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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Each form of prayer you experiment with this year, every new initiative in your neighborhood you show up for, every new professional endeavor you launch trusting that God is somehow leading you, each and every new form of thing in your life can become a deeply spiritual practice because this is how we learn Christ. Today, this morning we are gonna continue our if then series where we are working through the New Testament letter to the Ephesians and in this series we're actually doing a pretty high level Passover, like 30,000 feet at least. Hopefully we can come back to this letter at some point in the future, do a more thorough examination because this time around we're just really trying to, we're doing our best to understand Paul's big ideas and to do that, the past couple of weeks we've looked at the first half of the letter where Paul lays out this vision of what it means if the mysteries of God actually appeared in the person of Jesus. What it means also if the small local communities of people who were captivated by Jesus' message, if those showing up in the first century, if those were a creative sign of God's great goodness showing up not just in creation at the beginning of all things, but in community in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:What it might mean if Jesus had inaugurated a new way to be human, where to adopt this way was to lay down the hostility of our nations and our religions and our politics. And for Paul, all of this culminated in his belief that to follow Jesus was to lay down the primacy of distinctions like ethnicity and accomplishments and status. He could, he was convinced that this was happening in the ancient city of Ephesus and that the people who were doing that work together, they were like a new house on the street. Different lives and stories and histories being fit together like stones with the mortar of the spirit forming a social movement that God's self could live in. And that kind of community, it might have been unprecedented in the ancient world but doesn't it feel like that kind of community is still needed?
Speaker 1:Right? This is why I think for many of us, this is why we turn to the scriptures again. It's why we still think they matter because they instruct us and what it means to be human right now and because they still invite us to consider what it means if we choose to trust Jesus, if we choose to follow his way together and if we're going to, then there are some implications and that's where we're headed into the second half of Ephesians today. But before we jump into all of that, I'm gonna invite you to just pause, we've all found a seat, let's pray together. Loving God, we're grateful for all that these moments offer us.
Speaker 1:For some of us there's a chance to rest, maybe a chance to reflect for the first time this week, there's a chance to be present to what we feel. For all of us, there's a chance to pay attention to the ways that you have led us, you have sheltered us, maybe you've inspired us in some way this week. And so, we also wanna take this opportunity to be nothing, to be nothing but ourselves because there's no need to pretend. We can trust you with our weakness and we can trust you with our vulnerability, with all the things that we maybe feel we're carrying with us and as we turn to the scriptures together, we ask simply that you would be or that the scriptures would be as the ancient poets said, that they would be a lamp for our feet and a light for the path that we're on, that you would give us insight into what we're facing today or tomorrow or this week, but then also too that you would grant us wisdom and perspective for where we might head in the months and in the years to come. We pray that we would find ourselves more aware of you and your goodness today.
Speaker 1:We ask this in the name of Christ who is our hope. Amen. Alright. Well, again today, we are gonna shift our attention to the second half of Paul's letter to the Ephesians and to do this is going to mean we're going to shift to the implications side of this correspondence. And for the first recipients, it is assumed that everyone in the room has heard and grasped Paul's argument about who Jesus is and how things are different because he showed up.
Speaker 1:And now, the rubber meets the road. It's as though Paul says, okay, if you believe me that Christ is Lord and King, then here's what you do now. And this is why we need to talk a little bit about a master class, how we learn do's and don'ts and we'll talk about waking up. To start today, I actually want to encourage you to use a visual when you think about Paul in the second half of this letter. I think it's super helpful to imagine this as a kind of MasterClass.
Speaker 1:Now, do we have any MasterClass fans here in the room today? No one, nobody's willing to say that they are. If you aren't familiar, MasterClass is a subscription based online platform that includes this whole library of inspiring informative video courses that are taught by experts and taught by celebrities. Here you can learn things like relational intelligence from the illuminating therapist, Astaire Peral, You can learn how to cook from decorated chefs. You can get climbing tips from Alex Honnold who just climbed a massive building in Taiwan.
Speaker 1:You can also get advice about how to write mediocre sensationalized fiction from Dan Brown, if you want. You can also try to memorize Kim Kardashian's rules for business, aptly called the 10 commandments. And yes, church humor writes itself, people. There it is. I'm not saying you have to watch all the videos, you have to use your own discretion.
Speaker 1:It's a great platform in that brilliant writers and scientists and practitioners alike. They all distill their wisdom, their expertise. Many of them distill the lessons they've learned over years and over decades into some fun anecdotes and helpful suggestions and this is why I want you to see that this is what Paul's doing. He's closing his letter with his clearest, most practical ideas about what it means to be a follower of the way of Jesus. He's summarizing all of his most frequently offered suggestions for how we should live.
Speaker 1:Is why I want you to imagine him if it were a master class session, he's in front of the camera, there's a simple table and a chair behind him, some rough hewn walls and he begins as he does, Ephesians four. As a prisoner of the Lord then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling that you've received. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient. Bear with one another in love.
Speaker 1:And right off the top it can seem like he's offering these run of the mill generic character descriptions but this is only if we are we're not paying attention to the ancient culture and the language that informs these ideas. Right out of the gate Paul says, live a life worthy of the calling you've received. And what can get lost is how the Greek terminology for calling can go a couple of different ways. In some instances in the ancient world, we know that it was synonymous with legal summons or citation which would have Paul describing our lives of faith as a kind of response to a summons or a directive that each of us receives by grace from God. Alternatively, in some other ancient contexts, this term referred to an invitation to a feast and I love this reading or this interpretation of calling here.
Speaker 1:It's not unlike an invitation I recently received for an upcoming wedding where my cousin asked those that she loves to show up on a certain day and time and to please dress formally. So like that Paul's saying to his friends, you've received and accepted God's invitation to follow Jesus so show up in your life looking like it. Conduct yourself appropriately. And then he gets specific with his recommendations. He says, be humble.
Speaker 1:Literally, have a distinctive lowliness of mind. Don't don't think too highly of yourself but consider yourself in light of who God is and in light of these people who walk around beside you created in God's image. And that might seem straightforward except for the fact that in a competitive Greco Roman society, this terminology wasn't desirable. Being humble was not a virtue. In fact, some scholars think that the Christians actually invented this term humility because it wasn't really something we used in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:Because to be humble was to cower, to be seen as common or having a suspect reputation. Well then, to this Paul added, be gentle. And again, this language has a long it had a long history of meaning in Greek society going all the way back to Aristotle who had taught that the person who is gentle in this way, this is the person who is always angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time. Paul's instruction to his friends was to be a person stirred up by injustice and then to be people who are not affected by personal slights. And then finally, Paul says, be patient, bear with one another.
Speaker 1:Which Saint John Chrysostom clarified in the third century. This describes the kind of person that has power and reason to exact revenge but chooses not to. The person who receives or takes insults without letting it fester into bitterness. And if you are paying attention this morning what should be immediately clear is how Paul's giving a master class in how Christians were to live in ways directly opposed to a dominant culture. A dominant culture we know wasn't distinctly Greco Roman.
Speaker 1:Right? No. No. If we're honest, there's something eerily familiar about a status driven rage baiting, complicit to injustice, quick to cancel and dismiss culture that Paul says Christian followers should critique with the way that they live. And this is why in chapter four verse 17, Paul says to those in the Ephesian church, he says, you must no longer live like your fellow Gentile citizens.
Speaker 1:He describes those outside the Christian community as having desensitized hearts. He says people walking around the world, they become numb to generative ethical living. And as a result, they've shamelessly given themselves over to the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of power. What this means, it's actually terrible what happens is they stop caring about what others think and they stop caring about who gets hurt along the way. Then he asserts, that however is not the way of life that you learned when you heard of Jesus.
Speaker 1:You were taught with regard to your former way of life to put it away because it's being corrupted by deceitful desires. You were taught to be made new in the attitude of your minds. You were taught to put on a new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. And here, if you're you probably have eyes to see it, Paul's using language that would come to define early practices of baptism where literally Christian converts would take off all or most of their old garments and then they'd go into the baptismal water and then they'd receive new white garments on the other side as a sign of leaving their old attachments and picking up new ones. There was actually similar practice like practices like this in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:We know of one in ancient Rome where there was a coming of age ceremony in which young boys would be given a new formal off white toga as a sign that they had moved from childhood into the dignity of adult citizenship and the responsibility that that carried. It's quite possible that Paul's taking that ubiquitous image of Roman youth and he's extending it as an example of what ongoing Christian practice should look like. And what I love, I love of the about this imagery is how it characterizes a life of faith as in effect learning Christ. How since the very earliest communities of Christians to embrace the way of Jesus was to set off into life anew and to keep on doing that. And yes, this meant that in the ancient world you had to do the old work of putting away an old harmful pattern.
Speaker 1:You were meant to set aside previous toxic perspectives. It meant to leave behind the hurtful labels and limits that had been imposed on you by others and you know what? It still means that today and that means that as twenty twenty six unfolds, every therapy session you attend, every fresh expression of generosity you attempt, every word of forgiveness you extend, every moment of gratitude you cultivate, every new book from our lending library you read, every new relationship you're open to, every new pattern in an old relationship you try, each form of prayer you experiment with this year, every new initiative in your neighborhood you show up for, every new professional endeavor you launch trusting that God is somehow leading you, each and every new form of thing in your life can become a deeply spiritual practice because this is how we learn Christ. This is how you become more than a self actualized and self improved person. This is how you become the person God that Paul says you were created in God to be.
Speaker 1:How else could you do it but to go out and find it? And what did this newness look like for Paul? Well, he didn't hesitate to tell us. He spends much of chapters four and five in this letter telling us exactly what he thinks and in some ways it can feel a little bit like this master class is merely a list of moralistic do's and don'ts but that's not quite right. See, he says things like this.
Speaker 1:He says, don't let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths but only what's helpful for building others up according to their needs that may benefit all those who listen. And in saying the equivalent of watch your mouths, he basically just takes that page right out of every parent's playbook. Paul literally says, in agreeing with the commonly held wisdom of the time, he's agreeing with Jewish teachers and philosophers who were known to give clear instructions about how you should be careful with your words, how we should be more committed to listening than to spouting off. In fact, I don't know if you know this but it was the ancient stoics who are credited with the oft recited truism that we have two ears and we only have one mouth so maybe we should listen twice as much than we speak. That's a very old idea.
Speaker 1:Now, that said Paul's injunction to the Ephesians is a bit more nuanced. We know this because the adjective unwholesome here, it's used in other contexts to refer to fish or to fruit that's starting to go rotten. And yeah, you should start to have a sensory experience in this moment because in effect, Paul's paralleling ancient moral teaching and then getting you to use your imagination to understand. He's saying, don't speak anything that's gonna fill a room or a relationship without unpleasantness. He's saying, don't say anything that smells or reeks of death to someone.
Speaker 1:Don't spew that into someone's heart and mind, speak only to build others up, pay attention to what they need to hear in order to flourish. And just for the record, if you came to church today looking for solid personal and professional advice, Paul just gave it to you for free. Right? But then, he offers an instruction that would have been jarring to his audience because he was going against common assumptions of the time. This is what he told the Ephesians.
Speaker 1:He said, among you there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality or of any kind of impurity or any kind of greed because these are improper for God's holy people. Now stay with me, don't stress out, we need to talk a little bit about sexual ethics at church today because Paul does and because ancient Greco Roman societies were marked by varied and ubiquitous sexual practices that would seem foreign to many of us. On one hand, prostitution was public and widespread. It was a central feature of social norms like slavery and religious norms like temple worship. Also, patriarchy defined almost all sexual practice in the ancient world and this just meant that men of standing had sexual rights to most others, slaves or free in a society.
Speaker 1:This meant that there was usually an imbalance between sexual partners, almost all the time. And then finally, our concepts or categories of orientation were very limited or even non existent in the ancient world. So it's important to not read those onto the text. And this is why it's essential to understand the interconnectedness of the words that Paul uses here. See the noun for sexual immorality, porneia, it's very, it's highly debated by biblical scholars.
Speaker 1:But generally, it refers to sexual practices where one individual has or uses power over another person. Jesus actually uses that word to describe individuals who are not faithful in their marriage vows and by people I mean heterosexual men to be clear. But Paul uses this word in other places to describe dominating or exploitative sexual practices that even pagan citizens would have blushed at. And then, Paul's reference to impurity here, this is just a general parallelism. It's often used along with porneia to speak about the ways that individuals debased themselves in their pursuits of sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1:The ways that selfish, unhealthy sexual practice did and still sometimes undermines our character. And then the third term translated as greed here, this for me is the clincher because it has a direct sexual connotation, describes the desire to possess or consume someone's body like a commodity. And listen, by wading into all of this, it got really quiet in here by the way, I'm very well aware of the Venn diagram, how fraud it is. The Venn diagram of the scripture and Christian tradition and sexual practice. Right?
Speaker 1:All those things seem to pull at one another and some of us sitting here have been deeply impacted by the forces of Christian moral prescription. Some of us have been shaped by things like purity culture where our understanding of human sexuality may have it may have been healthy or it may have been skewed. We may have needed to address some disconnection from our experience of our sexual identity. We may have needed to or we may have found ourselves carrying or still carrying some sense of shame unnecessarily. Now, said, all of us in the room are deeply shaped by a post Freudian culture that asserts that all or almost all sexual expression is good and that to hold back from it or to restrain ourselves in any way is to invite the ills of repression and unacknowledged desire.
Speaker 1:And guess what? I think Paul's instructions speak to all of that here today. And to all of us regardless of our relationship status, our orientation, or our desire today. I would argue that Paul's guidance is far more about conduct than it is about category. Because Paul's speaking to a church filled with all kinds of people, men and women, slaves and free people, individuals of different relationship statuses, orientations and persuasions.
Speaker 1:And because of what God had done in Jesus, Paul believed that that diverse group of people were as scholar Lynn Kohick describes, they were a community of equally worthy members. In Christ, Ephesian believers were to look at one another as equals with dignity. They were to use care with those around them in the world which was a drastic exception to the cultural rule. Christian believers in the this sort of community, they were to put aside the old forms of exploitative sexual practice regardless of their marital status or orientation. They were to guard and honor one another's bodies.
Speaker 1:They were to understand as we can too that what we do with our bodies and what we do with the bodies of others this reveals a lot about our theology. For the record Paul is not saying don't pursue pleasure. Paul is not saying don't be a sexual being. He's not saying that. He's offering a clear reminder that if you choose to align with Jesus sacrificial and self effacing way then this applies to your most intimate moments.
Speaker 1:It's a reminder that you should treat one another's bodies as objects of divine delight and love and it's an encouragement to keep pursuing relationships of joy and satisfaction predicated on nothing more than mutuality. Now, remember for Paul this means that there was no place in human experience or endeavor that had been left untouched by Jesus's appearance. Paul believed that the essence of the cosmos had changed and that meant that the essence of community and relationships was different. In early Christian churches, the walls between individuals were meant to come down he thought. He also thought that their most intimate connections were to be modeled on the idea that each of us bears God's image And Paul had such deep, deep conviction about this.
Speaker 1:This is why he uses such stark images and language in his letter. This led him to describe the transformation he saw happening in this way. He said, for you were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord so live as children of light for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth. He says to the Ephesians, think about it, think about the darkness and despair that you've come from, think about how you can keep on living in the light that Christ's example shows us and if you're having trouble knowing where that is just look for the places of virtue and flourishing and justice and truth that are right around you in your world. And in this way, this master class he's offering it starts to wind down with him looking directly into the camera and saying to us, you want to stay on the right track.
Speaker 1:Just camp out in the places of wisdom and warmth and honesty in your life. Stick around the people who cast off that kind of light. Then I got to be honest with you, I've been captivated by this language all week long. Paul goes on in the next few verses to say, but everything exposed by the light of Christ becomes visible and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it said, wake up sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.
Speaker 1:What's so intriguing about this on one hand because Paul's including this quote and we don't we don't know where it's from. There's a number of scholars that think that it very well could have been a few lines from an early Christian hymn that Paul and his friends in Ephesus would have sung together And that poetic flair only serves to accent Paul's greater point. See, he's contending that in Jesus a great light had come to illuminate the world. In Jesus, a light had come to make all things visible as they truly are and he was telling his friends, if you live in that light then you'll reflect that light and share it. And then to drive the point home he drops some lines.
Speaker 1:He shares these lyrics, lyrics that describe our spiritual lives as waking up and not not waking up on a Monday or to the sound of an unwanted alarm or your children bothering you. Not not waking up and wishing you could go on dreaming. No. Imagine waking up on a day you've been waiting for and anticipating. Imagine a day where you feel filled with hope and excitement.
Speaker 1:A day that starts with the sun streaming in and warming your face. Paul says, it's like that when you start to wake up to how God has appeared in Jesus. When you start to wake up to who you really are, your gifts, your skills, what you have to offer. When you start to be honest about the change that you know needs to happen for your health and for your flourishing. It also happens when you start to wake up to your own grief, to your own pain, to your own fear and you start to see the ways that other people are showing up for you.
Speaker 1:It also happens as you start to wake up to the glimpses of God wherever they're appearing. You start to realize that you are less certain about faith but somehow more compelled by it today. Maybe you find yourself more curious about Jesus. Maybe you find yourself starting to realize how the spirit has been leading you through the challenges and the changes you've been navigating for these past few months. This happens too when together we wake up to the world as God imagined it and then set to work making it more peaceable and just.
Speaker 1:In this, Paul says to us, wake up, friends. Christ himself has come to shine on you and in your rising, you will take that light and wake the world into a better day. Let's pray together. Loving God, there there's so much that we can learn today. So many ways that we can grow, so many ways that we can be more captivated by your grace.
Speaker 1:And maybe that can start simply with the invitation that we sense to to be humble, to be gentle, to bear with another, to put aside maybe what feels old, what we know is old, the things, the memories, the ideas that we've held on to for so long, and to, in whatever ways we can step towards the new as our spiritual practice. To clothe ourselves in the newness that comes to us in Christ. This is why we ask that you would help us to trust these words today, that there is no aspect of our lives that is not impacted by your love and your tenderness. So, give us grace to be careful with our words. Give us grace to be careful with the bodies that we love And, we pray, would you shine on us and guide us as we wake up again and again to the wonder of what you've done and the wonder of what you are still doing.
Speaker 1:Now and always, we pray 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. Thanks for tuning in, have a great week. Talk to you
Speaker 1:soon.