"The Vocation of the Church"
Knowing where your feet should stand, what your mind should think and what your eyes should see
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 27, 2002
Text: Ephesians 1:15-23, 3:14-21
An envelope came in the mail. I had no idea of the return address and I opened it. In it was a card. I thought it was a rather belated Christmas card, but it was not. It was, in fact, an invitation to celebrate someone's birthday - someone who is dear to us and dear to this church.
It was a celebration of a milestone in this person's life. When I opened the card, I must admit I was overwhelmed by what I saw, for on the front was a picture of the person whom we were going to surprise.
The striking thing about it was, however, that the picture had the said person in a bathing costume. On the top was his head and his body was that of a rippling, muscle-bound Adonis.
Having seen the man a number of times, although never in a bathing suit, I must say I was overcome with some degree of incredulity that the head and the body actually belonged together. Nevertheless, I confess that I was overcome primarily by a profound sense of jealousy. That was my primary concern, especially as this gentleman is seven years older than I am!
I have thought about that picture many times. (Actually, when we went to the party to celebrate his great day, the real body and the real head showed up, unfortunately.) As I was preparing our passage from the Book of Ephesians for this morning, however, my mind turned to that particular picture, for there seemed to be a very obvious disconnection between the head and the body. The two did not really go together.
Well, the Church of Jesus Christ has been summed up in the New Testament as Christ being the head, and the Church being the body. The Apostle Paul wrote on many different occasions that Christ is the head of all things and the Church is the body of Christ.
One of the problems that the Church has had to struggle with throughout 2,000 years of its history is that there has been a disconnection between the head and the body: There are people who look to the person of Jesus Christ, who read the story of his life, who look at his teachings and at his example, who look at the nature of his cross, and the resurrection, and the purity of his being, and then they look at the body of the Church. They see that the Church in fact has fallen very short of the ideal of the head; that there is a disconnection between the two.
And I think that there are many people in our society, even today, who are attracted to the head, who are attracted to the person of Jesus Christ but who, when they look at the Church, the body, find that it is flabby and irrelevant. It is out of shape and in need of some severe changes.
So this passage was written to the people in Ephesus, whoever the writer was. (It was probably someone who had scripted something on behalf of the Apostle Paul, although the passage is ascribed to Paul himself.) In this great passage of Ephesians, the early Church was struggling with this very problem. What had happened was that near the end of the first century there were people who had come into the Church teaching myths and legends and with these myths and legends, they were trying to enslave people to ritual, and to form, and to the aesthetic. They had forgotten the headship of Christ and the Church was drifting into a sort of banal religion, similar to the many religions that were in Ephesus at the time.
We are even told in the Book of Ephesians that there were two men, Hymenaeus and Alexander, both of whom were wandering around the Church in Ephesus, leading people astray with their false teaching and trying to convince them that their myths, their legends and their ceremonies were the most important things.
The Apostle Paul, therefore, is writing to the people in Ephesus and, in many ways, is writing an encyclical to the whole of the Church universal. He is warning; he is praying for the Church. He is saying you must remember that your head is Jesus Christ and that you are the body, but you are not the head. As the body, you must do as the head says and be as the head leads, rather than be a disconnected body wandering in your own pathway.
In a very moving passage that was read for us this morning from Ephesians 1 and Ephesians 3, the Apostle Paul is praying for the people in Ephesus. He is saying: "I am praying that you will in fact find your vocation. I am praying that the power of the Holy Spirit will so lead you that you will not wander away with these myths, but that you may stay connected with your head and, as connected with your head, Jesus Christ, you might then receive the very power of his risen presence."
For the Apostle Paul knew that if the Church of Jesus Christ were just to become another bland religion, if it were just another means of trying to please people's religious sentiment, it would die. It would die because its real power was spiritual power and its real power was the power that raised Jesus from the dead; and if the Church of Jesus Christ was to move away from that, then the body would die and crumble. So for the Apostle Paul, this prayer was of the utmost importance.
If we look at what Paul is saying in this passage, he is giving a health-card for the Church. He is outlining four things that need to be healthy if the Church is to carry out its vocation and ministry in the world. If it really wants to be the body of Christ, there are certain things that are needed.
The first of these is: It must have healthy eyes. Paul says: "I pray that your eyes of understanding will be illuminated."
Now here, in many ways, Paul is drawing on great traditions within Greek literature. Both Plato and Aristotle, for example, talked about the eyes of the soul. They believed, as many Greek philosophers did, that through the eyes the body is lit inwardly; that the eyes are the means for the light of illumination to come into the soul. If the eyes are wide open and if the eyes are fixed on wisdom, the body itself will be illuminated.
Homer said the exact opposite. He said that there is sometimes what is known as a smokey wrath, (I love that phrase) a smokey wrath when our eyes are closed and we look through a fog and therefore we are not illuminated by the light, but rather our souls live in darkness.
Paul, in writing to the people of Asia Minor, knows then that these people are familiar with the Greek idea that you open your eyes and you let in the light of wisdom. But Paul is also a Jew, and in the Jewish world there was the belief that we needed to open our eyes in order that we could understand the power of God's law. In Psalm 119, Verse 18, there is that wonderful passage where the writer pleads to God: Oh, open my eyes that I may see the wondrous nature of your law. Open my eyes.
Jesus has a similar phrase. He says, for example, that the pure in heart will see God.
There is a sense, then, even in the Jewish idea, that we must fix our eyes on the things that are important; that what we look at, what we fixate on, will determine in fact whether or not we are obedient to the law and whether we are obedient to God's holy purposes.
So Paul, then, is writing to the Ephesians and he is saying: "I want you, then, to have your eyes illuminated; I want you to have a true understanding."
For Paul, the only way that the Church of Jesus Christ could have a true understanding was if it opened itself to the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. On its own, it could not achieve this illumination by simply trying to examine its own experiences. It was not sufficient for the Apostle Paul to be able to understand and have the illumination of revelation. What was needed was for Christians to use their metaphoric eyes and to open themselves to the power of the Holy Spirit that would give them understanding.
In this most beautiful passage from Ephesians, Paul is praying that the whole Church may know and experience the power of the Holy Spirit in its life. Because he knew that just like individuals, if we do not have the power and the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are likely to wander into all kinds of things and lose our total sense of perspective.
The week after Christmas, I decided to do some shopping and to find some good deals. I went to a particular store in Scarborough where they were saying there was 50 per cent off jeans. So I drove up there, rushed into the store and cut a mad swath through it, picking up every pair of jeans that was even remotely near my size. I paid for them at the counter, and with a great big bundle in my arms, went to my car in the parking lot. I opened the trunk and I started to put in the jeans that I had bought.
All of a sudden, something dramatic took place. A woman had come along and was signalling left to pull into the empty space next to me. Just as she was about to pull in, another woman came right on the inside of her, dived into the parking spot, and parked her car diagonally across the spot.
Well, I couldn't even get into my car because she was almost perpendicular to my door and I just stood there, wondering what was going to happen. Who was going to move first? The woman who had been signalling stubbornly decided to just simply stay exactly where she was. The one who had come in at an angle could not then back out. She was stuck in place. Only bad things were going to happen. I decided just to stand there, thinking how well I'd done buying these jeans for 50 per cent off.
The woman who had parked quickly got out of her car, and the other woman who was waiting behind wound her window down and started to scream abuse and invective. Again, I knew nothing good was going to happen.
The first woman walked over to the woman whose window was down and promptly punched her in the side of the head. The woman in the car, somewhat dazed, decided then to open her door very quickly into the midriff of the woman who had hit her on the side of the head.
Meanwhile, I'm still standing there with my jeans in my trunk. "What do you do in a moment like this, O Lord?" I said. "What do I do?"
So I picked up my cellular phone and I began to punch in 911, but I didn't press Send. I went over to the two women and I advised them that I was about to call 911. I said: "You, dear lady (to she who had thrown the first punch), you will be charged with assault and you (to the woman who had shouted out expletives), you are going to be charged with stupidity."
The two of them looked at me, definitely scared at that moment, and drove off with the greatest speed imaginable.
I put my 50 per cent off-jeans in the trunk, got in my car and said: "Lord, thank you for cellular phones."
What really struck me about this (and by the way, this need not have been women, it could have been men) is how sometimes people just lose all perspective in life. They really do. It's amazing - coming to blows over one single parking space the week after the celebration of the Nativity. I ask you!
Unfortunately, this does not just happen in those circumstances. We all, to some extent, fall into this very trap. All of us, to some extent, lose our perspective. We become falsely depressed when we do not need to be. We set ourselves extraordinary goals that we cannot meet. We think that somehow we are the axis on which the world turns.
Even the Church of Jesus Christ gets caught up in the minutiae of things that are essentially irrelevant: We do this when we lose sight of our head, because it is Jesus Christ that always keeps us grounded in fact, that keeps the body firmly planted where it ought to be.
We need then, daily, the eyes of the Holy Spirit to lead us in our lives that we might be illuminated with understanding.
There is a second part of the body and that is the mind. Paul says: "I pray that you will be given a spirit of understanding and wisdom."
You see, the Apostle Paul knew that we are not saved by education. We are not saved just by the amount of knowledge we accumulate. Oh, there were those in the Ephesian church who believed that. No, he understood that what was needed was something more: We need the wisdom and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Here again, Paul the Jew comes to the forefront, for he understood the importance and the power of wisdom; because wisdom is not something that is earthly made. It is not something that is just read, or accumulated by a series of experiences. It is, in fact, the gift of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
One of the examples that I am sure was in Paul's mind was the example of that great, wise man in the Old Testament, Solomon himself. But there was a problem with Solomon.
There was a lovely story that I read about a minister who was leading an adult Bible class one Sunday morning. He got so carried away and so excited as he told his class that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines that, for good measure, he threw in "and, by the way, he fed them all on ambrosia."
One of the men who got caught up in the excitement of the moment said: "Never mind what he fed them. What did he eat?"
Solomon unfortunately got carried away with his own wisdom, rather than the wisdom of God, and he fell from grace.
You see, the Apostle Paul knew and understood that true wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It is something that we need to ask for. It is something we need to pray for because it is that very wisdom which is our power.
In a magnificent play on words, Paul uses four Greek words. (Always the Greeks have many different words for the same English word that we use.)
He says: "I pray that you may have the dunamis. In other words, I pray that you may have the ability of God.
"I pray," he said "that you will have the energeia. I pray that you will have the energy, the power to work for good.
"I pray that you will have the kratos, that you will have the ability to subdue things that lead you astray.
"And I pray that you will have the ischus, which is really the power and might of the glory of God."
He said: "When you have the wisdom and the power of the Holy Spirit, you do not need all these other teachings from Hymenaeus and Alexander and their strange myths. You have enough in the very power of God's wisdom to direct you in your life. All I ask of you is that you pray for it."
We also need to have healthy feet.
Paul says: "It is Jesus Christ who is the head and all things have been put under his feet, even to that of the church."
Now, this is a wonderful passage that is again rich in Hebrew terms and ideas. He says Jesus Christ is the head of the principalities, powers, might and dominion; that all the spiritual forces, both now and to come, are all subject to the one who is raised from the dead. In another passage in Philippians, he says that is why that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow; that for Jesus Christ, because he has been raised from the dead, all angelic powers in the heavens, all powers that exist on earth ultimately are under the feet of Jesus Christ.
Now, this was a word of tremendous hope to the Ephesians, for the whole Church that at that time was being persecuted for its faith. It reminded them that no matter what the challenges that lay before them, no matter the demons that they might have to struggle with personally or as a church, Jesus Christ is greater than all of them.
The problem has been for the Church, however, that since the time of Constantine, we have thought that somehow all powers on earth are subject to the Church. We have believed for too long, I think, that political powers are somehow always accountable to us and we have tried to seize political power by wedding ourselves closely with power and influence in the world.
The true Church of Jesus Christ understands that it is not in political power that it really manifests the word of God but rather, in its spiritual power and accountability to its head, Jesus Christ, under whom all power sits. It is not we, then, who are the superior, it is Christ. We are simply the body that serves him.
A man drove up to a church early one day and parked in a parking spot. No sooner had he got out of his car than a woman came up to him and said: "You can't park there. You have taken my place. I always park there."
Very upset with this, the man backed out and parked four spots away.
He came into the church where the minister was beginning to lead a Bible study with a round-table discussion. The man wanted to get the benefit of the wisdom of the minister, so he sat down on a particular bench at the table. An elderly man came up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said: "I'm sorry. You can't sit there. You have taken my place."
Being rather disgusted with all this, the visitor got up and went to a seat three places away.
Finally, it came time for church at eleven o'clock and the man walked down the aisle and sat in Pew Number 7. Just as the service was about to begin, there was a tap on the shoulder from one of the ushers. A lady standing right at his shoulder said: "Excuse me, sir, you have taken my place. That is where I sit."
And so he got up and he moved to Pew Number 8.
Very distraught, he nevertheless sat throughout the whole service until it came to one of the great, high prayers. In the great, high prayer, they asked for the risen Christ to bless them and to be present in their midst before the Sacrament of Holy Communion. At that point, the visitor rose. All of a sudden, scars appeared on his hands. Scars appeared on his sandalled feet. There were more marks all around the top of his head and he began to bleed.
One of the women said: "What has happened to you?"
He said: "I have taken your place."
The power of the risen Christ, then, is the one who determines our place, not the other way around. The Church has played games for too long trying to determine Christ's place in the world, rather than understanding that its place in the world is determined by its head, by Jesus Christ.
There is a wonderful verse by A. Sowter. He wrote:
I know not what art.
This power is given.
I only know He has my heart
And I have Heaven.
The true ones, then, who know where their feet should stand, know what their minds should think and know what their eyes should see, are those who understand that Christ is the head. When we know that, we know our calling. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.