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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
I think Paul's words come to us and remind us that as long as we are holding our hostilities, we have no way to receive the peace that Christ promised to bring us. This morning, we are continuing our series in the New Testament letter of Ephesians. We've called it if then and as Jeremy discussed last week, those words are both a kind of series title but they're also a kind of reading hack for you anytime you choose to come back to the letter to the Ephesians in the future for yourself because this letter can be more or less divided into two halves. The first is a collection of Paul's thoughts to his friends on just what it means if God has started to repair all creation through Jesus' life, death, resurrection. Apostle, he also seems to have been thinking a lot about what it means if that small little collection of believers in Ephesus were in fact participants in that great renewal project.
Scott Wall:And we're actually going to talk a little bit more about that today. But then we are going to spend the next two weeks exploring the second half of the letter where Paul takes that big if and he says to his friends, well, if this is in fact true, then what? Like, then how are you going to live? And by extension, how are you and I going to live? And last week, we thought a little bit about Paul as the composer of this letter to the Ephesians.
Scott Wall:Jeremy explained a little bit about why he's convinced that this letter, it likely traces to this first century rabbi in and from Tarsus. That's just part of what made last week interesting and insightful, so be sure to check it out if you missed last week on our podcast. You can go to YouTube as well. But I actually wanna just pull gently on a thread that stood out for me in Jeremy's contention that Paul obviously used different styles and vocabulary at different times in his life and across his different letters. I think this offers us some perspective on our journeys of faith.
Scott Wall:See, Paul was convinced dramatically and radically that Jesus was the long promised Messiah of the Jewish scripture. Also, he was convinced that Jesus was somehow the great cosmic rescuer of all creation. And those are massive ideas that took him decades to grapple with, to explore, and to carry well. And I think this indicates a kind of if then embedded in what it will always mean to follow Jesus. A kind of rule that if you commit to following Jesus' ethic toward neighbor and enemy, or maybe if you have found yourself just captivated or curious about the story of Jesus, then your trust in him and his story will grow and change over time.
Scott Wall:Put another way, if Paul changed his mind on big theological ideas, then so will you. If Paul could grow in his understanding of God's great love, then so can that person in your life that seems to be so stuck. If Paul's language to describe his faith deepened and shifted over the years, then maybe we should assume that change is the evidence of the spirit's faithful work in us. So as we open our hearts to that great continuing work and to Ephesians chapter two today, I'm gonna invite you to just pause. There's a bit of a pause here in this moment, isn't there?
Scott Wall:Why don't we step into that? Why don't you pray with me? Oh, loving God, we do just take a moment in whatever state we're in, right in the middle of all that's going on around us, and we embrace the presence and the community that this moment offers us. We trust that our deepest thoughts and longings are no mystery to you. Even as we are learning to trust that you are quietly and faithfully and steadily at work in us And where perhaps this morning we feel weary, we ask that you would come and bring your peace.
Scott Wall:Where we feel frantic maybe or distracted, we pray that you would come and you you would bring a calm that is rooted in your ultimate goodness. And in a world that is so full of content and in a culture that's so consumed with self improvement, we turn our attention this morning to Jesus. Jesus who is the way and the truth and the life that we need desperately. And so, Jesus, we recognize that you are a great shining example of how to be fully alive and fully human. That's why we ask that as we turn to ancient words that you would soften the places of our cynicism and our hopelessness, that you'd comfort the places in us where we carry deep sorrow and maybe even despair today.
Scott Wall:We ask these things in the name of Christ who is our hope. Amen. Okay. Back to the letter to the Ephesians today And along the way, wanna think with you a little bit about conjunctions and about divine creativity and about the walls we build and about why metaphors matter so much. And to begin, I think it's important to remember that, again, we're in the first half of this letter.
Scott Wall:In the first half, Paul is still using all of his intellectual and his persuasive power to grasp at and describe what it is that God has done in the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus. And to do that, Paul begins Ephesians chapter two with this statement that spans for several several verses in ancient Greek. Greek's good like that. If you weren't done thinking, you can just keep adding statements to what you're saying. Super helpful.
Scott Wall:English is a little more clunky but what Paul does is he begins by keeping it real and describing the nature of our human experience. And he write this, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and your sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world. All of us also lived among them at times, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Now quickly here, these words transgressions and sins, these probably not super common in everyday conversation for most of us in Calgary. But that said, what's interesting is how visual and active these Greek terms are.
Scott Wall:The word that Paul uses for transgressions here, paroptoma, it's actually derived from a verb that means to slip, to lose your footing, to fall. The word translated as sins here, hamartia, that's an archery term. Actually, technically, it's a description of someone who's not very good at archery. Somebody who misses the target every shot they take. And we will miss most of the gravity of what Paul is saying in the rest of this letter if we don't recognize how descriptive he's being here.
Scott Wall:And in fact, Paul was saying to his friends, listen, all of us, we know this is true. We have this habit of slipping up. We end up on our backsides covered in mud and you know it, we all miss by so much in our efforts at being righteous, at being moral, at being upright, at being human. And why is that? Well, we always seem to be seeking what we want.
Scott Wall:We follow blindly after our thoughts, he says, and we end up off course as a result. We slip into the ditches of our lives as it were. And in saying all of this, Paul easily could have been watching our news feeds. Right? Could have been observing our political turmoil.
Scott Wall:He also could have been riding shotgun with me just a few years ago when someone cut me off and I diverted from my destination to follow that person and honk behind them for three blocks. And it is a true story, I promise. Paul was painting a vivid picture and to do it, he front loaded the sentence. Now as we follow along it can feel a little bit like Paul's gonna continue describing the blatancy of our mistakes except he pivots with one of the most significant conjunctions in all of scripture. But because of a great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even while we were dead in the ditches of our lives.
Scott Wall:It's by grace that you've been saved. Now, I could say a lot here, but I wanna focus on what would have been most striking to Paul's ancient audience. See, the ancient Greco Roman citizens of ancient Ephesus, they were definitely theists. They lived in a world full of gods. Deities like Zeus and Ares and Heracles and the local favorite, the goddess Artemis.
Scott Wall:These were all deities whose actions and demands they shaped the core of ancient transactional religious practice, where people in the ancient world, they would offer sacrifices. They would offer their devotion in exchange for favor and for health and for success. But what an ancient Ephesian would never have thought, not even once, is that the gods might love them. And this was the crux of Paul's view that the world is being restored because of the great love that God has expressed in Jesus. And because of this, Paul thought the ancient Ephesians were already experiencing this kind of restoration despite their falling and their failing.
Scott Wall:Paul was convinced that in Jesus, God had put an end to Ephesian transactional forms of faith and by extension to ours too. God had put an end to the ways that we still believe sometimes, that only those with particular morality or political views or activism are the ones that God truly loves. Or the ways that maybe we lay awake at night, some of us do, and we wonder if we've done enough, or if we're okay, or if grace applies to the messy situation that we have slipped and fallen into ourselves. And what this means is that if we are going to read Ephesians well, we have to pay attention to conjunctions. And then, as much as we are able in the days to come, it is so important that we abandon any theological reflection that does not begin by saying, but because of God's great love for us, everything is different.
Scott Wall:See, for Paul, this change in everything was unfolding on a kind of axis spanning the cosmic to the communal. Because Christ had defeated death, Christ was now seated on a kind of elevated throne in a great cosmic kingdom, and Christ's followers were seated and living under that cosmic rule. But then also in Paul's imagination, he saw the local first century gatherings of Christ's followers as signs of the profound change that God was enacting in the world. For Paul, transformation and redemption were tangible, local things. And this is why in verse 10, he says this.
Scott Wall:He says, for we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. We're gonna talk a little bit about the social fabric of the Ephesian church here in a second, but before we do, it's important to notice Paul's language here. There's a kind of subtlety to the imagery because Paul says that we are God's creative output. When he says this, I'm convinced that he was speaking to all those gathered in places like Ephesus as Christ's followers, places like this one. And there's something about the terminology here though, the word poiema that's translated by the NIV as handiwork.
Scott Wall:It simply refers to anything that's made, an effort of craftsmanship. And given that this Greek term poiema is the root of our English word poem, it's so important to create or to read a kind of creative flare into Paul's inference, I I think. In effect, Paul's saying that every gathering of Christ's followers is a kind of divine poem, a poetic message in and for the world. And also in saying this, he was tapping into the Jewish imagination of God as a cosmic creative force where once in the beginning, God made the universe, now God is making something new. And that means that with our twenty first century imaginations of planets and nebulas and light years, we might read Paul as saying that while God keeps on making galaxies, divine innovation is happening right here, right now.
Scott Wall:And that reminds me of a piece that poet and activist Padre Gottuma wrote a while ago, in which he describes poetry as something we make. And how all making is a way of living, from propagating the species to making shelter or safety or treaties or peace or galleries or museums or schools. And then he drops a line and says, or cake, which I think is great. Which is just to say that you are never more in step with the divine than when you create, when you make something in the world. From families of all configurations to art of various colors and kinds to change that alters many lives beyond your own.
Scott Wall:It's also to take Paul at his word in some small measure that when we collectively create a community committed to beauty and justice and generosity, we embody the redemption that God imagined eons ago. The catch is that while Paul's saying these soaring theological statements, Paul has a very specific and practical consideration in mind. This is, after all, a letter. It's not a theological textbook. It's the equivalent of a long scrollable email written to an actual historical place to people in a particular time.
Scott Wall:It was written to an early Christian community negotiating the tension between participants who were ethnic Jews as almost all of Jesus' first followers were, and a growing number of Gentiles, just think Greeks and Phoenicians, etcetera, all these people being baptized into these new communities. And as you read through chapter two of Ephesians, Paul is clearly addressing the newer gentile arrivals saying to them, okay, remember, you were considered outsiders once. At one time, you felt as though you did not have access to the promises of God that were given to Abraham and to his many descendants, but now in Christ Jesus, you have been given full access. In verse 14, he comes to the heart of it. He says, for Jesus himself is our peace.
Scott Wall:He's made the two groups, the Gentile and the Jew one, and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. By setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and its regulations, God's purpose was to create in himself, in Jesus, one new humanity out of the two, and one might even read the many. Thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility. Now, in many ways, this is an application of Paul's earlier language where he told his friends in Ephesus that they were an expression of divine creativity. But it's here in these verses that Paul tightens the screws on what he really means.
Scott Wall:And what he means is really practical. Christ is the peace that holds final jurisdiction over all of our ethnic and our national boundaries, Paul claimed. In fact, Paul claims that Jesus has destroyed the barriers that divide. And there are many biblical scholars that feel that Paul probably had a particular feature of Jewish tradition and worship in mind when he wrote this. See, in the first century, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was the center of Jewish identity and devotion.
Scott Wall:It was a place that had been built, it had been set aside, it was a place to gather as a unique people, it was a place, it was believed that God's presence rested and it had become an imposing structure after renovations conducted by Herod the Great in the decades right before the life of Jesus. And those of you here in the room, you can see the model that shows how it was an expansive complex of courts and colonnades and buildings. And the outer square of this complex, the court that is on the outside there, it was open to anyone, open to include devout Gentiles. The formal sanctuary and worshiping spaces though in the center, however, were limited to the Jewish people. And separating that court of the Gentiles and the sanctuary proper was this waist high wall, a kind of latticework fence called the soreg.
Scott Wall:This was more than just a social deterrent or a form of loose security. On that fence, there were these signs which we know about because of the Jewish historian, Josephus. He describes them and then his account was confirmed by tablets like these that were discovered, the first of them in the eighteen seventies. And the instructions in Greek, many of you can't read it, they're chillingly clear that no foreigner is allowed beyond the Soreig into the sacred precincts of the temple itself on threat of violence and death. And it's against or maybe a better way to say is it's with these sentiments in mind that Paul sort of makes this argument.
Scott Wall:It's over and against any such imagination of religious boundaries and the need for violence to defend them that he speaks. Paul claims that in Jesus, the boundary between a Jew and a Gentile in Christian community, it had been removed. That hostility and threats predicated on religious dogma, these had been dismantled. But then he keeps going on. He argues that in Jesus, there had been created had been a a new representation, a kind of new humanity, a different quality of being a human being, a way of being human in which divine grace is shared in common without restriction.
Scott Wall:And for Paul, early communities were meant to be outposts of a kingdom in which there were no foreigners, A kingdom in which all hostilities must be laid down. And as careful readers, I think it's okay that we assume that those words would have probably been hard or a challenge to some early Christian adherents living in a diverse politically charged urban environment like Ephesus. But I think we can also assume that Paul's words have something to say to us too, fond as we are of the walls we built. And yes, of course, there there are the borders that we hold and we guard to separate us from our foes. Sure, those are there.
Scott Wall:But then there are the habitualized walls we carry on our person, like our status, and our success, and our barely concealed pride. The things that demarcate us from those we fear, those who do not belong with us, those we disengage from, those we feel morally superior to. And then, of course, I think there are even more subtle forms. There's the emotional resistance that we form against those we live with. The hardness of heart toward those we can barely tolerate.
Scott Wall:The barriers between us and those who have let us down again and again. They've spurned our affections. Let's be clear. I don't I don't think Paul's instructions to early Christians were meant that all interpersonal boundaries are wrong. You know, sometimes it's right to create space between ourselves and others in order to ensure safety and flourishing.
Scott Wall:But more to the point here, to let Paul's words reach us, is to examine the ways that we might claim we're following the way of Jesus while we dismiss those in our community that we disagree with. The ways we find ourselves wary of those whose experience is just different than ours, and it is to pay attention. And this is my invitation to you this week. Invitation to see the ways in which sometimes it can feel like your way of faith is like walking a fence line, where you argue every point. Sometimes just in your own head.
Scott Wall:When people are saying things, you do your very best to shield yourself from the person whose views contrast with your own. I think Paul's words come to us and remind us that as long as we are holding our hostilities, we have no way to receive the peace that Christ promised to bring us. And Paul doesn't stop there. For him to imagine that in Christian community, peace could come to all the places of our deepest suspicion of one another was to also imagine that our categories and our labels of one another would need to change. We actually find evidence of this elsewhere in Paul's writing, but here in Ephesians, he actually reclaims the terminology of difference to make his point.
Scott Wall:In verse 19, he writes, consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but you are fellow citizens with God's people and also members of God's household, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In Christ, the whole building is joined together. It's not bounded and separate from no. In Christ, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple to the Lord. And in many ways, this is a brilliant summation of Paul's theological and ecclesiological imagination because to the Gentile person in Ephesus, he says, you're not an outsider anymore.
Scott Wall:Trust me. And to the Jewish person in Ephesus, he says, you are a joint citizen in a great household of faith, in an ancient family that God has expanded. And to both of them, he would have explained this, this thing between you, it's a sign of what God has been doing all along. It's taking shape right here in front of you. And I think we can imagine that this would have inspired some of them, that it would have inspired many others who would have heard this letter read aloud in communities around the ancient Mediterranean.
Scott Wall:I also have to believe that it's inspired those who over the centuries have heard it and read it and felt like they were seeing something happen in their world too. And maybe that includes us for whom the social world and situation might be different than they were for Paul, but the imagery is no less profound. This idea that healthy, faithful Christian communities are a lot like a house. Just a simple, sturdy structure. Its foundation, the tradition of prophets and apostles teaching.
Scott Wall:Its walls, the lives of nameless saints and renegades. Its roof the justice and peace raised by effort and prayer, its strength the cornerstone of Christ's example and resurrection. And why is that important to remember? I think it's important to remember given our tradition has this tendency to get our metaphors mixed up. See, at times we've imagined ourselves as God's conquering army.
Scott Wall:News flash, we've been the conquering army sometimes. We've imagined that the church could be gathered to a celestial city on some future day with all of our enemies vanquished. And we've conceived of the church as an embattled fortress in need of our passionate defending. But for Paul, the most striking metaphor of the church was that of a home. A place where welcome could be found and offered.
Scott Wall:A place made holy by those building it with their service and their awe and their love for each other, lives fit together literally by spirit. Maybe that's why it matters what metaphors we choose. Because to imagine community as a home is to reimagine that you and your story in all of its episodes, that it's part of some bigger families. It's to realize that the only walls we are ever asked to raise are the ones of shelter and relief for all. And it is to trust that the place that God will always choose to dwell is not found in the hallowed stones of an far off city or in the dream of a far off heaven but between us and with us for the good of the world.
Scott Wall:Let's pray together. Loving God, what a mystery it is to think about how you are changing all things and how you are changing us. What a mystery it is to receive this invitation in Paul's writing to his friends, this assertion that we should start all of our theological reflection with an awareness of your profound love. All other places of starting will lead us to more slipping and falling and missing the mark. And so today, we receive in whatever ways we can, the gift of the peace that you bring, a peace that invites us to go out from this moment and to encounter those we meet, not as those we must be hostile toward, but those created and brought along into our stories as part of your great redemptive work.
Scott Wall:Even as you teach us that you are fashioning a home for all and that we can be the temple of the living God, built together, fit together in Christ as we offer love to one another in welcome always. We pray this in the name of Christ who is our hope. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey. Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community.
Speaker 2:You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in, have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.