Polar Star

In the Letter to the Ephesians, we are introduced to a church that has been divided into two camps. Much like our modern world, Ephesus was a diverse community. In ancient times, it was booming metropolis. Located on the Aegean Sea, it was a center for travel and commerce, which brought with it a culturally-diverse experience. With diversity comes new ideas and ways of looking at every aspect of life. 

Sometimes, we welcome these changes, and sometimes we struggle. Sometimes change needs to occur, and sometimes the old way was “not broken.” As the writer sees it, there’s apparently been a takeover movement by Gentiles, who neither know nor care much about Israel and its place and salvation history. Its traditions and practices are odd and strange to those of pagan heritage and are being dismissed as archaic and increasingly irrelevant to “real life.” 

Moreover, these new Christians are, in the eyes of their Jewish brothers and sisters, too enamored with the easy-going morality of the dominant culture, calling it “Freedom in Christ” and citing the Apostle Paul as their justification for offensive practices. Old versus new, progressive versus traditional, classic versus contemporary have been time-honored camps that the Church has often found itself divided into.

To address this divide, and to correct misinterpretations of Paul, the writer of Ephesians presents a vision of what God is up to in this community. Something new is clearly happening in the convergence of radically different traditions of religious experience that can be attributed, according to the writer, to the ongoing work of Christ. God is at work in Christ, revealing, adopting, sacrificing, and blessing in order to bring different communities together into a new unified body. The claim is bold, yet simple, that through the death and resurrection of Christ, warring religious cultures, passionately divided by heritage, traditions, moral codes, and behaviors have collided and now converge into a newly created order, a community that knows no barriers of race, class, or gender. 

The foundation is Christ, and we are called to move from what God is doing to what we should be doing as a community of faith. We are being shown how to transition from laying out a grand vision of what God has done in Christ to the question, “How does this lofty vision play out in congregational life?” The answer, “Unity.” 

The writer of this text points out that unity is not just given but is also a goal for the community to embrace. Unity is not just something Christians passively accept or reject, it is something we choose to do. The maintenance of unity requires “every effort” on the part of the church to create a space of grace where diversity in life and practice is honored. “I’m a love-filled Christian” is not just a slogan or catchphrase, but a recognition, acceptance, practice, and celebration of gifts given to the community “for building up the body of Christ.”

So, as we move from this election and into a new season, how are we to build up the body of Christ? How do we move beyond that which divides us and live into a community where unity is our polar star?