Ephesians 2:11-21 "The Far Country" Scott Hoezee

I hold in my hand a piece of the Berlin Wall, chiseled off by a friend of mine in 1990. In one of my photo albums there is a picture from 1984 of the nineteen-year-old me standing in front of the Berlin Wall. Behind me on the wall you can see that someone had spray-painted the word "HELP!" but had printed the word and its letters backwards so as to look like that cry for help was seeping through from the eastern side of the wall.

In the early 1980s such cries were emerging from East Germany, but few thought they would be heeded anytime soon. President Reagan had recently ratcheted up the Cold War rhetoric and would soon label the Soviet Union an "evil empire." When on that trip in 1984 we spent five days in East Germany, my friends and I quickly sensed the entire ethos of fear which thirty years of socialism had inculcated into the people. Conversations were hushed. No opinion was whispered until the person making the comment first made the obligatory glance over both shoulders to make sure no unwelcome ears were in the vicinity.

"Help!" was indeed a cry that emerged from the east side of the Berlin Wall. But if in 1984 anyone had suggested that before the decade was out people would be carrying pieces of the Berlin Wall in their pockets, they would have been scorned as dreamers. That miles-long wall and guarded border did not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. Yet it did and with astonishing speed. Many of us well remember the image of people from West and East joining one another atop the soon to be demolished wall.

The image of a wall crumbling and people being reunited is central to this passage. The gospel, Paul says, is about drawing people to God and to one another. We need these reunions because the result of sin is alienation. We are far from the God who made us; far from other people. The power of God's grace, Paul claims, is what draws us closer.

Throughout the Bible you pick up the image of exile in a far country. Adam and Eve began human history living close to God in that place called Eden. Sin led to exile from Eden. Sin then spread as Cain slew Abel. Cain was also then exiled, leaving his family to become "a restless wanderer on the earth." Then God began a new thing by opening the covenant with Abraham. Yet what was the very first thing God said to Abram? "Get out of your country and go to the land I will show you." Abram started his sacred journey by being exiled from the only place he had ever called home to travel to an unnamed far country.

A bit later Jacob and Esau appeared on the scene and though the biblical text clues us in that Jacob was the one God had chosen to work through, this fact soon results in Jacob's going into exile as he flees Esau's wrath and goes into a far country. Later Joseph is put into exile when his shady brothers punish his favored status by selling Joseph into Egyptian slavery.

Joseph eventually lands on his feet in Egypt and so re-locates his family there, but that put the people of God out of the promised land and they'd remain in that exile for four more centuries until Moses led them home. A few more centuries would pass but eventually would come the great Babylonian Exile of Israel.

Over and again the people of God live in some far country, exiled from God and from one another. This pattern in Scripture may well encapsulate the essence of sin: sin is what alienates us, drives us from home, keeps families and friends apart even as it yawns open a chasm between God and us.

The far country. It's the place to which the prodigal son in Jesus' famous parable went when he decided he wanted his old man's money but not his old man. So he left; he relocated to the far country where he lost himself in the high life only to discover, as countless others have likewise found in history, that the so-called "high life" can bring you pretty low. It's only when the prodigal hits rock bottom, sharing a feed trough with pigs, that he comes to himself, wakes up, and concludes, "I've just got to get home!"

The far country. It is any place, be it a hunk of real estate or a state of mind, where we feel lonely, isolated, at odds with other people if not with God himself. It is the place where at some point we come to ourselves, shake the cobwebs from our minds, and realize with a jolt that there are people with whom we have bad relations. Maybe those people are our parents or a sibling, a cousin or a grandparent. Maybe those other people are whole groups of folks: people with skin colors or speech accents different from our own. Maybe the One from whom we are ultimately alienated is the Creator God himself. We know we're not living the way our heavenly Father would want and so may well hit bottom at some point, come to ourselves and conclude, "I've just got to get home."

The far country. It is the place finally to which the Son of God came. He left the precincts of heavenly glory, journeyed to the far country of our broken world, and lost himself among the flotsam and jetsam of humanity, becoming a member of the human family. God's Son, who got named Jesus one night when born in a barn among the pigs and lying in one of their feed troughs, joined the lot of us who live far from home, east of Eden, alienated from each other and the God who so dearly wants to claim us as his children.

Like the rest of us so also Jesus just knew he had to get home but unlike the rest of us he decided to take home with him as many exiles as he could get. But that was no easy task. Trying to accomplish that task took the very life's breath out of Jesus. Jesus did not get out of the far country alive. Only the almighty power of God raised Jesus up from the death which is the ordinary, rock-bottom end for all us exiles. Death is the end of the story, the boundary past which we cannot pass, the road block that finally prevents us from getting back home.

The far country. It is the place in which we're stuck, save for the grace of God anyway. But the grace of God is real. It raised Jesus from the dead and simultaneously made Jesus into the road over which the rest of us can now travel home. We've all become foreigners and aliens, prodigals and lonely people but Jesus draws us back home, raising us from the death which otherwise keeps us from God even as he gives us the Spirit to overcome the walls of division which otherwise keep us from also one another.

Exile from home. Brother against brother. Cain versus Abel, Jacob versus Esau, Joseph versus the whole clan, Israel versus the world. Yet through it all there is a curious sub-theme: God is with his people in exile. He kept taking care of Adam and Eve after they left the Garden. He kissed Cain's forehead to give him a mark that would somehow protect him during his restless wanderings on the earth. While Jacob was on the lam God gave him that dream of the heavenly ladder, and while Joseph languished in prison God gave him the ability to interpret dreams and so arrive at a better day. When Israel cried out in Egypt, God worked through faithful women like the midwives and Moses' mother to ensure that the people would be rescued. When Israel went to Babylon, folks like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel tagged along, speaking God's voice of comfort even in the far country.

Finally the day came for Immanuel to arrive in our far country: "God with Us" is Jesus' very name. And although the presence of God's Son in human flesh was a never-before-seen phenomenon, the truth is God had always been with us in all the various exiles of history even as he is with you and me today during all those times when we feel far from our family, far from former friends, far from people with whom we are supposed to have a better relationship but don't, far even from God.

Jesus came to draw us all home to God but also to one another. In verses 14-15 Paul says that the way Jesus did this, the way he broke down the walls that kept people apart (not to mention the big wall that kept God and us apart) was through his own flesh. The stricken, bloody flesh of Jesus shows our alienation, hostility, and sin. That's what we did to Jesus. But that puts a mighty weight behind the idea that now, if we truly are in Christ, we need to work hard to strive for unity and inclusion in the church.

"You all used to live way out there in the far country," Paul writes. "But now you've been drawn near, and the center to which we've all been drawn is Jesus himself and the perfect peace, the shalom, that his sacrifice made possible." We all get the same peace, Paul says in verses 17 and 18, and through that we all have access to the same God.

Jesus' body was shattered, abused, sacrificed. They hacked at Jesus' flesh, ripped into it with whips, pierced it clean through with nails and swords. But out of that carnage God brought a miracle: he made a new Body. Just imagine if someone had been able to gather up the chunks of the Berlin Wall--that symbol of separation--and had somehow managed to construct out of all those pieces a glorious cathedral in which all people from East and West could gather to worship God! How miraculous it would be to take something which had once reminded us of separation and fashion out of it a place of unity.

Just that, Paul says, was Jesus' goal all along. He came to our far country, allowed himself to be murdered like some outsider who did not belong. He did that so that out of his broken body God could build us exiles a new place to call home. The nail holes and marks of our alienation now become the symbols of God's fierce desire to bring us home, reunited with himself and with one another.

This morning we see again the way God has opened up that homecoming. We see these scattered fragments of Jesus' body and blood and are reminded that somehow, some way, by the alchemy of God's power and grace, God gathers up these scattered pieces of our alienation and creates out of them a new home. In Christ we have a place where exiles can gather at peace, hushed and quieted the way we once felt as children after mom or dad had safely tucked us into our beds. Then we would drift off into the serene sleep of children as we listened to the soothing murmurs of adult conversation elsewhere in the house. That's the peace you feel when you're home.

But even as the bread and wine of communion this morning give us just this sense of shalom, they challenge us, too. Not every dividing wall of hostility in my life, your life, or this world has toppled yet. The racism that lurks in our hearts, the dysfunction in families and the suspicions we harbor about one another even at church remind us that though the highway out of this far country is wide open in front of us, we none of us have traveled that road clear down to its final destination in the kingdom of God.

And so we are nourished by the elements of our Lord's most holy Supper. We are fortified and strengthened and motivated to keep tearing down any and every wall of division we still see in this world. We are most certainly reminded that we are flat out not allowed to participate in things which deepen divisions. As Paul reminds us with a literary force that is still startling two millennia later, the reason we cannot create even more alienation is seen in nothing less than the flesh of Jesus.

All the sacrificial carnage we see on display on this table happened so that we who were or are far can be drawn near; so that all us prodigal sons and daughters who are in exile can come to ourselves and so conclude, "I've just got to get home." But, like Jesus, we also know that we've got to take as many folks home with us as we can.

So this morning we hear our heavenly Father's voice calling out to us the way maybe our mothers called to us from the front porch when we were young. As the daylight faded into dusk, the front door of the house would open and mom, framed by the amber light spilling out from the kitchen, would call out into the approaching darkness to children she could not see but who she knew could hear her voice. "Dinner's ready. Come on. It's getting late, dear ones. It's time to come on home." Amen.