In a famous "Peanuts" cartoon, Lucy and Linus are talking about what they want to be when they grow up. Linus says he'd like to be a doctor. Lucy responds, "You a doctor! Ha! That's a big laugh. You could never be a doctor. You know why? Because you don't love mankind, that's why."
As she skips happily away with her jump rope, Linus shouts after her, "I LOVE mankind; it's PEOPLE I can't stand."
There’s a similar idea in CS Lewis' book Screwtape Letters. It’s written as a collection of letters from Screwtape, a senior devil, advising Wormwood, a junior devil, on how to cause Christians to fail. He tells him that, if he can’t stop his target from loving altogether, then it’s better to make sure that his love is directed more and more to people on the periphery of his life, reduced to a vague benevolence towards "humanity", rather than to the actual people with whom he has to live, day by day.
It really is much easier to feel a warm glow of love towards “humanity” or to make a confession of faith that God loves the church, than it is to actually be loving towards individuals who rub us the wrong way, or towards the actual Christians we meet at church or in bible study.
We can find ourselves borrowing a line from Linus, “I love God. I love Jesus. I might even love “the church.” It’s other Christians I can’t stand.”
This morning we’re starting a new series called “Doing Life Together.” We’re going to look at what it means to be Christians together and how that is different from, and actually better than, just trying to follow God by ourselves, if that is even possible.
We’re going to start that process this morning by looking at the beginning of chapter 4 of Ephesians. In the first three chapters Paul has been gushing about the wonderful reality of the church, that in Christ we are… 3 blessed; 4 chosen; 5 adopted; 7 redeemed, forgiven; 13 sealed with the Holy Spirit; 2.5 made alive; 6 raised up; 10 we are God’s workmanship; 13 brought near to God; 19 made members of God’s household; 22 God’s dwelling place;… and the one that really blows my mind… 3.10 the revelation of God’s wisdom to the world.
Then, at the beginning of chapter 4, he turns from talking about what the church is, to the practical side of how that should affect the way we live.
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you
to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.
Before we go any further we need to take a little detour to talk about who he’s talking to here.
There’s a tendency, in our individualistic culture, to read the Bible as if it were written just to me. I’ve heard people say, and even teach from the pulpit, that the whole Bible is a letter from God to each individual believer.
That approach would have each of us read this passage as God saying to us “I urge you ___________, or you _________, or you __________ to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
The problem with that is; it only works if you have a multiple personality disorder!
You see, almost every time Paul says “you”
in his epistles, (11 times out of 12 in fact) it’s a plural “you.” Of course we
wouldn’t be having this detour if we spoke pretty much any language other than
English, because they have different words for “you” _______ and ”you” the
whole church. English doesn’t, but we need them to make sense, so we make them
up. In the South they say “y’all,” in
I think you’ll (all) agree that if Will or
James is leading worship and says, “I want you to sing this next song as loud
as you can.” it makes a difference if they’re talking to the whole congregation
or just to Vicki. And it makes a difference that what Paul is actually saying here
is, As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge
y’all to live a life worthy of the calling y’all have received.
This calling – the calling to be 3 blessed; 4 chosen; 5 adopted; 7 redeemed, forgiven; 13 sealed with the Holy Spirit; 2.5 made alive; 6 raised up; 10 God’s workmanship; 13 brought near to God; 22 God’s dwelling place; 3.10 the revelation of God’s wisdom to the world; in short, to be a foretaste of his Kingdom – this calling is something that we receive together. We are called together.
It used to be that people didn’t have “jobs,” they had “vocations.” “Vocation” is Latin for “calling,” and it’s only to be expected that your vocation, or calling, will shape your life. If your calling is to be a carpenter it will shape your life and your skill set. If your calling is to be a doctor your life and skill set will be quite different. Your calling will even shape what muscles you develop, depending on whether you spend your time installing kitchens and roofing houses, or doing fine surgical incisions on other people’s bodies.
I did four years of engineering drawing at high school and a mechanical drafting diploma at Mohawk. In my teens and twenties I worked as a draftsman for a couple of engineering companies. To this day, if I am struggling with a problem, I find it easier to work through it with a pencil in my hand, drawing diagrams and pictures. That vocation, that calling, has shaped me.
Callings come with expectations as well. For instance, doctors are expected to “first, do no harm” and to keep medical records confidential. Lawyers are expected to act in the interests of their clients. Shopkeepers are expected to keep honest scales and to sell quality goods.
Our calling as the people of God is no different. It comes with expectations. That doesn’t mean that you have to behave in a particular way to become a Christian. I run into that a lot when people find out I’m a pastor. They start saying things like “I’ll come to church as soon as I get my life straightened out.” That’s getting things backwards. We don’t live differently in order to be Christians, we live differently because we are Christians. The calling is primary. It’s our calling that shapes our life, and shapes our life together.
When we respond to God’s call to follow Jesus, we are called into community. The Bible knows nothing of solitary Christians, or solitary believers in general for that matter, whether in the Old or New Testament. Solitariness and isolation are the results of sin.
In Genesis 1 & 2 there is community; God, Adam and Eve. By the end of Genesis 3 (the third chapter of the Bible) that community has been broken by sin and rebellion. Adam and Eve are isolated from each other and from God. And at the core of God’s plan for the world is the restoration of community. He starts with one man, Abram, and from that man he builds community. First a family, then a tribe, then a nation, and eventually, in Christ, a global community of faith called the church.
In chapter 2 of Ephesians Paul speaks of the church and of how “in Christ” God has brought together Jews and Gentiles, breaking down the barriers that once held them apart. He says, “For he [Jesus] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
When we come to faith in Christ he calls us together into a community of faith that reflects the unity of God himself. (We’ll talk more about that next week.) That’s a high calling, and it isn’t easy. That’s why Paul says in verse 3, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”
There’s a lot of interest these days in
“team building.” Whether it’s the executives of big banks and major companies,
or the people at the check out for Wal-Mart and
I’m a great believer in teams. I’ll choose
a team over a committee any day. But teams have to be built from the ground up.
The movie “Remember The Titans” tells the story of a high school football team
in
Paul doesn’t tell us to build unity. He tells us to “keep the unity of the Spirit.” Unity, or community, in the church is not something we create. It is something God creates, and we are entrusted with.
Verse 4 says, “There is one body and one Spirit— just as you were called to one hope when you were called— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
Our unity as a body of believers, our community of faith, our life together as the people of God, is something that God creates. “One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.” These are all things outside of ourselves. It’s significant that “one” is repeated seven times in this list. Seven in the Bible is the number of completeness and perfection, God’s number.
We are not one community because we all like each other (because we don’t), or because we all come from the same ethnic or socio-economic background (because we don’t), or because we all like the same kind of music, or because we all have the same political views, or any number of other things that can bring people together.
I remember having a conversation with a community development worker from the Hamilton Community Foundation who was complaining that churches don’t build community, except within their own walls. On reflection, I realised that we have different roles. As a community development worker her role was to build community where there was none, community that is often based on something as simple as living on the same street. As a pastor my role is to strengthen a community that I had no part in forming – that was in fact created by God – and to encourage that God-created community to live out our calling together.
We don’t create our life together, our unity, our community, God does.
We don’t create our unity, our life together… but we can break it. Which is why we are encouraged to “make every effort” to “keep” our unity, to safeguard it, to make sure we don’t break it.
I helped a family move yesterday. They moved everything they own from an apartment into a house. Some of those things were quite fragile. There was a lampstand with two stained glass butterflies on it. None of us had made it. I don’t think any of us would have had the skill to make something like that. But we did “make every effort” to “keep” it in one piece as we moved it. We didn’t throw it in a box. We carried it separately down in the elevator. We didn’t put it in the back of the pickup. It went in the front seat and someone held it in their lap.
It made the move in one piece.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the kitchen chair that came off the
back of the truck as we turned from
Our unity, our life together, is God-given and precious, but it is also fragile. Clearly you can’t throw a fragile piece of stained glass in a box and chuck it in the back of a pickup and expect it to survive. Neither can we take our life together for granted and treat it roughly and expect it to not to be damaged.
So how do we “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit” ? How do we keep it safe?
You might think that the answer would be to restrict access to our community, to keep out “the wrong kinds of people,” to make sure that we only let in people who agree with us. You see, that way there would be less jostling. We’d have a nice smooth community, with no arguments or strife, and there would be less chance for our unity to be bumped and broken. You might even think that’s what Paul means when he says that we keep our unity safe “through the bond of peace.”
Except that in verse 2 he tells us to “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”
You don’t need to be patient with people who don’t upset you. You don’t need to bear with people you agree with. This is how we maintain our unity in the bond of peace, not by excluding people we disagree with, but by loving them.
We can safeguard our life together by being humble. That way, if we get into a disagreement about something, we will be humble enough to consider that the other person might actually be right and that we might be wrong.
We can safeguard our life together by being gentle. Even if we are convinced that we are right and that the other person is wrong, we can still treat them with respect and gently seek to explain why we believe one way rather than another. When I was a young Christian, I was greatly influenced by Francis Schaeffer. He was a brilliant man and a great debater. He would debate with atheists and all kinds of people who disagreed with him, but he was always gentle and gracious as he did it. So much so that he would sometimes lose the point under discussion but win his audience. I fear that too often I may err in the other direction, winning the point but losing the person.
We can safeguard our life together by being
patient. We don’t have to all agree on everything this week. Paul goes on,
after this passage, to speak about the leadership gifts of apostle, prophet,
evangelist and pastor-teacher being given to build up the body “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the
knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure
of the fullness of Christ.”
So, clearly, while unity of the Spirit is something that is given to us by God, unity in the faith and knowledge of the Son of God is something that takes time to develop. And things that take time require that we be patient with one another.
And we can safeguard our life together by bearing with one another. Patience is something you extend to others. To bear with someone means that you hold yourself in check. In practical terms it means not taking offence.
Some of the hardest people to live with are those who are easily offended. They are offended by what others say or don’t say. They are offended by what others do or don’t do. They take offence; then they put it in their pocket and nurture it like Tam o’Shanter’s wife, sitting at home, “Gathering her brows like a gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”
If we take offence, and hold on to it, and let it fester and grow, it hurts our life together. We can avoid that by bearing with one another.
We’ve been talking about unity and community. We are about to celebrate communion, a word that comes from the same root and talks about coming together at the Lord’s table. Taking communion with one another doesn’t mean that we all agree about everything. It does mean that we commit to being humble and gentle with one another, patiently bearing with our differences as we grow together as the people of God.