In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning, beloved of the Lord, I have in mind to speak with you about this reading from the second chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians. It's a rich and concentrated text. It would be no problem at all, in fact, spending an entire three-hour semester just exegeting these nine verses. It is an extremely dense text. To speak about it at all, I have to really narrow down what we want to say.

In this passage that you heard this morning, St. Paul speaks of the joining of both Jews and Gentiles in one Church. That's what he was seeing at the time when he wrote it. Two words that appear several times in this passage form a contrast worth exploring. The first word is "enmity," he echthra, a word that appears twice. The underlying Hebrew word, I believe, is eiva. The second word is "peace," strictly speaking, the peace, he eirene, the underlying word being ha shalom. I'm mentioning the Hebrew texts because I believe, although St. Paul is writing in Greek, he's still thinking like a rabbi in Hebrew.

Both words appear more than once in this short text. Paul began this morning: "He is our eirene, ha shalom shalnou, our peace. He is our peace." Later in the text, Jesus is described as making peace, poion eirenen." And again, a little further in the text, Jesus preached peace: evengelisato eirenen. Three times the word "peace" appears there. That by itself would be a three-point sermon. We'll save that for another occasion.

With regard to the word "enmity," echthra in Greek or eiva in Hebrew, Paul says that the Messiah abolished the enmity in his flesh, in his sarx; the Hebrew would be basar. He abolished the enmity in his flesh. He declared that the Messiah did this through the cross, dia tou stavrou, through the cross: he killed the enmity. Twice he uses the word "enmity." A contrast between peace and enmity.

This morning I want to develop this contrast between enmity and peace under three aspects, one psychological, having to do with the soul—psyche, psychological—second, social, having to do with our relationships with one another; and third, historical, having to do with the relationship with generation to the next generation. See, because both the enmity and the peace carry these three aspects.

The passage from enmity to peace is accomplished, says St. Paul, dia tou stavrou, through the cross. Beloved, the Messiah did not die on the cross to appease an angry God. The passion and death of Jesus changed nothing in God. Nothing in God was changed by the passion and death of Christ. God did not need changing, because God has never been the enemy of the human race. The enmity is entirely on man's side. That's what needed to be changed. Without the reconciliation of the cross, the human race is not okay. That's the sign we should hang up there beside this big cross on our church: "If you're okay and I'm okay, what am I doing up here?"

There was a book back when I first started teaching college, called, I'm Okay, You're Okay. No, we're not okay! We are not imperfect beings in need of improvement; we are dead men in need of life!

Let us then describe this enmity, this echthra. First, as I said, psychological. You know, I'm amazed at the popular surprise at extraordinary manifestations of the enmity. We've had so many of them recently, haven't we? So many of them! All these shootings, all these shootings. This is regarded as a social problem, and the newscasters, if you can bear to watch them, listen to them: "How could anybody do this?" And they put microphones in front of people's faces, and they say, "I don't see how anybody could do this!" I'll tell you who's not surprised at this is the Church of God. We're not surprised at this, because we've been hearing confessions for 2,000 years. We receive men's sins. I think of that every time I step up here. I'm taking the— I'm the voice of the Church, hearing sins, counseling sinners, absolving sin. When I step up there, I know I belong to the institution that has seen the rise and fall of empires. We're not at all surprised by these things. In fact, we rather expect it! A world that does not even confess its sins, does not even recognize it has sins and has only faults and imperfections.

I think of the young man in Texas recently, walking up and down the aisles of that Baptist church, shooting children and babies, deliberately shooting children and babies. That is what we should expect! It's not the new normal; that's the old normal. That is what we should expect. This is a society that murders babies all the time, in the abortion clinics. We should expect that. It's going on. We see it and say, "Oh, this is terrible!" No, it's happening every single day. He's simply expressing echthra; he's expressing the enmity.

Our popular commentators express dismay and astonishment. They know nothing of the human heart, and knowing nothing of the human heart they cannot possibly understand the drastic nature of the cross. The cross seems like it's an unnecessary thing, because, after all, we're "really okay." We're not okay.

The Christian and humane exploration of the psychology of enmity has lots of expressions in literature. One of my favorites, I suppose, is by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, in which he analyzes the psychology of the narrator, Raskolnikov. He takes us inside the mind of a murderer. A more recent example is André Malraux, in his book, La Condition Humaine, The Human Condition, where he does an analysis of this character by the name of Tchen. In the opening scene of Malraux's novel, Tchen commits a murder. Malraux does many things through the course of the novel, but one of the things he does is explore the psychology of death in the murderer.

Both these murderers are descendants of Cain. In Dostoevsky and Malraux, we have two very fine presentations of the psychology of the murderer. The more comforting of these is, of course, Dostoevsky, because Dostoevsky is writing as a Christian. Malraux is not writing as a Christian, and that's why the fate of Tchen is very different finally from that of Raskolnikov.

But, you know, more frightening to me are writers who don't dare analyze their characters because it would be too far: we would never come back, because the characters don't bear analysis, so the writer is reduced simply to describing them. We could not possibly want to get into their minds. No one would want to do that. Take, for example, the mass murderers portrayed by Colman McCarthy. Take characters like John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden in Colman McCarthy's overpowering novel, Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness [in] the West.

Colman McCarthy spares his readers. He simply describes what the characters do. He does not try to take you into their minds, because you will not want to go there. We could not endure to enter into the psychology of a character like Judge Holden. Really, every one of McCarthy's novels is this way. There are characters there: you do not want to go into their minds. It would require a level of compassion, because that's how you get into a person's mind: by a certain compassion. That's a level of compassion you do not want, because it would annihilate our souls. So McCarthy is reduced simply to describe what such characters do. We could not bear actually to look at their souls. It would be a vision of hell beyond anything Dante ever dreamed of.

Now the cross goes into the soul. The cross redeems our souls, our psyche. The cross changes the human heart from within, the psychology of the cross, what one writer calls "cruciformity": the cruciformity of Christ. According to this morning's epistle, the cross breaks down the wall of enmity constructed by sins. Clinging to Christ in faith, the human soul, the human psyche, the human psyche is changed, because we have, as St. Paul says this morning, access to God our Father—our Father, Abinu, God our Father—in the Holy Spirit.

Second, both the enmity and the peace are social. Genesis 3 is followed by Genesis 4 not just because of a numerical sequence. The things that take place in Genesis 4 are a result of the things that take place in Genesis 3, and the things that take place in Genesis 5 and 6 are the result of things that take place in Genesis 4. The Bible presents the enmity as social. Sin is shared. It just is. As soon as Eve eats the fruit, Adam eats the fruit. Now we've got a problem; we've got a social problem. But, see, the Bible also presents salvation as social. We come to the foot of the cross as a body. St. Paul's word this morning is soma, a body of believers. This is not just a matter of individual faith and individual salvation, which is, frankly, highly overrated. In fact, an emphasis on it will almost certainly limit the accessibility of the Gospel.

I remember back when I was a student at Southern Baptist Seminary, decades ago—oh, many decades ago!—one of my classmates was a Japanese student, Japanese Baptist, by the name of Goki Saito. Goki taught me a lot. I had many conversations with Goki. He talked about trying to preach individual personal salvation in Japan. He says it made no sense to them, made no sense at all to them. The Japanese can't think about individual anything. Everything is family; everything is social. Parents, spouse, children—individual salvation, he says, is not even an attractive message in Japan. It has to be something else.

But, you see, the Christian faith is a social faith. It's the faith of the Church. This morning's epistle from the Ephesians is about the construction of the Church, isn't it? The building up of the Church. The Church, beloved, is not a divine after-thought. I don't know how many times I've heard people say the Church is based on the Bible. That's not even historically true since the people of God precede—even historically precede—the Bible. Israel precedes the Old Testament; the Church precedes the New Testament. The Bible itself was written from within the people of God. The peace, the shalom, of Christ is necessarily social, just as the enmity is social.

And, third, both the enmity and the peace are historical. To introduce this theme, let me give you an example of a problem. Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which, by the way, is an awfully difficult book to read— It's a very, very difficult book to read. So many sentences have to be read three or four times to find out what he's talking about because, frankly, Gibbon was not a good writer. I know he's famous for being a writer and everybody says, "You have to read this book." It's a difficult book because honestly he was a poor writer; he was a poor stylist. If I received paragraphs like that as an English teacher, I'd say, "Put that modifier some place else; I don't know what it refers to."

But anyway, in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, here's something that Edward Gibbon wrote. Are you ready for this? "It may be safely presumed—" That's already a very bad sentence. [Laughter] There's no need there for a passive voice. "It may be" should be "We may safely presume," but anyway, that's a good first example right off the bat of somebody who's got an inferior style. I'm discouraging you from reading this book—that's not really my intent! [Laughter] But like any book, read it critically; read the book critically. "It may be safely presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism." He says that in 1776. The presumption that unless the face of nature changed, no people relapse into their original barbarism. It's not possible for the Irish to do that. If we lost Christ—if the Irish lost Christ—you think they would not go back to their Celtic roots and start human sacrifice again? In fact, that's what they're doing! Just look at the abortion laws in Ireland: that's what they're doing.

Come back to Gibbon. "We may, therefore, acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race." Every day, in every way, we are getting better and better. We're not only okay; we're improving! Simply because there's a thing called Progress. It's part of history: Progress. Now that was 1776 that he said that. Gibbon died five years after the French Revolution, in 1794, the Year of Terror. Not only did the French not make progress, they certainly returned to an initial barbarism. Gibbon was not spared the sight of the barbarism arising in the midst of a Western European civilization, arising from within that civilization, not from outside. When the French sold their birthright at that revolution, it was not progress. As far as we know, Gibbon did not comment on this refutation of his earlier assessment. You see, Gibbon was the voice of a new philosophy, a philosophy of progress.

Now, one would have thought that the events of the 19th, but especially the 20th centuries would have discredited and destroyed the philosophy of progress. After everything that happened in world history over the past 100 years, since World War I, anyone who still believes in historical progress can only be described as delusional! "Delusional" is how, frankly, I would describe so much of current civilization. Delusional. I've been hearing about a man, who's quite published now, who is a white man who has suddenly declared that he is a Filipino woman, and we must all treat him that way. He must be referred to that way. In the old days, people had enough sense to lock somebody like that up, because he's living in a delusion.

Delusion is very common these days. One thinks of the terrible sickness of men who fancy themselves to be women trapped in male bodies. That is delusional. It should be called delusional because it's imagination cut off from physical reality, and it's a lethal delusion. I'll give you a book. I'm recommending books this morning—not Gibbon particularly. It's a wonderful book by Daphne du Maurier entitled The House on the Strand, and it's a book about imagination cut off from physical reality. Just try it some time; read that book. It's most entertaining, although it doesn't have a particularly happy ending.

See, what is truly handed on in history, beloved, is not progress. It's what St. Paul calls the enmity, alienation from God and alienation of men from one another. It pertains to the very substance of the human inheritance. Parents bequeath this enmity to their children. It is the historical transmission of the fall. But, you see, the transmission of the peace is also historical. The Gospel is handed on from one generation to the next; handed on from one generation to the next: that's how the Gospel is propagated.

We preach to everybody else, of course, we send out missionaries, but the first people to be missionized and evangelized are our children. There's our fundamental responsibility of evangelization. The peace, the shalom, that passes understanding is the birthright of the Christian child, and in this venture, too, it is necessary to eschew any notion of progress. There's no such thing as progress in the transmission of the faith, and we can never take it for granted. Every generation must be evangelized within the Church. Every single generation must be seriously evangelized within the Church.

That's why some sweet people here this morning, I know, have been studying the Jesse Tree. It's about the ancestors of Jesus who are also your ancestors. When you grow up, you're going to tell your children about the Jesse Tree.

Beloved, what the world wants from us mainly is our children. We dare not permit ourselves to forget this fact even for a day, and we dare not underestimate the power of the world over our children. Do not underestimate that. Never take it for granted that they will do just fine out in the world. Don't take that for granted at all. Immunize them in every way you know how.

This morning we are gathered here as part of this ongoing effort. What we do today involves first the shaping and nurture of our soul—it is psychological—the framing of the body of the Church—it is social—and the transmission of the faith—it is historical. How does St. Paul sum this up, what we're doing here today? Because that's what he does: he sums up what we're here about.

Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God, that are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom all the building is fitly framed together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord in whom you are also builded together for a dwelling of God in the Spirit.