Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Lauren J. McFeaters
September 6, 2015
Eric Hobsbawm grew up as a Jewish orphan in Berlin and when he was 15 years old, he saw at a newsstand a headline that would change his life and would change the world: “Adolph Hitler Appointed Chancellor of Germany.”
Later in his life, Hobsbawm reflected on that moment and said,
“It was as if we were all on the Titanic
and everyone knew it was going to hit the iceberg.”
It was difficult, he said, to describe what it meant to live in a world that was simply
not expected to last.
It was like living between a dead past
and a future not yet born.[i]
We learned in those years about God’s call upon us.
God’s call upon us was not to stay silent
or slink into oblivion.
How often, this week, have we wanted to stay silent; to slink into oblivion? I know I have.
- Perhaps it was that first glimpse of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old refugee from Syria lying in the surf? We can still see his Velcro sneakers; his red shirt.
- Was it the picture of Melvina Allen bruised and bleeding after her family; an African American family from Sacramento, who had been enjoying a reunion camping trip, only to be terrorized by nearby white supremacist campers turned violent?
- Or was it the snapshot of a father lifting his child amid thousands of other refugees trying to board a train in Hungary and somehow making it to Austria or Germany. We saw a father’s anguish, his suffering, that he might not be able to pass his daughter onto others; even if he didn’t get on the train.
- Or perhaps it was the photo of Friday’s funeral for Sherriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth. We witness the face of his grieving wife and their five-year-old son; that little boy trying to stand tall in a Captain America t-shirt. He was trying to stand bold as he walked with his mother into Second Baptist Church in Houston. And just as we’re ringing our hands and shaking our heads and crying out “What is happening to our world?” Paul comes by with a hymn from the ancient church and won’t let us be silent. You see once you’ve known the love of Christ you can never stay quiet can you? You can never slink into oblivion or pretend you don’t smell that fragrant offering of Christ Jesus’ sacrifice. At this point, some of you may be taking out your phones and checking the news. Or going onto Amazon for some kind of search for a moral primer in Christian living. Go ahead; take out those phones. I dare you. But you won’t find a list of do or don’ts that matches Paul’s because of course his list isn’t about a “do” or a “don’t.” Paul offers us the answer. The way to serve the Lord looks exactly like the Lord serves us:
No lies. Speak truth.
Be imitators of God and live in love.
He doesn’t want our sympathy or pity. He wants our empathy; our kindness. He wants no less from each of us, marked with a seal of the Holy Spirit, to love the world like we’ve never loved before.
Support one another.
Be angry – go ahead, you can be angry, just don’t let the sun go down on your anger.
And forget about stealing; plagiarizing.
Speak only words that build up.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.
Forget all bitterness, wrath, anger,
slander and malice,
and anything that keeps you from being in relationship with other people.
And with everything that you are:
be kind to one another,
forgiving one another,
as God in Christ has forgiven you.
God’s commandments. God’s revelations for living.
I recently spoke to a friend and I’m still shaking my head. They say they were really tired of Paul. Why, I asked? Well you know, they said: he’s so judgy, so preachy, so annoying, so against women. I don’t come to church to have a finger pointed in my face; and anyway Paul’s not a very nice person.
Mmmmm.
You know those times in your life when you think of the perfect and brilliant thing to say (after something like this) and it comes about four days later?
That’s what happened to me and in this instance I remembered something Barbara Brown Taylor said about Paul: niceness does not concern Paul at all. He does not give two rips about being nice. No one ever taught him that if you cannot say something nice you should not say anything at all. Paul knows when we get together, we discover big differences and we suffer very real discord. For Paul, it is not possible to love one another without knowing that you can also be furious with one another. And when anger comes, we are not to shut up and slink into oblivion; we are to speak up, being honest but also kind.[ii]
It takes practice.
It’s one of the most difficult lessons of the Christian life. It’s one of the most difficult lessons I teach students in the ordination process and it’s one of the most challenging spiritual disciplines for church folk. And it’s this:
We are never called to be nice. We are always called to be kind. There is a deep theological difference.
- Nice is shallow; kindness bares your souls.
- Nice is cautious; kindness has the courage to speak the truth in love.
- Nice takes zero imagination. Kindness is creative and resourceful.
- Nice lets us look away from the front page of the paper and go right to the comics. Kindness takes the feelings we have when we look at that child churned up in the surf. Kindness breaks our hearts and gives us a place in the world to say, “No More!”
- Nice is a perpetual Stepford-spouse smile. Kindness gives us wrinkles, because it shapes us and it mends us and it reforms us into something new every day.
Frederick Buechner says it best: If you tell me living as a Christian is a kind of nice thing that happens to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say “go to,” “go to,” you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine.
Every morning, Buechner says, we should wake up in bed and ask ourselves this:
“Can I believe it all again today?”
No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side right next to your Bible.
Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for this particular day. If your answer is always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing is all about.
At least five times out of ten, he says, the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so.
The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it.
And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes!, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and……great laughter. [iii]
Yes!
You see, in Christ, the past; it’s dead and the future is born. He is our past. He is our present. He is our future.
- We, he says, are members of one another.
- We do not make room for evil.
- We share with the needy.
- We put bitterness and anger.
- We are tenderhearted and forgiving.
- The very things Christ has been for us.
And my friends, when you have experienced the Living and Loving God, you can never keep quiet; you never slink into oblivion; never shy away from suffering that tears you apart; because you know in the depths of your soul you are here to serve the One who has created you. You are here to be responsible for the world.
And by the way, what would we ever do without one another?We love one another.
What would we ever do without one another?
Mmm.I don’t even want to think about it.
What would we ever do without one another?
I don’t even want to think about it.
ENDNOTES
[i] Thomas G. Long. Sermon: Called By Name. Broadcast on Day One from Alliance for Christian Media, Chicago, IL, January 11, 2004.
[ii] Barbara Brown Taylor. God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998, 33.
[iii] Frederick Buechner. The Return of Ansel Gibbs. New York: Knopf, 1958.
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