our enemies, if Christ took the hostility into himself to destroy it, on what grounds can we justify keeping any barriers in place? The cross is the place where barriers were destroyed – where all barriers were destroyed! If we are to live in Christ, if we are to be his body, there can be no barrier to our love! And yet we still erect barriers and allow them to stand!

What are the barriers that separate us from one another? We live in a country where we no longer have drinking fountains marked for whites or for coloreds. We live in a country where all people swim in the same pools, ride the same buses, and attend the same schools. But it took nearly twenty centuries after the crucifixion for those barriers to come down. And even though the signs are gone, all the attitudes have not changed. Prejudice still exists in our society and in our world. Prejudice still exists in places far away and in places right here at home. Pastor Brenda’s recent experience was an all too painful reminder that prejudice still exists – even in the body of Christ. And it is easy for us to point fingers at others and say “shame on you,” but we need to look inside ourselves and examine our own motives and attitudes. That’s the challenge Paul lays before us. What are the barriers that separate us from others, from people we view as different from ourselves? Who are the people we choose to exclude or ignore or look down upon? We still live in a world of us and them and it is so easy for us to look the other way and avoid the them in our lives – people who have wronged us, people who have hurt us, even people who are simply different from us.

What are the barriers that keep us from loving one another and reaching out to one another? What are the barriers that keep us from enjoying the peace which God would have us enjoy?

Paul said Christ died on the cross to put to death the enmity between people and to bring us peace. The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom. And Shalom means much more than the end of fighting. The peace that is Shalom encompasses all the fullness of life that is possible when we live in harmony with God’s love for us. God’s will for us is Shalom. That’s what God wants for each of us: Shalom. But as long as we allow barriers to exist between us and God and as long as we allow barriers to exist between us and them, we will never experience that peace – God’s shalom.

What are the barriers in your life? What are the barriers that separate you from God? What are the barriers that separate you from others – others who are different from you or others who may be much like you – even members of your own family? And what are the barriers that others see when they look at our church from the outside? What are the barriers that keep others from entering our doors to experience the love of Jesus Christ? What are the barriers that prevent us from reaching out to love all people – all people.

If we are us, who are them?

What walls need to come down to make us one?

My prayer today is that God will open our eyes and open our hearts and open our arms and bring us peace! Shalom!

AMEN