Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Trinity
Sermons. This week we are continuing our sermon
series, Cross Culture, where we are looking at
what it means to be a multicultural church of
diverse languages, nations, and cultures that
all come together under the name of Jesus. Now
what is your house made of? Is it all brick?
Is it all wood? Is it all one type of stone?
Probably not. And in the same way, the church
is made up of a diversity of stones. That's what
we're going to uncover in today's sermon and
how each one of us is a part of this building,
this place that is the church. Today's reading
is from Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11 to 22,
and will be read in Ukrainian. English will be
on the screens for you to read along. So remember
that you, once with a bad body, that your so
-called hand -cut body is called uncut, that
you were without Christ at that time, separated
from the Israeli community and other people's
promises, having no hope without God in the world.
And now in Christ Jesus you, who were once far
away, have become close to the blood of Christ.
He is our peace, who made out of two one. He
destroyed the middle of the garden, the enemy
with his body. He destroyed the law of commandments
with his science, to build a new man with God,
to make peace, and to make peace with God with
Christ, both in one body, and to kill the enemy
in this. And when he passed away, he blessed
you with peace, far and near peace, for both
of us have an approach in the spirit of one to
the Father. The Word of the Lord. You know, the
Bible tells us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter.
And for that reason, a lot of people think that
Jesus himself was a carpenter. But actually,
the Greek word for carpenter is a word tekton.
And tekton actually means builder. And so carpenter
isn't necessarily the only or even the best fit
for what Jesus was. A lot of scholars think that
Jesus was actually more likely a stone worker
or a stone. mason. After all, most of the houses
in Israel were built with stone, not wood. And
trees were kind of hard to come by. They still
are kind of hard to come by there. So it'd be
kind of hard as a carpenter to probably to make
a living for yourself. Archaeologists have also
discovered that just around the corner from where
Jesus grew up, there was a large, there's a large
remnant of a stone quarry there, which is where
you get stone for building projects. And Just
around the corner from that, Herod was building
this huge city called Sepphoris, which would
have meant that there was lots of work for those
who were in the business of building with stone.
So imagine, therefore, Jesus is building a house,
not out of wood and nails, but out of stone,
and he's got his chisel there with him. He's
building, and he has the option of kind of building
that house with maybe one type of brick, in which
case he would take all the stones and he would
chisel them down so they're all kind of one uniform
shape. That's one option he has. The other option
Jesus would have would be to kind of take various
shapes and sizes of rocks and maybe they were
different colors and different materials and
came from like different sources or different
varieties and to make a house out of a brick
like that. Now, I think that if he was to use
like this variety of stones, that would probably
take a lot longer and it would be a lot more
difficult. I think it would be easier probably
just to build over and over again with one type
of brick over and over again. But I also think
that a mosaic of stones, of a bunch of different
stones, would look far more beautiful in the
end. But here is the thing. You know, Jesus didn't
come to build a physical house or to build physical
houses. Jesus came to earth to be with us to
build a spiritual house. Jesus came to... build
a church. I'm not talking about a church building.
I'm talking about the church, the people of the
church, which is why we just read, although Daniel
read it in Ukrainian beautifully, that in him,
you too, that's you, plural, are being built
together to become a dwelling in which God lives
by his spirit built on the foundation of the
apostles and the prophets. So the question is,
here's the question I have for you this morning.
If Jesus is building a spiritual house, he's
building his church. Is he going to build that
church with just one kind of stone, one kind
of person? Is it going to be a church where everybody
has the same appearance, everyone from the same
background, everyone speaks the same language,
everyone kind of looks and sounds the same? Or
is the spiritual house that he's building going
to involve like different people, different backgrounds,
a multicultural, multi -ethnic church? Now, again,
I would argue that if you were to build a church
out of just one kind of people, it would probably
be a lot easier. In fact, there's lots of evidence
that some of the fastest growing churches in
the world today focus on one homogeneous people
group. It's true. But even though it's more complicated,
and even though it takes more time, building
a church out of... People from different backgrounds
and different cultures, a mosaic of different
people is far stronger and more beautiful in
the end. Okay, so we are in the middle of a teaching
series we're doing this January called Cross
Culture, where we are looking at what does it
mean for us to live in a deeply diverse and multicultural
community right here in Mississauga. Last week,
I explained to you that it has always been God's
plan from the very beginning to gather to himself
a diverse and multicultural people. And you remember
last week, if you missed it, you can go back
and check. I took you through the whole Bible
from Genesis to Revelation to show that this
has always been God's plan to build his spiritual
house out of a diverse group of people, different
ethnicities, different nationalities, different
languages, and all that. But like I said, building
a church that way wasn't easy and isn't easy.
And today I want to show you how hard it was.
I want to show you how hard it is to create a
diverse church. But also I want to show you how
beautiful it is and how it's way better to do
it that way. And so what we're going to do is
we're going to go back 2 ,000 years ago. We're
going to look at the very first churches that
were being built by God in that pivotal time
when the church was just forming. And just like
any building project, what we're going to see
is in God's church, there were several phases
to that building project, and it wasn't easy.
I've given you some sermon notes. You should
have these. And I invite you to follow along
to make sure we all kind of leave having learned
something important this morning. So let's begin
with phase one of God's great building project,
right? When you're starting a building project,
it is usually a good idea to keep it simple.
right? You start with one kind of material, one
kind of brick, you know, but you got to make
sure you got something solid first before you
start making it too complex. And when God began
building his church, he did the exact same thing.
He started with one people, with one ethnicity,
who spoke one language, who came from even one
city, and all of the first followers of Jesus
were Jewish. They all lived in Jerusalem. Jesus
was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. All the
first Christians were Jewish. They all, in that
way, looked the same. What God was doing in that
moment was building a faithful community. that
was being formed within Judaism. The first followers
of Jesus, they didn't leave Judaism, right? They
believed that this church was actually the fulfillment
of Judaism. And that's why Jesus would say things
like, hey, don't think that I came to abolish
the law or the prophets. I didn't come to abolish
them. I came to fulfill them. So you see the...
First church was holy and fully Jewish in all
of its culture and all of its practices. That's
why we read that those early Christians continue
to meet day by day together in the temple. And
we might say, well, why are they still meeting
in the temple? That's a Jewish thing, and these
people are Christians. Because the original church
was totally Jewish in its way of life, in its
ethnic identity. They loved the temple. They
loved the law. They loved the Sabbath. They loved
circumcision. Well, they probably didn't love
circumcision, but this was the first phase of
construction. right and so before the gospel
could cross into other cultures it had to start
in one culture you kind of had to look around
and see what were the bricks that you had around
to start building with and so yes the very first
church was monocultural they were all jewish
christians all in jerusalem and it was only when
the building seemed to kind of get strong enough
that you could start adding different stones
and that's exactly what happened Okay? Every
building project, I suppose, reaches some moment
when the materials change. And that first phase
of formation, which I called it, gave way to
this next phase of the building, which I want
to call tension. Tension. See, what happened
was that those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem
started to get persecuted by their other Jewish
friends who felt that this whole Jesus thing
was nonsense and was actually quite destructive
to Judaism. And so those Jewish Christians got
chased out of Jerusalem. They got scattered.
And some of them went, they went all over the
place, but some of them landed in this large
cosmopolitan Greek city that was called Antioch.
And there in Antioch, something really kind of
unexpected happened. These Jewish Christians
began to share their Christian faith with these
pagan Greek speaking foreigners who lived in
Antioch. And to their surprise, these foreigners
believed. The message of Jesus. A great number
of people believed and turned to the Lord. These
Greeks were like, hey, this sounds pretty good.
Hey, I believe in this Jesus. Hey, can I join
your church too? Which meant that at Antioch,
brand new stones. started showing up on the construction
site but these stones were very different these
stones came from a very different quarry and
and these two groups as you can see looked nothing
alike so for example for example jewish christians
they observed all the teachings of the torah
but but greek they didn't even know what the
Torah was and certainly wasn't their story. That
was the Jewish history. It was the Jewish story,
right? That wasn't their history. That wasn't
their background. And Jewish Christians, they
observed the Sabbath. They didn't work on the
Sabbath. But Greeks, they didn't have any category
for that. You know, like that didn't work. That
might have worked in Jerusalem, but that wouldn't
work in Antioch, taking a day off every week.
And Jews, they had especially very strict rules.
rules about the food you could eat. And there
was no way that a Jewish person would ever be
found having dinner with one of these Greek foreign
pagans in Antioch. They didn't follow the food
laws and they didn't follow the rituals. Paul
actually writes that in these ways, all these
Greeks were foreigners to the covenants of the
promise. God had promised all these things to
the Jewish people, but this was all foreign now
to this new brick, these new people that were
showing up. Oh, and of course, there was this
other thing. Yes, Jewish Christians were circumcised,
and the Greeks were like, say what? And in these
ways, and in lots of ways, these new stones just
didn't fit, didn't match with the original stones.
And so all sorts of tension was unavoidable.
And the question was, do these new stones need
to be chiseled down and shaped so that they look
like the original stones so that they can actually
be part of the building project? This was the
tension phase. And if you had to sum it up, what
you had was you had two cultures, but you had
one gospel and a whole lot of unresolved questions.
Two types of stones trying to build one spiritual
house, and they didn't fit together. Now, the
Jewish Christians could have said this. They
could have said, okay, listen, Greek. our greek
brothers and sisters we love you we're so glad
that you found jesus but here's what you should
do go over there and build your own church and
kind of speak your own language and do things
your way and we're going to go over here and
we're going to build our own church and do things
our way that way the things that we're doing
don't annoy you and the things that you're doing
don't like disgust us kind of a thing That was
one option. Use this brick to build one church.
Use this brick over here to build a separate
church. But, but, but, after a lot of prayer
and after a lot of debate and after a lot of
struggle, the leaders of the church decided,
no, it'd be way better if they could find a way
to build this church together. If they could
find a way to get these stones to fit together.
And so what they did is they had this big meeting
down in Jerusalem. And at that meeting, actually
it was Jesus' brother, James. Jesus had a brother
named James who got up during the meeting and
he says, here's what I think. I think we should
not make it difficult. for the Gentiles who are
turning to God. And they decided it does not
make sense for these Greeks to have to observe
all the Jewish food laws. And it does not make
sense to make Torah observance an entry requirement
into our new church. And it does not make sense
for these Greek men to get circumcised. And this
wasn't James saying, by the way, none of these
laws matter anymore. No, this was James saying
that the church we are making cannot be reduced
to one cultural way of life. Now, you would think
that that would have resolved all the tension,
but the truth is that just creates... tension
because now you've got these two groups and they're
trying to figure out how to live together you
know for if you're a jew for example how do you
live faithfully in this foreign city in this
pagan city where for example nobody observes
the sabbath how do you how do you keep observing
the sabbath and if you're a greek how do you
now follow a jewish messiah without being a jewish
person yourself you had all these clashing of
cultures and and ideas and and if we're honest
was really straining the bricks. It was really
straining the mortar at that time. I want to
just pause for a second. I want to say this kind
of tension still shows up in churches today.
It even shows up here at Trinity. And sometimes
our diversity as a church can lead things to
not line up so neatly either. Like, for example,
some of you here, you come from a cultural background
where you really appreciate quiet prayers. And
you grew up, when you went to church, it was
just lovely, beautiful, quiet liturgy. And you
find all the loud music we sing very distracting.
Others of you, you grew up in a setting where
you would love loud praise and worship music,
and you find quiet prayers and liturgical prayers
to be completely lifeless. Guess what? Maybe
you're both right. Maybe you're both wrong. It's
just that you're different. Or let's take the
idea of time, for example. Some people grew up
in a culture where time is, you have to be very,
very punctual. And that's why if the Sunday service
is running late, you're like, why are they always
running behind? And you are looking at your watch.
Other cultures have a very different view of
time. I mean, they could, the service could go
on forever and ever. And they would be like,
why are they cutting things short? Why is Rob
rushing to get through the service? He should
just let it be. Why are we always trying to watch?
Watch the clock, right? You see, there's different
cultures. For example, I want to tell you this
Christmas Eve. I had someone tell me, Rob, that
was the best Christmas Eve sermon I have ever
heard. And then the next day I had someone tell
me, Rob, that was the worst Christmas Eve sermon
I have ever heard. And I'm not even joking about
that. I had someone say to me, Christmas Eve
is no place for the celebration of communion.
And they sent me a letter about it. Can you imagine
how many letters I would have got if I had canceled
communion on Christmas Eve, right? What I'm saying
is this does not mean, uh -oh, something's gone
wrong at Trinity Streetsville. All it shows us
is that our churches, like that church in Antioch,
we are made up of stones that are cut from different
quarries, and we bring all that with us when
we gather together. And in Antioch, The walls
were creaking and cracking and the mortar was
straining. The question was, could the gospel
that had brought these two groups together, was
that gospel strong enough to hold these two groups
together? Or would the church end up splitting?
Well, the answer to that question is actually
found. Years later and hundreds of miles away
in a different church in a city called Ephesus.
Because it was there that this tension was finally
understood and finally resolved. I want you to
think of it this way. Antioch was like the construction
site. It was dusty. It was noisy. Things were
unfinished. But years later in Ephesus. This
other church gave us a glimpse of what a truly
integrated spiritual house could look like. Jews
and Greeks, different stones, different people,
different backgrounds. A church that Paul says
was held together by Christ himself. Paul writes
about this church in Ephesus. He says, for Jesus
himself is our peace, who has made these two
groups one. and has destroyed the barrier, the
dividing wall of hostility. Now notice, it wasn't
that the Ephesian church achieved this amazing
unity by ignoring the difference. They didn't
just say, oh heck, agree to disagree, go along
to get along. But no, what they're saying is
Jesus actually created this unity between us.
Jesus brought us together. It was actually Jesus
who was doing something. In our midst. And the
reason was, Paul said, that this diverse church
was able to hold together was because they were
built on the foundation of the apostles and the
prophets and Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
Now, the cornerstone isn't just another brick.
You guys know that this stone, the cornerstone,
is the big one that determines how all the other
stones line up. Which means different stones
don't have to match each other as long as they're
aligned. Different people don't have to match
each other as long as they're all lined up with
Jesus. And so what was happening was, in Ephesus,
these different bricks were becoming one building
in Christ. Jewish believers didn't stop being
Jewish. Gentile believers didn't have to become
Jewish. Both groups were being built into something
that neither one of them could become on their
own. And this is really important, that when
you build a church this way, two incredible things
happen. First, the church becomes stronger. Home
builders will actually, I think, tell you this,
that it's not necessarily the strongest way to
build a house to use the same material over and
over and over and over and over again. Use different
materials. Use stone. Use timber. Use steel.
Because each one can kind of carry the weight
differently. Strength does not come from sameness.
It comes from how different materials work together.
And that's exactly what happened in the Ephesian
church. that the other needed and as a result
the church got stronger now i want to give you
one little example of this but here's one example
jewish christians spoke about jesus as the messiah
and that was a very very rich word for them it
had to do with their their ancient story the
torah the story of of who jesus was that meant
so much to them that's how they understood who
jesus was he was the messiah but for greek -speaking
gentiles That word meant absolutely nothing to
them, right? That they didn't share that history.
So they needed a word that made sense to them
about who Jesus was. And they found that word
in the word Lord, the Greek word Kyrios, right?
That was a word they understood because in their
old pagan days, they had used the word Lord to
talk about their deities. And they actually used
the word Lord to talk about emperors. They used
the word Lord to talk about anything that had
supreme power and authority. Now, to Jewish ears,
when they heard the Greeks calling Jesus Lord,
it sounded really risky. It sounded like, you
know, they were distorting the faith. It was
a very poor substitute, they would have said,
for the word Messiah. But to the Greeks, the
word Messiah was like outdated, foreign, and
confusing to them. But something really surprising
happened. Having both words turned out to be
better than having just one. Because Jews then
started to think about Jesus as Lord, Lord of
all creation. Jesus, Lord with authority over
all things. That is actually something we haven't
maybe thought about that way before. And of course,
when Gentiles learned that Jesus was the long
-expected Messiah of Israel, that changed their
thinking. And now their faith was more rooted
in Israel's scriptures, right? And this is why
Andrew Wall said that crossing a cultural frontier
like this led to a creation. movement in theology.
Can you imagine that? Creative theology, where
the eternal Lord was also understood as the Messiah
of Israel. And at first, it always felt like
something was being lost, right? Oh, we're losing
our thing. We're losing our thing. No, no. But
it always resulted in gain, right? Jesus wasn't
either Messiah or Lord. He was both. And only
together could they see the full strength of
who Jesus was. That made the building stronger.
It didn't just make the building stronger. It
made the building more beautiful. Because, I
don't know, I think when I walk around and look
at houses, a house that is built of just one
material, it may be efficient, but it is rarely
beautiful. But a mix of stones. brings out all
the color, brings out all the beauty. Paul puts
it this way. It's in our unity. It's when we're
together that the knowledge of the Son of God
becomes a full picture, a whole picture. And
we can see the fullness of who Christ is. You
can't see the fullness of who Christ is from
one culture alone, but it's only when we come
together, right? Jewish believers didn't see
the whole picture without the Gentiles. The Gentile
believers didn't see the whole picture without
the Jewish believers. And here at Trinity, I
think it's safe to say sometimes we might worry
about the same thing. We might worry that our
differences will result in some kind of loss.
But again and again, differences actually result
in gain for everyone. I mean, it's true that
we, let's say we don't all come from a culture
that reads the scriptures the same way. Some
of us come to the scriptures as a story. Others
come to the scriptures as more of like a source
of all truth. But when we read it both ways,
we gain. We don't lose anything, we gain. Theologically,
we don't all come from the same spot, right?
But that is not a loss because when we come together,
it helps us learn and grow and see more of the
beauty of who Christ is. And Ephesians tells
us that as long as we're in Christ, that's important,
as long as we're in Christ, those differences
are not a loss. they're always a gain it isn't
subtraction it's always multiplication we gain
strength we gain beauty when all of us are here
and now i'm going to kind of quickly move to
the last two phases of the building project as
beautiful and as hopeful as the ephesian moment
was it didn't last and it wasn't because they
did something wrong it wasn't because the vision
was wrong it's because history intervened You
know, every building project eventually faces
something out of its control, and the early church
was no different. In the year A .D. 70, Rome
destroyed Jerusalem. Rome destroyed the temple.
And for all of those Jewish Christians, it was
like their heart had been ripped out. It was
like they lost their center of gravity, and they
were unanchored and unmoored, and they really
began to drift. And pretty soon, Jewish Christians
gathered together with each other in synagogues
more than they gathered together in church. And
so over time, this church that had, you know,
once held Jewish and Gentile believers together,
now it's started to lose one of its foundational
stones, right? And so that brief period of unity
was broken by history and by violence and by
displacement. And the church now, it continued
to grow, but now it grew unevenly. And it became
increasingly this brick now, right? It was mostly
Greeks and Romans and Gentiles, not Jewish culture.
That Jewish culture was kind of pushed to the
margin. It slowly kind of was largely forgotten.
And as Andrew Walls noted, that it wasn't long
before the church had become monocultural again.
The bricks were the same again, but a different
kind of sameness. Right? Isn't that interesting?
This is how history goes. Empires rise and fall
and the church adapts. But what about that vision?
What about God's vision? One building with many
different stones. Is that vision over? Is it
over? No, absolutely not. Because we find ourselves
living in phase five of God's great building
project. And diversity of the church is being
restored in a way that you would not believe.
The conditions that made that Ephesian moment
possible have returned, but they have returned
on a much bigger scale for us. And again, it's
not because we planned it. It's just, again,
history has shifted once more. Today, the center
of gravity of Christianity is no longer in Europe
or in North America. The majority of Christians
now live in Africa, they live in Asia, or they
live in Latin America. And for example, there
are more Anglican churches in Nigeria than there
are in Canada, plus the UK, plus the United States
of America, right? Stephen Bevins wrote that
by 2025, two -thirds of all Christians will live
in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The average
Christian today, is female, black, and lives
in a Brazilian shantytown or an African village.
At the same time as the center of Christianity
has shifted globally, guess what else has happened?
Global migration has brought people from all
those regions into cities like ours. Mississauga,
guess what? The world has moved to your doorstep.
The nations have come to our city. which means
that the Ephesian moment has returned on this
global scale. And once again, churches can be
shaped by vastly different histories and different
languages and different customs, you know, different
people being brought together. Guys, this is
not a theory. This is what is happening right
here in congregations like ours. Only now, it's
not just that there's two cultures. It's dozens
of cultures. It's hundreds of cultures. A mosaic
of stones have shown up from every imaginable
quarry you could think of. And just like before,
we might be tempted to see this as a problem
instead of a gift. Because, of course, all that
change, that feels very, very threatening to
us. And we may fear losing something we love.
But as Paul reminded us, remember, in Christ,
we never lose when this happens. We always gain.
We gain strength. Because no single culture can
carry the weight of the whole gospel. And we
gain beauty. Because Christ looks more like Christ
when he is reflected through many cultures, not
just one. So the question before us and the question
I want to leave with you today is not how do
we protect what we have? It's what are we building
here? The question is, will we allow Christ to
build what he wants? Will we retreat into comfort
and familiarity or will we step into this new
Ephesian moment? Trusting that the same Christ
who once held together Jews and Gentiles can
now even hold together a far more diverse church
today. I'm telling you people, the stones are
all here. The question is, what are we going
to do with them? But let me just end with this.
Whatever we're building, it must be built on
the one foundation. With Christ Jesus being the
cornerstone. Because if Christ is our cornerstone,
then our unity does not depend on us agreeing
with each other or looking like each other. Our
unity depends on us aligning ourselves to him.
And when we do, guess what? We become one building
with many stones held together by Christ. So
let's do that. Let's, as a church, continue to
build something beautiful together. Thanks be
to God. Amen.