In general, when preaching on a text, I tend to honor the counsel Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts gave the White Rabbit during the trial of the Knave of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” In general. This morning is an exception, because we have this giant hook on the imagination in the middle of our final passage from Ephesians, and we need to tend to that reality first and work outward from there.
We’re told twice to put on the whole armor of God. If you’re wondering why a sword is included when it isn’t armor, the Greek word is panoplia, which means the full set of a soldier’s equipment, not just the armor. We could translate it more exactly, but “whole armor of God” is what King James’s translators gave us, it’s what people are used to, and it’s close enough—especially since it highlights the most important point, which is our need to put on all these things. Every piece is necessary, and it’s only effective as a coherent whole.
I closed last Sunday’s sermon with these words: “In this world, relationships are about power dynamics, so we naturally read passages like Ephesians 5 in that light as if they were written to tell us who has power over whom, in what ways, to what degree, and why. That gets the Bible exactly backwards. Jesus calls us to set thoughts of power completely aside and let his Spirit teach us to see our relationships as opportunities to love others as he loves us and serve them in his name.” That’s profoundly important, because in power relationships the thing which truly matters is the power imbalance in that relationship—because almost every power relationship has one. It may be legal, as in the relationship between employer and employee, or creditor and debtor; it may be structural or positional, like the relationships between employees up and down the hierarchy—team member to team lead to assistant manager to manager and so on; it may be intrinsic, as with a dominating person and a “friend” who’s a wholly-owned subsidiary—think Gaston and LeFou in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, if you’re familiar with either version. Then there are relationships which combine categories, like the parent/child relationship, which is both legal and structural—and when a highly dominant person is a parent, you get all three.
With all these, with all worldly relationships, the power imbalance is the important thing. What matters to the world is who gets to tell whom what to do and why, because the world sees relationships from the demand end. Unfortunately, in the church we reflexively approach the “household code” passages from this worldly mindset. Consider the questions we ask. “What do I have to do or not do?” “What can I get away with doing or not doing?” “What do I have the right to demand that you do, or not do, or stop doing?” We take these passages as law and argue them like lawyers. We generate rules, draw lines, and look for loopholes. We get mad when other people don’t meet our expectations; when we don’t meet theirs, we retreat behind a cloud of ink—legal, not squid, but same difference.
Again, truly Christian relationships are relationships of mutual submission. Read more→
I love preaching on this passage. That might sound strange, given how much ill feeling it generates in some parts of the church, but that’s actually why I love preaching on it. There are passages of Scripture that have gotten jammed up over the years in interpretations that don’t actually make sense, and it’s a joy and delight to be able to come along and say, “You keep using that passage. I do not think it means what you think it means.” (All due apologies to The Princess Bride.) There are interpretations of Scripture which ought to be inconceivable that are widely assumed to be obviously true, and they need to be set right.
That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s a widely-misused passage which illustrates two common pathologies of biblical interpretation. One is the mindset which reads the Bible as an instruction manual from which we are to extract “biblical principles” to follow in our lives. With that approach, the instant the brain sees the word “wives,” the mental guillotine drops and everything that follows is cut completely out of its context. It’s as if Paul said, “OK, I’m done talking about all this grace and unity stuff; now I’m going to sit down and write you a rulebook on ‘how marriage is supposed to work.’” That’s how it’s frequently read, as if it were a marriage manual that got mixed up with the letter and published by mistake.
If we’re going to take this passage seriously as Scripture, we can’t do that. Read more→
An interesting thing structurally about this passage is that it begins and ends with a pair of Janus verses. Janus was the Roman god of doorways and transitions, beginnings and endings, boundaries and time and all things in between. He presided over the moment of birth and the moment of death, as well as declarations of war and treaties of peace; the gates of his temple in Rome were opened when war began and closed when peace arrived. He was understood to live where the ends of the earth and the farthest reaches of heaven met, on the threshold between the two, belonging to both and neither. The month of January was named for him, and he had two faces, one looking forward, one looking back.
As such, as you can probably guess, Janus verses are transitional verses which belong to both the passage which precedes them and the passage which follows. So it is here. Verses 1-2 are both the concluding application of the text we considered last week and the beginning of our section this morning. To those purposes, Paul makes three points here. First, because we put away the old self and put on the new self, we are to model our way of life on God’s way of life. This is obviously not something we can do by our own strength, but only by the power of God, but equally obviously we won’t find ourselves being made more like Christ while we’re wandering around indulging our sinful desires. We aren’t Janus, we can’t look forward and backward at the same time—and even Janus couldn’t walk in both directions at the same time.
This is a daunting standard, but we’re called to imitate God not as his equals but as his beloved children. Even if you’re not a parent yourself, if you had loving parents, you know the difference. Some of you have met our third child, our daughter Bronwyn, when she was visiting here. Sara loves to tell about the time when Bronwyn, just a little squiffet, was helping her fold laundry. My wife would take a towel, or a washcloth, or something of that sort, hold it up, shake it out, fold it, and lay it on the stack; and so our daughter would grab a washcloth, hold it up, shake it a couple times, wad it up, and set it triumphantly on the table. Was she “doing it right”? No, Sara had to actually fold all those washcloths. Was that the point? Also no. She was with my wife in what she was doing, watching her mommy and doing what Mommy did, as best as she could understand it; and so it is for us. God is inviting us to be close to him, to learn his ways—especially as he revealed themself in Jesus—and try to walk in them, to become like him. We won’t “do it right” much of the time, but you know what? He’s big enough, he can take care of that. He delights in us standing there doing it with him anyway.
Paul has said a lot in this chapter about the character of Christian maturity and what it means to be spiritually mature in Christ. Now he turns to the practical side. It’s a turn he began in 4:1, but he had a little more to say before completing the turn here. His focus from here on is on the work of Christian maturity: what does it look like to live out what God is making you to be? It’s a common transition in Paul’s letters, what scholars call the turn from the indicative to the imperative—from telling you what is true to telling you what to do as a consequence.
He begins with the negative example: don’t be like the Gentiles. He means, of course, those Gentiles who are not disciples of Jesus, as his concern is to show the character of those who live in opposition to God. The diagnosis he presents is the same one he presents in Romans 1: their thinking is futile. From that parallel and from other scriptural texts, we know the reason for that futility is their idolatry. We’ve talked about this before, that idolatry produces spiritual blindness and deafness because idols are blind and deaf and we become like what we worship. As a consequence, the understanding of unbelievers is darkened—they can’t perceive the world accurately and thus are unable to comprehend it correctly.
If you were listening closely to our Scripture passages this morning, you may have a burning question: does Paul even know how to read? If you don’t, look back at Psalm 68:18, then look how Paul quotes it, and you’ll understand the question. To understand what’s going on here, we need to begin—as always—with the context. In his concern for the unity of the church, Paul reuses the metaphor from 1 Corinthians of the church as the body of Christ: a lot of parts that look very different and do very different things put together to work together as a single unit, with Jesus as the head. Up to this point, he’s simply asserted the unity of the body as an accomplished fact. Here, he unpacks that assertion, explaining how God is building the body of Christ. To that end, he starts by saying we are God’s building materials.
You probably recognize the sermon title, even if only because you’ve looked at your change lately. The motto E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—comes from Pierre-Eugène du Simitière, a naturalist and painter who was an artistic consultant for the design of the Great Seal of the United States. His very first proposed design, submitted in 1776, included this motto, which was eventually included in the final design we know today—and on our money as well.
Now, I know very little about du Simitière, so I can’t say if he was a man of faith who knew the Scriptures or not; many among the Founders were, of course, and even those like Jefferson and Franklin who weren’t believers knew the Bible well. The degree to which the US was founded as a Christian nation has often been vastly overstated, distorting our understanding of our nation and its history; on the other hand, there are also many who vastly minimize the Christian character of this nation’s founding or deny it altogether, which is equally problematic.
I think Lincoln put it best, as he so often did, on February 21, 1861 when he told the New Jersey State Senate, “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” As the historian William Lee Miller dryly observed, “God did not say to Israel, ‘You are almost my chosen people. I have nearly chosen you, from almost all the other peoples of the earth, to be unto me a somewhat special people.’” Lincoln neatly parses the reality that, on the one hand, the US is not God’s chosen nation in the way Israel was—with the coming of Jesus, God’s plan no longer subsists in a single nation or people group; that’s part of Paul’s point in this letter—but on the other, granted that God is at work in every tribe and nation and people and language, this nation does seem to have been a particular project of his across its history.
OK, Tychicus, are you ready to start? Listen, brother, I’m really sorry your hand cramped up so badly . . . I have to admit, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a pen fall out of someone’s hand like that. —But you’re better now? Good. Thank you.
Just let me put myself in the proper frame— Yes, I’m going to take a minute to think about—well, I know we’re planning to send this around all the churches in the province of Asia, but “Asians” sounds strange, and the only church I really know is Ephesus; I’m just going to call them “Ephesians.” If I can fix them in my mind’s eye, it will be like I’m talking directly to them. You know that’s how I work.
No, I don’t want to sit down, I think better standing up. —Something to lean against? You’re right, I’m not feeling well; that might be a good idea. —Though I think you’re just hoping if I walk less, I’ll talk less.
So . . . where did you put the copy you made? —Oh, right, I’m holding it. Thank you. Now, where were we? . . . Hmmmm . . . Tychicus, I never finished my prayer for the Ephesians—I must have forgotten I was writing a prayer, because I went off on a tangent. It was a good tangent, but still . . . I wonder why we didn’t catch that? —You caught it? Of course you did. Why didn’t you tell me? —Because it was a good tangent and you didn’t want to interrupt me? Well, that’s something, anyway.
Still, I need to finish that prayer. So, let’s see, where did I leave off—mutter mutter “no longer exiles and resident aliens, fellow citizens with the members of the house of God, built on the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus the cornerstone, being built by the Spirit into a temple for God.” OK. Ready? Good. Continuing:
In the first part of this chapter, Paul proclaims the saving work of Jesus Christ in epic terms, as an inconceivable transformation wrought on a cosmic scale. As we discussed a little bit last week, he pivots here—“Therefore,” he begins, because of this, for this reason—to declaring the equally epic, equally cosmic unifying work of Jesus Christ. If we were dead in our sin, then that death was separation, from God and from each other. If we are now alive together in Christ, then that life is, must be, unity, on the same terms and the same scale.
If we look around at the world, I feel safe in saying that former reality is blazingly obvious to everyone, at least in the flesh—in the physical reality of human life. We see all around us divisions based on outward distinctions, beginning with one Paul highlights: ethnicity and national identity. You, he tells his Gentile audience, were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. Along with that went the visible mark of circumcision which divided those who were “in” with God from everyone else. Economic class was another big one—Paul doesn’t discuss that here, but he does in the letters to the Corinthians, where those lines of division were a major issue. We can come up with others; political tribalism wasn’t an issue Paul deals with (though it had been a century or two before, in the dying days of the Roman Republic), but it is for us, where so many people identify as members of the Red Tribe or the Blue Tribe—and remember, any identity we find or make for ourselves outside of Christ is an idol.
All these divisions seem hugely important to us, in any and every generation going back to Cain murdering Abel; all the way along, they keep us from doing the work God has for us. Paul’s fellow Jews looked down on everyone else—“We’re circumcized, and they aren’t”—and so they weren’t the light to the nations they were supposed to be. Instead of inspiring the nations to worship God, they inspired the nations to hate them. The prophet Isaiah was clear: one reason God would send the Messiah was to be the new Israel and fulfill the mission they forswore.
Thing is, merely earthly divisions don’t really matter all that much. They just aren’t all that important; they don’t justify our alienation from one another the way we insist they do. Read more→
The basic outline of this passage is simple: “You were dead,” verse 1, and “God . . . made us alive,” verses 4-5. As usual, the message is in the details, but the heart is that stark before-and-after picture—which is not as simple as using a neutral-density filter on your camera, as in the image I used for this week’s slide. We were dead, but God made us alive.
