Stop Striving For Unity

On marriage, church divisions, and living in the reality of what is already true.

This is part of a brief series on Ephesians. Read part 1 and part 2.

In the spring of 2015 my fiancé and I sat at a desk across from a professor of Biblical Greek and his wife. Over the course of several premarital counseling sessions they impressed on us the seriousness of the commitment we were preparing to make. One theme ran like a thread through every conversation: will your presence and participation in this relationship help the other person look more like Jesus? According to our professor and his wife, this was the purpose of marriage, to draw each other into Christlikeness.

In marriage, a husband and wife become one flesh (Eph. 5:31). This mysterious union is an ontological reality enacted through the marriage covenant. It is not something we strive to achieve overtime, a pinnacle of marital maturity and decades of developing good communication skills. It is as true at “I do” as it is at “death do us part.” For my husband and I it was as real on August 1st, 2015 as it is today, nearly nine years in. The question is not, our counselors told us, are we one flesh? The question is, are we walking today in the reality God has created between us?

Paul presents a similar challenge to the early church in Ephesus. Unity is one of the themes crisscrossing the tapestry of his letter. To a congregation likely composed almost entirely of non-Jewish disciples he writes about how Christ has “broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” between Jews and Gentiles (2:14). He spends the bulk of chapter 2 describing the “one new man” that God is building as a home in which his Spirit will dwell (2:15, 22). Unity among disciples, he emphasizes in the first half of the letter, is an ontological reality. Christ “has made us one” (2:14). Jews and Gentiles alike have been reconciled to God “in one body through the cross” (2:16). We are “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (2:19).

This mysterious union is not something we strive to achieve over time, a pinnacle of theological consensus and hours of social media debates. This reality is as true in Acts 2 with a few hundred disciples as it is in 2024 will millions of believers across thousands of nations and denominations and expressions of faith. When Paul transitions from describing the spiritual reality of our salvation to explaining how we should live it out, he urges the church to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). “Put off your old man”, he says, the one given to divisiveness and greed and selfishness (4:22), and “put on your new man”, the one God is building to image himself in righteousness and holiness (4:24). As in marriage, the question for the church should not be, are we united? But rather, are we walking today in the reality God has created among us?

Beauty in Grief
The last few weeks have been filled with grief. Sorrow has sat down in the rocking chair on our front porch and I don’t know how long she plans to stay. But there are small moments when beauty finds us, even here. The moment you make eye contact with someone who knows and feel the relief of a shared burden. The giggle of a child with popsicle juice dripping down their arm toward their elbow. Answers to prayers you feared might be too small or insignificant to whisper.

Beauty in The Desert
We’re rounding the bend toward August, the hottest and most humid month here in the Coachella Valley. As I write this it is 114°F with 22% humidity. We beat the heat with trips to the pool and the children’s museum. We try to keep our eyes open to find beauty in nature, like the lizard who found his way into the air conditioning with us, or the cumulus clouds piled like a toupee on the crest of the mountains.

In pursuit of Beauty,