Living Words - Sunday Morning

Just as the Messiah Loved Us Ephesians 4:25-5:2 by William Klock   Fourth of July weekend in 1998 I had to go on a service call to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.  I did not want to brave the ferries for a one-day round trip to Friday Harbor on a holiday weekend, but this print shop was desperate, so the owner suggested I bring my wife and daughter—Alexandra wasn’t even two months old at the time—and they’d put us up for the whole weekend.  That sounded a lot better.  And, conveniently, the Episcopal church was literally next door to the place we were staying.  Sunday morning we walked over for the service.  The second lesson was from Ephesians—the part of Ephesians we’re just now getting into today with Chapter 4.  And their deacon got up to preach and said, “This morning’s lesson was written by Paul.  I don’t like Paul very much and I know that’s true for all of us.  Paul says mean, nasty, bigoted things.”  He went on to pit Paul against Jesus as he described Paul as a “Pharisaical moralising Puritan”—like Paul had never really understood Jesus’ gospel of grace and made it all about works instead—and a lot of “works” that are just plain offensive to modern sensibilities: stuff that comes up particularly in Chapter 5, like “don’t let sexual immorality be named among you” or “wives, be subject to your husbands”.   I bit my tongue after church as we filed past him.  I really wanted to say, “It’s not Paul who never grasped the gospel; it’s you!”  Because you can’t separate the gospel from ethics as if living out the implications of the gospel is an optional add-on, or something less important that we’ll work on later, or a body of “rules” from which we can arbitrarily pick and choose based on the sensibilities of current secular culture and values—which is exactly what that preacher was doing.   That was the day I realised that even a lot of Christian don’t understand the connection between ethics and the gospel.  In contrast to that deacon, lot of us want to be obedient and we are obedient, so we do what God tells us in the Bible, but we don’t really understand—maybe we’ve never even thought about—why right is right and wrong is wrong.  We just think, “Well, God said so,” and we do our best to obey.  That’s better than disobeying, but it would be better if we actually understood why.  The church has often unintentionally fostered this sort of moralism.  Back in 1560 Queen Elizabeth ordered that plaques be installed at the front of every church displaying the Ten Commandments.  Most churches also included plaques alongside with the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.  It sent a message: Do this, believe that, and pray this here.”  You could certainly do worse.  Elizabeth was trying to help a people who were largely biblically illiterate.  But then the local pastors need to do their part and show how what we believe—the gospel—makes sense of and ties together how we live and what we pray.  And that often doesn’t happen—or it doesn’t happen very well.  And people start to think that when Paul gives us a list of dos and don’ts, that this is just Paul, not Jesus, and, well, maybe his moralising isn’t totally arbitrary, but it’s probably culture-bound so we can feel free to pick and choose what seems right to us.   A big part of the problem is that we’ve sometimes got the gospel—and the big story of God and his people—wrong.  Not totally wrong.  But enough that we no longer understand why right is right and wrong is wrong and why it matters.  I’ve talked before about two sorts of gospel worldviews that we find in the church today.  On the one hand is a view embodied by a famous quote from Dwight Moody.  After surviving a shipwreck he preached, “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel.  God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”  The other is a quote by Abraham Kuyper.  It’s worth noting that both these men were contemporaries, but came from very different church backgrounds.  Kuyper wrote, “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”   Those are two very different understandings of God’s plan.  Moody, shaped by 19th Century Revivalism and Dispensationalism saw the world as corrupted, evil, a problem that God would one day destroy.  The job of the church was to preach the good news and to save as many people as we can from the coming judgement so that we can go to heaven.  At least the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, saviour and lord is still clearly here.  But Moody’s thinking about the world and his vision of the future was basically gnostic—more pagan than biblical in many ways.  In contrast, Kuyper understood that because God created the world, it is good.  It’s we who have fallen and put it in bondage to corruption and tears.  And because God loves what he has made, he won’t throw it away.  To the contrary, God is very much in the process of redeeming and renewing it.  And so in Jesus he provided a new Adam to lead a redeemed and renewed humanity, washed clean by his blood and filled with his Spirit, a new humanity to pick up where Adam failed.  Kuyper knew that if Jesus has ascended and is now enthroned in heaven, he is the world’s true lord and sovereign and he will not let one square inch of his beloved creation fall through his fingers.   Brothers and Sisters, that is the good news.  It’s about God reclaiming what he’s created and what belongs to him.  We’ve seen already that this theme of new creation and the temple run all through Ephesians.  The church is the working model of God’s new creation.  And the church is the temple in which God dwells.  And that just absolutely shouts “Genesis!” at us.  Go back to the beginning and make sure you’ve got the story right to start with.  Consider how the story begins.  God creates human beings, Adam and Eve, and he places them in his garden to live in his presence and to steward it.  The garden is God’s temple.  Humans are his stewards, his image bearers who represent his sovereign rule there.  And not just that, but his only command to them—and it’s more blessing than it is command—but he tells them to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth.  In other words, keep having children who will have children who will have children who will steward the garden and grow that garden until it fills the whole earth.  Until, to use the language of the Prophet Habakkuk, the glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters cover the sea.”   That would have been an easy task for Adam and Eve.  All they had to do was steward the garden and have children.  There was no sin, no death, no tears, no brokenness, no opposition.  Just fellowship with God, take care of the garden, make babies and the mission takes care of itself.   But no.  Humanity rebelled and broke everything.  Now the least of our difficulties in accomplishing the mission are weeds and pain in childbirth.  We’ve become sinful, rebellious, self-centred, angry, greedy, idolators.  We not only lost our knowledge of the mission, we even lost our knowledge of God.  So in he stepped, into the darkness, and called Abraham.  And through Abraham he created a people to be light in the darkness.  And he gave them a law.  Not arbitrary rules, but a way of life meant to teach the people his character and to keep them pure and holy so that he could live in their midst.  Preparing a people to become his temple.  God was taking the first steps toward creating a renewed humanity to whom he could restore Adam’s vocation and mission to fill the earth with his presence and his glory.  And that’s just what he’s done in Jesus.  We’ve seen in Ephesians: In Jesus, God has taken on our flesh, he has died and been resurrected to be the new Adam, to be the firstborn of God’s new creation.  And he calls us to himself and he purifies us with his blood and once we’re clean and fit for God’s presence, he fills us with God’s Spirit.  And he makes us the temple: the place of God’s presence, a people called to be stewards of God’s wisdom—of his good and just plan to renew his creation.   Brothers and Sisters, our vocation, our mission is Adam and Eve’s vocation and mission: to serve as the priests and stewards of God’s temple, to proclaim and to live out his wisdom, and to be fruitful and to multiply—through our own children and through the proclamation and living out of the good news—until God’s presence and the knowledge of his glory cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Until that day when creation no longer groans under the weight of corruption, because the sons and daughters of God have accomplished the task entrusted to us and finally been fully renewed—resurrected—ourselves.   Of course, the difference is that the mission should have been easy for Adam.  Ethics didn’t matter.  Just steward the temple and have children.  It’s so very, very hard for us.  We’ve filled the world with sin and corruption and they push back.  The false kings and the false gods we created will not go away easily.  And we ourselves, face the daily challenge to, as Paul put it in last week’s lesson, to put off that old way of being human and to put on the new one that we’ve learned in Jesus.   And all of this, Brothers and Sisters, is my long way of helping you to understand that ethics, that right and wrong, that how we live as Jesus’ people is bound up in that mission and in our vocation as stewards of the gospel, of God’s presence, of his new creation.  You know how architects build models so that people can see what the finished building will look like?  That’s what the church is supposed to be: God’s working model today of his coming new creation.  The world should be able to look at us and know—or least get a pretty good idea—of what God is planning for the future.  Ethics—the way of life in God’s new world—is not an add-on to the gospel.  It’s at the heart of the gospel.  And it’s why we cannot pick and choose or cobble together our own ethical codes.  Because there’s the fallen world, as Paul said in 4:17-18, cut off from the life of God, foolish-minded, ignorant, and darkened in understanding—the fallen world that cause all the pain and tears—and there’s God’s new creation, the world set to rights as God’s wisdom and justice give it shape and direction.  The two aren’t compatible.  It’s light and wisdom or it’s darkness and ignorance.  It’s God’s way which leads to life or it’s pain and tears and ultimately death.  We will never accomplish the mission God has given us if we compromise with the dark foolishness and ignorance of a fallen world that does not know him.  This is why the church cannot take its moral cues from secular, unredeemed culture.   So, now that I’m halfway through the sermon, let’s pick up with our text in Ephesians 4, at verse 25.  [Page 1161 in the pew Bibles.]  Again, Paul’s just said that if we have been renewed by the Spirit, we need to put off the old way of being human and to put on the new, displaying genuine justice and genuine holiness.  Showing the world what God’s future looks like.  Now he goes on: “Put away lies, then.  ‘Each of you, speak the truth with your neighbour,’ because we are members of one another.  ‘Be angry, but do not sin’; don’t let the sun go down on you while you’re angry, and do not leave any opportunity for the devil.  The thief shouldn’t steal anymore, but should rather get on with some honest manual labour, so as to be able to share with anyone in need.  Don’t let any unwholesome words escape your lips.  Instead, say whatever is good and will be useful in building people up, so that you will give grace to those who listen.   “And don’t disappoint God’s holy Spirit—the Spirit who sealed you for the day of redemption. All bitterness and rage, all anger and yelling, and all blasphemy—put it all away from you, with all wickedness.  Instead, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, just as God forgave you in the Messiah.”   Notice where Paul’s going here.  He’s going from old humanity to new humanity, from dark, fallen world full of sin and death to new creation full of light and life.  From lies and rage to kindness.  A lot of people, when they think about “ethics” or “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”, they immediately think of some kind of moralising killjoy—like that deacon who said that Paul was just stuck in his Pharisaical puritanism and never got his head around the concept of grace.  I want to ask, “Did you even read what Paul wrote?”  Because I just can’t figure how you get “killjoy” or “puritan” out of someone whose saying we need to leave behind anger and wrath to embrace kindness and tender-heartedness, to leave behind the darkness of sin and death and to embrace light and life—and grace—God’s new creation.   “Be angry, but don’t sin.”  Paul quotes straight from Psalm 4:4.  He knows that we’re all going to deal with anger from time to time—sometimes even righteous anger over sin and wrong and injustice.  But don’t let it smoulder—righteous or not—because letting it fester like that leaves the door open for the devil to come in and do his work.  And don’t steal.  I assume that if Paul’s warning about something specific, that specific thing must have been a problem.  Maybe some of the very poor in the church or some who were recently freed slaves were stealing to get by.  No, says Paul, that’s not what new creation looks like.  But he doesn’t just say: Stop stealing.  He tells them to get an honest job, so that they can give to the poor.  Because, you see—and this is really important, Brothers and Sisters—new creation isn’t just an absence of sin; it’s also the positive presence of goodness and virtue.   But what Paul has to say to start with is mostly about speech, about words.  He starts with telling the truth in verse 25 and then there’s the bit about being angry but not sinning.  Being angry isn’t always about words, but I bet for most of us it usually is.  That’s the old humanity that Paul’s told us we need to put off.  Instead, he’s saying in verse 29, as someone redeemed by Jesus and full of God’s holy Spirit, consider that every time you open your mouth it’s an opportunity to speak grace to someone.  Again, just as with the bit about stealing, living out new creation isn’t just the absence of sin.  Living out new creation is about positively stewarding God’s grace to others.  So, he says, we shouldn’t be squandering that chance to speak grace by wasting our breath on unwholesome words.  “Unwholesome words” is a broad category, but that’s why he puts it that way.  You fill in the black with whatever kind of unwholesome words you’re inclined to speak.  No, Paul goes on, don’t disappoint, don’t grieve the Holy Spirit who has marked you out as God’s new creation.  Don’t just leave unwholesome speech behind.  Put away—verse 31—put away all bitterness and rage, all anger and yelling, and all blasphemy.  Paul describes this crescendo of sinful speech that starts maybe with dirty jokes, casual jibes, or swearing through outbursts of rage, shouting matches, and finally blasphemy—blaspheming God or blaspheming a fellow human who bears his image—either way, that’s the worst way you can abuse God’s gift of speech.  Brothers and Sisters, if we’re going to be living out and modelling God’s new creation, we’ve got put away all behaviour—starting with speech—that hurts and destroys, that tears apart relationships, families, churches.  Put aside anything that makes the darkness around you darker, anything that’s going to bring pain and tears to others, and instead use your God-given faculties of speech to build others up.   Paul makes this point really dramatically.  Again, he works up this crescendo, from bitterness to rage to anger to yelling and finally to blasphemy.  You can feel the rage storm getting stronger.  Most of us have been there—sometimes more than we’d care to admit.  You get angry and then things get worse or someone says something that just throws gas on your rage and you explode.  But then in verse 31, the rage storm blows itself out and Paul shows us, in stark contrast, what new creation and the life of the Spirit are like.  The rage storm stops and everything is calm: Kindness, tender-heartedness, forgiveness.  I like how Tom Wright reflections on this.  “Feel the sigh of relief.  Then cherish that feeling.  Then reflect on what brings it about.  Then make a habit of it.”   But why?  It’s not just about the sigh of relief that comes with new creation.  Paul says to do these things—and here he zeroes in on forgiving others “just as God forgave you in the Messiah”   And we might not realise it, but this idea of imitating God would have been absolutely radical to these gentile Ephesians.  Not quite so much to Jews.  God had been telling them for centuries through the Old Testament: Be holy, for I am holy.  That made the Jews unique.  But few if any pagans would ever have thought that the world might be a better place if we imitated the gods.  No way.  Because the pagans were just like us, but with unlimited power to unleash those rage storm, to abuse people for their whims, to kill and to destroy.  But the God of Israel, revealed in Jesus the Messiah is different.  A God who is himself holy and, even more radical, a God who gives himself for the sake of his people.  A God who gives his life that he might set sinners to rights.  Look at 5:1-2 and we’ll close with this.  Paul writes, “So you should be imitators of God, like dear children.  Conduct yourselves in love, just as the Messiah loved us, and gave himself for us, as a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice to God.”   Again, it can’t be stressed strongly enough just how radical this idea was to First Century pagans.  Not only were their gods unworthy of imitation, the way the pagans viewed the world gave no hope.  Some saw everything as a never-ending and inescapable cycle.  Others saw the world as a shadowy and bleak existence from which death releases us into the “real” spirit world.  No one had a hope the world actually being set to rights, of a world without sin and sorrow, pain and tears, let alone a world delivered from death.  And no one would have dreamed that a god would love us so much that he would give his own life to do this.  Until the good news about Jesus began to spread.  Until the pagans began to see these little churches popping up around the world, churches full of people who not only believed in this Jesus and this God of redeeming love, but who lived out that love—who stopped the rage cycle with kindness and forgiveness; who refused to use and abuse other people; who weren’t greedy and selfish, but instead gave generously to others; whose families and households were overflowing with love.  A people who lived in hope of a world set to rights full life and light instead of death and darkness.  And the pagans took note.   Just before we moved here they tore down the Palace Theatre downtown.  I’m glad I had a chance to see it before it was just a vacant lot.  But for what, sixteen or seventeen years, there was just a vacant lot where a wonderful historic building had been.  And everyone knew that wasn’t right.  And after a few years we all started to wonder, “Will this ever be made right?”  After a while you start to lose hope.  Will it be a vacant lot with a fence around it forever?  But then a big sign when up and on that sign was an architects rendering: a fancy new building full of businesses and homes.  And you’d see it as you walked past that corner on Fifth Street and it started to feel like things might get back to the way they’re supposed to be in that spot. Maybe that’s not the best illustration.  It’s just a building.  A vacant lot isn’t that big of a deal and neither is a new building—unless of course you live or work in it.  But it does highlight what Paul wants us to understand here.  In the midst of a world filled with darkness and death, the church is meant to be the sign showing the world that God is at work to set it all to rights.  We are the sign meant to show the world what the project will look like when it’s finally done.  As we embody the gospel and God’s new creation, we ought to be an attractive advertisement that draws the world in—making them constructively curious, showing them a God they never could have fathomed, and hope they never dreamed of.  To be God’s temple.  Paul closes this part here with more temple language.  As Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was a sweet-smelling sacrifice and offering to God, so our life together imitating him should be too.  And, Brothers and Sisters, if our life together is a pleasing sacrifice to God, we can be sure that we’re on mission to bring God’s presence to the world, to carry his glory to the ends of the earth.   Let’s pray: Almighty God, you show to those who are in error the light of your truth, that they may return to the way of righteousness: Grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Put on the New Humanity Ephesians 4:11-24 by William Klock   Back in the Fall of 2007—after you’d hired me, but before we’d made the move here—I came up for a standing committee meeting in Victoria and then a visit here.  The trip from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay started out like any other trip, but about half an hour in, the winds picked up.  It got bad enough that the terminals were shut down for the rest of the evening.  But there I was.  It was one of the big Spirit-class ships.  But there I was on a ship in the middle of the storm.  What was supposed to be a two-hour trip took a little over three hours as the ship drove into the winds and the waves.  Every few minutes the ship would hit a wave and the loud “thud” and the shudder would reverberate through the ship.  But we made it.  It took longer than it should have.  And all through, even though we could feel the reverberation of the waves through the ship, it was steady as a rock on the churning strait.  Its design, its stabilisers all did what they’re supposed to do.  I was a little impatient to get to the destination, but no one was seasick and  never once did I fear we wouldn’t make it.   Brother and Sisters, in the midst of the wind and waves of the world, that’s how the church should be.  The church should be the great ship, rock steady, in the middle of the storm, not being tossed this way and that way.  The church should be the ship, dead on course, sure of its arrival even if the storms slows her down.  The church should be the ship—like Noah’s ark—a place of security, a place of peace, a place of safety in the midst of the wind and waves.  But the ship won’t be that steady rock in the storm if we don’t get the preliminaries right.  Those big ferries that sail the Strait are carefully engineered: precisely designed hulls, precisely designed stabilisers, paired with precisely designed engines.  And just so the church.   Remember last week as we began our look at Ephesians 4. I said that what Paul was doing there was a bit like designing a three-legged stool to support what comes next.  And so he stresses, first, that we—as individuals, but then collectively as the church—need to be humble, meek, and patient, bearing with each other in love.  You can build a church without those things, and it might even be rock steady in the storm, but it’s going to the sort of place—or the sort of ship—that throws people overboard when there’s a problem, or it’s going to be the sort of ship that sees someone floundering helplessly in the sea and runs them down instead of rescuing them.  It’s going to be a ship sailing to the wrong port.   And, second, the church needs to be one—to remember the unity it has in the one Spirit, the one Messiah, the one God and Father of all.  We’ve all been baptised in one baptism and strive forward toward the one hope shared by the one church.  It’s hard to be steady in the storm if we forget that.  Instead of all pulling together to accomplish our gospel mission, this person is doing this and that person is doing that and someone else is doing something else over there and the ship goes nowhere or drifts aimlessly off course.   And then, third, and closely related are the gifts.  Paul wrote in 4:7-10, loosely quoting Psalm 68:18, that when Jesus ascended to his throne, he sent the Spirit to bring gifts to his people—so that he might fill all things.  That was temple language and a reminder that God’s ultimate purpose is to fill the whole of creation with the knowledge of his glory and ultimately with his presence.  And that’s our job, our purpose, our mission.  It’s the port our ship is headed for as we proclaim and live the gospel, making God known.  But we don’t do it on our own.  Our knowledge and experience of God’s glory will only go so far, and so he’s not only filled us with his Spirit, but the Spirit the equips us for the mission.  In the Spirit, the presence of God goes with us.   And that brings us to our text today as we pick up with Ephesians 4:11. [Page 1161 in the pew Bibles.]  As Paul wrote verses 11 to 16, it’s one really long sentence.  In English we have to break it up.  It has two “movements”.  First, look at 11-13.  Paul writes, “The gifts he gave were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for their work of service, for the building up of the Messiah’s body, until all of us come to unity of faith and the knowledge of the son of God, to maturity, measured by the standard of the Messiah’s fullness.”   This is one of those lessons that it seems the church has to learn over and over and over.  We’re all different.  Paul, thinking in terms of the First Century, talks all the time about Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor, man and woman, but we bring all sorts of difference.  We come from different cultures and backgrounds, different socio-economic classes, different languages, different levels of education, different sorts of families.  We have different interests and different likes.  We have different personalities and different skills.  Sometimes we find that those who were once enemies—soldiers on different sides, criminals and their victims, people from different political parties—are now brought together by the gospel.  The Spirit binds us together.  We share one baptism in one Lord who is the son of the one Father and we all yearn towards that one hope in which the earth is full of God’s glory and creation set to rights once and for all.  And it’s not only that, but the Spirit gifts us all differently.  What those gifts are and how they work and how they’re received isn’t fully clear.  I think sometimes we’ve had a tendency to try to nail this down too much.  To say, for example, that the gifts Paul talks about are all somehow miraculous gifts that we wouldn’t have without the Spirit or we take Paul’s lists of gifts (and there are several lists and they’re all different) and we tell people that they have to have one of those specific gifts from his lists.  Brothers and Sisters, I think it’s more organic than that.  The Spirit can give someone an entirely new gift that they could never come by naturally, but many of the gifts are just who we are and what we’re gifted with naturally, but now empowered and given gospel direction by the Spirit.  And I think the full list is as diverse as the church is.  None of us is entirely quite the same as anyone else.   So there’s a vast panoply of gifts, but Paul puts his focus here on the ones that steer the ship: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.  I wonder if Paul puts his focus here because of his own experiences with rejection as an apostle.  Or maybe it was because he’d seen churches torn apart when leaders and teachers put themselves above the unity of the church.  Some people followed this teacher and other followed that teacher.  It’s still a big problem today. I’m always suspicious of men and women who develop big ministries that aren’t anchored the church and who name those ministries after themselves or ministries, again not really tied to a church and all centred around a person or personality.  We just don’t see that in the New Testament.  It’s the opposite of the model for ministry scripture gives us.  And it’s also sadly common these days for churches to split because people have decided to follow this teacher, instead of that one.  When the gospel is being compromised and the people doing it refuse correction, that may be just cause for division in the body.  But an awful lot of our divisions today are the result of leaders and teachers who have forgotten the great importance of maintaining the unity that Jesus and the Spirit have given us.   Whatever Paul’s reason for focusing on these kinds of leadership or authority or teaching gifts, it’s not exhaustive, and his point is that the Spirit gifts us—not just some “saints”, but all the saints, all of God’s people—in order to equip us for the work of service.  Some translations say “ministry”, but I think “service” is probably better in our context.  When we think of “ministry” today, a lot of people immediately think about the clergy, about pastors.  The way we talk about the clergy can be misleading.  We often use the term “minister” for someone who is ordained.  Or we say, “He’s in the ministry.”  And that can leave people with the false impression that people like me or like our bishop are the ones who do the real work.  But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  We’re all ministers and we’re all equally involved in ministry—or service.  The Greek word is diakonia.  That’s where we get the word “deacon”, meaning one who serves.  But that’s what we all do.  The church isn’t like a ferry, where you’ve got a few people who run the ship and everyone else is just along for the ride.  In his providence, God has brought us all together and each of us has a natural place to serve.  If we struggle to find it, it might just be because we’re thinking too narrowly of what “ministry” is or looks like.   And that ministry, whatever it is, Paul is stressing, is for the building up of the body.  Paul longed for the Ephesians to grow into maturity.  And that meant growing to the point where they—not just as individuals, but as the body—the point where they faithfully put on display the truth of Jesus the Messiah.  It happens through a combination of unity in faith and knowledge of the son of God, of Jesus.  And the standard for measuring that maturity is the fullness of Jesus himself.  Think of it this way.  The risen and ascended Jesus is the embodiment not just of God’s new creation, but more importantly he is the new human being, the new Adam.  He is everything Adam was supposed to be and more.  And Paul wants to see the church grow into just that kind of image: to grow into Christ-likeness.  It will never be perfect this side of eternity, but Brothers and Sisters, when the world looks at the church, it should see Jesus and it should see his new creation.   And this maturity, this growing up” is the main point of verses 14-16.  Paul goes on, “This is so that we won’t be babies any longer.  So that we won’t be toss to and fro by the waves, carried away by every gust of teaching, by human tricksters, by their cunning and deceitful scheming.  Instead, we must speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him, that is, into the Messiah, who is the head.  He supplies the growth that the whole body needs, linked as it is and held together by every joint which supports it, with each member doing its own proper work.  Then the body builds itself up in love.”   We all start as spiritual babies.  God plunges us into his Spirit and gives us new life, but that doesn’t make us mature saints—saints who have grown into the stature of the Messiah—overnight.  That said, it’s often remarkable what the Spirit does do.  Often the Spirit will convict of sins that we didn’t even know were sins.  Often the Spirit will suddenly flood us with one or more of his fruit and dramatically change us.  But on the whole, it takes diligence and effort to grow as Christian.  We don’t learn the great story, we don’t learn God’s character, or what he expects of us by osmosis; we’ve got to steep ourselves in the scriptures.  We’ve got to invest in prayer—talking to God—in response, as we hear him speak to us through those scriptures.  We have to exercise our faith as if it were a muscle and the same goes for all the fruit of the Spirit.  We have to work diligently to put off the old and put on the new, not just to leave our sins behind, but to resist going back to pick them up.  We have to work at guarding the unity of the body of Jesus.  Because the world, the flesh, and the devil are all doing their damndest to make sure we never grow up.   And this may be why Paul puts the emphasis here on gifts related to authority, leadership, and teaching.  There are heresies and false teachers out there.  People proclaiming false Jesuses and false gospels, people promoting gospels that promote selfishness or sin or health and wealth.  There are people proclaiming violence and politics as gospel.  There are people inventing their own scriptures and there false prophets.  And there are even real Christians and real churches out there that have, themselves, never grow up.  They got as far as the spiritual toddler phase, and somehow they got a platform—the modern church is sadly really good at giving it to them—and they’re proclaiming that Jesus just wants you to come play forever in the sandbox instead of doing the hard work of growing into his full stature.  We need the people with those gifts who will lead us where we need to go.  The apostles—who were unique and whom we only meet in the New Testament—it’s their authoritative writings that speak with the authority of God.  There are those uniquely gifted to shepherd the flock into green pastures and to protect them from wolves.  There are those with gifts to faithfully teach.  God even gifts some to be prophets.  We too often today think of prophets in terms of someone who tells the future, but in scriptural terms a prophet is really someone who applies God’s truth to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  A prophet comes alongside the faithful in times of trouble to comfort and to exhort.  But a prophet also confronts the church when it is in error or has gone astray and calls it back to faithfulness lest it experience God’s judgement.  These are the people who guide us as we grow, who protect us from wolves, and who confront us when we’ve gone off course—or when we’d rather just play in the sandbox.   And, of course, it’s all done in love.  Remember the first leg of the stool that supports all this: humility, meekness, patience, and love.  As we minister in the name of Jesus, we need to minister with the heart and character of Jesus.  But if we do that, we will gradually grow up into Jesus, who is the head of the body.  And Paul stresses: never forget that he is the one who ultimately grows us up.  It’s all of his grace.  He’s ultimately the one who has brought us all together and holds us all together.  If we want to grow up into his likeness, we need to keep our eyes, our focus on him.   So Paul started the chapter by urging them to live up to the calling they’ve received—in other words, to be the new humanity that Jesus has made them.  And now he gets back to that in verses 17: “So this is what I want to say; I am bearing witness to it in the Lord.  You must no longer behave like the gentiles, foolish-minded as they are.  Their understanding is darkened; they are cut off from God’s life because of their deep-seated ignorance, which springs from the fact that their hearts are hard.  They have lost all moral sensitivity, and have given themselves over to whatever takes their fancy.  They go off greedily after every kind of uncleanness.”   This should be a no-brainer.  I think that was especially so for the Ephesians.  They’d come out of the dark, hopeless world of paganism.  They knew how everyone just looked out for themselves.  They knew what a world without grace was like.  They knew that world in which things like humility and meekness and forbearing with people below your status was a sign of weakness.  They knew a world of idolatry and moral filth that, even as bad as our world sometimes seems, we can only begin to imagine.  They’d been delivered from that kind of life.  They’d been made part of God’s new creation.  And yet, over time, bits and pieces of that old world kept creeping back into the lives of these Christians.  The same thing happens to us.  We’re captivated by the gospel, we repent, we turn aside from sin and idols, we embrace Jesus.  We read our Bible and we pray and we walk with our brothers and sisters.  But slowly bits and pieces or our old life start to creep back in.  Or maybe we’ve never full repented in the first place.  So we commit ourselves to Jesus, we love God, but money is still an idol.  Maybe not as much as it once was, but we haven’t really let go of it and that starts affecting our spiritual growth and our witness.  Greed leads us to be dishonest in business or to treat coworkers or employees unjustly.  It keeps us from being generous with God and with others.  Or maybe it’s sex.  We continue to use and abuse others, whether physically or virtually through pornography, to gratify our desires.  Maybe we indulge our anger and wrath.  Maybe we let our self-control slide.  And instead of maturing into the stature of Jesus, we stagnate or we even start to revert back to being babies again.   Paul warns us: Don’t behave like that.  You know better.  The fallen world and fallen humanity are like that because their hearts are hard and their minds are full of foolishness—and, most importantly, they know nothing of real life.  But you know better.  The Spirit has softened your hearts.  God has filled you with his wisdom.  And, most important of all, he’s not only given you a taste of his new creation and made you a part of it, he’s made you a steward of it.  No, Paul says in verse 20: “That’s not how you learned the Messiah—if, indeed, you did hear about him, and were taught in him, in accordance with the truth about Jesus himself.”   Notice: Living in such a way that Paul would question whether you ever actually did know the gospel, that’s not a good place to be.  No, Paul’s saying, remember what you were taught: “That teaching stressed that you should take off your former lifestyle, your old humanity.  That way of life is decaying as a result of deceitful lusts.  Instead, you must be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and you must put on the new humanity, which is being created the way God intended it, displaying justice and genuine holiness.”   I love the way Paul puts in terms of how we “learned the Messiah”.  That’s how it works.  We were captivated by the gospel because we learned an image of Jesus: wise and loving, tender and gentle with the hurting, confronting and stern with the hypocrites and the wicked.  And we realise, that’s what true humanity looks like.  That’s what men and women set to rights by God are supposed to be like.  And so, in our baptism, we put off the old, fallen, broken, decaying way of being human—a way that leads only to tears and death—and we put on the new humanity embodied by Jesus and enlivened, made possible by God’s indwelling Spirit.  Maybe we need to bring back the old practise from the ancient church where those being baptised put off their old clothes and put on clean, fresh, white robes. It might remind us what we committed to in our baptism: to put off the old way of life that leads to death and to put on the new life of Jesus and the Spirit, the new humanity, God’s new creation.  Because, Brothers and Sisters, we need to ground ourselves in this renewal every single day.  This is what it means to be a Christian.  This is what it means to live as God’s renewed humanity.   And, Paul stresses in verse 24, such a people will display God’s justice and true holiness.  Let’s close with that image: justice and true holiness.  Such a people will display their—our hope—as we live together as a people washed clean by the blood of Jesus and renewed by the Spirit.  We live out and bring to the word justice.  Or righteousness.  The Greek word, dikaiosune, means both.  And that’s why Paul can couple our display of justice and righteousness with true holiness.  Brothers and Sisters, as God sets us to rights, he makes us a people who witness the very thing the whole of humanity and all of creation so desperately needs—the solution to the pain and the hurt and sickness and the tears, the solution to the brokenness of the world.  It’s not just moralism.  It’s justice finally brought to a world of injustice.  It’s righteousness finally brought to world of unrighteousness.  It’s a people, made holy by Jesus so that we can be a fit place for the dwelling place of God—a temple that carries his presence to the ends of the earth.  It begins in our baptism, but it does not stop there.  It continues as Jesus grows us into his full stature of justice and holiness, and as he brings us together to share our gifts in a united mission of service: to bring the good news of that justice and righteousness to the world.  To be the temple through which God will make his glory known through all the earth.   Let’s pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immesasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore.  Amen.

Walk Worthy of Your Calling Ephesians 4:1-10 by William Klock   “It’s Pauline and she sounds angry.”  It was my first week working as an Apple Computer repair tech and the receptionist was telling me I had a call.  I’d repaired Pauline’s computer that morning and now she was on the phone and angry.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew there was no way her computer had the same problem.  I picked up the phone and listened as Pauline yelled at me for a couple minutes because now her printer wasn’t working.  This was a new problem.  It didn’t make sense.  I spent the next half hour walking her through everything I could think of to get the printer working.  Nothing worked and she was getting angry again.  I knew the printer was plugged into the wall, because we’d already verified the lights were on.  “Pauline, this may sound really stupid, but the printer cable is plugged into the computer?  Right?  You plugged it back in when you got the computer home?”  She bit my head off.  “I never had to plug it in before!” she yelled at me.  “Okay, well, nothing else is working so just humour me.  Is there a cable plugged into the side of the printer?”  “Yes.”  Follow that cable to its other end and tell me where it goes.  If it’s not plugged into the printer port on the computer, the computer can’t talk to the printer.”  I heard grumbling on the other end of the phone, then a bit of swearing, and then she hung up.  She didn’t call back.  Problem solved.  And thus began my career as a computer repair tech.   There were a couple calls like that every week.  There was lady who delete an application from her iMac and needed help to reinstall it.  I told her to put the CD in the computer and then to double click it when it appeared on the desktop.  After going round in circles for over half and hour I finally figured out that she didn’t know what a CD-ROM drive was.  She was holding the CD up the screen and then putting the mouse on top of it and clicking the mouse button.  As Veronica can relate, I had stories like this all the time.  These were the ones with funny endings.  A lot of them were just exercises in hair-pulling frustration.  I had to listen as people fumed or cry when I told them their hard disk was dead and their data were lost.  I had to call to tell them how much it was going to cost to fix their computer and then figure out what to do when they couldn’t afford it.  But those direct interactions with my customers reminded me where my bread and butter came from.  They were the business.  Keeping them satisfied was the mission.   A few years later I was hired by a company in Seattle.  The week before I was supposed to start, I went down to meet the guys I’d be working with.  Their shop had a completely different vibe.  And that was because the techs were completely isolated from the customers.  They didn’t take phone calls, they didn’t offer support, they didn’t even talk to them at the service counter.  All they did was fix computers.  And that changed everything.  Talking with them, I used the word “customer” and the lead tech said, “Let me stop you right there.  We don’t call them customers.  We call them…”  And what he called them isn’t something I can repeat.  It was really bad.  The next morning I called the general manager there and told him I didn’t want the job.  I eventually did get a job with that same company in Portland.  Things were run pretty much the same way as that shop in Seattle.  Thankfully the attitude was much better, but I noticed the problem.  When you never meet or deal with the customers, it changes your perspective.  The service counter keeps handing you broken computers and your job is to fix them.  And it never stops.  And instead of seeing the broken computers as the problem, you start to see the people who broke them as the problem.  You can even start to see them as the enemy.  And it becomes all about fixing the computers.  You lose sight of the real mission, which is to satisfy the customer and to leave them happy and with a good experience.  And it’s easy to not notice, because you’re still fixing computers even though you’ve lost the real mission.  In the corporate world they have a term for that: employee misalignment.  Or when it happens to a whole department or company, it’s “mission drift”.  And it can absolutely destroy a business.   Brothers and Sisters, the same thing can and does happen in the church.  We lose sight of our mission.  We misidentify the enemy.  And we fail as stewards of the gospel and of God’s kingdom.  If a church does that long enough, if it gets entrenched in the wrong mission, if it misrepresents Jesus and the gospel and the kingdom and refuses to get back on track, Jesus warns that he will take away our lampstand.  Remember his letters to the seven churches in Revelation.  He’ll let a church dwindle and die.  Because a bad witness is worse than no witness at all.   We’re back to St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Ephesus this morning—Chapter 4.  [Page 1161 in the pew Bibles.]  And Paul gets at something very much like this idea of “mission drift”.  First, a little bit of recap: Before Passiontide we made our way through Ephesians 1-3.  In the first half of the letter Paul made his way back and forth between prayer and praise to walk us through the story of God and his creation—through the story of Israel and how Israel’s story led everything to the story of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, and how Jesus has created a new Israel, a new people of God who have been filled and given new life through the Holy Spirit God had promised to his people so long before.  In Ephesians 1:10 Paul spelled out God’s plan and promise: to sum up the whole cosmos in the Messiah, everything in heaven and on earth in him.  It’s a promise of a new temple.  Heaven and earth brought together and at the centre of it, at its heart is the image of God.  That image was supposed to be us—humanity.  God created us to be the stewards of his creation and the priests of his temple.  But we rejected that vocation and tried to become gods ourselves.  And so Jesus has come to restore that image—to represent it faithfully and perfectly himself and to wash us clean with his blood and to fill us with his Spirit in order to restore us to that lost vocation.  So Paul is clear: this promise has been fulfilled already in Jesus.  It is currently being fulfilled in the creation of a renewed humanity.  For Paul, the great witness of this new humanity is the church—where Jews and gentiles were being brought together into a single, united people, filled with God’s Spirit and living as his temple.  And the promise, finally, will be fulfilled in the end when, as he puts it, God will do far more abundantly than we can ask or imagine.   So Jesus and the church—this new people, this renewed humanity—are the evidence that God truly is at work to set his broken creation to rights.  Through this people, God will reveal his manifold, his multifaceted, his Technicolor wisdom to the world and one day, because of Jesus and the faithful stewardship of his people, the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God.  Brothers and Sisters, this is why the church’s witness is so important.  This is why mission drift is so dangerous.  This is why, if a church goes astray from the mission and repeatedly and repeatedly refuses God’s correction, he will let us wither and die.  Because the church is meant to witness his glory to the world and that can’t and won’t happen unless we are faithful stewards of his gospel and his Spirit, unless we’re truly heaven on earth people.   So Paul now begins Chapter 4 writing, “Therefore…”  All of that (Chapters 1-3) is what the “therefore” is there for.  So knowing God’s plan and his promise, knowing that he is setting creation to rights through Jesus and the faithful witness of his church, he says “Therefore, I appeal to you—yes, it’s me, the prisoner in the Lord—I appeal to you to walk worthy of the calling to which you’ve been called.  Bear with one another in love; be humble, meek, and patient in every way with one another.  Make every effort to guard the unity that the Spirit gives, with your lives bound together in peace.”   Paul’s going to make three points in verses 1-10 and this is the first.  He’s got something important coming in 11-16, but first he’s got to lay a foundation for it.  Think of it in terms of him building a sturdy three-legged stool to support it.  So, first, here in verses 1-3 he stresses the need for humility.  He starts out stressing that it’s essential for the church to live in a way that matches the gospel—the good news about Jesus.  “Walk worthy of the calling to which you’ve been called.”  Into the middle of this Paul interjects a reminder of his imprisonment.  They already knew he was in prison.  That’s why he’s writing them a letter instead of talking to them in person.  But Paul reminds them again at this point because he saw his imprisonment as an example of what it means to walk worthy of our gospel calling.  Brothers and Sisters, the ways of God’s kingdom are the inverse of the ways of the world.  To the pagans in Ephesus, for Paul to be in prison was a sign that either he was out of favour with his God or that his God was powerless to help him.  But for Paul, who had made the cross and the humility of Jesus the lens through which he looked at everything, to be in prison for the sake of the gospel was a sign of faithfulness.  In the same way, the gospel virtues that he says should characterise the life of the church—the ones he lists in verse 2: loving each other, being humble, meek, and patient—those weren’t virtues at all in the world of the Greeks and Romans.  To the pagans, they were signs of weakness.   So Paul stresses that they’ve been called.  Usually Paul uses this word, this idea of “calling” to emphasise God’s initiative in our coming to faith, but here he kind of wrapping everything to do with—call it “conversion”—he’s rolling it all into this idea of calling: We’ve heard the gospel, we’ve received and taken to heart the gospel, we’re repented, and in faith we’ve obeyed the gospel.  Now he reminds us just what it was we responded to when God called us.  This is the part I think we sometimes forget, but Paul wants us to remember that the gospel—the good news about Jesus and the message that once captivated us—is about God’s amazing kindness and generosity and grace.  And Paul’s point is that if that’s the gospel that called us, then our gospel life ought to be equally characterised by kindness, generosity, and grace.   When I hear that I think, “Oh yeah!  Duh.  How could I lose sight of that?”  But we do.  I don’t think we ever forget it; it’s more that it sort of slips into the background.  But when we let that happen—think of our Philippians 2 Epistle from Palm Sunday—when we let this slip into the background, we lose the mind of the Messiah that Paul is so insistent we should share.  We stop acting with humility and we start acting and living according to the values of the world around us.  Instead of living for others, we start using and abusing others for ourselves.  Instead of putting others before ourselves, we act out of pride and selfishness.  Instead of being gracious, we can become jerks.  To people out there.  But to our brothers and sisters in the church, too.  And when we do that, we stop working and living as the body of Jesus, our unity starts to break down, and our light grows dim.  We undermine our witness to God’s new creation.  So Paul reminds us: bear with each other in love, with humility, meekness, and patience—because this is the way of the cross!   The Greek word Paul uses for “patience,” it literally means “great-heartedness”.  Brothers and Sisters, consider the great-heartedness of Jesus who died for his enemies.  We ought to have that kind of great-heartedness for each other.  It doesn’t happen naturally, but this is why God has plunged us into his Spirit—or maybe I should say, he’s plunged his Spirit into us: to fill our hearts with love for him and for each other.  We come to the church from different backgrounds, we all have our likes and our dislikes and our preferences, we have our different personalities, we all have our hurts and traumas, and it’s really easy to get bent out of shape or bend others out of shape when things don’t go right.  It’s really easy to want to force our desires on others.  It’s really easy to use others to accomplish our own goals.  It’s really easy to become divided.  Paul knew that as well as anyone and so he tells us, “No!  That’s not your calling.  Your calling is be a loving, generous, and gracious gospel people who share the mind of the Messiah and overflow with the love and life of God’s Spirit.   And, like I said, things like humility, meekness, and patience were not virtues in their world.  This is why Israel stood out from the peoples around them.  The scriptures taught them over and over the importance of humility and love, meekness and patience.  The pagans didn’t think that way and even Israel struggled and often failed to be this kind of people.  And this is why it’s so important for the church—for us—to remember our calling: because our renewal through Jesus and the Spirit to this kind of life is the fulfilment of the scriptures—of God’s promises.  Our gospel life is a witness to God’s glory and one that confronts this broken world with what true humanity is supposed to be.  This is how the church announces the coming of God’s new creation.  This is what it means to be the people who pray “on earth as in heaven” and not just the people who hope for it and pray for it, but most importantly the people who do it.   Instead, we’re too often like James and John (remember that scene in Mark’s Gospel) conniving a way to sit at the right hand of Jesus.  And Jesus reminds us: That’s how the pagans do things.  They push and shove and boss and bully their way through life, always trying to get to the top, but the son of man came to give his life as a ransom for many.  Brothers and Sisters, keep the generous humility of Jesus always in your sight.  That’s the kind of people, the kind of community the church should be.  In fact, Paul writes in verse 3: the Spirit has given us unity and made us one and we need to guard that unity with our lives.  That means, first, that each of us ought to live for the sake of our brothers and sisters and not for ourselves.  If we would do that, we’d have no reason to be offended by each other and to divide.  But, too, to live for the sake of each other is to be willing and quick to forgive instead of taking offense when things do happen.  And, again, this runs totally against the grain of our culture.  Our culture says to look out for ourselves; it says to get even; or it says, at least, to cut those problem people from our lives.  The church is meant to witness a better way of being human—one that shows the world (again) the love, generosity, and patience of the cross.   So that’s the first leg of our stool.  Now look at verses 4-6: “There is one body and one Spirit; you were, after all, called to one hope which goes with your call.  There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.”   I can’t help but think that Paul has the shema in mind.  Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  That was sort of Israel’s fundamental creed.  It’s why God could not be represented by idols and it’s why there was only to be one temple in Israel.  And now Paul extrapolates that out in light of Jesus and the new covenant.  One body, one Spirit, one hope; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; and above all, there’s one God.  We’re so distant from the polytheistic world of Paul and the Ephesians that we might not realise what Paul’s doing here, but this is him again highlighting how the church confronts the world with the reality of God and his new creation.  Hear, O Church, the Lord our God, the Lord is one…and that oneness works its way through who we are and what we do.  And it not only makes the church stand out in a world chock full of gods as in Paul’s day, but it also makes the church stand out in a world that is divided by philosophies and religions and all the “isms” we can think of.  And that includes all the “isms” that divide the church: Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, Pentecostalism and on and on.  You and I won’t fix all those divisions, but we ought to do all we can in our life as the church to live out the reality that we share one faith in the one Lord, that we’ve all been baptised into the one triune God, filled with the one Spirit, and live with the one hope of a world set to rights, and that we are one body despite what the signs outside our churches might imply.   When it becomes more about our “brand” than it does about our one God, our one Lord, our one faith, our one baptism, and our one hope; when we start thinking of Brothers and Sisters in the Lord as enemies—we’ve lost the plot.  Ecclesiastical employee misalignment.  Ecclesiastical mission drift.  We need to recentre ourselves on Jesus.  We probably really need to remember his humility, because we’ve probably become more than little ecclesiastically or theologically snobbish.  And we need to remember that God intends to make his glory known to the world through his church regardless of our “isms” and those things won’t matter when the mission is accomplished and he is above all, through all, and in all—that glorious image of a temple filled with his presence.   And then then the third leg.  Look at verses 7-10: “But grace was given to each one of us, according to the measure the Messiah used when he was distributing gifts.  That’s why it says [and here Paul quotes Psalm 68:18], ‘When he went up on high, he led bondage itself into bondage, and he gave gifts to men.’  When it says that ‘he went up,’ what this means is that he also came down into the lower places, that is, to earth.  The one who came down is the one who also ‘went up’, yes, above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.”   What Paul’s working towards is an explanation of God’s gifts to the church—all of us having a vast diversity of gifts to be used together for the common good.  We’ll get to that next Sunday.  But before he can get to the diversity of gifts, Paul wants to stress the fact that the gift of the gifts themselves is yet another thing that stresses our unity.  Because those gifts, if we run with them on our own can turn into a source of division.  So Paul quotes from Psalm 68, which is about God’s enthronement on Mt. Zion, but it’s also got echoes of Moses going up Mt. Sinai.  The gist of it is God enthroned on high and lavishing gifts on this people—whether that’s his abundance on the nation Israel or sending down Moses with his law carved on stone tablets.  Paul knew this Psalm well, but after he met the risen Jesus, it took on another layer: It’s now the Messiah who ascended to his throne and in doing that he has led bondage itself into bondage.  The long captivity of humanity to sin and death is over.  Jesus has triumphed and been exalted.  It follows Paul’s prayer in Chapter 1 where he praises God for putting all things in subjection under his feet.  So Jesus’ enthronement after defeating our enemies has inaugurated a new age.  And that prompts Paul to tweak the words of the Psalm.  Instead of humans bringing gifts to God as they did under the old covenant, God now pours out his gifts of grace and redeemed humans receive them.  Through that grace and through those gifts, God is setting his people to rights so that they—so that we, his people, his church—can begin to live his new creation here and now.  So, first, the gospel not only restores us to our God-given vocation, it also gives each of us a new sub-vocation to help the church fulfil that task.   Second, Paul, I think, stresses that this is part of the gift of God’s Spirit.  Jesus has ascended and in doing so the Spirit has “come down”.  This is again about God’s new temple.  Jesus washes us clean and makes a fit dwelling place for God, and God then sends down his Spirit to indwell us—as Paul put it in 3:19 when he talked about the church being filled with all God’s fullness.  And in this Paul reminds us of the mission: Again, God’s purpose is to set creation to rights by filling it with the knowledge of his glory as the waters cover the sea.  The church is his means of doing that.  We’re not only the people entrusted with the good new of Jesus, crucified and risen; we’re not only a people entrusted to proclaim the goodness and faithfulness, the lovingkindess and generosity of God; we’re also a people filled with his presence and made stewards of his new creation, enabled to live it out—even if imperfectly—in the midst of the old.  A people called both to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and that he has died and risen to deliver us from sin and death, but also a people called, gifted, equipped, indwelt by God himself, in order to make known his love, generosity, and patience and to display as a community the very renewal, the very filling of all things that is our hope and towards which his plan and his promise are moving.   And this—I’ll just say in closing—this is why the Bible’s image of the temple is so important.  It not only reminds us who we are; it reminds us of the mission.  The temple is the place of God’s presence.  It’s the place where people go to find, to meet, to know, to experience the God of creation.  And too often we think of it as something out there, but Brothers and Sisters, the temple is us.  Washed clean by the blood of Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit, we are the temple.  And that means that the world ought to see the God of the incarnation, the God of the cross, the God who humbles and gives himself for the sake of his enemies, the world ought to meet that God in us.  We can become consumed by so many other good things, so many other things that, yes, as the church we should be doing.  But we lose sight of the real mission, of our real calling to be God’s temple, to make his glory known to the ends of the earth.  Brothers and Sisters, the world ought to be drawn to God, to this temple, as it sees in us a better way to be human, as it sees the beginning of God’s new creation in our life together: humanity’s divisions and strifes healed here.  Humanity’s tears wiped away, here.  As it finds hope here.  The grace and love, the meekness and the patience of Jesus the Messiah on display here.  As it sees the glory of God in the work of redemption taking place in us.   Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justifiction: Grant that we may put away the leaven of the old age, and put on the life of the new that we might make your glory known in all the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Easter Day Colossians 3:1-4 & St. John 20:1-10 by William Klock   On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in the early morning darkness…   John is a brilliant story-teller and he’s a brilliant story-teller because he knew the story so well.  Not just the story he tells of his time with Jesus, but the whole story, the big story of God and Israel—a story that leads straight to Jesus.  But, even more, John knew that the story of God and Israel was even bigger.  It was part of a story that involves the whole human race and all of creation.  And so there are echoes here in his Gospel—deliberate echoes—that recall that big story, of Israel and Israel’s God, of his beloved creation that our fallen race has corrupted, and the story of his love, his mercy, and his grace that are at work to set it to rights.   So Mary went to the tomb early Sunday morning, while it was still dark.  Jesus had been crucified on Friday.  He was dead.  End of story.  Jerusalem was ready to carry on with life as usual.  If they’d had water coolers in the First Century, the events of that Passover might have been the topic of discussion that first day back to work.  Some weird things had happened: the veil in the temple torn, the dead rising from their tombs and appearing in the city.  But it was over.  Or so everyone thought.  But while Jerusalem slept, Mary went to the tomb.  John writes specifically that it was the first day of the week.  He didn’t need to tell us that.  Jesus’ body wasn’t placed in the tomb until late on Friday.  Saturday, well, that was the sabbath.  No one would go to the tomb on the sabbath.  So we know already that it was the first day of the week, Sunday.  But John tells us anyway and he tells us in such a way to remind us of the opening words of his Gospel: “In the beginning…”  You know those words.  “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”   But when John wrote those words, he chose them very carefully, because in introducing Jesus, he wanted to remind us of another beginning.  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.  He tells us that Mary came to the tomb while it was still dark.  Again, remember the first words of Genesis, the very beginning of the story: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”  As John opened his Gospel with words suggesting that the story of Jesus is going to be a story of new creation, so even as he tells us about Jesus’ resurrection, he again frames it in terms of new creation, filling his story with echoes of Genesis.  John writes that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.  On the sixth day, Pilate presented Jesus to the people and announced, “Behold the man!”  Hanging on the cross, Jesus used his last gasp of breath to declare, “It is finished.”  Again, an echo of Genesis.  Any normal person who counted himself a friend of Jesus would have considered that first Good Friday a very, very bad day, but that echo from Genesis reverberates through John’s account.  When God had finished the work of creation he declared that it was all very good.  Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb for the sabbath—another echo of Genesis.  Death is not the end, but the beginning of new creation.  As Mary went to the tomb that first Easter morning, the first day of the week, the word of God was poised to burst forth in an act of new creation.   At the time no one understood any of this.  Mary went to the tomb expecting that, like every other person in history who has died, Jesus would still be there, stone cold and lifeless.  She went to mourn and to meet her friends to finish the work of anointing Jesus’ body.  And to her surprise, she found the tomb was open, the great stone door rolled away.  It was dark, so there was no point poking inside for a look.  But that didn’t matter.  The open tomb meant only one thing: Jesus’ body was gone.  John doesn’t reveal Mary’s thoughts, but resurrection would have been the last thing on her mind.  No, the open tomb meant someone had taken the body, maybe grave robbers, maybe Roman soldiers playing a joke on some silly Jews, adding insult to injury.  So she ran.  She ran to Peter’s hiding place in the city and beat on the door.  Peter went running with John to the tomb.  John’s the one who describes himself as the one whom Jesus loved—his best friend.   John tells us that he outran Peter and got to the tomb first.  The sun was rising and as he peered into the tomb he saw the linen strips that had wrapped Jesus’ body.  That was an odd thing.  Mary, John, and Peter could think of a few reasons why someone might have taken Jesus’ body, but that anyone would first unwrap him was inexplicable.  Peter arrived and headed straight into the tomb.  If Jesus’ tomb was like others that have been found, his body was likely placed on a shelf to one side of the small, low entrance.  If his head had been oriented towards the door, it would have been difficult to see without at least putting head and shoulders into the tomb as Peter did.  And what a curious thing Peter found.  Not only was the body gone with the wrappings left behind, but the wrappings appeared to be undisturbed, as if Jesus had simply passed right through them.  And the cloth that had been on his head, probably a piece of linen tied around the head to keep the jaw closed, it had been moved and neatly placed nearby.   For comparison, it hadn’t been that long before that Jesus had raised Lazarus from death.  The disciples had watched as Lazarus stumbled awkwardly out of his tomb.  He was still tightly wrapped in linen, probably not unlike a Hollywood mummy.  His friends scrambled to tear the linen cloths away, making a mess in the process.  Lazarus was all sticky and oily from the various liquids used to anoint his dead body.  In contrast, everything about Jesus’ tomb spoke of calm and order, even the face covering was neatly set aside.   John tells us that at this point he squeezed into the tomb beside Peter.  He saw and believed, he writes.  But believed what?  John goes on to tell us in the next verse that “as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”  They did not yet understand, but he believed.  Some argue that John merely believed Mary’s report of the missing body, but this seems like a pretty trite detail in amongst everything else John has told us here.  Peter and Mary believed Jesus’ body was really gone, too.  What would seem to make the best sense of this passage is to understand that John is saying that this was the moment when he realised that Jesus had been raised from death.  He said nothing to Peter or to Mary.  He and Peter returned home.  Mary remained at the tomb weeping.  They, the others, didn’t know what to make of the missing body, because they did not yet understand the implication of either Jesus’ claims or of the scriptures.  But John was beginning to put two and two together—and he believed.   You can’t really blame John for not saying anything.  He, himself, must have been struggling to understand and to make sense of it all.  But there it was.  The tomb was empty.  I expect John ran through the handful of reasons that the body might be gone and realised that none of them really made that much sense.  The Romans had no reason to take it.  Neither did the Jewish authorities—especially after they’d released Jesus’ body to his friends for burial.  Grave robbers?  What would they want with a poor man’s grave?  And the empty, but undisturbed linens?  Who in their right mind would unwrap the body?  Suddenly all the things Jesus had said, things like his statement that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days, it started to come together and to make sense.  John’s brain started reaching back into the scriptures that he thought he knew so well, and new connections started to form.  He started hearing those old words afresh in light of Jesus—and especially the empty tomb.  And he began to understand.   I think that, again, the contrast with Lazarus must have stood out.  John had seen a sort of resurrection before, but Lazarus was resurrected to a life still subject to death and decay and emerged from the tomb still wrapped in his graveclothes.  Something different had happened to Jesus.  The undisturbed graveclothes spoke of something greater.  Resurrection—something God’s people longed for—had happened, but not as anyone expected.  Resurrection was supposed to happen to everyone all at once at the end of the age, but—what if, John started to think—Jesus was raised first—raised to inaugurate and to lead the way into the age to come.  And that meant that Jesus really was the Messiah and that somehow this meant that God really was going to set everything to rights.  New creation had begun that morning, but it would take some time—and a meeting with the risen Jesus—before John would be able to sort out for himself what it all meant.   But if new creation was born that morning, it also had to have implications not only for Jesus, but for his people too.  John doesn’t elaborate at this point.  The wheels in his head, after all, were just starting to turn.  But that’s where St. Paul and our Epistle pick up, written decades later after he and so many other had had the time to think it through and work it out—rethinking everything they’d ever known in light of the risen Jesus.  Let me read those four verses from Colossians again.  Colossians 3:1-4. [Page 1169]   So if you were raised to life with the Messiah, seek the things that are above, where the Messiah is seated at God’s right hand.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on the things that are on earth.  Don’t you see: You have died, and your life has been hidden with the Messiah, in God!  When the Messiah is revealed (who is your life, remember), then you too will be revealed with him in glory.   What are the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for his people?  St. Paul wrote Colossians, at least in part, to address what seems to have been a common problem in the New Testament churches: legalism.  Jewish Christians struggled with the place of the law in the new covenant and many gentile believers were told that they needed first to embrace a form of Judaism before they could really be followers of Jesus.  In Colossians 2:20-23 Paul asks such people why they continue to live as if they were still enslaved by that old way of life.  Sure, the law has “an appearance of wisdom” in helping a person to attain an outward appearance of piety and holiness, but that’s just it: it’s an outward appearance, an outward conformity to holiness.  It’s not that this is necessarily a bad thing in itself, but that true holiness is something that wells up out of the heart—or, at least, it should.  It’s not hard to hear Paul’s frustration in these words.  Jewish converts should know better.  This had been Israel’s struggle since the beginning and Jesus, in his death and resurrection, had finally fixed it.  Jesus gives his people new life by giving us new hearts.  His perfect sacrifice purifies us so fully—also in a way the old covenant sacrifices could never do—that God himself, in the person of his Spirit, actually come to live in us.  And his Spirit then turns our hearts away from sin and self and rebellion and back to God.  But it’s easy to talk about the new life Jesus and the Spirit give.  It’s often a struggle to actually live it.  New life is the starting point when it comes to defeating sin, but all too often we forget and start thinking that new life is the result of first having tackled sin ourselves.  Paul knew all too well that’s not how the gospel works.   Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has led us in an exodus from sin and death.  In his resurrection he has given us new life.  We are no longer slaves.  This is the basic truth of the Christian life and if we don’t get this right, we’ll get everything else wrong.  As the Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt through the sea and freed them from their bondage to Pharaoh, Jesus sets us free from sin’s bondage when we pass through the waters of baptism in faith.  It’s a truth.  A fact.  A done deal.  We have been redeemed.  Even if we don’t feel it, Jesus and the Spirit have transformed us: we were slaves to sin and death and now we are free; we were in bondage to the powers of this wicked old age and are now citizens of the kingdom of God.  This is what we mean when we speak of “regeneration”.  This is what Paul gets at in our Epistle.  He writes in 2:20 that we have died with the Messiah and now he writes in 3:1 that we have also been raised with the Messiah.  Again, we may not feel it, but if we have truly taken hold of Jesus in faith, he has carried us through death and out the other side into a new kind of life.  What he did for the Israelites when he delivered them from their Egyptian slavery through the waters of the Red Sea he has just as surely done for us in delivering us from sin and death through the waters of baptism.  It’s a done deal.  It’s a sure thing.   And yet, there’s more to come.  What we have today in the Spirit is the down payment of the life that awaits us the other side of resurrection.  What Paul is saying here is one of those “already-but-no-yet” truths.  Jesus has been raised to the sort of real life and true humanity that we lost through our sin.  We look forward in faith and hope to the day when we will be raised as he was, but in the meantime we have God’s own Spirit living in us as an earnest, as a down payment, as a promise on that day.  We await the resurrection, but even today the Spirit makes that future resurrection a reality for us.  Maybe this is what makes life in Jesus a struggle.  If we could appear in locked rooms and never know sickness or decay again—as is true of Jesus—it would be easier to remember who and what we are.  Instead, we are called today to live by faith, not by sight.  One day the promise will be fulfilled.  One day the things of the present age will be gone for good and God’s new age, his new creation will come in all its fulness, heaven will descend to earth and human beings will live with God.  But until then we have God’s promise and we have his Spirit and we have the empty tomb to remind us that our hope is sure and certain.   And so we begin with first principles: If we have died with the Messiah, we have been raised with the Messiah.  We need to get this truth into our heads and when we do, we’ll remember that our life and everything about it that matters, is in the heavenlies where Jesus sits at the right hand of God.  Our true lives are hidden there with Jesus, Paul says.  It’s a kind of mystery, this “already-but-not-yet” life we have in the Messiah.  But even though it’s stored away in the heavenlies along with the rest of the age to come and God’s new world, Paul wants us to understand that it’s still very much who and what we are right now.  The new age dawned that first Easter morning when Jesus rose triumphant over death and if we are in him by faith, we really are part of that new age.  It may be hidden from the world around us, but it’s not hidden from us, because Jesus and the Spirit have made it our reality.  We live today in faith-filled hope and in hope-filled anticipation of the day when Jesus returns to rejoin heaven and earth, God and humanity, and to bring the new age in all its fullness.  And as difficult as it may be some days to live this reality, Paul urges us to do so in faith-filled hope, knowing that Jesus, who is our life, will return to finish what he has started.  On that day we will know glory in all its fullness.  Our hope is not merely that Jesus will return, but also that when he returns he will reveal who we really are in him.  Resurrection will vindicate and reveal the faithfulness of God’s people, just as Jesus was vindicated and glorified in his resurrection.  As we struggle against sin and as we labour for God’s kingdom we may feel inadequate or insignificant, but the resurrection of Jesus ought to be a source of encouragement to live the truth of who we are in Jesus even as some aspects of it are still hidden with him.   Now, back to our Gospel: St. John reminds us of those words “In the beginning…”  The story has begun.  Now we wait for the end.  But we await the ending in hopeful anticipation, because what our God has begun, what our God has so invested with his love and with the sacrifice of his own Son, our God will surely finish.  Brothers and Sisters, glory awaits.  Let us take our eyes off the things of this age, and set them instead on glories of Jesus’ kingdom.  Let us live out God’s new creation in the midst of the old.  Let us live not only to the glory of God, but to make his glory known through all the earth.   Let’s pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.  

A Sermon for Palm Sunday Philippians 2:1-11, St. Matthew 21:1-17, and St. Matthew 27:1-54 by William Klock   One of the buildings that intrigued me the most when I studied architectural history is the Pantheon in Rome.  It’s absolutely massive.  If you’re not familiar with it: it’s a magnificent round building covered by the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.  It’s so impressive, that until I studied the Pantheon in architectural history, I’d always assumed it had been built during the Renaissance.  But no.  It was built by the Romans in the early Second Century, a testament to their engineering capabilities.  That’s what the Pantheon is known for.   What doesn’t get nearly as much attention is the function of that massive building.  It was a temple for all the gods of Rome, hence the name “Pantheon”, meaning “all the gods”.  It was a temple, full of altars and statues of the gods to which they were dedicated.  And, in this, it came to represent the imperial power of Caesar and his empire, backed and supported by the power and authority gods.  When I read Paul writing about the “principalities and powers” of the present wicked age, I can’t help but think of the Pantheon.   But in the Year of Our Lord Six-hundred-and-nine, the Christian Emperor Phocas and Boniface IV, the Bishop of Rome, ordered the by then disused Pantheon stripped of its pagan idols and pagan altars.  Twenty-eight cartloads containing the bones Christian martyrs were exhumed from the catacombs and reburied there.  A Christian altar was erected.  And the building was dedicated as a church in honour of those martyrs whom the pagan Romans had murdered in the names of their gods.  To this day, over fourteen-hundred years later, the Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs remains there, a faithful witness to the conquest of Rome by the gospel and of the lordship of Jesus the Messiah.  A testimony to the power of the cross and the blood of Jesus, not only to purify us from our sins and to make us a dwelling place fit for God’s Spirit, but to wash creation itself clean from our sins as well.  There is nothing in creation—whether sinful humans or the most pagan of pagan temples—that Jesus cannot purify and redeem and set right for the glory of the living God.  But the Pantheon is also a testimony of how, of the power of gospel virtue—humility, love, grace, mercy—over the raw power and violence of empire and human endeavour.   Think back to the beginning of Lent.  We listened as St. Matthew told us the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  The devil took him off to a very high mountain and showed him all the magnificent kingdoms of the world.  Off on the horizon was Rome.  “I’ll give the whole lot to you,” the devil said, “if you will fall down and worship me.”   To rule creation was, after all what Jesus had come for.  He was creation’s true Lord.  Caesar and all the other kings were pretenders, shams, parodies of who and what Jesus really is.  All of it, from Jerusalem to Rome and beyond belongs to him.  “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” to quote Abraham Kuyper.  But this was not the way.  Jesus will not reclaim his creation without also setting it to rights, without dealing with the problems of sin and death.  Without purifying it from idolatry.  without dealing with the very problems that gave us kings in the first place.  To do that requires more than raw power.   And so today we hear Matthew again as he tells us of Jesus’ triumphal procession into Jerusalem.  When they came near to Jerusalem, and arrived at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of the disciples on ahead.  Go into the village over there and at once you’ll find a donkey tied and a foal beside it.  Untie them and bring them to me and if anyone says anything to you, say, “The Lord needs them and he’ll send them back right away.”  He sent them off at once.   Jesus was about to act out another one of his prophecies.  This time it was to show and to remind the people what sort of king the Messiah was to be.  They did want a king who would set all to rights, but in their heads, to their way of thinking, that meant leading a revolt against the Romans.  He would be like David, who defeated the Jebusites to take their city Jerusalem as his capital.  He would be like Judas Maccabeus, who defeated the Greeks and established an independent Jewish kingdom under the high priest.  The Messiah would be like that, only better, greater, more powerful, and his kingdom would last forever.  He would raise up Israel and put the gentile kings under their feet.  The day before or maybe even that same day, as Jesus came to Jerusalem from Bethphage, Caesar’s governor, Pontius Pilate, was marching into the city from the opposite direction, from his base in Caesarea, at the front of a column of Roman soldiers.  They were there to represent Caesar’s might and to keep the peace with threat of violence during Passover.  If Jesus was the Messiah, now was his time—or so a lot of people thought—now was Jesus’ time to finally and really be the Messiah, raise up his army, and cast down Pilate and the Romans and take his throne.   But violence wasn’t the way to the throne any more than bowing down to the devil was.  Matthew says that Jesus did it his way to remind the people of what the Lord had said about the Messiah through the Prophet Zechariah: Tell this to Zion’s daughter: Look now! Here comes your King.  He’s humble, mounted on a donkey, yes, on a foal, it’s young.   The king they expected was going to ride into Jerusalem in a chariot or at least on a great warhorse.  But God’s king is different.  A great warrior might take care of the Romans and even take his throne.  He could set things to rights in the way of earthly kings like Caesar, but the world would still be subject to sin and death.  So Jesus acted out the prophecy.  The disciples brought the donkey and Jesus humbly rode it into the city.  And the people cheered all along the way.  They spread their cloaks on the road.  Others cut branches form the trees and scattered them on the road.  The crowds who went ahead of him, and those who were following behind shouted, “Hosanna to the son of David!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!”  And the whole city was gripped with excitement when they came into Jerusalem.  “Who is this!” they were saying.  And the crowds replied, “This is the prophet, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.   The humble king, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah.  But Jesus wasn’t done with his acted-out prophecy.  Matthew says that on entering Jerusalem, Jesus went straight to the temple and when he got there he threw out the people who were buying and selling in the temple.  He upturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers.  It is written, he said to them, “My house will be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a brigand’s lair!”  The blind and lame came to him in the temple and he healed them.  But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the remarkable things he was doing, and the children shouting, “Hosanna to the son of David!” they were very angry.   The king was fulfilling the words of the prophets.  He came in humility.  And he came announcing that he really was going to set the world to rights.  He was going to set the world to rights in a way that would make the temple obsolete.  Jesus himself would bridge the gulf between God and sinful humans.  Jesus would offer himself as the once-for-all and perfect sacrifice for sin, a sacrifice that would finally purify his people so that in the Spirit, the living God could dwell within them and make them his temple.  So that he could finally give them new hearts full of love for him and love for each other.  They didn’t want to hear that.  It was his preaching about the temple that got him arrested.   Our long Palm Sunday Gospel today—Matthew 27—vividly depicts the Messiah’s humble way to his throne.  Betrayed by his friends, rejected by his people.  Standing humbly before the Roman governor so many people expected him to slay.  Facing trumped up charges made by lying men.  Left condemned to death as the people chose instead that Pilate should free a brutal, violent revolutionary—a man truly guilty of the trumped up charges against Jesus.  Standing humbly as the very people he came to save cried out to Pilate, “Crucify him!”  Standing humbly as he, the king, was rejected by his own people who cried out the unthinkable, “We have no king but Caesar!”  Standing humbly as Roman soldiers mocked him, beat him senseless and scourged him, ripping the skin from his body.  Humbly dragging the very cross on which he would be crucified through the city.  The king, nailed to a cross and hoisted to die between two violent thieves as his own people shouted blasphemies at him, as the chief priests and scribes mocked him shouting, “He rescued others, but he cannot rescue himself.  If he’s the king of Israel, let him come down from the cross!  He trusts in God; let God deliver him now if he’s really God’s son!”   For hours Jesus suffered: pulling on those nails driven through his wrists, pushing on the nails driven through his feet, lifting himself to gasp for breath through the pain, while the people gathered around: Jews, Romans, even the spiritual shepherds of his people who claimed to speak for God mocked him and shouted blasphemies.  And despite all that, Luke writes that Jesus prayed for them: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.  And eventually his body could take no more and Jesus breathed his last breath.  Matthew says, the earth shook.  The great veil that guarded the holy of holies in the temple was torn in two.  And the Roman centurions standing guard, scared out of their wits, announced the very thing Jesus’ own people would not: He really was the son of God!   Brothers and Sisters, there can be no Easter without Good Friday.  To set the world to rights—to really set it to rights—not just to take a throne, not just to defeat the Romans—but to defeat sin and death and to reconcile sinful men and women to God required a king willing to let evil rise up to its full height, to let evil concentrate itself all in one place, and to let it do its worst, crashing down on him all at once.  It required a king willing to throw himself into the gears of this fallen, broken, and sinful world to bring them to a stop.  It required a king willing to give his life for his own people even as they mocked and blasphemed him, so that he could rise from that humiliating death to overturn the verdict against him, rise victorious over sin and death and the absolute worst that they could do.  Only that humble king could defeat death and bring life—real and true life—back to God’s creation and gather a people forgiven, cleansed by his blood, and filled with his Spirit to become a new temple, a new holy of holies where the nations would—where the nations now—enter the presence of God.   It was in that humble king that those Roman centurions saw something they had never seen before.  Their Caesar called himself the son of God, but in Jesus they saw the God of Israel at work in all his glory, in all his love, in all his mercy, in all his faithfulness—like no god they’d ever known—completely unlike any god or goddess honoured in the Pantheon.  Whether they knew it or not, those centurions that first Good Friday announced the defeat of Jupiter and Mars, of Hera and Diana, of Neptune and Vesta and all the others.  And they announced the defeat of Caesar, too.  In less than three centuries, the Emperor of Rome himself would be captivated by the good news about Jesus, the son of God, the great King who was setting the world to rights.   But Brothers and Sisters, the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, didn’t go out through the empire and to the nations all on its own.  It was carried, it was stewarded by a people—by a church—that, itself, took on the humility of the Saviour.  The bones of those martyrs buried in the Pantheon are a testimony to the faithful, humble, sacrificial witness of Jesus’ people in those early centuries.  They didn’t just proclaim a message.  They lived it out as a community—as the vanguard of God’s new creation born that first Easter morning.  A people welling over with the humility of Jesus and the love of the Spirit.  In the midst of a world of darkness, of false gods and idolatry, of brutality and immorality hard for us to imagine today, they gave the pagans a glimpse of God’s future.  By the way they lived, they lifted the veil and showed the world God’s new creation.  It was not only the proclamation of the church, but the very life of the church that showed the world a better way, a way no one before had ever known.   Here's the truth of it: The people of the humble king must be humble too or it’s all for nought.  This is why Paul, writing to the Philippians, says to them, If our shared life in the king brings any comfort; if love still has the power to make you cheerful; if we really do have a partnership in the Spirit; if your hearts are at all moved with affection and sympathy—then make my joy complete!  Bring your thinking into line with one another.  In other words, if you’re going to be a gospel community for all the world to see: Have this mind amongst yourselves!  Here’s how to do it.  Hold on to the same love; bring your innermost lives into harmony; fix your minds on the same object.  Never act out of selfish ambition or vanity; instead, regard everyone else as your superior.  Look after each other’s best interests, not your own.   And I can hear them asking Pau, “But how?  It seems impossible to be that kind of people.”  And Paul knew that, too.  And so he takes them back to the cross.  Brothers and Sisters, everything goes back to Jesus and the cross!  The cross is the only way a gospel people can be a gospel people.  He writes: This is how you should think amongst yourselves, with the mind that you have because you belong to Jesus the Messiah.  And what does that look like?  Paul quotes what looks like song lyrics—maybe a hymn they sang regularly in their churches—a hymn full of gospel truth that maybe they’d got just a little too used to over the years, truth they needed to be reminded of, to think through, to incorporate into their own lives.  Paul writes:   Who, though in God’s form, did not regard his equality with God as something he ought to exploit.  Instead, he emptied himself, and received the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.  And then, having human appearance, he humbled himself, and became obedient even to death, yes, even death on a cross.  And so God has greatly exalted him, and to him in his favour has given the name which is over all names.  That now at the name of Jesus every knee within heaven shall bow—on earth, too, and under the earth.  And every tongue shall confess that Messiah Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.   Paul reminds them of the humble king, the son of God who not only took on our flesh, but who gave his life in the most painful and humiliating way possible so that on his way to his throne he might take us with him.   Brothers and Sisters, the only way we will ever be faithful in being the people Jesus has called us to be, the only way we will ever be faithful in being the new creation people the Spirit has made us, the only way will ever be faithful stewards of the gospel is to keep the cross of Jesus always before us.  There’s a reason why we confess our sins before we come to the Lord’s Table.  There is a reason that we repeatedly recall our unworthiness to enter the presence of God on our own merit.  There is a reason why, as we rise in the morning and as we go to bed at night, we confess our sins.  It’s so that as we hear the absolution and as we come to the Table, we will remember just how gracious and merciful and loving God has been to us.  It’s why we sing songs like “Amazing Grace”.  Amazing grace is such a sweet, sweet sounds, because apart from grace we are such sinful wretches.  And it is inevitable that when we forget this, when we start to think of ourselves as deserving of the gifts God has poured out on us, when we forget the sinfulness of our sin, when we forget that we are the ones who have broken his beloved creation, dear Friends, that’s when we forget the true power of the gospel and the true mercy of the cross and the great depth of the love of God for sinners.  When we forget the sinfulness of our sin, we lose sight of the amazingness of God’s grace.  Eventually we lose the mind of Jesus the Messiah and we cease to be the community of humble servants that he has made us.  We turn, instead, to self-righteousness, to pride, to violence, to politics, to money, to power to further the kingdom of God.  And our light grows dim.  Our witness fails.   We see it happening all around us in the West.  We’ve stopped talking about sin and we’ve thought more highly of ourselves than we ought.  We preach a doctrine of cheap grace.  And our light has gone dim.  Our churches have emptied and the culture has claimed them for its own.  In some they preach false gospels of prosperity or the divinity of man or the goodness of sexual immorality.  We setup idols to politics and earthly power in them.  Some are literally gutted, becoming theatres or bars.  Others are little more than tourist attractions: testimonies to the power of the gospel in the days we proclaimed it, but now empty, dead shells.  The culture removes the cross and sets up altars to its idols.  Brothers and Sisters, before it is too late, let us kneel before the cross of Jesus and look up.  Let it fill our vision.  Let us remember that he—the sinless son of God—died the death we deserve.  And let us meditate on the depth and power of his grace that we might share the humble mind of our humble king, that we might be the people he has called us to be, the people he has given his Spirit to make us, the people who will steward his gospel of grace until every knee bows and every tongues confesses that Jesus the Messiah is Lord and gives glory to God the Father.   Let’s pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility:  Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

A Sermon for Passion Sunday Hebrews 9:11-15 by William Klock   I’d like to put our study of Ephesians on pause.  We reached a good stopping point last Sunday.  Now Easter is fast approaching and we need to switch gears for a few weeks.  It’s often the case that the lessons for the Sunday before a major feast day are meant to prepare us and to explain what’s about to come and that’s just what Passion Sunday does—not just for Easter, but for Palm Sunday and all of Holy Week.  That said, today’s Epistle from the book of Hebrews dovetails remarkably well with what we’ve been reading in the letter to the Ephesians.  In Ephesians, Paul’s been writing to a cluster of little churches in what today we call western Turkey.  The people in those churches were mostly gentiles—non-Jews.  They had been pagans who knew the world is not as it should be.  They longed for a way out.  Some of them, no doubt, had taken note of the Jewish diaspora communities in their cities and those communities had got their attention.  The Jews had a sense of holiness.  They kept themselves apart from the moral filth, from the sexual immorality, from the dog-eat-dog world of the Greeks and Romans.  The Jews had a sense of compassion, of love, of mercy that was foreign to the pagans.  Maybe most of all, they saw in these Jewish neighbours a sense of hope—that history wasn’t just going forever round and round, never changing, that their God actually cared for the world and for his people, and that one day he would do something to set the world to rights.  The God of Israel was a God who cared, who was faithful, who would one day wipe away the tears and deal with evil.  There was nothing and no one like that in the pagan world.  But that wasn’t their story.  The God of Israel wasn’t their god.  They had no right to it.  The best they could do was hang out on the fringe and hope maybe something of it would rub off.  If nothing else, it gave them at least a little hope to know that it was possible to be different.   And then Paul came along and he proclaimed the good news about Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who was crucified, buried, and who rose to life.  Paul told them how the blood of Jesus—if they would only believe and submit themselves to him as creation’s true Lord—how the blood of Jesus would purify them from the stain of sin and of idolatry and of death.  And they did believe.  And in response, the God of Israel adopted them as sons and daughters.  He filled them with his Spirit—drawing near to them, just as he’d promised to draw near to his people Israel.  And so Paul wrote his letter to them to say that in all of this, they’ve become the new temple of God—the place where he has drawn near, the place where he dwells, the place where a renewed humanity—Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, slave and free, men and women—are all being brought together, the vanguard of God’s new creation in the midst of the old—a people to challenge the principalities and powers, the gods and kings of the old world with the Lordship of Jesus and the inauguration of new creation.   And Paul’s chief word for those gentile believers in Ephesus—so far as we’ve got in the letter to this point—is that this story that belonged to Israel is now fully their story.  Jesus and the Spirit have brought them into it.  The promises of the God of Israel are now their promises.  The hope of Israel is now their hope.   And then the book of Hebrews.  It takes the same themes and flips them around.  We don’t know who wrote it.  Possibly Paul.  Probably written in the mid-60s.  To Jewish believers, probably at Rome.  These were people who had been part of that story all along.  They were the natural sons and daughters.  They were the original branches of the olive tree—not gentile branches grafted in.  And, just like Paul, they were confronted with the risen Jesus and recognised that he was the long-promised and long-awaited Messiah who changed everything, who brought the old promises to fulfilment.  And they believed.  And they, too, became part of this community, this new Israel, purified by Jesus and filled with the Spirit.  They too became part of this new temple in which God had come to dwell.  But then persecution came, too.  And with the threat of persecution hanging over them, it was all too tempting to go back to their old ways.  The Jews had a long-standing arrangement with Caesar.  They would pray for him and he would let them worship and live in peace.  And so these Jewish Christians began to withdraw: back to their synagogues, back into their purity codes, away from their gentile brothers and sisters.  Hebrews was written to them—to remind them of the same things Paul wanted the Ephesians to be sure of.  That in Jesus and in the church, their hopes are being fulfilled, that God’s new creation is being born, and that there’s no going back.   In fact, this is just what Hebrews does: it reminds these Jewish believers—in case they’ve forgotten—that their old way of life fell short.  The tabernacle was wonderful, it was the sign of God’s presence with his people, but they couldn’t actually enter it.  The priests and the sacrifices they offered were great.  They purified the people from their impurity and from the stain of sin and death so that God could dwell in their midst, but despite being offered continually, they were never able to perfect the conscience of the people who came to worship.  No, all these things were good, but the writer of Hebrews repeatedly makes the point: The tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices the torah itself, they were part of the promise.  Jesus and the Spirit are the fulfilment.  Again, you can’t go back.  This is where today’s Epistle picks up: Hebrews 9:11-15.   But when the Messiah arrived as high priest of the good things that were coming, he entered the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands (that is, not of this present creation), and not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood.  He entered, once and for all, into the holy place, accomplishing a redemption that lasts forever.  For if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer, make people holy (in the sense of purifying their bodies) when they had been unclean, how much more will the blood of the Messiah, who offered himself to God through the eternal Spirit as a spotless sacrifice, cleanse our consciences from dead works to serve the living God!   When the Israelites built the tabernacle in the wilderness, on their way from Egypt to the promised land, it was a house for God to dwell in.  But it always pointed to more than that.  It’s very structure, layout, and design were meant to evoke the garden of Eden.  It reminded the Israelites what humanity had lost in our rebellion against God.  And it pointed forward to a future in which God would, someday and somehow, set the world to rights and once again dwell with his people.  Human beings were created to live in and to enjoy God’s presence, to receive life from him, and in turn to steward that life back to his creation.  But when we tried to become gods ourselves, when we sinned, we drove a wedge between ourselves and God, between earth and heaven.  We began to die and we brought death and chaos into the very world into which God had meant us to carry his life and his divine order.  But in the tabernacle, Israel saw the beginnings of restoration: God once again, dwelling in the midst of a people purified—albeit imperfectly and temporarily—from the stain of sin and death.   The tabernacle was a promise.  Its imperfection made this clear.  God was with his people, but not fully.  They camped around his presence and they could draw near, but there was a great veil that separated them from God.  Even the sacrifices that purified them couldn’t make them pure enough to pass that veil.  God had made them a holy people, but even a holy people could never enter the most holy place where God’s presence dwelled.  Sin and death still separated the people from God.  But that remaining separation—so close, but yet so far—drove home the promissory nature of the tabernacle and the priests and the sacrifices.  If God was going to all this trouble to draw his people this close now, then one day he would surely bring them fully into his presence.  One day he would fully heal the breach.   But as the centuries passed, Israel took the tabernacle (and later the temple) for granted.  The people forgot the promise.  Like the dog in the meme, sitting in the midst of a burning room, but contentedly sipping his coffee and saying, “This is fine,” Israel eventually just came to see the tabernacle and the priesthood and the sacrifices as the solution, the fix for sin.  Yes, God still had to deal with those wicked gentiles and one day he would smite them and put Israel on top of the political heap.  One day God’s presence would return to the temple.  But the priesthood and the sacrifices would go on and on.  That’s what it would mean for the world to be set to rights.  They stopped seeing the imagery in the temple that pointed forward to a day when Eden would be restored.  They forgot about the vocation God had given to Adam and Eve in the beginning.   I think we too often do the same sort of thing as Christians.  We come to the Lord’s Table and somehow it becomes hum-drum for us.  We no longer think of the end goal, of the great feast that awaits on the day when this work of new creation is finally done and the knowledge of the glory of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.  We just try to be good and we wait for Jesus to take us to heaven so we can escape the evils of the world.  We lose sight of the big picture, of God’s grand plan, of us and creation actually, somehow and someday, fully restored and set to rights.   This is what the writer of Hebrews is getting at when he talks about Jesus as our great high priest of the good things to come.  The tabernacle was a good thing, but it pointed to better things, just as the Lord’s Supper is a good thing, but points to something even better.  And Hebrews says, as our high priest, Jesus entered not in to the most holy place of the tabernacle.  Instead, at the cross Jesus entered into the immediate presence of his Father, laying down his life as the perfect sacrifice.  As he did that, the heavy veil in the temple, the one that closed off the most holy place, it was worn in two.  In Jesus, the way into God’s presence has been fully opened.   So, the first point here: the tabernacle pointed forward to a better day when God would be fully present with his people.  Then the second point: As the tabernacle points to the full presence of God with his people, so the priesthood of the old covenant points forward to the prefect priesthood and sacrifice of Jesus.   The tabernacle and, later, the temple saw perpetual sacrifices.  Day in and day out, all day long, animals were brought, killed, butchered, and burned.  The cloud of smoke rising from the altar never stopped.  Hebrews speaks here of the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer.  Those were sacrifices for atonement, to purify the tabernacle and the people of their uncleanness and their sin.  The ashes of a heifer were used to purify those who had come in contact with death.  And those sacrifices were offered over and over and over.  People sin.  Impurity—not sinful itself—but ritual impurity was inevitable.  Even the great purifying sacrifice offered on the day of Atonement—when the blood of a bull and a goat was sprinkled in the most holy place to purify the nation and the tabernacle, to keep it and them a fit place for God to dwell—even that had to be done every year—year in and year out.  And, in that, they pointed to something greater.  Over the time, the people forgot.  But all along, the necessity for repeated sacrifices pointed to a day when God would provide an atonement that would last forever.   When Jesus made that once-for-all and perfect sacrifice with his own blood, it was hard for people to wrap their heads around.  Again, they’d forgotten that the whole system had been pointing to this.  But, too, no one ever expected the coming Messiah, the great high priest, to offer himself as that perfect sacrifice.  But the writer of Hebrews stresses: it was there, all along in Israel’s scriptures.   All those animal sacrifices reminded the people of the cost of sin and the impurity of death.  Because of their sin, Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, cut off from the tree of life.  Brothers and Sisters, sin separates us from the presence of God. Sin separates us from the source of life.  Sinners die.  The only way back into the presence of our holy God is by the shedding of blood.  The sacrificial system taught Israel that redemption from sin requires the death of another in our place.  The animals sacrificed in the temple were costly sacrifices, but they were also imperfect sacrifices.  They were dumb and unwilling.  They served only until the next sin was committed.  And they brought the people only into the tabernacle or the temple.  For the people to be truly cleansed from sin, for the people to enter into the most holy place, into the presence of God, would require an even costlier sacrifice.   Those sacrifices pointed to Jesus.  In Jesus, God himself took up our flesh—he became one of his own people.  He did that so that he could represent them.  He became like a second Adam.  In that role, Jesus willingly gave his life for them—and for us.  He was the costly sacrifice—the spotless lamb, the best of the flock.  As our representative, he took on himself the death that we deserve.  This is why we can say, as we do in the Lord’s Supper, that by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world has been made.  This is why we can ask that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood.  The blood of animal sacrifices gave a superficial cleanness to people who had been defiled by their sin, the ashes of the heifer purified them temporarily from the stain of death, but Jesus’ blood doesn’t just make us superficially clean.  It purifies us from the inside out.  And so we can also pray that as his body and blood make us clean, we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.  By his blood we can finally enter the Holy of Holies, we can finally be restored to the presence of our holy Creator.   And that gets at the third point made here—the third way in which Jesus’ sacrifice is better than the old sacrifices and the new covenant is better than the old.  The sacrifices of the old covenant were singposts pointing to the real sacrifice.  The most holy place in the temple was a signpost to the real holy of holies, not just the heavenly presence of the Father, but it looked forward to the day when creation will finally be set to rights, when heaven and earth will finally be joined together and humanity can once again live in God’s presence, just as Adam and Eve did before they sinned.  The cleanness and atonement offered by those old sacrifices was a shadow of the atonement and the cleanness offered by Jesus.  Jesus didn’t just enter the central room of the temple in Jerusalem to offer the blood of an animal on our behalf.  Jesus, who is both God himself and our perfect human representative, entered into the actual presence of his Father with his own blood shed at the cross.  In doing that he offers a sacrifice that washes us clean from sin to the very core of our being.  And his purifying sacrifice prepares us for the gift of God’s Spirit—the life of the age to come, a down payment on the resurrection of the dead, given to us today.   Somehow the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, Hebrews says, purifies our conscience from dead works so that we can serve the living God.  Brothers and Sisters, through Jesus and the Spirit we are transformed.  No longer just going through the motions of holiness, but purified from the inside out to be a people who desire holiness.  Jesus and the Spirit have given us a taste of the age to come, of new creation, of the world set to rights, of our tears wiped away, of our sins forgiven.  Jesus and the Spirit have made us the new temple, the place where God dwells, the place where the hope of the world is known, stewards of his grace and of the good news that brings this same grace and hope to the world.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, not only has God come to dwell with us, but we’ve been restored to our vocation—to be the priests of God’s temple and to steward his goodness, his faithfulness for the sake of the world—to make his glory known through all the earth.   And then verse 15:   For this reason, Jesus is the mediator of the new covenant.  The purpose was that those who are called should receive the promised inheritance of the age to come, since a death has occurred which provides redemption from transgressions committed under the first covenant.   Jesus is the mediator.  There’s no other way.  As persecution came, these Jewish believers were tempted to go back the old ways, the ways before Jesus.  Hebrews was written to remind them: the old ways, the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices, their days have passed.  The promise they pointed to has come.  In Jesus, God has established a new covenant and he is the sole mediator.   Every time I preach on this passage, I’m remined of the trip we made to Montréal in the winter.  On the bridge over the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottaway Rivers we saw a jeep speeding the opposite direction below us, on the frozen river.  Commonplace in Quebec and Ontario, but not for this California boy.  You can do that in the middle of a cold Québec winter, but when Spring comes the bridge is the only way across.  Try driving on the thawing ice and you’ll die.   Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus, Spring has come to the world.  In Jesus a bridge has been provided across the water.  The law was perfectly good in its time, just as the ice was safe to drive on if you wanted to cross the river in January, but the time has passed for that.  If you want to cross the river now the bridge Jesus provides is the only way.  Hebrews was written to people who feared persecution for following Jesus.  They were used to driving on the ice and despite the fact that it was now melting and thin, they were still tempted to keep driving on it.  Hebrews reminded them and it reminds us: The time for those old ways has passed.  Jesus offers something better and his way is now the only way.   Brothers and Sisters, do our lives demonstrate faith in Jesus as our sole mediator?  While you and I may not be tempted to go back to the law or the temple or the old covenant sacrifices, we have our own pasts to which we often hold more tightly than we may realise.  We profess faith in Jesus, but we still haven’t repented of all of our old loyalties, all of our old ways of doing things, all of our old sources of security.  We profess Jesus, but we still find satisfaction in sin and in self.  We say we trust Jesus, but we still look for security in work and in money.  We say we trust Jesus, but we often evaluate ourselves, not based on what he has done for us, but on what we think we’ve done for him.  Friends, it’s like giving people directions to the bridge, while we ourselves are sitting in our cars with the engine running, nosing our wheels into the water and thinking we’ll somehow get across the river.  Lent is a time for us to look around, to take stock, and to evaluate our situation.  Easter is only two weeks away.  It’s a reminder that in Jesus Spring has arrived.  The river isn’t frozen anymore.  We need to let go of the old ways of life and follow Jesus across the bridge.  Will there be challenges and sacrifices along the way?  Of course.  But Jesus and the Spirit have shown us the signs of God’s spring.  The flowers are breaking through the snow, the buds are forming on the tree.  God has provided all the signs of his goodness and faithfulness and the inevitability of spring.  Let us commit ourselves to the one who has given his life to restore life to us and let us give our lives that the whole world might know his glorious spring.   Let us pray: Almighty God, look with mercy on your people; that by your great goodness we may be always governed and preserved both in body and soul, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Infinitely More than We can Ask or Imagine Ephesians 3:14-21 by William Klock   Eugene Peterson, one of my seminary professors, used to tell the story of a little Haitian girl named Addie.  She was an orphan.  When she was five, she was adopted by an American family.  This man and woman travelled to Haiti to pick her up.  As they walked toward the plane to go home, little Addie reach up and slipped her hands into the hands of these two strangers she’d never met before. In that moment, they became Mom and Dad.  In that moment, this scared little girl put her fearless trust in these loving strangers.   That evening, back home, they all sat down to dinner.  There were heaps of pork chops and mashed potatoes and Addie watched, wide-eyed, as everyone dug in—and particularly as her two teenaged brothers dug in and dug in and dug in—until there was nothing left.  She’d never seen so much food before and she’d never seen people eat so much.  And when it was gone, Addie became very quiet.  Mom and Dad realized something was wrong.  And it occurred to Mom that it was the disappearing food.  This little girl had lived her whole life hungry.  When food was gone, it was gone and it might be a day or more before there was more.  And so she took Addie to the kitchen and she showed her the bread drawer, which was full of bread; and she showed her the refrigerator, which was full of milk and eggs and vegetables and meat; and she took her to the pantry and showed her bins full of potatoes and onion and shelves of canned goods.  She showed Addie that no matter how much her hungry teenage brothers ate, there would always be plenty of food and she would never go hungry again.  And notice, that Mother didn’t just tell Addie she’d never have to worry about going hungry again.  She showed her.  She named the meats in the fridge and the ice cream in the freezer; she let her handle the potatoes and the cans of soup.  She gave Addie confidence and reason to trust.[1]   Or as Paul has said to us in Ephesians 3, “confidence and access” (v. 12) to the “Messiah’s riches, riches no one could begin to count” (v. 8).  None of it was ours—or the Ephesians’—by birth.  We—and they—are gentiles.  The promises of God, the Messiah, those things belonged to Israel.  And yet, Paul has stressed over and over, the great mystery revealed in Jesus the Messiah is that through him, God has welcomed everyone—Jew and gentile alike—whoever believes—into the inheritance of Israel and into the vast riches of Israel’s God: forgiveness of sins and a promise of life, both for us, but also for the whole creation, one day to be renewed, made new, resurrected as Jesus has been, to be what God created it, created us to be in the beginning.  The world set to rights and us, living forever in fellowship with God.   That is good news.  And those gentile believers in Ephesus—and we—we’re captivated by that good news, by the promise, and we slip our grubby, sinful, idolatrous little hands into the hands of the Messiah and he washes us clean, he introduces us to his—now our—Father, and he begins to lead us home.  Not on an airplane for a short little hop across the Caribbean, but a lot more like Israel being led through the wilderness for forty years—only this time the promised land is God’s future, his new creation.  And maybe it’s because we didn’t see for ourselves the army of Pharaoh drowned in the sea, maybe it’s because we never experienced the manna in the wilderness, but when the journey gets difficult—Paul knew that times of persecution were coming—but when the journey gets difficult, it’s easy to worry whether God will come through—whether there will be enough.  It’s easy to hedge our bets and to compromise—trusting in the things of this world to see us through the hard times rather than trusting God and letting him lead us.  It’s even easy to let go of his hand altogether.  To just go back to Egypt—or in our case, to paganism, to the rule of the principalities and powers of the old wicked age.  Things are familiar there.  It might have been bad, but at least there was food.  Paul knew these Christians would one day face uncertainty, he knew they’d be tempted to compromise their faith and their allegiance to the King, and he knew that if they did that, they’d fail to be the church Jesus and the Spirit had made them.  They’d become just like the shabby and drab world around them instead of shining forth the Technicolor glory of the God who indwelt them and the wonders of his new creation.  So knowing that, what does Paul do?  Brothers and Sisters, he prays for them.  Look at Ephesians 3:14: “Because of this,” he writes, “I am kneeling down before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.  My prayer is this: that through the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power, through his Spirit, in your inner being; that the Messiah may make his home in your hearts through faith; that you may be rooted and firmly founded in love; and that you may be fully able to grasp, with all the saints, the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the surpassing love of the Messiah, so that God may fill you with all his fullness.”   Maybe we should start at the end of the prayer—with the thing that Paul wants most for the Ephesians and for us—the thing that he’s praying all the other things will lead us to.  He prays that God will fill us with all his fullness.  Remember, that language of filling is temple language.  That’s what Paul’s been talking about all this time.  We are God’s temple.  The blood of Jesus has purified us from our idolatry and from the stain of sin and death so that God can come and dwell in us through his Spirit.  And just as God’s glory shone from the old temple on Mount Zion, revealing his presence with his people, just so God wants his glory to shine forth from us, from the church.  We don’t just proclaim the good news about renewal and new life and new creation and resurrection in Jesus.  Brother and Sisters, we’re to live it. We’re to be the beginning of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.   And Paul knows this won’t be easy.  It wasn’t easy for Israel on her journey and neither will it be easy for us.  So,, ack to verse 14: He gets on his knees and he prays.  We’d do well to do the same, probably even the kneeling part.   You can pray sitting or standing or walking or riding a bike, but this got me to thinking about kneeling. It’s not mandatory, but I wonder if it would do us well to kneel more often.  Our tradition is to kneel when we pray in church and I know we don’t do that here because we don’t have kneelers and, even if we did, God bless the Presbyterians who made our pews a hundred and fifty years ago, but they made them so that only a child’s feet can fit underneath them without major contortions.  But maybe we need to kneel—at least in our private prayers—more often.  I don’t often read Eugene Peterson.  I’m just not on his wavelength.  To quote Eugene Peterson again: “While on my knees I cannot run away.  I cannot assert myself.  I place myself in a position of willed submission…On my knees I am no longer in a position to flex my muscles, strut or cower, hide in the shadows or show off on stage…I set my agenda aside for a time and become still, present to God.”[2]   Prayer is the place where we come to the Father as adopted sons and daughters, reach up, and trustingly place our hands in his.  And maybe it would do us good, when we pray, to put ourselves in a posture where that’s all we can do, knowing just how prone we are to running away or cowering in fear or showing off.  As we kneel, we empty ourselves, and with Paul, we pray that God will fill us up.  Again, the point of our being filled is to shine forth God’s glory, but what we’re filled with to make that happen is God’s love.  In verse 15 Paul starts out appealing to God as Father—the one in whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.  In verse 17, it’s the love that fills our hearts, that is the root of the great tree, and the foundation of the temple itself.  I expect, if he wanted to, Paul could just keep piling metaphor on metaphor to describe the riches of God’s love, because he wants us to know that it’s in knowing God’s love that the church will find the power to be what God has called us to be.  Would that we would remember that.  How often have we put something else in the place of love?  There are all sorts of things that are important to our being the church.  There are all sorts of things that are even essential to being the church.  But without love at the centre, without love as our taproot, without love as our foundation, we will never be the church that Jesus and the Spirit want us to be.  Think of Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians.  They were a church full of spiritual gifts.  The people were doing amazing and astounding things in the name of Jesus.  But Paul writes to them and says, “Without love, it’s nothing.  Without love, you might as well be a clanging cymbal, a bashing gong.”  You Canadians might say that the church in Corinth was a “gong show”, because it wasn’t built on love.  Without love as the root and foundation, it’s all for nought.  Without love, there is no glory.   This is what Paul’s getting at when he prays: “that through the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power, through his Spirit, in your inner being.”  Paul wants us to see the riches of God’s glory laid out for us.  Like little Addie going to the kitchen to look in the refrigerator and the pantry, to see the bacon, to see the ice cream, to see that big bag of potatoes, to handle the cans of soup.  To know those riches and to know that she has no reason to be afraid anymore.  To know not just that she’s been adopted into this family, but to know that its riches are now and fully her riches.  This is what Paul wants for us.  To see the riches of God’s love, to experience the riches of God’s Spirit, and to know that we belong to him.  We are his people, his family, his sons and daughters—and to know it in our inner being, deep down, where it shapes who we know ourselves to be.  Brothers and Sisters, to know that new creation is our inheritance.   And somehow, it’s in this community called the church, this community that brings together everyone, people who are different, Jews and gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free—Canadian and American, native and immigrant, Conservative and New Democrat, young and old, homebody and adventurer, Star Wars and Star Trek, Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy, introvert and extrovert—somehow in this community in which we’re brought together, so different, and yet united in the Messiah, made one body, and our life together is dependent on these people so many of whom are so, so different from us, it’s here that we begin to plumb the unplumbable height and depths of God’s love.   Plumbing the heights and depths is an image that weaves its way from the Prophets all the way through to the end of the story in Revelation.  Think of the Prophet Zechariah, who exhorted the people of Judah to rebuild the temple after they returned to Jerusalem from their Babylonian exile.  But there was more to it than the earthly temple.  Zechariah had a vision in which a man was measuring the whole city and his measuring became a promise—a promise of a temple and a city even greater, one that no wall could contain, one in which the Lord would dwell with his people and become the wall himself.  Ezekiel has a similar—and much longer—vision in which he measures the new temple—a new temple larger and greater and more awesome than anything that had ever stood on Mount Zion and that image from Ezekiel is then picked up by John in Revelation.  To plumb the height and depth and width of God’s love is to know, to grow to understand God’s purposes for us as his new temple.   It’s interesting, because Paul has already written about this new temple as being full of the wisdom of God—like a storehouse for the nations, for new creation.  And that’s something Job talks about: the wisdom of God, longer than the earth and broader than the sea.  In Sirach, in the Apocrypha, the great sage envisions Wisdom herself, coming to live in the temple.  He knew the world is not as it should be; he knew his people, Israel, were not as they should be; they needed God’s wisdom to set them to rights—and it would start, it would flow forth from the temple as a show of God’s glory.  This is who God wants us to be, through the Messiah: people who know God’s wisdom, people who embody his new creation in the midst of the old.  A people full of light and life in the midst of darkness and death.  A people who will challenge the principalities and powers of the old age by our very existence.  A people who will proclaim God’s glory to the ends of the earth.   Think again of Paul’s line of thought so far.  One of the difficulties of peaching just a little piece or half a chapter of a letter like this week by week is that we lose sight of the bigger picture or bigger argument.  But remember back to Chapter 1.  I said last week, if we want to understand Ephesians, just look at the “tens”.  Chapter 1, verse 10, Paul stressed that it is—and always has been—God’s plan to unite heaven and earth.  That’s how he created the cosmos to be in the first place: heaven and earth overlapping; he and humans living together; he, sharing his love and his life with us.  And ever since we sinned and drove a wedge between ourselves and God, he’s been working to make us fit again for his presence.  And so he’s sent, he’s given his Messiah—to bring it all back together, to embody new creation himself: God and man, heaven and earth united in one person.  And then, in 1:23, Paul wrote that the church is the Messiah’s body and—it still amazes me to read it—the church is the fullness of the one who fills all in all.  Remember, that language of filling and being full of God’s presence, that’s temple language.  And then in 2:23, Paul told us that it’s through the gift of God’s Spirit who lives in us that God has begun to fulfil his promises to dwell with his people.  The church as God’s temple is the signpost that points forward to God’s future when that wedge will be completely withdrawn and heaven and earth, God and man restored to each other.   And this is why Paul stresses, why he says it’s so essential the church be filled with God’s fullness.  Our being the temple, our being filled with the presence and love and glory of God, is the witness to his promise to one day flood all of creation with the knowledge of his glory.  I think Paul wants us to hear Isaiah 11 echoing in his words here.  Remember we looked at Isaiah 11 back when we looked at Ephesians 1.  That was Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming King.  Under his wise rule the wolf and the lamb will lie down together at peace and the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.  And so Paul prays that in our prayer, in our worship, in our life as the church, we may already know the reality of all this so that we might live, not just in hope of God’s future, but as people actively pulling God’s future into the here and now.   Now, think again of little Addie.  She’d never seen a refrigerator or a freezer or a pantry full of food.  That kind of plenty was beyond her imagination.  And that’s how God’s riches were for those gentile Ephesian believers.  They knew that the world is not as it should be.  We all know that in our bones.  Like Addie surely knew that it’s not good to be hungry.  But what’s the solution?  And, if God is going to set things to rights, what will that even look like?  We’ve had a glimpse.  We’ve known the gift that God has given us in his son, who has given his life to purify us from our sins.  We’ve known the gift of his Spirit, whom he’s poured into us to give us a taste of renewal and new creation and life together with him.  And if we’ve listened to the story of God and his people we’ve heard of the garden, heard of the temple in which his presence once dwelled, we’ve heard of the exodus and Pharaoh’s water-logged chariots, and the manna in the wilderness.  We’ve read John’s Revelation and had a glimpse of the end of the story, even if only in symbols and its full glory veiled.  We’ve seen the kitchen and the pantry stocked with food.  And yet that’s only the beginning.  It’s only a hint of what’s to come.  And so Paul prays again in verses 20 and 21: “To the one who is capable of doing far more than we can ask or imagine, granted the power which is working in us, to him be glory, in the church and in Messiah Jesus, to all generations, and to the ages of ages!  Amen.”   Brothers and Sisters, God’s glory isn’t just to be revealed in the future.  It’s here and it’s now and he means for it to be revealed in us, his church, in the same way he’s revealed it in Jesus.  Whatever vision we have of the church, Brothers and Sisters, God’s vision for us is bigger and wider and deeper and higher and greater than we can ever ask or imagine.  C. S. Lewis once preached a now famous sermon on the “weight of glory”.  That’s where he rebukes us saying that we are far too easily pleased.  We’re like children, happily making mud pies in a slum, when we’ve been offered a grand holiday at the sea.  “We are half-hearted creatures,” he says, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.”  And maybe we’ve progressed a bit in the church, but we’re all too often still obsessed with politics or denominational divisions or even otherwise good things like theology.  But not love.  It’s funny how we can centre ourselves even on all the good things that revolve around the love God, but somehow miss the need ourselves to be centred on that gospel love.   We need to be captivated by the gospel, by Jesus, by his cross and by his resurrection and by his ascension.  We need to be captivated by the life of the Spirit into which we’ve been plunged.  We need to be captivated by the promise of new creation, even though we’ll forever struggle to envision it this side of eternity.  We need to be captivated by God’s glory, because he doesn’t just call us to be spectators to it.  No. He’s called us into the story.  He’s led us in our own exodus, from slavery to sin and death so that we—as fickle and confused and anxious as we often are—should live in the here and now, learning to be plumb the heights and depths of his love so that we might make his glory known in the earth.  As inadequate as we may feel, we are his poiema, his workmanship, his grand and glorious piece of art, painted with the blood of his son and shining forth the glory of his Spirit.   This what he’s saved us for.  To be the vanguard of new creation, making known his glory.  And if that’s scary or overwhelming, Paul reminds us that the very one who has saved us is capable of doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  In other words, the fridge and the pantry are full of more food than we can ever imagine.  This is our God.  So come to the Lord’s Table this morning and as you join with your brothers and sisters to eat the bread and drink the wine, be reminded of the infinite riches of love in our Father’s house.  Look back to the cross and look forward to his promises, know the life of his Spirit, and in faith slip your hands into his and now that you are his son, you are his daughter, redeemed and renewed that you might know his love and shine forth his glory.   Let’s pray: Gracious Father, in our Collect today we acknowledged our sins and thanked you for the grace and mercy by which you have redeemed us and made us your own. Remind us always, we ask, of your great riches, that we might know the great height and depths and width of your unending love.  And not just know your love, but as we know it, that we might live it—to love you and to love each other and in doing so, to shine forth your glory and to make you known in the world. Through Jesus our Lord we pray.  Amen. [1] Practice Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010, 159-60. [2] Ibid., 154.

Prisoner of Jesus the Messiah Ephesians 3:1-13 by  William Klock   Ask yourself what happens when the church is being faithful in its gospel calling and life. As we’ve worked through the first two chapter of Ephesians, Paul has explained that the church is God’s new temple. It’s a people purified by the blood of Jesus so that God can draw near in the person of his Spirit to dwell with us. That’s always been God’s plan for humanity and for creation. The garden was his temple and he placed us there to steward it well, on the one hand, and on the other, to dwell with him and to enjoy his presence—life with him.  And ever since we rejected that calling, God has been working to restore us to it.  And so the church, this people washed clean of sin and death by Jesus, and then filled with his Spirit, this new temple, we’re the working model of God’s coming new creation in the here and now.   And if we’re faithful in being that working model, what happens? The ideal, the hope is that people hear our proclamation of the kingdom and they see the first beginning of God’s new creation when they look at the church. In the midst of the darkness, the church should be light.  In the midst of death, the church should be life.  The church should be here to show a better way through the cross.  To prophetically wipe away the tears of the hurt and mourning and to confront the principalities and powers, the false lords and the corrupt systems of the world with the truth of the gospel and the lordship of Jesus.  And people do hear and see and experience the faithfulness of the church.  In us they meet the living God and the Lord who died for them and they encounter his glory and they kneel in faith and are, themselves washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit. But our idea of the faithful church often stops there. Maybe that’s because we think of the church, not in terms of faithfulness, but in terms of success.  Butts in the pews. Money in the plate. Acclaim by the world.  And yet for the first Christians the opposite was true.  They were small.  They were poor.  They were persecuted and imprisoned and martyred by the world around them.   And that’s because, when the church is faithful in living and proclaiming and witnessing the presence of God’s new creation and the Lordship of Jesus, the principalities and powers—that was how Jews like Paul thought of the unseen powers, once placed by God to oversee peoples and nations, but now in rebellion against him—those principalities and powers, earthly kings, and the powerful people invested in those kingdoms and the corrupt systems that run them—Brothers and Sisters, if we’re doing our job showing that God’s new world is breaking in and that Jesus is setting things to rights, those powers will fight back.  They will try to shut us up or shut us down. They will throw us in prison.  They will kill us.  Or they will try to corrupt us. They’ll divide our loyalties: Sure you can worship Jesus, but you’ll also need to kneel to Caesar.  They’ll get us to adulterate the gospel with materialism and commercialism or politics.  They’ll convince us we can have one set of values in the church and another in business or in government.   With that in mind, look at Ephesians 3. Paul rites, “It is because of all this that I, Paul, the prisoner of Messiah Jesus on behalf of you gnetiles…”  Paul sort of interrupts himself there for rhetorical purposes, but we should pause here too.  Paul was in prison. Probably this is when he was in prison in Rome, but it could have been in Ephesus.  And for a lot of people in his word, that meant that Paul was out of favour with God.  How often do we hear that sort of thing today? There are parts of the church that have been corrupted and compromised by the idea that faith means health and wealth, happiness and prosperity.  That you can name it and, by faith, claim it.  And if you don’t get it, well, then you don’t have enough faith or you’re out of favour with God.  If we were to turn over to Second Corinthians we’d see that that’s how the Corinthians interpreted Paul’s imprisonment.  But this is pagan thinking.   But Paul knew better. In verse 13 he tells them, “Don’t lose heart because of my sufferings on your behalf. That’s your glory!”  In other words, he’s imprisoned because he’s been faithful to the calling God gave him.  He’s imprisoned because of his great faith.  He wants the Ephesians to understand the paradox of the cross: God’s power is made perfect in weakness.  We’re prone to forgetting this.  When we bail on a church because we think it’s too small, when we start adopting sales tactics as if the gospel is something to sell, when we cozy up to corrupt leaders and rulers looking for favour, when we think we have to project or pursue strength in order to win, we’ve lost the plot that is centred on the cross of Jesus.  You can’t adulterate God’s new creation with the old.  If we do, we lose our witness and we stop challenging the principalities and power of the old with the lordship of Jesus and the glory of the kingdom.   So Paul was in prison because he was being faithful, because he was establishing, just as God had called him to do, these little communities that were breaking the rules of the old order: bringing Jews and gentiles, men and women, slave and free together into a single family.  This was the family through which God will make his glory known throughout the earth.  Remember the priests mocking Jesus on the cross, to come down if he was really the son of God, then they would believe. But Paul knew—and the people in those little churches in Ephesus knew—it was because Jesus is the son of God that he had to stay on the cross.  It was through his weakness, through his death that the great enemy, death itself, would be defeated and the battle won.  Weakness is the powerful way of the cross.   Paul had got the attention of the powers of the present evil age and it landed him in prison, but instead of thinking that God had failed, Paul knew that this was actually the sign, the proof that the gospel and the Spirit were doing their work, that they were truly rising to challenge the old gods and kings.  So he goes on in verse 3, “I’m assuming, by the way, that you’ve heard about the plan of Gods’ grace that was given to me to pass on to you?  You know, the mystery that God revealed to me, as I wrote briefly just now.  Anyway…  When you read this you’ll be able to understand the special insight I have into the Messiah’s mystery.  This wasn’t made known to human beings in previous generations, but now it’s been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.  The mystery is this, that, through the gospel, the gentiles are to share Israel’s inheritance.  They are to become fellow members of the body, along with them, and fellow sharers of the promise of Jesus the Messiah.”   God’s great mystery, his secret purpose that was there all along, promised to Abraham and to Moses, to David and to the Prophets, but missed by so many people in Israel—and of course totally unknown to the gentiles who did know about those promises—that mystery hit Paul like a ton of bricks the day he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus—or maybe it was three days later when Ananias prayed for him and his eyes were opened.  Paul started to rethink everything his Jewish Pharisee brain knew—and it knew the whole story—but suddenly he was looking it at through a new lens, through the reality that this Jesus who was crucified as a false Messiah had been raised and was, in fact, the Messiah after all.  And if that were true—well, that wall outside the temple, the one carved with the warning that gentile must not pass on pain of death—that wall was now irrelevant.  In fact, that whole temple had become irrelevant because of Jesus.  He’s said this back in 2:19 and now he says pretty much the same thing again, “The mystery is this, that through the gospel, the gentiles are to share in Israel’s inheritance.  They are to become fellow members of the body…fellow sharers of the promise in Messiah Jesus.”  In Greek he drives this point home with real force using three words that all begin with the prefix syn that means “with”.  The gentiles are with-inheritors, with-body, and with-partakers—to put it very literally in English.  For those in the Messiah, the distinction between the Jews and the rest of the world is gone.  And we often read right past it, but this was absolutely key, heart of the gospel stuff for Paul.   Israel’s story reached its climax and the promises were fulfilled in the Messiah and in his death for the sins of the whole world.  In that moment the whole sacrificial system, the whole system of purity and impurity, the temple itself became irrelevant for everyone—whether or Jew or gentile—for anyone who throws himself or herself at the feet of Jesus in faith and love to be purified once and for all and forever by his blood, to be filled by God’s Spirit, and thereby to become a part of God’s new temple.   When the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, he was the first to really grasp all this.  The other apostles back in Jerusalem were still debating whether gentile believers had to be circumcised or not.  So Jesus sent Paul to go announce to the gentiles that it’s not necessary.  There’s now a single people defined by faith in the risen Messiah.  Of course, Paul first went back to Jerusalem to make sure his fellow apostles understood this, too.  But his mission was to proclaim the good news to the nations.  I expect most of the his first converts were those gentiles who were already on the fringe.  The “god fearers” as the Jews called them.  Greeks and Romans who encountered Jewish society and saw something they’d never seen before.  In a world of moral filth, they saw in Israel a passion for holiness, a desire for justice, a hope of God setting the world to rights—a hope few in the gentile world had.  And they couldn’t go to the temple, but they could sit in the synagogues and hear the scriptures read and there they heard about the faithfulness of Israel’s God.  And so they hung around, on the fringe, longing for what this family had, but knowing it was not theirs and thinking it never could belong to them.  Hoping that maybe there could be a place for them, even if on the fringe, in this story of hope.  And Paul came to them excited, to announce that in Jesus, they were co-inheritors, fellow body-members, and fellow partakers of all those promises God had made to his people.  That in Jesus and the Spirit, the could actually become the temple of the living God…not on the fringe, but actually the temple in which he dwells.   Imagine the excitement those first gentile believers felt. Like children in an orphanage, waiting and longing for years to have a place in and the love of a family, now they were part of the family.  They’d escaped from the fickle gods and moral filth and hopelessness of paganism and were now sons and daughters of God.   So having made clear this point that is so central to everything, Paul goes on in verse 7: “This is the gospel that I was appointed to serve, in line with the free gift of God’s grace that was given to me.  It was backed up with the power through which God accomplishes his work.”  I have to think that Paul never ceased to marvel at this.  The guy who made it his career to round up Christians so they could be brought before the Jewish council—and stoned like Stephen—that evil guy was called and chosen by God to proclaim this good news.  Washed clean by the blood of Jesus and made an apostle.  If anyone understood grace, it was Paul.  If anyone knew the power of God made perfect in weakness, it was Paul.  And so he goes on in verse 8: “I am the very least of all God’s people.  However, he gave me this task as a gift: that I should be the one to tell the gentiles the good news of the Messiah’s riches, riches no one could begin to count. My job is to make clear to everyone just what the mystery is, the purpose that’s been hidden from the very beginning of the world in God who created all things.”   Paul, the least deserving of anyone having been such a great persecutor of Jesus and his church, has been given the grace to proclaim the riches of God, his immense wealth.  The riches of the Messiah.  Sonship in God’s family.  The inheritance of the word.  And one day that world set to rights and fellowship with the living God forever.  This is good news.  Not good advice, like, “Hey, let me tell you about Jesus. Try him out and see if he works for you and if not, oh well.”  No this is good news.  Sin and death are defeated, the corrupt principalities and powers are on borrowed time, God’s kingdom has come.  And those powers have heard the proclamation of Paul and his churches and they’re angry.  Maybe if it had just been all talk, maybe if they’d just proclaimed it as good advice, maybe if they’d let themselves be corrupted by the desire for strength and power, but no…the principalities and powers, the king and gods of the present age are angry, because they’ve seen this good news at work.  Caesar was the great peacemaker who had forged all the peoples of his vast empire into one with his sword and his armies.  But this crucified Messiah who came out of a weak and conquered people, whose missionaries had gathered a bunch of largely poor people, women, and slaves—their unity across all their difference brought about by a message of grace—that was a real threat to the order of the old world.  The Lord Jesus was the real deal.  Caesar was a cheap copy.  And while the Caesars of the world will one day be brought down, they won’t go down easily.  And yet, it’s in just this that the church has its greatest witness the power of God, the power of the cross, the power of the good news.  God’s power is made most manifest when we are at our weakest—laughed at, imprisoned, martyred.  Those things are proof of the power of the gospel.   And now Paul brings the first part of the chapter to its climax in verse 10: “This is it: that God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety, was to be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places—through the church! This is God’s eternal purpose, and he’s accomplished it in Messiah Jesus our Lord.  We have confidence and access to God in him, in full assurance, through his faithfulness.”   I’ve heard and read Tom Wright say that if you want to understand what Paul is really getting at in this first half of Ephesians, look at the 10s: 1:10, 2:10, and 3:10.  In 1:10 we see God’s purpose to bring all things together in heaven and on earth in the Messiah. In 2:10 we see the church today, justified by grace through faith, called to have the vital role to play in God’s plan to bring everything together in the Messiah.  And here in 3:10 Paul reminds us that when the church is faithfully the church—that fellowship of people from every nation, tribe, and tongue who have given their allegiance to the Messiah, then the principalities and powers are put on notice and called to account.  As Paul says here: “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety, was to be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places—through the church!”  For two thousand years God’s promises to set creation and humanity rights was out there, but how was it going to happen?  Brothers and Sisters, it’s through the church being the church, with uncompromising allegiance to Jesus, living in the power of the Spirit, refusing to compromise, refusing to give an inch to evil men, to wicked systems, to the gods of the present age.  Not one inch.  Because, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus tell us, in those famous words of Abrham Kuyper, “there is not one inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”   And knowing that with full assurance, uncompromisingly living that out, we the church are, as Paul put it in Chapter 2, we’re God’s poiema, his beautiful, finely crafted handywork.  We put on display God’s wisdom in all its polypoikilos, the ESV translates it “manifold”.  I’m tempted to translate it a little more freely as something like “all the colours of the rainbow”.  Think of the vision of the church in Revelation 7—an uncountable multitude from every nation, tribe and tongue.  The church is meant to display the polychromed, Technicolor glory of God’s new creation and, in doing so, to reveal the shabby drabness of this wicked old age and its gods and kings.  But what the church has done instead is to fracture.  This colour here and that colour over there.  It’s to our shame.  And perhaps it’s because we ourselves have lost the glory of that Technicolor world the church is meant to represent, we seem to be perpetually drawn back to the shabby drabness of the present age and it’s cheap attempts to do what only Jesus and the Spirit can do.  Again, we treat the church and the gospel like commodities to marketed and to be bought and sold.  We try to divide our loyalty between Jesus and mammon or sex or power.  We become captivated by the ugliness of violence and war.  Or we sell our souls for a mess of political pottage, losing our vision of new creation and our passion for goodness, truth, and beauty and instead of trusting in the God who will bring it about, we trust in horses and chariots and chase after lesser evils instead of the good.  Brothers and Sisters, that what the principalities and powers, that’s what the devils want.  They want us to think that we can bring God’s kingdom by using the world’s ways.  But it won’t, it can’t work.  Because doing so simply paints the church with the same shabby drabnesss of their world and casts a veil over the glory of God and the goodness of the gospel.  It removes us as a threat to those powers.   But when we are faithful to being the church.  When we are uncompromising in our loyalty to Jesus.  When love one another and are truly one, instead of fracturing our witness to the unity of the people of God, that’s when the world and its rulers take notice.  They recognise that, as Paul wrote back in 2:6, we are already seated with God in the heavenly places in the Messiah.  That doesn’t mean we’re somehow above the mess.  Instead it means we’re right here in the midst of the mess, taking on the corrupt and evil powers of this age with power of the cross of Jesus for the sake of the people around us.  We’re here, with the authority of heaven, to shine the light of the gospel and to put on full display the Technicolor glory of God.  Even as the powers fight back.   We’ve all seen it.  It’s not always as obvious as Paul being in prison.  More often than not, it seems that when a church being faithful to preach God’s word and to live out the gospel and the life of the Spirit, all hell comes at us out of nowhere.  People start grumbling and creating divisions.  People leave over stupid things.  World or national events distract us from the gospel. or divisions become obstacles to faithfulness.  Those are times for prayer and to double-down on faithfulness to Jesus and the gospel when we’re tempted to give up or tempted to compromise.  But Paul would tell us to be prepared.  When you’re being faithful, when a church is putting on display the manifold wisdom of God—new creation—the enemies of the gospel will see, they’ll feel the threat, they will strike back.  That’s why Paul was in prison.  And he tells them, “That’s your glory.”   Think again back to the Solomon’s dedication of the temple.  That stunningly grand and beautiful building, skilfully and purposefully crafted so that the glorious presence of God could dwell with in it.  So that God could shine forth from it.  That was the glory of his people on display for the sake of the whole world.  And Solomon and all Israel watched as the cloud of glory descended and filled the temple.  I always struggle to visualize just how amazing that must have been.  But the key takeaway here is this, Brothers and Sisters: that glory now indwells us.  We are now God’s temple, his skilfully and purposefully crafted handiwork, purified by the blood of Jesus, so that he can dwell in us.  And if we, by his grace and sure of promises, are faithful to be what he has made, we will shine forth that glory: life in the midst of death, light in the midst of darkness, hope in the midst of despair, glorious Technicolour in the midst of dreary mud puddles, new creation in the midst of the hold.   Let’s pray: Almighty God, consider the heartfelt desires of your servants, we pray,  and stretch out the right hand of your majesty to defend us against all our enemies, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Place Where God Will Live Ephesians 2:11-22 by William Klock   In today’s Old Testament lesson we hear King Solomon praying at the dedication of the temple.  The temple was finally completed and Solomon gathered the elders of Israel at the tabernacle, where they offered sacrifices too many to number.  Then with the priests leading them with the ark of the covenant, they processed up the mountain to the temple.  When they’d placed it in the holy of holies, the presence of the Lord, the shekinah, the cloud of his glory descended to fill the temple as it once had the tabernacle.  And Solomon prayed.  He prayed for the new temple and he prayed for his people.  He prayed that they would be faithful.  And then, our lesson today, he prayed for the foreigners, for the gentiles who might come to the Lord’s temple having heard of his great name, his mighty hand, and his outstretched arm—that coming to the temple, they would know his glory.  Solomon’s kingdom was, however imperfectly, a fulfilment of the Lord’s promise to Abraham to make Israel a light to the nations.  And the nations came to Israel and to Solomon, because they saw and because they heard of the Lord’s reputation.  Not only had he blessed his people, but in him they saw a god unlike their own.  And so they came, and they saw for themselves the goodness of the Lord, the God of Israel.  And Solomon knew, too, that they would come to the temple that he’d built.  So he prayed that when these foreigners came and prayed, that the Lord would answer them, that he would make himself known to them, so that “all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel.”  Again, this wasn’t some one-off prayer that Solomon came up with.  Solomon’s prayer is rooted in the promises of God and in the story of his people.  Solomon knew that the world is not as it should be; Solomon knew the Lord’s promises to set it to rights; and Solomon knew that God had given an integral role to his people to bring the fulfilment of those promises.  And Solomon great desire was for his people to be faithful to that calling, to that vocation—faithful to be a temple people.   Now, this imagery and idea of the temple wasn’t new with Israel; it goes all the way back to the beginning of the story.  The garden was God’s first temple.  And the man and woman he created—he created them—us—to bear his image.  That means to be his representatives in the temple, to serve him, and steward his goodness to the rest of creation.  We rejected that vocation and the story ever since has been about God restoring his temple and his people.  Two weeks ago, when we looked at Ephesians 2:1-10, we saw how Jesus—the one in whom God and humanity have come together—represents God’s work to restore his temple, but we also saw there that, as Paul stresses so much, what is true of Jesus is also true of those who are in him.  One day his people will be raised to be like him—heaven and earth people—but in the meantime, God has filled his church—filled us—with his Spirit as a foretaste and a down payment of that hope.  Brothers and Sisters, that means that we, purified by the blood of Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit, we’re now the temple—not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a temple of people filled with God’s presence.   Just as Solomon prayed that the nations would know the glorious reputation of the God of Israel through his people and come to meet him at his temple, our prayer, our desire, our commitment ought to be that the world will know God’s glorious reputation through us and come to meet him here.  What God promised to Adam and Eve, to Abraham, to Moses, to the people through the Prophets is now reality in us.  The promise isn’t completely fulfilled.  One day the knowledge of the glory of God will fill the earth.  On that day the new creation that began when Jesus rose from the dead will come to full fruit.  Creation and us with it will be made fully new.  God will wipe every last remaining bit of evil from the world and sin and death will be no more.  But, Brothers and Sisters, here’s the really important thing here: The church—you and I and everyone else who is in Jesus the Messiah—we are God’s vehicle to get the world to that point.  The church is God’s means of making his glory known until it fills the earth.  And that ought to get us reflecting on how faithful we are to our mission.  When the world looks at the Church, when it looks at Christians, does what we say and do and live declare the glory of God: his great name, his mighty hand, and his outstretched arm?  (To put it as Solomon did.)  Does what we say and do and live give the world a desire to come to the church to meet God?  Do we at least make the world constructively curious?  If not, we need to reflect on our priorities and on what we’re doing.   And this is true of everyone who is in Jesus the Messiah, but Paul, writing to the Ephesians who were mostly gentile believers, wants to stress to them just how significant it is that through Jesus and the Spirit they have been made a part of this temple people.  Brothers and Sisters, this is something that we don’t spend enough time talking about and reflecting on.  For Paul, the unification of Jews and gentiles in the Messiah was at the heart of the gospel.  It was the proof that God was fulfilling his promises.  This church, made up of Jews and gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, all together, unified, one body was a testimony to the glory of God.  In fact, for Paul, it was the testimony of the gospel’s power.   And I don’t think it’s even on the radar for many of us today, because we’ve become so used to and even so complacent about divisions within the church.  Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Romans, and Eastern Orthodox—and those are just some older divisions amongst us before we got really split-happy in the last century or two.  And it’s not just theology and polity.  I suspect Paul might have at least a little sympathy for those sorts of divisions, especially over serious, gospel-compromising theological matters.  But Paul would be furious to see how we divide over things like language and ethnicity.  The English are here and the Germans are at that Lutheran church and the Swedes at that other Lutheran church and the Italians and Spanish and Filipinos are at the Roman church and the Greeks at the Greek Orthodox, the Russians at the Russian Orthodox, the Ukrainians at the Ukrainian Orthodox, the Syrians at the Syrian Orthodox.  The Dutch are in their Reformed church and the Scots are in their Reformed church.  And there’s a church just for Chinese-speakers and another for Afrikaans and so on and on.  And you’ve got Messianic Jews forming their own synagogues.  And Paul would be shouting at us and asking, “Haven’t you read a single thing I’ve written to you?  Your divisions are undermining the very gospel you claim to preach!”   Paul did not want this to happen in the Ephesian churches, but even more than that, he wanted the people in those churches, especially he wanted them to appreciate just what God had done for them in Jesus and the Spirit, because if we understand what God has done to make us one, we’ll hopefully be far less likely to let it be undone.  So, Paul writes in Ephesians 2:11-12 and reminds them of what they used to be: “Therefore, remember this: In human terms—that is, in your ‘flesh’—you are ‘gentiles’.  You are the people whom the so-called circumcision refer to as the so-called uncircumcision—circumcision, of course, being something done by human hands to human flesh.  Well, once upon a time you were separated from the Messiah.  You were alienated from the community of Israel.  You were foreigners to the covenants of promise.  There you were in the world, with no hope and no God.”   You were gentiles.  Of course, Gentiles didn’t think of themselves that way.  They were just regular people; it was the Jews who were weird.  But the fact that Paul can say this to them, “You were gentiles” means that they’ve now been brought into the family of Israel.  And just in case they might have forgotten the significance of that, he describes them as having been outsiders with this string of descriptors that work up to a crescendo of alienation.   First, they were separated from the Messiah—from the rightful King.  The Messiah was some weird thing the Jews were into.  What would Greeks or Romans—who were oh, so superior—want to have to do with him?  And even if they did, the Messiah wasn’t part of their story.  Then second, Paul says that they were alienated from the community—the commonwealth as the King James puts it—of Israel.  They were foreigners.  Israel was not their nation and Israel’s God was not their God.  Even if they did see something attractive in Israel and went to the temple in Jerusalem—think of Solomon’s prayer for the foreign visitors who would come—there was a wall between the court of the gentiles and the court of the women.  In Paul’s day there was an inscription on that wall warning that foreigners passed it on pain of death.  Gentiles could look from a distance, but they were cut off from the living God.  And third, they were foreigners to the covenants of promise.  Most of them had never heard of Abraham or Moses, but if they had, that simply wasn’t their story and it certainly wasn’t their family.  They didn’t belong there.  Whatever promises the God of Israel had made, those promises were not for the gentiles.  And Paul then sums it all up and says: You were in the world without God and without hope.   I think Paul intends a bit of irony there.  When he says they were without God he uses a word that essentially means they were atheists.  And “atheist” is exactly what the gentiles called Jews and the first Christians.  Because Jews and Christians worshipped only one God and one God might as well have been no god to them with their vast pantheons.  And Jews and Christians refused to take part in the pagan worship and festivals that ran all through gentile life and society.  And so Paul flips it around.  “No, it was you gentiles, separated from the Messiah, alienated from Israel, foreigners to the covenant promises—it was you who were the atheists.  You were the ones without God.  And because of that you had no hope.  And if being called atheists didn’t make an impact, I have to think this would have.  Because it’s not that the Greeks and Romans didn’t understand the idea of hope; it’s that they had no reason, no grounds to live with hope.  No one in their world believed in progress the way people do today.  That idea is rooted in our biblical heritage.  They thought things just went round and round in cycles—forever stuck.  And while their philosophers might talk about life after death, it was all very vague and not hopeful at all.  Hesiod imprisoned hope in the bottom of Pandora’s box, lost forever.  Aristotle and others wrote about hope as fickle and treacherous—a foolish thing to trust in.  Things could go wrong just as easily as they could go right.  Hope just wasn’t a big deal for the Greeks.  But in stark contrast, hope was at the centre of the whole Jewish and early Christian worldview.  As I said last time, no one in the pagan world would have ever dreamed that the gods loved them or even really cared about them, so why would anyone in the pagan world have reason to hope?  So Paul sums it all up: Without God and without hope, the gentiles were alone and lost in the world.  Paul reminds them just how bleak things were for them before they were captured by the gospel.  I think it’s a good thing for us to reflect on this ourselves and if we did, I think we would have a greater appreciation for what God has done for us and for what he has made his church.   So after painting this bleak and pitiful picture of where these people were before Jesus, Paul cuts through the hopelessness and despair.  Like he did with that great, “But God!” in verse 3, now in verse 13 he practically shouts out, “But now!”   “But now, in Messiah Jesus, you who used to be far away have been brough near by the Messiah’s blood.  He is our peace, you see.  He has made the two to be one.  He has pulled down the barrier, the dividing wall, that turns us into enemies of each other.  He has done this in his flesh, by abolishing the law with its commands and instructions.”   Paul wrote about the Messiah’s blood back in Chapter 1.  Jesus’ blood is the means through which God has accomplished redemption and forgiveness.  This was the great, once-and-for-all-time sacrifice that the Old Testament sacrificial system was pointing to all along.  In the Old Testament, sacrificial blood was like a disinfectant.  It cleansed the tabernacle and later the temple; and it cleansed the people of Israel so that the holy God could come to his people and dwell with them.  Pagan sacrifices were all about killing valuable animals to placate the gods.  In Israel, the sacrifices were all about the blood—a symbol of God-given life—and that blood was shed to wash away the stain of sin and death so that God could come and dwell and fellowship with his people.  Brothers and Sisters, the blood of Jesus, shed at the cross, has fully accomplished once and for all and for everyone what the Old Testament sacrifices did partially and temporarily.  And in doing that, God has abolished the law.   You see, the law was the thing that set Israel apart from the rest of the world and Paul saw that wall in the court of the gentiles as symbolic of it.  The law, like that wall, kept the gentiles out of God’s people, out of his covenant, and out of his promises.  The law marked out the gentiles as idolaters and as unclean—unworthy of God’s presence.  But Jesus’ blood has washed us clean—Jew and gentile alike—making both the law and the wall that kept the gentiles out irrelevant.  In Jesus, God had brought these Greek believers into the family—fully and no longer aliens and foreigners.  And why?  Paul goes on in the second half of verse 15:   “The point of doing all this was to create, in him, one new humanity out of the two, so making peace.  God was reconciling  both of us to himself in a single body, through the cross, by killing the enmity in him.”   Do you remember the first thing the risen Jesus said to his disciples when he entered that locked-up house where they were hiding after he’d been crucified?  It was “Peace”.  Shalom.  Peace is what the world looks like set to rights.  And so it makes perfect sense that “Peace” would be the first thing Jesus would say to his disciples after rising from death and inaugurating God’s new creation.  He’d just begun the work of setting the world to rights.  And for Paul, this new humanity—Jews and gentiles, once divided by the law, but now brought together—this new humanity, the church, is the first sign of God’s peace breaking out into the world.  The church is the sign of the new age.  As I’ve said before, we are God’s working model of his new creation.  Jesus has killed the enmity that was once between us and he has reconciled both to God and, through that, to each other.  Jesus’ blood as washed us clean and Paul stresses regularly to his fellow Jews, this means there’s no longer any reason to consider gentile believers in Jesus to be unclean.  We gentiles, with hearts renewed by the Holy Spirit, have turned away from our idols to serve the living God and by the blood of Jesus he has washed us clean.  And if there’s any doubt, Paul would point to the fact that the same Spirit has come to fill the gentile believers who first filled the Jewish believers.  So he goes on in verse 17: “So the [he Messiah] came and proclaimed peace, to you who were far off and to those who were near.  Through him we both have access to the Father in one Spirit.”  Again, it’s all the fulfilment of God’s promises.  In Isaiah 57 God had promised that he would heal the broken and humble in spirit and give peace: peace for those far off and peace for those who are near.  He’s now done that in Jesus and the unity of the church—these people who were once separated, these people who once hated each other—their unity in the Messiah as one people is the proof, the testimony, the witness of God’s faithfulness and the power of the gospel.   And Paul, again, wants to drive this home.  Look at verses 19 to 22: “So then [—this is the result—] you are no longer foreigners and aliens.  No, you are fellow citizens with God’s holy people.  You are members of God’s household.  You are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Messiah Jesus himself as the cornerstone.  In him the whole building is fitted together, and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  You, too, are being built up together, in him, into a place where God will live by the Spirit.”   The point of all this is that through Jesus and the Spirit, the living God has welcomed us into this amazing story.  We’ve been adopted into a family that was not ours.  We were poor, dirty refugees without hope, but God has washed us clean in the blood of Jesus, he has made us welcome members of his family, and most importantly, he has come to dwell with us.  He has filled us—aliens, foreigners, strangers, gentiles—with his Spirit—the presence that he had promised to his own people and in doing that he has made us holy.  And just just because.  God has a purpose for us.  He always has.   And this is where Paul stops hinting at things with temple language and imagery and comes out and says it: God has done this in order to establish a new temple.  For centuries the Jews had been waiting for God’s presence to return to the temple, not that unlike the way so many Jews today go to the Western Wall and pray for a new temple and God’s return.  Brother and Sisters, Paul’s stressing that God has, in fact, returned, that he has built a new temple, and that he now dwells with his people.  But not in a stone building on the mountain above Jerusalem.  He has built is new temple and returned to live with his people through Jesus and the Spirit.   And, again, that means that we—the church—are God’s ongoing means of fulfilling his promises to set creation to rights.  God’s presence with us is the sign that one day his presence will fill all of creation.  We are the temple, the working model of new creation.  As we proclaim the gospel, we proclaim the glories of God to the world.  As we live the gospel, we put on display the glories of God to the world.  And our unity in Jesus and the Spirit—something we’ve often forgotten—is one of the most important ways we ought to be living out the gospel.  Just as there was one temple in Israel, there is only one church.  By our divisions and schism and arguments, by our elevating language and race and nation over the gospel, we’ve often obscured this reality, but Brothers and Sisters, there is but one church and the unity of that one church across our natural divisions of language and race—and class, and status, and every other way the world divides and separates us—that unity is meant to be a witness.  A witness to the power of the gospel.  A witness to the power of Jesus and the cleansing power of his blood.  A witness to the Holy Spirit who indwells every believer.  And most of all, witness to the faithfulness of God, who has been true to his promises.  And through that, our unity becomes a witness to a bleak and hopeless world of God’s coming new creation—not just of the world set to rights, but of humanity set to rights within it: one people, renewed and purified, in fellowship forever with the living God.   Let’s pray: Gracious Father, you have purified us by the blood of your Son and filled us with your Spirit to make us your temple.  Pour out your grace that we might be faithful stewards of the gifts you have given us.  Teach us to guard the unity of your church, so that the nations will see in us a witness to your mighty hand, your outstretched arm, and your great name.  And when they draw near, hear their prayers, we ask, that they might know your great name as we have, through your Son and through your Spirit.  Amen.

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent Ephesians 2:1-10 by The Rev’d Dr. Matthew Colvin             Week after week, I see Pastor Bill preaching the Bible to you on Sundays, and I want to commend him to you. I’m not sure you are aware how rare it is to have a pastor who does his own translation work in the Hebrew and Greek, and who attempts, with diligence and great effort, to read the text of the Bible anew, divide it up properly, and serve it to you. What matters to Pastor Bill in his preaching to you is what the Bible actually says — the actual point of the gospels’ stories, or the actual meaning of the prophecies of the prophets, or the actual meaning of Paul’s arguments in his letters — not what famous theologians have used the Bible to say, or what scholastic medieval philosophy says it can and cannot mean, or the way modern self-help gurus can use Bible verses out of context to tell a very different story. If you attend to the words delivered from this pulpit, you are being trained to understand the Bible on its own terms, rather than watching as a slick speaker uses the Bible to express his own ideas. The story needs to be your story; you are to think of yourself as a child of Abraham, as a sharer in Israel’s Messiah, as someone in covenant with Israel’s God. Since it is the first Sunday in Lent, we are confronted with the very first episode of Jesus’ public ministry after his baptism by John the Baptist. This story has much to teach us about Jesus’ work as the Messiah, the nature of his sufferings, and ultimately, the way we ought to think about God Himself. I want to start by thinking about what it means when the Messiah goes into the desert. In Acts 21, when Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, the Roman centurion is surprised that he knows Greek: “Are you not the Egyptian, then, who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand men of the Assassins out into the wilderness?" -Acts 21:38 (I joke to my Greek students that knowing Greek is handy if you are ever suspected of being a terrorist.) In Acts 5, Gamaliel mentioned Judas of Galilee and Theudas, false messiahs who also started their rebellions against Rome by going out into the wilderness. Why do so many messiahs begin this way? Because they are attempting recapitulate of Israel’s story. And the true Messiah also relives the story of Israel, embodying it in the events that happen to him: he has already gone down to Egypt to escape a tyrannical attempt to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem, much as Pharaoh tried to kill all the male Hebrew babies; he has already been baptized in the Jordan, as Paul says Israel was “baptized in the cloud and in the sea” of the Exodus; and now he goes into the Wilderness to be tempted for 40 days, as Israel was tempted for 40 years. Covenant history rhymes, as the saying goes. So that is why Jesus is in the desert. There remains explain why he is being tested, and how he resists that temptation, and what these things tell us about the Messiah and about God. We must recognize that Jesus resisted Satan’s temptation as true man, as a matter of his messianic office. Jesus’ self-understanding as the Messiah was in terms of the latter chapters of Isaiah, i.e. the suffering servant. This understanding of his calling is why he girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper; it is why he set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem; it is why he undertakes to drink the cup of suffering, and sheds sweat like drops of blood falling to the ground during his agonized prayer in Gethsemane. Being this kind of Messiah involved contradicting the expectations that other men had about what the Messiah would be like. When Jesus is on trial, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, for instance, asks him — in a question whose statement-like word order indicates incredulity — “You are the king of the Jews?” (that is the word order, sarcastic or incredulous), and then puts over his head a sign reading “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” in three languages, so that everyone could get the joke. Pilate mocks Jewish pretensions to even have a king. That is why he refused to change the sign to say only “He claimed to be the king of the Jews.”  It is also why he also brings out Barabbas and asks the Jews, “Whom do you want me to give to you? Barabbas, or the king of the Jews?” Pilate is operating with the standard pagan understanding of kingship: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:25-28) Pontius Pilate and the Romans were expecting someone taller, perhaps. Of course, Jesus could have met those expectations, as he told the soldiers who arrested him in Gethsemane: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53) It isn’t that he couldn’t just blow the Romans away with fire from heaven. But that is not his agenda. That is not what the Messiah has come to do. He has come “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus also has to correct the expectation of the Jews about what the Messiah is to be like — even the expectation of his own disciples! It is this self-understanding that makes Jesus tell his disciples in Mt 16:22-23 that “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Peter’s suggestion that Jesus could be the Mesiah without suffering and dying is so inimical to Jesus’ self-understanding and his mission that he calls Peter “Satan.” And rightly so, because what Peter is suggesting is pretty much of the same spirit as what Satan himself suggests in our gospel lesson this morning. So that is the background: Jesus as the true Israelite, the Messiah, is in the desert, not to lead a rebellion or a gang of terrorists, but to be tested as Israel was tested. Against all this background, we are ready to hear the words, both of Satan tempting, and of Jesus answering, and hear them with richer and fuller meaning — meaning not from Greek philosophy or self-help gurus or even systematic theologians, but rather, from the story of Israel. With his first temptation, Satan seeks to exploit Jesus’ hunger:   “The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written,  "'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" (Matthew 4:3-4)   Any of you who have ever been hangry know exactly why Satan is doing this. Jesus, no less than we, lived his earthly incarnate life in a body, and that body was subject to weakness. Jesus is not like Superman, so that bullets or nails would bounce off his skin. He was capable of suffering, and he did suffer. Satan is suggesting that Jesus should exploit his Messianic status — for that is what is meant by “If you are the Son of God” — and use it to avoid this suffering. Take your authority over all creation and use it to transform stones into bread. This is not a ridiculous suggestion. It is similar to Jesus’ first miracle in John’s gospel, where he turned water into wine for the wedding at Cana. But the aim of the action here would be quite different. Satan’s meaning is basically the same as Peter’s suggestion: “Suffer from hunger? Why put up with that? This shall never happen to you!” Jesus’ answer is a quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3. (In fact, all three of Jesus’ answers to Satan are from Deuteronomy. (Dt. 8:3, 6:16, and 6:13). That is, they are taken from Moses’ instructions to Israel about how to live with the Lord. Jesus is the one who follows Deuteronomy’s description of the faithful Israelite perfectly.) As so often, however, Jesus’ quotations of the Old Testament are metaleptic —a fancy Greek word that means “takes along with it.” The idea here is that if I say, “We stand on guard for thee,” it would be a mistake for someone to try to understand that utterance merely by using a dictionary to look up “stand” and “guard” and so forth. The meaning of that phrase is rather to be found in the larger context of the Canadian national anthem as a whole, because that is how everyone who hears it will immediately start thinking in their minds: all the other verses will come flooding into your minds; you will perhaps recall occasions when you sang it: in school, or at sporting events; or watching a Olympic medal ceremony. Just so, when Jesus quotes the Old Testament, every Israelite hearer will not just think of the words he quotes; he will think also of the surrounding context, the story in which those words first occurred. So when we look at Deuteronomy 8:3, we should also think about the immediately preceding verse:   "The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.” (Deuteronomy 8:1-2)   And then it goes on to say, in the very next verse, “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deuteronomy 8:3) This is what Jesus has in mind: he has been in the wilderness for forty days, being humbled, being tested. He answers Satan from the very passage of Deuteronomy that has to do with his situation: it is about testing in the wilderness. He has been thinking about this verse for a while now.   The tempter’s second try is with a more showy possibility:   Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,  "'He will command his angels concerning you,'  and  "'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" -Matthew 4:6   This would be an impressive display! Who could fail to follow a Messiah who had made such a proof of divine power? Jesus had answered the first temptation by quoting Scripture. But the devil can quote Scripture for his purposes, so Satan appeals to lines from Psalm 91:11-12. And again, he knows what he is doing: at a time when Jesus feels alone, when he is in the desert, Satan tempts him with lines from that most comforting song: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.” It is full of promises of God’s protection and deliverance: in battle, from wild animals, from dangerous diseases. And yet it is singularly inappropriate for Jesus’ messianic vocation: He has come to suffer and die. To avail himself of divine protection against these sufferings would be to deny his messiahship.   So Jesus replies with words from Deuteronomy again.   "Again it is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" -Matthew 4:7   This is from Deuteronomy 6, that chapter which contains the Shema, the single verse of the Torah that could be called the creed of Israel: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” It is the core chapter of the Torah about Israel’s relationship with God. He has rescued her from Egypt and taken her to Himself to be His bride; at Mount Sinai, he has married her.   But Israel was not faithful. She tested the Lord like a wife acting up to trying to make her husband angry. When there was no water to drink, Exodus 17 says, “Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, "Give us water to drink." And Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?" (Exodus 17:2) The verb used here, and also by Jesus in Matthew 4:7, is πειράζω.   Note well: Who was doing the testing in the wilderness for 40 years? Exodus and Deuteronomy say it clearly: Israel was testing YHWH. And thus, we may perceive some clever irony in Jesus’ answer to Satan here. For Satan is called “the tempter,” and in Greek, that is nothing other than a participle form of this same verb πειράζω, literally, “the testing one.” So on the one hand, Jesus’ quotation of Deuteronomy 6:16 could mean, “You are asking me to test God by throwing myself down from the Temple. I am not going to do it, because Moses warned Israel not to test God.” But it could also mean, “You are testing God, Satan.”   Satan doesn’t take the hint. He keeps on testing Jesus. There will be more attempts later, but the last temptation that Satan tries on Jesus in the wilderness is narrated like this:   Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." -Matthew 4:8-9   Why does Satan take him to a very high mountain? In the Bible, mountaintop scenes are real estate transactions. If I sell you this pen, it’s simple enough: you put money in my hand, and I put the pen in yours, and you carry it away with you. But houses and land don’t fit in your pocket. So we have other procedures. In our day, we get banks and notaries involved and sign a lot of documents. But in the ancient world, you took possession by inspecting the property after the transfer.  This is done in the case of Abram in Genesis 13:17: “Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you.” The same thing happens when Moses is about to die; in one sense, Moses doesn’t get the promised land, because he dies before he can enter into it; but in another sense, God actually gives him the land, because he takes him up on a mountain and shows it to him, and this is the formal transfer of the land: “Go up this mountain of the Abarim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, across from Jericho; view the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel as a possession..” (Deuteronomy 32:49)   Satan is attempting to use the same convention in Matthew 4:8. He is trying to get Jesus to make a deal, offering the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worship. But Jesus has no need to make such a bargain, for God had already promised to give the Messiah everything Satan is offering, and Jesus, whose self-understanding as the Messiah is shaped by Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, knows it very well from Isaiah 49:   The Lord says: "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." (Isaiah 49:6)   He knows it also from Psalm 2:   I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, "You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.   Ask of God. Not of Satan. The nations belong to the Lord, not to Satan. Jesus has no intention of making a bargain to purchase what Satan wrongly claims to own. In Matthew 12, after the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan, Jesus replies that,   How can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. (Matthew 12:29)   And he does plunder it. We see the result in Revelation 20:   “And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer...” -Revelation 20:3   And as for the real estate deal Satan was trying to make, well, we see the end of that at the very end of Matthew’s gospel. For the Great Commission too takes place on a mountain, and this setting seems significant, especially in light of Jesus’ declaration that “all authority in heaven and earth” has been given to Him. This is a pointed contrast with Satan’s lying statement, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.” (Luke 4:6 NKJV) Quite the contrary, Jesus, having refused Satan’s bargain, and having bound him and plundered his goods, now bestows the kingdom on His disciples and takes possession of the nations by sending his disciples to teach and baptize them.   I want to end by correcting three misapprehensions that some people might have about this story, which may prevent them from grasping what it teaches us about God.   One mistake some have is that Jesus didn’t really suffer in the wilderness; that His divine nature was smirking and unbothered by Satan’s temptations aimed at his human nature; that all these things just rolled off of Jesus like water off a duck’s back. We know this was not the case. Recall Gethsemane again, where Jesus begged the Father to “take this cup from me,” and his sweat fell to the ground like drops of blood — drops of blood, not water off a duck’s back.   A second mistake would be to think that, yes, Jesus suffered, but that’s only because He is human. But that is not what the Bible says. It says that Jesus revealed the Father by his sufferings; that if you want to know what the Father is like, you should look at Jesus, for He who has seen Him has seen the Father. Greek philosophers say that God is an unmoved mover, and that God cannot suffer because he is perfect; but the Bible tells us that Jesus was “made perfect by sufferings.” (Heb. 5:9) Greek philosophers tell us that God cannot be afflicted; the Bible says that “in all their afflictions, He was afflicted.” (Isaiah 63:9) Greeks and Romans thought that suffering was miserable and degrading, and that if you are suffering, you must not have any glory or power; the Bible says that Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore — not in spite of his sufferings, but because of them! — God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” (Philippians 2:8) There is no clearer picture of Israel’s God than the cross of Jesus Christ. That is where we finally see God fully revealed.   Finally, a third mistake would be to think that, yes, Jesus’ sufferings were powerful and important, but ours are not. The truth is exactly the opposite. As George MacDonald put it, “The Son of God suffered, not that we might not suffer, but that our sufferings might be like His.” And they are. “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory...” (2 Corinthians 4:17) We are in the Messiah. His story, Israel’s story, is our story. In Him, we are faithful Israelites, true to Deuteronomy 6. In Him, we are the suffering servant of Isaiah’s prophecies. In Him, the kingdoms of the world belong to us. In Him, we too are victorious over Satan.   Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake you fasted forty days and forty nights: give us grace so to discipline ourselves that our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may always obey your will in righteousness and true holiness, to the honour and glory of your name; for you live and reign with the Father and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.