It’s always interesting to read the signs outside of churches. Some of them are just plain lame, like the one that reads, “God is like Coca Cola; He’s the real thing.” How lame is that? Some are a little strange, like, “Church Parking: Trespassers will be baptized.” And some are really quite insightful, like the one that reads, “Prayer: Wireless access to God, with no roaming fee”. I saw a church sign in town recently that said, “Tired of searching for the perfect church? Then come and join us.” It’s like the old joke, “If you find the perfect church, don’t join it. It wouldn’t be perfect anymore.”
Personally, I don’t think there is any such thing as a perfect church, but over the next few weeks we’ll be looking into Ephesians again; staring in chapter 4, in a series that I’ve called “The Ideal Church.”
Just to get us back into where we’ve been so far this year… In the spring we spent 9 weeks in the first three chapters of Ephesians. Those first three chapters are full of theology. They’re all about being “in Christ”. It’s great stuff! In Christ we are “blessed… in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing.” (1.3) In Christ we are chosen (1.4, 11). We are forgiven (1.7). We are part of God’s plan (1.9). We have hope (1.12). We are included (1.13). We are raised up in Christ (2.6). We receive God’s grace in Christ (2.7). We are a new creation in him (2.10). We are brought near to God in him (2.13). We experience God’s presence in him (2.21, 22). In Christ we have a share in God’s promises (3.6). And in him we approach God with freedom and confidence (3.12).
As he talks about all these blessing that are available in Christ, Paul takes great pains to point out that these are available to anyone and everyone who comes to Christ in faith. They aren’t just for the Jews, they’re for the Gentiles too (that’s us). So that those who were once “foreigners and aliens” are now “fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household.” (2.19) The churches that Paul helped found and that he wrote to had an amazing diversity of people in them. Not just people who were Jews and “god-fearers” (people on the fringes of the Jewish synagogue) but Scythians, Cretans, and Greeks, and Lysians, and Romans. And there were people from all social classes, land owners and business people as well as slaves and manual workers and craftsmen.
That was one of Paul’s main points in the first three chapters of Ephesians. When God draws people to himself, he draws them towards each other too.
This is the big picture, the theological background. Then at the beginning of chapter 4 Paul changes gears, from theology (what we believe,) to ethics (how we behave).
This is where the rubber meets the road. If we say we’ve put our faith in Jesus and accepted God’s offer of life in his son, what difference should that make in our lives? In Ephesians 4.1 Paul says, “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” Then in verse three he says, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” He’s saying that we should live lives that are worthy of the calling we have received, that there should be visible evidence of our new life in Christ. Then he spends the next three chapters telling us what that should look like. In the process he talks about all kinds of things like, “Unity”, “Diversity”, “Maturity” and “Purity.”
This morning I want us to look at what Paul says about “Unity,” but before we go there, I just want to spend some time talking about the “s-word.”
A couple of minutes ago I used a word that makes some of people uncomfortable. I said that we should live lives worthy of our calling. Folks often get upset when you start using the “s” word, “should,” in a conversation. We can talk about “your opinion” and “my opinion.” We can talk about “what’s right for you” and “what’s right for me,” but as soon as anybody starts using the s-word, and saying that here is something that people should do, there is often a reaction. “What right do you have to tell me what I should do?” “What right do you have to impose your values on me?” “I make up my own mind about what’s right for me.” Like the song says, “I’ll do it my way.”
Unfortunately, that isn’t really an option for us as Christians. Jesus made it clear that there are certain expectations attached to following him. Yes, he welcomed all kinds of people, but he also called upon them to change and to follow his way, not their own. Again and again Jesus reached out and drew people to himself who would have been rejected by the regular society and religious people. But he didn’t leave it there. He called for change too. You can’t really say that Jesus’ followers included tax-collectors, lepers and adulterers. It included former tax collectors, former lepers and former adulterers. Matthew and Zacheus, the tax collectors, left their jobs. The leper was healed, and the woman caught in adultery was told to go and sin no more, not to return to her lover.
Paul does the same thing. In fact the second halves of most of his letters have to do with what kinds of expectations there are for Christians, and Ephesians is no different. Unfortunately, in English the second half of Ephesians sounds like one long list of commands. “Do this! “Do that!” In just the first few verses of chapter 4 we get, “Be humble and gentle!” “Be patient!” “Make every effort!” That’s unfortunate, because the closest thing to a direct command here is actually in verse 1 and what Paul says is, “I urge you…” or “I encourage you…” or better yet “I implore you, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
He’s just spent three chapters talking about the wonderful blessings of being “in Christ.” Now he’s pleading with the Ephesians for that reality to make a difference in the way they actually live.
In chapter 3 verse 6 he wrote that, “through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.” In Jesus, all these different ethnic and language groups that I just mentioned (Greeks, Jew, Scythians, etc.), they’re now members of one body and Paul is basically saying, “OK now, live like you believe it.”
But he’s not naïve. He realises that there are always difficulties when people get together. The more different the people are, the greater the difficulties. Marilyn grew up here in Hamilton. She went to school at Delta. Despite having travelled all around the world, she still has a lot in common with other Hamiltonians who grew up middle-class in the 60s and 70s. Not just school and popular culture, like TV shows, but she at least understands a lot of the same shared expectations and dreams and ways of doing things.
Marrying me was a culture shock for her! (Getting married is always a culture shock.) There’s no question that Scotland and Canada share the same cultural roots (and something close to the same language) but there are also significant differences. Things that I just took for granted were news to her, and vice versa.
[One simple example was serving dinner. Marilyn and I got married in a community setting where most meals were communal. The community was led mainly by North Americans, and it always struck me as strange that they would talk about how nice it was having their meals “family style.” By that they meant that servers would put platters and bowls of meat, potatoes, rice, whatever in the middle of the table and people would serve it up at the table.
That’s not how my family, or any of my school friends’ families, served dinner. In my house, the person who made dinner would serve it straight off the stove onto the plates and then put the plates on the kitchen table, which is where we ate. The only place where I had experienced food brought to the table in bowls and served out was at school for school lunches. So what Marilyn and others saw as “a nice touch of home,” I experienced as the ultimate in institutional eating.]
Marilyn and I didn’t come from any great cultural distance and we spoke the same language, but we still had some serious learning to do to understand each other. Imagine the cultural and social stresses involved in the church at Ephesus. The very thing that Paul is so excited about, the inclusion of all nations and languages in God’s plan, makes it so much more difficult for the community to function together. You have language differences, cultural differences, and people coming from different faith heritages with different ideas of what words like “God” “saviour” or “faith” mean.
Into this situation Paul says, “I plead with you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” And the things he focuses on first of all are things that relate directly to the diversity in the community. These aren’t commands as much as they’re descriptions of what the community of faith needs to look like if it’s going to be able to deal with all the ethnic and cultural diversity that the gospel welcomes. To show that, I’m going to use the New American Standard Version here, because it’s a much more literal translation. (I don’t normally like literal translations, but in this case the literal translation gets it right.)
2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, 3 being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Not a single command! For those of you who didn’t hate grammar at school, the closest thing to a verb is “to preserve!”
My point is that Paul is not wagging his finger at the Ephesians, or us, and saying, “Do this! Do that!” What he’s doing is pleading with us to have our faith make a difference in how we live. And, because he has just finished talking about the wonderful diversity that there should be in the church, he takes that as his jumping off point to fill out what he means. He’s not just giving orders, he’s teaching about what the marks of a Christian life are, and the marks that he picks to focus on first are; Humility, Gentleness, Patience and Tolerance. Can you see how important these are when you’re dealing with people from different backgrounds from yourself?
Humility is the first step because humility allows us to consider the possibility that our way of doing things isn’t necessarily the only way, or the right way. It might be just our way. It’s not right or wrong to serve food straight onto the plate, or to put it into a bowl first. It’s just different.
And we need Gentleness because it is so easy to hurt each other without meaning to. We’re often insensitive to others’ feelings, but if we can learn to treat each other with gentleness it will go a long way towards smoothing out the bumps in our relationships.
As the Ephesians learned to live together in a multicultural community of faith they would have needed lots of patience with each other. The Greek word translates literally as long-tempered. We all know what short-tempered is. Patience is the opposite.
[When I was learning Dutch I stayed with a Dutch family, Dirk and Audrey Zwijnenburg. I still refer to them as my Dutch family, but Audrey wasn’t born in the Netherlands. She was born and raised on a farm in Australia, where she spoke nothing but Dutch until she went to primary school, at which point she learned English. So she spoke fluent Dutch and fluent Australian English. But in all the time I stayed with them to learn Dutch she would never take the short cut of explaining something to me in English. Instead she would patiently work with me in Dutch until I understood it in Dutch.]
That’s the kind of patience that’s needed if we’re going to have a community that reflects God’s love for all nations and cultures.
Then, finally Paul lists Tolerance. This isn’t the modern version of tolerance that says that all views are equally valid. This is the real meaning of tolerance, which means that you disagree with someone (you think they’re wrong) but you will bear with them because of your commitment to some higher value. True tolerance doesn’t deny that we can disagree. It doesn’t paper over the cracks. True tolerance says, “I will still make space for you, even though I think you’re wrong, because we share a commitment to something higher.”
And the higher value that Paul appeals to
is what he calls, “the unity of the Spirit.” He says, Being diligent or
making every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of
peace.
I want to point out something here. The unity of the Spirit is not something we work towards or create. Paul doesn’t say, working hard to achieve unity in the Spirit. He doesn’t making every effort to build unity in the Spirit. He says, Being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
He’s saying to the Ephesians that, because they all have come to faith in Jesus, they are all one in Him, no matter what their background. He’s already said as much in Ephesians 2:17, “He (that is Jesus) came and preached peace to you who were far away (Gentiles) and peace to those who were near (Jews). 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” Then in verse 22 he says, “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”
So we don’t create unity in the church. Church unity isn’t a matter of sitting down at some theological poker table with our lists of doctrines and practices and saying, “OK I see your Virgin Birth and raise you a Believer’s Baptism.” No. If we belong to Jesus, we belong to each other, whether we like it or not. He’s the one that brings us together.
And the reason why we can aspire to that kind of unity is rooted in the oneness of God himself.
4 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.
The church is one body because there is one Spirit and one Lord, one God and Father of all.
There aren’t multiple, different gods for different folks; Baal, Ashteroth, Kali, Ganesh, take your pick. Neither are there different versions of one God; Yahweh, Allah, Mithras. Both of those options actually draw people further apart.
But, as God draws us towards himself, as we get to know the God revealed in the Bible better, we are also drawn closer to one another. We may come from different perspectives (Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist) but as we draw closer to Jesus we begin to understand others’ perspectives. [illus]
One of the tests of our vision of Jesus is, “Does it draw us closer to the God revealed in the Bible and closer to other believers?” If it’s taking us off on a tangent somewhere, we may be following a Jesus of our own making, not the one we find in the Bible.
Buried in the middle of that confession about one God are two statements about our response to him; One faith, One baptism. We are born into God’s family when we respond to him in faith, believing that he loves us and sent Jesus to die in our place. We identify with that family, we visibly unite ourselves with other Christians, in the act of baptism.
As we pray and consider how God is calling us to reach out to other Christians, especially the Karen refugees who are coming to Hamilton, we need to remember that unity is something we preserve, not something we create. Everybody who trusts Jesus for their salvation is our brother and sister, no matter what language they speak, or clothes they wear, or tradition they come from.
Even so, we will have lots of opportunity to practise humility, gentleness, patience and tolerance as we seek to preserve that unity and serve our brothers and sisters.