(This message is one in a series on Paul's letter to the Ephesians titled, 'Growing Together.')
Ephesians 2:1-10
We continue our series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’
Why Ephesians? When we started we read this quote: “We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours.” That about sums it up.
Last week I told the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. Their part of the mine caved in and for the last 50 days or so they’ve been trapped a half-mile underground. It took 17 days for the rescue teams to locate where they were trapped, and the task of bringing them to the surface is expected to go into November.
Remember that when the miners were found they’d already organized themselves into teams—they were sharing regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their standard procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.
That’s how we want to be here in this church.
What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.
That’s what we’re going to do.
As we work our way through Ephesians we’re going to be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything.
Because we know that hard things are going to happen even as we grow in our lives as disciples. We also know that we struggle with believing that we can trust God at his word. And finally, we wonder where being a follower of Jesus fits in this crazy world. Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.
I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.
Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Today’s passage is an important part of that.
For years, every time I sat down to watch an American football game on TV, I saw the same thing. After a touchdown, the special teams would come out for the extra point. The offense and defense would get ready and the net would go up behind the goalposts to make it easier get the ball back after the kick. That’s when you’d see it. There was always some guy in the stands holding up a bright yellow sign that said Eph. 2:8.
I always wondered about that guy. What did he do for a living? Did any of his family or friends know that that’s how he spent his Sunday afternoons? What made him get a season ticket just so that he could have these few moments in each game when he might be seen on television holding up a Scripture reference that no one knew?
Our passage today includes that text of Scripture. Listen for God’s word to you.
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
First, that is one abrupt start to a passage. We go from some pretty flowery theological language—even for Paul—in the first chapter to this. In the first chapter we hear “praise be to our God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms,” and “I pray that your heart may be enlightened in order that you may experience the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.” We go directly from that to ‘As for you’. Now when you hear a sentence that starts with As for you, you know it’s not going to go well for you. “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…”
I remember reading this and thinking: “I’m going back to the first chapter…it was a lot more fun.” But that would be missing the point. We can’t get to the important idea of God’s grace unless we get a reminder of just how much we need that grace in our lives.
The crucial truth to take from this text is that our sin isn’t the end of our story.
In the very next breath Paul writes: “But because of his great love for us…” God’s love and mercy are the starting point of our new lives, and he gives us that gift before we even understand that we need it. We saw in Romans last year that “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…” It’s like having a friend who starts to make up with you before you’ve even said you’re sorry.
And then we get to Grace.
“It is by grace you have been saved.” What is this grace we keep hearing about? The pastor I grew up with talked about it as ‘undeserved favor’, something we can’t earn or make for ourselves—something we have to receive from someone else.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “Grace originates in an act of God that is absolutely without precedent, the generous, sacrificial self-giving of Jesus that makes it possible for us to participate in resurrection maturity. But we can’t participate apart from a willed passivity, entering into and giving ourselves up to what has gone before us…Such passivity does not come easy to us. It must be acquired.” Uh-oh.
I’ll bet my lunch money for a week that none of us actively tries to acquire any kind of passivity, that none of us consciously trains our kids to be passive in any way. And yet, without learning how to give ourselves up to the presence and action of God from time to time, we miss a crucial part of the grace he offers us.
The bottom line is this: God’s graces changes our values and methods and priorities. God’s grace changes everything, because when we welcome and make room for God’s grace in our lives, we experience in a deeper way the life that he wants for us—the life that he gives for us. We find that our salvation doesn’t come from how much we earn or what we own or where our kids go to school. Our salvation comes only from God, and only in the form of a gift we don’t deserve.
The whole point of this text is wrapped up in the last three verses, including the one that guy held up on his sign: Ephesians 2:8-10. Listen to how all of that sounds in The Message.
“Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”
What should we take away from this part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians?
First: Learning to be ready to take care of each other as a Christian community begins with believing that through Christ God has taken care of us first. Our text today reads chronologically: God acted, so we could become who we were meant to be, so we could go where we were meant to go.
Second: Through Christ we join God in the work he’s doing in this world. Churches tend to think we’re out there, leading the spread of the gospel in the world. But the best advice I ever got for how to become an effective church was this: “Look around and see what God is already doing in the world, and join in.” Being a maturing, growing church is about seeing where God is working, and throwing ourselves into the effort. I said last week that the point isn’t what the church ought to be doing, but what God wants to do through the people of the church.
That’s the best insurance against thinking that we’re the ones behind the good things that happen here. Last week we heard Zena and Natasha talk about their time on a mission trip with Habitat for Humanity. Pretty easy to feel good about that one—we helped pay their expenses, they went and did the work at the site—it would be easy to think that we were behind all of that. We weren’t. What happens in this place isn’t what we do, it’s what God does through us.
And finally: That work is done through the church—through the imperfect, broken, complaining, addicted, abused, jealous, greedy and forgiven people…people just like us. Understanding that grace changes everything begins with acknowledging that there are parts of our lives that we need God to enter in and change.
I could throw a list at you, but seriously, don’t we all know where we wish God would transform us into the people he made us to be? The key here is that we don’t have to be perfect, don’t have to be successful, don’t have to be rich, don’t have to send our kids to elite universities—we don’t have to measure up to have God use us in a meaningful way. The old saying goes like this, and it’s true: God doesn’t care about our ability, what he really wants is our availability.
When I think back on that guy at football games who held up the Eph. 2:8 sign, my first thought is probably similar to yours: ‘What a nut.’
But in the end all he was really trying to do was remind us of something very important, that it is by grace that we’re brought into God’s presence and kingdom—that it’s by grace that we have been saved. It’s by grace alone that we have anything in our lives that matters.
That reminder is the task of the church. That’s how we prepare for hard times—it’s how we learn to take care of each other when those hard times come—it’s how we fellowship and worship and grow in faith and serve the world. It is by grace that we learn to live the way we were meant to live all along.
This passage of Ephesians is the gateway to being a mature disciple of Jesus. Maybe the right response to the guy with the sign wasn’t to dismiss him. Maybe the right move was to buy a season ticket and sit next to him so he could hold a bigger sign.
My prayer for all of us is that we’ll grow into a church that announces to the world the good news that we find in that single verse from Ephesians.
“For it is by grace you have been saved through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”
There is just one hymn that will measure up to the power of that passage of Scripture. Let’s stand and sing it together: ‘Amazing Grace.’
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Grand Scheme of Things
(This is the first in a series of messages on Paul's letter to the Ephesians titled 'Growing Together.')
Ephesians 1:1-10, 22-23
Today we begin a series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’ Why Ephesians? Check out the quote on the front of your bulletin.
“We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours. This is the holy soil in which we have been planted, the conditions that make it possible for us to grow up in Christ, to become mature, ‘healthy in God, robust in love’”
That’s from Eugene Peterson, and it sums up as well as anything why we chose this letter for the autumn series of messages.
Last week I told the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. If you haven’t heard about it, the men were hit by a cave-in and trapped underground. They survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were, and now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until late-November.
But the fascinating part of this story describes what the miners have been doing down there. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.
When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.
That’s how we want to be here in this church.
What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.
That’s what we’re going to do.
Don’t worry—we’re not going to turn our worship hour into a disaster preparedness class or some kind of first aid training. Not exactly.
What we’re going to do over the next 10 weeks is be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything.
Because we know that hard things are going to happen even as we grow in our lives as disciples. If we’re honest with each other we’ll admit that life doesn’t always go the way we planned—accidents happen, wounds happen, disasters can strike. You don’t have to be pessimistic to say that—you just have to be awake. Too often church families are safe places only when things are going well. When a loss or a struggle interrupts our lives we can feel like the church is the last place we want to be.
I want that to change.
We also know that we struggle with believing that we can trust God at his word. Everyone has struggles with faith—seriously, we’d be crazy not to wonder sometimes if this is all true. The problem isn’t doubt. The problem is that sometimes the church is the last place we want to share the doubts that we have, the ones that keep us from believing and worshipping and serving freely and joyfully.
I want that to change, too.
And finally, we wonder where being a follower of Jesus fits in this crazy world. On the one hand we read about the God Delusion, and on the other tens of thousands of faithful Catholics are lining the streets to see the Pope. On the one hand Mother Teresa sets a standard that none of us will ever reach, and then a minister in Florida makes us embarrassed to call ourselves Christian. Where do we fit as people who want to be disciples of Jesus Christ? Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.
I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.
Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Listen to how this letter starts.
Our text this morning is Ephesians 1:1-10.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.
That’s a powerful and complicated statement about the grand scheme of things—the unseen reality of being an everyday follower of Christ. It’s an amazing hymn of who Christ is, what God did through him, and who we are because of it. Listen to how another translator brought it into English:
“How blessed is God and what a blessing he is! He’s the father of our master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down the earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love…Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments…And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making…It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we’re living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he’s working out in everything and everyone.”
Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in Ephesus to encourage them and remind them not to forget their first love. The letter is unique in that it’s the only one of Paul’s letters to churches that doesn’t address some serious problem. It’s not that the Ephesians had it all together—Paul is just writing one of his theological letters to a church that he liked.
In the end what we find in this passage and in the rest of Ephesians, is that the church somehow represents and gives shape to the resurrected Jesus. The one we celebrate on Easter Sunday is the one we represent in our lives and in this place every day, every week. In the words of Eugene Peterson, we gather as the church to ‘practice the resurrection’ in our lives and worship and service. He writes:
“Church is an appointed gathering of named people in a world in which death gets all the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation…The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word—Jesus life.”
Part of how we prepare ourselves and each other for whatever life throws at us is to remember that we are a community that is built on a resurrected Messiah. The engine of the church is the belief that this life isn’t all there is, and that through the resurrection of Jesus, death isn’t the last word. Reminding ourselves and each other that we’re resurrection people, even when it’s hard to grasp or believe, is how we prepare for the hard times that might come our way.
There really can’t be any doubt that Ephesians is written to support the church, or at least gathered groups of believers. The word ‘us’ shows up a half-dozen times just in the 8 verses after the opening greeting.
God blessed us, he chose us, he predestined us, he gave us grace—no, wait a minute, he lavished us with grace, and he made Christ known…to us.
If ‘us’ is the church, then what is it about us that makes us ready to help, ready to love and care and serve in Christ’s name? What is it about us that makes us a Christian community that can grow into a mature experience of life and faith and interaction with the world?
Listen to verses 22 and 23 of the same chapter.
And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
Three things to take away from this passage as we begin our journey through Ephesians.
Christ is the head of the church. That’s not a swipe at the Pope’s visit to London—any good Pope would confess the exact same thing. Christ is the head, the leader, the source of everything true and good and loving that comes out of the church. To forget that is to forget who we are and whose we are, and that’s never a good thing.
The church represents Christ’s fullness to the world. No one of us can do it alone, but as a community of faithful disciples learning how to share our gifts with others we become the body of Christ here, showing what he’s like to a world that needs to know.
And finally, what defines us as church isn’t what we do, it’s what Christ does in us and through us.
This past week a seismologist said that London was overdue for a serious earthquake. They haven’t had a real shaker here since 1580, and the fault line in the Dover Straits has been quietly building up tension for centuries.
The talk of earthquakes took me back to growing up in Southern California, and how much time was spent in school learning how to react when we felt the earth start to shake. We knew how to get under our desks, how to stand where buildings were the strongest, and eventually even how to apply some basic first aid. Then we’d go back to our normal lessons and get on with the task of learning the rest of what we needed to know.
Our walk through Ephesians is going to be a bit like that. We want to be a church, a community of believers, a family that knows how to respond in faith to whatever gets thrown our way. That’s how we’ll make a real and lasting impact on the world God made—the world God loves.
Listen to how those last two verses are translated in The Message:
“At the center of everything Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, and by which he fills everything with his presence.”
My prayer for us as we make our way through the letter to the Ephesians is that we’ll grow more and more into a church like that. One that takes its place, serving from the center of things—a church that Jesus Christ himself will speak through, and will act through. Make that your prayer, too.
Ephesians 1:1-10, 22-23
Today we begin a series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’ Why Ephesians? Check out the quote on the front of your bulletin.
“We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours. This is the holy soil in which we have been planted, the conditions that make it possible for us to grow up in Christ, to become mature, ‘healthy in God, robust in love’”
That’s from Eugene Peterson, and it sums up as well as anything why we chose this letter for the autumn series of messages.
Last week I told the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. If you haven’t heard about it, the men were hit by a cave-in and trapped underground. They survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were, and now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until late-November.
But the fascinating part of this story describes what the miners have been doing down there. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.
When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.
That’s how we want to be here in this church.
What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.
That’s what we’re going to do.
Don’t worry—we’re not going to turn our worship hour into a disaster preparedness class or some kind of first aid training. Not exactly.
What we’re going to do over the next 10 weeks is be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything.
Because we know that hard things are going to happen even as we grow in our lives as disciples. If we’re honest with each other we’ll admit that life doesn’t always go the way we planned—accidents happen, wounds happen, disasters can strike. You don’t have to be pessimistic to say that—you just have to be awake. Too often church families are safe places only when things are going well. When a loss or a struggle interrupts our lives we can feel like the church is the last place we want to be.
I want that to change.
We also know that we struggle with believing that we can trust God at his word. Everyone has struggles with faith—seriously, we’d be crazy not to wonder sometimes if this is all true. The problem isn’t doubt. The problem is that sometimes the church is the last place we want to share the doubts that we have, the ones that keep us from believing and worshipping and serving freely and joyfully.
I want that to change, too.
And finally, we wonder where being a follower of Jesus fits in this crazy world. On the one hand we read about the God Delusion, and on the other tens of thousands of faithful Catholics are lining the streets to see the Pope. On the one hand Mother Teresa sets a standard that none of us will ever reach, and then a minister in Florida makes us embarrassed to call ourselves Christian. Where do we fit as people who want to be disciples of Jesus Christ? Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.
I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.
Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Listen to how this letter starts.
Our text this morning is Ephesians 1:1-10.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.
That’s a powerful and complicated statement about the grand scheme of things—the unseen reality of being an everyday follower of Christ. It’s an amazing hymn of who Christ is, what God did through him, and who we are because of it. Listen to how another translator brought it into English:
“How blessed is God and what a blessing he is! He’s the father of our master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down the earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love…Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments…And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making…It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we’re living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he’s working out in everything and everyone.”
Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in Ephesus to encourage them and remind them not to forget their first love. The letter is unique in that it’s the only one of Paul’s letters to churches that doesn’t address some serious problem. It’s not that the Ephesians had it all together—Paul is just writing one of his theological letters to a church that he liked.
In the end what we find in this passage and in the rest of Ephesians, is that the church somehow represents and gives shape to the resurrected Jesus. The one we celebrate on Easter Sunday is the one we represent in our lives and in this place every day, every week. In the words of Eugene Peterson, we gather as the church to ‘practice the resurrection’ in our lives and worship and service. He writes:
“Church is an appointed gathering of named people in a world in which death gets all the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation…The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word—Jesus life.”
Part of how we prepare ourselves and each other for whatever life throws at us is to remember that we are a community that is built on a resurrected Messiah. The engine of the church is the belief that this life isn’t all there is, and that through the resurrection of Jesus, death isn’t the last word. Reminding ourselves and each other that we’re resurrection people, even when it’s hard to grasp or believe, is how we prepare for the hard times that might come our way.
There really can’t be any doubt that Ephesians is written to support the church, or at least gathered groups of believers. The word ‘us’ shows up a half-dozen times just in the 8 verses after the opening greeting.
God blessed us, he chose us, he predestined us, he gave us grace—no, wait a minute, he lavished us with grace, and he made Christ known…to us.
If ‘us’ is the church, then what is it about us that makes us ready to help, ready to love and care and serve in Christ’s name? What is it about us that makes us a Christian community that can grow into a mature experience of life and faith and interaction with the world?
Listen to verses 22 and 23 of the same chapter.
And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
Three things to take away from this passage as we begin our journey through Ephesians.
Christ is the head of the church. That’s not a swipe at the Pope’s visit to London—any good Pope would confess the exact same thing. Christ is the head, the leader, the source of everything true and good and loving that comes out of the church. To forget that is to forget who we are and whose we are, and that’s never a good thing.
The church represents Christ’s fullness to the world. No one of us can do it alone, but as a community of faithful disciples learning how to share our gifts with others we become the body of Christ here, showing what he’s like to a world that needs to know.
And finally, what defines us as church isn’t what we do, it’s what Christ does in us and through us.
This past week a seismologist said that London was overdue for a serious earthquake. They haven’t had a real shaker here since 1580, and the fault line in the Dover Straits has been quietly building up tension for centuries.
The talk of earthquakes took me back to growing up in Southern California, and how much time was spent in school learning how to react when we felt the earth start to shake. We knew how to get under our desks, how to stand where buildings were the strongest, and eventually even how to apply some basic first aid. Then we’d go back to our normal lessons and get on with the task of learning the rest of what we needed to know.
Our walk through Ephesians is going to be a bit like that. We want to be a church, a community of believers, a family that knows how to respond in faith to whatever gets thrown our way. That’s how we’ll make a real and lasting impact on the world God made—the world God loves.
Listen to how those last two verses are translated in The Message:
“At the center of everything Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, and by which he fills everything with his presence.”
My prayer for us as we make our way through the letter to the Ephesians is that we’ll grow more and more into a church like that. One that takes its place, serving from the center of things—a church that Jesus Christ himself will speak through, and will act through. Make that your prayer, too.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Welcome Back to What?
Welcome Back Sunday 2010
Joshua 1:6-9
Our text today is pretty straightforward and clear. Here’s what’s happening: The Israelites have been released from slavery in Egypt, but they were a little weak on the twin ideas of gratitude and obedience, and so God had them wander in the wilderness for 40 years. Even Moses got old and died during that time, and so now Joshua is their leader.
After all the wandering and problems and negotiating with Moses and the people over the years, here’s where we are. God’s people want to know how long they have to wait before they get to the Promised Land, God wants them to trust that he’ll do what he said he would do, and Joshua is taking over for the most important leader in Israel’s history. Everyone wants a straight answer here, and so God says this very clearly to Joshua.
6 “Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them. 7 Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”
There are a few things to know about this passage as we try to find out what it means for us.
First, the book we call Joshua describes the way God fulfills the covenant he made with his people. The first books of the Old Testament are filled with promises that God makes to his people, and in Joshua we see some of those begin to be fulfilled.
Second, our text falls within a time of conflict and danger and fear. There are wars, divisions among God’s people, frustration with the constant wandering, and struggles with how to live the life of faith.
Finally, for us this text is a reminder of the way God calls us to be his people. Notice that God calls Joshua to three tasks or practices or behaviors: to be strong and courageous, which we can interpret as being faithful and hopeful; to read and study and reflect on the Scriptures God gave us; and to live the way he calls us to live.
Whatever else we see in this text, I want us to take it as a wakeup call for the church—for all of us who want to be followers of Jesus Christ.
There are so many news stories competing for our attention, but one of the most compelling for me is the one about those 33 miners stuck in a hole—trapped underground in Chile. If you haven’t seen the story, the men were hit by a cave-in and they survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were. Now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until December.
Once they got a communication device down to the men—remember they’d been there for two and a half weeks—most just wanted someone to say clearly and honestly how long it was going to take to get them out of there.
But there’s something else about those miners that you might not know. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.
When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.
There’s something we can learn from these brave miners.
As a church, how do we gather ourselves and prepare to help each other when disasters happen, or just when normal hard times come? We know that bad things happen in the lives of people we know and care about—how do we get ready for that in our church life? How do we make ourselves ready to step in and care for people when they need us the most?
Maybe, on Welcome Back Sunday, a different way to ask that as we reconnect and enjoy our time together today is this:
Welcome back to what?
I’ve been thinking about that over the summer and especially this past week or so as we’ve been preparing for a new church year. I’ve been thinking about how to give a straight answer to that question…welcome back to what?
Welcome to a community where we try to be strong and courageous—to be faithful and hopeful—even when we really feel weak and afraid. To be faithful and hopeful is to believe that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he’ll do. That’s not easy—it’s why we do it in community, as a church family. How? That’s the second thing.
Welcome to a church family where we’re going to dive into the Scriptures and wrestle with what they meant when they were written, so we can understand what they mean for us today. We have a year-long adult Bible study on Sunday mornings where we’re going to explore the Psalms. A group of women are going to gather for a 10-week Beth Moore Bible study on the fruit of the Spirit starting in October. Our kids are learning Bible stories as they have fun in Sunday School, and our youth are learning to apply the Scriptures to the questions they’re asking about life and faith. Get the idea? We’re taking the Bible seriously…and faithfully.
And finally, welcome to a place that is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ—a place that wants to show the world who Christ is through Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship and Mission. As we start a new year make sure you check out the different ways we’re going to grow together in this place. The point is that we all develop into the disciples God made us to be.
Those are the same things God told Joshua to do in order to get ready for the road ahead.
Be faithful and hopeful,
Be immersed in the Scriptures,
and make your life a reflection of what you believe.
That’s what we want to do in this place as we live in Christian community.
This time of welcoming and welcoming back is a perfect time to say some other things, too. Whether you’re new here or you’ve been coming for a while, here’s what I want you to know:
No matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done or even what you’ve believed before, you’re welcome here.
Whether you feel close to Jesus or lukewarm about him, or if you feel stuck in a very deep hole and you can’t get out, you’re welcome here.
This is a place where you can connect with each other and with God, where you can grow in faith and serve Christ’s Kingdom—this is a church family made up of people who are looking for forgiveness and wholeness, and we want that message to be as clear as possible.
The promise to Joshua was ‘the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’ We believe that here, even when it’s a struggle, and we want to be a place where we practice God’s presence in everything we say, and everything we do. ---
Over the next few months we’re going to focus on what it means to grow in faith together as we look at Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church. It’s such a great book of the Bible, and I hope you’ll join us as we explore what it means for us as a church in London in the 21st century.
For now, though, welcome and welcome back. Let’s pray together.
Joshua 1:6-9
Our text today is pretty straightforward and clear. Here’s what’s happening: The Israelites have been released from slavery in Egypt, but they were a little weak on the twin ideas of gratitude and obedience, and so God had them wander in the wilderness for 40 years. Even Moses got old and died during that time, and so now Joshua is their leader.
After all the wandering and problems and negotiating with Moses and the people over the years, here’s where we are. God’s people want to know how long they have to wait before they get to the Promised Land, God wants them to trust that he’ll do what he said he would do, and Joshua is taking over for the most important leader in Israel’s history. Everyone wants a straight answer here, and so God says this very clearly to Joshua.
6 “Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them. 7 Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”
There are a few things to know about this passage as we try to find out what it means for us.
First, the book we call Joshua describes the way God fulfills the covenant he made with his people. The first books of the Old Testament are filled with promises that God makes to his people, and in Joshua we see some of those begin to be fulfilled.
Second, our text falls within a time of conflict and danger and fear. There are wars, divisions among God’s people, frustration with the constant wandering, and struggles with how to live the life of faith.
Finally, for us this text is a reminder of the way God calls us to be his people. Notice that God calls Joshua to three tasks or practices or behaviors: to be strong and courageous, which we can interpret as being faithful and hopeful; to read and study and reflect on the Scriptures God gave us; and to live the way he calls us to live.
Whatever else we see in this text, I want us to take it as a wakeup call for the church—for all of us who want to be followers of Jesus Christ.
There are so many news stories competing for our attention, but one of the most compelling for me is the one about those 33 miners stuck in a hole—trapped underground in Chile. If you haven’t seen the story, the men were hit by a cave-in and they survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were. Now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until December.
Once they got a communication device down to the men—remember they’d been there for two and a half weeks—most just wanted someone to say clearly and honestly how long it was going to take to get them out of there.
But there’s something else about those miners that you might not know. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.
When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.
There’s something we can learn from these brave miners.
As a church, how do we gather ourselves and prepare to help each other when disasters happen, or just when normal hard times come? We know that bad things happen in the lives of people we know and care about—how do we get ready for that in our church life? How do we make ourselves ready to step in and care for people when they need us the most?
Maybe, on Welcome Back Sunday, a different way to ask that as we reconnect and enjoy our time together today is this:
Welcome back to what?
I’ve been thinking about that over the summer and especially this past week or so as we’ve been preparing for a new church year. I’ve been thinking about how to give a straight answer to that question…welcome back to what?
Welcome to a community where we try to be strong and courageous—to be faithful and hopeful—even when we really feel weak and afraid. To be faithful and hopeful is to believe that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he’ll do. That’s not easy—it’s why we do it in community, as a church family. How? That’s the second thing.
Welcome to a church family where we’re going to dive into the Scriptures and wrestle with what they meant when they were written, so we can understand what they mean for us today. We have a year-long adult Bible study on Sunday mornings where we’re going to explore the Psalms. A group of women are going to gather for a 10-week Beth Moore Bible study on the fruit of the Spirit starting in October. Our kids are learning Bible stories as they have fun in Sunday School, and our youth are learning to apply the Scriptures to the questions they’re asking about life and faith. Get the idea? We’re taking the Bible seriously…and faithfully.
And finally, welcome to a place that is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ—a place that wants to show the world who Christ is through Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship and Mission. As we start a new year make sure you check out the different ways we’re going to grow together in this place. The point is that we all develop into the disciples God made us to be.
Those are the same things God told Joshua to do in order to get ready for the road ahead.
Be faithful and hopeful,
Be immersed in the Scriptures,
and make your life a reflection of what you believe.
That’s what we want to do in this place as we live in Christian community.
This time of welcoming and welcoming back is a perfect time to say some other things, too. Whether you’re new here or you’ve been coming for a while, here’s what I want you to know:
No matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done or even what you’ve believed before, you’re welcome here.
Whether you feel close to Jesus or lukewarm about him, or if you feel stuck in a very deep hole and you can’t get out, you’re welcome here.
This is a place where you can connect with each other and with God, where you can grow in faith and serve Christ’s Kingdom—this is a church family made up of people who are looking for forgiveness and wholeness, and we want that message to be as clear as possible.
The promise to Joshua was ‘the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’ We believe that here, even when it’s a struggle, and we want to be a place where we practice God’s presence in everything we say, and everything we do. ---
Over the next few months we’re going to focus on what it means to grow in faith together as we look at Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church. It’s such a great book of the Bible, and I hope you’ll join us as we explore what it means for us as a church in London in the 21st century.
For now, though, welcome and welcome back. Let’s pray together.
Monday, September 06, 2010
Getting Back in the Saddle...
OK, so I've been gone for a while.
We spent a month together with our families and friend in Glendale and Burbank this summer. It was a great (and necessary) time of rest and play and connection with people that we miss a lot during the year. I'll get back to writing soon, but here are some pictures from our summer in California.
Chinatown for Dim Sum with some friends.
Ian got to hang out with one of his best buddies from nursery school.
The Griffith Observatory in LA (where the knife fight in 'Rebel Without a Cause' was filmed.
Ian and Ericka
No wonder people find LA confusing...
The pendulum in the atrium (Latin humor)
Yes, there are two starches on my plate. Sue me.
Family dinner in Shell Beach.
I was going to say we played a little chess, but that would be wrong...
Ian and I fished off the pier, and also on one of the half-day deep-sea charters.
This amounts to a 'before and after' set of pictures.
We spent a month together with our families and friend in Glendale and Burbank this summer. It was a great (and necessary) time of rest and play and connection with people that we miss a lot during the year. I'll get back to writing soon, but here are some pictures from our summer in California.
Chinatown for Dim Sum with some friends.
Ian got to hang out with one of his best buddies from nursery school.
The Griffith Observatory in LA (where the knife fight in 'Rebel Without a Cause' was filmed. 
Ian and Ericka
No wonder people find LA confusing...
The pendulum in the atrium (Latin humor)
Yes, there are two starches on my plate. Sue me.
Family dinner in Shell Beach.
I was going to say we played a little chess, but that would be wrong...
Ian and I fished off the pier, and also on one of the half-day deep-sea charters.
This amounts to a 'before and after' set of pictures.
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