A Sermon Based Upon Ephesians 2: 1-10,
NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
October 2nd, 2016 (Series: 1/7, Amazing Grace)
The spring after we adopted our daughter
in November of 1989, we made our first camping trip to Florida, where we would
also visit Disney World. We had a
wonderful time experiencing the camping and Disney experience together.
After the week was over we were making
our way back in the middle of the night on Highway 95. I had planned for us to make camp on Tybee
Island, Georgia. We turned toward the
Island and we drove, for what seemed like hours. It was much further than I had
anticipated. It was also very dark and
we could see nothing. Everyone was
complaining. The further I drove the
worst it looked. There was
nothing. I had no GPS, only a map. When we finally arrived at what was said to
be Tybee Island, it looked abandoned.
No one wanted to stay there. We
turned around and may our way back toward the main highway. It was already late, and everyone was
tired. Finally, I pulled the little
truck and camper off in a parking lot near the interstate and we all crawled
into the camper and went to sleep. It was
like a nightmare.
Have you ever miscalculated your drive
or your destination? It’s harder to do
that with GPS, but it still happens.
Once on route to speak at a church in town I was unfamiliar with, my GPS
took me down a road that turned to dirt and finally ended up at a river with no
bridge. It was the shortest route to the
church, but did not realize there was no bridge.
In our modern world with sophisticated
satellites and GPS guidance systems, it’s getting even harder to admit that we
can be lost or mistaken about where we are going, but it still happens. It’s kind of like those drones, or unmanned
aircraft, especially the military type.
They fly over a target, see some people who look like the bad guys, and
perhaps really are. Then they unleash
the missiles and only latter we read that they ended up hitting building full
of school children. ‘Collateral Damage’, they call it. It may be getting harder to miss our target
or destination these days, but now when we miss it, we really miss it.
In today’s text we read about missing
the right ‘target’ when it comes to living our only chance to live our lives. That’s how the apostle Paul defined sin in
his letter to the Romans, as ‘falling
short of the mark’ (Roms. 3:28), or missing the target. Here,
in Ephesians we find an very detailed elaboration of what ‘missing the mark’ truly
means when you have only one life to live, which is, only one chance to hit the
target right. Paul also called the
result of ‘missing’our mark the ‘wages’ (Roms.
6:23) or consequence of sin, which is ‘death’.
When we ‘miss the mark’ of living the right way, we end up arriving at the
wrong place, hitting the wrong target, or hurting the wrong people, including
ourselves. In the history of this world, we human beings
have an incredible strong, if not an overwhelming tendancy, when left to our
own choices, our own desires, or our own ‘fleshly’ inclinations, to make the
wrong decisions, to go down the wrong the road and to end up hitting the wrong
target, even a ‘target’ which we sincerely thought was ‘right’ for us all along. In other words, getting where we wanted proved to be a ‘dead end’ in more ways than
one. As the tragic saying goes, “We get
what we want, and then we don’t want what we got.”
“YOUR
WERE DEAD THROUGH YOUR SINS” (2:1).
The writer of Ephesians, either Paul, or
one of his disciples who wrote for him, describes in great detail what ‘getting
what we don’t’ want means when people ‘follow
the course of this world’ by going with the flow or current of the ‘powers’ that are ‘disobedient’ to God’s intended target. Paul does not say this is how the ‘world’ lived, but he says this is how Christians have lived also: “You
were dead through the trespasses and sins” (2:1). “All
of us lived among them in the passions of our flesh” (2:3). We too have followed ‘the desires of the flesh and senses’ and have been ‘by nature children of wrath’ (2:3).
These are strong words. They are not chosen randomly but
intentionally. They are intentionally
strong, which is too for most people, drawn to appear much more ‘politically
correct’ today. But the sad truth is
that we’ve lost the value of God’s love for us, exactly because we’ve lost our vocabulary
about ‘sin’, and because of this, we’ve also lost our God’s given ability to
confront the reality and very real consequences of sin, which can wreck great,
if not irrevocable havoc in our very short, precious but most fragile human
lives.
Australian Mark ‘Chopper” Read was
beaten by his Father and then bullied in school. He then got into a lot of fights at school,
losing several hundred of them. By age
14 he was made a ‘ward of the state’ and declared mentally ill and given shock
treatments. Between the ages of 20 and
38, he only spent 13 months outside of prison.
He became a member of prison and criminal gangs, in order to
survive. Once he launched a prison
war. He killed not to be killed. He used a blow torch to punish his victims
and burn off their toes. Once he
attacked a judge in court. He had a
fellow inmate cut off his own ears so he could temporarily leave the
prison. He claimed to have killed 19
people, and attempted to kill 11 others, many of whom criminals too. Near
the end of his life, he put many of his life stories into crime novels and a
movie was made about his life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_%22Chopper%22_Read).
The title of that movie: “One Thing Led To Another.” That
very intentional title, chosen by a notorious criminal, points how such a difficult,
deadly, even degrading life got started from a very gifted, innocent, but
hurting and brokenhearted child. By the
way, Mark “Chopper” Read got the name ‘Chopper’ not from the people he
‘chopped’, but from his favorite childhood cartoon character, a big bull-dog in
the Yakky Doodle cartoon named
“Chopper”.
Few of us ever intend on ending up where
we do. Few of us ever choose the wrong
road on purpose. Most of us thought we
were choosing the ‘right’ road, or we choose the ‘road’ or ‘route’ we wanted
and we made the ‘choices’ we felt we had to, or wanted to choose. It’s a free country, isn’t it?
But Paul links our self-directed
choosing with the ‘the passions of our
flesh’ or the ‘desires of flesh or
senses’ (vs. 3). Today, this kind
of language has completely reversed itself into a more positive packaging: “Find Your Passion”, or “Follow your desire.” It all sounds very attractive and makes
what the Bible presents to us appear terribly ‘outdated’ and/or ‘restrictive’.
Would we dare admit today that our
‘free’ choices and our own decisions can still be influenced by the ‘ruler of the power of the air’ who is
still at ‘work among the disobedient’? Would
we dare say that all that all that is destructive and deadly among us is only humanly inspired? I
remember what someone said after Donald Trump’s outrageous negativity and nasty
rudeness which strangely kept getting him votes, against all political
precedence or reason. Someone said,
“Either he is a genius or he’s an idiot!”
I could add maybe it’s neither stupidity or brilliance, but that other
‘powers’ are still at work underneath the negative intensity of our world.
“BUT
GOD, WHO IS RICH IN MERCY…” (2: 4)
There was another person, whose early
life had too many hurts for such a tender, young child. At a very young age, he lost his mother to
illness, because his Father was a sailor, he had to be sent to boarding schools
which often proved very difficult for unwanted or abandoned children.
After Johnny ran away from school and
came home, his Father began to take him off to sea with him. Johnny began to love the adventure of the
open seas, but the living the life of a sailor caused him to rebel against the
faith his mother taught him. His faith
and life became ‘shipwrecked’ by his own ‘delight in sin’ and doing what he
knew to be wrong. After a short stint
in the wartime navy, the free-spirited Johnny decided the regimented military
life was not for him, so he went AWOL in search of his Father. But this young, self-serving ‘deserter’ was quickly captured,
publically beaten, and stripped of his rank of midshipman, and placed in
shackles.
After his release from military
confinement, feeling greatly humiliated, he contemplated suicide, but then
managed to get on to an African bound freighter. He
managed to get onboard a ship headed for India, but behaved so poorly with crew
of the ship, and was left with a West African salve dealer, whose wife
mistreated him much as if he was a slave himself. This time of exploitation and degradation
only made little Johnny more rebellious, and he tried to soak his sorrow in all
kinds of debauchery and dissolution.
Johnny was rescued from his abuser by the kindness of a sea captain, who
had been asked by Johnny’s father to search for him, and to bring him back to
England. But on the way back to
England, the slave trading ship encountered a severe storm off the coast of
Ireland. The 23 year old named Johnny,
found himself in the middle of the dark night, aboard a storm-tossed ship, quickly
filling up with water. After reaching
the deck, he was ordered to ‘go get a knife’, but when he returned, the man
standing in his place, had been washed overboard by a wave. “That wave was meant for me”, he
thought. It was in that moment that
Johnny called out to the God he remembered from his mother, “Lord, Have mercy!” Not long after his prayer, the cargo shifted,
stopping up the gaping hole of the sinking ship. The ship then drifted to safety. But during that long, slow drift, Johnny
began to have thoughts he hadn’t had in years.
He begin to wonder if this God did ‘have mercy’ on this wayward
child. That young man is Johnny, who
one day later, as John Newton, came to understand what had happened to him on
the merciless, angry waves of life, and then came pen these powerful words we
still sing today: “Amazing Grace, How
Sweet the Sound, that Saved a Wretch Like Me….”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Newton).
“Amazing Grace” is perhaps the most
beloved hymn of all, or at least is the most sung in church and especially at
funerals. It is the theme of this song
that still rings true to our hearts, because we too have at some time or other,
been pronounced ‘dead’ spiritually,
if not also physically, mentally or emotionally deadened---either because of
our own sins and failures, or because of the failures and sins of others that
have hurt us---have been taken by ‘forces’ and ‘powers’ we did invite, down
paths we did not intend into dark places we did not wish to go, putting us a place where there seemed to be
no way back or no way out.
This song, Amazing Grace, recognizes exactly what Paul also realized here in
this wonderful text. Had it not been for
“God, who is rich in mercy out of his
great love” (v. 4), who has come to interrupt
and interfere with the whole downward spiral, and even to stop a false ‘upward’
one, we too could have become ‘children
of wrath’ obtaining just enough ‘rope’ and power to hang ourselves. This is where we ‘all’ have been, would be, or will end up, Paul suggests, unless we also come to know the ‘grace’ (v. 5) of this God who has come
to us in Jesus Christ, ‘to make us alive
so that we can be raised up ‘together’ to ‘be seated with Christ in the heavenly places’ (v. 6). Through Jesus Christ, and all his teachings,
his living, and his dying and his resurrection is about, God wants to show the
same ‘grace in kindness to us’ (v.
7) which God showed when he raised up Jesus from what human sin and death did
to him.
“FOR
BY GRACE YOU HAVE BEEN SAVED” (2:8)
Just as there was no way for Jesus to
get out of this world ‘alive’, there is no way for us to get out of this world
‘alive’ either, unless we also come to find this salvation God offers to save us through our faith, by his grace (v.
8). What makes God’s grace amazing, is
exactly as John Newton discovered in that storm onboard that slave ship. This is what Paul discovered and expressed
too, when he wrote: “It is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not a result of works,
so that no one may boast” (v. 8-9).
You do get this picture, don’t you?
There is no way out of this world alive.
There is also no way out of your own situation right now,
unscathed. There is also no human way
out of the messes we people make for ourselves, or get ourselves into, when
left to our own devices, left to our own passions, desires and senses, unless there
is this God who has entered this world through Jesus Christ to offer us His
unmerited, unearned, unfathomable, and amazing grace.
“For
by grace, you have been saved…”
(2:8). If helps us to realize that Paul
is writing these words of ‘grace’ to people who look around at the world, as it
is, as it seems to remain, and as it appears to be getting worse and worse, and
he says to them, “You were dead…. You
followed the course of this world… You lived among the passions of your flesh… you
were, by nature children of wrath…. BUT GOD, WHO IS RICH IN MERCY, OUT OF HIS
GREAT LOVE… has
‘saved’ you ‘by grace’. Because you have seen the lies of world, and
the senselessness of your destructive desires,
you ‘have been saved through
YOUR faith by grace’---saved through
your faith in God, through Jesus Christ and saved by God through your faith
given by Jesus Christ. IT is Jesus who
has restored your ‘faith’ and it has all been done by God’s grace.
During a British conference on
comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any,
belief was unique to the Christian faith.
They began by eliminating possibilities.
Incarnation? Other religions had
gods appearing in human form.
Resurrection? Again, other
religions had accounts of returns from death.
The debate went on some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the
room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked.
He heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity
unique contribution among the world religions.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Lewis responded.
“It’s grace.”
After some discussion, the conferees had
to agree. The notion of God coming to us
‘free of charge’—no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of
religion or humanity. The Buddhists
eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and the
Muslim code of Law---each of these offers only ways to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love
unconditional. At the center of the
Christian gospel is a ‘lovesick father’ who is waiting for a ‘homesick’ child
to come home---nothing said, no questions asked, only a party of love and
welcome will be served. It is an amazing
welcome that is now provided through
faith, but only ‘served’ by grace (From “What’s So Amazing About Grace” by Philip Yancy,
Harper Collins, 1997, p. 45).
“HE HAS MADE US… FOR GOOD WORKS” (2:10)
So what ‘s our own response to such
amazing love expressed through ‘amazing
grace’? In his commentary on
Ephesians, N. T. Wright tells an interesting story about fellow Englishman,
James Herriot. Perhaps you recall that
James Herriot became very famous through his delightful and inspiring stories
about people and animals in the local farms and villages o Yorkshire,
England. His book “All Creatures Great
and Small” also spurred a TV series.
In one of his stories, Herriot tells
how, after one of his books was finished, he planned to take his wife out for a
small celebratory dinner at a restaurant some distance from home. When he was about to pay, he suddenly
realized that he had lost his wallet and had no means to pay. However, to his complete astonishment, the
waiter told him that the bill had already been paid. Unknown to him, his senior partner had
telephoned the restaurant and told them to charge the meal to him instead. It was his personal gift to the couple (Paul
For Everyone: The Prison Letters, by
N.T. Wright, WJK Press, 2002, p. 21).
The astonishment, and the relief of such
a moment, is a small, but valid pointer to the message Paul is still
proclaiming to us. In Jesus Christ, God
has ‘paid’ the cost of our own reconciliation to God and others, and God has
also redeemed us from a ‘life’ and from a ‘death’ that has no meaning or
hope. This is what God has done, as a
free gift. There are ‘no strings’
attached—none whatsoever, only ‘faith’ in Jesus Christ enables us to ‘receive’
God’s free gift of grace.
But perhaps the most ‘amazing’ thing
about God’s grace is not what it does ‘for
us’, but what it does ‘in us’, as
our text concludes by saying that we are not saved ‘as a result of works’, but
that we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for
good works’ (v. 10). This is not a
‘trick’ salvation to get us from doing our own thing into doing God’s thing,
but this is a ‘true’ salvation which gets us back to doing the ‘good’ and being
the kind of people we have been ‘created’
to be. This is what true faith does and
this is what true salvation means---
because we ‘were dead’, but now, ‘we
have been saved’ and made alive ‘in
Christ,’ we will, most definitely, be doing the ‘good’ God had planned and ‘prepared
beforehand to be our way of life’ (v. 10).
When we are ‘saved by grace’ we glad to get back to the ‘good’ we know we have been
‘created’ to be and to do. We are
‘glad’ to serve, because we know who has given us back our life as a ‘gift’.
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