Sermon manuscript from 28 June 2009:
As we begin this morning, let’s hear the Word of the Lord. From Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: Read Ephesians 4:1-16
Prayer: “God, as your people, we come together today. We come to hear a word from you. As we open our minds to engage this ancient text, may it receive new life in our own lives and in our community today. May your Spirit move in us beyond anything that I might say, so that we may hear your calling in our lives, that we may be filled to the full measure as the Body of Christ, in whom we pray. Amen.”
Ephesians is one of my favorite letters. It ranks up there with some of them that Natalie have given me and… um, no. I mean it ranks up there with some of them that Paul wrote. It’s full of these majestic images. You know I love Philippians for the real earthiness of a servant Jesus, but Ephesians is very different. It’s full of majestic images, cosmic images, world-critiquing, world-shattering, world-changing images.
In sweeping and inspiring language, Paul grounds the life and the existence and the calling of the church in a breathtaking vision of what God has already done in Jesus Christ and what God continues to do in the world through the Spirit-empowered church, the Cosmic Body of Christ.
Paul knows that God’s actions in the past and God’s goals for the future guide and empower the church and help determine the way the church views her present. How she imagines living life together today.
For Paul, in Christ God’s new creation began to break into the world with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In a very real way, heaven is already coming to earth. Right now, God is unfolding his mysterious plan for the healing of creation and the reconciliation of all of humanity both to God and with one another. God is tearing down the dividing wall that separate people from one another. He is tearing down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles in Christ, and their unity as one cosmic, holy church is a sign to the world of the wisdom of God in all of its rich variety.
That is a beautiful vision to contemplate. In fact it’s really hard to get my head around, especially in the face of the failings of the church. But even in spite of that, it is powerful, awe-inspiring. It brings me pause.
But Paul’s cosmic images, Paul’s imagination of the church, aren’t just big dreams, but they are a challenge for a small community of Christians to imagine themselves differently.
One author describes Ephesians and what Paul is trying to do there in this way, “As Paul works to open the Ephesians to a renewed imagination, he makes claims that blur the distinctions between future and present, and [between] heaven and earth… to lift us into a time and place where we can see the world differently” S. Saunders, Int. 56, 166.
Now, I think that Paul knows if he can get this church there, if he can get them to imagine themselves differently, then he can begin to turn the key, begin to pull the lever on getting them to act differently. And so the first three chapters of Ephesians, this breathtaking vision of what God ahs done, is all just groundwork that leads up to an abrupt turn at the beginning of chapter 4.
Right on the tails of a soaring prayer and a glorious “Amen,” Paul writes, (παρακαλω ουν) “In the light of all of this, I, the prisoner of the Lord, I beg, I urge, I exhort you to walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”
The shocking language moves this little church from the world of the ethereal right back down to earth. It marks a powerful turn in the letter, where Paul says, “This is where the rubber meets the road; this is where all of the high thinking theology makes a difference.”
What God is doing in the cosmic church, he is now calling you to live out in your local community. As one unified body, bound together in the Spirit in the bonds of peace, grow up as a body. Mature as a body.
You see, Paul knows that it takes a whole community to raise a church.
I’ve thought about that a lot this week, especially in light of my own life, because I’m learning more and more each day that it takes a village to raise a child. I’m just not smart enough. I don’t have enough wisdom. I need a lot of help. So, I’m thankful that my daughter gets to learn from people like Peggi and people like Val and Leanne, and that she’ll get sit at Becky’s feet some day, and that she’s already being nurtured by so many of you.
And I see in very small but very real and tangible ways the difference that it’s making. When, we were down in Texas a few weeks ago, we were walking through an auditorium with some friends of ours. They were showing us a new auditorium that they built after their church building had burned down. And all of a sudden I realized that Melaina is sitting up on the stage with a Bible… open to Isaiah… turned upside down. It’s effective reading that way. Then, all of a sudden she started telling a story, which I’m pretty sure didn’t come out of Isaiah. She said, “One time Jesus was walking down the road and there was a blind man. He was blind. He was sick. He could not see. And then, Jesus spit and made mud and put it on his eyes, and he was made well. He could see.”
She’s taking her cues on life by watching all of you, because it takes a village to raise a child.
But the other thing that I’ve been learning about that is something that I thought I knew, that I thought I understood, but that I didn’t really grasp when I was growing up. I knew that my parents were changing as I was growing, but I didn’t realize how much it was a group growing process, a group maturing process. They weren’t just raising my sister and me, but they were growing as well. My parents were changing as well. We were all growing up and maturing as a family.
It takes a village to raise a child. I think along the way the village is raised as well.
I think the church is a lot like that. I think that may begin to get at what Paul is trying to say to this little church in Ephesus, or wherever the church was.
It takes a village to raise a child… and it takes a community to raise a church…
Paul wants us to understand that maturity in Christ is a comprehensive, communal experience. We have been called as a family to work together for the maturing of this body, the whole body, each of us using our gifts to equip one another and build up the body in love.
As Paul envisions it here, unity is not optional, but is demanded for working together and growing to maturity! It’s a unity that is grounded in some core, foundational beliefs about the nature of God, about who Jesus is. But it’s also grounded in some very real experiences of baptism, of the shared experience of the Spirit, and the community of faith. And grounded in our core faith and in our experience of God, we all use our gifts for the spiritual growth and maturation and strengthening of the body and empowering it for works of service, to grow to the measure of the full stature of Christ.
All too often in my experience, and maybe it’s not your own, but all to often in my experience I’ve seen people focus far more on the things that divide us than the things that unite us. When that happens we become a fragmented and broken body. But Paul here calls us to move toward mutual service and wholeness, not to the fragmentation of the body into individuals who are reconciled to God but have no horizontal relationship with one another.
Paul here encourages us to be just like him, a prisoner, but to one another, to be chained together in the bonds of peace to maintain the unity of the Spirit. The word that he uses there, the “bonds” of peace, is from the same word that Paul uses to describe himself as a prisoner of the Lord. And so, united in God and in the fundamental mystery of the faith, the church needs all of us to bring our gifts together to serve and edify and build the body of Christ and to raise this church.
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to raise a church.
As Paul imagines it here, we are committed to Christ only as much as we are committed to one another. We are committed to Christ only as much as we are committed to unity and to promoting the growth and maturation of the whole body.
This is a hard calling. It’s a hard calling because it flies in the face of American individualism and the popular religious piety that says faith is really just about my relationship with God and doesn’t really connect with a church.
But this isn’t just a hard calling. This is a high calling. It’s a high calling because it takes seriously the mystery that God’s purposes for the world require us, that God’s imagination becomes reality only as we grow together into Christ in love, that we bear the privilege and responsibility of being Christ’s body, holding before the world an alternative vision of life-together in peace.
I really struggled to know whether or not say this, to use this illustration, but I’m going to step out, so if I make a mistake and cross a line, someone just talk to me about it later okay. I have had this funny image that popped out of this passage in my mind all week and I’ve tried to put it out of my mind, but I can’t get rid of it. It is the image of a “bobble-head Jesus,” where you’ve got this big head and this little, scrawny, impotent body that can’t do anything. And I’m worried that if we don’t strive to grow into Christ, the head, together that that is just what is going to happen to the church, that the only vision of Jesus that the world is going to have is of a bobbing-head that has absolutely no body and absolutely no impact in the world. Because here, as Paul describes it, Christ is the head and we are the body, so without us being unified and growing together in love Christ is just a bobbing head.
But it’s not just a hard calling; it’s not just a high calling. It’s also a holy calling. It’s a hold calling because we are reminded that none of us has arrived as individuals because we have not yet arrived as a church. Just as my parents changed and grew as I grew, so as a church we are all in the process of continuing to grow. No of us has yet arrived because the church has not yet arrived. So we must encourage one another and speak truth in love so that we can all continue to grow from childhood to maturity as one body in Christ.
It takes a community to raise a church. It takes all of us to help this church, the Lake Orion Church of Christ, grow to maturity. We all have something to offer. No, I think it’s much more than that. It’s not just that we each have something to offer. Each one of you has something that this body desperately needs. There is a big difference there. We are a priesthood of all believers. That is one of the things that we have held dear in Churches of Christ. We are a priesthood of all believers, not just some believers, not just believers who have been members for a long time, not just educated believers, not just official or titled believer, not just male believers. We are a priesthood of all believers. And each of us has something that we desperately need for this body to grow in maturity and to be raised up in faith. And we need you to play your part, so that Christ will have a body, so that the world will not just see a bobbing head.
This is a high calling, this is a holy calling, but, as Paul says, this is the calling to which we have been called.
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