Unity and Disunity, Belonging and Separation

Reflections on the Lectionary for July 21st

I asked AI to create an image with the prompt “disunity and separation,” and this was the result. I thought it was provocative.

I’m writing this a couple of days after someone made an attempt on Donald Trump’s life, slightly wounding him, killing a member of the audience, and wounding two others. Not too many days ago the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have broad immunity for things they do while they’re in office, and just this morning a judge threw out decades of precedent and decided that Trump can’t be investigated by an independent counsel (though many others have been, including Trump himself). By the time you’re reading this, the Republican National Convention will be in full swing, with all the strange ritual and pageantry of American political life. Not long after that, the Democrats will have their turn amidst an intense debate about whether to keep Joe Biden as the nominee or replace him with someone more likely to prevail in November. I don’t know about you, but the combination of these normal political moments and the very abnormal ones has me on edge a lot of the time. I find myself thinking often about the American political system and American society itself—whether and how it will hold together, and what kinds of connection might still be functional in a society that is so frayed and torn.

These circumstances can feel like a minefield for friendships, families, workplaces, and even everyday places like the grocery store parking lot. And certainly it can be treacherous terrain for churches and the people teaching and preaching in them. It can be hard to know what to say to a group of people who don’t all share the same mind on something. It can be hard to know what to say to someone who’s close to you, with whom you disagree profoundly on matters of politics. I’ve seen memes flying around: “Don’t lose a relationship over two men who don’t even know your name.” But of course, there’s a lot more at stake than just Donald Trump and Joe Biden and our loyalty to one or the other. Many people across the political spectrum feel that something is coming apart, and it’s not just the question of one candidate or the other, but it’s a larger question of whether, how, and why we will be together as a nation or a people.

This is a very real anxiety, but it is not a new one. All sorts of groups of human beings have had to ask this same question over the years, in all kinds of different ways: what makes us belong together? For some the answer is shared history, family ties, race or ethnicity, or culture. It can be as simple as geography or as complex as a shared set of values. We are always negotiating the terms of our shared belonging, and it can sometimes feel euphoric—think of the unifying response when a country wins the World Cup, or your home country takes home Olympic gold. But figuring out how and why we belong together is also fraught, dangerous, disappointing, and murky.

In the lectionary for July 21^st, the epistle reading from Ephesians speaks to just this mixture of euphoria and disappointment and murkiness. This passage might look familiar to those of us who live with the anxiety of how to find unity across difference. If you’re wondering what to say to a congregation that doesn’t agree with itself or an old friend who plans to vote differently than you, this passage from Ephesians might help you think through things. It won’t solve anything, of course, but it might offer a view of how to hold the tension of difference while also potentially finding commonality.

Scholars debate who wrote Ephesians, and to whom. Most mainstream scholars do not think that Paul wrote the letter (though some still argue that Paul did write it), and the earliest manuscripts of Ephesians don’t mention Ephesus at all. So, some have concluded that the letter we call Ephesians was actually written by one of Paul’s disciples, years or decades after Paul’s death, and that it wasn’t a letter to the Ephesians specifically but rather a more general epistle meant for broader audiences. (You can go to Codex Sinaiticus, a glorious fourth-century manuscript of the Bible plus the deuterocanonical books and a couple of other non-biblical texts, and actually see this in action. If you flip to the section with Ephesians, you’ll find “en epheso,” “in Ephesus,” written into the margin of the first bit of the letter, having been added in later by a scribe). If the majority opinion about Ephesians is true, then it was written relatively late in the first century (perhaps in the 80s or 90s), and it reflects a time when the Jesus movement was beginning to really crystallize and become institutional. Most importantly for this week’s lectionary passage, the late first century was a time when one of the defining questions of first-century Christianity, the inclusion of gentiles, was really coming to a boil.

What is a gentile? At the most basic level, a gentile is not a Jew. That’s why I never capitalize the word—“gentile” isn’t an ethnic group, it’s the lack of an ethnic group—the negative space of ethnicity. From the perspective of Jews, “the nations” or the gentiles were everyone else—all the other ethnicities and nationalities of the world lumped into one category. Early on in the Jesus movement, there was a lot of energy toward gentiles, and in turn there was a lot of anxiety about gentile inclusion. After all, Jesus was a Jew, all his disciples were Jewish, and most likely every author of the New Testament books was Jewish. Paul was Jewish, but Paul also came to stand in for and symbolize the great Jesus-movement outreach to gentiles. You can see anxiety about this outreach and inclusion everywhere in Paul’s letters: in his disputes with opponents in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, in his tortured logic in Romans, in asides about his mission like the ones you find in 1 Thessalonians 2:16. Paul seems to have spent his career carrying a message about Jesus to gentiles, and both during his life and after his death the Jesus movement struggled with what it might mean to include both Jews and gentiles. There were plenty of forms of difference and plenty of kinds of tension. Jews tended to view gentiles as immoral, degenerate, and faithless, and gentiles tended to view Jews as isolated and superstitious. There was a lot of difference and a lot to work through. Sound familiar?

Take a look at Ephesians 2:11-22. The divisions are right up front: there are circumcised (Jews) and uncircumcised (gentiles), there are aliens to “the commonwealth of Israel” (gentiles) and citizens of it (Jews), there are those who are near (Jews) and those who are far off (gentiles). The premise of this whole passage is that some people—Jews—have belonged for a long time, and others—gentiles—are “strangers and aliens” who are in need of inclusion. Ephesians seems really interested in explaining why these differences shouldn’t matter—how God has brought unity to this division in the life of Jesus. Look at the climactic sentence of this passage, and notice how it builds toward a kind of unity across difference: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.” Here the language of political belonging is front and center: the Greek word being translated “fellow citizens” in the NRSVue and “citizens” in the NRSV is sumpolitēs, compatriots together, members of the same polity. Ephesians is arguing for an explicit kind of belonging, the same kind that might bind together citizens of a city or a country, across the divisions that were supposed to separate Jews and gentiles.

There are at least two ways to read this. You can read this passage as a straightforward description of unity: God has joined us together at last! Or, you can read this passage as evidence that unity between Jews and gentiles did not actually exist. After all, you only need to argue strongly for something if it’s not already true. Probably, Ephesians is doing the latter—it’s arguing that Jews and gentiles should think of themselves as united, even though they were not very united in the real world. Ephesians is exhorting its readers to think of themselves as compatriots and fellow citizens, even though the logics of the day wouldn’t have led them there on their own.

There have been some great works of scholarship about this recently. This book has some great chapters on the topic of belonging and ethnicity in early Christianity for example (including one by the always-sharp Denise Kimber Buell), and Jennifer Kaalund’s book on reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the Great Migration is a wonderful meditation on identity formation. Perhaps my favorite book is an older one by Maia Kotrosits, which asks about how diaspora and trauma and violence set the conditions for belonging. Early Christianity turns out to be a fascinating case study for asking how people belong together, precisely because it was trying to be trans-ethnic or trans-national, sometimes succeeding and oftentimes failing.

These aren’t the same conditions as 21^st century United States; there are a lot of differences between the two, more than we could list. But all the same, it can be useful to see others wrestling with the question of belonging, and especially the question of how to belong with people you might not know, respect, or like. What can connect us, when we have become so used to mutual enmity? What kind of unity might be big enough to encompass us all, when disunity is so common? Early Christian literature sometimes answered this question with some version of erasure: Jesus signified the elimination of the kinds of difference that used to separate people. You see a version of this argument in Galatians 3:28, for example, in the claim that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This is a kind of “voila!” theory of unity, a way of thinking that a thing can be come true simply by asserting it. It’s not so different from “after the election, we will unite behind a president.” It might be a nice thought, but it’s probably not true.

More interesting to me is the hard work of building a community that’s implied in Ephesians 2:20-21 and gestured toward in other passages in the latter New Testament. Belonging is forged in shared practices and shared commitments, and ultimately it relies on trust. Belonging is fed by storytelling—by talking about ourselves and how we came to belong together, and about the great moments of unity in our past. Belonging emerges from togetherness, and not the other way around. And sometimes, belonging simply doesn’t work. Sometimes unity isn’t possible, and it shouldn’t be the goal.  

That’s what’s missing from the Ephesians text, I think. Ephesians is arguing for the unity of Jews and gentiles, but the text that’s telling us that now belongs to an overwhelmingly gentile religion, it’s part of a canon used almost exclusively by gentiles, and it will be read and heard this Sunday by mostly gentiles. For all of Ephesians’ arguments about unity, the Christian tradition did not end up being a unity movement. Christianity evolved into a gentile movement (with extremely small pockets of Jewish participation over the years) that was often explicitly opposed to Judaism. The “uncircumcised” and the “aliens” replaced the “citizens” who had been there from the beginning. Today, many Christian sects and Jewish organizations have reached a kind of uneasy peace and sometimes even a place of intentional partnership, but the story of Jewish-Christian relations remains one of mistrust and misunderstanding, especially from the Christian side.

The fact that Ephesians and other texts like it failed—the fact that they did not create the kind of unity and belonging that they imagined—should tell us at least two things. The first thing is that, as I said above, sometimes unity isn’t possible, and belonging isn’t available. Sometimes we have to go our separate ways. Sometimes the “dividing wall of hostility,” as earlier translations put Ephesians 2:14, still stands. The second thing the failure of Ephesians should tell us, though, is that unity and belonging are still worth striving for. Even though its vision of unity never came to pass, Ephesians is in our Bibles, and its message of togetherness is still there, trying to be heard. Even if its specific vision of unity is long defunct, Ephesians is still reminding us to work towards togetherness. I don’t know how that translates to our relationships, our congregations, our politics, or our nation; it’s hard to know where any of this is going. But maybe, in moments when unity seems impossible and belonging seems lost, it’s the right moment to be reminded that we should try anyway.