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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Paul is just a dude enamored with the story of Jesus, desperate to tell people about it, and to plant churches that will continue to do the same. Paul's theology, just like yours and mine, is developing as he writes. Today though, we're starting a new series. It's called if then, and it's all about the letter to the Ephesians. First, let's pray.
Jeremy Duncan:God of grace and peace, as we begin something new today, we pause to remember that before we do anything, before we decide anything, before we respond to anything, you are already at work, both in and through us. So, quiet our noise, slow our hearts, help us to notice where we are carrying expectations or distractions, maybe even defensiveness as we enter into this space this morning. And, we gently set those down. As we open this ancient letter, we pray you would open us as well. Not just our minds, but our imaginations, our hopes, our willingness to be changed by you.
Jeremy Duncan:And then, may your spirit begin the slow work of forming us into people who live ahead of the curve of your healing work all around us in your world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. If then, today we'll cover birthdays, introductions, predestinations, and finally peace. But recently, it was my birthday.
Jeremy Duncan:And I like to keep that on the down low until after it's passed. At 48, I've had more than enough birthday celebrations. I'm very happy to let my daughter, who also happens to have a birthday in the same week as me, take center stage around our house. But this past week, Rachel and I, we did find time to go out for dinner together for my birthday. Thing is, as we're leaving the house, my freshly birthdate daughter noticed that mom and dad were a little dressed up, and not liking the idea that something might be happening that she was not going to be a part of.
Jeremy Duncan:She asked, where are you going? And I said, we're going out for dinner. And she said, to a restaurant. And I said, yes. And she said, just you and mommy?
Jeremy Duncan:And I replied, yes. And she said, well, if you are going to a restaurant with just mommy, then I want to go to a restaurant with just you and me. And so this week, I found myself on a date in a restaurant for the second time in as many weeks. Honestly, it's been a pretty good birthday. But here's the thing, my daughter's ultimatum, her if then statement as it were, is exactly what we have built this short four week series around.
Jeremy Duncan:Because Paul's letter to the Ephesians is essentially one big if then statement. And understanding that structure from the get go is actually really helpful in framing the smaller supporting arguments that Paul makes throughout the letter. See the book of Ephesians is six chapters long. It's written while Paul's in prison, likely in Rome, although possibly in Ephesus itself. And, the letter touches on a host of different ideas, both theological and ethical.
Jeremy Duncan:But, one of the things that's been noted all through church history is that the first three chapters of Ephesians form one long statement of praise and prayer. The first half of the letter is all about worship. Who is God? And, why should we care? And then, chapters four through six form the therefore.
Jeremy Duncan:If all of this is true, then what now? How should we live in response to this God? The letter to the Ephesians is essentially Paul saying, if all of this is true, then this is what you should do. And that might sound oversimplified. It is in a sense, but it's an analytical framework that has held up across thousands of years of faithful Christians exploring and interrogating this same letter.
Jeremy Duncan:And, actually, as simple as that is, it actually becomes really helpful if you find yourself stuck on a passage in Ephesians wondering exactly what's going on. One of the first questions you can ask is simply, is this part of the if or is this part of the then? And sometimes understanding that structure can actually help us find our way forward through the text. So, that's gonna be our structure for this series. We'll spend two weeks in the if chapters one to three, and we'll spend two weeks in the then chapters four to six.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, that's certainly not enough time to go through verse by verse. Although, that might be fun to come back and try someday. But for this series, which will bridge the gap to Ash Wednesday in the beginning of Lent, we'll work to get the broad strokes of Ephesians rooted in our hearts. And so, with that in mind, let's start at the start. Paul, an apostle to Christ Jesus by the will of God, to God's holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I said we'd start at the start, so let's start with that first word, Paul. Because yes, there has been debate historically about the authorship of this letter. And, if you remember back to the spring last year, we did a series on the letter to the Colossians. It was titled cosmic thoughts for daily life, you wanna look it up.
Jeremy Duncan:But in the opening week of that series, I referred to what are sometimes called the Deuteropauline letters. Those are Colossians, first Thessalonians, or second Thessalonians, and Ephesians. And these are designated Deuteropauline because scholarship is somewhat divided on whether Paul actually wrote those letters himself. There are seven undisputed letters. There are three that are often considered pseudo epigraphal written in the name of Paul, and there are these three which are debated.
Jeremy Duncan:Now last year I made my case for why I do indeed think these letters were written by the same Paul that wrote Galatians and Romans and first and second Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and first Thessalonians. Certainly open to changing my mind. I always want to be. But, in the intervening year, I have not. And so, I'm still persuaded that we are reading the same Paul that we did last year.
Jeremy Duncan:However, to refresh your memory, because I do understand that normal people do not have questions of Pauline authorship on their mind the way that I do. One of the big arguments against Pauline authorship in Colossians was how cosmic in scope the theology seems to be. In particular, the Christology, the way that Paul thinks about Jesus, it's all very grand. And so the argument goes that in Paul's other letters, he's honestly pretty down to earth. He's dealing with church politics and interpersonal conflicts.
Jeremy Duncan:Theologically, he's very focused on integrating Jesus into the history of the Hebrew scriptures. But in Colossians, he says things like, the sun is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. In him, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or rulers or powers or authorities, all things, everything has been created through him and for him. He's before all things and in him all things hold together because God was pleased to have all fullness dwell in Jesus. And through him, to reconcile all things, whether things on earth or in heaven, back to God.
Jeremy Duncan:That is what we call a very high Christology. Jesus is not just our example or a teacher, even an emissary from God. Jesus is the temporal actualized presence of the eternal divine in human history. And through Jesus, everything will eventually be made right. So, argument goes, well, that's a very different focus than the other letters of Paul.
Jeremy Duncan:This must be a different author. Except, here comes Ephesians. And, just in the opening chapter, adds this, that we are chosen in Christ before the foundations of the world. That's verse four. That in Christ, we have both redemption and forgiveness.
Jeremy Duncan:That's verse seven. That all things in heaven and earth will eventually be brought to unity in Christ. That's verse 10. That Christ is raised from the dead and seated in the heavenly realm far above all authority and power and dominion. That's verse 21.
Jeremy Duncan:And finally, God has placed everything under Jesus' feet, and Christ now fills everything in every way possible. That's verse 23. Clearly, Colossians is not the only letter in the New Testament with an extremely high Christology. In fact, I'd argue the second half of Ephesians is going to depend on this very high Christology in the first half. If all of this is possibly true about Jesus, then this is how we should choose to live.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, the argument against Pauline authorship here is, well, maybe the guy who wrote Colossians wrote Ephesians, but I still don't think it was Paul. And to be clear, there's an entire area of scholarship dedicated to hypothesizing which parts of Colossians were used by the author of Ephesians or vice versa. What I think that misses is that sometimes the simplest answer is really the best. Paul is not an author with a publishing contract trying to stay on brand, or a PhD with an area of specialty working to ensure he stays within his discipline. Paul is not even a theologian attempting to build a systematic theology throughout his corpus.
Jeremy Duncan:Paul is just a dude enamored with the story of Jesus, desperate to tell people about it, and to plant churches that will continue to do the same. This is a man who is all the way along, doing his best to work out his salvation, his understanding, his articulation of gospel, all with fear and trembling to quote Paul from the letter to Philippians. In other words, Paul's theology, just like yours and mine, is developing as he writes. As he meets with and he interacts with new people. As he sees the grace of God in new ways as he travels.
Jeremy Duncan:For example, the Paul that we saw at the Europagus in Athens just two weeks ago speaks very differently to a group of Greek philosophers than he will as he writes to a church in Ephesus. And for me, as long as we can trace the thread of his development, it actually makes more sense to me that Paul's letters, occasional and circumstantial as they are, are honestly kind of all over the place thematically. I mean, I don't know what your dinner table is like, but if you try to map the conversation around ours, the diagram will get pretty convoluted quite quickly. No one wants to be friends with the guy who only has one story. Thankfully, Paul has lots to tell.
Jeremy Duncan:Now quickly here. That's not the only argument against Pauline authorship. Colossians and Ephesians do present some unique vocabulary as opposed to the undisputed letters. However, if you want the stats, Ephesians has about 13% unique words. And because it's pretty easy now with computers, I've done linguistic analysis on my own sermons.
Jeremy Duncan:Turns out, I use about 15 to 20% unique words if you compare any two sermons I've written. So, not that big a deal. Finally, there are some stylistic differences in the writing. And that is absolutely true when you read these letters in Greek. But I would counter with the fact that first and second Corinthians, which almost everyone agrees were written by Paul, are wildly different, not just in their tone, but in their grammar and their sentence structure.
Jeremy Duncan:First Corinthians, and you can see this in English, is pretty happy letter. It's easy to read. Second Corinthians is decidedly darker. Things have taken a turn for the worse, and that comes through, not just in the content, but in the very convoluted grammar in that letter as well. Paul just writes differently.
Jeremy Duncan:So style alone has not convinced me this isn't Paul. I think we're still dealing with the same guy. Still, we're one word into this letter, so let's continue. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to God's holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jeremy Duncan:Already, we've got our first little if then statement here. Because God's holy people, that's the word, the faithful in Christ, that's the word, means something like the holy and the loyal in Christ. And at first glance, you might be like, okay. Sure. Like, that's a very Bible y type of thing to say at the start of a letter.
Jeremy Duncan:Let's get on with things. But if you think back to all those verses from the opening chapter that I read when I talked about the high Christology of Ephesians, we are chosen in Christ before the foundations of the world. In Christ, we find both redemption and forgiveness. All things in heaven and earth are brought to unity in Christ. God has placed all things under Christ's feet because Christ fills everything in every way.
Jeremy Duncan:The holy here in Ephesus are not those who've done the right things to merit the title. The holy in Ephesus are those who've simply discovered themselves caught up in the story of Jesus. And then the loyal, well, are those who've chosen to respond faithfully to that reality. In other words, Paul's giving away the game, like laying out the whole argument right from the opening line. It's Christ who comes to find you.
Jeremy Duncan:He's the one who's fixing the world. All you have to do is decide whether you'll live as if that's true. That's the whole argument in Ephesians, by the way. God is repairing all things, and you and I, we have the chance to join the story ahead of the curve. Just listen to this language from a little later in chapter one.
Jeremy Duncan:Paul writes this, God 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 reach their fulfillment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. God's plan is unity, to reconcile and repair everything. Things on heaven and earth, all of it comes together in Jesus. And Paul and the Ephesians, those early Christians, they have been brought in on the mystery a little bit early. Because in him we were chosen, having been predestined, I would argue a better English word here is probably appointed, but it's fine.
Jeremy Duncan:We'll go with predestined. According to the plan of him who works with everything in conformity with the purpose of his will. In order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be the praise of his glory. Granted, Paul's language gets a little convoluted at times. He gets a little too fancy for his own good.
Jeremy Duncan:This is what we gotta understand here. Predestined, at least in this context, is not about who goes to heaven and who doesn't. Remember, for Paul, God is bringing unity to all things according to the divine plan and timeline. The faithful, the first, the predestined as it were, those are simply the ones who get to see themselves part of the plan as it's unfolding. I'll steal a line from NT right here because I love his phrase.
Jeremy Duncan:He says that what Paul is arguing here is that the church is the small working model of new creation. In my words, we are the test bed for what the world will be like one day. That's what it means to be chosen, to be appointed, or to be predestined. This has nothing to do what happens after you die, at least not yet. What Paul is arguing here is that the Ephesians have been offered the chance to get in on the ground floor of the transformation of everything.
Jeremy Duncan:To borrow a phrase I used earlier, they are ahead of the curve. And so to those who then take up that invitation faithfully, Paul extends grace and peace. And once again, that's a line that Paul uses in every letter that he writes. It's always there in the opening, and sometimes that means we read it as perfunctory rather than as profoundly theological. Thing is grace and peace is an incredibly important phrase in Paul's writings.
Jeremy Duncan:Because grace and peace is a play on two well known phrases in Roman culture. First, it's a play on a standard greeting you might use in a letter. Has the root, that means joy or delight, but it was also the standard way to open a letter. Technically, it meant to rejoice, but in practice, in a letter, it just meant greetings. Charis, which is what Paul uses here, has the same root.
Jeremy Duncan:Sounds almost exactly the same, but this form of the word means grace or gift. And, in early Christian use, grace was the gift of God that creates a new relational reality. Grace is the greeting between humanity and the divine. So Paul is tweaking the standard greeting in a Greek letter just by a couple letters to smuggle his theology into the opening, and that's just kind of fun. I love that.
Jeremy Duncan:But at another level, Paul is smuggling in his politics as well. See, grace and peace evokes another very familiar phrase. This time a slogan of the Roman Empire, victory and peace. Or sometimes stated victory then peace. In fact, we have an inscription from just before the birth of Christ.
Jeremy Duncan:It's twenty nine BCE, and Octavian has assumed control of Rome. He would go on to take the title Caesar Augustus a couple years later. You might have heard of him. But after returning from this battle, victorious in the Roman civil war, he has this monument built to his uncle Julius Caesar. It was called the Templum Divi Ulia.
Jeremy Duncan:And it was designed to commemorate Octavian's victories, to affirm the deification of Julius Caesar, and therefore to establish Octavian as the son of a god. And in that temple, there's an image of Octavian leading the battle with the inscription, Imperator Caesar, son of God. Following the victory in the war which he waged on behalf of the republic in this region when he was consul for the fifth time and imperator for the seventh. After peace had been secured on land and sea, consecrated to Mars and Neptune, the gods of war and water, The camp from which he set forth to attack the enemy, now decorated with naval spoils. I'll quote the scholar, Dominic Cross in here.
Jeremy Duncan:He says, this inscription gives us the sequential program of Rome's imperial theology, which was religion, war, victory, peace in that order. The shorthand version of which stamped on the consciousness of every Roman citizen who had just suffered through a long protracted bloody civil war, victory, then peace. Like that was the Roman euangelion. Their good news. If we just keep fighting, faithfully supporting the wars of Rome, then eventually, one day, we can have peace.
Jeremy Duncan:And yet, here's Paul saying, actually, there is another son of God. And everything has already been put under his rule, which means we can already have peace if we want to. We just have to choose to live that way. And so, over and over again, every time he writes a letter, every time he enters a new city, every time he starts a new church, every time he begins a new conversation, he reiterates the gospel of Rome is not true, and the good news of violence is a lie. Peace does not come through war.
Jeremy Duncan:It comes only through grace, through the gift, the self giving love of God in Christ Jesus. In other words, peace is not what comes someday, sometimes, somewhere down the line as long as you keep supporting the imperial ambitions of Rome. Peace is the result of living as if grace was the most powerful force in the universe. And if that's true, then you and I, we should do our best to demonstrate a small working model of a new humanity. A new way to live together in the world.
Jeremy Duncan:One that rejects strength as the means to power and domination. And one that instead, repurposes whatever resources we have available to us. Be that whatever little strength and power we have or our wealth and intellect, our influence, and creativity, even our prayers if that's all we can muster, but put all of that in the service of those near us. After all, if God is at work healing the world, bringing unity to all things in heaven and earth, then you and I, we have been predestined to live in that reality ahead of the curve. Even, maybe even especially, when that brings us into opposition with Rome all around us.
Jeremy Duncan:See, Paul's argument is that there are a lot of gospels floating around in the world. But the version of good news that you choose to trust, the one that tries to sell you victory and strength and violence and terror, or the one that offers you grace and self giving in the service of others, that choice, that will determine your steps in the world. And the truth is that message is as prescient today as it was two thousand years ago with empires continuing to try to co opt our imagination for their own ambitions. Saw it again this weekend. Empires that try to convince us violence is necessary.
Jeremy Duncan:The cost of peace is the death of our innocence. The proximity to power is worth denying the way of Jesus, and it is not. Because we're still living in the if. But if salvation is what God has made inevitable in Jesus, then Paul is convinced that the deeper he can sink that conviction into our bones, then the more the implications for our lives will become apparent and clear as he turns the corner toward how we should live for each other in the world. But for now, let's pray for peace.
Jeremy Duncan:God, we want to believe in a good news that seems too good to be true. And we want to put our trust in a gospel that calls us to imagine possibilities we can barely even comprehend yet. And we want to believe that you are at work healing all things even when we struggle to make sense of that in our lives. And so, we ask that by your spirit, you would grant us that kind of creativity, that kind of courage to believe that inevitably all things in heaven and earth will be brought to unity in Christ. And that therefore, we can live ahead of the curve, demonstrating a new way to live together, to care for each other, to use whatever resources we have at our disposal for each other.
Jeremy Duncan:To demonstrate that there is a different way to peace. The way that moves through grace, the way that moves through gift, the way that comes through self giving love. And if we can be that little image of the kingdom in the world, then perhaps even in our small efforts, we can contribute to the story you are writing and the destiny that we desperately want to believe is the end game. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan: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. You can also join our Discord server.
Jeremy Duncan: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.