The other day I heard what I thought was a fascinating item on NPR. It seems a group of economists Who are used to dealing with statistics made a study of how accurately umpires— those paragons of unbiased judgments— call pitches, especially close calls. In this day and age, of course, they had all sorts of help, as pitches are well and accurately monitored by a variety of electronic equipment as they head for the catcher’s mitt and they had the record of who threw every ball and how every pitch was called. The results were astounding. An umpire, it is clear from their findings, is far more likely to call strikes when he and the pitcher share the same ethnicity. Isn’t that amazing? No one thought this was purposeful or premeditated, but the study revealed the sort of inborn bias, the kind of tribal favoritism toward folks who are just like me which has characterized human nature since the very beginning.

We all know from history, from current events, from our own experience how insidious such biases can be and how, like cancers, they can grow and harden into alienation, into dividing walls, into hostility, into dehumanization, into downright hatred for the ‘other.’ People my age can remember the early photographs and newsreels of the death camps of the Third Reich and the slow revelation of the vast extent of the horror we call the Holocaust. We can remember how a dictator like Tito could impose and enforce an uneasy modus vivendi between the various factions which made up Yugoslavia, and people a good deal younger can remember the tragedies that erupted between Bosnian and Serb and Muslim and what-have-you when the old regime collapsed. We can remember when the Berlin wall went up to seal the western, capitalist part of the city from communist East Germany; and people a good deal younger can recall the euphoria when that wall came a-tumblin’ down. All of us today are all too aware of how bias can become intolerance can become hatred can become terrorism can become death.

Our reading this morning from Ephesians is based squarely on this unfortunate truth about human beings, with particular reference to a very ancient divide in the human community, that between Jews and Gentiles. It was a division that had its roots in Jewish history and tradition, but ancient writers like Tacitus show us that the dislike and distrust was deep-seated and mutual. The writer, who may or may not have been Paul, was in either case a Jewish Jesus freak who was writing to people who had grown up as pagans, as Gentiles. He gets off, I think, to an unfortunate start with that “you”— that “you” which means “not us”: “you Gentiles in the flesh” he says as opposed to “us” who were born citizens in the commonwealth of Israel, “us” who were born heirs of the promises of God, “us” who were born with hope in a saving God. But despite that use of pronouns that divide, it is clear that the whole argument is about divisions overcome, about particularity giving way to inclusiveness about inequalities replaced with parity, about hatreds vanquished by reconciliation, enmity by love. It is a vision of the Church of God as it was meant to be, as it ought to become so that all of us who profess and call ourselves Christian may truly become a dwelling place for God.

The Church has rarely lived up to this vision, has rarely opened her arms as Christ opened his upon the cross to embrace and welcome all sorts and conditions of men. We American Episcopalians can take some pride in the fact that, from the very beginning back in 1789, we are a church governed by lay people in concert with clergy— a very real fact which many Anglicans abroad find impossible to conceive of, much less understand. And we’ve come a long way, let me say, from the Dark Ages when I was growing up in the church, back when women wore hats and could sing in the choir, properly hatted, and work in the sacristy but couldn’t go behind the altar rail or sit on the vestry. It took nearly two thousand years, but we now have a woman suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Texas and a woman Presiding Bishop over our church. And I think we can take pride in the fact that our Church has opened the door a bit more by stating basically that baptism is the only prerequisite for any office and order in the Church.

Christ welcomes all into his fold. His arms remain outstretched in love for all persons of all races and persuasions. He has welcomed each one of us as his brother or sister without qualification, without bias. If our Christ is so open and welcoming and full of love for every human being alive, how can his Body the Church be less if we Christians are to grow together into a holy temple in the Lord, if we Christians are to be built together in the Spirit into a dwelling place for our God?

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