A couple of weeks ago, a young man carried out a tragic act of violence that ended Charlie Kirk’s life. He was speaking to a group gathered on a campus in Utah, and in a moment his life was suddenly ended.

To be honest with you, I did not know much about Charlie Kirk prior to that moment. I had heard his name mentioned in political discussions, but that’s all I knew. Since his tragic death, there has been a flood of videos circulating from his dialogues and conversations on college campuses across the country. Some of what he said I fully affirm, and some of what he said disturbed me. Yet Charlie Kirk and I were united by our common faith in Jesus Christ. And regardless of whether I agreed with him or not, I mourn his tragic, brutal, public death.

In the days after his death, the already existent cracks of division within our society seemed to widen. Christian conservatives venerated Kirk’s memory, while some progressives seemed undisturbed by his sudden death. My social media feed became a firestorm of comments as people lobbed insults at one another based on how they had responded to this tragedy. Quite frankly, it became too much for me. I deleted all of my social media accounts because I found myself grieving the mean-spiritedness, the cruelty, and the disunity I saw from people I loved on both sides of the political divide.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the letter to the Ephesians. This short epistle is written to a divided Christian community. We don’t know much about the historical context, but there seems to have arisen a dispute among Greek Christians and Jewish Christians. Though we only hear one side of the conversation, it’s clear that tensions were threatening to tear the Ephesian church apart.

Perhaps they argued about the time of the worship service. Maybe they had some theological disagreement. Or, like us, perhaps the news of the day was raising anxieties among them. But to all of their high-blood-pressured hearts, Ephesians says this: