Reaching Across: Unity is Spiritual Warfare W/ Pastor Ericka

Our mission is to be better lovers of one another.

Does anybody know this quote?

Those words were spoken by Elder Judd Smealink.

We mentioned him last week during a council retreat in the late 1980s, where Madison leaders were gathered together trying to find the right words for the church's mission.

And I thought about those words this week, and I thought, wow, all these years later, I believe those words still beautifully describe the precious work that the Spirit has entrusted us with.

To be better lovers of one another.

As we come to the final reach in our series today, we're going to turn our attention to this precious and sometimes difficult work.

The work of Reach Across.

And I want to just name from the beginning: this is not easy.

It's a calling.

One of the things I love about Madison's history is that Madison, as I read the book, this church, through victories and through painful, difficult lessons, is still bold enough to lean into the work of reconciliation when it would just be easier to avoid it.

And yet, this work did not originate with Madison.

It was not created in a council retreat.

And it's not even a strategy we developed.

Reconciliation originates in the heart and the mission of God.

And when we talk about racial reconciliation with justice here, we do so because we believe we are called to live into what Christ has already made true across racial and ethnic divisions.

And to repair what sin has broken, and to make our shared belonging visible in a world that so desperately needs to see that witness.

Reconciliation describes what happens between us in the room.

And justice asks whether the way we listen, the way we lead, the way we make decisions, the way we share resources and repair harm actually demonstrates what we say we believe.

This is the call of love.

I just kept coming back to that.

Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God with all that we are, and then to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So reaching across is one of the ways that neighbor love becomes visible across differences.

Particularly, we're talking about today, but not limited to racial, cultural, ethnic difference.

But it is love.

Love is what draws near.

Love is what listens.

Love is what tells the truth.

Love is what makes room for those conversations.

It bears one another's burdens and it seeks the good of our neighbor just as seriously as we seek our own.

That's love.

And I'll tell you that love will cost us all something.

But it does not begin with what we must do, it begins with what God has already done for us in Christ.

And I want to look at what that is.

So let's jump in the word.

I want to invite us to see that in Apostle Paul's words to the church at Ephesus in Ephesians 2 and 4 through 7, and then we're going to jump to verses 11 to 22.

So if you can, I'd love to invite you to stand for the reading and hearing of his word.

But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved.

And raised us up together and made us to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Therefore, remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, made in the flesh by hands, that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation.

Other translations say wall of hostility, having abolished in his flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in himself one new man, one new creation from the two, thus making peace, and that he might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.

And he came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near.

For through him we both have access to one by one spirit to the Father.

Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone in whom the whole building being fit together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Do you hear the language Paul kept using?

I don't know if you noticed it, us together, both one.

Do you hear or see a movement of God's grace?

That a people who were dead have been made alive together with Christ.

A people who were far away have been brought near through the blood.

A people who were divided have been made one.

And people who were once strangers are being joined together as a dwelling place for God to live in.

Paul's not just describing a group of individuals who happen to have a love for the same Savior.

He's describing a new humanity that Christ has created through the cross, which is much bigger than a call to just get along, church.

In Ephesians 1, Paul calls this the mystery of God's will.

Something once hidden that has now been revealed in Christ.

And that revelation is God's intention, is not division.

His intention is not estrangement.

His intention is not hostility.

His purpose is to bring all things, not just people, all things in heaven and in earth together under Christ.

Then Ephesians 2 shows us what this cosmic mystery looks like on the ground.

It looks like people who are divided becoming one new humanity through the cross.

The reconciled church becoming a revelation of what Christ is doing, a preview of what the coming kingdom will look like in its fullness.

The evidence of Christ's reconciling work, it may not seem as visible as the brokenness around us.

I mean, we see that earth is groaning louder and louder.

The division can seem louder than redemption.

But would you believe that even now, Christ is at work?

Everything that sin has scattered, Christ is gathering now.

Everything hostility has separated.

Christ is reconciling now.

Absolutely everything the enemy has torn apart, Christ is bringing under his rule now.

This runs through scripture.

We see that God promised Abraham that all of the families of the earth would be blessed through him.

Then we saw in Isaiah that Isaiah saw nations streaming up.

So many that they're streaming up to worship the Lord.

At Pentecost, the Spirit gathered nations of people.

So from generation, from Genesis to Revelation, generation, let's throw that together.

Genesis to Revelation, God is forming a generation of people.

A beautifully reconciled multi-ethnic family that gathers around one king.

And Paul says something really powerful in Ephesians 3 and 10.

He says that he's doing this through the church, that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God is being made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.

In other words, the reconciled life of the church is not only a witness to people in the earth.

We are a witness and an announcement to spiritual powers that the cross worked.

Every time people who the world says should remain separated, become one family around Jesus, the church announces that the wisdom of God has defeated the powers of darkness.

The church, the body of Christ is not merely meant to talk about reconciliation one time a year.

Our life together is meant to put the victory of the cross on display.

Every single day.

Paul writes that God has raised us up together and seated us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

We've not only been rescued by Christ, we have been joined to reign with him.

I want you to just take a moment in your seat and lean into your seat.

You are reigning in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

You're here, but the mystery is that you are reigning with Christ Jesus in this earth now.

And he calls us to practice that now.

To reign in the way of our King.

And how do we do that?

We do that by loving our neighbors.

We do that by serving one another.

We do that by resisting hostility to one another, by pursuing justice, to refuse by refusing to treat someone as if they're disposable.

That's how we practice the reign of Christ.

Every time we choose love over contempt, every time we choose to be reconciled instead of withdrawing, we're practicing what it fully means to live into the reign of God and reveal his victory among us.

We're rehearsing the kingdom of God now.

Want those words to just kind of sink in.

I look at Paul's words and I think if we will one day reign with people from every nation, every tribe, every language, why would we wait until then to learn how to love one another?

So racial reconciliation isn't just something we've tacked on to the gospel because it seems socially important.

It's something that the gospel actually creates in this new creation.

This call does not mean that we ignore real hostility, real injustice.

Our history in this world is real, and those things have separated us.

But God's answer to division is not to pretend the wounds aren't there.

And if you're wounded, God's message to you today is not just move on and get over it and forget that it happens.

So then the question is okay, God, then how do divided people stay together without denying what has happened between them?

And Paul takes us to the cross.

Paul tells the Gentile believers to remember that they had been separated, they were excluded from citizenship, that they were strangers of this covenant promise.

They were without hope, they were without God in the world.

And he presents this in the letter to them.

He's locating them inside of grace.

He wants them to remember the distance that Christ crossed to bring them near.

They were alienated from God, but never outside of God's concern.

God's promise to Abraham had always reached out toward all nations.

I will make you the father of many nations.

But then Paul says, but now those who were once afar off have been brought near by the blood of God, by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace.

Jesus doesn't just give us peace to be together, he is our peace.

Paul is referencing two things here when he says he tore down the wall of hostility.

He's referencing first the physical barrier in the temple that restricted Gentiles from going further into the inner courts.

That was a barrier in that day.

But he's also naming another barrier that I think is important for us to see.

He references the law with its commands and regulations.

And when we look at this, we can say, is Paul saying the law itself was evil?

No.

In fact, elsewhere in Paul's writings, he calls the law holy.

He says it's righteous.

He says it's good.

But the problem he points to is that sin had hijacked the law that God gave us.

The law revealed God's character.

It was given to us to form, it was given to Israel to form them as God's covenant people.

But human pride turned those distinctions of what it means to be godly.

It turned it into pride.

It turned it into superiority, into exclusivity, into hostility between God's creation.

So what God had given as a gift, which is his law, his holy law, was being used as a wall.

So when Paul says Christ abolished the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, he means that the law can no longer function as a boundary determining who has access to God and who belongs among God's people.

Ethnicity does not have the doorway.

Culture of conformity, it does not give us the doorway.

Circumcision, it's not the doorway.

Christ is the only doorway.

It was at the cross that Christ destroyed the hostility that had turned difference into division.

And Christ took that hostility and he let it land on him.

And he received hatred without handing hatred back.

And in his own body, he put hostility to death.

And I think about man, Lord, will you make us strong enough to do that?

Christ did not create just one humanity so that divided people could tolerate one another.

I keep coming back to that.

So we could tolerate one another from opposite sides of the room.

No, people of different ethnicities.

Let me just say this: we can share a sanctuary without sharing our lives.

We can worship in proximity while remaining relationally divided.

But the cross creates more proximity than that.

It creates a new belonging together.

Even now, where the wall once stood, Christ is building one new humanity.

And Paul gives us in that same text three pictures of what this life together looks like.

He names a kingdom, he names a family, he names a temple.

In this world, the world creates outsiders that don't fit.

But Christ calls us fellow citizens in his kingdom.

The world withholds belonging to certain people that he they think uh it doesn't belong to.

But Christ calls all of us as strangers once, now family.

The world teaches us to protect ourselves from one another.

That hurt.

I'm gonna protect myself from you, but Christ joins us, he literally glues us together to make a temple for God to dwell in.

So imagine these bricks being built to a holy temple.

This is what Christ seeks to build in place of the wall.

And my message to you would be today: don't fight what Christ is forming.

Christ is the cornerstone of that temple.

He determines the shape.

When we talk about Madison, I've heard this about Madison being mixed nuts.

Guess what?

Christ created that form.

And he is the cornerstone that God is building among us.

The question is: will we allow Christ to make that unity visible through the life of this church?

Because this work is precious and it's been entrusted to us.

Again, we didn't create this calling and we can't carry it out in our own strength.

We shouldn't mistake the calling I mentioned earlier, too, for comfort.

God never called us to comfort.

Reaching across is beautiful and it sounds beautiful, and it is.

But it feels different when pain is named.

It's different when relationships are strained and Christ confronts something in us that has to change.

What happens when Christ names something in us that has to change?

In Ephesians 4, Paul tells the church to walk worthy of its calling with humility, with gentleness, with patience, and by bearing with one another in love.

Then he says, make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.

Why would we need patience if this were easy?

Why would we need to bear with one another if we never became uncomfortable?

Why would Paul say, make every effort if unity cost us nothing?

It's not easy.

But it's our calling.

It's a call to love.

And love will cost us something, our pride.

It'll cost us our need to be understood before we are willing to understand someone else.

It's gonna cost us.

But church, we're not alone.

I believe that the Spirit lives in this church, the Spirit lives in us, and He supplies us with what we need to answer this call.

I wonder, as I was seeking the Lord, I wondered if we have begun to pull back from the harder parts of this work.

The absence of open conflict is not necessarily peace.

Silence does not mean wounds have healed.

And avoiding what's hard does not make us reconciled.

Have we settled for being in the same room without allowing Christ to do deeper heart work between us?

That work, what is that work where Christ forms us, where he exposes what needs to be healed, where he prunes what he says cannot remain, and he teaches us to be better lovers of one another.

And this is the shape of how Paul writes.

This is the shape of Ephesians.

He says, because of what Christ has done, this is how we must live.

So, Madison, how do we visibly live as one family?

I want to look at this image of a table.

And just four things.

We I would propose we remain at the table.

We don't walk away merely because difference has become uncomfortable.

We keep showing up, we keep remaining curious.

We listen across the table, not defending ourselves or proving that we're good people, but to understand.

We ask, what has your experience been?

What might I not be able to see from your perspective?

We make room at the table.

And not merely a chair, but room for people's voices, for their gifts, for their influence, for their leadership, their perspective.

Shared belonging must also be shared participation in this work.

So there is room at the table.

I heard my sister Louisia say, leaders of color, we need you.

Can I echo that?

We need you.

We need your perspective.

We need your voices.

I want to just invite you, because y'all are a little too quiet for me right now.

Look at your neighbor and say, Are you at the table?

And finally, we repair what keeps people from the table.

So, my brothers and sisters, when harm has been revealed, we repent.

We ask, what must I change?

Ask the Holy Spirit, show me what needs to be changed in me.

And then when we receive that apology, let's make visible changes, changes in our patterns and in our practices.

Okay.

So then your question may be, yeah, Pastor Erica, that's great.

It's a good plan.

And if this is God's plan, Christ has done the decisive work on the cross, and the Spirit is forming us into one dwelling place.

Why does it feel like such a fight?

Paul has an answer for that too.

And it actually changes who we identify as the enemy.

Ephesians 6 and 10.

Finally be strong in the Lord and his mighty power.

Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

When Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, he's not saying flesh and blood cannot hurt us.

Can we just be honest?

He's not removing human responsibility.

We hurt people all the time.

He's showing us that there are spiritual powers working even through our human sin to deepen division, to distort our vision, to turn us against one another.

I feel like Paul is just kind of like, let me pull the curtain back so you can see.

The person on the other side of division is not your enemy.

He wants us to revive the hostility that Jesus killed, to divide the body that Jesus has formed.

So the enemy whispers, you know, the best way to handle this is to just walk away.

Yeah, find people who are the same as you.

Find a place where difference does not require so much of you.

Have you heard anybody say things like this?

Stay there.

Call that peace.

And never allow Christ to form you through someone who is unlike you.

Those are our enemy's words.

But sameness is not reconciliation.

A wall.

It makes things quiet, but it cannot make us one.

And that's God's desire that we would be one.

So my assumption here for this week that I've been chewing on and praying into is unity is spiritual warfare.

And we are in a battle against a real enemy that wants to divide us.

So what do we do?

We resist him by leaning into unity.

Every time we refuse to rebuild the wall that Christ destroyed, we resist the powers of darkness that are determined to divide what God made one.

So we don't get to throw up our hands or rebuild the wall.

We resist the enemy.

When pride tells us someone else has to come and apologize, when pride says, this will be easier if I just leave, guess what we do?

We follow Jesus because he's leading us to what that future kingdom looks like of kings and priests.

Church, don't resist what God is forming.

Resist the enemy and trust the Lord with the work here.

Trust the Lord with the hard work that he wants to do in you.

Trust the Lord with the hard work of leaning in.

This is our warfare against the enemy.

If Jesus is Lord, then the enemy does not get to rebuild the wall here.

Let us be a church that says, no, we will become better lovers of one another.

Satan, you will not rebuild here.

Can I get you to just say that?

Make that declaration over this work.

You will not rebuild here.

Satan, I serve you.

Notice you will not rebuild here.

We don't reach across in our own strength.

The Spirit will do this work, and we'll keep doing it until we see it.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's pray into that.

Abba.

You've blessed us with such a holy calling.

This is boy, not something easy to talk about.

Something hard, something that has been a battle, hard-fought battles, spiritual warfare, heart work, pruning, cutting, all things, God, that are holy to you, that bring you glory, that are hard.

And yet you call it a blessing.

I often have to remind myself, Lord, that you don't call us to complete those assignments on our own.

You empower us to accomplish the call.

So, Lord, I ask for your power here.

I ask for you to wage war against the enemy of the cross that desires to dismantle that work in us and among us.

You paid an ultimate price for that work.

And Lord, I pray that you would contend with our enemy.

Holy Spirit, give us the power to stand.

I pray that you would preserve this sanctifying work in us and among us.

That you would renew, that you would strengthen, that you would strengthen our resolve to answer this call.

Give us a new yes and a new grace to lean into this work.

Help us to repair what needs to be repaired, to say what needs to be said, to heal the wounds that need to be healed.

And I pray that, Lord, you would put a salve on it in a way that it doesn't look like there's ever been a wound, that you would only allow us to be a gleaming, visible view of what you want this world to be, to see, which is one family united.

Two groups, three groups, separate groups, division, being made one.

Almost as if you can't see the beginning or the separation or the demarcation.

Make us one blended family that represents only you.

Only you can do this work, Lord.

We yield to you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.