None of us are immune from the Us/Them mentality.  Our interpretation of Scripture, in a way, permits such thinking: Jesus tells us there will be a final accounting, where those who claimed to know Jesus but did nothing with the acquaintance will be separated from those who made the most of being claimed by God in Christ.

The message Jesus proclaimed found eager listeners among Gentiles.  The message was proclaimed almost exclusively within the house of Israel.  That was fine with some disciples.  Charity begins at home, the old saying goes: first take care of your own.  The problem is when charity goes no further, when your own are first and last.  The Gospel isn’t like money, clothing, or food—in limited supply.  With a few changes in our lives, we might be surprised how much more  abundant our “limited” resources could become.  But we aren’t eager to make changes.  If change involves getting or taking more, hooray for change!  When change involves giving, though . . .  We’re naturally progressives when it comes to getting or taking.  We’re naturally conservatives when it comes to giving.  We wonder why our politics are so screwed up: we only need look inside our own hearts.

Peter is called to the home of a Gentile, a Roman, a soldier—God help him!  Peter is sent: in a vision, God tells Peter to go.  Peter demonstrated his love, he lived his love for God, by doing what God asks him to do.  The Roman soldier, his family, and all his household hear the Word and receive Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus had once remarked in Peter’s hearing how a certain Gentile had more faith than any child of Israel (Lk 7:9), but that Us/Them mentality is hard to overcome, that wall of separation.

Peter is defending himself before the church in Jerusalem; some want to prosecute him for his failure to keep the Law, to stay on his side of the wall.  When Peter had his vision in Joppa on the rooftop, he, also, was inclined to stay on his side of the wall: he wasn’t about to have anything to do with the unclean, the unacceptable.  Keeping the Law was at the heart of his identity, as he had believed, assumed, to that moment.  Keeping the Law was the way of blessedness, of salvation.  Then, Peter met the Way, and the Way called him, taught him; the Way died for Peter, rose for him, and prays for him.  The Law did none of these.  The Way, Jesus, did.  Jesus is the way of blessedness, the way of salvation.  He fulfills the Law and overcomes the barrier of the Law—the barrier to us, the barrier we could not scale.  We couldn’t go around the wall.  We could not go under the wall.  We could not go over the wall.  So, Christ went, through the wall.

This is why God sends the vision, three times: He is saying, I sent my Son to you and put my Spirit upon you for you to perceive that your identity is and always has been in Me.  My Law was to direct you to Me; your stubborn hearts took what was good and made it into a means to cause hurt, to create distinctions, and exclude.  You made my Law into a wall.  At the cross, I tore down that wall.

Perhaps the Law, originally, had the function of keeping God’s people focused upon living abundantly for God.  The Law provided a protected space for flourishing and to experience holiness, but, as Paul devastatingly points out (Rom 7), sin took the Law and made it into a wall, to create distinctions and divisions.  Where there are distinctions and divisions, there is pride.  Jesus heard that pride as he proclaimed Good News.  People said to him, God doesn’t really want anything to do with them—you know: sinners!  Jesus looked at them, amazed.

Some walls are quite visible.  Nearly thirty years ago (November, 1989), the Berlin Wall began to come down.  We set up limits, conditions, walls.  We don’t set them up to provide a protected space for flourishing.  The aim of our walls is to keep Them away from Us, to keep Us separate from Them.

What we busily build up, God pulls down.  This brought to mind Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” (1914).  I hear Peter explaining what happened, how God in Jesus through the Spirit spoke to him, and I hear Frost’s narrator: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / And spills the upper boulders in the sun; / And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”  I hear the Gospel.  Frost doesn’t use the word God—maybe he didn’t mean to, doesn’t want to; maybe he doesn’t have to.  Something in this world “doesn’t love a wall.”  Nature tells it plainly, so why doesn’t our nature, or why aren’t we listening?  The gaps are wide enough that “even two can pass abreast”: people can walk through side by side, maybe hand in hand.  The poem doesn’t say hand in hand or side by side, but “abreast”: maybe because what’s inside our breast, our chest, is our heart.  The gaps that “something” makes in these walls that we throw up allow people to pass through, heart to heart.

“The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending-time we find them there.”  They’re just there, those breaches in our wall.  Unseen, unheard, they happen: what makes them happen?  Expansion and contraction?  Freezing and thawing?  The sun?  The wind?  Peter knows that the Holy Spirit is at work, surprising him, just as Jesus had an uncanny ability to surprise Peter and the rest.

Spring, Frost’s narrator tells us, is “mending-time.”  Isn’t spring, Easter time, mending time?  In that time, people come together.  The Holy Spirit is bringing people together: this is what Peter is saying, what he is beginning to understand in a new, a beautiful, a holy way.  And Frost’s narrator and his neighbor arrange a day to meet, “to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again.”

“We keep the wall between us as we go.”  In mending-time they meet to mend—the wall.  They work together to mend—the wall.  They don’t work together on the same side: that is understood, goes without saying.  They don’t think about it.  The stones themselves seem to resist this pressed service: “some are loaves and some so nearly balls / We have to use a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’”  Once the neighbors have gone back to their separate sides of the hill, it doesn’t especially matter whether a stone plops down.  They know they have maintained the wall, invested in, labored on the wall.

The narrator says “We wear our fingers rough with handling” those stones.  Some of us know about rough hands.  Peter did.  Rough hands are nothing to be ashamed of, depending on the work to which you have been putting those hands.  Roughen your hands with holiness, with righteousness.  Roughen your hands with service.  Don’t lose any more time roughening your hands, your heart, with labors of exclusion.

Frost’s narrator, not unlike Peter, begins to wonder what it’s all about: these walls, this labor.  “There where it is we do not need the wall: / He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. / He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’”  There it is.  We’ve heard that before.  There’s a kind of truth in it.  Mine and yours.  You on your side, me on mine.  And in mending-time they come together—to maintain this exclusion.

But there’s a Spirit in the air, beloved.  In mending-time, there’s a Spirit in the air, and Frost’s narrator feels it: “Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: / ‘Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it / Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. / Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence. / Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.’”  Walling in, walling out.  Stay in there!  Keep out!

Neither message seems in keeping with the Gospel or the ways of the Holy Spirit.  Is it good walls that make good neighbors?  What makes good neighbors?  Fraternity.  What is at the heart of fraternity?  Love.  God.  Let’s get more tangible: we are made in the image of God.  When you see any human being, you are seeing a being made in the image of God.  When we blow each other to bloody bits in war, we are obliterating images of God.  When we abuse one another, we abuse another made in the image of God.  When we show kindness to another, we do so to one made in the image of God; when we give love to another, no matter how undeserving, we make room in our hearts for one made in the image of God.

“‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.’ / I could say ‘Elves’ to him, / But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather / He said it for himself.”  No, it isn’t elves: no magical, mythical sprites of wood and stream.  Called to Cornelius’ home, Peter doesn’t have to lay a lot of groundwork.  The Holy Spirit has been at work in Peter, revising his perspective on salvation, blessing, and who qualifies for both.  The Holy Spirit has been at work in Cornelius.  It’s the Gentile who speaks to Peter, asking to hear the Good News, the words by which he and all his family will be saved (11:14).  The Spirit has already prepared him to welcome the Word.

The poem’s narrator, watching his neighbor lugging a stone in each hand, says, “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees. / He will not go behind his father’s saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’”  “He will not go behind his father’s saying”: Jesus once told a parable and asked at the end who was the neighbor (Lk 10:36).  He told the parable because he had been asked, who is my neighbor?  The man who asked was a legal scholar, well-versed in the sayings of the fathers.  Perhaps the Law, originally, had the function of keeping God’s people focused upon living for God.  Sin, indwelling, all-corrupting, made the Law into a wall to keep others out, as though the children of God could lock God in with them, or lock Him away.

The neighbor, a stone in each hand, “likes having thought of” his father’s saying “so well” that he says it again.  In what sense has he “thought” of it?   It isn’t original to him.  If anything, the saying prevents thought: the thinking that Frost’s narrator, the man’s neighbor, was inviting by asking questions, by wondering, by wanting to reason, maybe, even, teach.  Sisters and brothers, the Holy Spirit opens doors and offers invitations.  The Holy Spirit poses questions.  The Holy Spirit teaches.  Peter is sharing with the church what the Spirit taught him: how the Spirit does not love a wall, wants it down.  The Spirit has not made the Church to be a wall but a body that lives, moves, and breathes to invite, share, and encourage.  The Spirit opens the way into hearts, minds, and souls.  The Spirit ushers us, opened, to others whom the Spirit has opened, to receive what we are being sent to give, say, and do.

The world insists upon distinctions and divisions.  Our politics are rabid about them.  Where there are distinctions and divisions, there is pride.  Jesus heard that pride all too often as he went about proclaiming Good News.  People would say to him: God doesn’t really want anything to do with them—you know: sinners!  And Jesus would look at them with amazement, and sorrow.

Go, remembering you are the opportunity God has given to others to repent and live (11:18).

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

 

Appendix, "Mending Wall," by Robert Frost (1914)

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”