Welcome To The Center Of Life
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
"The thickets, I said, send up their praise at dawn."1 I thought of this line from a poem by Wendell Berry as we sat with one of our church elders who was dying of leukemia. We had driven up to visit her in her rural mountain home in North Carolina where she had moved several years ago. She was in bed, looking out her window, and she said that she appreciated the trees each morning because they praised God every day. Her testimony, as she faced death, was to give thanks to God for all levels of praise in her life. She was an artist, and during her 25 years at Oakhurst, she had been a central force in helping us to see the possibilities of using art to help people experience God's presence and to help us find a new way of living in God's presence. On this particular summer day in the mountains, we thanked her for all her gifts to us, and she reminded us that life is meant to be lived in praise of God and in loving God and loving one another.
As she spoke, I was also reminded of these beginning verses in Ephesians. Today's lectionary reading is really one long, sweeping sentence in Greek, an extended song of thanksgiving and praise to God for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. It is also a succinct summary of the faith that has nurtured the people of God for centuries, from the first century to the twenty-first.
I get ahead of myself here. We have switched streams in the epistle lectionary texts from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians to Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians is one of my favorite New Testament books, and many scholars don't even think that Paul wrote it! Ephesians speaks to something deep inside my heart, and it has done so since I was a boy. When I discovered that Paul's authorship of the letter was in dispute, my heart sank. I thought that its power rested in its connection with Paul's writing it, but over the years I've returned to my original reaction to Ephesians -- its power is evident, no matter who wrote it. Over several centuries of the early church, the general consensus from many places was that this letter spoke the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the church chose it to be part of its sacred texts.
Did Paul write Ephesians? There is evidence on both sides of the argument, but the general consensus is that it was likely written by a disciple of Paul, written not just to the church at Ephesus but as a general epistle to the emerging, Gentile-based churches in what is now western Turkey.2 In this sense, the words of this powerful letter speak to all of us. The truth of this letter resonates to every generation in every place in every age, welcoming us, as the Ephesians are welcomed, into a whole new way of life, welcoming us into the center of all that is. Welcome to the center of life!
This introductory passage of the letter to the Ephesians begins in praise and thanksgiving to the God we know in Jesus Christ, with its first phrase exactly repeating the opening phrase of 2 Corinthians: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 3). The thanksgiving is based in the fact that God, the center of all that is, the creator and sustainer of the entire universe, has come to us in Jesus Christ to offer us life and love. That claim itself is enough to give us pause, to cause us to take a break from the noise of television and cell phones and from the busyness of our lives to listen for a deeper and stunning truth. At the heart of all of creation, at the center of all of life, at the center of our own individual lives, is a loving God who seeks life for us, who asks us to be motivated by love rather than by fear. The center of life is not death or violence or injustice or greed, but love. This is quite a claim in our crazy, violence-based, fear-driven world.
The author of Ephesians tells us that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has given us what we need to live and to love in this kind of world: "Who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (v. 3b). It is not clear what the "heavenly places" are. It is a phrase used frequently in Ephesians but nowhere else in the New Testament. In other places in the New Testament, "heaven" usually describes God's residence as distinct from earth, but in chapter 6 we also hear that there are "spiritual forces of evil" in the heavenly places (6:12). This phrase more likely means here the realm where the spiritual world and the material world meet, where we live.3 Whatever the meaning of this phrase, the praise to God is rooted in the understanding that God has given us the power to do what we need to do as God's children. We live in a world that tends to make us feel afraid, powerless, and overwhelmed, but the author of Ephesians tells us that we have been given what we need: spiritual blessings. Does that mean that we can change the world? We don't know that, but we do know that God has given us the power to be witnesses. Did Rosa Parks think that she would change the world when she wouldn't give up her seat on the bus? I doubt it, but she was empowered to be a witness for God, for God's call to justice.
Ephesians is inviting us to step into the center of life. The motivation for this invitation is not our hard work or our potential or any deeds on our part -- it is God's initiative. God "chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world" (v. 4a), and this refers not to a linear time line but rather to the fact that the invitation is God's doing and not ours. It is what the strange doctrine of predestination really means. We are invited into the center of life not because of who we are or what we've done but because of who God is and what God has done.
The purpose of this initiative and movement on God's part is to set us apart as the people of God, to be brought before God as "holy and blameless" (v. 4b), using language from Leviticus 22 that has its roots in the Hebrew purity system: the animals that were to be dedicated to God had to be without blemish. The description of "holy and blameless" can be both frightening and dangerous. It is frightening because we know that we will never reach this point. There is too much baggage and too many unresolved issues individually and communally in our lives. So, many of us seek to hide from God in fear, seeking to avoid God, as Adam and Eve did, because we have an awareness that we aren't holy or blameless. At this place in our lives we discount the depth of the grace of God by deciding that God's grace is not powerful enough to bring us into the center of life, not powerful enough to overcome our shortcomings.
This language is also dangerous because one of the ways that we cope with our awareness of our frailty and failures is to move to the other end of the spectrum. We begin to believe that although we can't be perfect, we can get close. The church has a difficult and sad history that is rooted in this need to believe in our own righteousness. In this case, we discount the depth of the grace of God because we convince ourselves that we really don't need that much grace, that God loves us because we made an "A" on the test.
Despite these two tendencies regarding "holy and blameless" in the history of the church, this description actually has at least two good points that we need to hear with fresh ears. First, it emphasizes that "God is able," that God's grace is sufficient and necessary to bring us into the center of life. We may not be able to see how this can be done, or we may not think that we really need it, but these verses affirm the central truth of our lives: It is God's grace that makes us children of God. And secondly, the purpose of this movement in grace is not to make us pure but to establish us as the people of God. The primary definition of the church is not those who are pure but those who belong to God. One of the words used to describe the church in English is "ecclesiastical," and it is a direct derivative from the Greek word meaning "called out." We are thus called out of the definitions of the world into the center of life to live as those who belong to God rather than those who belong to the categories of the world.
The author of Ephesians tells us that the center of our lives is not our race or our economic status or our nationality or our gender or any other category of the world. The center of our lives is God's grace and God's purpose for our lives. To say this does not mean that God has a predetermined plan that we are supposed to be following. It means that God is at the center of our lives, and that God has given us the gifts to live in that definition. As a pastor in the Reformed tradition, I'll share our vision of the purpose of our lives from John Calvin's Larger Catechism: "What is the chief and highest end of man? Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully to enjoy God forever."4
Ephesians tells us that God accomplishes this movement through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, stressing that God does this out of love, choosing us in love "according to the good pleasure of his will" (v. 5). One of the central places that we see this love is in the cross, the "redemption through his blood," as verse 7 puts it. Redemption is a word rooted in the idea of buying back a slave or freeing a captive prisoner of war through payment. Many of us modern folk struggle with the idea that Jesus paid the price for us, that he basically took the punishment that we deserve. There is good reason for our struggle. To emphasize that God needed to hurt somebody in order to justify the price of sin -- and that God hurt Jesus instead of us -- is to divide the Trinity and, even more important, to dilute the power of God's grace and love.
But, there is a profound truth in the cross that we moderns need to hear. The blood atonement is based in the truth that there are consequences to our actions. In the cross we see our resounding, "No!" to God. We would rather kill Jesus than submit our lives to being ruled by his love. The purpose of the cross is not for God to shake his finger at us and tell us how bad we are, and then spank Jesus instead of us. Rather the purpose of the cross is to show us how captive we are, for us to realize the depth and the consequences of our captivity -- we would rather kill Jesus than be loved by him. An astonishing thought! Even a cursory look at twentieth-century history (that continues now in the twenty-first century) reveals the truth of the cross: We prefer death to love. We believe in death -- we believe that love is naive and simplistic.
The author of Ephesians tells us that there is another way. It is the mystery of life that God is revealing to us in Jesus Christ. First, God intends to restore creation to its original purpose of glorifying and enjoying God, to gather up everyone and everything in Christ for the restoration of all things. What this means for the final judgment in Revelation or for the doctrine of universalism, we do not know. From the point of view of Ephesians, however, God in Jesus intends to restore all of creation -- things in heaven and things on earth.
The second part of the mystery that is revealed here is stated explicitly in 3:6: "the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Jesus Christ." This second theme of the welcoming of the Gentiles will continue throughout this letter. The Gentiles are invited into the center of all of life through God's gracious power in Jesus Christ. This second part of the mystery not only means that God wants the Gentiles. It also means that we belong to one another, Jew and Gentile. As the author will put it in the second chapter: We are in the house!
"Welcome to the center of life!" That is what the letter to the Ephesians asks us to hear and to believe. The center of life is not the Roman empire. It is not American military might. It is not money; it is not technology. It is not race or gender or sexual orientation. The center of all of life is the God we know in Jesus Christ. It is an incredible and humbling assertion. The God of all that exists, the God who hurled planets to the farthest reaches of the universe -- this God knows me and wants me. This God knows you and wants you. This God wants to be known and loved by us. This God wants our lives to be transformed by the invitation to move to the center of life. This invitation comes from God and is entirely at God's initiative. God doesn't preface it with our condition -- not our skin color or economic status or gender or immigrant status or sexual orientation. The invitation comes to us because of the nature of God's love. Welcome to the center of life! Let us say, "Yes," and let us send up our praise at dawn. Amen.
____________
1. From the poem "Meditation in the Spring Rain," by Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 135.
2. For more discussion on these issues, see any mainline commentaries. These have been helpful to me: Robert G. Bratcher and Eugene A. Nida, A Translator's Handbook on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians (London: United Bible Societies, 1982) and Pheme Perkins, Ephesians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997).
3. For more information, see Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 89-91.
4. "The Larger Catechism," in Book of Confessions, Presbyterian Church USA (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1999), p. 195.
As she spoke, I was also reminded of these beginning verses in Ephesians. Today's lectionary reading is really one long, sweeping sentence in Greek, an extended song of thanksgiving and praise to God for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. It is also a succinct summary of the faith that has nurtured the people of God for centuries, from the first century to the twenty-first.
I get ahead of myself here. We have switched streams in the epistle lectionary texts from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians to Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians is one of my favorite New Testament books, and many scholars don't even think that Paul wrote it! Ephesians speaks to something deep inside my heart, and it has done so since I was a boy. When I discovered that Paul's authorship of the letter was in dispute, my heart sank. I thought that its power rested in its connection with Paul's writing it, but over the years I've returned to my original reaction to Ephesians -- its power is evident, no matter who wrote it. Over several centuries of the early church, the general consensus from many places was that this letter spoke the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the church chose it to be part of its sacred texts.
Did Paul write Ephesians? There is evidence on both sides of the argument, but the general consensus is that it was likely written by a disciple of Paul, written not just to the church at Ephesus but as a general epistle to the emerging, Gentile-based churches in what is now western Turkey.2 In this sense, the words of this powerful letter speak to all of us. The truth of this letter resonates to every generation in every place in every age, welcoming us, as the Ephesians are welcomed, into a whole new way of life, welcoming us into the center of all that is. Welcome to the center of life!
This introductory passage of the letter to the Ephesians begins in praise and thanksgiving to the God we know in Jesus Christ, with its first phrase exactly repeating the opening phrase of 2 Corinthians: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 3). The thanksgiving is based in the fact that God, the center of all that is, the creator and sustainer of the entire universe, has come to us in Jesus Christ to offer us life and love. That claim itself is enough to give us pause, to cause us to take a break from the noise of television and cell phones and from the busyness of our lives to listen for a deeper and stunning truth. At the heart of all of creation, at the center of all of life, at the center of our own individual lives, is a loving God who seeks life for us, who asks us to be motivated by love rather than by fear. The center of life is not death or violence or injustice or greed, but love. This is quite a claim in our crazy, violence-based, fear-driven world.
The author of Ephesians tells us that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has given us what we need to live and to love in this kind of world: "Who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (v. 3b). It is not clear what the "heavenly places" are. It is a phrase used frequently in Ephesians but nowhere else in the New Testament. In other places in the New Testament, "heaven" usually describes God's residence as distinct from earth, but in chapter 6 we also hear that there are "spiritual forces of evil" in the heavenly places (6:12). This phrase more likely means here the realm where the spiritual world and the material world meet, where we live.3 Whatever the meaning of this phrase, the praise to God is rooted in the understanding that God has given us the power to do what we need to do as God's children. We live in a world that tends to make us feel afraid, powerless, and overwhelmed, but the author of Ephesians tells us that we have been given what we need: spiritual blessings. Does that mean that we can change the world? We don't know that, but we do know that God has given us the power to be witnesses. Did Rosa Parks think that she would change the world when she wouldn't give up her seat on the bus? I doubt it, but she was empowered to be a witness for God, for God's call to justice.
Ephesians is inviting us to step into the center of life. The motivation for this invitation is not our hard work or our potential or any deeds on our part -- it is God's initiative. God "chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world" (v. 4a), and this refers not to a linear time line but rather to the fact that the invitation is God's doing and not ours. It is what the strange doctrine of predestination really means. We are invited into the center of life not because of who we are or what we've done but because of who God is and what God has done.
The purpose of this initiative and movement on God's part is to set us apart as the people of God, to be brought before God as "holy and blameless" (v. 4b), using language from Leviticus 22 that has its roots in the Hebrew purity system: the animals that were to be dedicated to God had to be without blemish. The description of "holy and blameless" can be both frightening and dangerous. It is frightening because we know that we will never reach this point. There is too much baggage and too many unresolved issues individually and communally in our lives. So, many of us seek to hide from God in fear, seeking to avoid God, as Adam and Eve did, because we have an awareness that we aren't holy or blameless. At this place in our lives we discount the depth of the grace of God by deciding that God's grace is not powerful enough to bring us into the center of life, not powerful enough to overcome our shortcomings.
This language is also dangerous because one of the ways that we cope with our awareness of our frailty and failures is to move to the other end of the spectrum. We begin to believe that although we can't be perfect, we can get close. The church has a difficult and sad history that is rooted in this need to believe in our own righteousness. In this case, we discount the depth of the grace of God because we convince ourselves that we really don't need that much grace, that God loves us because we made an "A" on the test.
Despite these two tendencies regarding "holy and blameless" in the history of the church, this description actually has at least two good points that we need to hear with fresh ears. First, it emphasizes that "God is able," that God's grace is sufficient and necessary to bring us into the center of life. We may not be able to see how this can be done, or we may not think that we really need it, but these verses affirm the central truth of our lives: It is God's grace that makes us children of God. And secondly, the purpose of this movement in grace is not to make us pure but to establish us as the people of God. The primary definition of the church is not those who are pure but those who belong to God. One of the words used to describe the church in English is "ecclesiastical," and it is a direct derivative from the Greek word meaning "called out." We are thus called out of the definitions of the world into the center of life to live as those who belong to God rather than those who belong to the categories of the world.
The author of Ephesians tells us that the center of our lives is not our race or our economic status or our nationality or our gender or any other category of the world. The center of our lives is God's grace and God's purpose for our lives. To say this does not mean that God has a predetermined plan that we are supposed to be following. It means that God is at the center of our lives, and that God has given us the gifts to live in that definition. As a pastor in the Reformed tradition, I'll share our vision of the purpose of our lives from John Calvin's Larger Catechism: "What is the chief and highest end of man? Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully to enjoy God forever."4
Ephesians tells us that God accomplishes this movement through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, stressing that God does this out of love, choosing us in love "according to the good pleasure of his will" (v. 5). One of the central places that we see this love is in the cross, the "redemption through his blood," as verse 7 puts it. Redemption is a word rooted in the idea of buying back a slave or freeing a captive prisoner of war through payment. Many of us modern folk struggle with the idea that Jesus paid the price for us, that he basically took the punishment that we deserve. There is good reason for our struggle. To emphasize that God needed to hurt somebody in order to justify the price of sin -- and that God hurt Jesus instead of us -- is to divide the Trinity and, even more important, to dilute the power of God's grace and love.
But, there is a profound truth in the cross that we moderns need to hear. The blood atonement is based in the truth that there are consequences to our actions. In the cross we see our resounding, "No!" to God. We would rather kill Jesus than submit our lives to being ruled by his love. The purpose of the cross is not for God to shake his finger at us and tell us how bad we are, and then spank Jesus instead of us. Rather the purpose of the cross is to show us how captive we are, for us to realize the depth and the consequences of our captivity -- we would rather kill Jesus than be loved by him. An astonishing thought! Even a cursory look at twentieth-century history (that continues now in the twenty-first century) reveals the truth of the cross: We prefer death to love. We believe in death -- we believe that love is naive and simplistic.
The author of Ephesians tells us that there is another way. It is the mystery of life that God is revealing to us in Jesus Christ. First, God intends to restore creation to its original purpose of glorifying and enjoying God, to gather up everyone and everything in Christ for the restoration of all things. What this means for the final judgment in Revelation or for the doctrine of universalism, we do not know. From the point of view of Ephesians, however, God in Jesus intends to restore all of creation -- things in heaven and things on earth.
The second part of the mystery that is revealed here is stated explicitly in 3:6: "the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Jesus Christ." This second theme of the welcoming of the Gentiles will continue throughout this letter. The Gentiles are invited into the center of all of life through God's gracious power in Jesus Christ. This second part of the mystery not only means that God wants the Gentiles. It also means that we belong to one another, Jew and Gentile. As the author will put it in the second chapter: We are in the house!
"Welcome to the center of life!" That is what the letter to the Ephesians asks us to hear and to believe. The center of life is not the Roman empire. It is not American military might. It is not money; it is not technology. It is not race or gender or sexual orientation. The center of all of life is the God we know in Jesus Christ. It is an incredible and humbling assertion. The God of all that exists, the God who hurled planets to the farthest reaches of the universe -- this God knows me and wants me. This God knows you and wants you. This God wants to be known and loved by us. This God wants our lives to be transformed by the invitation to move to the center of life. This invitation comes from God and is entirely at God's initiative. God doesn't preface it with our condition -- not our skin color or economic status or gender or immigrant status or sexual orientation. The invitation comes to us because of the nature of God's love. Welcome to the center of life! Let us say, "Yes," and let us send up our praise at dawn. Amen.
____________
1. From the poem "Meditation in the Spring Rain," by Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 135.
2. For more discussion on these issues, see any mainline commentaries. These have been helpful to me: Robert G. Bratcher and Eugene A. Nida, A Translator's Handbook on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians (London: United Bible Societies, 1982) and Pheme Perkins, Ephesians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997).
3. For more information, see Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 89-91.
4. "The Larger Catechism," in Book of Confessions, Presbyterian Church USA (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1999), p. 195.
