-laca.
So brothers, sisters, praise his name who died to set us free
From
sin, division, hate and shame, from spite and enmity!
In
Christ there is no east or west --- he breaks all barriers down;
By
Christ redeemed, by Christ possessed, in Christ we live as one.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” says the New England
neighbor in Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. And probably at some time in all of
our lives, we may have been tempted to quote him; when the neighbor’s grass
reaches knee-high, when the next-door yard is full of tiny plastic ride-on toys
and lots of screaming toddlers falling off them, maybe when your neighbor
gardens in a bikini that would have been close-fitting several years and pounds) back. We
even like the idea of fences and walls to keep certain groups of folks
separated from others; them, and us.
In this text we sing that Christ came to break barriers, to
minimize what separates us, to set us free from the things that hold us back
from unity. And there is something a little scary about tearing down fences,
something a little out-of-control about ending our human-constructed divisions.
Jesus says we’ll just have to trust him for that. “Something there is,” Robert
Frost said, “that doesn’t love a wall.”
Here’s to a tear-down, coming soon to a neighborhood near
you!
