Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Ephesians 4
Summary: In Ephesians 4, Paul calls the church to unity in the way of Jesus — a high task that we continue to struggle with! We work towards unity of walking in the way of Jesus, serving those in need and those less fortunate than ourselves, being rooted and grounded in love as we seek to imitate Christ.
Greetings everyone, it’s so good to be with you! This is one of those weeks where I woke up early and re-wrote a big chunk of my sermon, so forgive me if I am not as polished as I sometimes am.
Why, you may ask, did this happen? I think, honestly, it’s because I can find the epistles a little bit…tricky. Frankly, I haven’t worked in the epistles much at all, in seminary, nor until now — and while I think this is positively due to the Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on focusing primarily on Jesus’ life and ministry, we do miss a lot when we don’t dwell in the epistles as well. But, unlike the gospels, or even many parts in the Old Testament, when we open up to an epistle, we aren’t going to get a succinct story with a beginning, an end, and characters we know well — instead, reading epistles is kind of like tuning in to a lecture.
Now, I’m the first person to say that in the right context, lectures can be extremely wonderful and fun — and part of what makes them fun is connecting them to something practical, something we can more easily understand.
So I asked myself — what story of God from elsewhere in the bible most reflects how Paul is describing God in this passage? As I thought on this a bit, I realized I think Paul is trying to describe God here a bit like the Father in the story of the prodigal son. One of my first Sundays here Pastor Tig preached a great sermon on that parable, and it’s a good one to always remember — that God knows us, and knows our failures, but always celebrates us coming home.
In this chapter and throughout Ephesians, Paul is reminding us that we, too, used to be cut off from God, and living in ways that weren’t good for us, or those around us — but that God is always waiting for us to come back, to come on home to the way of Jesus. =
And this isn’t just a message for us — it’s a message we are then asked to share in our lives — now that we’ve been welcomed home by God, we live our lives to share this invitation with others. When we encounter other Christians, and non-Christians we are meant to tell ‘em to come on home to the way of life in Jesus — this is what I think is at the heart of this chapter, and really the whole epistle to the Ephesians.
As Christians, we can lose our way — the world is complicated, sin is real, and there seem to be ever more issues and topics calling for our attention and loyalty. But, friends, there’s good news: God is always calling us to come on home to the way of Jesus, to spreading the good news of God, of reconciliation and wholeness in the arms of the creator.
Tig has done a great job in our series on Ephesians so far — and I’m really enjoying this deep-dive into an Epistle, it really feels needed for me, and Ephesians is really exceeding my expectations.
But, this doesn’t mean Ephesians isn’t without some serious tough spots, as Tig mentioned last week…but most of those are for my sermon next week; and yes, thanks Tig for laying out the series so I got them rather than you!
Also, before we dive in I want to mention that this is a bit of an experiment sermon, where I’m trying out a bit more of an expository, verse by verse, preaching style — while we had the first few verses of the chapter read already, as I preach I’ll be reading almost all of the chapter. Sometimes it’s good to mix it up, and sometimes it’s good for preachers to ‘get out of the way’ of the scriptures a bit — because Paul has some really incredible things to say.
And knowing who Paul used to be — a zealot against the people of the way of Jesus — it is remarkable how gentle, humble and patient he seems in most of this book, here at the end of his life, writing from prison in Rome. Picture this Paul with me for a minute — weather-beaten from years on the road, tired, getting on in years, probably with a long beard, pale and weak from long months indoors; and imagine his joy and maturity despite his chains — his surety of rest in the good news, his smile as he writes to his friends, brothers and sisters in the faith that he knows well, and misses. It is this Paul we’re hearing from today.
So, as we work through the chapter, I want you to listen for three things — first, that God is still calling all Christians to come on home to the work of the church — peace with God and peace with others. Second, we need to walk in a way consistent with our mission of all-encompassing love, which means allowing the church to grow, change, and become somewhat varied in its form while not forgetting our shared mission; and third, we need to live new lives transformed by our relationship with God.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Verse 1 “I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”
What is the calling to which we’ve been called? To understand this verse, we need to back up a bit. Before closing chapter 3 in prayer, Paul states the mission of the church; this is chapter 3 verses 9 and 10: Paul has lived “to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places,” and he goes on to say everyone can now know God via Jesus.
This is our mission, too — that through us, the church, the wisdom of God revealed in Jesus would be made known to the rulers and authorities, to the power centers of our world, and to the everyday people we walk beside. The church exists to carry the knowledge and wisdom of God — the way of life — into the world, leading all towards God and wholeness.
And we don’t just speak this truth — we also live it; our witness is not in words alone. As Saint Francis said, we are to preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words. If we don’t live lives consistent with the message we preach, we become guilty of one of the easiest ways to lose trust and respect — hypocrisy. For the church to accomplish its mission of reconciliation and peace, we can’t just talk the talk, we have to walk the walk.
We need to remember — if we want ends of love between all people, and union with God, we need to use means consistent with those ends. We will not get to the redemption of creation, the lordship of Jesus, the king of peace and forgiveness, via hypocritical means — if we give into the temptation to use un-Godly means, we will not reach Godly ends.
Verses 2 to 6: walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”
In a clever use of biblical imagery here, Paul reminds us once again that God is both multi-faceted and unified at the same time, just as the church must be — and he reminds us that there are seven — the holy number — things that must unite the church.
But if you’re like me, there is a large question we need to address here — if Paul is so clear about the oneness of God and the church, why is there so much division within the body of Christ today? In Rockingham County, where Harrisonburg is, I’d count at least 20 denominations, and at least six significantly different kinds of Mennonites; in Northern Virginia I bet we have well over 100 denominations. How can we understand these divisions within the global body of Christians while still seeking to be faithful to this scripture, which calls all Christians to one-ness? Does all this division mean we’ve failed to head God speaking through scripture?
On one hand, obviously, yes — the division of the Church is one of the greatest failures of Jesus followers over the past two millennia.
But on the other hand, throughout church history, most attempts to unify the church have been disastrous, relying on violence rather than love, and have tended to have much more to do with economic and political power than actual faithfulness to the way of Jesus. We must remember that unity maintained by the sword of the state or the coercive power of the inquisition is not unity — we’re after unity of the spirit, which goes far beyond membership in any individual denominational structure.
While we don’t agree on everything with other Christians, and shouldn’t pretend we do, I’m glad to live in an era where we recognize our shared faith with Christians of other denominations, and even beyond that, recognize and truly live remembering that all people are created in the image of God, striving to live at peace with everyone.
But this doesn’t mean we fully set aside our understanding of Jesus and his way. I think it’s actually time that we as Anabaptist-Mennonites, particularly in conversation with other Christians, remember that this was actually one of the origin points of our movement — to return to the priorities and practices of the early church. Permit me a bit of church history —until Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity about 300 years after Jesus day, all Christians were pacifists and centered on loving those in need — core beliefs taught by Jesus — far more than simply on correct doctrine, church hierarchy, and the success of the empire. In hindsight, it looks like Rome converted Christianity much more than Christianity converted Rome — we still have a ways to go in correcting this tendency as a global body of Christ. May we pursue this goal in love and gentleness.
We are called to come on home to the way of Jesus — and I believe if we truly seek to follow Jesus’ commandments, including the crucial and hard ones to take up our own crosses, and to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, we can never take up the sword. We should not cheapen what it means to follow Jesus — we are called to lives of simplicity and service, not lives of wealth and comfort. We must never give in to the temptation that has entangled many of our brothers and sisters in other movements over the years — centering a king, or empire, or organization, rather than Jesus.
But this is not incompatible with diversity within the church. While we do strive for unity of core doctrine — and we understand righteous, peace-centered living as core — we can also recognize that diversity within the body of Christ is often good, not bad. If we go back to chapter 3 verse 10 again, we are revealing to the world “the wisdom of God in its rich variety” — It is actually a beautiful part of the Christian witness in the world that God’s rich variety is revealed by may peoples, nations, tribes, and races, many languages, from straight-laced Swiss-German that sing hymns to Pentecostal ecstaticness — God’s wisdom and way of life, based on scripture, does not require total uniformity, instead, our diversity highlights that God is bigger than our human divisions of race and class and culture.
A lovely quote, usually attributed to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement goes as follows: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
Now, this quote from Wesley doesn’t answer two crucial questions — “what are the essentials, and who determines them?” It is the varied answers to these two questions that have led to our diversity of Christian movements today — and it is crucial we discuss these questions continually; but as we do so, may we not forget what we’re really after: to come on home to the way of Jesus.
For sake of time, let’s jump to verses 11 and 12: “He himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”
Again Paul reminds that God, though one, gives radically different gifts — we need believers of all types for the church to be healthy. Some are apostles — founding new organizations and orders within the Christian family. Some are prophets — calling established organizations and communities back to the “love of Christ which they had at first,” calling the faithful even deeper into faithfulness. Some are evangelists, spreading the good news to places it has yet to reach. Some are pastors, dedicated to being present in the lives of the faithful in the here and now. And finally, teachers, using the mind to more fully reveal and pass on the way of Christ revealed in scripture. This diversity of gifts within the one church body doesn’t mean a diversity of missions, or division of the spirit — we are all parts of one body even as we walk in somewhat different ways, with different emphases.
One other thought on these five gifts — A deep sadness I carry these days, is what I see as division amongst people who have any one of these gifts very strongly. A temptation we all face at some point is to elevate the importance of our own gifts above the gifts of others — today, we too often see, for example, prophetic leaders and evangelistic leaders cut off from one another. For the church body to be whole and function well, we need both the prophetic, righteous-living strains of Christianity and the priestly, center God’s holiness, strains of Christian faith to all work together, uniting rather than dividing, building up rather than tearing down.
Verses 13 to 16: equip the saints “until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
Again, we see the theme of maturity — we must ask ourselves and our faith community often: are we moving deeper into relationship with God and other Christians, toward the unity God desires for us, or away from it? Are we moving more closely to the Jesus of the gospels, who rejected the temptation of military power, who overturned the money-first, racially in-group exclusive temple system? are we moving closer to Jesus of nazareth, who healed the sick, raised the dead, and preached peace to those near and far? When we remain unified in moving towards the one Jesus of scripture, when we are growing to be like him, good things happen in and through us.
Now for one of the tougher parts of the chapter, Verses 17 to 24: “Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer walk as the gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus, to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
I want to draw out the idea that the non-Christian Gentiles of this passage have “lost all sensitivity” — flipping it around, we can infer that one of the calls to faithfulness is to remain sensitive to the suffering and needs of those around us, even those we disagree with, even our enemies, even those people least like ourselves — when we desensitize ourselves to the suffering of others, we have abandoned the way of Christ for a way of greed — seeking our own happiness at the expense of others, as the Gentiles do. We need the reminder to come on home to seeing and experiencing the suffering of the world, so that we can be the hands and feet of Jesus in serving the least of these.
These days, it is easy to become desensitized to the horrors of man-made famine and devastation in Gaza, to the neo-colonialism of Russia, China, and often our own government, to the evils of economic inequality, to become desensitized to the homeless and downtrodden in our own country and city. We must not look away, there is still much work for us to do — may we not become desensitized to the suffering and needs of the world, as we were before we were in Christ.
Verses 25 to 28: “So then, putting away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with your neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Those who steal must give up stealing; rather, let them labor, doing good work with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”
As Christians, we first and foremost want to be givers, not takers. We are told to be angry, but not sin — here I think of Jesus cleansing the temple. We are allowed to be angry at injustice, at the failures of the church and world to care for the needy, at systems that put profit over people, that put money above the health of the planet, when we put ourselves over future generations — but we cannot allow our anger to become all-encompassing; righteous anger held on to for too long can become a foothold for the devil, morphing back into the wrath that destruction thrives on. Earlier in Ephesians, in chapter 2 verse 3, Paul reminds us that before we met Jesus, we were “Children of wrath, like everyone else.” So, while we can be angry, we must remain members of one another, seeking health and life, reconciliation and conversion, not destruction.
Verse 29 to 31: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only what is good for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.”
This final section laying out behaviors we should avoid as Christians points decisively towards one human organ being a major source of sin — the tongue. Remarkably, Paul uses seven different Greek words referring to speaking or talking between chapter 4 verse 26 and chapter 5 verse 6 — what we say matters. When we write and talk to and about one another and about our neighbors, we need to be extremely careful that we speak the truth in love for the sake of building up, rather than speaking for the sake of tearing down.
And finally, Verses 32 to 5:2: Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
This is a fitting message to end our sermon on today — as Christians, if we are anything, we must be people of forgiveness, especially to each other. We are resurrection people — God has overcome death through death and forgiven us; we have a forgiving God, so we must become a forgiving people. When we truly accept God’s forgiveness and grace for us, how can we fail to offer grace and forgiveness to those around us?
So — we’re called to many things as God-followers. We are called to unity in the essentials, remaining centered on and unified in Christ Jesus. We are called to diversity — that the church is strengthened by the breadth of its gifts and focuses. And finally, we are called back to the mission of reconciliation, wholeness, and peace — to share and model the good news of Jesus in word and deed, calling individuals, families, businesses, systems, even the whole world, towards God’s way of life.
As you go this week, I’m sure you’ll encounter some people in need of love, some people who have lost their way, like the prodigal son; when you see them this week, I want you to tell ‘em to come on home to the way of forgiveness and self-sacrificial love — tell ‘em to come on home to the way of Jesus. Pray with me.
God, you call us back, time and time again, to the narrow way — the way of grace, the way of forgiveness, the way of righteousness, the way of peace. Guide us, God, into deeper faithfulness to you, and to deeper forgiveness of our brothers and sisters. Amen.
