Breaking Down Walls 2/21/43

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.”

There is a good deal of conflict and fighting going on around us in this, as in any, day. But one of the joys of our age is that there is so much good fighting going on. By a good fight, I mean an honest struggle of ideals and convictions against recognized evil - a fight hard but hopeful, a fight worth winning, a fight offering risks and calling for courage. I mean a conflict such as that an English poet had in mind when he wrote,

“I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s broad and pleasant land.”

Some of this good fighting going on today may be said to be between wall builders and wall breakers. These fights are going on in books, schools, churches, as well as on the battlefronts, all around us. Which is the better, wiser, more reasonable and Christian course, to build up walls between ourselves and others, or to pull them down?

The wall builders are determined folks and are hard at work. And they have strong sanctions from the past. Jerusalem was not considered safe until completely surrounded by a wall. In ages gone by, China sought safety behind a great wall.

Until recent times, people have had great faith in all kinds of walls. It is only in modern years that people have ventured to open the windows of their sleeping rooms. Previously it seemed obvious to them that safety from disease lay behind the walls and closed windows of their rooms. Cities without walls were unsafe. They lay open to attacks from any invader.

The swift development of modern explosives and other means of destruction has lessened the confidence of people in walls of wood, stone, sod or concrete. But the wall builders, using other materials, are still very busy and very influential. We have some of them in politics fostering a narrow type of party spirit and policies of exclusion. We find some of them in society talking much about superior and inferior races, mistaking bragging nationalism for healthy patriotism. We find them everywhere, the wall builders and the wall repairers. They are uneasy if anything that keeps classes, races or nations separated shows signs of giving way. They are always building up defenses and armaments, guarding social traditions. They feel most secure when self, and family, and country are enclosed within good strong walls that are built to shut out all others.

But the wall breakers are also busily at work. They are sure that such walls are not only useless, but often harmful. They want to take down the barbed wire and partitions and create a common brotherhood among men. Ultimately, they believe, the fences must come down.

And the wall breakers have their sanctions too. The time was, of course, when every man’s castle was, very literally, his castle with a wall and gate or a moat and drawbridge around it for safety. In this day and age we don’t depend on moats or walls very much for safety. There may not be more than green grass or a hedge between our house and that of our neighbor - an imaginary surveyor’s line between our nation and Canada. And yet do we feel less safe than did the lords of the castles? We have learned that mutual trust with our neighbors gives us more safety and peace of mind than walls or moats can give us.

The time was when every large city depended on its solid, high walls for safety. How many of us realize that boulevards now run in many an ancient city where walls once stood? This is true in Paris and other great European cities. The Century Dictionary defines a “boulevard” as “a public walk or street occupying the site of demolished fortifications.” It was a proper and fitting symbol of the high hopes which Dr. Sun Yat Sen had for a new and better day in China, when he had the old wall of Nanking pulled down, and replaced by a boulevard.

A goodly number of forward looking people are looking through the future toward a world that shall be content to be unwalled and unarmed, except for adequate and decent policing; safe through trust and good will toward one another. They see the great cities of the future secure in the way that the ancient prophet saw them secure, when he said: “We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation, that keepeth truth, may enter in.”

The fight is on between the wall builders and the wall breakers; those who would build the bulwarks higher, and those who would transform them into boulevards, trusting in a highway rather than a wall. Which side is right?

It is hard to see how one can be a good American and a good Christian, and not believe that, on the whole, the wall breakers are right.

We have ridded America of so many of the political walls on which other countries rely. Here are 48 states with no physical barriers between them, no guards and no fortifications, and few legal frontiers. Are they not safer from each other than are all the states of Europe with their elaborate defenses? Would either Canada or the United States be better or safer if there were a wall and soldiers all the way along that lengthy boundary line, with battleships on the Great Lakes?

It should be instinctive for us who live in America to trust in open dealing, in confidence, in good will, and in mutual agreement, rather than in walls and defenses.

Certainly a Christian should be, on the whole, a breaker rather than a builder of these walls. For he follows a Master whose function was to “break down the dividing walls” as Paul says of him.

All the Jews and many of the Gentiles to whom Paul was writing, knew instantly what he meant when he spoke of that “inner wall of partition.” [Ephesians 2: 14]. Across a court of the temple at Jerusalem ran a wall which was low enough to see over, but which no Gentile might cross on pain of death. Paul sees Christ, the Prince of Peace, bringing about peace by breaking down that wall, and letting the two groups mingle in brotherhood and good will. Christ has always been doing that. Before him, people are neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek. That is our ideal. Yet, in order to make progress, there must be no mere blind enthusiasm for an ideal, nor a demand that the ideal be instantly substituted for present ideas and customs.

There are distinctions which only a fool would ignore. There is noble truth, for instance, in Paul’s statement that in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female. It was something of a triumph for the Christian spirit in Paul that he could make such a statement, for his opinion of women was not always flattering. But that does not mean that Christianity makes men and women just alike. Men and women do differ. But because a man and a woman differ does not mean that either one is to be considered inferior to the other. They are created to complement each other.

There are distinctions worth keeping all through our life. It is not a clear issue between walls or no walls.

What can we do wisely to help bring better relations between people, to put boulevards in the place of bulwarks, to break down walls and bring in brotherly love and respect?

The first thing we can do is to believe with all our hearts in the ideal of brotherly love and a brotherly world, a world without walls or perhaps with walls that invite, not repel. But it is not enough merely to believe in the ideal and talk and sing and pass resolutions about it. We must be ready to use any honest means at our hand, no matter how poor; to take any steps, no matter how short.

That is to say, we must be practical idealists. One who walks with his eyes fixed on a star is just as apt to step in a ditch as though he were blind. People who believe in Christ’s coming and yet will do nothing until he comes; people who scorn the League of Nations because it is not as strong as it might be; people who want to revolutionize the whole government and then set up at once a perfect government, are probably doing as much harm as any to the struggling and hopeful cause of peace and good will among men.

The world needs practical idealists who can see stars and at the same time keep their feet on solid ground; never losing sight of the ideal, yet eager to use any honorable means of advancing a single inch toward the ideal.

There is a magnificent picture of such an idealist in the book of Isaiah. “He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set justice in the earth.” [Isaiah 42: 4]. There is you idealist! But note the other side: “The bruised reed shall he not break, and the dimly burning wick shall he not quench.” [Isaiah 42: 3]. If a bruised reed is all that is available when one needs a perfect pen, the bruised reed can be mended until it will write. If one needs a light and has nothing but a smoky wick, better not blow it out and wait for an electric bulb, but trim it, care for it, coax it to burn brightly. Jesus never despised the means at his hand. He looked at dull, mediocre men and said, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” [Matthew 5: 48]; and somehow they began to stumble along the road toward perfection, and he helped them.

The best way to pull down walls between people is to foster acquaintance between them. Charles Lamb once said he hated a certain man. “Do you know him?” he was asked. “No,” he answered; “I don’t want to. If I knew him I couldn’t hate him.”

There is always someone who wants to quote Kipling’s poem that “East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet.” They forget that Kipling himself corrected that cynicism when he went on to say:

“But there is neither East nor West,

Border, nor breed, nor birth;

When two strong men stand face to face,

Though they come from the ends of the earth.”

Bishop McConnell once said that, as a boy, he looked with awe and wonder on pictures of the great pre-historic monsters which formerly inhabited the earth. They seemed so big, so strong, so well armored that he wondered how men ever managed to get rid of them. Then, as he grew older and read more, he learned that they were never eliminated by direct attack. The climate changed and they died. “It is the business of Christianity,” said the Bishop, “to change the climate so that some things will die.”

When, somehow, enough of us poor humans cleanse our hearts of distrust and envy and selfishness and greed and deceit, when enough of us learn to trust, admire, give, be truthful and of service to others, we shall have so changed the climate that the monsters of fear and hatred will have died and we can tear down the walls and live in brotherly peace with each other.

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dates and places delivered:

Kahului Union Church, December 4, 1932

Puunene Japanese Church, January 8, 1933

Paia Japanese Church, January 8, 1933

Wauluku Union Church, January 15, 1933

Huelo Hawaiian Church, January 22, 1933

Puunene Hawaiian Church, March 25, 1934

Kahului Union Church, January 27, 1935

Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, September 13, 1936 PM

Wisconsin Rapids, February 21, 1943