Ephesians 2:11-22 / The Village, Sunday 17th August 2025 / Rev. Josh Olds / Unity: The Prequel
This morning we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Now, we’re still in the first half of the letter, and if you’ve been with us on the journey you’ll know that the pattern that Paul uses in Ephesians is that the first part of the letter is all about these big sweeping, mind-bending theological truths – the big ‘what God has done’ things that the set up the later part of the letter that is all about how we are then to live. We’re still in the ‘right thinking’ section of Ephesians – but soon we’ll get to the ‘right living’ part.
We’ll come to our passage in a moment – but before we do, I wonder if you’ve ever seen a movie or read a book that’s a ‘prequel’? Yes, a prequel…
Prequels are books or movies that come out as a sequel to an existing story, but are set in a time pre or before the existing story – they often tell the backstory to the existing story or dive into a certain character’s background.
Star Wars sort’ve made the prequel famous – or another example closer to home is the Hobbit – which of course came out after Lord of the Rings, but tells the story of what happens before the Lord of the Rings story takes place… Essentially a prequel is the background story that makes the main existing story make sense…
You could sort of think of this sermon today as a bit of a prequel… We’re going to be generally talking about the concept of unity, but not unity in the practical sense of how we live it out, rather we’re going with the prequel and looking at the theological foundation of unity which makes the living unity out part important and possible. In other words, we’re not looking at the what and how of unity, we’re looking at the why question of unity this morning – the precursory work of Jesus that sets the entire stage.
But fear not, as is the pattern in Ephesians, Paul will come back to the practicalities of unity – i.e. how to live with unity in the second half of the letter – so we’ll get there eventually. But for now, we begin at the source, we start with the why question… why is unity important… why do we need to be united?
As we read this passage, we see that Paul paints a picture with two very distinct groups of people: the Gentiles and the Israelites (or Jews). He’s talking about a divide that was so deep that it defined the world of his day. The Ephesian church was mostly made up of Gentile believers – a Gentile essentially being anyone who is not Jewish.
Paul address the heritage of these Gentile believers directly – “Remember, you who were born Gentiles, were separate from Christ, and the people of God…excluded, foreigners, without hope, without God…”
Paul’s coming in hot, and we might be forgiven if we thought he might be being a bit harsh here. But Paul isn’t trying to shame the Gentiles, he’s not holding their heritage against them, he’s trying to set up the big point that he’s trying to make – that through Jesus all are now offered the invitation to join in the community of God’s people.
I think that due to some of the current events in our world it’s worth being clear about what Paul is actually saying here…
When he says they – the Gentiles, were ‘separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel…’
Paul isn’t referring to Israel in the same sense as we might today, this isn’t a political statement about a nation-state; it’s a theological one. When Paul talks about us, or the Gentiles in the Ephesians church being brought into citizenship with Israel, he’s not referring to the modern political state of Israel. He’s talking about a theological reality—God’s historic people.
To understand what that means, we actually have to go all the way back to the very beginning of the biblical narrative—to Genesis chapter 12.
There, we find God making a covenant, or a sacred promise, to a man named Abraham.
The promise was that God would make Abraham’s family line into a great nation and that through his descendants, all the families of the earth would be blessed. The Israelites, later known as the Jewish people, is the eventuality of Abraham’s family line. This was the original design: Israel, the family that came from Abraham, was chosen not to be an exclusive club, but to be the vessel through which God’s blessing and love would flow to the entire world. For centuries, this family lineage—this covenant community—was the means by which God was working in the world.
But the point that Paul is making here is that through Christ, this family lineage that traces their heritage back to Abraham is no longer the defining factor of the people of God, faith in Jesus is. This is the point that Paul is trying to drive home when he dramatically declares – “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” In other words, God’s love and blessing are available to all.
Paul sort’ve makes this point in a few different ways throughout the passage. He says that Jesus didn’t just mend a crack in the wall of separation; he ‘destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility’ on the cross.
Through Jesus, all are invited near to God – those previously far off, separated by their heritage, and those previously from within the covenant lineage.
Unity within the people of God, then, isn’t based on our heritage, culture, or where we come from—it’s not even based on needing to share the same theology or denomination or church structure – our unity as the people of God is founded entirely on our shared faith in person and work of Jesus. He is our peace and our source of commonality.
Paul then writes about how the unified people of God are built together like a building. And not just any building, but a ‘holy temple’ where the very presence of God’s Spirit dwells. In the Old Testament, God’s presence dwelled in a physical and specific place – early on it was in the make-shift temple known as the tabernacle which the Israelite people set up, packed down and moved from place to place as they wandered for forty years, later this then became the permanent temple in Jerusalem.
Paul’s point here is radical: He says through Christ God’s presence now dwells physically, by the Holy Spirit, in the unified gathering of God’s diverse people. Together we are the temple of God’s presence in the world, we are the dwelling place of God on earth. This is the ‘why’ of our unity: we are one because God has made us one, and in that unity, the Spirit of God lives.
And this is where what Paul wrote to the Ephesians church in this passage directly relates to us – this isn’t just ancient thinking, it’s very much relevant to us – this is the very heartbeat of who we are and how we aspire to live as The Village, this passage undergirds our identity as a church community today.
Some of you will be familiar with our Vision and Values document—a document in which we, as a church, have tried to articulate what we believe and how we seek to live. Even if you’re not familiar with the document itself, hopefully the values described in it will be implicitly evident in our shared life together. They are what guide us, what we strive for, and what we fall back on.
Our vision and values largely revolve around the idea of our church community being a community that’s open, welcoming and hospitable – let me read you 3 of our values specifically:
- We believe that we are called to value, be open to and be accepting of others
- We believe that God welcomes us with generous hospitality, therefore this is how we are to be with others.
- We believe that relationships come first.
These are things that we hold as important to us, these are things we have chosen to explicitly characterise our church community by – but, have you ever stopped to wonder why we values these things so highly?
It’s not just because they sound right, or that they make for a catchy slogan… we value these things so highly because they are a direct reflection of what God has already done for us in Christ. Our posture of welcome, hospitality, inclusivity and relationships first is not an empty aspiration or a nice thing to do; its our response to the radical welcome and hospitality that God has first shown us.
This is the answer to the why question of unity – and it comes straight from this passage in Ephesians:
That if God, through Christ, demolished the great dividing wall of Paul’s time – that between the Jew and Gentile, then by extension, every background, every story, every person – is offered welcome into the family of God. We don’t welcome others as an act of duty, as some sort of box ticking exercise, we do it because God first welcomes us. This is the great prequel, the backstory, to unity. It’s the precursory work of Jesus that makes unity possible. And it’s so important that we don’t start with the “how” before we’ve fully grasped the “why.”
You see, God has always been moving toward us.
Paul, in another one of his letters, that he wrote to the Philippians, gives us this same idea through the lens of Jesus’s incarnation, he writes:
“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Unity doesn’t come from following the path of least resistance. It often costs us something; it certainly cost Jesus something when he sought unity with us, it can be hard and at times uncomfortable to join with the other.
But unity isn’t supposed to begin with us—it begins with what God has done through Christ. God took the first step toward us. He moved toward us in our brokenness, in our otherness…
And as God steps towards us, we are invited to respond, we are invited to join the community of the people of God – not because of anything we’ve done or our heritage, but because of what Jesus has done – the invitation is cast wide, as God said to Abraham back in Genesis 12 – God’s blessing has always been intended for all.
Let’s pray:
Loving God, thank you for tearing down the walls, for welcoming us—all of us—into your household, and for making us one new humanity. Help us to rest in the peace that Christ is, and to remember that our unity is a gift that is entirely of your making. May we, as your people, be a living reflection of your barrier-breaking love and hospitality in the world. Amen.