(Psalm 68:1-13, 17-20, 32-35, Ephesians 4:1-16)

Our passage from Ephesians this morning is a difficult one in some ways, largely having to do with Paul’s use of Psalm 68. As you likely noted during the reading, Psalm 68:18 says that God received gifts from people, while the quotation of that verse in Ephesians 4:8 says he gave gifts. At first glance, this seems like sheer incompetence; and yet, Paul had trained as a rabbi and he knew the Scriptures very, very well, so that’s out. What he has done here with the psalm must have been deliberate. Of course, that only raises the question, how could he justify doing what he did?

The answer seems to lie in the broader context of Psalm 68. You see, this is what has been called a “divine warrior” psalm, celebrating God’s defeat of his enemies, both past and future; victorious, he ascends Mount Zion, his holy mountain, having taken captives and plunder from those who opposed him. So far, so clear. The connecting point is that in the ancient world, kings would give away some of the spoils to their supporters, probably as a means of strengthening their position; they plundered their defeated enemies not simply to enrich themselves but to reward and strengthen their friends.

We can see this even in the text of this psalm. In verse 12, after announcing the flight of the Lord’s enemies, the psalmist observes, “The women at home divide the spoil”; and in verse 35, God is praised because “he gives power and strength to his people.” Thus the gifts Christ gives his people are precisely those gifts he has wrested from his enemies. The one who descended from heaven to the earth, Paul says, has now ascended back to heaven in victory, showering on his people the gifts he received.

And what were those gifts? Us. It’s one of the interesting things about Ephesians 4:11 that the focus isn’t on what we think of as “spiritual gifts” but on people who have been gifted to serve in particular ways. Christ came down to live among us, to die on the cross for our sins, to rise from the dead in victory over sin and death, and to ascend back to heaven in glory, where he now intercedes for us before the throne of grace; and in his victory he won us as the spoils, and from his place before the throne he now gives each of us as gifts to his people.

Paul specifically highlights those who have been given to the church in various leadership roles, but note the purpose he names for such people: “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Too often, churches are defined by their pastors, denominations by their leaders, and both by their structures; but Paul says no, the purpose of those leaders (and thus, logically, those structures) is to serve the people of God, such that his saints—that’s you—are well-trained and -equipped to do the work of the ministry of the church.

Note the goal to which that’s aimed: “until all of us come to the unity”—that’s one: we’re supposed to be united; but on what terms?—“of the faith”—that’s two: “the faith” in Paul’s usage being of course faith in Jesus Christ and him alone, no exceptions, no additions, no alternatives, no fooling—“and of the knowledge of the Son of God”—that’s three: we are to be united in and by knowing Jesus Christ. The primary focus here isn’t on what we know about him, because one could know a great deal about Jesus and not know him at all; that’s part of the picture, but the focus is on the direct, personal, experiential knowledge of Jesus and his love which comes from being in close relationship with him.

That’s what the Holy Spirit is on about in our lives: telling us about Jesus, drawing us close to Jesus, helping us to know Jesus, and indeed God the Father also, in this real and personal way. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son and wants to talk about them, and so the more we’re filled with the Spirit, the better we will know them, the more we’ll love them, and the more we’ll want to talk about them, too.

Through this, we come “to maturity,” which is “the measure of the full stature of Christ.” It’s important to note that this is a collective statement, not merely that we become mature individuals—though that’s obviously part of the picture—but that collectively as the church, we become mature. Unity in Christ, after all, is an element of maturity in Christ. This is about how we live. All of Paul’s thought in this passage flows out of the clarion call with which he opens it: “I urge you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” We were created in love by God the Father, and redeemed in love at a horrible cost by his only Son, and now we have been given in love the great gift of his Holy Spirit in our lives; that wasn’t just so we could keep toddling comfortably along like the rest of the world and then go to heaven when we die. God did all this for us to give us something far, far better—to give us the life of heaven, not just after we die, but now—and he wants us to experience the full goodness of his gift.

That’s part of why he calls us as a people and gives us the church, and gives us to the church. He lays out these commandments in verses 2-3, and then look at verse 7: to each one of us grace has been given—how? Enough grace to do this perfectly by ourselves? No; to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. And then he goes on to talk about the spiritual gifts. Jesus sent us his Spirit to empower us to be humble and gentle and patiently loving with one another, to seek the good of others ahead of our own and have a long fuse with the failures and sins of those around us—why? Because those are good virtues? Well, yes, but for a more specific reason as well: because those are the virtues that enable true unity and peace. And why is that important? Most basically, because we are all called by one God, we are one people serving one Lord, filled with one Spirit and given one common faith, and we ought to reflect the unity in love of the God whom we worship; but on a practical level, there is also this: we cannot live the life of Christ alone. God didn’t set it up that way.

Understand this, because this is important, and God did it deliberately: he took all the gifts and strengths that are necessary for us to grow to maturity in Christ, as individuals and as a people, and he mixed them up and gave some of them to each of us—and then he gave each of us as gifts, to the church and to each other. He designed us and prepared us to work together, to live together, to be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each of us has strong areas that stick out, and weak areas where we have holes; I am strong where you are weak, and you are strong where I am weak, and we fit together such that our strong areas fill in the weak areas of others.

This is what it means when we say we believe in the church: not that we put our faith in the church—we put our faith in Jesus Christ—nor that we believe we are saved through the church—we are saved by Jesus Christ—but that we recognize that we are saved into the church, the one holy people God is creating for himself through the work of Jesus Christ, by the power of his Spirit. It means that we confess that we can’t live this life on our own, that we need each other, because God has designed and gifted us to need each other; it means that we understand that we are not for ourselves, but that we are gifted to serve others, to be God’s gifts to them, and that we need to accept them humbly as God’s gifts to us as well. Granted, some of those around us may not be the gifts we might have wanted God to give us, but even so, they are the gifts he knows we need.

Now, in the language of the Nicene Creed, when it affirms one church, it adds three adjectives, so let’s take a look at those for a minute; and let’s take them in reverse order. The creed affirms the one church as apostolic. There are those who take this as referring to a continuity of structure between the church now and the earliest church; this is of course the basis of the Roman claim for the authority of the popes. That’s false. What’s in view here is something much more fundamental: the true church is that which stands in continuity with the faith and teaching of the apostles, which we have revealed to us in the New Testament. We share their faith and understand ourselves as under the authority of that teaching, rather than feeling free to accept only what pleases us.

Also, the creed affirms the one church as small-c catholic: though the form and culture of the church changes through the ages, and there are differences about particular beliefs, we are not many churches, we are all one, because we all have the same Spirit and worship the same Lord. Any individual part of the church which claims the label “catholic” exclusively for itself makes a false and unjustifiable claim.

And finally, the one church is holy, not because we have reached moral perfection, but because the work of Christ in our lives has restored our relationship with God and set us apart as his people; he’s now about the process of changing us from the inside out so that our lives reflect what he has already done in our hearts. It’s rather like education—as one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s characters says, educated is what you’re supposed to be coming out, not going in. Holy is what we’ll be when God is done with us, not what we have to be to sign on.

The key in all this is that when Jesus sent us his Spirit, he didn’t do so just to bless us as individuals—he sent his Spirit to enable us to lead a different kind of life, so that each of us, in our own way and with our own gifts, might be a blessing to his people, his body, the church. He didn’t call us and fill us with his Spirit to live for ourselves; rather, he called us to live devoted lives—lives devoted to his service, to the service of the church, and to the service of all those in need—and he gave us his Spirit to empower us to do so. Thus, as we pray that the Spirit would shine the light of Jesus into all the world, we need to remember that part of the point is that his light shines into every part of our lives, as well, seeking out and burning away the darkness in us; we need to remember that looking at Jesus changes us, and the longer and more intently we look, the more we will change, because the ultimate goal is for us to look like him.

(Ezekiel 36:22-28; Romans 8:1-9, Romans 12:1-2)

The last few weeks, we’ve been talking about God the Father and God the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior; and as I noted, part of understanding what it means to confess our faith in the Father and the Son is to understand the various ways in which some in the church resist doing so. The basic impulse behind all of them, I believe, is the desire to make God safer and less challenging—really, less threatening to our pride and our selfish desires—by re-imagining him in whatever way suits our fancy. This is a constant temptation for all of us, as it’s one of the most basic ways the Devil seeks to derail us; that’s why we need to keep coming back to Scripture to correct our view of God, and to help us see him a little more clearly and truly each time.

Our tradition as Presbyterians, the Reformed tradition, is strong on this; these are more truths we need to remember than to learn. This is a good thing. When it comes to the Holy Spirit, however, we aren’t so strong; we tend not to understand his part in God’s work, and so to leave him out. Partly, this is no doubt in reaction to some of the wilder charismatic and Pentecostal types out there, who might give you the idea that it’s only when people are speaking in tongues and falling over that the Spirit is moving. That’s a false view of the Spirit’s work, but unfortunately, it is out there—and just as unfortunately, it has scared others in the church into the equal and opposite error of denying the work of the Spirit. You can hardly blame folks for saying, “Well, if that’s what the Spirit does, I don’t want any part of it—I’ll just stick with God and Jesus, thanks”; but that, too, misses the real work of the Spirit, and skews our view of God, ourselves, and the church.

You see, when I said last week that the work of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was only completed in his ascension, that points us to another truth: the work of his ascension was only completed at Pentecost, when he poured out his Holy Spirit on all who believed in him. In Jesus’ crucifixion, the price was paid for all our sin, leaving no penalty or punishment remaining; in his resurrection, the power of sin and death over this world and over us was broken, freeing us to receive the life of Christ; in his ascension, Jesus opened the way for us as human beings to enter heaven, and took up his place as the one who intercedes for us before the throne of God; and in giving us the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, everything he did became for us, applied specifically to each of us. It is by the presence and power of the Spirit that the work of Christ becomes real in our lives, that it becomes not just redemption in general, but our redemption. It is the Holy Spirit, you might say, who plugs us in to what God has done, and is doing, and will do.

It’s important to understand this, that before Pentecost, the life of the people of God was very different. Before then, only a select few people received God’s Spirit; at Pentecost, that changed, as God poured out his Holy Spirit on all his people, giving all of us the direct relationship with him that only prophets, priests and kings had known up until that point. God had promised that this would happen, that he would put a new spirit—his Spirit—in his people to give them new life; at Pentecost, he kept his promise.

Jesus had told his disciples before he left that this moment was coming, and coming soon, and so they set about preparing themselves for it. As part of that, they gathered together regularly to pray, and so they were all together on the day of Pentecost, also called the Feast of Weeks, which is one of the high festivals of the Jewish calendar. We don’t know where they were; some think they were gathered in the upper room; but we know that they wound up in the temple, because where else would a crowd of devout Jews have been on such a day? For that matter, it seems only logical that Jesus’ followers would have been there as well to celebrate the feast together; and so it seems likely to me that they were in the temple area, right in the religious center of Judaism, when the Holy Spirit came on them. After all, the Spirit of God shouldn’t be kept under cover in a back room somewhere; with his coming, the time for the disciples to hide was past.

The results were astonishing, as they tend to be when the Spirit is powerfully at work. Suddenly there was a sound like a high wind, which Acts says “filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Along with the great sound came what looked like tongues of fire; and just as the wind is associated with the Spirit, so too fire is associated with God’s appearances. The wind and flames were unmistakable signs to the Jews that God had just entered the building, and that he had come in power.

This was the fulfillment of the promise God had made through prophets like Ezekiel and Joel; it was the eruption of the kingdom of God into the kingdoms of this world on a broad scale. No longer was his realm to be identified with an earthly country, no longer was the rule of God directly identified with the rule of a particular human king, no longer was there a need for a human mediator between God and his people. Now, by the Spirit of God, people of every language and nation would become subjects of his king-dom, under his direct authority; for as Paul told the Philippians, whatever our citizenship may be on this earth, we are first and foremost citizens of the kingdom of God, and his ambassadors to the people and nations of this world.

If that sounds like it makes us different, it’s because it does. As followers of Jesus, we have been reborn, from above, by the Spirit of God, and we are not the same as those who do not follow him; we have a new and different nature, and a new and different orientation—to use the old cliché, while the rest of the world is marching in lockstep, we are called to march to the beat of a very different drummer indeed, following a different leader, serving a different master, pursuing different interests. To the rest of the world, we should be as independent, unpredictable and uncontrollable as the wind, for “so it is,” Jesus said, “with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

This is the point Paul makes, and drives home, to the church in Rome—and through them, to us. They, and we, are no longer under the power of sin and death, but under the power of the Holy Spirit; we no longer live the life of the flesh—which is to say, the life of this world, which operates according to the law of sin and is subject to death—but we live instead the life of the Spirit of God. The ways of the flesh, the ways of this world, lead only to death, and so the mindset and attitudes of this world, this-worldly ways of thinking, can only bring death; but if our thoughts and attitudes are in line with the Spirit of God, we find life and peace. That’s what the Spirit comes to do in us—to change our mindset, our frame of reference, our assumptions, our values, our attitudes, our ways of thinking, so that we will think as God thinks and see the world around us as he sees it, and thus live our lives accordingly, rather than living them according to the ways of the world and its conventional wisdom.

This is why Paul says in Romans 12, “Don’t be conformed to this world”—or as Eugene Peterson translated it, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking”—“but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern the will of God.” This is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, renewing us and transforming us from the inside out. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.

The problem is, of course, that old habits die hard, and old ways of thinking die even harder, especially when the world around us keeps reinforcing and drawing us back to those old ways of thinking; it’s all too easy to lose our focus, and we’re all too prone to resist the Holy Spirit’s work and leading. To really follow Christ, to really walk by the Spirit, we have to begin by listening—and listening in the expectation that we will be convicted, because we will. If we open ourselves up to hear what God is trying to tell us, we will be convicted of sin in our lives that we don’t want to admit, we will be convicted that there are areas in our lives where we need to change, and we will be convicted of the ways in which we are immature and need to grow. We tend to resist that, because we really don’t think there is anything wrong with us the way we are; and so we live our lives according to the ways of the world rather than according to the Spirit.

That, incidentally, can be true even if we’re living “good Christian lives.” After all, it’s perfectly possible for most of us to be nice, moral people—good enough on the outside to make most folks happy, at any rate—in our own strength; and in this country with its Christian heritage, the world is perfectly happy to let you live a nice, moral life, as long as you are properly “tolerant”—which is to say, that you don’t do anything that makes anybody else uncomfortable. It’s a way of living that makes it easy for us to look at ourselves and think we’re doing just fine, and not realize how much we need God—while on the inside, our hearts can remain closed to him. As C. S. Lewis said,

We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.

The world is perfectly happy for us to believe in a safe God who doesn’t challenge us or anyone else, who is content to let everybody do whatever suits them; as religion goes, that’s a pretty comfortable and inoffensive form. What it isn’t is any sort of biblical faith. God doesn’t call us to be nice and never make anybody unhappy, he calls us to follow him and he fills us with his Spirit; and the Spirit works in us to grow us and stretch us, to expand us day by day that each day we might be filled a little more, and each day we might be able to hold a little bigger view of God, to see him a little more clearly and know him a little more truly. The Spirit breaks us out of our comfortable expectations of how the world should be, and how life should go, and what God ought to be like; his goal is not to grow us into nice Christian people, but into something far more—indeed, to grow us out of merely being nice Christian people, into those disconcerting, unpredictable, awe-inspiring people called saints. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,

Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

We are to be the ones who take off our shoes, because we understand that God is that big, and that his Spirit is alive, present, and at work in every moment, in us and in the world around us, speaking to us, speaking through us, transforming us. We are to be the ones who live out of that awareness, following a voice the world cannot hear, to the glory of God and the praise of his name.