Pentecost +13 – Formation in Christ

Sermons – St. Brendan's Anglican Church

Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 by James Ensor

Pentecost+13 2024
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Ephesians 5:3-14

I am resolved to know nothing among you But Christ, Jesus and Him crucified. In the name of the living God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We are continuing our study of Ephesians, and as I did last time I preached, I want to back up, because a week is a long time and a month is even longer. In chapter one, we had an overview of the book, what it means to be in Christ. In Chapter Two, we saw how being in Christ gives us new life as individuals and as one body, especially as Jew and Gentile, are united in the Lord. And then in chapters three and four, we turn from the vertical relationship we have with God to our horizontal relationship with each other, focusing on the role of the speaking offices of the church in creating a unity of belief and doctrine that transform us into a new man in Christ, thinking first followed by action, which brings us to our reading ror today, Ephesians 5:3-14.

Writing in the 16th century, the Lutheran theologian Erasmus Caesarios commented that this chapter contains those habits that Paul encourages under the general heading of Love, against which he tells the Ephesians not to sin so as not to destroy the unity of doctrine, peace, harmony and edification of the church in our own age. The New Testament scholar Charles Talbrook says it more bluntly, the book of Ephesians simply presumes that conversion leads to moral renewal: habits and moral renewal, moral renewal and habits.

At first blush, this sounds sensible, obvious even. It may even sound doable, but when we really think about it, friends, this is not good news, because in the matter of habits, we’re a mess. Most of us want to change something in our lives, something about ourselves, but it’s hard, isn’t it? It’s hard.

A 2018 study in the journal American Clinics of North America says that 44% of US residents want to lose weight, and so they go on diets, 44% but within two years, most of those studies have regained more than they lost. AA, arguably the most successful addiction recovery program out there, nonetheless, humbly, states that only 13% of those who engage in their form of sobriety stay sober for 10 years or more. One in 10 change is hard. I could brag about my marriage that in our eight years of marriage, my wife, Kate and I have had no new arguments, and that sounds pretty good until you realize we’ve been actually just having the same two to three arguments for eight years,

Change is hard.

Paul today talks about vulgar speech, foolish talk, coarse jesting. Have you noticed what passes for public conversation today? Social media and the words in your heart, your heart, even if they never come out? Paul talks about sexual immorality, impurity of any kind, and greed. Have you noticed the world we live in? Have you noticed what’s marketed to us these days as virtues? At one level, I’m kind of an optimist. I truly believe that most people, and certainly most Christians, want something different in their lives and in themselves. False, but we wind up settling for the same old patterns, getting what we’ve always got, or maybe in a burst of enthusiasm, we try to change, and I don’t want to make light of it, we try so hard, we eventually fail, discouraged and dejected when I can’t even stay off social media for the sake of paying attention to my son. How do I think I can handle anything more complex?

Change is hard.

One of the hardest things I’ve come to realize in my own Christian life and in pastoring others is not so much that people don’t want a more Christian life, a more sanctified life, a more successful life, it’s that they’re beat down, worn out, and somewhere along the way, they’ve just given up. Our self-help plans, our Almighty willpower: just don’t work.

So how do we change? In an August 19, 2019, article in Psychology Today, Dr Justin Brewer argues that the key to lasting change isn’t us, perhaps pragmatically, but nonetheless honestly. He says, that the key to getting rid of old habits, the key to changing is simply finding a bigger better offer.

Finding a bigger, better offer, talking to the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, admitted that alcoholism was medically hopeless, medically hopeless, and that the only way a cure could be found was in a transformative spiritual experience, a bigger, better offer.

So here is where we are at this stage in looking at what Paul’s saying in this chapter, moral renewal requires good habits of the heart. Problem is we don’t have the best habits. Change is hard, if not impossible. We need a bigger, better offer to do what Paul’s suggesting today. We need a transformative, spiritual experience, and so in Paul’s thinking, then we have come full circle. We started with our vertical relationship with God. We’ve been talking about the horizontal, but if we’re going to have a lasting horizontal change in our behavior, our relationships, in our lives, we have to flip back to the vertical again. We don’t have it in us to live like this.

What’s required is a transformative spiritual experience in verses five and four. Today we’re going to work backward. Paul shows us that the real problem we are facing isn’t bad habits, it’s what’s underneath. And he’s going to show us how a properly ordered, vertical relationship with God is provided to us.

It’s not our striving, not our willpower, it’s what clothes us in the garments of the new man. Let’s listen to verse five. Again, chapter five, verse five, if you’re following along, for you can be confident of one thing, that no person who is immoral, impure or greedy, such a person is an idolatry has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Idolatry.

When we hear the word idolatry, many of us think of the kind of things that Kate and I dealt with in Nigeria. I remember going to Pankshin to a cultural festival, and there were the servants dressed in their traditional garments, holding their spears, and in the middle of them, they were holding it proudly. I have a picture. It was a jar, and they looked defiant and arrogant as they hold their jar, the source of their power. It can be a jar, a statue, even a tree. That’s what most of us think of when we think of idolatry. And it’s dangerous, because when we think of idolatry that way, we inevitably think of something that happens over there. You know, in Africa,

Idolatry is more common and ordinary than that, and it’s right here at home.

C. S. Lewis says, “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history— money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery— the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy,” echoing Martin Luther, and Kyle Idleman in his book Gods at War. He writes, idolatry isn’t just one of many sins, it’s the one great sin that all others come from. Calvin in his 1559 Institutes of Christian Religion Puts it this way. I’m translating from the Latin “the human condition is driven by idolatry.” It’s common, it’s ordinary, it’s right here, because the God most of us truly worship is ourselves, our belly, our head, our heart, our hopes, our fears, our wants. You see when Paul says that greed and immorality are that the person who practices them isn’t an idolatry, or what he’s saying is the issue isn’t the greed, the impurity or the immorality that the issue is the fact of the matter is, the person is an idolater. It’s not our habits, per se, that are the problem. It’s that our habits have been formed in service of and worship to a false god the self.

My grandmother used to sing me a song when I went to bed at night and went, “I love myself. I think I’m grand. I sit in the movies and I hold my hands.” Despite the humor, is the human condition to the extent that we are immoral, to the extent that we are impure, to the extent that we are greedy, it’s because our spiritual worship is of ourselves and our own desires. Late Modernity in the West is nothing more than a psychologically fine-tuned method to help us worship ourselves and our desires and thus buy more stuff. And so we worship the idol of self because it works for us. It scratches the itch, it fulfills the need, at least for a season, at least until it doesn’t.

And if it doesn’t, there’s always something else to buy. But, but, but, but to those whom God has called eventually, a better way is shown, exchanging self-idolatry for the worship of the true God in Christ, let’s consider verse four. Neither should there be vulgar speech, foolish talk, or coarse jesting, all are which, all of which are out of character, but rather Thanksgiving. Not vulgar speech, not foolish talk, not coarse jesting, not the degenerate language, the endless outrage and bitter complaining in our culture, in our lips and in our hearts, enough of that it’s out of character. Rather, our lips, our hearts, our culture, at least in this space, is to be filled with thanksgiving.

Not the holiday.

We’re not talking about turkeys and stuffing that gets in idolatry real quick and not merely an attitude of gratitude. No, the word “thanksgiving” is eucharista. What does that sound like? Worship?

Eucharist what we’re doing right here today. Our bitter hearts, our bitter worlds, are transformed not by picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and starting all over again. They’re transformed from without by the word of God, Christ, Jesus, through preaching, through bread and wine become body and blood through the waters of baptism. Truly, as he said today, he is the bread which came down from heaven to give life to the world. Do you hear that word? Give? Not me working myself up and taking? He gives. The heart of Pauline theology is the relentless assertion that God in Christ is reconciling the whole world to Himself. Thank you very much.

Our moral renewal. And I know some of you are trying so hard and you’re so discouraged and you’re so hopeless, our moral renewal, friends will never be accomplished by discipline, self-help or just plain trying harder. We need a bigger, better offer. We need a transformative, spiritual experience. In other words, it’s something done to us, for us, it’s an outside job, and we are the recipients. Way Down in verse 14, you notice Paul broke into song again,

“Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.” ^[1]

Probably an old baptismal hymn again, these words can help us understand how change really happens for us and to us awaken. And someday we wake up. Maybe it’s a sudden alarm like a heart attack or divorce, or maybe it’s the slow process of returning to consciousness and seeing the disarray and disappointment in our lives all around us, we just find, upon awaking that we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Change is hard, but Christ awakens us.

Awake, oh, sleeper,

One of the main things about being awake is that you realize that you have been asleep. We’ve been lost in the dreams and nightmares of a world in which we and our desires have been God for us, and being our own god, we find that we have not inherited paradise, but have wandered far in a land that was waste. We realize that for all our good intent, self-help, self-determination, self-anything just isn’t cutting it. This self is our enemy, and we don’t need rehabilitation. We don’t need renewal. We need resurrection, because we’re dead in the same old, same old. It’s like the movie Groundhog Day, except it’s just not funny.

Change is hard,

but Christ repents us awake. O sleeper, rise from the dead, called by God, we are washed in the waters of baptism, and mercifully, it drowns us. It kills us, finally dead to self, with nothing to lose. Lose and nothing to control. We can begin again, new women and men clothed in Christ, fed at his table, listening to his word, no longer isolated and miserable, which is always what happens when we worship the idol of ourselves. We wind up isolated and miserable.

We are instead here in the church, where the vertical and the horizontal meet, here we are saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Jesus Himself the cornerstone. Change is hard, but Christ resurrects us, awake o sleep. Arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light in such a place, transformation just happens. I know that’s terribly unsatisfying to you. You’ve been trained to get 10 to 10 action points from the end of a sermon, but it just happens. Seeds just grow. Fruit, just sprouts. We grow up into him who is the head, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but always progressively and always certainly.

It’s an outside in job.

One of the strangest things in my life, because I am somewhat of an irascible man, is when I find the fruit of the Spirit coming out of me.

Didn’t plan it, didn’t expect it. Bam, there it is. Moral renewal and new habits eventually grow in us as we grow up into him who is the head, we are at first surprised, then overjoyed, then confident that in some halting way, we are indeed becoming inheritors of God and His dearly beloved children change his heart, but Christ changes us. You.

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^[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Eph 5:14.