Ephesians 4:25-5:2
August 18
Lauren J. McFeaters
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Eric Hobsbawm grew up as a Jewish orphan in Berlin and when he was 15 years old, he saw at a news stand, a headline that would change his life and change the world: “Adolph Hitler Appointed Chancellor of Germany.” Years later, he 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 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.[ii]
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. This week, for me, it’s been in seeing:
- Our family members, friends, co-workers, church visitors, unable to find consistent and dependable mental healthcare.
- Khaled Joudeh at a morgue in a hospital in central Gaza, having a last glimpse of his sister.
- The gateway from Chad into Darfur opens slightly to allow food and medical care for Sudanese people starving at record numbers, and closes shut once again.
- Wars raging in the Middle East and North Africa, Ukraine and Russia, Yemen and Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia, Tigray, Myanmar and Sudan, and the DRC.
And just as we’re ringing our hands and shaking our heads and crying out “What is happening to our world? There’s nothing I can do!” Paul comes to us with a hymn from the ancient church and won’t let us be silent or slink into oblivion.
In facing the world where we live; Paul doesn’t want us to dive into sympathy or pity. He wants our empathy and our kindness at the ready. He wants each of us, marked with a seal of the Holy Spirit, to love the world like we’ve never loved before.
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 there’s nothing you can do – not when you belong body and soul to the Lord of Salvation.
At this point, some of us may be taking out our phones and Googling for a moral primer in Christian living. Go ahead; let’s take out those phones, but we won’t find anything that matches Paul’s primer for the Ephesians. It’s all there in chapter 4, verses 25-32. To live as people of the Gospel is to:
To tell the truth.
To sustain 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, thieving.
Speak only words that build up.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.
Forget all bitterness, wrath, fury, slander and malice,
and anything that keeps you
from being in healthy relationships.
And with everything that you are:
be kind to one another,
forgiving one another,
as God in Christ has forgiven you.
These are God’s commandments.
God’s Revelations for Living.
My pastor friends and I check in with one another about our upcoming sermons. This week, I’m still shaking my head when I said I was preaching from Ephesians. Not one, but two friends said
“Aren’t you tired of Paul?”
“Why would I be tired of Paul?” I asked.
“Well you know,” they said: “He’s so judgy and irritating. He’s so preachy, so annoying.
And anyway in the end, Paul’s not a very nice person.”
Mmmmm.
You know those times in your life, after someone says something like this, and you think of the perfect, ideal, and brilliant thing to say and it comes …… about four days later? That’s what happened to me.
“Paul’s not a very nice person.” Well of course he’s not a very nice person. Niceness has never, ever concerned Paul at all. He could give two rips about being nice. Not a part of his DNA. No one ever taught him that, “if you can’t say something nice you shouldn’t say anything at all.”
Because Paul knows when we get together, we discover very big differences, huge disagreements, 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 keep quiet, get nice, and slink into oblivion; we are to speak up, express honesty, declare ourselves with sincerity and to do it with kindness. [iii]
Kindness. It takes practice. A lot of practice.
It’s one of the most difficult lessons of the Christian life. It’s one of the most ambitious tasks of maturing in faith. It’s one of the most challenging spiritual disciplines for church folk. And it’s this:
We are not called to be nice.
We are always called to be kind.
And there are deep theological differences.
- Nice is shallow; kindness bares your soul.
- 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 breaks our hearts because it’s a way for us to experience the desperation and anguish of others.
- Nice is a perpetual-Stepford-spouse smile. Kindness gives us wrinkles, it shapes us, it mends us, and it reforms us into something new every day.
Frederick Buechner says it best:
If you tell me that 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 for it, go ahead,”
because you’re lying to yourself and lying to me.
Every morning, Buechner says, we should wake up and ask ourselves this:
“Can I believe the Gospel again today?”
No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read the news, till after you’ve studied that daily record
of the world’s brokenness and corruption,
which should always be 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 days, he says, the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, and 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, really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and……great laughter. [iv] Yes!
My friends, when you have experienced
the Living and Loving God,
you can never keep quiet;
never slink into oblivion;
never shy away from the suffering
that tears humanity 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 here to do that with one another.
And by the way,
what would we ever do without one another?
We love one another.
We cherish one another.
What would we ever do without one another?
What would we do?
I don’t even want to think about it.
ENDNOTES
[i] Ephesians 4:25-5:2: So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
[ii] Thomas G. Long. Sermon: Called By Name. Broadcast on Day One from Alliance for Christian Media, Chicago, IL, January 11, 2004.
[iii] Barbara Brown Taylor. God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998, 33.
[iv] Frederick Buechner. The Return of Ansel Gibbs. New York: Knopf, 1958.