Friends, we find ourselves in the middle of the Sundays after Trinity and the lectionary provides us with an opportunity to speak about the nature of the Church. It does this because, for the next few weeks, the New Testament readings are taken from the book of Ephesians. And the book of Ephesians is all about the Church: what it is and what it should be. So let’s begin with our reading today, Ephesians 2:11-22.

This passage is so rich that we can’t possibly comment on everything. So I’d like to talk about the two groups of people it mentions, paying particular attention to what we can learn about the Church.

To begin with, the Apostle Paul speaks about ‘Gentiles in the flesh’ (Eph. 2:11). A Gentile is simply someone who is not ethnically or religiously Jewish. To the Jewish mind, the world was divided into two in this sense: Jew and Gentile. So, when you read the word ‘Gentile’ in the Scriptures, this is what it means.

Paul is asking those Gentiles who have joined the Church to remember their position before they came into it: they were ‘separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’ (Eph. 2:11-12). And that final phrase is really the key, the summary of everything that went before: outside of the Church, the Gentiles have no hope and are without God in the world.

Now that might seem like a strong statement: who is the Apostle Paul to say that people have no hope? Surely people can find their hope in all sorts of things and don’t need religion or the Church to do so. But I would like to argue that the Apostle Paul may be on to something.

Consider the situation of probably the majority of people in modern, twenty-first century Britain. Although there are many beliefs and outlooks in our society, surely the dominant paradigm is that of secular materialism. The reigning ideology of our age considers religion (by which we mean ultimate questions of God and the purpose of human destiny) to be secondary to other concerns such as material prosperity and societal flourishing. Let me give a small but I think telling example: I subscribe to a particular newspaper app (I won’t say which one). When I look at this app on my phone, at the top of the screen various topics are presented to me for my perusal: News, Sports, Business, Travel, International, Food, and so on. But there is no button for Religion, the Church, or Christianity. So unimportant are these things deemed to be that they seem a minority interest with no mainstream appeal.

It is doubtless the case that material prosperity, health, comfort, security and societal flourishing are great and important blessings. But have we traded something of ultimate value for our emphasis upon these things? Are we not like the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World who, whenever they are troubled by any social, political or philosophical anxiety simply medicate themselves with a drug called Soma which makes them feel calm and happy? Isn’t watching NetFlix, or flicking through the Twitter feed on our iPhone, or working incessantly for greater financial gain, the equivalent to this? Aren’t these things ultimately a distraction from the nagging sense that there might be more to life than this?

I met a middle-aged man the other day who has come to Christian faith in the past couple of years. He is a wealthy, successful man, who no doubt lives in a nice house and drives a nice car. But he said to me that he always had a sense that there was more to life than work, that he had in fact been serving his work as though his work were a slave master. He recalled to me the words of Morpheus to Neo in the film The Matrix: that there was always something wrong, but that he was only dimly aware of it, and yet it was there, nagging at him, like a splinter in his mind.

I think many people have a splinter in their minds: they know that there is more to life than financial security, physical comfort, material wealth, entertainment by technology, and all of the benefits that are offered to us in our late modern culture. But they find it very difficult to understand what that nagging feeling is or how to act upon it.

You might ask: if so many people feel like this, why don’t more people consider the religious question and become Christians? Why aren’t the churches full of people? There are many things to say about this, but let me make a single point: we live in an age in which we have unprecedent technological and economic power and resources. We live at the far end of a conceptual revolution in thought that has conditioned us to believe that the material world is the only thing that is real. The success of science and technology has given us the impression that this is the case, but it is not necessarily so. The great modern philosopher Iain McGilchrist makes the perceptive point that the things that we attend to are the things that come to us to seem real. This is no doubt true of societies as well as individuals: we have attended so closely and for so long to the mechanics of the material world that we have conditioned ourselves to believe that the material world is the only thing that is really there. But what might happen if, as individuals or as a collective, we began instead to attend to the spiritual realm? Might we discover that it is not such a fiction after all and that we have indeed become blind to its reality?

This all makes perfect sense, as far as I can see. It matches the biblical view of the world, which tells us that people do know – deep down – that there is a God behind the existence of the world and that, ultimately, he has a plan for all human life (Romans 1:19-21). But we, as a society, have, broadly-speaking, suppressed this knowledge of God such that we have almost convinced ourselves that he is not there.

But that word ‘almost’ is really the key here. The reality is that, in the words of the Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer, ‘He is there, and He is not silent’.

To return to the point, most people are not without any kind of hope whatsoever, but many (particularly in our society) are without the ultimate hope that is offered by Christ and (ideally) by the Christian Church: that is, the ultimate hope that we can be forgiven by God for sinning against him, ignoring him and living as though he doesn’t exist, and that we can live with him forever as he has always intended us to do. Because of this, the secular world that we live in – even in the midst of the material comfort and the technological power that we enjoy – is tinged with a tragic sadness, the sadness that, in the end, none of this will last, and that we and all that we have ever known will slip into the darkness of oblivion.

That, says the Apostle Paul, is the situation that we were in before we knew Christ. It might be that many of you were brought into the Church by your parents and have not experienced that alienation from God in any obvious way. That’s a good thing. In that case, it means that this is the situation you would have been in had you not had such godly parents.

I know what it is to live a life without God, to base my identity and my hope in something that is not ultimate but is passing, uncertain, and transitory. I am glad that others shared the faith with me, that I was able to read Scripture for myself, and come to know Christ.

And this observation leads to me to what I think we can learn about the Church here, which is this: that the Church exists not only for its own members, but for those who are outside, those without hope, those without God. The one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple said, ‘The Church is the only organisation that exists for the benefit of its non-members’. And that is the truth.

Paul is asking us to remember that, but for the grace of God, we would be outside of the Church. If our parents hadn’t brought us to the baptismal font, if our friends hadn’t shared the Gospel with us, if we hadn’t been so fortunate somehow to come in, we too would be outside and without hope.

But there’s even more. Consider the words of Paul: ‘But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ’ (Eph. 2:13).

What makes us Christians ultimately? Not our culture, not socio-economic status, not our race, not our postal address, but the fact of God’s grace in Christ. To give a bit more context to the passage, there was a great deal of racial tension between Jew and Gentile at the time, and all of this is very human. We take some aspect of our identity, which could be our race but it could also be all sorts of other things too, and we elevate it to something ultimate. And then we look down on other people who don’t share it. In its most extreme form, we call this things like ‘prejudice’ and ‘racism’ but we all do it in some form.

Paul is telling us that there is to be nothing of that in the Church. Why? Because, before God, none of us has merited a place here. We are all here by the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ. Not because we are wise, not because we are good, not because we are of a certain race or socio-economic group, but because of his mercy towards us.

Here I feel that I must be blunt. This church does not belong to you. It doesn’t belong to me. Being a member of this church does not make you superior to the people out there. Being a Christian should not make you look down on other people. But, rather, you should remember that, if you truly know Christ, it is only by his grace that you do. And you should remember that this gift is given to you not so that you can keep it to yourself but so that you can share it with the world.

Finally, then, some application. Firstly, give humble thanks to God for calling you into the Church, even though you, like everyone else, have sinned against him and do not merit a place in his family. But, more than that, recognise that we now have a mission, which is to share that grace with everyone. I know of an American pastor who for a long time had this written on his Twitter Bio: ‘A nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody’. I love that.

This is why everything that we do as a church must be orientated towards those who are outside of this building. Yes, we must grow in holiness. Yes, we must worship God together. But we must never lose sight of the fact that we exist as an outpost of the Kingdom of God, to call others to join and to know the salvation that has been freely bestowed upon us.

Practically speaking, we have a beautiful building in the middle of a vibrant city. We have a lovely churchyard. We have a car park and a church hall and incredible financial resources. We have all of these material blessings and we must recognise that these are gifts given to us by God so that we might use them not for ourselves and for our own benefit but for the mission that he calls us to: namely, to invite other people to know Jesus Christ. Therefore, evangelism and outreach must be at the very top of our list of priorities: our money, our effort, and our time must be put towards this end. It is not some kind of optional extra that only evangelical churches engage in. It is the very mission and purpose of the Church: as we were called by God, so we are to call others. And he gives us gifts to accomplish this end. We, in particular, are immensely blessed. Let us use what we have, therefore, to call those who are near and those who are far to membership in this community established by God’s grace. Let us make this the most welcoming and outward-looking church in the city because we want as many to come to know Christ as possible. Let that be our mission and our identity.

Amen.