(Ephesians 3)

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:

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(Ephesians 2:11-22)

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→

(Ephesians 2:1-10)

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.

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(Ephesians 1:15-23)

How many of you recognize the name Abraham Maslow?  For those who don’t, he was an American psychologist of the last century who was one of the founders of the discipline of humanistic psychology.  If you know his name, though, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t “humanistic psychology,” it’s this:

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(Ephesians 1:1-14)

As we move into the letter of Paul which we know as the letter to the Ephesians, we should begin by saying it probably wasn’t a letter to the Ephesians—not specifically.  For one thing, from the oldest manuscripts we have, there’s good reason to think the words “in Ephesus” in 1:1 aren’t original to the text.  For another, Paul founded the church in Ephesus and then spent three years there, his longest documented stay with any one church.  He’s imprisoned in Rome following his arrest in Jerusalem; consider that on his way to Jerusalem for that fateful visit, he had the ship sail past Ephesus to Miletus and then sent a message to the elders of the Ephesian church to meet him there.  He couldn’t just sail past them without saying goodbye, but he knew if he stopped there, it would take him weeks to tear himself away again.  Yet with all that affection and all those strong relationships, there are no personal comments in the letter and no references to specific situations in the Ephesian church.

I believe, as many have for centuries, that this was actually a circular letter which was sent to all the churches in the Roman province of Asia, which occupied the western part of the Anatolian Peninsula, what we now know as Turkey.  It seems to have been inspired by the issues Paul was addressing in his letter to the church in Colossae, with which Ephesians shares a great deal of material, and one of the earliest lists of New Testament books references it as the letter coming from Laodicea which Paul mentions in Colossians 4:16.  The subject and concern of this letter is the unity of the church as the body of Christ; Paul takes his language from 1 Corinthians, where he tried to help the Corinthian believers understand their unity in Christ, and broadens it out to apply it to the whole church in every place and culture and language.  As the great New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce summarized it, Colossians lays out “the role of Christ as Lord over the cosmos”; this is how Paul counters the false teachers in Colossae.  Ephesians takes it a step further, asking what this means for our understanding of the church as the body of Christ.

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