If you would please stand. I'm going to read from Ephesians chapter two, verses 11 through 22, which you can find in the Pew Bible, beginning on page 976. Ephesians chapter two, verses 11 to 22. Paul writes, remember therefore that at one time you Gentiles of the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace. and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being united together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. The word of the Lord. Gracious heavenly Father, we pray now that you'd please send your sovereign spirit upon us, that you would open our ears and our hearts and give us grace, Father, that we might hear your word, believe it, obey it, and rejoice in it. Amen. Amen. Please be seated. I had a very interesting lunch this week on Friday with a young minister named Robbie Mills. Robbie is a PCA church planter over in the Richardson, Garland, Northeast Dallas area of town. He is the planter of a ministry called New City Church. It's a church plant. of the PCA that is doing really, really interesting work reaching out specifically to immigrants and refugees from other countries. And Colin and I went and had a very, very enjoyable lunch talking to Robbie about his work and some of the things he's learned about cross-cultural ministry, some of the things that he had to think about and learn the hard way that maybe we can benefit from as we think about participating in a church plant over in the Richardson-Garland area as well. It was very, very productive for me, and I think Colin and Robbie wound up having an even longer time carrying on the discussion after I had to leave. But it was a really, really interesting conversation to me, specifically in light of Ephesians chapter two. I'm often doing this when I go to an appointment or have a meeting, often with members of the church. I'll often be sort of percolating the sermon text in light of the conversation I'm having, and God has been very gracious to me over the years, and it seems like the week before a sermon I'm about to preach, he gives me lots of opportunities to think about the themes in the Bible passage that I'm gonna be preaching on, and that's certainly been the case this week. So it was a helpful lunch, and it gave me some real, I think, insight into the kind of thing that Paul is talking about here in Ephesians chapter two. In fact, the whole letter of Ephesians, the whole letter of Ephesians is written to a church that was doing the kind of work Robbie and one day Colin is doing, will be doing. Paul in Acts chapter 19 goes to Ephesus, and it is a crazy place. It is full of pagans, full of Gentiles, full of non-Jews, full of people who are very, very different from Paul. He went there, as he often did. He began with the Jews, but he very quickly found himself in conflict with the pagan worshipers of Artemis, Diana, that was based there. And so he had a series of really remarkable experiences. It included some violence. There was actually all kinds of crazy violence that happened around Paul and to Paul. And so Paul was doing a very transcultural ministry in Ephesus, the church to which he's writing this letter. And in fact, we won't really understand Ephesians, we might even misunderstand it, if we forget the fact Paul's writing to a church that's trying to do mission in that context. It's hard work. One of the things Robbie said over and over and over again, it's really hard to do transcultural ministry. One of the things he said, you have to get past the idea of, transcultural ministry as decoration. It's very easy to think of cross-cultural ministry as just sort of adding different skin colors to a church. And it can, if you're not careful, it can become simply a matter of just sort of decorating the church with different ethnicities, sort of to show the world how diverse we are. That's not absolutely nothing, but it's certainly not what Paul is describing. Nobody gets too turned up about transcultural ministry as decoration. Now, it begins to be a serious discussion when it actually means full integration, when the church actually listens to the diverse ethnicities and the diverse backgrounds in a particular ministry context that was going on in Ephesus and it forms the backdrop to Paul's letter to the Ephesians. So what does Paul have to say to a church like Ephesus and maybe a church like Metrocrest as we consider the idea of growing in multicultural, transcultural ministry? What kinds of things does he say to us? Well, that's kind of what Paul is getting at in chapter two, verse 11. He's speaking to the church and he says in verse 11, therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called your uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, that is the Jews. which is made in the flesh by hands. Circumcision is a ritual performed by hands. He says, verse 12, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants and promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Paul wants the Ephesian Christians to remember that once upon a time, They were separated from God. He begins by talking specifically to the Gentiles. It was a congregation that included both Jews and Gentiles. But he begins by talking to the Gentiles. I think that's probably providential. In fact, I'm quite sure it's providential. God begins by talking through Paul to the Gentiles in this message. Why do I think it's providential? Because over time, the church moved from its Jewish neonatal care unit out into the world. And increasingly over the millennia, since Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians, increasingly the church has become more and more and more a non-Jewish church. We don't really wrestle very much with what they were specifically wrestling with, which is the dividing line between Jew and Gentile. At the time when Paul wrote this letter to the church in Ephesus, that was an intense conflict. The dividing line between Jew and Gentile was enormous. It was cultural, it was political, it was historical. It included very real spiritual dimensions. It included all kinds of religious dimensions. Judaism was a religion very different from the worship of Artemis, which was the cult goddess of Ephesus. So there were all of these very intense differences that were evident in Ephesus. And Paul wanted them to understand, the Gentile believers, that there was a time when they were aliens, they were strangers, they were separated from God. Why did Paul want the Ephesian Christians to remember that? Why was that important? Well, it's very, very important for a church that is called to be missional in a cross-cultural environment to remember that they, too, were once aliens. They, too, were once strangers. They, too, were once separated from God in his fullness. They were separate from the way God had revealed himself. That's really important for a church to remember. Why is that important? Because if we don't remember that, over time, the status quo becomes all we really understand, all we really know, and we begin to think of the church as this static unit. And typically, that static unit looks a lot like you, talks the same language as you talk, wears the same clothes, eats the same food, comes from the same place, has a very similar experience. Over time, we can, like the Jewish believers in Ephesus, like the Jews in Jerusalem, like the Pharisees in their day, can begin to define the community of God in terms of these outward expressions of experiences, these different ways communities come together around similar backgrounds, similar ethnicities. We can begin to define God's church that way. Well, Paul wants the Ephesians to remember that they were not always part of this community. They were once outsiders. They were once strangers, alienated from God, alienated from the covenants. They were separated from him. I think that's a really, really important thing for all of us to remember. You know, Metrocrest is coming up on 34 years old. We're gonna be celebrating that just A few months, we'll be celebrating God's faithfulness to us as a church. That's a wonderful thing. It's a great blessing to claim that and to celebrate that. But there's also a bit of a danger in 34 years of shared history. 34 years of shared history all too often means that comes to be how we define the church. We begin to define it in a tribalistic way, in a cultural way. We define it by sitting in pews with people we've known a long time, that we've loved, we've been through a lot with them. That's a wonderful thing. But it can become idolatrous. It can become something that shuts down mission, that shuts down ministry. So Paul says to them, and I believe he says to us, remember that it hasn't always been this way. Remember that you were once a stranger. Paul was a stranger. You know, Paul was raised in a devout Jewish home. Paul was raised at the feet of one of the great Jewish teachers of his day. He was a man who was just soaked with Judaism and it defined him so much so that he hated Christians. He hated people who didn't fit his understanding of Judaism. He hated them, even to the point of violence. You know the story, he literally held the cloaks for those who stoned Stephen to death, the church's first martyr. Paul had come from that kind of a background to be the preacher to the Gentiles. He was himself kind of the epitome of this. He was himself, in his person, kind of the demonstration of what he's talking about. He remembered what it was like to be an outsider, to be one outside the church, outside the church because of his ethnicity and culture, but also because of what he had done. He had actually helped to kill a Christian. and it persecuted Christians actively. And so Paul lives the rest of his life in ministry among Gentiles, preaching the gospel. He describes it in this passage. He talks about his ministry of preaching, Jesus's ministry of preaching. Paul saw himself as preaching and teaching what Christ had preached and taught. It's important for us to remember that. as we get ready for our 35th year and beyond. What does the Lord have for us at MetroCrest? Well, one of the things we're realizing over the past 30 plus years, our neighborhood has changed. Our neighborhood has changed a lot. Our neighborhood is predominantly non-Anglo. A lot of Anglos, but more and more people who have different backgrounds from you and me, perhaps. More and more people from different parts of the world, more and more people who have very different ethnic heritage, different languages, different cultures. Here's a word for us in this season of growth as our church is growing. Here's a word for us that we should remember what it's like to be on the outside because that will shape the way we deal with outsiders. It will give us compassion, it will give us a heart for them. One of the things Robbie said was, you've got to grab hold of that outsider way of experiencing life. One of the things Robbie preached in the very first sermon I ever heard him preach was at a Presbytery meeting, he preached on John Calvin as a refugee. When I think of John Calvin, I think of the doctrinal preacher of all doctrinal preachers, the greatest theologian, of modern times, a man who God used to bring great depth of understanding to theology, and he was all of that. But you know what shaped John Calvin in his church life, perhaps more than anything else, was the fact that he was a refugee. He had fled France, where he had been raised, country of his origin, the language he spoke. He had fled France, made his way across Europe, and wound up in Geneva, Switzerland. And one of the hallmarks of life in Geneva, Switzerland, well, it included doctrinal faithfulness. It included Presbyterian polity. Praise God for that. He reimagined Polity and light of the New Testament, that came out of Geneva and made its way to Scotland and then to us. But another thing that characterized life in Geneva under John Calvin was an active outreach to other refugees. people from other parts of the world who were fleeing Protestant persecution. They were being persecuted wherever they were as Protestants, and they'd made their way to Geneva to find peace and safety and security. It happened all over Europe. Many, many persecuted Christians made their way to Geneva. And guess what? A lot of Genevans weren't really happy about that. because it brought lots of change. It brought lots of needs. There were all these different people doing things in a different way. And they weren't very sure about that. It makes us uncomfortable sometimes to do things in a different way. But Calvin said, no, no, the gospel is for the outsider. The gospel is for the refugee. The gospel is for the person who's different. Uniquely so, the church is to be the place where outsiders and people who are different are welcome. In fact, we're specifically supposed to be the church that doesn't just open its doors and says, you're welcome, but we're to be the church that goes out to the outsider, out to the people who are different, and to invite them in, to welcome them in. Well, if I had a vision and a hope and a dream for Metrocrest in the next 30 plus years of our life and mission and ministry is that we would grow more and more and more with that vision of John Calvin and that vision of the Apostle Paul and that vision of the Lord Jesus who came into the world to seek and to save the lost the outsiders, those who are outside of the fullness of life in the covenant to come and bring us to himself. Because you see, we've all been outsiders. We've all been dead in sin. We've all been in darkness. Whatever our ethnicity, whatever our background may be, we've all been there. So Paul says, Remember that. Let it shape the way you live out life in the church. Let it characterize what you do. In fact, the whole book of Ephesians is written with that in the background. That the church would be the missional church, the church that shares the gospel with the whole world. And I mentioned last week how our VBS was such a delight to all of us who were here for it. It was a great joy, a great blessing to see as God reached out through our little church to our Korean neighbors and our Hispanic neighbors and African-American neighbors, reaching out through our little church with a gospel of love, which welcomes in people who are very, very different. Now, we don't wanna just think of that as decoration to make us feel good about ourselves. No, it's much more than that. What we're called to is an integration where we fully welcome those who God is bringing to himself. So Paul begins by saying, remember that you were separated from God, but he doesn't stop there. Look at verse 14. or begin up at verse 13. Now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. This dividing wall of hostility, anger, enmity, dislike, intense dislike, the kind of thing Paul experienced among the Ephesians when he came preaching and they wanted to kill him. That was hostility, that was enmity. Well, Paul says that that enmity is broken down by Christ because at Christ we're all even. We're all sinners saved by grace. We're all sinners in Christ who were once far off, but through him had been brought near by his blood. You know, we're gonna, in a moment, gather around this little table. We say it every month. It doesn't belong to Metrocrest. It doesn't belong to the PCA. It belongs to Jesus. It is his table. And he invites to his table All those, all those who know and love Him, who worship Him, who are in fellowship with His church, it doesn't matter where you come from, it doesn't matter what language you speak, it doesn't matter what kind of food you like to eat, it doesn't matter any of those things. What matters is Christ, our oneness in Him, and that His blood has been poured out for us, and what His blood does is it makes us one in Him. He's already described our relationship with Christ in terms of adoption. Adoption is a beautiful idea to an alienated people. It's a beautiful idea to people who have experienced being separated and being an outsider. See what it says is you're invited in not to just be decoration to make us feel good about ourselves. You're invited into the family. You live with us. What happens to you matters to us. We care about you. We care about what matters to you. You know, part of the symbolism of the Lord's Supper originally was there was one cup. Today, because of a lot of different reasons, we use small individual cups. That's fine. But I want you to remember the original imagery. The original imagery was there was one cup and you drank, all of us, from that one cup. It's an act of extreme intimacy. It was the kind of thing they literally did around the Passover table with your immediate family. You would drink from the cup, you would share. from the cup and part of the imagery of this meal, part of the significance of this meal is that we share something deeply intimate with one another and with Jesus. We commune with him and we commune together. We still get the imagery in the broken bread. When you come up in a moment, we've gone away with the little individual cups where the bread's in the little individual cup When you come forward, what you'll actually see is a piece of bread and you break off a piece of the bread, you take it back to your seat and we'll eat it together. But the idea is you break off a piece of the one loaf. You see the intimacy? That's family intimacy. It's the kind of thing you do with your own immediate family. And Jesus is saying, in this meal, you have that relationship now with one another through me. Through me, you are a family. Verse 15 says, Paul says, the law of commandments expressed in ordinances have been abolished. Those behaviors and things that were meant to mark out the Jewish people as different, those things have been set aside in a way. We no longer do the Jewish ceremonial traditions. Those things which were to mark out Judaism in a world full of different religions, they no longer have that function any longer. Why? Because now the gospel is for the whole world. We're still marked out, but it's now by the work of the Spirit in our hearts and our lives. It's not by which specific foods we eat any longer. That served its purpose. Those things have been fulfilled. Now in Christ, we're not defined by the kinds of foods we like to eat. We're defined by the blood of Jesus and his body broken for us. That's how we're defined. All the other things which have served their purpose no longer are meant to divide us and we should never let them divide us. Because in Christ, we have actually, he says, through his cross, verse 15, we have been made one body, thereby killing the hostility. Remember that you were a stranger And in the body of Christ, that hostility, that enmity, which has in the past divided us, well, Christ has dealt with it on the cross. Paul came to proclaim that. So we're one in Christ. He goes on to say, Verse 17, Jesus came and preached peace to you who are far off and peace to those who were near, for through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. We're one in Christ and we're one in the church. It's not a Jewish church and a Gentile church. There's one church, there's one covenant, there's one church. Interesting, Paul talks about the Gentiles having once been separated from the covenants, but no longer separated from the covenants. We don't have a covenant that is somehow different from God's covenant with Abraham. The only difference is the historical context. We are participants in the covenant with Abraham. We're participants, we share through Christ in the covenant God made with Abraham. We share in that same saving covenant. through Christ. And in the church now, we are no longer strangers, we're no longer aliens, but we're fellow citizens with the saints. And here's that picture again, members of the household of God. And this household, this family, he says, verse 20, is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. So we are now one in the church. MetroCrest is the host of a Korean congregation. They'll be gathering at two o'clock this afternoon down the hall. We are looking for ways where we can express our oneness with our Korean brothers and sisters. They meet at two, their service is entirely in Korean. We meet at 10, 15, our service is in English. But we're still one church. We're one community, and we're looking for ways where we can express that, we can display that to the world, that yes, we have differences, we don't pretend we don't have differences, but we look for opportunities to show forth the oneness we have in Christ. So we're making plans to host the Korean Presbytery of the South here at Metrocrest. We hosted our very first Presbytery meeting in the North Texas Presbytery just a few weeks ago, the first one in many years. And we're going to have our second Presbytery meeting, but it's the Southern Korean Presbytery. And they will be invited to our church. They will share fellowship. They will gather at the Lord's table. They've invited us to be present. See, that's a little glimpse of the oneness we have in the church. We're one in Christ. We have some missionaries here with us today who serve in a very different context. They are a manic, just a little expression, a little display of our little church here in Carrollton. reaching out thousands of miles with the same covenant gospel to people who don't look like us, don't speak like us, don't have the same heritage that we have, but bringing them the same saving message of God's love in Christ. That is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I'm praying that everything we do here at Metro Christ will just pulse with that gospel heart of the Lord, that lovely heart of love that will flow through the church because we are made one in Christ here at the church. Whatever your ethnicity may be, whatever your background may be, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. So we're one in Christ, one in the church. And finally, we're one in mission. Someone say, Pastor Bill, where is mission in this passage? It's everywhere in this passage. because the whole context of what Paul is writing about is a church in this environment of mission. He talks in verse 20, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. That being builtness is mission. The being builtness that Paul's describing here and that he's gonna go on to say much more about. That is our mission. That is us reaching out beyond ourselves to the rest of the world. Reaching out to people who are very, very different to us. That is the characteristic of a church where the Holy Spirit is powerfully at work. A few weeks ago, after General Assembly, I mentioned that while Larry and I were free one afternoon after GA adjourned, Paul and Judy were doing their thing and Larry and I had a few minutes and we drove over to the Birmingham jail. And it's still there, the one that Martin Luther King Jr. was in jail there. And we pulled out a copy of Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail and actually read it there outside the Birmingham jail. I don't know if you remember that letter. I'm going to close with this. But the letter was written to Christians who were telling Martin Luther King to calm down, to be patient, not to worry about all this thing about racism and the hostility between blacks and whites. They were saying, don't do that. One of the signatories of that letter was the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. And Martin Luther King, Jr., there in jail, wrote this letter. And I get a minute, I reprinted a big chunk of it two or three Sundays ago. If you get a chance, Google it. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham jail. You may have read it many times. But he writes this letter as a Christian pastor to other Christian pastors. And this is one thing he said. He says, I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi, and all the southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn evenings, I have looked at the south's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I've beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over, I have found myself asking, what kind of people worship here and who is their God? Who is their God? See, the way we approach mission shows to the world who our God is. Who is our God at Metrocrest? Is our God a white, southern, middle class, American? Or is our God the God of the whole world? At every race, language, tribe, and nation? Does our church show that? Does it show a heart for others, a heart for the outsider, a heart for the stranger, a heart for the people who are different from ourselves? Martin Luther King closed his letter in, I thought, a particularly beautiful way. He says, I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith, I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities And in some not too distant tomorrow, the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. I love the way he closed this letter with lots of profound insight, but he closes it by just saying, I want to be a brother in Christ. That's what I want to be. But to be a true brother in Christ, we have to set aside racial discrimination, racial hostility, all the things that divide us from one another, all the things that rage within us, anger about whatever we're angry about, all those things which separate us and alienate us from one another. In Christ, we learn to set those things aside and to work together in mission to reach out to our neighbors, our friends, those all around us, whoever they are. Well, that's my prayer for us. That's my prayer for us as we gather at the Lord's table in just a few seconds. My prayer is that we will come forward having prepared ourselves by, as Paul says, discerning the body, the oneness we share. It's not talking about the bread. turning into Jesus's physical body. It's talking about us as Jesus's body and the oneness we share. And as you come forward in a second, I hope you will come forward seeking to discern that oneness in Christ.