Pentecost +8 – Redeeming All Creation

Sermons – St. Brendan's Anglican Church

Christ the Geometer. Illumination from a Bible c. 1252-70. Cathedral Museum, Toledo, Spain.

Pentecost +8
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Ephesians 1:1-14

Forever resolved to know nothing among you except Christ Jesus and him crucified in the name of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Being hot natured and a man of my generation at home, my preferred dress is a T-shirt. I wear T-shirts and shorts year-round. In Nigeria, that wasn’t so hard. During my years in Chicago and Pittsburgh, it was a little more challenging. The difference now though, is that I wear T-shirts with pockets on them.

And I don’t like them.

I don’t think they’re stylish. And they can also be hard to find. I have to order them online. Why do I wear shirts that I don’t like? Because of my son. Many of you may have seen that one of the things Isaiah really likes to do when I’m in my clericals is to find my pectoral cross and pull it out. In addition to that, what you may not have noticed is that he likes very much to put it back in with some degree of force. I would be at home and my shirt didn’t have pockets. Isaiah would find a ball or a toy or what have you, and would be very frustrated that there was no pocket sometimes he would pull the neck of my shirt back and shove it down to my stomach. For the sake of my wardrobe, I decided it was better to get pockets, toys balls, the salt shaker or what have you. From time to time, Isaiah will grab something and run over to daddy and pull the pocket as hard as he can and with great force, shove whatever he has in his hand down in the pocket, and say quite triumphantly “In.”

Believe it or not, that makes me think of Ephesians.

Today, we begin a series of weeks lasting until early September, where our Epistle readings will be from the book of Ephesians. We’ll cover major sections of each chapter of the book. And if you want a guideline for what you’ll be hearing, whenever you hear Ephesians read, you can think of my son, and my pocketed T-shirts because the underlying theme of Ephesians is kind of like that. It’s the joy and delight of God the Father putting us “In” Christ. Our joy and delight in being found in the right place “In” Christ.

By way of introduction to the book, I just want to say a few things. Ephesians is widely considered one of the two most important letters in the New Testament with Romans. It’s the earliest book in the New Testament to be referred to as Scripture in 250. Polycarp refers to Ephesians as Scripture. Although it’s written to the Ephesians, the earliest manuscripts don’t say “the Ephesians.” So it was more likely a circular letter where the people in Ephesus made the most copies. We start seeing “To the saints in Ephesus” written in, so we call it Ephesians. This circular letter is a teaching first about the gospel and then its ethical implications.

It seems largely directed to a Gentile Christian audience. If you read it, it looks like it’s possibly a baptismal instruction catechism. And our portion today appears to be Paul’s edit of some preexisting material: verses three through 14, particularly if you rearrange them and put them in a poem form, verses three through 14. Quite possibly an early hymn. I tend to think of them as liturgical prayer probably used at baptism or the reaffirmation of baptismal vows.

So the latter is most likely baptismal instruction to Gentile Christians, and the verses we have today can serve as an overview for the whole land. In case you missed it, this passage focuses on what it is to be in Christ, both in terms of our spiritual identity, but also the lives we live. The letter is encouraging, but not in a superficially cheerful way.

And that was necessary because I want you to think about the world that the Ephesians lived in. It was a world of tribal and regional factionalism, factions fighting one another all the time, held together only by the strong arm of the Pax Romana. The Roman Empire, as Tacitus said, had a distinct way of enforcing peace, they’d make a desert of whatever city resisted them, and then they call that peace. The reality is, it’s the piece of the Roman Empire, but it’s the piece of a sword. It’s the sword that keeps the factions together. It was a world of hostile powers, political, economic, and supernatural. A world of “anything goes morality,” what we might call loose living, which had twisted even the beliefs and practices of the Roman cults and civil religion into a parody of what they had originally been intended.

If we take the Corinthian correspondents seriously, we see that that loose living has even gotten into the Christian community. It’s tribal conflict, factionalism, hostile powers, moral degeneracy, and confusion in religion. The answer to all this, according to Ephesians, it’s been rightly found in Christ in Christ.

The promise is that in Him, we are saved. In Him, we find unity in our lives, marriages, households, churches, communities, the whole world. In Christ, the whole universe will be put right. This is one of the areas where I wish I wasn’t in a typical American Anglican church because I’m going to walk you through the verses. If someone near you has a Bible peek on, because Paul’s Greek is bad enough but Paul in English can be incomprehensible. In verses three through six, what we have in this liturgical prayer that Paul is reworked is praise of the Father. Listen to this blessing.

It is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ, for he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love. He did this by predestination us to adopt adoption as his legal heirs through Jesus Christ, according to the pleasure of His will, to the praise and glory of His grace, that he is freely bestowed on us in his dearly beloved son.

The first three verses are praising the Father for what he’s done. Why? Well, it doesn’t sound like praise to some of us who’ve grown up in certain traditions. He’s praising the Father for predestination, hallelujah. If you’ve ever been scared about whether you’re saved, if you’ve ever wondered what you’re doing is good enough. If you’ve ever wondered if God is really that nice guy, Jesus, or some angry, invisible God, predestination is not something you’re inclined to praise God for.

Yet our Anglican fathers in the 39 articles put it this way in article 17. Predestination to life belongs to God’s everlasting purpose, and a godly consideration of predestination. And our election in Christ is full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons. In other words, predestination election, the certainty of your salvation based on God’s action is good news. It’s good news.

Why would we praise God for that? It’s scary. Well, it’s scary if we focus on two things incorrectly, when we focus on ourselves and think about predestination The question always arises, am I good enough? Did I do enough? Let me help you know, and know. If we focus on us the answers are negative. The other problem is if we focus on the future, will I be saying the future is dark and scary. So the problem becomes, we focus on ourselves, we know we’re not good enough, and we focus on an uncertain future. And predestination sounds like Gotcha.

One wrong step, buddy.

However, if we change our perspective to what the Bible teaches about predestination, and what the earliest Protestant churches taught about the about predestination, things get better. It’s a matter of changing our perspective. Notice, there’s no double-edged sword here, there’s not what our Calvinist friends called Double predestination, article 17, is clear.

All it’s going to talk about is predestination to life, there is the mystery of why some are saved, and some are not. There is the mystery of what about the Hindus? We don’t address that. We don’t know the mind of God. What we do know is the mind of God regarding predestination to life.

We focus on Christ, Chosen of the Father, and choosing all of you, rather than what we can’t do. Well, it’s a little different. Again, let me go back to my son, our house is usually scattered with toys at this age, we clean up four or five times a day, and there’s no point in it. But what it means is that when I’m sitting there on the floor with my pocket, a t-shirt on, Isaiah is busy, because he’s going to go on the floor, and he’s running,choosing toys, putting them in my pocket.”In.” Friends, that’s Jesus. Choosing choosing choosing. It’s not about what you did or didn’t do Saturday night, and I don’t want to know about as your pastor. It’s about what Christ is doing. Choosing, choosing choosing. And if we focus on that, which means we’re focusing not on the future, but on the past.

Well, suddenly predestination feels pretty good.

My predestination was before the foundation of the world, and God’s loving, not dangerous heart, in God’s desire for me. And through the work of the church through the work of Holy Scripture through the work of the Holy Spirit, I was chosen, with at least as much enthusiasm as my little 15-month has for his plastic zebra. Father Gerald McDermott, the Anglican theologian puts it this way, “We have to view predestination retrospectively, rather than prospectively, looking at what happened, rather than our fear about what might happen.”

Look at me. I am a man from a violent, drug addicted, dysfunctional home. On top of that, I was an atheist and committed atheist. There is no reason I should be standing here like this. If it weren’t for predestination to live, my family pattern had its path laid out. My belief system had its path laid out. God chose a different path; I didn’t. He did. Sometimes I’m putting this collar on in the mornings and I just laugh and I’m like, You got to be kidding me. You got to be kidding me. But the reality is, if we focus on Jesus and what He has done great things he has done. Praise the Lord. Then, predestination to life is full of comfort. Do you want to know you’re saved? I used to say this all the time in in Nigeria because they worry about this to look around for a minute. Just Just look around.

You’re here You’re here.

They’re all better than Saturday. You’re not somewhere else. You’re here. And if you think being here this morning has nothing to do with you think again. It’s in spite of you that you’re here. And you know it, you know it, you know it, you know it. And so predestination to life. It’s comfort, and we praise God because it’s the church father, Ambrosiaster says, “Divine love, is the motive of God’s predestination will.”

Verses seven through 12:

In Him, we have the redemption, through his blood, the forgiveness of our offenses, according to the riches of His grace, that He lavished on us in all wisdom and insight. He did this when he revealed to us the mystery of his will, according to the good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, toward the administration of the fullness of the times to head up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ, we too have been claimed as God’s own possession, since we were predestined according to the purpose of him, who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his own will, so that we who were the first to set up on Christ would be to the praise of his glory.

It’s all about Jesus.

He’s not just one human, who bore all of humanity’s sin. He is also the one human who was elected, in whom the Father predestined all of us to life, just as he took all that sin on him. So he is the conduit of the Father’s choosing love, choosing you and you and you. “In,” “In,” “In.” Clement, writing in his epistle writes this, “God elected the Lord Jesus Christ, and through him, us, for his own people. Christ is the condemned, Christ is the elect, condemned because he took our sin, and we are left because he is Good Friday, all of our wickedness on him, Easter morning, all of his vindication, pouring out of the tomb, and washing over all of us.” In Him, we have redemption through the blood. In Him, we have forgiveness of our offenses, we are claimed as God’s possession, and it won’t stop with us. As the fifth century church father, Theodore, puts it, “The ultimate goal of all this predestination, the ultimate goal of this transformation, the ultimate goal of all this choosing is the complete redemption of all things.”

God’s gold is nothing less than the complete redemption of all things. “Keep your disciples quiet,” they told Jesus on Palm Sunday. He said, “Well, I could. But the rocks would sing.” One day, the rocks will sing. Because everything will be chosen and loved and restored in that predestination of Christ that we shouldn’t be so afraid of.

Verses 13 and 14.

And when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, when you believed in Christ, you are marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit, who is the downpayment of our inheritance until the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of his glory.

In verses 13 and 14, we turn to the Holy Spirit. Have you noticed why I think this is a prayer we started out with God the Father, we talked about the Son and now we’re talking about the Spirit. It’s Trinitarian we turn to the Holy Spirit, God activity in the world and in our lives, which means whenever we’re talking about the Holy Spirit, it’s answering the questions of how great how does this happen? And for what, what’s the purpose, how and for what, how and for what, how? We’ve been over that to Jesus’ choice, through the preaching we somehow heard. I don’t know when I first heard about Jesus. But I heard through the gift of faith, remember faith isn’t something we work up it’s a gift. And then were sealed by the Holy Spirit sealed is a liturgical word. We have our faith and then the means of grace, baptism, Eucharist, for Anglicans confirmation, we are sealed, we are confirmed in the faith, as a down payment for when it gets really good one day. We’re guaranteed.

This is a deposit baptism isn’t deposit the body is a deposit. We are guaranteed that one day we’ll get the full inheritance on that day when the rocks seen. That’s the how, what’s the for what? Well, what for what is in our worship? Yes, we’re supposed to Praise God. Praise God for the gift of His Son praise God for the mystery of election. But also for praise in our lives. The reformer, Johannes Bugenhagenputs it this way. “We are to be holy in faith. Notice not by works. We are to be holy, in by faith inside of God, and united to one another.” In mutual love. Holy in faith, God justifies us, God makes us right. And then the call is we are united in mutual love. But let’s be clear, let’s get rid of that modern notion again, love is not a feeling.

Kate and I are going on nine years of marriage.

If love were a feeling, we wouldn’t be going on nine years of marriage. Love is an action. In Ephesians 2:10. Paul will say we are “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we might walk in him see it’s by faith not works.”

There are works but they’re God’s works. We’re just the hands and the feet are good news in him. Our lives in him become good news for the world. As the election of Israel was such good news, that it could sustain the community of faith through all those years of persecution and exile. So is our election in Christ for the church even today? And we need it, don’t we? We need it.

Like the Ephesians. We are living in a world of tribalism. We live in a world of hostile powers, both earthly and demonic. We have morally flexible, self-chosen lifestyles. And yes, we have a Compromised Church. Looking around at the world today, it’s evident we need a reset. Looking at the events of just this weekend, it’s evident that we need to reset Christ is that reset in him. The church is a witness to that reset through our praise and through our love.

The funniest thing I say about Isaiah is that he’ll get so excited with those toys. He’ll grab up too many, and my pocket is only so big. And so he’s trying to get the zebra and the lion in and he loves the koala. You can’t forget the claw and then there’s the gorilla and they’re beginning to overflow and he’s pushing harder with some frustration going in, in in and they just won’t fit.

We need to tell the world. What we need to remember ourselves is unlike my pocket. In the heart of God. There’s always room.