On Friday, November 9 we celebrated the thirty year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can vividly remember watching television and seeing people standing on the wall and chipping away at it with hammers and chisels. I couldn’t help but think of Joshua and the walls of Jericho.

A couple of years later Paulette and I visited Berlin and saw a part of the wall that was still standing. My thought at seeing it was, “What a tremendous waste of resources for a project whose only intent was to prop up a corrupt regime. Thank God it’s gone.”

When I was teaching, Paulette and I would invite some of my classes over to the house for dinner. One of those classes included a student from Berlin, and that evening the conversation turned to the Berlin wall. Everyone was fascinated to hear him describe how one morning they looked out their back window and saw workmen building it at the back of their garden. They had to hurry and get their car, because they parked it in a spot that would eventually be on the other side of the wall. For many years they had to look out at an ugly monstrosity that separated them from friends, neighbors, and relatives. I wasn’t in contact with him when the Wall fell, but I imagine they all rejoiced, and they rushed to once again unite with friends and relatives.

Sometimes the walls that divide people are symbolic. In the first years of the Church there was a divide between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians. I am sure much of this was due to their cultural differences, but the biggest divide was because of sincere, deeply held beliefs about whether or not the gentile converts had to become Jewish. Paul even uses the wall metaphor for the divide. In Ephesians 2:14 he said, “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” Much of this rift was healed at the Council of Jerusalem, but Paul makes clear that the real source of the healing came from our Lord. There have been many divides in the Church over the centuries, and today we are facing one at Joy. But Paul’s words still hold. He himself is our peace and destroys the barrier. He loves those on both sides of the wall equally, unconditionally.

Jim