Ephesians is an intellectually dense and possibly confusing book. We’ve been reading through it section by section these last few weeks in worship. Each section has a core idea that if you can understand it the rest of it makes sense. The core idea for the section we read today is in verse 19, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God…”
We ae citizens and members of the household of God. Citizenship and family. These are ideas we may easily overlook but are essential to understanding the passage.
What is citizenship? What does it mean to be in a family? They give us more than we may realize. Imagine what it would be to not have citizenship or family. You’d be a living human, certainly. But what else.
Here is a painful thing to imagine but it gets at the idea. Imagine that you are a 17-year-old girl living Columbia in South America. Drug cartels in your hometown have made it impossible for your family to stay safe. Making a desperate decision, your family pulls all their resources and hires some smugglers to get you and your siblings to the United States. It’s precarious. It's not legal. But it’s a chance rather than no chance at all.
Along the way you are separated from your siblings. And, you are sexually assaulted by the smugglers and become pregnant. Somehow, someway, you actually make it across the border into the southern United States. You have no money. No contacts. No documents. And limited skill in English.
I have created a very disturbing situation to imagine. I certainly hope it is not true, but there is probably some measure of truth to it. It gets at the point. This 17-year-old is certainly a person. She is alive. But who is she? What would you do? Where would you turn? Who could you trust? You cannot exist alone. But you have no means of getting food, water, shelter, and even the most rudimentary medical care? Who would you approach? You have no outside way of confirming your identity.
Citizenship in a nation gives you an identity. In the United States you have a name. You have a birth certificate. You have a Social Security number. And you have a host of rights, privileges, and expectations that go along with it. If you are a citizen of a different nation you most likely have the same or the equivalent in documentation, rights, and responsibilities.
But take away the protection and rights that your citizenship gives you in this world and who are you? What keeps you safe? What guarantees you at least some sort of rudimentary justice and fairness? If you have no citizenship and someone commits a crime against you, where are you going to turn? Who can you turn to? You can’t turn anywhere.
Ephesians 2:19 says we are citizens with the saints. That means we are citizens in God’s kingdom. It also says that we are members of the household of God.
In the 1st Century Greek and Roman world the father was the head of the household. Being a part of a household was pretty much essential to survival, or at least to thriving. The father, or pater familias was the head of the household. He basically owned everything. He owned his wife. He owned the children. He owned the slaves, the land, the livestock and all the family possessions. If you were a woman, child, or slave you wanted to have a good pater familias. And if you did not, woe to you. You had very few rights. The pater familias even controlled who was in the family and who was out. He could reject a child if he so chose. The father is also the one who gave the children their names.
Do you remember the story of the naming of John the Baptist? John’s father, Zechariah, was unable to speak. He had been visited by an angel who prophesied the birth of John. Zechariah didn’t believe it and asked the angel for a sign as proof. So he got what he asked for. The angel said he wouldn’t be able to speak until the child was born. And so it happened. When it came time to naming the baby he couldn’t do it. So his wife Elizabeth chimed in and said his name was John. The crowd didn’t accept that. She wasn’t the father. She didn’t have naming rights. Finally they gave Zechariah something to write with and he we wrote, “His name is John.”
The pater familias sounds like a tyrant. Some certainly were. But many were not. If you were the father you bore a lot of responsibility. Your wife and children depended upon you. Your workers and slaves depended on you. You had to make good economic decisions, good farming decisions, and good family decisions. Sure, most fathers delegated many tasks, but the buck stopped with them.
So, Ephesians says we are citizens and members of the household of God. When we say, “Our Father,” in the Lord’s Prayer we are invoking this ancient family system. We are acknowledging God as our Pater Familias. God gets to choose whether we are in the family or not. God gets to determine our identity. We look to God for our protection and to provide for us.
Safe, solid, well-run households of the Roman world were the basic building blocks of society. Households built communities, which built cities and provinces, which combined to form nations and empire – which was able to create citizenship for its people. Ephesians tells us that God is our Father. We are members of the household and we are citizens of God’s kingdom.
I hope none of us ever have been in the situation of the undocumented 17-year-old that I used as an example before. I hope none of us are ever in such a situation. But it is a contrast that helps us realize how essential it is to life to be a part of a family and a citizen of a country. Take away those things and what are you? Is survival possible at all? None of us exist alone.
We all know that families can be great. But some families are horrible. Some nations are great. Some are horrible. Being a part of a family or a nation in the world today is not a guarantee of success or of a good life. Therefore our real citizenship is in God’s kingdom. That is not about Social Security numbers or documents or what our ancestry is. Ephesians tells us that all are united by the blood of Jesus. It is with that that we wrap up.
It would be great to live in a world where everyone was hard working and responsible. It would be great to live in a world where people earned what they consumed and didn’t take from others. It would be great to live in a world where there was honesty and trust. It would be great to live in a world without barriers and security checks and the need for Social Security numbers and citizenship papers. It would be great to live in a world of responsible loving fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and neighbors nearby and far away. But that is not the case.
Somehow it is the nature of human society to create divisions. They decide who is in and who is out. In the day of the writer of Ephesians one of those divisions was between Jews and non-Jews. Or as they would say, Jews and Gentiles.
I’m not qualified to give an opinion on international politics and trade and immigration and all of that. Human sinfulness is woven through it all. Everyone, including the most loving and selfless among us, cannot escape the sinfulness and the complications of barriers; and effectively the need for them. But as we live with that unavoidable reality we are called to operate at a higher morality.
The cross achieved what no human ever could – reconciliation of a sinful humanity with God. If God is the King in the kingdom and the Pater Familias, is God a stern tyrant who needs to be appeased to deal with his anger? No. Is God drawing lines and to who is capable of being his citizens ad in his household? No. At least not according to Ephesians. God is a loving benefactor, offering all people a stake in salvation. By dying on the cross God breaks down a wall that separates humanity from God. We humans unwittingly and unknowingly built it. Ephesians 2:14 says it is by the blood of Christ that the divide has been broken.
If you, as a citizen of a nation ever encounter a 17-year-old girl with no identity, no safety, and no hope, I cannot give you answers as to how to treat her. The situation is too complex for easy answers. But ultimately you treat her and all people with the recognition that Christ’s blood was for them too. They are fully and freely invited into the household of God and citizens of God’s kingdom. That is who they are and who you are. That is their identity and your identity. I believe things will sort themselves out from there.
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