Do you ever sense that open space is not easy to come by? Especially around here. Dallas is smooshed even as it sprawls, which must be why we build walls. Richardson to Garland, Lake Highlands to Highland Park: the privacy fence sections us in tidy squares. I was reminded of our neat geometric flying down in to Love Field the other day. Circling low over Northwest Highway and LBJ, I realized our Dallas area secret: backyards are a treasure. That must be why we wall them in.

We are a people who know how to separate and surround a place to call our own—part of the American Dream maybe.

The struggle for our space, plenty of room, is hardly new. This is a perennial problem to hear Paul tell it. Fencing out and hedging in are the open secrets of the early church at Ephesus. Who has a spot here? The community wonders. Who is inside, who’s outside? The barriers, unlike our wooden ones, are carved in the flesh or not …circumcision and uncircumcision—you have it or you don’t.

A partition divides the believing peoples. What should be an open space, God’s very dwelling place, is divided by walls. Jewish believers and Gentile believers bicker over who occupies the church. Privacy fences are the last thing the Christian community needs.

The church is a chosen community. Yet from its earliest days, we’ve struggled with unity in our diversity. This letter to Ephesian followers gives direction to the church to be first and foremost a place of bringing together, being brought to God. And we need space for that. I don’t mean space: new buildings or parking lots; but a place without divisions, a wide open welcome where the world may enter into God’s family and find plenty of room to dwell.

If Ephesians 1 prods us to glimpse our privilege and our purpose (as George proclaimed last Sunday), then Ephesians 2 answers the key question: well, how exactly do we live with this privilege and go about our purpose? Openly and spaciously.

The heart of Paul’s letter is this: stranger or member—however we see ourselves this morning—Jesus alone is our host to God and we are all his guests. So, you have entered this place today feeling that you are outside looking in on God and God’s mysterious grace? Welcome in. If you feel left out, excluded, without hope, here is the place where nothing restrains the Lord of Life to embrace you and pull you in. Right now in Christ Jesus we who once were far off are brought near to God by the blood of Christ. Paul preaches this good news. And our gathering is the evidence of this gospel.

Marva Dawn, a contemporary theologian on matters of worship and Christian living, puts it straight: “Community in the biblical sense is more open to the realities of differences, more openly gracious to all, more deliberate, an act of will…What we do to build community is a response to the grace of a unifying God” [A Royal Waste of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping and Being Church for the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 179-80].

We are the place where a devastating God builds. Christ has broken down the dividing wall. As a result, there is room for peace. For he is our peace. Leave it to God to build us up by breaking barriers down. As for our response to God’s construction-by-destruction: the only things that we should lift up here are our voices to tell each other of the different graces of the same God. In the space that God clears, we live the reality that not everyone will join in the household of God, but anyone—any one—can.

Nope, game’s locked! Game’s locked! Nothing like a 3^rd grader at recess to make you feel the barrier. I hated those words because usually in PE at Rocky Ridge Elementary I was not the 1^st one picked…or the 2^nd…or the 3^rd…so I’d find my spot there in exile (me and a few other 2^nd graders). Sure, we’d ramble off eventually to the tire swings and then play a little freeze-tag; but I really wanted to get on the field, catch a pass, run like a maniac.

Paul preaches peace from Isaiah. And Isaiah said it first when the people of God were heading into exile themselves. Centuries before Paul preaches to the Ephesians, the prophet Isaiah knows God alone unites and establishes peace when it is least expected. Christ came and proclaimed peace to us—in exile and at home—far off and near. This is our message that makes radical amounts of room. In church, the game is not locked.

Still, it is tough on your soul when you are Cwxb,--on the outside, as the Rabbinic Hebrew expression goes. Our own Mary Blye Howe probably knows the term and the feeling of the inside/outside tension. Her book, A Baptist among the Jews, depicts the sensation of being outside the group and hoping for an introduction into it.

I remember a similar feeling. It was tough being Cwxb, on the outside a few times when I studied at Hebrew Union College.

There sits Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a Talmud scholar and the youngest professor at the College—an intellectual giant. He is at most a year or two older than I. Other than age, though, the division is thick here. He’s a Jew, I’m a Christian. He’s a doctor, I’m a wannabe. He is the esteemed teacher, I’m merely the student. With 4 other rabbinical students, I (the lone Gentile) enter his class as an outsider to Jewish interpretation of the Bible. Dr. Cohen, one of those slight, quiet, intimading-ly calm personas enters the first session of the course. He pulls up a chair. He places his faded brown leather satchel in it. He thoughtfully sits facing us on the desk that would be his lectern. Dr. Cohen is a gentleman and a scholar.

Introductions are made—the class is primarily for 3^rd year rabbinical students not 2^nd year graduate students. They’ve all said their hellos and recall some past experience they’ve had with each other, with Dr. Cohen.

I’m a fly on the wall now, so it feels. Dr. Cohen then rotates his crystal blue eyes toward me—I feel like I’m that fly now buzzing up bumping the window. I tell you he knows it. He knows I’m hitting this wall. So, he actually creates a bit of room with: it’s so nice to have a graduate student in Talmud. I gush a bit and say, I’m Jay and…Oh, and I’m a minister, a Baptist minister. So what does he do? Have you ever joined in the xsp meal, Jay? Umm, No. So, he says, well please come next week to my house for the celebration. Before a page of Talmud is turned Dr. Jonathan Cohen invites me to celebrate Passover. I assure you a wall cracked open that day; because Professor Jonathan Cohen was determined to welcome an outsider in.

No, it was not as spectacular as the Berlin Wall crumbling in 1989. Just a Jew and a Christian and a story of God making more room in my little picket-fenced life.

It’s a gentle tug that Jesus gives you; I think I’ve even felt it once or twice. He is a gracious host, who seems to take your hand and weave his fingers over yours. Before you know it, you find yourself weightless as you come face to face with Almighty God. Jesus leads us to this open space where God takes up all the room God needs…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. George quoted the first line of Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall”, last week. I thought, Hey, I am going to use that! George goes and steals the thunder. But Frost’s poem rumbles too loudly not to hear it again. The verses go on to share no small sense of ambiguity about the wall: it’s not really needed, but it does offer that one common place where each spring the two neighbors connect again.

So as the wall divides them, it also unites them in mending it. We wear our fingers rough with handling the stones, Frost writes; and concedes, it’s just another outdoor game one on a side. It comes to little more there where it is we do not need a wall. But up it goes again. Walls may be barrier, but they are also comforting—deceitfully soothing.

Do you sense that ambiguity at work? Some days you wish you could connect with the coworker in the next cubicle? Most days, though, you sure are glad modular furniture is what it is…there to separate. You feel that uncertainty at church sometimes? Pews have great capacity to segregate so sacredly, don’t they? Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. But there is still something that desires their safety.

When was the last time you classified another person by where she lives? When did you last categorize someone by what he drives, how she makes her money? Have you walled anyone out because she is divorced or because he remains single? Fences come in such a wide array of colors and textures, thicknesses and heights. A raised eyebrow and a barbed wire fence share the same danger ultimately. They both cut while cutting off.

But, the demolition man has arrived. Christ has come—hardhat on, hammer in hand. So, is he tearing down or building up? The miracle of grace is that he will do both at the same time. Through Christ on the cross we are being built together, joined collectively to shape God’s holy temple.

Maybe, just maybe, Paul’s vision of Christian community helps us in the hurts over loss as well. A friend like Gene Greer, while gone now from this physical place, is an addition to the invisible community of saints. Bob Brooks and Gregg Bunn may go from here. And, while we feel the sting, we also experience their going not so much as separation from us, but as a great homecoming for another of God’s dwelling places.

Thomas Cahill observes the touchstone of the Christian community. In the preface of his book, The Gifts of the Jews, he writes:

We normally think of history

as one catastrophe after another…this is perhaps an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recounting of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

I proclaim to you good news: Jesus Christ has given us something so far beyond what was required by any circumstance. Through him we have access in one Spirit to God Almighty.

Open space is not easy to come by; for this is the kind of space that comes only through the cross of Christ. Barriers are broken here and peace is proclaimed here. And all of us are near here.

Will we be God’s dwelling space? Will we be an open place?

Amen.