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July 30, 2006- Year B, Proper 12
The Reverend Mark H. Byers
Preached at Redeemer, Aldie

On Our Way

One of the great “gifts” of the modern world is the notion that it all comes down to the individual and helping that person to be happy and prosperous. Even within much of evangelical Christianity, I could argue, this is the case. It all comes down to the individual in relationship to Jesus, and what faith will give to that person, whether it be wealth, or personal fulfillment, or the assurance of heaven. This is not surprising, in some respects. Christian believing is, for many of us, less the in-dwelling Spirit of God through Jesus Christ undergirding and equipping God’s people for mission, and more a personalized license plate we each wear in hopes that God will be able to identify us when we get to heaven. It is less about what God is trying to do, and more about what we hope God will do for each of us.

I’ve told many people of an experience I had in college, where a fellow student and member of the college’s Honor Council, the student disciplinary body, summed up our Honor Code as “Don’t Cheat and Be Nice.” Given that the code was a product of the college’s Quaker heritage, this seems sad to me. But it’s also probably inevitable, given the culture in which we find ourselves. The highest aspirations of secular culture are built around a nebulous sense of the individual person living selflessly for the sake of other people. And the highest aspirations of many Christians are built around a piety designed to accomplish personal salvation, with the end result that we’ll each try and live selflessly for the sake of other people because that’s what Jesus wants. Or so we imagine.

It’s not helped, of course, by the way most of us read our scripture, in decontextualized  chunks, sometimes with important pieces missing, as in our epistle reading today. And we tend, as with our license plates, to personalize it, using it to affirm however we’re already thinking about our relationship to Jesus Christ and one another.

It would be easy to summarize the personal implications of the epistle as follows:

Try and be nice to each other, and tolerant. We’re all from the same church, after all. And we all have different roles in the church to make it run smoothly, so each of us needs to be mature, believe correctly, and help things along so that we stay saved. (Mark Byers, from his work, “Deliberately Bad Interpretation of Scripture, July, 2006.”)

Or something else similar. But we lose the build up of ideas that precedes this passage by focusing only on what these words mean by themselves. We can’t know scripture simply by looking at it as aphorisms or admonitions about how we are to behave. The letter to Ephesians, and indeed, all of the Bible, are part of a larger story about who God is and what God is doing in the world.

I mean, this is part of the story that begins in Creation, that continues in the Fall, that contains covenants given by God after the Flood, then again with Abraham, to Moses at Sinai, to David, and finally, with all of humanity in Jesus Christ. And there are times of glory and of decline and judgment throughout the whole story. The entire thread of the story is, in fact, something of a tragedy, because of human sinfulness and disobedience, apart from the continued work of God to reveal Himself and redirect our wayward steps.

So it’s impossible for me to preach about this passage in Ephesians without noting some important things from earlier in the letter. For instance, the fact that Paul uses the plural in talking about the people of God. If you want to follow along, this passage is Ephesians 1: 3-5.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed US in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose US in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined US for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ…

You get what I’m saying: Paul doesn’t mean “you, singular,” or “me.” He means “all of us together.” This is, as some theologians might it, a global, cosmological message that has personal implications. The gospel is not, in the initial stages, about saving Mark Byers or even John Sheehan, as much as we might need saving. It’s about all of us together.

This is affirmed a few verses later. Ephesians 1: 17-21:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

The sort of power and love that God has has as its purpose much more than simply compelling me not to cheat and to be nice, and to love Jesus. There is, as Paul says, a hope to which we are called together, a rich inheritance, which is the Kingdom of God. Our personal relationship with Christ, and even the relationship of the church to Christ, doesn’t require the dominion of God over “all rule and authority and power and dominion,” over every government and leader and ideology and delusion or illusion of the darkest corners of the human heart. Deepak Chopra could handle setting out a viable way of “actualizing our self,” or that sort of nonsense. God is doing something far greater, and that’s what Paul is saying.

God is conquering Satan, and not in the childish, Sunday school way of “if the Devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack, ‘Ouch!’” Ephesians 2:

You [all of us, together] were dead through trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. [Satan, my friends.] All of us once lived among them… and we were by nature children of wrath…

Wow. That puts a different meaning on things, more like the actual, enormous meaning that the Bible should have. “For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” This isn’t just a “personal application” sermon. Paul says God is not simply redeeming what we were: in Christ, he has made us into something new, and this new Creation has a purpose, which is to live in such a way as to announce that God is the Lord, and there is no other who should have any call upon us BUT God. We are not simply saved: we are called to be a part of the new thing that God is doing, which is the salvation of all humanity through the Kingdom he has established, flowing out of heaven across the earth.

That kind of changes the way might do church, I would guess. And it changes the way I read the epistle today.

Let’s go through it again, briefly:

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Eph. 4: 1-3

In other words, we have, and I emphasize “we,” a special calling, and it takes special dedication and behavior that doesn’t necessarily flow naturally from human beings. That is, humility, gentleness, patience, mutual love and forbearance, and devotion to the unity that is God’s gift to us through the Spirit. Such a collection of people as us, having a shared mission in Christ to the world, must behave in ways that fly in the face of what we have learned almost from the time we came forth from our mother’s wombs. We are not, after all, people of “shock and awe,” or of a flag, or of values such as individualism and materialism. We are not people of any “ism,” but rather, people of the Cross, the Empty Tomb, who live through the grace and love that is ours by virtue of having been joined with the Body of our Risen Lord.

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,” which is the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ, who is not simply our salvation, but the whole world’s. In a world divided by sin, by the power of our own weaknesses, compounded through the presence of ancient evil, there is no hope, except as we proclaim and live as dwellers in the Kingdom. “…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” The victory of God is begun and inevitable, yet for all of us, such a proclamation as Paul’s, the very one that we make every time we baptize a new member of Christ’s body, is required to remind us that we are not simply slowing marking time until our bodies decline and we die, but rather, that we are marching onward together into eternity in the new Creation.

And God does not send forth His saints without the tools, the gifts, through which He plans to work out His purposes. So some of us will be “apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…” We may have been born weak, but together in Christ, we have all that we need for the march. In these times, I wonder how we will be able to maintain unity, but then I remember that unity is a function of the strength that comes from walking the path that Jesus set before us. No person ever got strong from having the good intention of embarking on a fitness program, and no traveler has ever reached her destination simply by reading about it. The gifts we have been given are the boots, the backpacks, the walking sticks that we need to be on our way, and the call that we have is to be… on our way.

...we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

“Love,” a friend of mine once said, “is not a feeling. It’s a verb.” And the love that we have through Jesus Christ is that sort of love. It does not happen except as we are on our way, and together. If I hear one more person talk about “walking apart,” I’m going to kick something. For that matter, if I hear one more person start talking about Christian faith as “spirituality,” I’m going to… I don’t know what I’ll do. Probably just ignore it. We don’t need to be talking about walking apart, because people who are talking about being on their way together aren’t walking. They’re just talking. And while flapping gums may be exercise of a sort, it will never strengthen our body to be people who can lead this world into the new one.

And we don’t need to talk, either, about feeling ‘accepted’ or ‘affirmed.’ The best way to accept and affirm people is to point out their boots, their packs, and their walking sticks and to invite them to come walking. And if they are so hurt that they say they can’t walk, then put your arm under their arms and help them along. Nothing is so healthy as sunshine, fresh air, and exercise, our parents used to tell us, and we tell our kids the same thing, when they’re not glued one end to a screen and the other to an armchair. A great tactic that the world uses to undermine what God is doing through the church is to constantly encourage God’s people to be talking about how to do the things that we can only accomplish by doing them. That is trickery and craftiness and deceitful scheming, in Paul’s words, of the highest order. The only way to avoid getting sucked into such wind-blowing, to avoid being tossed to and fro, is…

Wait for it.

Be on our way. Together.

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