If The Armor Fits, Wear It: Waging Peace In God’s Army? – 8/23/09 – Ephesians 6:10-20

I like the way that two contrasting ideas, or two very different pictures, sometimes show up alongside each other and give either a fresh insight into a reality or make us ask some questions about the nature of things. 

Earlier this week we spontaneously decided that I could take a vacation day mid-week so we could go up to my folks and process some garden produce that was ripe and ready to be done.  So I did a little rearranging of schedule and we headed up and had a great day working under the shade of Mom and Dad’s big maple tree cutting up and bagging sweet corn and green peppers to freeze for the winter.  The sharp contrast came toward the end of the day.  Throughout the day we had been talking some with my cousin who is my folks’ age.  She has been staying with Mom and Dad and is soon to move in with her sister in out West.  These last number of years she’s had some difficult health problems, hasn’t been able to work, has had some financial struggles (connected to not having health insurance), some depression, and is now having to whittle down her belongings to just the basics so she can move in with her sister.  This was being extremely heavy for her this week.  And then at the end of the day as we were saying goodbye to her it started pouring down rain and Eve and Lily stripped off all their clothes and startedfrolicking around out in the yard in the middle of the downpour.  So we were hugging our late-middle aged cousin who had the weight of the world of her shoulders, and we were looking at this perfect picture of carefree bliss with our laughing naked daughters.  This is life.      

I think putting unexpected images alongside each other or trying to merge them together is also a strategy that works well in visual art.  I visit the Red Tree Art Gallery and Coffee shop here in Oakley fairly regularly.  They change their displays about once a month and this past month they had the theme of superheroes.  So all of the art had something to do with superheroes.  The painting that caught my attention the most was one of a person from the waist on down, she’s wearing a kitchen apron, with the words beside it, “I wear my cape around my waist.”  Common apron as domestic super hero.  I liked it so much I had this scheme to buy it and surprise Abbie with it on her birthday.  I got as far as getting it down from the wall and handing the manager my credit card with painting in hand until I realized that I had completely mis-read the price tag.  I think my brain wanted it enough that it imagined it as being affordable.  Oh well, the idea is still valuable. 

We’re at the end of Ephesians, and at the end of this series of “Being the Church,” and I think Ephesians 6 is another good example of contrasting, or unexpected images held together in a way that might give some fresh insight.  You can turn there if you’d like, and I’ll read verses 10-15:

^NRS Ephesians 6:10-15 “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. ¹¹ Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. ¹² For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹³ Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. ¹⁴ Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. ¹⁵ As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.”

It goes on to mention taking up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.  So, this is the gospel of peace, coming at you in full battle armor.  I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling the contrast.

I can’t remember what it was exactly, but last week there was some point where I caught myself using a violent metaphor in a conversation.  It was just regular conversational language and a common metaphor, but after I said it I mentioned out loud that I had just realized what I’d done and I tried to find another way to say what I was trying to say.  This was before I read this passage this week, so it was interesting to see here how living out the gospel of peace is spoken about in the language of warfare. 

I was kind of curious about how we sometimes use language with violent images without really realizing it, so I did a Google search on “violent metaphors” and came up with some interesting things. 

One link was a description of a workshop called “The language of peace: constructing non-violent metaphors”  given at the University of Florida.  The website gave this opening example of how violent metaphors can be contradictory or send the wrong signals: “Johnny don’t fight at school. Your mother is helping the war on cancer. Your father has his battles everyday at work. Your sister has to attack her studies. We just can’t have you fighting at school.”

It goes on to list alternative metaphors for different common phrases.  http://at.ufl.edu/~hardman-grove/peace.html

Another site said, “The first way in which we make war an ‘appropriate’ response to problems, is that we metaphorize the non-violent as war, as in the following examples.  We wage war on cancer / war on drugs / war on crime.  In medicine we attack, treat aggressively, use ammunition from a pharmacological arsenal stocked with big gun antibiotics. In the end we conquer disease.  We try to conquer someone we love by dressing to kill, by fighting for love, by winning someone’s love.”  http://www.iheu.org/node/1140 

One site warned: “Caution: violent metaphors can blow up in your face” http://www.metafilter.com/21966/Violent-metaphors

Well, OK, I get the point, and agree in many ways.  Looking through scripture, though, it’s hard to escape violent metaphors and I wonder if there isn’t something more going on to pay attention to.  Instead of doing away with the contrast of the gospel of peace and engaging in battle, what happens when we let them stand right beside each other? 

Ephesians 6 is explicit both about a great struggle in which we are engaged, and also that the enemy is never another human being.  Verse 12 says “For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood.”  The armor of God’s righteousness, and salvation and faith is a nonviolent, yet aggressive movement against the cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil, personified as the devil. 

Some commentators have speculated that Paul, in writing this passage, is looking over his shoulder at a Roman guard and imagining ways that these weapons of war could be used for advancing the peaceful kingdom of God.  Sounds possible.  Others have claimed that Paul is taking these images directly from Isaiah, who would portray God as a warrior dressed for battle. 

If this is the case, then Isaiah 59 would be one of these: “God put on righteousness like a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on God’s head.”  Isaiah 11 is another.  This is the passage about the shoot that “shall come out from the stump of Jesse, the spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding.”  It also gives the image of the peaceable kingdom – the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.  But right in the middle of this, we get “with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked”.  And then the armor imagery.  Righteousness shall be the belt around his waste, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.”  This has the appearance of violent imagery, but what is the weapon?  It’s the rod coming out of his mouth.  It’s speech.  It’s the power of words.  It’s that rich Hebrew understanding of the nonviolent creative power of spoken language, the very power by which God created the universe.  God spoke, and it came to be.  The stump of Jesse, the leader who reflects God’s ways, slays wickedness through the rod of his mouth.

All throughout the story of Scripture God is working to overturn the aggressive violent forces of evil with the equally aggressive forces of peace and reconciliation.  It’s hard to imagine the Gospel narratives of Jesus without this kind of framework.  Jesus confronts the devil in the wilderness, casts out demons from people, talks about the Satan as a strong man whose house he’s going to plunder.  First, you must tie up the strong man, then take over his house Jesus says in Mark 4.  The drama of the cross is portrayed as a confrontation with the forces of death themselves.  Colossians says that Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities, and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross.  Jesus willingly, without retaliation or calls for vengeance, goes to his death and it’s treated as a victory over the forces of death.  How bizarre and wonderful is that? 

The book of Revelation takes this battle imagery to a whole other level and, because of this has inspired some pretty bizarre and troubling literature about end of the world scenarios involving great physical battle scenes.  One of the culminating scenes in Revelation is the rider on the white horse, who judges and makes war, whose eyes are like flames of fire.  The armies of heaven are following him, and it says, “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.”  This is Christ, the one who used to ride on the donkey, now on a war horse.  Unfortunately people miss the punch line that it is a lamb who is the one doing battle, and that he is referred to as the Word of God, the word warrior whose truth slays an enemy not of flesh and blood.

It may be easier to swallow some of this imagery if you consider 20^th century folk singer Woody Guthrie.  He believed that his greatest weapon against the evils of his time, including fascism, was through his music.  Imagine a picture of Woody Guthrie with his guitar, which said on it, “This machine kills fascists.”  Then reread the line from Revelation “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations.”  (I’d love to take credit for this juxtapostion, but saw this very image HERE: http://www.culture-voice.com/Home/Olorin/WhenMetaphorsAttack/tabid/273/Default.aspx    Jesus confronts and overcomes evil on a completely different plane than evil itself.  He lives life with a completely different set of weapons – in the words of Ephesians, weapons of truth, righteousness, faith, salvation.  That’s the song Jesus sings and it undermines the very foundations of the droning powers of death.  It’s such a different way of being in the world that we’re still trying to let it convert our imaginations which have been so taken up by physical violence. 

I have to admit I still have mixed feelings about violent metaphors, but if we are going to wear this armor, then for the church to be the church, it means that we are engaged in an active and pro-active process.  Pacifism is not passive.  Nonviolence is not noninvolved.  We are challenged to be fearless in doing our own soul work.  The internal battle.  In confronting the demons in our own lives, our own inner struggle to let the gospel of peace be planted firmly within us. 

And as we do this we become strong in prayer and word and deed.  In the manner of 21^st century warfare, maybe we need to think of ourselves as going around and dropping cluster bombs of joy.  Or we should get in the driver’s seat of the Humvee of reconciliation.  Or we could learn the techniques for rigging up IED’s of forgiveness.  Sounds like explosive stuff. 

Twenty five years ago, at the Mennonite World Conference held in Stasbourg, France, Ron Sider gave a speech that still gets talked about.  He challenged Anabaptists to consider all of the resources, and energy, and commitment and loyalty that go into physically fighting for peace.  He observes that “Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die. Proudly, courageously, they gave their lives. Again and again, they sacrificed bright futures to the tragic illusion that one more righteous crusade would bring peace in their time. For their loved ones, for justice, and for peace, they have laid down their lives by the millions.”  He then had some extremely challenging words.  In short, he called on the church to approach its mission with the same energy, passion, and willingness to give one’s life for the way of peace that we proclaim.  He called on the church to form and train peacemakers who would be willing to develop and implement nonviolent means to intervening in conflicts around the world.  In many ways, this is a vision that is yet to be fulfilled.  From this speech did come the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who continue to serve in various conflict areas, not nearly on the scale of what Sider was calling for, but they have done amazing work.

Not all of us will serve on a Christian Peacemaker Team, but the thrust of the speech brings home the point.  The church, to be the church, is a church in mission.  And that mission happens wherever God has placed us.  For example, right here in the Cincinnati area.  A church actively engaging the world through the same Spirit, singing the same subversive song, as Christ.  To know this call as a church but to be not engaged in this way, would be setting up two of the most bizarre, most disjointed, contrast of images yet.

 

Three Mini-Sermons – 8/16/09 – Ephesians 5:21-6:9

Three Mini-Sermons (not necessarily in this order): It’s better than it looks, The whole elephant, That’s so first century

We’ve been talking about being the church and the reading this week is Ephesians 5:15-20, and next week starts at Ephesians 6:10, which means we skip over this portion in Ephesians called the household code – Ephesians 5:21-6:9.  How participation in the church plays out in domestic relationships.  After hearing that passage read it’s probably evident why in a progressive/liberal type congregation any preacher with any sense at all of what’s best for himself or herself would steer clear of this passage — just give thanks that the creators of the lectionary had mercy on us without including this in the recommended readings.  But it’s there, and it’s referenced often, especially at weddings, and it asks to be interpreted. 

The way we’re going to come at this is that I’ve written three mini-sermons on this passage, each one representing a different approach to interpretation – ways of interpreting this passage or any scripture.  I’ll give all three mini-sermons, but so as not to favor any one of them, or to appear to give any the pre-planned last word, I will present them in random order, drawn from a hat.  Before we draw, let me give the titles of each mini-sermon and a couple more words of introduction.

One is called “It’s better than it looks,” and this stays right within the text.  We’ll look more in depth at this passage.  Another one is called “The whole elephant” and takes into account the full council of scripture.  This approach insists that in order to properly understand a passage we must weigh it against all of scripture.  The other is called “That was so first century” and looks at this from a cultural perspective.      

I do need to say that the views expressed in each message do not necessarily represent those of your pastor.  I will be assuming a certain perspective each time, and speaking as if I held that perspective.  Although I will say that I have tried to highlight the good of what each perspective has to offer.  You listen for what resonates and rings true, and what sounds off base. 

(Below is the order in which they were drawn from the hat on Sunday)

“That was so first century”

This is an important book.  It is our scriptures, our sacred text.  We read from it every Sunday, hear sermons based on its passages, and study it in our private devotion.  We claim this as our faith story and our spiritual heritage.  The Bible is our central book. 

It’s not a single book, of course, it’s a collection of books, 66 total, 39 Hebrew, Old Testament, 27 Greek, New Testament.  These books were written over a period of hundreds and hundreds of years, whose stories span well over a thousand years.   

You know and I know that this book did not drop out of the sky in finished form, straight from heaven to earth.  These books were written by various authors in various places, underwent multiple editing processes, each layer of development making its own contribution, each with particular insights into life and each with particular biases.  

There is no such thing as being able to stand outside one’s time and place.  We are culture-bound creatures, gifted by and limited by the sensibilities and understandings of our time.  We should never confuse the human word with the divine word.  Saying that scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit does not mean that every word is a direct channel from God to us.  What’s most important is that we discern together, as a community, in our place and our time, what the Holy Spirit continues to be saying to us, taking into account the Scriptures and taking into account our own experience, recognizing that we also carry our own gifts and limitations in our time.

This epistle, this letter that we have been studying, was addressed to the church of Ephesus, a particular church at a particular time in a particular place.  They had their social norms.  They had the way their society was ordered with which they couldn’t deviate too much.  As we’ve learned Ephesians is believed to be written by a follower of the Apostle Paul, several generations after Jesus actually lived.  The words that we have here are a sign that the church was already, even toward the end of the first century, starting to lose its radical edge.  In Galatians, an earlier book the Apostle Paul himself had written, it says: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28).  And now, this. “For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church…”Slaves, render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free.”  The shock waves of the Jesus movement were starting to dissipate in their intensity, going from a revolutionary force in society to trying to find ways to adapt to the culture of the time.  To be faithful to God, but not too radical so as to upset the boat.  A little less Galatians 3 and a little more Romans 13 – “Let every person be subject to the governing authority.”  In this part of Ephesians we can see how Christians were trying to navigate these difficult waters of faith and culture.  Slavery was such an entrenched practice that the goal was not to abolish it completely, but to mitigate its effects within the Christian community.  If both master and slave were believers, they could treat each other respectfully, honoring one another while maintaining their respective roles.  In God’s eyes, they were brothers and sisters.

Even if these words were radical at that time, speaking directly to women and children and slaves and giving them a seat at the table, we have moved beyond the place where these words can be helpful to us.  They have been too abused, too misused, reveal too much of human fallenness and too little of God’s steadfast love that we should hold them in the same category as certain other Scriptures, like Old Testament law codes, that we just don’t follow anymore.  They are interesting for academic study, but they are not appropriate for a worship setting.  The creators of the lectionary were wise to exclude them from the readings.  For us, these words are descriptive of a certain time and certain place, not prescriptive for our time and our place.

Let’s consider that our brothers and sisters in the early church were fallen creatures just like us.  Let’s take the best of what they have to offer us, and leave the other as signs of where we have been but not where we are going.  We have no desire to undo the difficult, courageous work of the abolitionist, civil rights, and women’s rights and feminist movements of the last while.  We see God’s hand at work in these movements, as we progressively learn more about what it means to be a whole human being in the human community.  Hebrews 4 says that the Word of God is living and active.  God’s Word is not trapped in the fallen culture of the past, but is working – active, alive – to redeem the present culture.  May we listen for this Word in our time.     

 

“The whole elephant”

Perhaps you’ve heard the proverb of the six blind men who come upon an elephant, each one encountering some part of the large creature, each convinced in their own mind that this one part represents all that there is to the creature.  There is a version of this parable that was written as a poem, written by John Godfrey Saxe’s ( 1816-1887).  This is how the poem goes:   

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach’d the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, -”Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” said he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” said he,
“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” said he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Given that we now have come upon this creature, this piece of scripture, that others have come upon as well and had their say about, here is a somewhat silly poem I wrote that hopefully has some parallels to that proverb.

When paging through the Holy Book

For guidance in the ways of life

Whenever you arrive at Ephesians 5

You’re bound to feel some strife

Especially,

If you’re the wife.

 

Wives submit, slaves obey

Is this what they call good news?

If it’s between the Bible and progressive society

We all must choose

I confess

Scriptures lose

 

To follow scripture and our conscience

There must be a way,

To love the ancient wisdom

And the human equality we value today.

About women and slaves

What else does scripture say?

 

There is that first beginning

Before the awful curse

Male and female created in God’s image

Creation beautiful and diverse

God said that was good,

We made it worse.

 

And then as things went downhill fast

Humanity more depraved

And empires rose through domination

More and more power and control to crave

The God of the Bible did not back Egypt’s regime

But the Hebrew slaves.

 

The prophets had the vision

That the world would someday heal

That sons and daughters would prophesy

That all who hunger would have a meal

That the curse

would be repealed.

 

When Jesus was placed within the grave

Rather than leaving him to become a fossil

It was the women who encountered the risen Christ

And became the first apostles

It was the men who said

Resurrection? Impossible.

 

And as the church began to spread

And scattered communities would form

For women to be leaders and deacons

Was not out of the norm

Women and men working side by side

Slowly took the Roman empire by (peaceful) storm

 

OK, timeout from the silly poem.  In his book Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women Willard Swartley writes that of the 27 individuals Paul greeted by name in his letters, 10 were women.  Two of them being Phoebe and Junia, who both appear at the end of the letter to the Romans.  And I’ll read those excerpts.  If you’d like you can turn to back to Romans 16.  Verse 1: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe a deacon (or minister) of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.” 

And Junia shows up in verse 7: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives (or colleagues) who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”

I couldn’t figure out how to make all that rhyme.

So is the Bible cutting edge,

Or sadly out of date,

Does is call for revolution,

Or a status quo type state

And if different parts say different things

How do they relate?

 

When fixed upon one passage

Thinking it’s the only feature

Remember we’ve been told a proverb

That can be our teacher

Listen to all the other blind people in the room

And consider the whole creature.

 

“It’s better than it looks.”

It may be hard for us 21^st century egalitarian minded Americans to get it when we read this, but if we are willing to come to this passage with fresh eyes, we may see that this has potential to be a text from which we can learn.  It may even be a liberating text.  We see lines like “wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord,” and “slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,” and we would quickly like to discount the whole passage, or push it away in disgust.  Maybe even raise our fist toward Paul and blame him for two millennia of patriarchy and slavery.  But this would be a tragic misunderstanding of the apostle’s intentions.  We can’t allow the way scripture has been twisted out of shape to have the final word.  We must claim it for the good news that it proclaims.  Read with an open mind, this Ephesians passage contains teachings that lead to what Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder refers to as Revolutionary Subordination.           

Let’s look more closely at the passage.  It’s tempting to go directly  to verse 22 that speaks to wives, but prior to this there is an important statement made that applies to all parties about to be addressed.  Verse 21 states “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  This introductory remark is addressed to all who claim to participate in the church.  It sets our relationships in the context of reverence for Christ, and it asks that being subject, or being subordinate, or being under the authority of one another is the role of all of us.  Before individual roles or persons are considered, all members are told: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  So there is no justification in what follows for any claims that one party or role or person can dominate or subjugate another.  We are each to be willing to be under one another’s authority – and that authority is one of Christian love, not abusive power.

Since that verb – u`pota,ssw , to be subject or submit, is so prevalent in verse 21, applying to all, it’s not surprising that verse 22, now speaking specifically to a group of people, wives, should read “wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.”  Perhaps even more surprising, though, is that that verb u`pota,ssw is not present in the Greek text in this verse.  Verse 22 contains no verb.  It very clearly makes a connection between the wife’s relationship with the Lord and with her husband – but doesn’t lead with that verb.  The reason for the inclusion of that verb in the translation of verse 22 comes from verse 24, where it is mentioned again, and thus implied throughout the whole relationship – “Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.”

Since everyone is expected to be subject to one another, this is a common task.  And when husbands are addressed, they are given a task that demands their whole lives.  “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”  Husbands are asked to sacrifice their lives for their wives, after the model of Christ for the church.  This is a reverse of what often has happened through history.  Usually it has been the wife who sacrifices herself for the good of the husband or family without seeking her own will.  If husbands would love their wives as Christ loved the church, it could be liberating for both.       

Beyond this note to wives and husbands, notice how this passage is structured.  There are three sets of relationships that are spoken to.  Wives and Husbands.  Children and Fathers.  Slaves and Masters.  John Howard Yoder compares this passage to Greek Stoicism of the day, which also had codes of behavior for dignity and ethics, but was addressed to men, fathers, and princes.  Stoic instruction was not addressed to wives, children, and slaves.  Yoder observes that here, from Paul, “The admonition…is addressed first to the subject: to the slave before the master, to the children before the parents, to the wives before the husbands.”  He goes on to say, “Here begins the revolutionary innovation in the early Christian style of ethical thinking for which there is no explanation in borrowing from other contemporary cultural sources.  The subordinate  person in the social order is addressed as a moral agent.  She is called upon to take responsibility for the acceptance of her position in society as meaningful before God.  It is not assumed, as it was in both Jewish and Hellenistic thought, that the wife will have the faith of her husband, or that the slave will be part of the religious unity of the master’s household.  Here we have a faith that assigns personal moral responsibility to those who had no legal or moral status in their culture, and makes them decision makers.” (JHY, Politics of Jesus, 1995, pp.171-172)

As a final note, just as this passage began with a note of equal responsibility – “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” it also ends with a similar note, the final words of 6:9: “for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with this One there is no partiality.”  Sounds like a liberating text to me.

 

“For We Are Members Of One Another” – 8/09/09 – Ephesians 4:25-5:2

When I study a passage of scripture I like to read the whole passage together multiple times – try and take it as a whole chunk of communication rather than being too quick to search for sound-bites or one-liners, but in this Ephesians passage I kept wanting to stop after a phrase in the very first verse.  That verse, Ephesians 4:25, reads:  “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.”  It was the last part of that line that had my attention.  “For we are members of one another.”  The writer of the letter throughout has been developing this image of the church as a body – and not just any body – the body of Christ – and now this verse takes that idea deeper with this provocative phrase – “members of one another.”  Us.

Usually when I’m struck by a phrase like that the next step is to try to find the right question to ask.  One question we could ask is “Do we really believe that?” and if so, what does that mean for us?  If we’re going to buy in to this body image of the church, one body, us being components of that body, then do we believe that we are indeed members of one another, connected in such an organic kind of way?  This is an OK question, but I think there may be a better one.  Since we are talking about the body, with all its senses that tell it is alive and that it is connected to a whole ecology of life, maybe the question should be “Do we feel that?”  Do you feel that we are members of one another?  The “we” here being the church both local and global.  Do we sense and know in a way that surpasses intellectual assent, feel in our gut, this to be so? 

My answer to that, I find, straightforward and unambiguous person that I am, is “sometimes, to varying degrees.”       

“Connected” is a word that gets a fair amount of useage these days.  For good reason.  The technological advances of the last 10-15 years have brought about a condition that allows for amazing opportunities for connectivity.  The writing of this sermon is an example.  The bulk of this sermon was worked out on Thursday afternoon, sitting at the Red Tree art gallery and coffee shop in Oakley.  With the laptop I was able to work on the sermon, be constantly connected to email through the wireless connection, go online to check a couple commentaries on the Ephesians passage.  I had my cell phone right beside me, able to almost instantly reach and be reached by anyone.  Over the speakers various folk/rock artists from around the country were singing their best songs to us as I drank good coffee that probably came from half way around the world.

Even when I myself was half way around the world a couple weeks ago, in Paraguay, there were still opportunities for such connectivity.  Only a couple blocks from my hotel was an internet café that I visited every evening to keep up with the flow into the inbox – and this itself is pretty old school.  Others there were able to keep up through Blackberries and I-phones in their pockets.

Does this connectivity, or hyperconnectivity some would say, make me, make us, more spiritual people?  More conscious of being members of one another?  Less? 

Ephesians is thought to be a second generation Pauline letter, which means that Paul himself most likely did not write the letter, but a student of Paul who would have had a similar theological orientation.  It was common to write in the name of a mentor or master, so when the letter opens with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,” it is most likely a student honoring the master.  The best way I’ve had this explained to me goes this like:  In our time, if you have been deeply influenced by the thought of a certain teacher, and you claim to write something under their name, you get in trouble.  In certain settings of ancient times, if you have been deeply influenced by a master and have been a student of their thought and you claim to write something under your own name, you get in trouble.  Since the author of Ephesians identifies himself as Paul, I’ll also call him Paul, but you may want to keep in mind that scholars would prefer to put quotes around the “Paul” who is writing this. 

So these are second, third, fourth generation Christians who are reading this letter – those who had not known Christ in bodily form.  Now being told that through the power of the Holy Spirit they are the Body of Christ.  Really?  If we haven’t had the original revelation or experience of being with Jesus, of seeing how he embodied the love of God, how are we to feel this to be true?  How do we experience being members of that body?  Members of one another.  Connected with one another through spiritual ligaments and blood flow and nerves – knee bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

Here’s a thought: if this much is true – if we have through grace, through the abundant mercy of God, through the steadfast love of God, been brought in, been welcomed into the body of Christ – then a significant part of the journey from here on out is learning to feel one another.  Learning to feel our one bodyness, and to let that shape who we are becoming.

I think there is an element of risk in all this.  If we start to develop and grow in this type of relationship with each other, it changes things.

Before going to Mennonite World Conference I knew very little about the Democratic Republic of Congo.  I knew they were having a drawn out civil war, but didn’t know much about it or have any personal connections to it.  I still know very little about the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I have a few more connections that make me more aware of being a part of the same body as Congolese sisters and brothers.  This happened in a few different ways.  One of the preachers during the worship sessions was a leader from the Congolese church.  He spoke passionately about the importance of doing justice and living the gospel of peace.  It sounded like a fairly standard social justice sermon.  He included the importance of empowering women to be leaders.  And then at one point when he was talking about the women in his country he started crying and said that some of these women have experienced too much pain that they will never fully heal.  He spoke in French and I was listening to an English translation over headphones, so I didn’t pick up all the nuance of what he was saying.  A little later in the week I ran into James Kraybill who works with Mennonite Mission Network and has spent much of his life in French speaking Africa.  He asked me if I noticed that the speaker from Congo had cried.  I said I had, and he said that there are women all throughout the Congo who are being raped as an act of war.  Many of the women are then shot afterward, and some of them survive.  He said this is what Congolese pastors have on their plates when it comes to issues of pastoral care and why the speaker had mourned that some of these women will never fully heal.  At another point in the week I was able to listen in on a group of US and Congolese leaders who sat together to follow up on developing deeper ties between the two churches.  Ed Diller, as moderator of MC USA, will be a part of this work in the next couple years.  Before leaving the conference I visited the artisans’ booth that had handcrafts that people brought and were selling.  I purchased from a Congolese woman who had made a piece of fabric art on burlap that portrayed a proud African woman holding a jar of water on her head that she was carrying to her village, wearing a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a bright colorful dress.  This is now hanging on the wall in our kitchen.

This might be a risky move.  I don’t know what these connections mean, but I know that as a result of being able to travel, and hear these stories, and meet some people, I have a deeper sense of being members of one another.  And I hope that I can be more prayerful toward the people of the Congo. 

Closer to home, we know that we are given opportunities to live out being members of one another.  When our Belle was stillborn in May and you surrounded us with prayer and thoughtful cards and meals, we experienced a piece of what it is like to be members of one another.  When we hear that Margaret Penner, not yet 25 years old, is now undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer, even though she is now living in Tucson, we know that we are a part of one body.  When we followed Jared Hess’ blog entries, we feel that we are members of one another.  And in our joys, when we celebrate our youth coming of age, when we cheer someone completing the hard work of a master’s degree, or an anniversary, we share in being members of one another. 

This is our gift and challenge of being the church.  In Romans Paul describes this as “Rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn” (12:15).  As humans we have this amazing ability to feel things that we don’t personally experience, or put another way and maybe a little more accurately, we have the ability to enter into an experience that is not initially our own and make it our own.  Part of the risk, I suppose, involves being changed by one another in ways we can’t control as the experience of one member is sensed by other members. 

Well, that’s the first verse of the passage – Ephesians 4:25.  Only nine more to go.  What follows after this verse is a series of instructions.  In this context of membership in one another, these instructions go beyond individual moralism.  Righteousness, holiness, takes shape in relationship.  It concerns the whole health of the body.  It’s not just a matter of I don’t do these bad things or I do these good things, but that we are a part of the same body, and that Christ is present here with us, and so we are trying to be a healthy, flourishing body together.

I like the NRSV translation of v. 26 – “Be angry, but do not sin; don’t not let the sun go down on your anger.”  I like it that we’re allowed to be angry, and maybe being in touch with the sins or the sorrows of the world will give us some needed anger.  There’s this great line that Bono from the band U2 has said.  And I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect that he had heard that having kids was supposed to mellow you out, give you a more settled down approach to life.  But, he said, for him, it made him all the more fired up and angry about all the evils in the world.  And so he has taken on this tremendous campaign of essentially asking people to consider that the poorest of the poor children of the world are also our own.    

Be angry, but in your anger, do not sin. 

I’m just going to go ahead and read through this whole passage now and then end with a thought.  Some  instructions of body members relating to one another: “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.  Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.  Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.  Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.  And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.  Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.  Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

A closing thought, on the way this passage concludes:  Lest we feel that all this happens at our initiative, that we are the ones who must create out of nothing this bond of love with one another.  All of this is couched in the overarching love of God.  Rather than an act of initiation, ours is an act of imitation.  “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children.  Live in love.”  God has dearly loved us before any of our loving occurs.  God has risked creating this bizarre dust creature with breath and consciousness and a strong will and we are loved despite our fragmented, disconnecting tendencies.  God has already forgiven before we can bring ourselves to forgive.  And Christ has already blazed a trail.  We are imitators.  We receive what is freely given, and we allow ourselves to learn to imitate this love.  We catch a wiff of that fragrant offering of Christ wafting around us and we try and let some of that stick to our skin.  We already live in love.  We are members of Christ’s body.  We are members of one another.

 

Being the Church – 8/02/09 – Ephesians 4:1-16

I need to start on a personal note here.  As I was looking through the calendar this week and doing some planning for the months ahead I realized that as of right about now Abbie and I have been in Cincinnati for three years.  It was the beginning of August, 2006 when we rolled into town, with our moving van, and our seven month old Eve.  We were met with a crew ready to move our items into the house and also bash out the walls of our bathroom, which we did quite thoroughly.  I distinctly remember the feeling that Abbie and I had after that first day.  All of our possessions were piled up around the house that we had just purchased, our only bathroom in the house was fully dismembered, and we had signed the contract to pastor at Cincinnati Mennonite.  The feeling was something like – Well, there’s definitely no going back now.        

More than just an anniversary, the three year mark carries special significance, which I noted in looking at worship and sermon preparation work for the month of August – because we have this thing called the lectionary which we follow.  The lectionary provides, every week, readings from scripture – a gospel, an epistle reading, a psalm, and OT reading – that we draw from in worship.  The lectionary is divided into years A, B, and C, and when you get to the end of C, you go back to A.  A three year cycle.  Which means that after three years of ministry together and all that’s occurred over that time period, we’re right back where we started.   

This is indeed an interesting place to be.  That August of ’06 we were using a worship theme that was taken from the gospel readings from John 6 where Jesus talks about being the bread of life, the true bread who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.  You may remember that series – it was called “Becoming Bread” and I believe every week for about 5-6 weeks we had different forms of bread as a part of the service.  It was a good series.  I still have it and the sermons on the file. Hmmmm.

Well, even though we’re focusing on the Ephesians texts rather than the John texts this time around, it’s caught my attention that it’s worth noting the direction that worship takes us.  If one is going to stick with this Christian worship thing throughout life, we’re going to keep looping back to these same texts, these same stories.  In a linear way of movement we’re not really going anywhere.  Jesus says “I am the bread of life” and we get to chew on that the rest of our lives. 

During the youth-adult joint worship service in Columbus Ted Swartz offered a memorable and rather funny monologue likening faith to cows in a meadow, ruminant creatures that they are, eating grass and chewing on it, and swallowing it, and bringing it back up, and putting it through another chamber in the stomach, and doing that for a while until it’s ready to be moved on through.  Which really just serves to fertilize more grass that eventually will be undergo the same digestive process.  The faith cycle and the cycle of worship.  His final line was something like, “faith – chew on it, and pass it on.”  Rather than being a linear progression, worship could be something more like those words that Rachel spoke to last week in the book of Ephesians – “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  This makes it sound like we are moving, perhaps expanding, every direction at the same time.  Better knowing the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ.

So that could be point one, which already hints at point two, the main point.  Point one, we’re not going anywhere and the ground we’re on now is old, but fertile, terrain.  Point two, we are going somewhere, there is movement happening in all directions, and Ephesians has some things to say about the vehicle that is supposed to be carrying us along.   

Alongside the John 6 Bread of Life readings are also readings from the book of Ephesians, which is a letter that speaks to what it means to be the church.  What is it?  What does it look like?  This summer has held a number of different gatherings of the church meeting together and worshiping and reflecting on its own life, so it feels fitting to follow through with a number of weeks on “Being the church,” which will be our August theme.  We are many generations removed from Paul and Ephesians, but the questions persist: What is church?  What does it look like?.  Keith’s sermon a couple weeks ago and the youth and Rachel’s reflections last week I feel did a great job of getting us started on this path.

Before we turn to the Ephesians passage I want to tell about some of my first encounters in Asuncion, Paraguay, after getting off the airplane for the Mennonite World Conference.  After getting my visa checked and passport stamped, and needing to use bits of my broken Spanish to get by, I was relieved to see people holding up signs that read Mennonite World Conference.  I walked toward the sign and was asked to stand in a group that was waiting for a bus to take us to our hotels.  I then began what would be an entire week of meeting the church.  In that group was Luke Gascho, director of the Merry Lea Center that works with issues of environmental sustainability in conjuction with Goshen College.  One of their buildings at Merry Lea was one of the first 50 LEED certified buildings in the nation, platinum level, for sustainable construction.  I met a group that seemed mostly to be from Canada that would be part of a group doing presentations on indigenous spirituality.  I also talked briefly with a seminary librarian, Brent Koehn, and a writer, Gordon Houser, whose name you will see often if you subscribe to The Mennonite magazine.  Helping all of us get where we needed to go were youth from the church in Paraguay who were bilingual and well-informed about the logistics of the day.  On the ride to the hotel I met a man who had worked most of his life helping lead new churches in New York City.  He was accompanied by his teenage granddaughter from rural Georgia.  These were some of the people with whom I could speak.  There were others in those first hours that I heard speaking other languages and being instructed where to go in their native tongue.

That we come into this with difference and diversity is a given.  The first half of Ephesians takes on one of the key differences that the early church worked with – that between Jew and Gentile.  Irreconcilable differences it would seem, as irreconcilable as whether to play Rook High or Rook Low, those who do it the right way and those who do it the wrong way.  I didn’t grow up playing Rook, so I don’t have an emotional attachment to either one, but Keith’s metaphorical haiku-ing still rings true to me.  How in the world are we going to work all this out?  How is this coming together going to happen?  Different cultures, different languages, different convictions and senses of what is true….Ephesians’ answer – through Christ Jesus, we are all members of the same body.  And then the verse that never fails to floor me – in Ephesians 3:9-10 “to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”  The mystery is the coming together of Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, the rich variety of God’s creations, and the place where this happens, the vehicle for this journey with cosmic significance is, surprise, the church.    

The difficulty of this work is what sets the tone for Ephesians 4.  What Paul has to say now, he says in the form of a beg.  “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father/Mother of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

Being one church is a miraculous event and it takes some Spirit given ingredients to even be possible.   “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the body of peace.”  Those words humility, gentleness, patience, love, peace sound to me like the same stuff as the fruits of the Spirit that Paul mentions in Galatians 5 – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  “making every effort.”  Christ has done the groundwork, but it still takes every effort of our own to remember that we are all a part of one baptism.

Historically, the church has done a pretty lousy job at this.  One of the things I’m fascinated with is to see how different groups interpret different events differently.  Two of the major church ruptures in the last 2000 years have been the splitting of the Eastern Church and the Western church – the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic church in the 11^th century, 1054 is usually the date that gets assigned to that – and also the breaking apart of the western Roman Catholic church in the 16^th century through the Protestant Reformation, of which we are heirs.  There are a couple different pictures I’ve come across to illustrate the view of this that I find pretty fascinating. 

The first one is this that I’ll pass around.  I have this from seminary days and it comes from the perspective of the Eastern Orthodox.  It wouldn’t speak for all Orthodox, but it would be one picture of their own self-understanding.  It’s a picture of a tree, with Jesus and the cross symbolically in the middle, and this tree is called the “tree of life” and it is the true church, which is the Eastern Orthodox Church which is the continuation of the church of the apostles.  At the bottom of this tree there are some little branches which have fallen off which would be the early heresies of the church, but the major thing going on here is this strike of lightning that has broken off a large branch.  This branch is labeled the “Roman Catholic Church” and the lightning is the great schism of 1054.  So this branch is no longer a part of the true church of Christ.  And then, you’ll notice, this branch that has broken off has leaves on the end of it which are falling off of it.  This is labeled “The Protestant Reformation, 1517.”  One of the leaves is Lutheran, one of them Anglican, Reformed, Baptist, etc.  Mennonites don’t have their label – maybe the closest to us is Brethren – so we might be one of those anonymous leaves that are mounting up on this large leaf pile underneath the broken branch in the West.  This is a picture where the unity of the Spirit has certainly been severed – a certain perspective.

Another image that has been used for the church, from early times, has been one of a boat.  The church is like a boat, something like Noah’s ark, that sails across the storms of the world with the survivors safely inside.  I wasn’t able to find this picture, so I’ll describe how I remember it and hope that I don’t completely screw it up by remembering it wrong.  This painting would have been done in the years after the Protestant Reformation and it shows a large boat on the sea, with the pope and other faithful inside, and then there are several people who are trying to escape on life boats.  The life boat people are labeled Luther and Calvin and Zwingli.  What I can’t remember is whether this grand ship is sailing just fine and these people in the lifeboats are leaving the mother ship, in which case it would be the perspective of the Roman Catholic church.  Or whether this large boat is actually starting to sink, and the leaders in the life boats and the one’s who are saving the church to stay afloat, in which case this would be the perspective of the Reformers.  What I do remember, is that there are also several church leaders who are floundering around in the water without any boat and that Menno Simons is one of those leaders.  So, whatever perspective this painting was from, we are definitely still sunk.   

These pictures have some humor in them for us, but they are also pictures of deep pain….

More recently the ecumenical movement has tried to pull together some of the scattered pieces – the leaves and the branches and the tree, or the little independent life boats and those of us who are close to drowning — and bring out some of the commonalities that we continue to hold. 

I’m encouraged by this direction and thinks it takes us in a more healthy way of thinking about the church of Jesus Christ.  Where the ecumenical movement has headed, and where this passage from Ephesians heads is what I’d like to emphasize.  And this is it.  Rather than treating difference as a threat or as an automatic sign of unfaithfulness – we are asked to accept difference as a gift.  Oneness of Spirit in the bond of peace does not mean uniformity, it means a wide collection of giftedness held together by the love of Christ. 

So after mentioning one Spirit, one body, one hope, Paul moves on to say that we have each been given a different grace, a different gift.  And the purpose of all these gifts is for the building up of the body of Christ that we might all come to a maturity in our growth. 

Ecumenically, a book that reflects this is this Introduction to Ecclesiology by guy whose name I probably won’t pronounce right: Veli-Matti Karkeinen.  His chapters talk about the different perspectives on the church that each tradition brings, their ecclesiology, and how we can learn from one another.  So the chapters titles are  The Church as an icon of the Trinity: Easter Orthodox ecclesiology; The church as the People of God: Roman Catholic Ecclesiology; The Church as Just and Sinful: Lutheran; The Church as Covenant: Reformed; The Church as the Fellowship of Believers; Free church ecclesiology – that’s us: and The Church in the Power of the Spirit: Pentecostal/Charismatic ecclesiologies.

In the church, with a big “C,” every person, every community, every tradition, carries with it a difference that contains giftedness.      

I’ve tossed out a lot of metaphors and without really sticking to any particular one – faith and worship in the church being cyclical like a cow chewing grass in a meadow, the church as a vehicle that takes us somewhere even if that isn’t a linear path, the church as the body of Christ, as a tree with many branches (and leaves), a boat on the sea.  So as a closing, I’ll mention one more metaphor.  One that sums up what I believe this passage is saying and also carries a flavor we at Cincinnati Mennonite can identify with.  The unity of Spirit to which we are being called, if it were a song, is not a melody.  We are not all asked to sing the same notes, at the same time, in unison.  We can think of it more as a harmony – many parts sung together, each adding its own texture, it’s own pattern, giving the song more richness, nuance, and beauty.  The one who makes all this possible is the Creator who is the composer, the conductor, one of the singers, and, who is, mysteriously, the song itself.

 

Epiphany as a run-on sentence – 1/04/09 – Ephesians 3:1-13

Sometimes, if you have something important that you’d like to say, and you want to write it down so that others can look over it and study it and ponder it and maybe even share it with others, it’s possible to get into the rut of writing your sentences too long and drawn out, because you have a lot that you want to communicate and it’s right there at the front of your mind all bunched together, hard to sort out, so you just start writing and it just keeps coming and you’re not sure where to put the period and where to start a new thought because it’s all one big thought for you and so you keep writing, which is kind of like what is happening at the beginning of Paul’s letter to the church of Ephesus where Paul is writing to the church about his belief that this love of Christ that they have experienced was not only special for them as a small group of people but also had significance, great significance, for all people and things such that everything everywhere in every time is affected by the meaning of Jesus’ life which is something the apostle feels is so important that he begins his letter by writing one extremely long Greek sentence that extends from verses 3-14 of the opening chapter of Ephesians…which is a long sentence, don’t you think?

Why so long?  Why not chop it up into smaller bits, make it easier to digest?  Why not feed it to us a spoonful at a time instead of having us scarf the whole meal in one breath?

If you look at the first chapter of Ephesians in your English Bible this is what has been done for us.  Verses 3-14 are split into several sentences, with different translations inserting periods at different points where they think we should be allowed come up for air.  The NRSV that we have splits it up into six different still rather long sentences.   Too bad.  We miss the effect.  It’s quite possible the writer of Ephesians was intending to plunge us into something that is supposed to overwhelm us, be too much to handle all at once, be so wide and deep and far that we can’t see the whole thing at the same time.  One big massive chunk of communication.

The words that are being used certainly fit with this idea.  This sentence on steroids begins by saying “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing.”  In case we don’t believe him, he starts to name every spiritual blessing.  We receive adoption, getting our official papers that we are indeed children of God.  We receive redemption, forgiveness of sins.  We receive an inheritance, salvation, the Holy Spirit.  But more than a laundry list of blessings we are supposedly receiving, there is a wider focus to what’s being said.  It’s first mentioned in verse 9.  “Christ has made known to us the mystery of God’s will according to God’s good pleasure set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”  This theme of all things is what gets carried through the entire introduction.  It reaches its climax in the last verses of chapter one.  “And God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The natural question that we may ask would be When the writer says ‘all things’ does he really mean ‘all things?’  Things in heaven and things on earth – spiritual unseen things and physical seen things?  What does it mean for Christ to ‘fill all in all?’     

This Sunday marks the end of the Advent and Christmas season, as we celebrate Epiphany.  On this Epiphany Sunday we mark the coming of the light.  Just as the earth begins to turn toward light with the days getting longer and the nights getting shorter, we celebrate that Christ’s coming into the world is a light for all nations.  The light that shines in front of us in a small way, is a light that shines in all corners of the world, inviting all to come to the light and be transformed. 

Epiphany is a time when that word ‘all’ keeps showing up.  All nations.  All things.  All in all.

When I think about “all” I think about the feeling I get just about every time I walk into a library.  I walk through the doors, happy to be picking up the book that I’ve ordered, and am very quickly confronted with all the other books on all the shelves.  Fiction, non-fiction, classics, new releases, periodicals.  Inevitably I’m struck with how much I haven’t read and never will read.  My one little book that I’m about to try and work through feels like a tiny slice out of this massive pie of literature.  It’s a feeling that is both overwhelming and humbling.  Of all these things, I’m familiar with so little.  I have to be content to start where I’m at and add slowly.                

How do we live in a way that starts to take into account the all?  With apologies to English majors everywhere, and anyone else who pays attention to these sorts of things in language, I’d like to offer that one way of characterizing our experience of Epiphany, and more specifically, our experience of the love of Christ, is as a run-on sentence.  Something that can’t be summarized in a small, compact way, but keeps growing these extra descriptions and extra clauses to try and better grasp just what is included in this “All.”     

One of the standard texts for Epiphany comes from the Matthew 2 story of the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus.  An important part of this story is that these visitors are foreigners – from the east.  Their being led to Bethlehem from their distant land is a sign that the light of Christ will extend out beyond the boundaries of Israel and be for all people.  The inclusion of the Gentiles, non-Jews, into the formation of the church is one of the major themes of the New Testament.  For those who believed that God’s grace extended only to a select group of people, Period, then this is a bit of a disruptive addition.

This is a theme that Paul moves toward in Ephesians.  In chapter three he calls it “the mystery hidden for ages,” but now “made known.”  The All of Christ reached across the boundary that had separated Jew and Gentile and brought the two together.  The meeting place of these two is called the church.  And these Ephesians are a part of this new thing that was coming into being.  The church is given the task of being a sign that groups that were formerly hostile to each other are able to join together as one body.  Here’s how Paul puts it in Ephesians 3: “In former generations the mystery of Christ was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.  Of this gospel I have become a servant… so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”           

The idea that Gentiles, like us, are brought together in the church is a common enough happening now that we don’t think about it much.  But we still manage to miss the point by splitting things up into Jew and Gentile type categories, with the Gentile things being those that are outside of what we consider to be the sacred.  We still let there be a wall between how we experience the holy things of the world and the secular, things supposedly having nothing to do with God.

The Reverend James Forbes retired recently from being the lead minister at the influential Riverside Church in New York.  At his retirement from that position he talked about the ongoing work he plans to do in spiritual and moral renewal of the nation.  He talks about his own take on what some have called the ‘God gap’ in the country.  He believes this gap “exists not so much between Democrats and Republicans as between the experiencing of God, or the sacred, and the living of everyday life.  Forbes says, ‘All of us in this culture have trouble sensing that which is….fundamentally sacred.’ (Christian Century, May 29, 2007, p. 10)

Another way of putting this is that we don’t really believe that Christ is all in all, as Paul writes to the Ephesians.  We don’t believe that the light shines in all places, in all aspects of our lives.  It makes sense how this can happen if we grow up in the church being taught that matters of faith have only to do issues of salvation, and what we do on Sunday mornings, and a certain more literalist way of interpreting the Bible.  We develop fairly distinct categories of things that have to do with God and things that don’t.  Our life is made up of the holy and the Gentile, with little or no crossover between them.  Which means that most of our life — our work, our play, our rest, ends up falling outside of what we experience as holy.  It’s just what we have to do to get through.  Or, this dualism can lead to a crisis of faith if we start to discover things that we truly love and find wonderful that are supposedly outside of the sacred.  Maybe one discovers that they are fascinated with science and the open ended exploration of the world that seems to challenge the teachings of faith and scripture.  If we are unable to see the light of God within something that gives us joy, or within something that doesn’t give us joy but is a significant part of what we do with our time, unable to recognize it as another place where Christ dwells, then we are missing something.  We miss the very thing that the apostle Paul so passionately committed his life to once he saw it to be true.  That nothing is outside of the love of God, that the light of God illuminates all things and that all things touch the holy in some way.  That creation is one big hunk of communication, a run-on sentence containing more than we’ll ever be able to take in at once.     

Isaiah 60 is written as a testament to the light.  “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.  For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and God’s glory will appear over you.  Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.  Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you.”  The light has already risen over us.  Part of our mission as the church is to recognize this light in all aspects of our life and to find the sacred in the parts of the world that have been desecrated.  This is the light that draws others in, they come to you.   

Several years ago the United Church of Christ, UCC, chose for its annual theme “Never put a period where God has placed a comma, “ a quote attributed to entertainer Gracie Allen.  In other words, God is still speaking.  There’s still more to be heard, more to be found, more love to give and receive.  More parts of creation that we will come to experience as illuminated by God.  Stay open, expecting something else to be added.  

So this is how we experience the whole thing.  We start out to write the sentence of God’s overwhelming love for the world, and of Christ’s presence in our lives, and we set out to write something that sums it up all nice and tidy.  Something that would pass as a well-shaped, concise sentence on an English exam.  But fairly early on, after thinking we’ve completed the task we find that there’s something we’ve forgotten, something we didn’t notice before, something that we now know has to be included, so we revise the sentence by adding another clause.  A little further down the road we realize that what we have still doesn’t do the trick, doesn’t say all that needs to be said, so we add more clauses that try and describe how wide and how long and how deep is the love of Christ.  And eventually, we might realize that instead of trying to close this thing up with a period, we can be content to leave our rambling run-on sentence with an open ending, with the most recent comma humbly in place, ready to receive what we learn and experience next. 

Because there’s no way that we can close this thing up, put a measuring line on it or a boundary to it and say that it stops here and goes no further.  We have to be willing to keep adding to the sentence, letting it expand, watch it get all complicated and awkward and too much to be able to take in in one breath, as we allow more of the all to be made holy.  More people, more of our time, more of our work, more of our thoughts, more of life, more….

 

Life After Birth – 1/06/08 – Matthew 2:1-12, Ephesians 3:1-12

This past Thursday’s Enquirer carried a cartoon by Jim Borgman that might well capture the spirit of the week.  The picture is of a man, labeled “Politics” trudging through the snow back to his Iowa farmhouse after having discarded his Christmas tree at the end of his lane.  The tree is in the foreground, looking ready for the compost.  Still hanging onto the tree but also lying pathetically in the snow are a couple banners that read “Good Will Toward All” and “Peace.”  The figure who just tossed the tree and its banners is walking away, dusting off his hands, and muttering to himself, “Enough of that.” (Thursday, Jan 3^rd, Local Section, B6)

The image implies that the message of the Christmas season is a pleasant, but short lasting, ideal that must give way to the more pressing realities of life.  After a brief change of decorations and rhetoric, we are officially back to the hardnosed real world, with Peace on Earth already a fairly distant memory.

In the middle of the 20^th century the poet WH Auden wrote a long piece called “For the Time Being,” which goes through the different aspects of the Christmas story.  He ends the poem by saying what many of us might be experiencing emotionally and spiritually after having come through this season.  These are some of his words:

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully –

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility…

But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate… city…where Euclid’s geometry

And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.  The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this. 

To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all…

(WH Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio)

 

We in the church might appear a little out of step with things since we’ve still got these candles up front – and we’ve even added a few more to note the light of Epiphany; we’re still reading scriptures about Jesus’ birth, and still talking about this as an event that somehow changes us and the world.  We’re not quite able to chuck this whole thing out like a dry tree that’s losing all its needles.  Advent is over, the child has been born, so what business do we have not moving on like everyone else?  What’s left to look at in this birth scene now that the election season is in full gear, and we’re back to work, back to school, and back to a more normal routine, life in The Time Being?

The story of the magi from the East is one that speaks to what happens after the birth of Christ.  We’re not told how long after Jesus’ birth this all happened.  The only reference to time we get from Matthew is that it was in the time of King Herod.  It might have been a little while since Matthew gives no indication of a manger scene and mentions that they visit Jesus in a house.

When the magi meet Herod in Jerusalem, during their search for the child, we are confronted with the two directions this story can go.  Is this birth an ending, a flash in the pan, short lived event, or is it a beginning, something that will take on a life of its own and grow in significance?  From Herod’s perspective, this is all best ended as soon as possible.  The magi tell Herod they have come to pay homage to the one born King of the Jews.  As one with an agenda to hold on to the status quo, hang on to people’s allegiances, and maintain a grip on power, Herod sets out on a campaign to put this potential rival king as far out of memory as possible. 

His first tactic is to lie.  To use language not to  express truth, but to manipulate other’s thoughts and actions for his own purposes.  He tells the magi to “go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”  However much the magi or we would like to believe it, Herod doesn’t want to pay homage to Christ.  Not the Christ born in the backwoods town of Bethlehem.  Not the Christ who will teach people to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors.  Not the Christ who will give equal dignity to rich and poor, not the Christ who will lower himself to the position of a servant and wash the feet of his friends.  This is an affront to kind of order that Herod seeks to maintain.  He would like to put an end to this and put these kinds of thoughts far in the back of people’s minds.     

Because his lying doesn’t work, Herod goes to a more extreme measure.  Like Pharoah, Herod is willing to take the lives of infants and children.  All done in the name of national security, no doubt.  He orders that all children two years old or under who live around Bethlehem be killed.    

The magi have the chance to collaborate with Herod, but their experience of this birth is the other direction that the story can go.  Their homage goes not to Herod, but to Christ, and to them this birth event marks not an ending, but a beginning.  They offer, of course, their gold and frankincense, and myrrh to Jesus, but the real riches are flowing back toward them.  In Christian tradition the magi are representative not only of the people from the East, but all Gentiles who are drawn to the light of Christ.  Through them the God of the Israelites was being revealed as the God of all peoples.  The God of slaves, the God of exiles, the God of the oppressed, was being made known as the God not just of the Hebrew slaves, but all slaves.  Not just of the Jewish exiles, but all people in exile – immigrants and refugees.  And so the words of Isaiah are finding fulfillment.  “Arise, shine, for you light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.  Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” 

Rather than letting the birth of Christ dwindle away in its significance, these Scriptures treat it as if it is like a dawning of a new day in history.  Herod’s lies and his killing can no longer be seen as the only option that we have for where we give our allegiance.  There is a making known that is happening that extends from Christ’s birth on into the present moment.      

But I guess the question still remains in my mind:  that when we put away our manger scenes, our nativity calendars, our candles, and our other reminders of the announcement of “Peace on Earth,” what is it that we have left?  What kind of concrete reality is there in this period we may call The Time Being?

The apostle Paul makes a statement to the church in Ephesus that I find fairly remarkable.  He says in Ephesians 3:10 that “now, through the church, the wisdom of God in its rich variety might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”  Now, through the church.  What we have left, Paul would like us to believe, is church.  The “church” that Paul is speaking of is not any particular denomination, but “church” in its primal form.  The word used is ekklesia, which simply means “gathering,” or “assembly.”  The concrete reality that we continue to live with is the assembly of those who continue to follow the ways of Christ over the ways of Herod.  It is inherently relational.  Church happens when we gather together for worship on Sunday mornings, but church also happens whenever there is any kind of relationship defined by the peace of Christ.  Jesus said he is present even when two or three are together.  In other words, the relationships that we have with others, no matter where those are happening, can be ways that the wisdom of God is being made known.  Someone has called a marriage ‘little church,’ as it meets the minimum requirement of two, gathered in relationship.  Church happens on the street corner, in the coffee shop, or in the local tavern, in the car, and at the workplace.

So somehow what we are doing here together as church is part of the way that God is being revealed to the world.  Earlier Paul spoke of the church as the body of Christ.  Our gathering and our relationships are a part of the visible, concrete way that Christ is alive. 

One of the advantages of having a long car ride for vacations is the chance to listen books on CD.  Abbie and I had never heard or read any of the Harry Potter series, so we checked out the first two audio books from the library and listened to them on the trip to Kansas and back.  In the first book Harry receives as a gift a magic invisibility cloak, which he uses in certain cases to move around undetected.  Underneath the cloak, his body disappears to anyone who might be looking his direction.  One of the things going on in the birth of Christ, and the birth of the church, is something even more mysterious.  Jesus is sort of the equivalent of God’s visibility cloak.  Making known instead of making hidden.  A body that God puts on to move around detected.  The apostle Paul believes that this cloak is now in the possession of the church, us, the gathering of those who continue to embody God’s presence.     

I wonder how we are being a part of this making known through our formal and informal gatherings in our worship and in our daily relationships.  I wonder what sorts of new ways of being church will evolve among us during the year 2008.  I wonder what sort of unexpected ways we will experience peace in our lives through our times together.  I wonder who all might be drawn toward the light of our community and how we can welcome them into our gathering.  I look forward to what’s ahead for us and to how we can continue to be instruments of Christ’s peace.             

 

Thank you, and Please (San Jose 2007) – 7,08,07

Our national body, Mennonite Church USA, has a statement called Vision: Healing and Hope that is a summary of what we are all about as Mennonite Christians.  It goes like this, “God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy, and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.”

This past Wednesday evening 5,500 Mennonites from around the country gathered together in the massive Exhibit Hall 3 of the San Jose Convention Center for a joint worship service of youth, young adults, and adults.  The singing, as you may be able to imagine, was a treat to be a part of, and there was plenty of it.  The speaker for the evening was a man in his mid thirties by the name of Paul Alexander – a Pentecostal speaking to Mennonites in our largest national worship service since the previous convention in Charlotte two years prior and Atlanta two years before that.  For the joint worship service in Atlanta, in 2003, we had had none other than former President Jimmy Carter speaking to us.  Now, this year, after the group singing was finished, we sat down to hear what this young Pentecostal might have to say to Mennonite Church USA. Like a good Pentecostal preacher, he spoke passionately for well over a half hour, maybe more like 45 minutes.  He had a two point sermon.  His first point was “Thank you.”  He told about growing up in the Assemblies of God with a strong faith that blended the power of God, the power of the US flag, and the power of the gun.  While in college, he supported the first Gulf War and said he cheered when the bombs fell on Iraq because he was convinced it was the right thing to do.  After finishing college he was day trading stocks, listening to Rush Limbaugh three hours a day, and studying ethics and theology looking toward possibly becoming a minister.  Something that began to change his perspective came when an investor buddy of his asked if he ever looked into the business practices of the companies he was investing in.  Did any of them have human rights abuses?  Did any of them profit heavily from warmaking?  Paul had never considered the question and initially brushed it off as unimportant.  He had never heard anything that may link being a follower of Jesus with economics or social justice.  But the question stayed with him and, as he described it, brought about a widening crack in the certainty of his faith.  If these things really mattered, and increasingly to him it seemed like they did, then he was going to have to start from scratch with what it meant to love God, what it meant to follow Jesus, what it meant to be a person of faith.         

His “Thank you” came to all of us seated there as he began to tell about his search for people who were actually trying to live the way Jesus taught.  Who believed and practiced teachings like “Blessed are the peacemakers, for theirs is the kingdom of God.”  People who took care of each other in community.  His search brought him to discover the Anabaptists of the 16^th century and the way that that tradition has been continued in the Mennonite church.  He was amazed with groups like Mennonite Central Committee that had people on the ground in conflicted areas building relationships between differing parties.  He was astonished that there was a denomination where it was normal for youth to go on service projects during their high school years and to be aware of how their faith connected with the careers they were considering.  He was shocked to learn that one Mennonite congregation organized several weeks worth of meals for a family in the congregation who had an unexpected hardship and was even more shocked when he found out that these people and other Mennonites he was getting to know considered this a normal, Christian thing to do.  Through reading Mennonite writers like John Howard Yoder, through getting to know groups like Mennonite Central Committee and Christian Peacemaker Teams, and through encountering real live Mennonites, he found himself being converted to a faith in God and in Christ that was concerned with the whole person and the whole of life, spiritual, communal, political, economic.  One of the quotes from him I was able to get down on paper was “your existence helped me realize I could follow Jesus in the 21^st century.  Thank you.”

The epistle to the Ephesians served as the Scriptural reference point throughout the convention week.  In chapter four the writer says, ^NRS Ephesians 4:1-4 I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ² with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³ making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴ There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling.” 

“Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”  There is a calling coming from beyond ourselves, presenting itself to us in the form of a compelling draw toward being people of humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love.  The theme for the week was “Live the Call,” and throughout the time we heard ways that different parts of the Mennonite Church are seeking to live the call.  The scope was broad.  We heard of Mennonites in violence ridden Columbia, Zimbabwe, Israel/Palestine, Iraq building relationships between groups in conflict.  We heard of ways of reaching out to immigrants in our communities and encouraging Congress to make immigration reform fair for families.  We were presented with possible steps for making our congregations and own lifestyles more ecologically sustainable,   We discussed and made movement toward upping our commitment to mutual aid in seeing that all pastors and church workers have health coverage – recognizing that currently 70-100 Mennonite pastors in the US are completely without health insurance, disproportionately those from racial/ethnic congregations.   

Sitting with our Mennonite sisters and brothers this past week I resonated with Paul Alexander’s message and personally felt a strong sense of being thankful for all of these Mennonites around the country and world living faithfully to the call.  We are a part of a faith family that is working to live within this story outlined in the Vision: Healing and Hope statement: God, calling us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy, and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.”  I found myself wanting to also say ‘thank you’ to the Mennonite Church.

I also felt a sense of thankfulness for Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship.   Thank you for the ways that you are a community of grace, joy and peace.  Thank you for loving each other.  Thank you for loving our children here and investing in their formation.  Thank you for your honesty in your faith and for being willing to question and seek and grow.  Thank you for letting your faith shape your lives throughout the week.  What you are doing is important work.  Thank you for that last scene that I saw before leaving Cincinnati heading out to the airport to fly to San Jose last Saturday.  A scene of youth and adults volunteering at the yard sale here to earn money for the “Free to Breathe” project with the health clinic in El Salvador.  And people from the neighborhood stopping in to see what these people who meet in this big building on the corner are all about.  Thanks for the creativity and energy that went into that.  It was a good scene to have lingering in my mind as I left for the week.  What you are doing is good, it is bearing fruit, it is important, it is not isolated but it is connected to the one body that is the body of Christ.

————

After saying “Thank you,” Paul Alexander moved to his second point, “Please.”  His discovery of the Anabaptist tradition led him to look deeper into his own Pentecostal/charismatic tradition – a stream of Christianity that has only been around 100 years or so but claims 600 million followers world-wide and growing.  And in looking at his own history, he found that for the first 40-50 years of its existence, the Pentecostal movement was explicitly pacifist, believing that a sharp distinction should be made between being citizens of the reign of God and citizens of any nation-state.  He started a network called the Pentecostal/Charismatic Peace Fellowship as a way of starting to recover the spirit of those early Pentecostals.  It has caused plenty of controversy within his circle of relationships.  After 9/11 Paul offered a word of caution to the Christian university where he was teaching to not rush too fast into flag waving and uniting around a military campaign, but to use the time to reflect on ways that we as a nation have failed to truly love our neighbor as Jesus calls us to do.  This was not well received.  He was barred from teaching his ethics class for three semesters. 

                Paul was asking us Mennonites to please, please continue to live out of our convictions of seeking to follow Jesus in all of life.  There is a great need for communities of grace, joy, and peace, living God’s call, and our message is not just for a niche market for people of faith, but one that all need to know and be invited to embrace.

The writer to the Ephesians is offering a similar kind of plea to the church to live out this vital calling.  “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”  I beg you.  The writer to the church knew that the city of Ephesus and the Roman empire desperately needed this little band of Jesus followers in Ephesus to lead out in offering a new way of being human together.  They were outnumbered, outresourced, and out-powered for sure by the dominant culture, but what they had was that magnetic bond of peace that has a way of undermining and overcoming the bond of violence that the empire rules by. 

I found it a little ironic to be listening to a Pentecostal begging Mennonites to be strong, assertive, overt, in our witness for peace.  But it does match up with other recent experiences I have had.  In the last couple months I’ve had the chance to interact with some neighbors of ours called the Vineyard Central Community.  This group is based in west Norwood and has chosen to intentionally live close to each other.  There are now over 40 households within a few blocks of each other.  They are straightforward in saying that they have been deeply influenced by the Anabaptist tradition.  I’ve eaten a couple meals with their pastor, Kevin Rains and our last meal together consisted almost entirely of him asking me about how we in the Mennonite church understand peace and how he could introduce that as a more central part of their community.  He was curious about how we relate with government, but also how they can be peacemakers in their own neighborhood.  He was essentially saying “Please,” help us figure out how to live this.

As a way of backing up his begging, the writer to the Ephesians points out that this community is not just a collection of individuals, but a single body, sharing one Spirit.  “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism”     When you see yourself as a part of one body, much larger than yourself or your immediate family, your single congregation or denomination, you begin to feel the sense of urgency with which the apostle is begging the church to live.  If we are all one body, then, as the writer of 1 Corinthians states, if one part suffers, we all suffer.  We can’t feel completely at peace until the entire body is well.  “Please” continue living the calling to which you have been called.”         

That message Wednesday night from Paul Alexander was representative of the overall spirit of the week.  Just about every speaker I heard and every workshop I attended echoed the value, the absolute necessity of the Anabaptist understanding of faith and what that can mean today, especially in this nation where the God of Christianity and the God of US nationalism are so easily conflated together.    So this is one of the messages I carry back from this convention and pass along to you.  A Thank you, an affirmation for being a community of grac, joy, and peace.  A Thank you coming not just from ourselves, telling each other we are doing a good job, but coming from those outside looking in and seeing something of great value that is attractive and hopeful.  And also a “Please:” keep living the call.  A begging to recognize the importance of what we have been called to.  Please continue living as if we are all a part of one body, where we can’t separate the health and well-being of our brother or sister from our own health and well-being.  The world needs us to remain faithful to our Anabaptist roots in claiming primary allegiance to the way of Christ and not being co-opted by the dominant culture.  I believe God is calling us, Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship, to Live the Call.  We have been given many gifts, and we have many gifts to offer each other and the communities we serve.  God’s blessing be with us as we seek to do this.      

 

“God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy, and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.”

(Vision: Healing and Hope printed in bulletins)