Being a brick

 This week's study is on Ephesians 2:19-22:

So then you are no longer foreigners and noncitizens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household, because you have been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole building, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

 These verses are where Paul talks to the Gentiles in the church in Ephesus about how they are a valid part of what God is doing. It would have been easy for them to believe that they were second-class citizens, because the rest of the church had thousands of years of Jewish heritage to lean on, and could make a convincing claim that they were God's chosen people. Because that's how it was in the Old Testament, before Jesus died on the cross and built something new.

That's where Paul starts off. He explains that the Church is a new thing. It's not an extension of the Jewish temple. It's not a Jewish anything anymore. It's bigger than that.

In the same way that one of the Jews in Paul's time might have been able to point to his genetic lineage and trace it back to Abraham, we can trace our spiritual lineage back to Jesus Christ. And the same way that the nation of Israel can trace its nationhood as a people back to Abraham, the Church can trace itself back to Jesus. The old genetic "blood sample of Abraham" lineage is made obsolete by the new Blood of Jesus lineage we all share, Jew and Gentile alike.

So, what Paul is saying is that there is no meaningful way to say that Gentile Christians are any less Christian than Jewish Christians, because we all come from the same starting point, which is Jesus Christ. 

In the same way, we can also trace some of our lineage to the apostles and prophets, since our introduction to Jesus probably depends somewhat on what they did. Many of us could probably even trace "degrees of separation" between the person (or people) who introduced us to Jesus and the person (or people) who introduced them, back through history, to one of the original apostles and then to Jesus himself, if records were kept.

And that brings us to another interpretation of us being the temple of God on Earth. We are not just the temple that God dwells in, in an individual sense, but also corporately as the Body of Christ, as the Church. It's not the building that he's talking about but all of the people gathered, inside and outside of that building, who live together in community and represent Jesus to the world.

We are assembled together like human bricks. Jesus is the main cornerstone of the foundation, and the rest of us are stacked on top in thousands of years of layers. It's a little hard to get a swelled head when you look at yourself as just another brick!

Like the physical temple in ancient Israel, God dwells in the midst of his Church-temple, in the midst of the gathering of his people. He lives in our midst through space and time. And just like the ancient physical temple in Israel once let the outside world know where to find God, we as the Church are a new kind of sign that shows that God exists.

When we spend meaningful time with other Christians, do we realize that God is among us, as if we were walls in a building? When we look at other Christians, do the ethnic and political differences really seem like much when we consider that we have thousands of years in common and will have millions more in eternity? Our whole reality should be based on Jesus, the way a building depends on a solid cornerstone.

This truth about us being fellow citizens of the same lineage can even serve as a lens for us to understand the Old Testament. We can feel united with God's people, and point to something like what Israel had, where our existence can be traced back to one man's sacrifice back before any of us was born.

This could also be a key to transcending denominationalism. Even if we're determined to be separate tribes, we still have to acknowledge our relation to one another and our sameness as one people. And we have to recognize that together we form one temple. If we partition our part off, maybe we're walling God out rather than in.

So that's something to think about this week. When you see other Christians, think "temple" and see what God shows you. And do your best to be a solid brick in that temple.