2/21/60

Scripture: Ephesians 2: 13-22

Text: Ephesians 2: 14; “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.”

Those who have visited the headquarters of the Mormon folk in Salt Lake City, Utah, know that one is welcomed to visit the great tabernacle with its mighty organ and its astonishing acoustics. One may visit their religious services in a chapel. But we “gentiles” may view their temple only from the outside. For no one enters that temple excepting members, in good standing, of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. It is as though there were a wall of division between the faithful and all others.

Other religious groups have had comparable walls of division. 19 and one-half centuries ago there was an actual wall in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Good Jews might go beyond that wall into the holy atmosphere of the temple. But Gentiles, though permitted to come as far as the wall, must not pass beyond it on pain of death.

A wall like that tends to become a mark of hostility. The Gentiles might resent it as a affront to them. The Jews might regard it as the mark of their superiority as the chosen people who, alone, could approach the holy presence of the most high God. The wall was to many folk symbol of the divisive differences between people.

When Paul had been converted, one of the things which he perceived was that Jesus Christ breaks down all sorts of walls and barriers. In the book of Ephesians, Paul speaks of Christ as “our Peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Paul thought of Jesus as the one who, far from dividing people, brings them together.

I. It is clear that we of the 20th century, in this land, need some of Paul’s understanding of our Lord. For we are still party to the building of walls, or are engaged in the effort to pull them down, or some of both. For ages there has been something of a wall between Jew and Gentile. The Jews had built it, literally and figuratively, during the time that Jesus came to earth. But often, and to this day, we Gentiles have built it, too. Tragically enough, Gentile resentment against Jews is often based on religious and theological grounds. Jews are accused of being the people who killed Jesus. And so, in the very name of Him who commanded and practiced universal love, the hate-mongers condemn the Jews of our day!

Perhaps it is true that many religious Jews do prefer to stick together in many ways, cultural as well as religious. But it is also surely true that they have often been herded into ghettos and confined there during a great deal of European history; that they have been generally, and even murderously despised through a great deal of history; and that our own time has seen the most brutal extermination of Jewish people known to history.

And we have not yet seen the last of it! Our own nation, during the last few weeks, has seen what appears to be the acts of rowdies, multiplied into a rate of incidence that compels attention. The fact that nazi swastikas were smeared on a synagogue building in LaCrosse can be shrugged off as an isolated prank or even willful vandalism on the part of some individual. But there have been enough similar incidents, especially in the east, to arouse some concern over it.

The latest issue of “The Christian Century” magazine [Feb. 17, 1960] prints correspondence from New York City that is extremely sobering at this point. There, many synagogues (no one knows just how many) have been smeared with swastikas and racist slogans. Nor does anyone know for sure how many Jewish business places have suffered broken windows or paint smears; or how many Jewish people have received telephone threats.

Police Commissioner Kennedy has pleaded that no public attention be paid to such rowdyism; that these acts were isolated perpetrations by juvenile delinquents who would only be encouraged to repeat their acts if given publicity. But a month ago, on January 7th, vandals smeared chalk swastikas on the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine and on the interdenominational (Baptist and Congregational) Riverside Church where, of course, the same vandalism against Jewish places is not approved.

Some religious leaders are convinced by Commissioner Kennedy that there is no central organization behind this hooliganism. Others are not so sure. The American Jewish Committee has charged that an anti-Semitic campaign is being sparked by wealthy Hungarian Nazis who live in West Germany, America, and Australia. And they offer names in evidence.

An Intergroup Relations Commission making its own independent investigation, charges that hate literature, distributed by neo-nazi groups, has set off a wave of hooliganism. The commission attributes the actual acts of vandalism to youthful vandals, but concludes that the kids are inspired by professional hate-mongers.

The chairman of the Intergroup Relations Commission, Alfred J. Marrow, reported that 30 religious institutions are know to have been defaced between Christmas and January 13th. He did not list the number of business places attacked, nor the number of religious or business places defaced outside New York City on Long Island. Mr. Marrow has said further that city officials have “known for many months of a rising tide of anti-Semitism in New York City.” He says that neo-nazi organizations have been flooding the metropolitan area with anti-Jewish and anti-Negro literature, and distributing swastika stickers to be used on envelopes and windows.

The wall-builders are at it again! And so all people are being faced with the challenge to help build, or to help pull down, those walls. It is dangerous to simply forget the matter as a passing craze. We need to give quick approval and support to those who are ready to lead us in a pledge of friendship to the Jewish communities, and to the Negro communities as well. We ought to pray that all Christians in America will act on such a pledge of friendship, if we are to pull down the wicked wall of partition which a few are trying to build.

One encouraging note is the finding of a United Nations commission that religious discrimination has been declining throughout the world. But the trend could be reversed, if people are not alert.

II. The need of our land for brotherhood, which is marked in special observances of this week, is much broader than the field of Gentile-Jewish relationships. It surely involves, within the Christian community, our Protestant-Roman Catholic relationships.

Among scholars at least, there is a new atmosphere which increases the possibility of real dialogue or conversation between Catholic and Protestant thinkers. To make such conversation profitable, Robert McAfee Brown (also writing in the latest issue of “The Christian Century”) suggests that certain rules should be observed by each partner to this exchange of ideas.

1) Each partner must believe that the other is speaking in good faith. This attitude will be helped if each remembers our common devotion to Christ who proclaimed, “I am the truth.” In this light there may be more hope for the discovery of a common understanding of truth.

2) Each partner must have a clear understanding of his own faith. Each should be willing to articulate - to state - his faith, and be willing to have it scrutinized. Catholic spokesmen will be carefully chosen and approved and governed by the Instruction of the Sacred Office (of December 20, 1949). Protestant spokesmen will be less precise because of the free range of differences among us. But the existence of the thinking represented in the World Council of Churches helps to articulate an informed Protestantism.

3) Each partner must strive for a clear understanding of the faith of the other. We indulge in a lot of popular misunderstandings and misinterpretations of each other. Now, it is silly, and even disastrous, to fall into the shallow notion that, after all, both sides are Christian, each side is trying to live rightly, and all are headed toward the same heaven. To shrug off the debate and the differences that easily is simply to close thinking. And no religion is any good without thought, as well as emotional experience. In this connection, some honest reading, with deep-seated desire to understand the faith of the other (not just to adopt it, but to critically evaluate it) and with willingness to revise one’s own caricatures of the other’s faith -- these will be helpful.

4) Each partner must humbly accept some responsibility for what his group has done, and is doing, to foster and perpetuate division. Each side bears responsibility for the fact that we are not one, as Christ clearly willed that his followers should be one. But if we are ever to become spiritually one it must be not on our terms, the terms of either, or any “side” of a controversy, but upon what we are able to discern as Christ’s terms!

5) Each partner must forthrightly face the issues which cause separation, as well as those which create unity. Not only common cause, but the real differences must be honestly faced by both. For example, there appears to be no half-way position between believing that the pope is infallible and that the pope is not infallible. There is no such thing as some middle ground that the pope may be “a little bit infallible.” These differences must be faced honestly and forthrightly. Probably the cleavages run deeper than either participant to the dialogue may at first realize. It may be depressing to find this out, but it is basic and necessary.

6) One more thing: each partner must recognize that all that can be done with the dialogue is to offer it up to God. If either side enters into discussion with the idea that “at last, those fellows may begin to see some light,” no lasting good will come of the effort. Preconceived notions as to just where we want the dialogue to lead will be worse than useless. But a dedication of the whole effort to God might be blessed with some of the guiding of God.

So much, then, for a few of the ground rules for any profitable dialogue between representatives of Protestant and Catholic thought. It should be done in an atmosphere of prayer.

Meanwhile it is well for Protestants and Roman Catholics to live in a community of tolerance -- not any cheap and easy tolerance, but one of attempted honest understanding. And it is also well for all Christian and all Jews to live in the same kind of community tolerance, as friends and brothers.

III. Now let us consider the status of brotherhood between the races. We are painfully aware that we have a long way to go in this field in our own land. And the whole world has a long way to go, too. There is much that is becoming hopeful, today. But the improvement in race relations is still slow, probably too slow. The walls built through centuries of busy effort, and in great measure by our own race of us here in this room, come down very slowly. Perhaps we are afraid to have them come down. Or perhaps there is still a good deal of belief in those walls and desire for them. But they must come down! And it is better that they be taken down in orderly fashion than that they should be blown down with violent hatred.

Among the hopeful signs is a disposition in the church to remember that we are all one in Christ. Denomination after denomination has come out for a desegregated church in a desegregated society. Our own Congregational Christian denomination declared this ideal as one of its aims for the next 100 years, in the General Council held at Grinnell, Iowa, in 1946. The National Council of the Churches of Christ in America has a similar aim. Wherever there are ecumenical meetings of church representatives, there is little if any racial discrimination or separation. Yet this is but a leading edge of the whole matter. Aside from such leading, there is more talking than acting on integration in the churches.

Racial prejudice is clearly not inborn. Little children play together in full acceptance of each other as persons. Colored children and white children will play together in full friendliness, when permitted to do so. It is frightened parents who erect the walls of prejudice and start these walls a-building in their children. Confront one of us with the fact of race prejudice, and Georgia Harkness says we may do one of three things: (1) deny that we have it; (2) admit it; or (3) begin to rationalize our attitude. The rationalization usually takes the form of words about superior and inferior races; about the dangers of intermarriage; about dirt, smells, lack of education, or general obnoxiousness; about how those of other races “do not know their place,” or are “creeping up on us.”

Anthropologists and psychologists have completely exploded the myth of inherent superiority of any one race. There are obvious surface differences in physical appearance. But they go only skin deep or as deep as bone shape. The World War II furor over separate blood banks for white or colored brought forth only the medical testimony that there is no determining difference between the blood of white or Negro. This reinforces, with this physical testimony, the biblical word that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” to dwell together. [Acts 17: 26a]

The fear of intermarriage lies deep in our attitude toward race separation. It is very real. For marriage needs to be recognized for what it is. Intermarriage is not a biological danger, but a precipitation of cultural conflicts. Young persons of differing races who contemplate marriage need to count the very great cost, for themselves, their families, and their children, before taking this step. But intermarriage can not be a continually-used red herring to take attention away from the real issues. For, as Martin Luther King has put it, what the colored person wants is to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

The church must keep continually in mind that its Christ held Jew, Roman, Samaritan, Syrophoenician, all as equally precious in the sight of God. The church must remember this; preach it; live it. And the church must put its own house in order, welcoming at the local level all who wish to worship and serve through it.

We have a long way to go in right relations between the races. It is not a problem for the white race alone. It is a problem for all races. But it is our problem and each of us must deal with it in his own life, and we must deal with it together. Just one more thing: we will all be advancing the cause of brotherhood immensely, if we choose to be good ambassadors of the best in our way wherever we go.

Foreign students from Arabia and Africa may be impressed with our Statue of Liberty, Radio City in New York, superhighways and supermarkets, George Washington Bridge, and glittering automobiles. But these are not what they will remember most when they return home. What that student will remember most is that when he sat down in a cafeteria near the University, a white student picked up his coffee and plate and went somewhere else to finish his lunch! Or he will remember (it happens all too seldom) that he was invited into an American home and was shown real family friendliness there.

Tourists abroad, and soldiers abroad, can do immeasurable harm or immense good, by the way they represent American attitudes and Christian friendliness where they travel or are stationed.

It is never too soon to start loving peoples of every sort in the friendly spirit of true brotherhood which tries to take down the walls of division between us.

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delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 21, 1960 (Brotherhood Sunday)