If you have ever seen photographs of the Earth taken from out in space, you will know that it looks like a beautiful sphere of polished marble: vivid blue and green, veined with white. From a distance, it could be paradise.
At a certain point, a man-made construction becomes visible to the astronaut's eye and the satellite's camera. Like a neatly closed wound on the face of the planet, the Great Wall of China can be identified from afar by the orbiting viewer.
Welcome to the Earth: we are people divided; we build walls to defend ourselves from one another. Indeed, the history of the human race could be characterized as a history of the building of walls.
Far north of here, for example, is Hadrian's Wall, which I must cross once more when I return home. Like the Great Wall of China, it has long ceased to have any defensive function. Both walls are now frequented by armies of tourists, not soldiers.
Some here in this cathedral today will remember the Berlin Wall going up. Rather more of us will remember it coming down, its destruction a symbol of hope, of light overcoming darkness. In fact, the darkness has simply relocated. Today's wall is going up in the West Bank, dividing Israeli still further from Palestinian.
Of course, the walls which divide us do not have to be actual, physical entities. Think, from the history of recent years, of the Balkans, Rwanda, Dafur, Iraq, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tibet. The list is depressingly long: so many walls, so much division, so much grief.
Nehemiah, from whose book the first lesson came, was a great builder of walls. Given permission to return from Babylonian exile, he wept over the desolation of his city, Jerusalem, and his people, the Jews. Much of the book which bears his name concerns the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, carried out under Nehemiah's direction.
And much of the account of the rebuilding of these walls consists in lists of names, the names of the builders: Zaccur son of Imri... the sons of Hassenaah... Meremoth son of Uriah son of Hakkoz, and so on and so on. From Nehemiah's point of view, these are 'our people', people like us, people who belong inside the walls.
Other names, too, are listed: the dissenting voices, those who are not like us, those who belong outside the walls: Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite... and Geshem the Arab. Names are named: we know who you are; we know where you live.
While this morning's passage does not directly concern the rebuilding of the city walls, it too is born of inclusion and exclusion and the perceived need to defend the Jewish people: Ezra, priest and scribe, stands before the people and recites a long, essentially penitential psalm. He begins by praising the one God, creator of the heavens and the Earth - this beautiful planet and everything upon it.
He goes on to rehearse the history of the God and his people: the great acts of salvation and mercy. Today's reading ends there, but the psalm continues with a catalogue of Israel's disobedient and rebellious acts.
The immediate cause of this penitential outpouring is another example of division and exclusion: this time, the question of mixed marriages - between Jews and non-Jews, between Israelites and foreigners, between people like us and people not like us.
This matter occupies even more space in the closely related look which bears Ezra's own name. There we find more lists of names, this time the men who had taken foreign wives. The final sentence of the Book of Ezra makes chilling reading. The list of men's names concludes with these words:
They sent them away, out of the city, beyond the protecting walls. Where did they send them? And what provision, if any, was made for them? One thinks, for example, of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s, of the women and children sent away to such places as the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. And of course one thinks of those others sent away to camps in Germany and Poland, camps packed with Jews and gypsies and others sufficiently different from the Aryan ideal to warrant not just incarceration but extermination.
Extermination of one's enemies was once uppermost in the mind of St Paul the Apostle. Indeed, his commitment to exterminate the followers of Jesus was the most conspicuous fact of his pre-Christian life.
And yet, this most zealous defender of Judaism, this most zealous persecutor of the emerging Church, became the latter's most powerful advocate. More than that, Paul broke down the walls that encircled early Jewish Christianity and took the Good News of God in Christ out to the non-Jewish world of the Gentiles.
For despite our Lord's commandment to his followers that they should 'Go... and make disciples of all nations', Paul's attempts to do just that caused consternation with many. And thus were divisions first established in the Church, with the Peter camp on one side and the Paul camp on the other.
But Paul held fast to his mission, remained true to his Lord's commandment. At the beginning of the second lesson, we heard him breaking down the walls still further. Writing to a predominantly Gentile congregation at Corinth, Paul claims common heritage for them with the children of Israel:
Paul recounts the same mighty deeds of salvation and mercy as does Ezra in the Book of Nehemiah, but with this difference: the wall is down; there is no division; all are invited into the city of the one God. As Paul says to the Galatians:
What would Paul make of the divisions in the Church today? In the Anglican Communion, walls are being reinforced, with many only too willing to decide who belongs on which side. The media do not help matters, characterising the disagreements around issues of human sexuality as being simply a spat between liberals and conservatives.
It is far more serious than that, as one commentator pointed out in a recent issue of the Church Times. The division is between, on the one hand, those who say that Christians with different views and lifestyles to their own are still Christian, and have a Christian integrity that must be part of the Church; and, on the other hand, those who think that this simply cannot and must not be the case. If you are not like us, you must be sent away, out beyond the city walls.
Which isn't to say that anything goes. Certainly that wasn't Paul's view. No-one was quicker than him to point what is unhelpful to life's journey and one's relationship with God. But judgement: that's another matter. It is for God to separate the sheep from the goats, and for God alone.
Paul's view was this, set out in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:
As Christians, we are called to do two things: Love God and love our neighbour. It's really very simple - if difficult and at times costly, for our neighbours, very often, are not people like us. But that's the gospel imperative and although no passage from the gospels has been read in this service, it is the gospel, the Good News of God in Christ that informs Paul in his words and in his deeds.
What made the difference to Paul - one minute the zealous persecutor, the next the zealous advocate - was Jesus Christ. Christ entered Paul's life and Paul was transformed. He didn't always get it right, I am sure; he probably wasn't the easiest person to be around; but he tried his utmost to break down the walls that divide people from one another and the walls that divide people from God.
It is thanks to Paul, in very large part, that God's message of salvation and mercy made it out of Jerusalem, out beyond Nehemiah's carefully and faithfully rebuilt walls, out, in time, to every part of this beautiful blue and green planet.
Sermon by: Jonathan Mason