Episode Details

The Church Exists for OutsidersEphesians 2:11-22Friends, we find ourselves in the middle of the Sundays after Trinity and the lectionary provides us with an opportunity to speak about the nature of the Church. It does this because, for the next few weeks, the New Testament readings are taken from the book of Ephesians. And the book of Ephesians is all about the Church: what it is and what it should be. So let’s begin with our reading today, Ephesians 2:11-22.This passage is so rich that we can’t possibly comment on everything. So I’d like to talk about the two groups of people it mentions, paying particular attention to what we can learn about the Church.To begin with, the Apostle Paul speaks about ‘Gentiles in the flesh’ (Eph. 2:11). A Gentile is simply someone who is not ethnically or religiously Jewish. To the Jewish mind, the world was divided into two in this sense: Jew and Gentile. So, when you read the word ‘Gentile’ in the Scriptures, this is what it means.Paul is asking those Gentiles who have joined the Church to remember their position before they came into it: they were ‘separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’ (Eph. 2:11-12). And that final phrase is really the key, the summary of everything that went before: outside of the Church, the Gentiles have no hope and are without God in the world.Now that might seem like a strong statement: who is the Apostle Paul to say that people have no hope? Surely people can find their hope in all sorts of things and don’t need religion or the Church to do so. But I would like to argue that the Apostle Paul may be on to something.Consider the situation of probably the majority of people in modern, twenty-first century Britain. Although there are many beliefs and outlooks in our society, surely the dominant paradigm is that of secular materialism. The reigning ideology of our age considers religion (by which we mean ultimate questions of God and the purpose of human destiny) to be secondary to other concerns such as material prosperity and societal flourishing. Let me give a small but I think telling example: I subscribe to a particular newspaper app (I won’t say which one). When I look at this app on my phone, at the top of the screen various topics are presented to me for my perusal: News, Sports, Business, Travel, International, Food, and so on. But there is no button for Religion, the Church, or Christianity. So unimportant are these things deemed to be that they seem a minority interest with no mainstream appeal.It is doubtless the case that material prosperity, health, comfort, security and societal flourishing are great and important blessings. But have we traded something of ultimate value for our emphasis upon these things? Are we not like the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World who, whenever they are troubled by any social, political or philosophical anxiety simply medicate themselves with a drug called Soma which makes them feel calm and happy? Isn’t watching NetFlix, or flicking through the Twitter feed on our iPhone, or working incessantly for greater financial gain, the equivalent to this? Aren’t these things ultimately a distraction from the nagging sense that there might be more to life than this?I met a middle-aged man the other day who has come to Christian faith in the past couple of years. He is a wealthy, successful man, who no doubt lives in a nice house and drives a nice car. But he said to me that he always had a sense that there was more to life than work, that he had in fact been serving his work as though his work were a slave master. He recalled to me the words of Morpheus to Neo in the film The Matrix: that there was always something wrong, but that he was only dimly aware of it, and yet it was there, nagging at him, like a splinter in his mind.I think many people have a splinter in their minds: they know that there is more to life than