Practicing resurrection as the church...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for Sunday, February 13, 2011 as a part of my on-going exploration of Ephesians.  I continue to find great insight from Eugene Peterson's text, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ.  If you are in town, please stop by at 10:30 am.

Let me share a quote with you from that grand old curmudgeon of the contemporary church, Eugene Peterson, because the way he puts it really cuts to the chase for us today. In his discussion of what is really at stake in being the church of Jesus Christ in our day, he pulls no punches in his commentary on Ephesians:

When the wild bull of American ambition and individualism is bred with a tame Christianity with no cross, the result is a hybrid spirituality – or more honestly a mongrel spirituality – in which both the image of God and the crucified Savior have been lost in the cross-breeding.

Ouch! That really stings if we’re taking it all in, yes?

• Wild ambition and selfishness – mixed with a watered-down Jesus – gives birth to a mutant spirituality that experiences nothing of God’s grace and reveals nothing of Christ’s soul.

• Sadly, the result is NOT the Body of Christ in the real world, but a pseudo-religious club spewing spiritual sounding words that sound an awful lot like the Lord’s warning in today’s gospel.

You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, 'I'll pray for you,' and never doing it, or saying, 'God be with you,' and not meaning it. You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say 'yes' and 'no' for when you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

So today – in part four of my series into St. Paul’s insights from the book of Ephesians – we’re going to consider what he tells us about the church. The real church: not the mongrel that passes for the church in its hyper individualized expression or the idealized and romantic notion of the church that is bound to distract and disappoint – but the real church – something that Paul calls the Body of Christ.

You see, St. Paul wants us to know that growing up and maturing as people of faith is NEVER an abstraction. “Nothing in the practice of resurrection,” Peterson writes, “is experienced or participated in apart from a body.” (p. 103) This is critical so I hope you were paying attention: nothing about maturing into our faith is experienced apart from a body. Paul tell us in Ephesians 2:

In Christ Jesus you who were once far off – strangers and disconnected from God’s grace – have now been brought near by the blood of Christ. He is our peace – our shalom - in his flesh he has made both insiders and outsiders into one body – breaking down the dividing walls and hostility between us – and making us into the body of Christ. (Ephesians 2: 13-14)

This is Paul’s first insight for us about doing and being the real church in our generation: whatever we do in the Spirit – however we experience Jesus in our lives – it all has to become flesh within and among us for that is how God works. Do you remember how the Bible begins?

• In both Genesis 1 and 2 what story are we being told: creation and first things, right? In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…

• So let’s say out loud what it was that God created according to these stories: “light and sky – earth and sea – trees and vegetation – time and seasons – fish and birds – cattle and kangaroos – man and woman… all of the things created in the Genesis stories speak of God pouring out grace into forms that are accessible to our five senses.” (Peterson, p. 102)

God’s creation, you see, all becomes flesh – something real and tangible – so that we can “see, hear, touch, taste and even smell grace” in our lives. This is how God works – this is what the Genesis stories tell us –and we have to be highly suspicious of any spirituality that would disconnect us from this truth about creation. So let’s not try to be more spiritual than God; we are not ethereal and disembodied spirits nor are we angels.

We are God’s creation set in a world where everything we experience is of the Lord… God’s sky upon God’s earth and sea, within God’s time marked by sun, moon and stars in the company of God’s menagerie of dolphins and eagles, lions and lambs… women and men made in the image-of-God who come to us as parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, brothers and sisters, neighbors and relatives, playmates and workmates, students and helpers – and Jesus. (Peterson, p. 103)

That’s why Paul insists that nothing in the practice of resurrection – or growing up into adult people of faith rather – ever takes place outside of a body. Whether it is Genesis or Jesus, the very heart of God’s grace is always incarnational: it is the Word made flesh within and among us. Like Christ tells us:

You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, 'I'll pray for you,' and never doing it, or saying, 'God be with you,' and not meaning it. You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say 'yes' and 'no' for when you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

• Are you still with me? Am I communicating and getting through to you?


• Let’s pause for a moment and see if there are any questions or thoughts or reactions about what I’ve said so far, ok?

Alright then: if the first insight about being the church and experiencing God’s grace is that it is always incarnational – grounded and expressed in one type of body or another – the second insight is that we have to pay very close attention to what bodies we are embracing for our lessons in a mature faith. One of the reasons we continue to read and study the Old Testament as Christians – what some call the Hebrew Bible – is because it grounds us in a time-tested body of knowledge, experience and human spirituality that knows how to challenge the evils of individualism.

The words we have been asked to read from Deuteronomy for today are illustrative. In no uncertain terms they tell us that God has set before us a way of living that will bring life or death – hope and integrity or fear and moral compromise – blessings or curses. There are two contexts for these warnings:

The first comes from the ancient story of Moses the great Hebrew liberator who led his people out of the oppression of Egyptian slavery towards the Promised Land. In our text the people of God are encamped just outside of what will become Israel – the land of milk and honey – and Moses is summarizing everything he has learned and taught the people. In just a few chapters he is going to go up Mt. Nebo one last time and gaze on the land of God’s promise, but like Dr. King he won’t be able to cross over and realize all of God’s blessings. So, after a generation of wandering in the wilderness with his people, just before his death Moses preaches one more time: “Obedience or death. Love God and live; serve other gods and perish!” (www.WorkingPreacher.org, Carolyn J. Sharp)

There are choices to be made with your bodies, you see, and they will lead to “blessings and extravagant abundance… for those who heed the voice of God; or unspeakable calamity, terror, and affliction (for) those who abandon the covenant.” God’s challenge is crystalline: either embrace liberation and responsibility in my new community or else slip back into the degradation and despair of Egypt. Today I set before you the ways of life and death – so make up your mind.

That is the first context – the historic commitment of Israel to live as God’s unique and counter-cultural people of freedom and responsibility in covenant with one another – but there is another setting for this text, too. And the second context is that this story from Deuteronomy was actually being told to God’s people NOT at the beginning of Israel’s history, but rather from the middle of the sixth century BCE when Israel’s best and brightest had been taken into exile and oppression again – this time to Babylon. And just like countless other wounded and confused people, the Israelites were telling themselves the stories of their origins to better understand just how their troubles had come to pass.

• Can’t you just hear them: it seems that somewhere along the way we chose death instead of life – fear instead of trust - yes? And when we hear those old, old words of Moses again – that great sermon about the consequences of choosing life or death – it starts to become clear that we tried to finesse things too much and make peace with the security of Egypt’s empty promises rather than trust in the challenge of God’s love.

• That’s part of what the Old Testament teaches us time and again – and why we still read it: when Israel tried to become a hybrid with other cultures – and remember they were surrounded by nations just as bright and creative as the United States is today – places like Assyria, Babylon and Egypt – when they did this, they gave away their unique commitment to God.

Peterson is most helpful again when he notes:

Our Hebrew people-of-God ancestors lived as neighbors with a number of high-achieving ancients. But however they may have accepted and benefited from their libraries and technologies, they were at their best when they lived as fiercely jealous about the integrity of their souls and vigilantly guarded their image-of-God identities. They did not admire the leaders of those other kingdoms and cultures, nor did they adopt the successful ways of life that produced the power and wealth of those civilizations. Rather… they were uncompromising in their rejection of the divine pretensions and sexual profligacy’s of their leaders in government and the arts and the superficial idolatries of the so-called best families.

Do you see where I’m going with this? When we try to live into God’s love all on our own terms – forgetting our counter-cultural covenant and the fact that God’s grace only becomes revealed in reality not abstract ideas – we become spiritual mongrels: our faith is compromised and sick, our testimony in the world is anemic and we find ourselves enslaved to the addictions and goals of Egypt rather than the faith, hope and love that God reveals in the Promised Land.

Let me give you a tiny example from within our own faith community: last week after Eucharist I was greeting one of our Sunday School adolescents. I shook his hand, patted him heartily on the back and said, “Man, I am so glad you are here.” And he looked at me – and like young teenage boys are want to do – started to kidding around saying, “Oh, oh, he touched me – he slapped me on the back – I’m suing, I’m suing.”

• Now, I am all for jokes and having a good time – and I really don’t believe that children are better seen than heard in church – but I have to tell you I was stunned.

• I was shocked and saddened, too because from out of the mouths of one of our babes was coming all the sickness and cynicism of our selfish and hyper individualized culture. I guess the contrast with Holy Communion was just too much for me because it really hurt me – and I physically ached for this boy – and the culture he is inheriting.

The second insight St. Paul urges us to embrace is that growing up in the Christian faith and practicing Christ’s resurrection within our bodies is a very counter-cultural matter and we can’t figure it out on our own. We need the stories of God’s people to guide us. We need the community of other adults to help keep us on track. And we need a way to remember both God’s promises and what it means to live into them or else we’ll sink back down to the lowest common denominator of our culture.

That’s what Paul’s third insight into being and doing church in the 21st century is all about: Without a regular reminder of what life is like when we are trapped or addicted or confused by American individualism, we’ll stay there – not because we want to – but because we don’t know any better. That’s why St. Paul reminds the Ephesians of who they were before they entered the community of faith we call church.

It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah… But don't take any of this for granted. It was only yesterday that you outsiders to God's ways had no idea of any of this, didn't know the first thing about the way God works, hadn't the faintest idea of Christ. You knew nothing of that rich history of God's covenants and promises in Israel, hadn't a clue about what God was doing in the world at large. Now because of Christ—dying that death, shedding that blood—you who were once out of it altogether are in on everything.

Did you grasp that? Church is the place where we are reminded NEVER to take God’s grace for granted. One of the things we’re supposed to do is jog our memory so that we keep on track with grace – but always with joy - NEVER with guilt. Paul reminds the Ephesians of seven truths they would like to forget: they were outsiders – Gentiles – strangers who were addicted to individualism rather than committed to God’s grace. They didn’t know about prayer or community or sharing; it was all “me first” and to hell with everybody else.

But now, by God’s grace they are different: they are united with the body of Christ – they are in community – and share values that go beyond greed and selfishness and the lowest common denominator. Are you with me? To be and to do church in the 21st century isn’t any different than when St. Paul got the ball rolling.

+ First we have to keep it real for God always expresses grace within a body.

+ Second we have to experience and practice the counter-cultural values of Christ in community knowing it takes a life time to get right.

+ And third we have to help one another remember why our commitment matters because it is all too easy to drift back towards Egypt.

And this is the last word: we are to do it with grace and joy never guilt and obligation. It is a lot of work, but so much better than the fear and isolation and addictions of the alternative – and that is the good news.