Westminster Congregational United Church of Christ

Sermon for August 9, 2009

Shaping Community

Pastor Marj Johnston

Ephesians 4:25-5:2 (The Message)

²⁵What this adds up to, then, is this:  no more lies, no more pretense.  Tell your neighbor the truth.  In Christ's body we're all connected to each other, after all.  When you lie to others, you end up lying to yourself.

^26-27Go ahead and be angry.  You do well to be angry—but don't use your anger as fuel for revenge.  And don't stay angry.  Don't go to bed angry.  Don't give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life.

²⁸Did you use to make ends meet by stealing?  Well, no more!  Get an honest job so that you can help others who can't work.

²⁹Watch the way you talk.  Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth.  Say only what helps, each word a gift.

³⁰Don't grieve God.  Don't break [God’s] heart.  [God’s] Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for [an eternal and sacred relationship].  Don't take such a gift for granted.

^31-32Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.  Be gentle with one another, sensitive.  Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.

5  ^1-2Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents.  Mostly what God does is love you.  Keep company with [God] and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us.  [Christ’s] love was not cautious but extravagant.  [Jesus] didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us.  Love like that.

~*~*~

Scholars and theologians tell us that the apostle Paul lived after Jesus died, and that he had never met Jesus in person. The texts gathered in the New Testament also tell us of Paul’s conversion from being a rather judgmental and notoriously mean-spirited Jew to one of the most radical Jews of his day.  Paul’s words and the life he led had been full of prodding at fellow Jews who didn’t follow the Law closely enough and mocking and treating anyone who was not a Jew with loathing and despise.  In Paul’s change of heart, mind and soul he became as passionate about the teachings of Jesus as he previously had been about Jewish Law.  Some of my ministerial colleagues and congregations of various traditions have a tendency to use the letters of Paul sometimes almost exclusively as examples of how we people of faith today are to live into our faith journeys.  The tension around this type of teaching for me has always been that the words of Paul are perhaps inspired and well-intended, but some of Paul’s teachings appear to be in conflict with the very teachings of Jesus himself.  They might speak to Paul’s context and certainly his perspectives, but what about in relationship to the Gospel stories recorded by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and what about in context with the Hebrew texts?

Don’t get me wrong – I think the epistles we read from the New Testament are rich and full of things from which we can learn from Paul and other writers to the new believers of that day.  And I like to remind myself that these words are perspectives on the words of Jesus based on Paul’s living as a person transformed by the Spirit of God.  Paul’s words are often reminders that how I read the words of Jesus and how I experience the stories from the Hebrew texts are indeed MY experiences and MY opportunities to listen for God’s leading, to trust the Spirit of God to open my heart and my soul’s eyes and ears to hear a beckoning that leads me into loving God with everything of who I am, of who I am becoming, into loving my neighbors as myself.

This morning’s reading was sort of like “old home week” for me in my faith journey.  I professed my faith in the teachings of Jesus when I was about to turn 13, was baptized and Sunday school teachers continued to share with me from their faith and life experiences what they thought the Bible would have me believe and do in order to become the best Christian teen possible.  We spent months reading various letters in the New Testament, abandoning the gospels and looking at what I called “to-do lists for Christians.”  That worked for a very short time.  Yes, I do think the letters of Paul and other apostles in the New Testament have validity.  But the more I read and studied, the more tension there was for me around how the teachings of Jesus were enhanced or inhibited by the rest of these sacred texts.  The question for me was when I held the gospel records in one hand and the balance of the New Testament teachings in the other, how could I could possibly expect to follow the teachings of Jesus when the other words made it seem almost impossible to live by grace through long lists of how I had to live in order to experience a full relationship with God through the teachings of Jesus?

Of course, frequent readings of the epistles further indicate that Paul himself struggled with that very question of grace and living by the Law, as did most of the people to whom he was writing letters.  The people of Ephesus, Philippi, Galatia, Colosse, Corinth and Thessalonica were all people like you and me:  People with real lives, real families, real jobs, and real efforts to understand the purpose of our lives and how to live fully as we journey through life.  I was indeed a young doubter then, and throughout the years I continue to have questions, which is why I love the phrase that we are questioners, believers and questioning believers.

We gather in this sanctuary, a place set apart from the rest of our week and the world out there, and we sing, pray and talk about how we are a part of something bigger, about the efforts it takes to work with other people who have other perspectives that draw upon all of us to make any of it work.  And in various faith communities this morning, others are hearing these same words from the apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians.

What may be different in our hearing the words this morning?  I’ve heard enough reminders about how I don’t live life “right” by someone else’s perspectives.  So what can we hear this morning about the journey we share?  What might be different in how we hear the words, how we act toward one another, how we live out the text this morning?  How does what we hear and share in this space help shape our communities in which we live?

There are people in our lives where we work, where we go to school, social gatherings who can poke holes in our claims that we are A people of God learning to live together and to do more as we share common stories and experiences on our way through life.  The church on the whole is often shaken when a scandal is reported, or when we bicker among ourselves about who can and who cannot share in communion or be baptized or find a place in the pews on Sunday morning.  People who don’t worship on Sunday mornings and who remain skeptical—even those who say “I’m spiritual but not religious” in order to maintain a safe distance from the institution of church—they know that we who gather inside these doors struggle with our fear of the other, our fear of who is different, our apprehension about change … real change that each one of us might have to be willing to make in order to see God at work for the greater good.

The writer of these words to the believers in Ephesus challenges us to not let our words become just words … expressions without honest sentiment, cheap and lacking just because they seem like the “right” things to say as people of faith.

If we made a list from the reading this morning, here would be the things we are being asked to refrain from doing, practices we avoid as people of faith in the teachings of Jesus:  we would refrain from lying, pretense or deceit, from being angry with one another, both inside and outside the church; stealing; we’d stop with the sharp, cutting or backbiting words; profanity; and anything that might grieve the God who has created us.

Now most of us know of people who point out that churches are full of hypocrites, that the teachings of Jesus are about forgiveness and love and making the world a different place.  Some of us have even claimed the church as full of people who hear but don’t live out the things we read and question about the teachings of Jesus, the words of the prophets, the Psalms with their hope and their crying out to God.  But do we model that we gather as a people forgiven and forgiving, trying again to become more like Jesus in how we live into the faith we profess? 

You see, right after this list of things we’re to let go of as daily practices, the words are:  Be gentle with one another, sensitive.  Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you?

And that’s what we want people to hear and see that makes us different from other people who profess faith in the God.  At the core of this morning’s text is that we are to be forgiving, just as we have been forgiven.  We are to overlook one another’s shortcomings as God overlooks ours.  We’re to aspire to richer ways of living with each other because of how we engage with the teachings of Jesus. 

There is a connection between the gospel records of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the words of the apostles that followed.  We read and consider what the words of Jesus mean, we explore their implications for us as we journey forward to be and to become individuals and a faith community, and we get to practice what we talk about as forgiveness from the Holy One, that we are not yet all of who we are meant to be and that there is this gap in our relationship between who we are and who God invites us to become as whole and healthy people in relationship with our Creator and with each other.  And along the way, we get to practice being gentle towards one another, pardoning others who hurt our feelings, step on our toes, make poor choices that have implications for others in life.

From here we can see both our call and our challenge as individuals who choose to gather in this place.  We are called and we are facing a challenge of how we gather and worship and then how we return to our community to live out the teachings of Jesus with grace from the One who has created and is still creating and with forgiveness for ourselves and for those we meet on the journey.  We get to practice kindness and forgiveness and lessen our own hardness of heart as we move into the presence of God, or to use a spiritual phrase—draw near to the heart and life of God.

And here’s what I read as the heart of the matter as we live into our faith journey as individuals and together.  In The Message it reads, “Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents.  Mostly what God does is love you.  Keep company with God and learn a life of love.  Observe how Christ loved us.  Christ’s love was not cautious but extravagant.  Jesus didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us.  Love like that.”

In the New Living Translation, it reads, “Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are God’s dear children.  Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ.  He loved us ….”

The Contemporary English Version reads, “Do as God does. After all, you are God’s dear children. Let love be your guide….”

The King James Version, “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also have loved us….”

And the New International Version:  “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us ….”

Do you know what this really means?  No matter which version of the text we read, no matter which translation, the words slightly different and the message is the same:  Imitating God means acting in ways that reflect and show the character of God.  Through whatever means we use, imitate your understanding, your experiences of how you have been loved by God, of how you want to be loved by God, how you long to be loved by God….  You ARE beloved of God and in what you say, what you do, how you act toward others, in your art whether it’s with paint or fabric or words or music, in how you prepare food… whatever you do, do it with such gusto and passion that others can’t help but know that there is a Spirit—the Spirit of the Holy One—that permeates your being and makes what you say and what you do different.  Imitate God, practice the teachings of Jesus ….

According to the gospels stories, the stories of Jesus and his teachings and how he lived with the people of his day, God acted in love through Jesus and the Spirit to bring us hope and to make things different if we longed for that.  Paul and the other followers of Jesus whose teachings we also continue to read modeled their hopes on the teachings of Jesus that every day something would be different, that those who met them and spent time with them would know that there were things in place for new ways to be forgiving and kind with one another.

We are instructed this morning in the text that we can and must live differently.  We are imitators of the actions of Jesus whose life replicated God’s love for humankind.  May we become those who imitate God, inviting others to draw near to God through our efforts to be kind and forgiving, bringing hope to all we meet.