|
|
Reading Other People’s Mail: Part I
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
July 12, 2009
Ephesians 1:3-14
I stand up to
preach this morning as I have stood up to preach nearly every Sunday morning for
the last twenty two years. Twenty two years. 1,134 Sundays. That’s a lot of
sermons! Of course I didn’t preach all of those Sundays. I still take a few
weeks’ vacation every year. But if you figure in all the Sunday night sermons I
preached in my first church, and those prayer meetings, revivals, and mid-week
worship services, and that one Holy Week in 1994 where I preached ten times in
eight days, well, that’s a whole lot of sermons.
When I came to
First Baptist last year I asked my secretary, Joyce Chrisman, if she would help
me organize those sermons. When she realized what a big job it would be she
wisely asked Betty Lowry to help out, and for several weeks Betty sat in that
little room between my office and Joyce’s, looking through those sermons and
trying to figure out where they should go. In the end she and Joyce organized
them not by date or topic, but by books of the Bible, starting with Genesis and
continuing all the way through Revelation. Those of you who have been listening
to me preach for a while will not be surprised to learn that they ended up with
an entire file cabinet for the Gospels: one drawer each for Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. And while there were plenty of sermons from the Old Testament it
probably won’t surprise you that I didn’t need a drawer each for the Books of
Ezra, Habakkuk, Joel, and Obadiah. But what did come as a surprise was how few
sermons there were from Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians,
Philippians, Colossians, and it made me wonder: had I been neglecting that part
of the Bible we refer to as the Epistles, that precious collection of letters
from Paul and others in the early church? As I tried to feed my congregations
through the years, had I been serving up mouth-watering entrees from Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John but leaving off the tasty side dishes of 1 and 2
Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus? It’s not like those people hadn’t
heard the epistles; we read them almost every week in worship. But
apparently I hadn’t preached them very often and when I was confronted
with the evidence I had to ask myself why.
I’m not sure I
know all the reasons, but I suspect that I haven’t preached from the epistles
because it feels too much like reading other people’s mail. These are real
letters, most of them, and they aren’t addressed to us. They are addressed to
the churches at Corinth, or Philippi, or Thessalonica. They address particular
concerns within those churches, and some of them are embarrassingly private. Do
you think Paul really wanted the whole world to know that a member of the
Corinthian church was living with his father’s wife? (1 Cor. 5:1). I don’t
think so. It’s true that there are times when the problems we face in church
are so much like those problems faced by the early church that the letters seem
to be written just for us. Count it all joy, then, brothers and sisters, that I
haven’t felt led to preach from the epistles every Sunday. It might just mean
that we don’t have as many problems as some churches do.
But of course
the epistles don’t only address the problems in the early church. Often they
teach theology. But often they do it in such an abstract way that a concrete
thinker like me can have trouble grasping the concepts. I was one of these
people who never did very well in algebra. For me, X plus Y always equaled “so
what.” But geometry was different. In geometry you got to draw pictures of
things, you could see what you were working on. I liked that, and I think I
like the Gospels for the same reason. When Mark talks about Jesus healing the
sick or casting out demons I can see the picture in my mind. But when Paul
talks about redemption or righteousness or sanctification I sometimes feel just
as baffled as I did in algebra class. How do you draw a picture of redemption?
Finally, I don’t
preach from the Epistles as often as I might because it’s more than reading
other people’s mail: it’s preaching other people’s sermons. Paul and the other
writers of these letters are trying to communicate to Christian congregations
everything they know about the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ, which is
just what I do on Sunday mornings! I look at the story of Jesus, and I try to
tell you what it means. The writers of these letters are looking at the story
of Jesus and trying to tell their congregations what it means. At its worst it
seems like plagiarism to preach from these letters: why not just read them to
you? At its best it seems redundant to say over again in other words what the
writers of these letters have already said. But that still doesn’t excuse me
from my dilemma.
The truth is,
these letters are part of sacred Scripture, and no less than the Gospel of our
Lord Jesus Christ they are “the Word of God for the People of God.” As
Christians we believe that “all Scripture is inspired by God, and is profitable
for teaching, for reproof, for correction” (2 Tim. 3:16). We believe that these
words written by Peter and Paul and John and others have something of God’s own
word in them, and if we listen carefully we can hear God speaking through them.
To never preach from the epistles would be to leave out of your sermonic diet
not only some tasty side dishes, but also those epistolary vitamins and minerals
which are essential to your overall spiritual health. So, forgive me if I have
neglected you and pray for me as I begin a sermon series from the letter to the
Ephesians that may be one of the most difficult series I have ever attempted.
I’m not sure I can pull it off. I may find that by the second sermon I’m ready
to give it up.
But if I’m going
to try it, I’m glad I’m trying with Ephesians rather than some other letter.
One of my favorite phrases in the Bible is in chapter 5, where the writer says
that, “Christ loved the church and gave himself for it,” because that’s how I
feel about the church. I love it. I would give myself for it. And the letter
to the Ephesians is all about it. Scott Nash writes: “The letter to the
Ephesians is for church people. It is for people who believe in the church and
yet hold doubts about it, who cherish the church and yet find themselves
chronically angry with it, who dream of the church’s potentials and yet agonize
over the church’s shortcomings—for those who care enough about the church to
love and hate it at the same time. Ephesians is for church people.”
If we’re going
to spend some time with it over the next few weeks it might help you to know
that what we call “the letter of Paul to the Ephesians” is probably not a
letter, probably not written by Paul, and probably not addressed to the
Ephesians. Scholars have reached consensus on the suggestion that Ephesians is
a kind of general treatise on the nature and mission of the church, written near
the end of the first century, and distributed to a number of local
congregations. There are some scholars, in fact, who think the letter may have
had a blank space at the top and we ended up with the copy that had been filled
in with the word “Ephesians.” The language and thought of the letter are just
enough different from Paul’s to make us think that it was probably not written
by him, but by someone who was a faithful disciple of his, and who wrote in
Paul’s name out of admiration and respect for his teacher.
New Testament
scholar Ralph Martin says that the purpose of the letter, first of all, is “to
show the nature of the church and the Christian life to those who came to Christ
from a pagan heritage and environment.”
While that message might be more relevant to people in places like Los Angeles,
or New York, even here, in Richmond, it seems that fewer and fewer people
understand what the church is or what it’s for. Our context is really not so
different from the context in which this letter was written, when, as Martin
says, “Gentile Christians were streaming into the church, adopting an easygoing
moral code based on a perverted misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching.” And
not only that, but they had almost no appreciation for the Jewish heritage of
the church. In the way some young people might come into a church and take it
over from the older generation, these Gentile Christians were saying they didn’t
need the Jews. Again it is Martin who says, “They became intolerant of their
Jewish brothers and sisters and forgetful of the Jewish past of salvation
history.”
They needed to be reminded of where the church had come from, what it was all
about, and where it was headed.
We still do.
If you will open
your Bibles to the first chapter of Ephesians we can begin this six-week journey
of understanding and appreciating the church. It might help you to know that
the Greek word that we translate “church” is the word ekklesia. It means
“called out,” and if you can I want you to picture a room full of people who
have been called out of the world and into the church. I want you to picture
this room filled up with the people Jesus loved enough to die for and who
loved him enough to receive that incredible gift—people like us. And then I
want you to imagine that we have all been called out of the world and into this
room to hear the reading of a will. We’re interested to hear this will. We
have a suspicion that there might be something in it for us. But it hasn’t been
easy to get here. We had to know the password first of all—“Jesus is Lord.”
And the only way to get into this room was through the baptistery. So here we
sit, all of us still dripping wet, dressed in our baptismal robes, and waiting
to hear what the will of God might be. We all get quiet as the judge comes out,
takes his seat, and begins to read from Ephesians 1:3-14:
Praise be to the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every
spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the
world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be
adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and
will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the
One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with
all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will
according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into
effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in
heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were also
chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out
everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who
were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you
also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of
your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the
promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the
redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of his glory (NIV).
The word of God for the
people of God; thanks be to God.
In Greek, this
passage is all one sentence. It’s as if the writer is so excited about what he
has to tell us that he can’t pause for breath. “Listen, church,” he gasps.
“Three cheers for God! He has poured out on us every blessing he had to give.
He chose us before the foundation of the world. He destined us
for adoption as his children. He lavished on us the grace that forgives
and redeems. And now he has made known to us the mystery that has been kept
secret for ages, that this was his plan from the very beginning—to send his son
Jesus to gather up a bunch of misfits like us and make us into
his perfect, pure, and
holy church—people who will share in his inheritance and shine
with his glory forever and
ever and ever, Amen.” If you can keep that image of the reading of the will
alive in your thoughts, then you can imagine how we might begin to wonder if we
had heard right. “Us? We’re going to receive forgiveness and redemption and
glory? What did we ever do to deserve that?” Well, nothing, of course. Grace
that you deserve isn’t grace at all. It is just God’s way to give us more than
we could ask for or imagine.
Here we are,
people from everywhere and nowhere, people who are somebodies and nobodies, the
haves right along with the have-nots, and yet we learn that before the
foundation of the world God loved us and called us his own, so that now as his
adopted children we stand to inherit everything he has set aside for his own and
only begotten son. That’s what it means to be the church, and the only
appropriate response is amazement. We should walk out of here today blinking in
the noonday sun, stunned by what we have learned, wobbling down the sidewalk, so
that someone might have to ask, “Are you OK?”
You could
understand the question: there you are standing barefoot on the sidewalk,
dripping wet in a white baptismal robe with a look of stunned amazement on your
face. You could anticipate the question. It’s the answer that surprises you.
“OK?” you say. “Am I OK? Listen, I’ve just learned that I’m a child of God,
part of the church, chosen from before the foundation of the world, destined for
adoption, redeemed and forgiven. Yeah, I’m OK. I’m way better than OK. All
heaven has broken loose, and I’ve just been standing in that church with my head
thrown back, my mouth wide open, drinking up every blessing God has poured out
on my head.
“I can hardly wait to come
back next week.”
—Jim Somerville © 2009
|
