Living Words

Be Subject to One Another Ephesians 5:21-6:9 by William Klock   Yesterday our parish breakfast group discussed C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In the story, Edmund and Lucy make their third visit to the magical land of Narnia, but they also take their cousin, Eustace, with them.  And Eustace, he has no framework, no point of reference, no way to understand Narnia.  Because Eustace came from a “progressive” family.  He addressed his parents by their first names.  He read books about factories and granaries, about modern industry and agriculture.  The one bit of beauty in his home was a painting of a Narnian ship.  His parents couldn’t bear it, but it had been a gift and they couldn’t get rid of it, so they hung it in a disused bedroom.  Eustace couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of being in a land of kings and princesses, magic and dragons, and talking animals.  All he can do in the first few chapters is scream for the British Consul, compare King Caspian’s beautiful dragon ship to modern steamships, and retreat from everyone.   And, I think, if we had to understand God on our own, we’d be a lot like Eustace.  We wouldn’t have the vocabulary, let alone the vision, to even think about God.  When we saw the beauties of his creation, we could do nothing more than reduce it all to physics equations and chemical formulas.  And so, Brothers and Sisters, God has spoken.  He’s given us his word.  (Imagine how much better off Eustace would have been had he read the Bible, the greatest of the “right books” he’d neglected.)  God speaks, not only so that we can know him, but so that we can have the vocabulary and the mental—even the emotional—framework to begin to understand him.  But, most importantly, his word has become incarnate: one of us.  And in Jesus we meet and come to know God at our level: A God who knows our life, who is full of patience and love, mercy and grace, a God who is angry at the sin that has disrupted and broken his creation, a God who will justly judge wrong, but who is also humble and loving enough to die to redeem and to set right.  In Jesus we meet concretely the God whom the Old Testament describes as King, as Father, as Husband.   And then we realise that these relationships—things like king and father and husband—are relationships we understand, because God has established them as the foundational units of human life and society and particularly so the family: husband and wife, children and parents.  And it’s in these relationships, even imperfect and damaged by our sins, it’s in them that we learn our first vocabulary for understanding and knowing—and trusting—God. It’s no wonder that the devil lies to us about sex, marriage, and family.  The devil lies and tells us that sex is about personal gratification, not about mutual self-giving.  And we believe the lie and sex becomes selfish.  He lies and tells us that men and women are interchangeable, and so we create birth control and try to make women like men by robbing them of the defining feature of feminine biology: the ability to give birth to children.  We start seeing God’s blessing of children as a negative “consequence” of sex.  And we create HR departments staffed by women who try to quash all the things that make men men out of their male employees.  And when we believe the lie of interchangeability, men have unnatural relations with men and women with women, undermining and rejecting the very purpose for which God created sex and rejecting his blessing upon us to be fruitful and to multiply.  And if we keep believing the lie, as our culture has, we get ever more absurd, thinking that with surgery and with chemicals and by changing our pronouns, we can turn men into women and women into men.  We reject the good story God has written for us, the one in which he’s given us the vocabulary of husband and wife, of children and parents, and we write our own lie-based story in which, when confronted with God, we can only think of him as a celestial killjoy out to rob us of our fun, our autonomy, and the carefully crafted identities we’ve created for ourselves.  We start to see God’s blessing of fruitfulness as a curse.  We start to see the traditional family as an enemy.  We’re like Eustace, surrounded by goodness and beauty, but only able to see it as threatening and other.  And, like the pagans of old, we reinvent God and remake him in our image and using our new vocabulary.  Instead of Father, Son, and Spirit we start speaking of him as her and addressing Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer or even Parent (or Mother), Child, and Spirit.  Not too far off the mark it seems, but no longer able to be properly known through the relationships, now rejected, that God established precisely so that we can know him and make him known.   And so, Paul writes to the Ephesians in Chapter 4: Put away lies.  Instead, speak the truth to each other.  Don’t be fooled by the dark and foolish ways of the world.  God has washed you clean in the blood of Jesus and he has given his Spirit to live in you.  He’s made you his temple: stewards and priests of his presence, his glory, and his wisdom.  A temple that one day, through the power of the gospel and the Spirit, will fill the earth with God’s presence and glory.  Don’t swallow the lies.  It’s your job, our job, the church’s job to confront the world’s lies with the truth of God’s creation.  So put off the old, corrupt, lie-based way of being human and put on the new humanity exemplified by Jesus, risen from the dead and firstborn of God’s new creation.  And Paul started by urging us to put away anger and instead to put on patience, kindness, and love.  It would be hard for even the most pagan of pagans to argue with that.  And then, based on exactly the same principle of living out the truth of God’s creation, Paul urged us to put away sexual immorality and greed.  And now, without a breath—because in the Greek there’s no sentence break, let alone a paragraph break, between Ephesians 5:20 and 5:21, where we ended last week, Paul writes, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for the Messiah.”  That’s 5:21.  [Page 1162 in the pew Bibles.]   What does new creation look like?  Brothers and Sisters, it looks like Christians being subject to one another.  What does God’s wisdom—his wise way of ruling creation look like?  It looks like his people being subject to one another.  He’s already told us back in 4:2 to “bear with one another in love, being humble, meek, and patient and making every effort to guard the unity the Spirit has given us.  Put away all anger and yelling, sexual immorality and all impurity and greed.  In other words, stop using others as your punching bags, as your means of sexual gratification, and as your means of getting rich.  Instead, be imitators of God and love each other the way the Messiah loved you and gave himself for you.  Jesus’ self-giving for our sake on the cross was a sweet-smelling sacrifice to God and if we’re going to be his priests and his temple, giving of ourselves to each other will be our sweet-smelling offering to God.  And this follows right along with what Paul has said already about our differentiated unity: Jew and gentile, man and woman, slave and free…Canadian and American, white and black, Liberal and Conservative, Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy, and on and on.  Different people with different backgrounds, different identities, Paul even stressed different giftings given by God, but all made one through our union with Jesus.   Our unity, maintained by this self-giving of ourselves is the means by which we confront the lies and foolishness and darkness of the world with the truth and wisdom and light of God’s new creation.  And at this point Paul could write a whole book covering all the situations and relationships in our lives and how this rule of being subject one to another might apply, but he’s writing a letter from prison and so he focuses on three areas that were key to the Ephesians.  I want to spend most of our time on the first, because it’s the most important for us.  But before we look at what he says specifically to wives and to husbands, I want to jump to his summary of the whole thing in the end, midway through verse 28.  As is so often the case with Paul, it’s at the end that he sums everything up and gives us the theology behind it.  So look at verse 28 and following: “Someone who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, nobody ever hates his own flesh.  He feeds it and takes care of it, just as the Messiah does with the church, because we are parts of his body.  [Now Paul quotes from Genesis 2:24.] ‘That’s why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.’  The mystery [the hidden meaning] in this is very deep; but I am reading it as referring to the Messiah and the church.  Anyway, each one of you must love your wife as you love yourself; and the wife must see that she respects her husband.”   So Paul understands marriage in light of the Messiah’s relationship with his body, the church.  He takes us back to Genesis 2 and God’s command that the man will leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife.  Yes, Paul admits, there are some hard things here, some hidden meanings, but the important and obvious thing is that this is ultimately about the Messiah and the church.  There are two important take-aways from this.   First, Paul saw Genesis 2 as a prophecy of God’s son, leaving his home to find his appointed bride.  And once Paul makes this connection, we can see this story weaving its way through the whole Old Testament as the Lord pursues and woos his intended bride in the wilderness, showing his covenant love; as the marriage is ruined through Israel’s prostituting herself to other gods as Hosea and Ezekiel describe; as God promises to renew that covenant, betrothing Israel to himself all over again.  And so Paul saw Jesus, the bridegroom taking up this role, one laid out for him over the course of the Old Testament.  And Paul could look forward to the culmination of the story as we see it in Revelation, in the restoration of all things, heaven and earth, God and man rejoined, all symbolised in the marriage supper of the lamb and his bride.   And the second point Paul sees here: Think of how this fits into the big sweep of Ephesians.  In Chapter 1 Paul wrote about God’s eternal purpose to bring together everything in heaven and earth in the Messiah.  In Chapter 2 Paul explained how this great plan is symbolised in the coming together in the church of Jews and gentiles into a single new humanity and growing into a temple filled with God’s Spirit.  And in Chapter 3 Paul described this coming together of the two people into one as one of the mysteries of the gospel that confronts the principalities and powers of the present age with the reality of God’s victory at the cross and his new creation.  Then in Chapter 4 Paul wrote about how this new humanity, the church, is sustained by a diversity of gifts and ministries given by God to help the church grow up in every way into the head, the Messiah himself.  And now Paul brings it all to a crescendo with this mystery—the Messiah’s own self-giving love as the radical model for the husband’s vocation to serve his bride.  So this isn’t just some one-off, detached, stand-alone advice on marriage.  What Paul says here about marriage is an integral part of the whole thing, the whole story that began with Adam and Eve and runs through God’s wooing Israel in the wilderness, and the coming of his son to prepare and to wed his bride. Brothers and Sisters, if you want to understand marriage, look to the relationship between the Messiah and the church.  And if you want to understand the Messiah and the church, look to the institution of marriage.  Think about it: heaven and earth, Jew and gentile, the body building itself up in love—now man and woman brought together in marriage.  The mystery is revealed.  This is the whole biblical story of God and his people in miniature, revealed in the institution of marriage itself.  And that comes with a warning: mess with marriage, tinker with it and you might just lose the whole thing.  Like Eustace having no way to relate to Narnia, because he hadn’t read the right sort of books.  But that’s what we seem to do.  We listen to the world’s foolish lies instead of God’s wisdom, we get bogged down in arguments about gender roles, and we end up missing the great vision of God’s purposes to set creation and us to rights.   So, now let’s back up to the details.  Look at 5:22-24: “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.  The man, you see, is head of the woman, just as the Messiah, too, is head of the church.  He is himself the saviour of the body.  But, just as the church is subject to the Messiah, in the same way women should be subject in everything to their husbands.”   And let’s keep going.  Paul is nothing if not an equal opportunity offender.  Verses 25 and following: “Husbands, love your wives, as the Messiah loved the church and gave himself for it, so that he could make it holy, cleaning it by washing it with water through the word.  He did this in order to present the church to himself in brilliant splendour, without a single spot or blemish or anything of the kind, so that it might be holy and without blame.  That’s how husbands ought to love their own wives, just as they love their own bodies.”   Now, my observation has been that people usually rankle at this because they’re well aware that abuse happens.  It does.  And Paul knew that as well as anyone.  In his world there were some powerful and independent women, but the reality for most women was that they often were little more than chattel.  They could be exploited, abused, and divorced on a whim.  In Greece and Rome, marriages were typically made for social or political reasons and with little if any expectation of love.  And this is why verse 21 matters so much.  “Be subject to one another,” Paul writes.  As in his day, so in ours.  The answer to abuse of power is not to abandon marriage.  The answer is to recover God’s original design, to live his new creation, to embrace the transforming power of self-giving love.  Paul knew it’s not easy.  If he felt the need to write this, it’s most likely because he knew some of the Ephesian Christians were struggling with this very thing.   And it’s not to say that all men are a certain way and that all women are a certain way with no variation, but Paul really leans into our natural wiring as men and women—how God made us in his wisdom.  When men look after, care for, and show love to their wives, their wives are more inclined to be subject to their husbands.  And, when wives are subject to their husbands, husbands are naturally inclined to respond with that love and care.  It’s a cycle that feeds itself, but more importantly, it reflects and teaches us something about Jesus and the church.  Because Jesus the Messiah has given himself for our sake, showing that he loves us, and showing that he is worthy of our trust, it’s both natural and easier for the church to submit to him in a reciprocal love.  Notice how Paul holds up marriage as a signpost to God’s new creation in the Messiah as the woman subjects herself, not to the heavy-handed, lording-over of her husband, but to a husband who models the self-giving love of the Messiah who died for his church.  And the husband loves his wife in the way the Messiah loved his church.  Just as the Messiah has redeemed and purified and is preparing us for God’s new world, so the husband should do everything he can to encourage the flourishing of his wife, for her to be glorious creation God intends for her to be.  That creates the relationship in which the wife, herself, responds with her own self-giving love.  And Paul wraps it all up in the language of redemption—of being presented spotless and pure and holy.  And the two becoming one flesh, mirroring the gathering together of Jew and gentile, Ford and Chevy, Coke and Pepsi in the church.  Our marriages are swept up and become part of God’s renewal of all things.  It shouldn’t be any wonder that marriage is so often a point of attack by the devil.   But that’s not the end of the passage.  Paul goes on in 6:1-4, addressing children and fathers.  And let me say before we read, that saying something like this to children, in Paul’s world, was almost unheard of.  Children were not addressed as responsible agents.  Consider that in Greek, the words for “child” are neuter, not male or female.  It’s almost like kids weren’t actually people yet.  But Paul says to them anyway, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord.  This is right and proper.  [And now he quotes Exodus 20:12.] ‘Honour your father and your mother’—this is the first commandment that comes with a promise attached!—so that things may go well with you and that you may live long life on earth.”  And then in verse 4 he says, “Fathers, don’t make your children angry. Bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”   Paul knew what family life can be like.  And if children and parents can get at each other in our world, imagine how bad things might have been in a world where children were hardly even seen as being real people.  Paul knew the danger of parents being harsh with their children and he knew how angry children can get when they’re treated unfairly or when parents demean them.  So he addresses them.  He reminds children of the command and promise God gave to the Israelite children: Honour your parents so it will go well for you in the land”—meaning the promised land.  In Greek that world “land” can also mean “earth” and since the gospel opens up that promise beyond Israel itself to the whole earth, I think Paul is now envisioning those children as the next generation of Christians, living out new creation in their own relationships and being the temple that God’s Spirit has made them and being the fulfilment of the blessing to be fruitful and fill the earth—not just with themselves, but with the gospel—as stewards of God’s presence and wisdom.   But Paul’s exhortation to mutual submission also extends to masters and slaves.  Look at verses 5-9: “Slaves obey your human masters, with respect and devotion, with the same single-mindedness that you have toward the Messiah.  You must get on with your work, not only when someone is watching you, as if you were just trying to please another human being, but as slaves of the Messiah.  Do God’s will from your heart.  Get on with your tasks with a kind and ready spirit as if you were serving the master himself and not human beings.  After all, you know that if anyone, slave or free, does something good, they will receive it back from the master.   “Masters, do the same to them.  Give up using threats.  You know, after all, that the master in heaven is their master and yours, and he is no respecter of persons.”   This is another spot where modern people get angry with Paul, because he sounds like he’s defending slavery.  He’s not.  In fact, in Philemon Paul offers a protest against the institution at least within the Christian community.  But here’s the important thing: Paul was thinking big when he wrote this.  Paul was thinking about new creation and in God’s new world there will be no slavery.  Paul could never put an end to it himself.  Slavery was what made the ancient world work.  We have machines and engines and robots.  The ancient world had slaves.  Close to a third of the people in the Roman Empire were slaves.  And Paul knew the way out wasn’t through rebellion, but through the gospel; the way out was through the church being the church, by putting off the old humanity and living the new humanity in the midst of whatever our current circumstances are, because that’s how Jesus the Messiah, his humility, his gracious sacrifice for sinners, his resurrection and life, and God’s new creation wisdom make their way into the world.  In that sense, slavery was no different an evil than anger, wrath, sexual immorality, or greed.  The only way out is for Jesus’ people to take up our vocation and to live as God’s priests, to be his temple in the midst of a broken world living in foolish darkness and in doing so to confront it all with the life-restoring wisdom of God.  To confront the selfishness of the world, with the mutual self-giving love of the cross, lived out in our lives, lived out in whatever situations we find ourselves: in marriage, in divorce, in singleness; as parents and as children; as slaves and as masters.  In our world today as employees—often used and abused because of the greed of our employers—and as employers.   Think on that.  We’ve often read this part of Ephesians as if Paul is giving us a doctrine of marriage—or a doctrine of parenting or of slavery.  We tend to look at these things as detached from each other.  We get bogged down debating gender roles or parenting techniques or even slavery.  And we end up missing Paul’s point, which is that these aren’t stand-alone doctrines or bits of advice.  Brothers and Sisters, this is about the church—about you and I—living out the gospel, about us putting off the old and foolish way of being human and putting on Jesus the Messiah, putting on the new humanity and living out in our relationships the humble, self-giving, and mutual submission of the cross.  It’s about living gospel lives that put into practise the gospel that we proclaim.  It’s about living out our future hope of renewal and restoration here and now and in a way that brings Jesus to world around us.   Let’s pray our Collect again: O Lord, from whom all good things come: Grant to us, your humble servants, that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by your merciful guidance put them into practice; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Don’t Let Anyone Fool You! Ephesians 5:3-20 by William Klock   The last three weeks we’ve been making our way through the fourth chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Ephesus, just getting into the first couple of verses of Chapter 5 last Sunday.  This is rubber-meets-the-road stuff.  In Ephesians 1-3 Paul writes about what the church is and our part in God’s plan to renew his creation.  By the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice at the cross, God has purified us from the stain of sin and death and set us free from their bondage.  And then, having purified us and made us fit for his holy presence, he’s filled us with his Spirit.  He’s made us—his church, his people—to be his temple.  He has made us stewards of his presence and his wisdom and his life.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, he has given back to us the vocation that Adam rejected.  And now he calls us, as he called Adam, to be fruitful and to multiple and to fill the earth.  And as we fill the earth, we expand the temple.  We carry God’s presence with us.  We bring his light and life into the darkness.  We confront the foolishness and injustice of the world with his wisdom.  As I’ve said repeatedly, we are in the present God’s working model of his future new creation.  We—the church—are the architect’s model meant to show what his grand project of renewal and recreation and resurrection will one day look like.   Which is why Paul has stressed, has said that it’s vital to our identity as the church that we put off the old way of being human and put on the new—the new exemplified by Jesus who is the firstborn of God’s new creation, the new Adam and prototype of God’s renewed humanity.  God told Israel repeatedly: Be holy as I am holy.  That’s why he gave Israel his law.  And this is why God has raised Jesus from the dead—to lead the way—and this is why he’s filled us with his Spirit.  Instead of a law written on stone tablets that our hearts would struggle to embrace, God has united us with his resurrected son and his Spirit has renewed or hearts and has written his law of love on them.  It’s still a struggle.  The world, the flesh, and the devil do their best to make us forget our baptism.  They do their best to drag us back into the slavery from which Jesus has freed us.  But this is why Paul stresses at the beginning of this very practical part of his letter, in 4:25, “Put away lies.  Each of you speak the truth with your neighbour.”   Brothers and Sisters, that’s what it comes down to.  Jesus the Messiah, resurrect from the dead, is God’s truth.  The renewed creation he represents is the truth.  Everything else is a lie.  It began when the serpent lied to Adam and ever since Adam’s disobedience, the world has been filled with pain and tears, darkness and death—because we chose the lie over the truth.  But if we know Jesus, if we have been united with him in faith in our baptism, he is the truth—the truth and the way to life.  Put off the lies and the old way of being human and embrace Jesus, embrace the truth, and be the new humanity God is making us.   And we saw last Sunday, that as Paul gets into the practical details of this he starts with our speech.  It’s not only that we shouldn’t speak lies; he says to put away anger and vulgar speech and, instead, to be kind to each other, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God forgave us in the Messiah.  Instead of letting the pain and brokenness of the world sweep us up into a storm of rage, instead of lashing out at those who hurt us, be God’s new humanity, look to the example of Jesus.  De-escalate, respond to wrongs with forgiveness, respond to anger with tender-heartedness, be kind.  Break the cycle.  This is why we need our hope—that vision of God’s creation set to rights, modelled by Jesus—we need that vision always before us.  We need to remember that we are God’s temple, the stewards of his presence and his wisdom, so that we can make him know to the world, so that we can expose the foolishness of the world with the wisdom of God—with his new creational way of life—with godliness, with holiness, with justice.   And I think Paul started with anger because even the most pagan of pagans knows—even if he won’t admit it—that anger and wrath only make the world worse.  They hurt others, they destroy our relationships, they make the darkness darker.  Even though the pagans might laugh at the idea of being kind to your enemies and showing mercy to the weak—because that was loser talk to the Greek and Romans—when they looked at the church they saw a community of mercy and reconciliation, of kindness and peace that they had to envy.  That witness made the Greeks and Romans constructively curious and won many to the faith.  But, like I said, I think Paul starts with anger and wrathful words because—even if they confront our sins head on—it’s hard to argue with him.  And so he establishes that this is what God’s wisdom for the world looks like.  This is new creation and it’s infinitely better than the darkness of the pagan world.   And now he can move on to the thing that’s going to get everyone’s hackles up, that everyone’s going to want to push back on: sex.  And money.  Mostly sex, but greed is a familiar friend of sexual immorality.  Look at Ephesians 5:3-10 [page 1162 in the pew Bibles]: “As for sexual immorality, impurity of every kind, or greed: you shouldn’t even mention them!  You are, after all, God’s holy people.  Shameful, stupid or course conversations are quite out of place.  Instead, there should be thanksgiving.”   “You should know this, you see: no sexually immoral or impure person, no one who is greedy (in other words, an idolator) has any inheritance in the Messiah’s kingdom or in God’s.  Don’t let anyone fool you with empty words.  It’s because of these things, you see, that God’s wrath is coming on people who are disobedient.”   “Don’t let anyone fool you.”  Brothers and Sisters, this is about truth—real truth—and it’s about God’s wisdom that will set his creation to rights.  Again, ever since Adam believed the lie of the serpent that he could be like God, we humans have been making a mess of God’s good creation.  Instead of living the truth of it and instead of living out the wisdom of God, we live a lie.  We’ve rejected the true story about God and about his creation and about us, the one in which he is good and faithful and loves us; the story in which he created us to live in his presence and to know his generosity; the story in which he called us to care for his garden temple and blessed us with children (and with sex so we can make them) so that we could expand that temple and the place of his good presence until his glory filled the whole earth.  But instead we’ve tried to write our own stories for ourselves.  Brothers and Sisters, we weren’t created to do that.  We’re terrible at it.  Writing our stories for ourselves has corrupted God’s good creation.  Our stories compete with each other.  We hurt each other.  We use and abuse each other.  We even abuse ourselves.  We deny the truth about God and worship idols instead.  We deny the truth about creation.  We even deny the truth about ourselves.  And some of the most powerful stories we try to write for ourselves are about sex and money.   We write our own stories about sex to justify all sorts of awful things: to justify sex before we’re married; to justify affairs when we’re married; to abandon our spouses; to justify the use and abuse of others through pornography and prostitution; to use and abuse our spouses when we are married; to abuse each other through unnatural relations, men with men and women with women; even to deny the reality of how God made us as men and women—writing our stories in which men are women, women are men, humans are cats—the most absurd denials of reality.  And money.  We write out own stories to justify taking and taking and taking, to justify stealing, to justify crushing others, to make ourselves rich, to put ourselves on at the top—idolatry—all the time forgetting the story God’s already written about his great goodness and his generosity.  We write our stories instead of living in the grand story of love and truth and beauty that God has written for us and we make a mess of his creation and each other.   To be clear: Paul was a Jew, steeped in Israel’s scriptures.  He knew that God created men and women to complement each other and, in that, to learn how to share and love and show grace in humility and to learn something about even the nature of God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit in mutual love and harmony.  Paul knew that God created sex and that sex is good.  It’s the blessing God gave in order to fulil his mandate to be fruitful and to fill the earth. Marriage and sex are part of the reality of God’s good creation.  Paul was no prude.  God’s first commandment was about something that results in more delight, physical pleasure, and the glory of mutual love than anything else.  The devil can’t beat it, but he can corrupt and counterfeit it with lies.  He’ll fool us into abusing God’s gift selfishly and in ways that hurt and destroy and that reject God’s purposes for it.   Brothers and Sisters, don’t be fooled by those lies.  God’s word and God’s son, the firstborn of his new creation, show us the truth, the reality of his creation.  So Paul says in verses 3 and 4 that as his people we have been given God’s Spirit that we might know the truth, the wisdom of new creation and model it for the world.  This is why truth matters.  This is why Paul tells us not to tell lies.  Sexual immorality means telling lies about God’s creation.  It means misrepresenting the very new creation he’s give us the Spirit to live out.   And Paul casts a wide net.  Sexual immorality—the Greek word should sound familiar: porneia.  We get our word “pornography” from it—sexually immoral writing, literally.  It meant any sexual activity outside marriage.  And, of course, for the Jews—and anyone else in that world no matter how pagan they were—marriage meant a man and a woman.  But just in case we might think of something that doesn’t fall under the heading of porneia—sexual immorality—Paul ads “impurity”—any kind of sexually deviant behaviour that would render one unclean or impure before God.  Remember, the point of Jesus’ death, of his blood shed at the cross as a sacrifice for sin, was to wash us clean from the stain of sin—to purify us the way the priests in the Old Testament used the blood of the sacrifices to purify the temple—so that God can dwell with us, so that the Holy Spirit can dwell within us.  We are God’s temple and the first rule of the temple has always been purity, holiness.   And it’s not like Paul was sheltered and didn’t know about sexual immorality.  Sex was everywhere in the world of Greece and Rome.  If you’ve ever had the misfortune of stumbling onto a Pride Parade—it happened to us once in Portland—and you see the open and proud displays not just of sexuality and nudity, but lewd, vile, grossness on shameless public display.  Greece and Rome were like that everywhere every day.  When we think of worship, we think of a church, a place that is quiet and holy.  When we think of priests we think of sexual purity—even sometimes abstinence and celibacy.  It was the opposite in the pagan world.  The worship of fertility gods and goddesses involved ritual prostitution and sex and raucous orgies in the temples.  Priests were often ritual prostitutes.  Wives were generally expected to be chaste, but men could and did have sex with anyone they wanted—male or female—just so long as it wasn’t another man’s wife.  Slaves were fair game for rape.  We know this from ancient literature and art.  There were occasionally philosophers or emperors who wrote that maybe all this sexual licentiousness had gone too far and wasn’t good for society, but the pagans weren’t interested.  People like their sexual immorality.  Paul and the Ephesians knew all about this world.  Most of the Ephesians, being gentiles, had been very much a part of that world.  So they knew the power of the gospel.  They knew the power of recovering the truth of God’s creation.  They’d been transformed by it.  About a hundred and fifty years later, the famous doctor and philosopher Galen wrote about Christians and said two crazy things stood out about them: They believed in the resurrection of the body and they didn’t sleep around the way everyone else did.  He thought they were crazy, but he also respected them.  They put off the old way of being human and put on the new way that Jesus taught them and the whole world noticed.  Those two thing: belief in the resurrection of the body and not sleeping around go together.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6 that the body is not meant for immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body.  Just as God raised the Lord Jesus, he will one day raise us, so it’s incumbent upon us to glorify God in our bodies.   The world will tell us otherwise.  There were all sort of “empty words” in Paul’s day, used to justify sexual immorality, just as there are today.  As our culture has rapidly de-Christianised over the last half century or so it’s been tempting for Christians and for the church to buy into those empty words.  The world’s empty words tell us we need to be more tolerant.  And there is a place for toleration in the church.  Thinking of 1 Corinthians again, Paul told the Christians there that they needed to be tolerant of their differences.  Some ate food butchered in the pagan temples and other refused to.  Paul told them to tolerate each other.  That’s what love does.  But it doesn’t work with everything.  It doesn’t work with lies.  In that same letter Paul called them out for tolerating sexual immorality and incest.  There’s no place for that in the new creation.  Saying so isn’t hate speech.  It’s telling the truth.  At heart, it’s a warning against idolatry.  In 1 Thessalonians 1 Paul calls us to “turn from idols to serve the living God”.  Brothers and Sisters, ethics, Christian morality, being pure and holy isn’t just good advice.  It’s a call to worship.   This is why Paul warns in verses 5 and 6: the sexually immoral, the impure, the greedy—they have no place in the kingdom.  These things are idolatry.  It’s because of these things that God’s wrath is coming on the disobedient.  This idolatry, these behaviours, this trying to write our own stories for our own benefit and to the hurt and detriment of others, this is why the world is broken, this is why it needs renewal, this is why Jesus died and rose again.  When the day comes that the church, the temple has filled the earth with God’s presence and glory, Jesus will finish his work of new creation.  He will put a final end to sin and death.  And that will mean that wiping from creation of anyone who still insists on disobedience, on sin, on writing their own stories.  If Jesus sets the world right and leaves them, they’ll just corrupt it all over again.  And, I think, pointing back to Israel: Paul warns that you can’t call yourself one of God’s people and live in disobedience and impurity.  That’s like the Israelites setting up altars to Baal or Asherah and worshipping with cult prostitutes in the temple alongside God’s altar.  It doesn’t work.  Either you belong to God or you don’t.  Either you give him your full allegiance and obedience or you don’t.  Either you’re part of his new creation or you’re not.   So Paul goes on in verse 11: “So don’t get involved in the works of darkness, which all come to nothing.  Instead, expose them.  The things they do in secret, you see, are shameful even to talk about.  But everything becomes visible when it’s exposed to the light, since everything that is visible is light.  That’s why it says...” And here Paul quotes what appears to be an early Christian hymn, “‘Wake up, you sleeper! Rise up from the dead! The Messiah will shine on you!’ So take special care how you conduct yourselves.  Don’t be unwise, but be wise.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s the nature of being the working model of God’s new creation.  Wisdom is the way God intends his creation to work.  And as his new humanity, his wisdom is what we’re called to live out in the midst of the foolish darkness of the world.  “Make every opportunity you have,” Paul goes on in verse 16, “because these are wicked times we live in.  So don’t be foolish; rather, understand what the Lord’s will is.  And don’t get drunk with wine; that way lies debauchery.  Instead, be filled with the Spirit!”   Again, think of those pagan temples.  Ephesus was full of them.  Where people would go to worship their gods in drunken orgies with priests and priestesses and who were prostitutes.  It was the idolatrous lie taken to extremes.  In contrast, picture the temple in Jerusalem.  A place purity.  Its priests forbidden to drink in its precincts lest they lose their inhibitions and become like the pagans.  A holy place where heaven and earth overlapped.  The place where humanity could go to meet God—and know his glory.  Everything about it a reminder of the garden that Adam had forsaken, but also everything about it pointing forward to God’s new creation and the day when his presence and his glory will fill the earth.  And now Paul tells us, leave behind that old, corrupt way of life and its lies and be God’s temple—a temple not of bricks and mortar, but a living temple.  Never forget that he has filled you with his holy Spirit.   The devils and the world won’t like our challenge to them.  They will throw their lies at us.  They will even threaten us if we won’t go along with the lies.  They always do that.  In the days of the Maccabees, the Greek king made the eating of pork a loyalty test for the Jews.  To many it didn’t seem like such a big deal.  There were other more important points of the law to keep.  But the faithful Jews knew, it was a symbolic compromise.  To give in was to reject the living God for the paganism of the Greeks.  And just so in the early centuries of the Church.  Caesar would not tolerate the challenge of Jesus, the world’s true Lord.  He could tolerate Christians doing just about anything, so long as they acknowledge him as lord with a pinch of incense offered at his festivals or in his temples.  But those early Christians knew, even though it seemed like a small thing, it meant everything.  And just so today.  The world increasingly insists: honour the rainbow, use the pronouns.  And it might seem like such a small thing.  We can keep going about all our other Christian business.  But Brothers and Sisters, that’s the lie.  And to capitulate, to offer that pinch of incense on the rainbow altar is to give up everything.   So remember the truth of new creation embodied in Jesus the Messiah who died and rose again to lead the way.  Do not capitulate to the lies.  And, as Paul says in verses 19 and 20: Being filled with Spirit, “speak to each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and chanting in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.”   Brother and Sisters, encourage one another.  None of us can stand alone.  We were never meant to.  You can’t build a temple out of a single stone.  God has brought us together to be his temple and together we fill it with his praises, giving thanks for what he’s done.  Giving thanks that he hasn’t left us to languish in a lie that brings death.  Giving thanks that he’s given himself to die to deliver us from that lie and to wash us clean from its stain.  Giving thanks that he rose from the grave to conquer the lie and to reestablish the truth of his good creation.  Giving thanks that he’s filled us with his Spirit to make us the firstborn of his new and renewed world.  Sing his praises with each other.  Sing his praises to each other.  Drown out the lies, drown out the idolatry with the truth of his glory as you give thanks for his mercy and grace, as you give thanks for his lovingkindness, as you give thanks for his goodness and his generosity and his faithfulness.  Remind each other of his glory so that we feel no need to live in any story but the glorious one that he has written for us.   Let’s pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Good Friday: It is Finished Hebrews 10:1-25 & St. John 19:1-37 by William Klock   Picture again the scene we read about in last night’s Gospel: Jesus and the disciples gathered in that “upper room”.  Their feet were dusty from a day spent walking the streets of Jerusalem.  There should have been a servant there to wash their feet.  But, instead, Jesus took up the towel and pitcher of water and began to wash the dust, the grime, the dirt from their feet.  Even Judas, whose feet were covered with dust from his journey to visit the high priest to betray Jesus.  Jesus washed even that dust from the feet of his betrayer.  Here was truly the Messiah, the suffering servant who came to wash his people clean from their sins.  Peter drew back.  “No Lord!  You can’t wash my feet!  If anything, I should be washing yours.”  But Jesus insisted.  This is what he’d come to do.   Jesus turned everything upside-down.  After washing the disciples’ feet—something totally inappropriate for a teacher to do for his disciples—he took the bread and the wine of the Passover meal and started talking about them as a new sacrifice.  These men knew all about sacrifices. They knew all about bulls and goats and lambs sacrificed for sin, their bodies broken and their blood poured out before the altar to purify the people from the impurity of their sins, to make them fit for God to draw near.  And yet Jesus now took the bread and wine and said that it was his body broken and his blood poured out—that they were all on the verge of a new exodus, but this time he would be the Passover lamb, his body and blood would be broken to free them from the slavery of sin and death.  The disciples didn’t understand.  Not at this point.  Picture them looking at Jesus and looking at each other with confusion.  What was he trying to say about the Passover?  They really did want to follow Jesus, they wanted what he had to offer, but they didn’t understand yet what it was he was offering.  When Jesus had tried to wash Peter’s feet, Peter had indignantly refused, but Jesus explained that he needed it—that if we wanted any part in his master, this washing was essential.  Of course, then Peter did want it—he wanted even more of it (“Wash all of me, not just my feet, Lord!”)—but he still didn’t understand what it meant.  He just trusted Jesus.  This was the Messiah.  Peter wanted what was coming…whatever that might be.   After supper Jesus took his friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.  Even after the foot washing and that last supper and all Jesus’ talk about servants and sacrifices, they still didn’t understand.  They had no idea what was going to happen.  They knelt among the olive trees as Jesus went off a little way away to pray by himself.  And as Jesus prayed like he’d never prayed before, the disciples drifted off to sleep.  They had no idea that something was about to happen that would change the world forever.  Jesus woke them up in time for Judas to return, leading a pack of Jewish soldiers who had come to take him away.  Peter drew out his sword, ready for the attack, and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers.  Maybe he thought that now was the time Jesus, the conquering Messiah, was going to throw off his clever disguise of humility and start the revolution that everyone expected.  Now was his chance!  But it didn’t happen.  In fact, Jesus actually healed the soldier and told Peter: “I can appeal to my Father and he’ll send twelve legions of angels.  But if I did that, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled?”  I can only imagine just how much more confused Peter was at that point.   And the disciples ran away as the chief priest’s soldiers took Jesus away in chains.  They figured it was over.  Chalk Jesus up as yet another failed Messiah.  But Peter wasn’t ready to give up on his friend, so he followed along to the high priest’s house to see what would happen.  He watched the sham trial they put Jesus through.  They condemned Jesus, and as the priests and soldiers spit on him and struck him, Peter gave up just like the other disciples had done a few hours before.  Three bystanders noticed Peter in the crowd and recognised him: “Hey, you!  You were with him.  You’re one of his friends.  You’re one of his followers.” And each time Peter denied knowing Jesus: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!  You must be blind!  I’ve never seen this man before!”  It wasn’t just Judas.  By morning Jesus had been betrayed and denied by his closest disciples and friends.  All of them.   And in the morning, the Jews dragged Jesus to the court of the Roman governor.  The Jews weren’t allowed to execute anyone; the Romans had to do it.  And so Jesus went through another sham trial before Pilate, who caved to their pressuring.  He didn’t want a riot on his hands and the Jews were crying for blood—and not just blood—they were crying out for a Roman crucifixion.  Pilate asked them, “But this man is King of the Jews?”  And they shouted back, “No he’s not!  We have no king but Caesar!”  That had to be the most unJewish thing ever shouted by a crowd.  I expect that shout left Pilate utterly speechless.  If they’d all suddenly began feasting on roast pig he couldn’t have been more surprised.  I expect it had Jesus in tears.  He knew, just as they knew, that the Lord was Israel’s king, not Caesar.  But they were so angry with him, they were so set on their rejection of Jesus the Messiah, that they would do the unthinkable and declare their allegiance to Caesar instead.  On Sunday the crowd outside the city had hailed him as King, but now their voices were drowned out by this great hoard calling for his blood.  Not wanting trouble, Pilate gave them what they wanted.   His soldiers, the whole battalion, took Jesus to be scourged.  They spit on him, they put a reed in his hand and a crown plaited of thorns on his head and mocked him as king, and then they beat him senseless.  They led him away with two violent thugs, revolutionaries, very possibly from Barabbas’ gang.  On a hilltop just outside the city, the soldiers held Jesus down on a cross while they nailed him to it with spikes through his wrists and through his feet.  Then they raised the cross up and dropped it heavily into the ground.  His mother and his friends watched as his blood poured and as he struggled for breath.  For three long hours he hung there.  Roman crucifixion was known for its agony.  The shoulders were dislocated.  Hanging, you couldn’t breath.  So you pushed yourself up, putting all your weight on the spike through your feet to gasp for air—alternating between the agony of asphyxiation and the agony of being nailed to a piece of timbre.  Some men lasted for days like that.  Jesus had been abused so badly, all it took was three hours.  He cried out to his Father—in relief, in exhausted victory, “It is finished.”  And just to make sure he was dead, John says the soldiers pierced his side with a spear.  Blood and water gushed out from the wound.  Not what anyone would normally expect, but a detail noted by John.  Maybe to stress the reality of Jesus’ body, because there were those at the time John wrote who claimed that Jesus’ body had only been an illusion.  As John saw blood pour from Jesus’ side, he couldn’t help but remember the blood pouring from the animals sacrificed in the temple, and as the wind sprinkled Jesus’ blood on the group gathered at the foot of the cross, John remembered standing in the temple as the priests sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats on him and the gathered sons of Israel.  Purifying them from the stain of sin and death.   The clouds darkened the sky.  The earth shook.  The great, heavy curtain in the temple that closed off the holy of holies, the place of the Lord’s presence, was violently torn in two.  The graves gave up their dead, who went walking through the streets of Jerusalem.  Something remarkable had happened and everyone noticed, but no one understood—except maybe that centurion who confessed, “Surely this man is the son of God!”  Despite all that, the city was quickly back to its business.  Jesus’ friends wept in sadness or in anger, and they went home to lie low lest the authorities come after them next.   That evening Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to claim the body of Jesus.  They took it down from the cross, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a tomb, and sealed it up.   Maybe now the disciples started to ponder what Jesus said last night when he had talked about his body and blood being given as a new—as a perfect—sacrifice.  In our epistle lesson from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, we read some more about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice.  The Law and the old sacrifices were but a shadow of the good things to come.  “It can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.  Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins?  But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year.  For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).   The blood of bulls and goats, sacrificed over and over, could only convict the people of sin as it pointed to the perfect sacrifice of the Messiah that had not yet been made.  And so Hebrews 10 says that Jesus came to do “away with the first in order to establish the second.  And by that…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Messiah Jesus once for all”(Hebrews 10:9-10).  The writer of Hebrews goes on to give us a vivid picture contrasting the old and the new: “Every priest [and he’s talking about the priests of the old covenant] stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin.  But when the Messiah had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:11-14).   Jeremiah wrote, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds…I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”  And Hebrews reminds us, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16-18).   When Jesus breathed his last and cried out, “It is finished,” it was finished.  Whereas in the old covenant the priest laid the sins of the people on the bulls and goats sacrificed repeatedly on the altar, Jesus, our great High Priest, took our sins upon himself and died the death that we deserved.  The old sacrifices fell short.  They could cleanse the people from the impurity of their sins, but the blood of bulls and goats could never deal with the sin itself.  That’s the difference between the old sacrifices and the perfect sacrifice of Jesus.  In the shed blood of Jesus we are purified so thoroughly that, in the Holy Spirit, God himself can live in us, renewing our hearts, writing the law—once carved on tablets of stone—now the Spirit writes that law of perfect love on our hearts.   When Jesus breathed his last and gave himself up to his Father, the temple served its last function in redemptive history.  Under the old covenant the holy of holies—the most holy place—was where the presence of the Lord resided visibly for the people, resting on the ark of the covenant.  And yet the people weren’t allowed into that place—into the direct presence of the Lord.  Only the high priest was allowed there and then only once a year.  No sinful human being could enter the presence of the Lord and the priest only did it to make an annual sacrifice for sins—and he did so only after a series of purification rituals for himself.  Nobody went there, because sinners can never enter the presence of a holy, just, and righteous God.   But when Jesus made his perfect sacrifice on the cross that day—as he breathed his last and pronounced, “It is finished”—the heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the people was torn in two.  By his death, Jesus opened the way into the presence of the Father.  Through Jesus sinners now find perfect forgiveness and, through God’s indwelling Spirit, they become the new and perfect temple.   On the cross Jesus stretched out his hands; he stretched out one hand to all those who had trusted in him, seeing the future and coming Messiah as they made their sacrifices at the Temple.  And with his other hand Jesus reached out to us, reaches out to the Gentiles, to the nations who had never heard of the Messiah.  On the cross he reaches out with both hands, uniting both peoples to himself, establishing his body by giving new life to dead and paralysed limbs through his life-giving body and blood.  Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).  That’s exactly what he did.  In fact, it’s exactly what he still does.  He stretches out his hands to draw us in, to unite us to himself.  Through his perfect sacrifice he offers perfect forgiveness of sin.  Through his body and his blood he offers new and eternal life.  Through his Holy Spirit he renews and regenerates hearts and minds and leads us on the path of holiness.  And through his cross, he leads us through the torn veil and into the holy of holies—into the very presence of God.

A Sermon for Maundy Thursday 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 by William Klock   “This is my body.  It’s for you.  Do this as a memorial of me,” said Jesus to his disciples.  And similarly with the cup he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Whenever you drink it, do this as a memorial of me.”  The Christians in Corinth, hearing those words from our Epistle would remember the stories told by the disciples about that night.  Just like we do, they’d mentally fill in the whole setting from Jesus washing their feet, to the Passover meal, to Jesus taking the Passover bread and one of the Passover cups and linking it with himself and what he was about to do.  They’d be thinking about this new covenant.  A mystery to the disciples, but the Corinthians knew the story of the cross, too.  They knew that the body of Jesus, broken, and his blood poured out at the cross established something new.  The Jewish Christians there new especially that when they shared in this meal that Paul described, it was like the Passover meal they’d known all their lives, but now in Jesus it meant something new and something better.  Not just an exodus from Egypt, but an exodus from sin and death.  Not just being led by God into a land of milk and honey, but being led by Jesus and the Spirit into God’s new creation.  As Passover reminded the Jews year after year of the Lord’s deliverance and how he’d established a covenant with them, how he’d made them his people, and how he’d given them a hope for the future, so the Lord’s Supper, every Sunday, reminded them how Jesus had delivered them from sin and death, how he’d marked them as his people in their baptism—not just in water this time, but by pouring his Spirit into them.  And it pointed forward to God’s promises of a promised land—not Canaan conquered by the sword, but the whole world captivated by the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen.  This community shaped by the Lord’s Supper, by this new Passover, was God’s future right here in the present, God’s new creation in the midst of the old, God’s light in the middle of the darkness.  Not perfectly, of course, but still God’s future here and now.   But we forget these things.  We forget who we are.  We forget God’s promises.  That’s why God gave Israel the Passover.  That’s why Jesus gave us his supper.  So we don’t forget what he’s done.  So we don’t forget who we are.  So we don’t forget the task we’ve been given to do.  And so we don’t forget our future hope.  And yet, even still, we forget.  And that’s why Paul wrote this to the Corinthians.  If we back up to the previous paragraph, to 11:17, [You can find this on page 1139 in the pew Bibles.] Paul writes to them, What I have to say now isn’t a matter for praise.  That means he’s about to rebuke them for something they’ve been doing wrong.  He goes on: When you meet together, you make things worse, not better.  Stop and let that sink in.  When you meet together, you make things worse, not better.  I tend to think that when Christians meet together to worship, even if we don’t get everything right, it’s still a good thing.  We’re better off for it.  On the whole God is pleased.  And yet Paul’s saying that when the Corinthian church gets together, what they’re doing is so wrong, that on the whole, it’s a bad thing, not a good thing.   So what are they doing?  He writes, To begin with, I hear that when you come together in the assembly there are divisions among you…  So when you gather together into one meeting, it isn’t the Lord’s Supper that you eat.  Everyone brings their own food to eat, and one person goes hungry while another gets drunk.  Haven’t you got houses to eat and drink in?  Or do you despise God’s assembly, and shame those who have nothing?  What shall I say to you?  Shall I praise you?  No, in this matter I shall not!   That doesn’t sound very much like the Lord’s Supper, does it?   Remember that in the very early church, the Lord’s Supper was probably connected to a fellowship meal.  It hadn’t yet become the symbolic meal that it would, where we eat a little piece of bread and take a sip from the chalice.  And in Corinth this had ceased to be a truly shared meal.  It sounds like the rich were separating themselves from the poor.  While they ate like gluttons and got drunk, the poor members of the church went hungry.  The rich people probably thought they were doing well.  After all, it was very gracious of them to let the poor—many of them slaves—have anything to do with their meals.  If they were still pagans, knowing nothing of the grace of God, the poor wouldn’t be there at all.  It’s another case of the Corinthians getting everything horribly wrong, but still patting themselves on the back for how gracious they were.   And Paul rebukes them.  Back in Chapter 5 he wrote, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.  Therefore let us keep the feast!”  But if this is how they’re doing it, it may be a feast, but it’s not the feast.  It’s not the Lord’s Supper.  Brothers and Sisters, if we don’t come to the Lord’s Table as one, we don’t come at all.  Again, Paul warns the Corinthians: If this is how you keep the feast, it’s better if you don’t—because this isn’t the feast.  In fact, if we jump down to verse 27, Paul writes: It follows from this that anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.  Everyone should test themselves.  That’s how you should eat the bread and drink the cup.  Now, we should stop there and make sure we hear him.  “Test yourself before you eat and drink.  Test yourself how?  He goes on:  You see, if you eat and drink without recognising the body, you eat and drink judgement on yourself.   The flow of Paul’s logic here is so simple there really shouldn’t be any question about it.  What’s the context of this rebuke?  The Corinthians weren’t united when they came to the Lord’s Supper.  They were letting worldly divisions and distinctions divide them up.  To put it in terms of our Epistle this past Sunday from Philippians 2: They didn’t share the mind of Jesus amongst themselves.  They weren’t being humble as Jesus is humble.  And so Paul reminds them that the Supper was instituted by Jesus to remind us of him and to remind us who and what we are in him.  And now he warns them that if you eat and drink of the Supper without recognising the body, you eat and drink judgement on yourselves.  What’s the body?  That’s one of Paul’s ways of talking about the church—especially when he wants to stress our unity and interdependence.   So what he’s saying is that central to coming to the Lord’s Table is doing so as one people.  The cross has overcome all our differences.  There is no longer rich nor poor, slave nor free, Jew nor gentile, man nor woman.  It doesn’t mean those markers are gone.  It’s that in the pre-gospel world, those differences divided us all up, but the cross now makes us one.  That’s part of how the church puts God’s future, his new creation on display here and now.  It’s one of the ways we show the world the beauty of the gospel.  Without this unity, the Lord’s Supper is just another meal—like any other worldly meal, where you invite the people who are like you or the people you want to score points with.  Ironically, it’s become common for Christians to flip Paul’s warning on its head and to fence off the Table from other Christians who have different views of how the Lord’s Supper works.  To “recognise the body” is taken to have something to do with Jesus being present in some way with the bread and wine, and we’ll only let people come to the Table if they agree with us on how exactly that works.  Which is just the sort of thing Paul is warning against.  Jesus instituted the Supper to be a powerful symbol of our unity in him, but we keep it to ourselves and keep others away who disagree over what exactly that means.   I have to think that this is one reason the church in the West is in such decline.  Our churches are too often divided between rich and poor, or divided along political lines or ethnic lines, and while there’s certainly a place for division over serious theological error, most of our division are over matters that should never be a source of division.  Paul certainly thought that lack of unity was a problem.  He goes on in verse 30: That’s why several of you are weak and sick and some have died.  But if we learned how to judge ourselves, we would not incur judgement.  But when we are judged by the Lord, we are punished so that we won’t be condemned along with the world.  So, my brothers [and sisters], when you come together to eat, treat one another as honoured guests by waiting for each other.  If anyone is hungry, they should eat at home, so that you don’t come together and find yourselves facing judgement.   The unity of the church, centred in Jesus, purified by his blood and given life by the Spirit is what should be at the centre of the Lord’s Supper.  But we tend to get hung up on other things.  We’ve often got hung up on the spiritual mechanics of it—even going so far as to exclude brothers and sisters who have different ideas about those spiritual mechanics.  Or, as we reflect on what Jesus has done at the cross to forgive our sins, we can be become so personally introspective that we all but forget that we come to the table, not just as individuals, but as a people—the body of Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, the Lord’s Supper, like the Passover of old, is about eating and drinking in memory of what Jesus has done for us and what Jesus has made us.  In light of that, it is vital that we come to the Table as one.  Not rich or poor, not slave or free, not Jew or gentile, not man or woman, not doing our personal devotions in a group setting, but as the unified people redeemed by Jesus, a people filled with God’s Spirit, a people who have been made a new temple where Jesus, the Spirit, and the good news of his death and resurrection—where his salvation—is mediated to a dying world.  A people who have learned here to have the mind of Jesus—to be humble and gracious and merciful and loving with each other so that we can then take that humility and grace and mercy and love to the world.   Let’s pray: Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.    Amen.