B231 Pentecost 9

[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to by the well, a lectionary based podcast, preachers recorded on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Hello, I'm Robyn Whittaker. [00:00:18] Speaker B: And I'm Sean Winter. [00:00:20] Speaker A: And you're listening to the episode for Pentecost week nine. Shaun and I are going to be discussing two Samuel, chapter seven, verses one to 14, the gospel reading, which is mark, chapter six, verses 30 to 34 and 53 to 56, and the epistle, Ephesians, chapter 211 22, in that order. So let's get into Samuel. Sean, this is a very significant chapter for all sorts of reasons. We'll unpack some of those. [00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's important within the narrative of to Samuel itself. So last week we were looking at David arriving in Jerusalem and providing, by bringing the ark into Jerusalem, some religious legitimation for the political power that Jerusalem represents, the expansion of the davidic kingdom, the conquering of Israel's enemies, the overall usurpation of the family of Saul. And now God seems to respond in chapter seven with a kind of establishment of a covenant. This is why David and David's kingship and the monarchy is now significant, and why Jerusalem is the place where this happens. Jerusalem isn't important just because it's a city. It's important because it will become the place where the house of God is built. But it's also a really important passage because it anticipates all sorts of other things that flow out, of course, in jewish history and expectation, particularly the idea that the davidic monarchy has this kind of crucial, definitive character to it, that even when David himself is dead, the question of how do we find a king like David perpetuates into Israel's history, and then, of course, into the story of Jesus and the early church. [00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And for that reason, it's often connected with what we call the davidic covenant. So there are lots of covenants in the Old Testament, not just one. And this is if you go to the end of chapter seven. So the lectionary doesn't give us the full chapter. But, you know, after David's prayer and response to the bit that we have, there is again this promise reiterated, you know, to bless the House of David basically forever, that this dynasty, as you said, is going to be established. So let's go back to the beginning. We have a, you know, David's danced in with the ark. We've had lots of carry on in the chapter before this, but we have a sense here of a pause, almost. The king is settled in his house, and the word house is going to get repeated over and over, all over the place, meaning different things. And God gives him rest from enemies. So there's a sense that there's peace and kind of settling happening. [00:03:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it won't last terribly long, but it's there for the time being. And it gives enough space in the narrative for. For David to. For God to establish this covenant and for David to respond appropriately. I think it's really important to reiterate something that we said last week, which is that we're in a world here where the religious and the political, the cultic and the social, the question of who David is as king and who David is as the person who kind of somehow represents God, all of those things are blurred and merged up in the ideology of the text overall. But you're right, this is a particular pause. And we have a very strong narrative focus on the question of the nature of God's promise to David and what that will mean for David and for his family. [00:03:48] Speaker A: Yes. And where God will live. So, I mean, I'm struck reading this and scholars will talk about, you know, these are texts that have layers of editing and redaction going on. But it starts with a fairly simple seeming proposition in verse two. You know, David is observing to the prophet Nathan, I have this house of cedar of wood, a granddaddy, but God is still in the ark of God, which symbolises God's presence, is in the tent or the tabernacle, the skene. And initially the prophet says, go do what you have in mind. But we're going to get a bit of a walking back of that, because David himself will not end up building the temple. That will happen later by Solomon. That's right. And so we get into this narrative where God starts to sort of speak through the prophet, you know, posing these questions, are you really the one to build my house? And we get a bit of a. I read this. I don't know how you read it, but as you know, what picks up in verse five with God speaking through the prophet is really an almost autobiographical thing. Of all the things God has done, making it very clear, the king is not in charge. God is in charge. God has done all this work, brought the people to the land, established the king, chosen him. Any success David has is God's. [00:05:06] Speaker B: So it's doing that kind of theological work. Absolutely. It's also doing some fairly prosaic historical kind of reconstruction work, dealing with the problem that David, of course, is the ideal king in jewish tradition. But everyone knew that it was Solomon who built the temple. So what you need is a story that says, that was always part of the plan. [00:05:29] Speaker A: You know, that's God's plan. [00:05:31] Speaker B: That's right. It's a bit like Moses never entering the promised land. You need a story that says God shows up to say, you're not going to get to the promised land. This is why you aren't the person to do it. But that doesn't make you any less definitive or any less significant. It just means that it's a subsequent generation that will deliver the promise that I have made with you and the covenant that I've established with you. [00:05:53] Speaker A: That's right. And I mean, readers familiar with the New Testament might immediately start to notice some language that we get in the gospels here. So we, you know, getting into verses twelve and 13, we start to get this language of, I will establish his kingdom, his throne. We get language of father and son. This is familiar to us because, of course, the gospel writers would pick up much of this language and this idea of the promise that there'd be always be an anointed one in the line of David and they would apply it to Jesus. Jesus would be son of David. So it's familiar to us in a way, because of that legacy. [00:06:31] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's important to know that in the light of this passage, we can say pretty much everywhere that where we read son of God language in the New Testament, we're looking at messianic language, we're looking at davidic kingship language, although, of course, in christian theology that emerges into what we would call trinitarian language. That's not where it begins. And in the New Testament it's probably not what it signifies. It signifies Jesus claim or the attribution to Jesus that he belongs to this story. And we'll see a bit of that in the passages in Mark where Mark presents Jesus precisely as fulfilling, actually, both the story of Moses and the story of David in some of the things that happen in the gospel itself. So I think it's really important. I think it's helpful to know that what we also have here is a real play on the notion of a house. So a house becomes. Is a way of talking about a physical structure. So God doesn't have a house because God lives in a tent. It's also a way of talking about a dwelling, a place where God lives, an inhabitation, if you like. And it's also a way of talking about what we might call a dynasty. [00:07:39] Speaker A: A household. A household, yeah. A legacy, kind of, yep. [00:07:42] Speaker B: So the text constantly weaves these usages of the word house in and out of each other. And I think what's really crucial is that what sustains it, this is the point you were making earlier. What sustains this change, this transformation, is the covenant promise of God. So verse 15, I will not take my steadfast love from him as I took it from Saul. And that's the basis on which we can talk about your house and your kingdom being made sure forever. I think the other thing to say is it raises really interesting questions about what we might call the relationship between God's reign, God's rule, God's power, God's authority, and the space, for want of a better word, within which that power or rule or authority is manifested or revealed or resides in a way. So one of the things that always strikes me about the opening of the Gospel of Mark, for example, is that Jesus gets to the temple at the end, but he talks about kingdom from the beginning. [00:08:52] Speaker A: Yes. [00:08:53] Speaker B: So you will get to Jerusalem and we will deal with all that question about temple and who's the king. But the announcement of the kingdom happens in the villages of Galilee up in. [00:09:03] Speaker A: The north, traveling around in the countryside without big buildings and structures. [00:09:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. So all of this, I think, is the way that in the christian tradition, these davidic themes, the connection between monarchy, God's authority and rule, temple, cult, Jerusalem, all of these things are interwoven with each other in a particular ideology. And the New Testament works with them and then unpacks them and plays with them differently. [00:09:29] Speaker A: I think that's right. I think one of the ripples here that's a little interesting to me and I don't want to overread it because I think it is doing the work you referred to earlier of trying to give a reason for why the great KiNG David did not actually build the temple. Solomon did. But, you know, there's maybe also a bit of a subversive thing we could read into this language of God sort of saying, I've been in the tabernacle, in the tent and, you know, I've traveled with you in that way, which is a reminder that God is not found in our buildings and our structures. So, you know, in the contemporary world where we're post Christendom or maybe still in Christendom, depending where you are in the world where we so associate divine presence and the grandeur of faith sometimes in these huge, beautiful buildings which are lovely to visit, but actually the kernel is the presence of God is not needed in those places, which seems obvious and simple. But I think it's something our people need to hear, that if their church building falls down, the God that's journeyed with them has not gone down with it. [00:10:30] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think, I mean, two, Samuel is a text is actually quite ambiguous about David. It's quite ambiguous about the monarchy, although it's a story that tells about how significant and important it is. There is always this kind of question mark hovering over whether or not it actually. It clearly isn't the same as monarchies in other contexts. It has an ambiguity about. It is the word that I've used. I mean, one of the things that's striking is Monica and I talked last week about whether Michal's challenge to David when he enters Jerusalem, where she says, you're behaving in an unseemly manner. Yeah. [00:11:10] Speaker A: Inappropriate way for a king. [00:11:11] Speaker B: Very often we interpret that as a kind of, you know, she's interfering in stuff she doesn't know about. But actually, her critique of David and what David is doing then leads onto this promise from God. You're not actually going to get to build the temple that you want in the holy city. So you get almost this sense that even God isn't sure that David is the right person to do this, even as God is establishing the family of David and the rule of David in some perpetuity through this covenant. [00:11:39] Speaker A: Yep. Well, shall we move on to Mark, chapter six? [00:11:42] Speaker B: Yes. [00:11:52] Speaker A: So the lectionary gives us two rather odd bits of text that Sean and I are not very happy about. He's shaking his head here. And what we skip in the middle of our two sections is the feeding miracle. [00:12:04] Speaker B: That's right. [00:12:05] Speaker A: And Jesus walking on water. [00:12:07] Speaker B: That's right. [00:12:08] Speaker A: But we're getting bookends to that. And just before this, we have had, if we go back a little while, the sending of the twelve out. So we've had this missional activity where the disciples really, for the first time are sent. The language is the apostolic language. They're sent out to themselves, do the ministry and activity of Jesus, and they now come back and report. But in the meantime, we also hear. We kind of go offstage left or something and hear that King Herod has killed John the Baptist and his disciples. So we're getting immediately a contrast. John the Baptist's disciples are grieving and bearing their leader, and Jesus disciples are returning to him in some ways, I think, in 630 with stories of success, they're telling him, these are all the things we did. [00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Although Jesus then pretty much ignores them and just moves on. So there's an interesting dynamic to this. And look, one of the things about this section, Mark's gospel, is it's really difficult to work out quite how different stories have been stitched together and how it works. There's a massive geographical problem in verse 50, or whatever it is, where Jesus comes to Gennesaret, which. [00:13:19] Speaker A: Where does he come from? I know he's supposed to go to. [00:13:20] Speaker B: Bethsaida and they're in completely different places. So it doesn't all kind of stitch together seamlessly. I don't think so. One of the questions that we might ask is, given that people are very familiar with the two stories of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water, how do the brackets, the parentheses, how do those help us to understand those events? And what do they tell us about what's actually going on overall in the narrative that Mark is trying to tell in this central section of the gospel. And I think that the answer, just to kind of anticipate, I'd be interested to hear what you think of this. The answer probably lies most obviously in that point where Jesus comes back and we read that people recognize him. And the summary of the things that Jesus does is a kind of way of talking about what stories of feeding and crossing talked about in relationship to Israel. What am I saying here? Well, stories of feeding and crossing are wilderness stories. They're Moses stories, they're people of Israel stories. And so Jesus kind of inhabiting those dramas, if you like. And I mean, it's interesting in verse 30 or 31, come away to a deserted place all by yourself, or sometimes a lonely place. [00:14:53] Speaker A: It gets translated isolated. [00:14:55] Speaker B: The word is eremos. It means wilderness. [00:14:57] Speaker A: Yes. [00:14:58] Speaker B: So come away to the wilderness. And then once you understand that that's the story that you belong to, then what you see is that Jesus steps in with these extraordinary deeds of power that show how God is at work. So it's the story of Israel that's being worked out here and Jesus is fulfilling a kind of mosaic prototype in leadership and then also a davidic one, I think. [00:15:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I think that's a really nice way to read what can feel like, like you said, a fairly loose collection of stories that you're going like. What is your point here, Mark? I do. So again, we've got a lot of drama and a lot of contrasts to be attentive to. So the contrast between the disciples. But then the contrast between the disciples come back. They're keen to tell him everything and that invitation to come away. And Mark uses these repeated phrases that are doubles it's unnecessary. It's like to a deserted and isolated place by yourself and rest, like he's laboring the point for us. And it is that wilderness. And then, of course, that will be contrasted with even there. The crowds will follow and in fact, they will eagerly run. So there is perhaps maybe the difference to the mosaic story, which I think is hovering all in the background with feeding in the wilderness and being able to cut through water kind of things, is almost that Jesus fame is his own burden. Like he's being presented as a very successful leader, that people are literally running ahead of him. They're tracking where he's going. He cannot get away. And so we have this tension between twice in this chapter, the call to go away to quiet places, and this emphasis. The other thing that gets repeated is this poloi, the many, the many crowds. Many crowds. And so I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to do with that. I mean, you could go into some sort of, you know, this is a metaphor for ministry. You know, there's a balance between the spiritually, between the quiet times and the times to serve others. The demands of discipleship are being kind of writ large here, that this is what following Jesus means even when you do try to get away. [00:17:14] Speaker B: So there'll be a later discourse where Jesus will ask, you know, what was. What was all that about that feeding stuff? [00:17:19] Speaker A: Yes. And they don't get it. [00:17:20] Speaker B: They don't get it. They don't understand. And I think that's implicit here as well. So if you ask, well, these crowds that are so kind of bursting with enthusiasm that they run, they run past the disciples in order to get to the place where Jesus is going before the disciples ahead of him. [00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. [00:17:37] Speaker B: So they're there waiting for him. What does that crowd need from the narrative perspective? Well, the feeding miracle. And what the disciples will say is they're hungry and they need something to eat. What Jesus actually says when he has compassion on them is that they are like sheep without a shepherd. [00:17:55] Speaker A: Yes. [00:17:55] Speaker B: So they need instruction. They need leadership. [00:17:57] Speaker A: They need a leader. [00:17:58] Speaker B: They need guidance. Those two things are mutually exclusive. But if all you see is a bunch of hungry people who actually don't realize or don't understand what it is that they're participating in, then you've missed the point. You actually need to understand the significance of the drama, the story that is unfolding in front of you, which would be hard to do in real time. It's only a later perspective that helps you to understand that this is the story of Israel being retold, reenacted, redramatized in the story of Jesus. [00:18:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's where we get the davidic stuff coming in. Right. The sheep without a shepherd. Shepherd being a leadership image throughout the Old Testament, particularly in the psalms, which are accredited, maybe rightly or wrongly, to David. And, of course, if we go into the details of the feeding story, which is not the point this week, we get this twelve baskets left over. So the twelve tribes. I mean, this Israel stuff is everywhere. [00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And they sit in ranks that suggest the wilderness wanderings. And, I mean, the shepherd motif is really interesting because, I mean, from the point from the moment where the story of David is told as the story of a shepherd who becomes king, the notion that even after David has done, every king has this characteristic of a shepherd is really there. It's there in Ezekiel 34. I think it is that you have this idea that leaders and those who exercise instruction and guidance within the community, they do so with authority. Yes. But that authority is conditioned and shaped by this kind of capacity to be what we would call pastoral. [00:19:39] Speaker A: Yes. There's one little note. I don't know how much of a major point this is, but I really love it. It gives us a clue to mark's interweaving of these stories in verse 56, where in the sort of second image of a crowd all being eager and they're bringing their sick and they're coming from all over and they're begging him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak. So this language of fringe, the crespodon, is like a jewish fringe, the tassels on a garment. So it's a little reminder here that Jesus, if we're visualizing him, is dressed in traditional jewish clothing. But, of course, it's invoking from the previous chapter, part five, the bleeding woman, the hemorrhaging woman who touches the tassels, the fringe of his cloak, and is healed. And here we have that same language. All who touched it were healed. Or the Greek is the sodzo saved. It's a holistic healing. So, you know, Mark will bring back these themes that we've met once in a particular person, and now it's happening at a kind of a much bigger level of a crowd or a. Yeah, that's absolutely right. [00:20:43] Speaker B: I mean, the whole first half of Mark's gospel moves between the summary passages. Everyone brought everyone else, and they all came to Jesus, and, you know, there were too many of them. And then these highly individualized, personalized stories and the two are mutually informative of each other. Absolutely. [00:20:59] Speaker A: So let's move on to Ephesians, and then maybe we'll come back and think about how we preach all of this, if we can draw some threads together. So, Ephesians, chapter 211 22. [00:21:14] Speaker B: Yeah. What a passage. [00:21:15] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot going on here. Shaun, can you give us some context? [00:21:21] Speaker B: Well, the best way is probably to do it is to pick up again on something I talked about last week. Last week we looked at the opening of Ephesians, which is this kind of opening, long one sentence prayer. And I talked about the way in which the theology there, which is really theology, about what it means to understand and perceive the revelation of the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation in Christ. I mean, it's theologically loaded language. How Ephesians really is structured around two questions that follow on from that. If you understand what God has done in the gospel, two things happen. First of all, you renegotiate the relationship between the past and the present, the old and the new. You were like this, but now you're like this. And the second thing is you renegotiate the relationship across cultural, ethnic boundaries in relationship to the other, so that the two who are divided become one. This passage is absolutely smack bang in the middle of the articulation of both of those themes. And one way of thinking about it is really to talk about the way in which, if christian identity is about anything, it is about ongoing attention to the question of how we are on a journey away from one thing towards another, whatever that might mean, and how we are on a journey across barriers towards the other. [00:22:44] Speaker A: The other, yeah. Who is a unity that meets the. [00:22:47] Speaker B: Other meets the other. So ephesians two begins with, remember that at one time you were and you were at that time without Christ. And then in verse 13 switches to but now in Christ Jesus. So that's the old and the new. And then it moves on to the question of the two groups that Christ has brought into one by breaking down a dividing wall. And we can talk a bit about that, because the fact it's Jew and Gentile that have been brought together raises questions about whether this is a passage that envisages, like the creation of a new. Third thing, that isn't either Jew or Gentile, or whether there's something slightly more sophisticated going on in terms of identity formation. Complex question, but we can talk about that, maybe, all of which, of course, is possible because of what God has done in Christ. So throughout this, the things that happen, the change in the lives of gentiles who didn't know God but now do know God, who weren't part of the commonwealth and now are part of the commonwealth. The overcoming of that hostility, all of it is possible in Christ through Christ, through his blood, etc. Etc. You get it repeated over and over and over again. [00:24:04] Speaker A: I was struck, reading this, how beautiful the structure is. So we kind of go down, I think the language is chiastic structure, but we start with the gentiles and this language of strangers and aliens, and we're going to sort of unpack that and we almost. I'm drawing like a big u. We're going down to what I think is the central point around verses 14 and 15, and we come back out to the absolute juxtaposition of that which is citizens and saints and members in the household of God. So you're getting these really strong contrasts, but we got to kind of almost read from the bookends in to see what's being compared. So you are now citizens, not aliens. You are now members of the household of God, not strangers. You're one in the father, one spirit. You're not gentiles or there's no sort. [00:24:51] Speaker B: Of ethnicity, gentiles or jews. [00:24:52] Speaker A: That's right. And we can come down to the reconciliation. So I was struck, if we read it that way, we end up with this very central message of peace, verse 14, for he, Christ is our peace. And again, end of verse 15, the one who makes peace. And that's framed by this author. And we need to be careful reading these things, not to read them too literally. Right. We've got strong language here of breaking down divided walls, human hostility, the abolishment of the law and its commandments. So that's a tricky one. There's huge debate in these pauline texts quite where and what happens to the law, but, you know, commandments and ordinances that divide are somehow. You can comment on that in a moment. And this creation of a new humanity. So there's something in the death and reconciling work of Christ that is also creative. Right. The blood of Christ is this creative force creating a new community and one based on peace. So there's a lot to play with there. This is very theologically dense. I think it really is. [00:25:55] Speaker B: And as soon as you recognize, of course, that it's about the relationship between jew and non jew, you can't help but extend beyond the kind of theological framing here to various political forms or social forms of conflict that we meet in our own world today, both Israel, Gaza, but also other forms of conflict. Across cultural and ethnic boundaries. I think. I mean, the first thing to say is that I didn't confess this last week. I don't think this is by Paul. [00:26:22] Speaker A: No, I agree. [00:26:23] Speaker B: And it feels to me very much like a patchwork of the kinds of things that were really, really important to Paul. But there's a kind of extension of them, a kind of hyper real version of some of those ideas. The question of jew gentile relationships for Paul is absolutely grounded in the complexities of the communities that he was working with and writing letters to, particularly in Galatia and Rome. Here it feels like we're a couple of steps back, and we're kind of seeing it in the abstract, in a salvation history mode that's almost slightly more distant and slightly more universal in the way that it wants to talk about things. Nevertheless, it's absolutely clear that what isn't said here is that what Christ creates is a new community. That means that the old communities to which you belong no longer exist. We don't yet have here the creation of what in later christian theology in the second century becomes this idea that Christianity is a third race. You know, there were two races, Jews and Gentiles, and now there's a third race. And the third race basically destroys or does away with, dismisses the other two. What is destroyed is the dividing wall of hostility. [00:27:43] Speaker A: Yes. [00:27:44] Speaker B: What is destroyed is not the law per se, but the law in its commandments and its ordinances, which I suspect is a particular way of thinking about the law functioning as what some scholars would call a boundary marker between Jews and Gentiles that mark off this ethnic distinction as somehow definitive of identity in certain kinds of ways, rather than the. [00:28:07] Speaker A: Law being the Torah, the kind of gift of God. Absolutely. [00:28:11] Speaker B: I don't think it's the law person. [00:28:13] Speaker A: Yep. [00:28:14] Speaker B: And I think what the language of peace is really interesting, because what it effectively picks up is the pauline language of reconciliation. So we have that referred to in verse 16. That's there in two corinthians five. It's there in romans chapter five. Romans chapter five also has a mention of the word peace. But you're absolutely right. That language of peace comes into the foreground and becomes a kind of highly. Not unique, but a highly focused way of thinking about what it is that Christ creates. And given that we have Jesus traditions that also talk about the importance of being peacemakers, the importance of peace in the kingdom of God, it's a really interesting place that this text lands up with. It's a way of thinking about the identity of a church as a place, location where peace can be found and where peace is created and made. [00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And, I mean, I guess I want to say yes to all of that with a warning. There's a temptation, I think, with these sorts of passages, to go quickly to unity and oneness. The word unity, I mean, there's language of one here, but unity. And, you know, with the caveat that when those of us who are the dominant culture, and I'm speaking here as a white person in a western church, do this, we often actually mean everyone becomes like us. [00:29:34] Speaker B: That's right. [00:29:34] Speaker A: So just being a bit careful about the breaking down, the hostility is not about negating difference or the gifts that different cultures bring or any of that kind of stuff. It is about peace building, even with those differences. The other thing I would note here is, I think. I mean, I agree with you. I think most scholars would put Ephesians sort of late first century, so, written in the tradition of Paul, not by Paul. I think we have some imperial language here. So as soon as we're starting to talk about citizens and strangers, this reflects the culture at the time where being a roman citizen gives you certain privileges, right? Including you wouldn't be put to death on the cross if you're a roman citizen. And, of course, the emperor is thought to be the bringer of peace, the pax Romana. So I think we've also got a bit of a. Playing with some familiar motifs that people would know from their culture at the time, but breaking them down and saying, in Christ, there is something here that is not about that stratified, hierarchical society. This is a Christ who brings peace through his own body and blood, not through power. Yeah, no, I think that's hierarchy and all of that. [00:30:44] Speaker B: And that's entirely consistent with Paul. And I think it relates to all sorts of questions, the culture question, the kind of question of racism in the life of the church, and the way in which whiteness becomes a kind of a default position over against which we understand what reconciliation might actually mean. It relates to all sorts of questions about reconciliation between first and second peoples. It relates to the ecumenical question. I published an article a few months ago in uniting church studies, which was entitled Non Christian Unity, which was basically saying that actually, the ecumenical vision that comes to expression in these kinds of texts is not what we recognize as the ecumenical vision of all christians becoming. [00:31:26] Speaker A: Part of one church, one church denomination. [00:31:29] Speaker B: Because, actually, these texts weren't written by a Christian who thought there was anything called Christianity, and there wasn't a thing called the church. That you could. So it's very clear that what the text is thinking about is the incorporation of gentiles into a jewish form of unity, but they do so as gentiles, not by becoming jewish in any kind of definitive way. So I think all of that is really, really important to tease out. Our visions of unity can be overly kind of romantic and naive and naive, and they can mask forms of illegitimate power at worst. And I think that that's a really important thing to be attentive to the other point of connection, just to maybe move to thinking about how we might deal with these texts. I mean, it does end up with the identity of Jews and gentiles no longer in hostility to each other. It does end up with temple language. [00:32:28] Speaker A: Yes. [00:32:28] Speaker B: So the whole structure is. Grows into a holy temple in the Lord in whom you are built together spiritually. So this question I asked earlier about house as place and house as where God dwells. [00:32:40] Speaker A: Yes. [00:32:41] Speaker B: God seems to dwell here in the act of the reconciliation between divided people and in the forms of life that they create together rather than in a particular institution of any sort. [00:32:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And when one is living according to this kind of peace and harmony with one another. Yeah. For me, some of the preaching themes, there's a lot to play with this week, but you could pick up this household idea to play with where we find the presence of God. What does it mean? And what does it mean, including if we read around the rest of Ephesians, that Christ is in us and we are in Christ. So there's something embodied without getting sort of moralistic and all puritan about it, but we embody Christ. And what does it mean to be the dwelling place of God? [00:33:23] Speaker B: That's right. [00:33:24] Speaker A: Communally and individually, maybe. [00:33:25] Speaker B: And I think the question of how being in Christ means that we actually open ourselves up to what Paul would regard as the work of the spirit, or what the Gospel of Mark would regard as the teaching or the instruction of Jesus, or what in jewish tradition is the law that is given to us. None of these things are done away with. We still need leadership, guidance, direction, as well as the practicalities of our common needs met together. But all of those are oriented towards this extraordinary goal of what it means to live in the kingdom of God. [00:34:01] Speaker A: By the well is brought to you by pilgrim theologian College and the Uniting Church in Australia. It's produced by Adrian Jackson. Thanks for listening.