The Letter to the Ephesians

The Letter to the Ephesians

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

This week, we move our attention to the letter to the Ephesians.  In our text, you heard the suggestion that we need to “speak the truth to our neighbors.”  This morning, we will do that several times.  Let’s start with one truth:  it’s entirely unclear whether Paul wrote this letter.  It sounds like Paul or someone who wrote like Paul.  However, people who study the New Testament for a living have been debating who wrote this letter since the late 18th century.  So, if you’d like to write your dissertation on this topic, please see me following worship.  I’ll warn you, though, that it normally takes twelve years to get that degree and you need to pass fluency tests in a slew of ancient languages.  For the rest of us, it may simply suffice to say that the authorship is in question.

Second truth: it’s unclear who the author was writing.  Certainly, Ephesus was a key place in the early growth of Christianity.  Ephesus is in Turkey and reminds us again of how central Turkey was in the the survival of the faith.  However, the letter doesn’t have any of the personal greetings and references that we normally find from Paul.  It seems like the author is writing more broadly to churches in the area.  Again, this doesn’t disqualify the letter’s value.  I’m just telling you what we don’t know.  

Here’s some troubling truths that we do know.  First of all, in the fifth chapter of the letter, just after our text, there is some really disturbing advice to slaves.  They are instructed to obey their masters just like they obey Christ.  While that settles for you, if you look back to the whole debate about slavery in our country, Ephesians 5 is referenced again and again in sermons that defended American slavery.  Some try to temper this problem by pointing out that the author also instructs the masters to be nice to their slaves, but seriously?  The Bible can be used to support terrible things!

The second serious problem occurs in the same chapter.  I’m told that Paul never married.  I assume that if some follower of Paul wrote this letter then maybe he wasn’t married either.  Why do I say this?  Well, in a way that is parallel to the advice to slaves, the author tells wives to be submissive to their husbands because the husband is the head of the wife just like Jesus is the head of the church?  Really? Guys…you all try that one at home tonight and let me know how that goes for you?  Still, unlike the sermons supporting slavery, I’ve actually heard wedding meditations where such instructions were literally given to women, with the afterthought that, sure, husbands should love their wives, too.

So, we’ve got a defense of slavery and a defense of misogyny or, at least, of male chauvinism.  Here’s the thing:  both are totally unacceptable and totally at odds with the respect and love that Christ taught us to treat our fellow human beings.  These things are in this letter because this letter arose out of a world that was steeped in slavery and misogyny.  The author, like most everyone else in his culture and time, was blind to those travesties.  

Here’s the thing, you could decide, having heard this truth, to just toss the letter.  (Honestly, if you do, you’re probably going to have to toss the whole book.)  Cultural blindness and bigotry and prejudice run through human history.  How could it not shape even some of what’s in our most sacred book?  

The better option, to me, is… to be honest.  It’s safe to assume that it won’t be long before someone looks at us some day and points out our blindness and bigotry and prejudice.  Reckonings happen.  Awakenings take place.  Thank God they do!  And, let’s all pray to God that on the day when we run into someone who is there to awaken and enlighten us, we will listen and stand ready to have our eyes opened and change.  We’re here to grow, after all.

In this sense, it would be awful if we read something that was 2000 years old and somehow the lessons on cultural life or marriage or parenting could just be applied as written.  Don’t you hope that we’ve made some kind of progress over the years? Start in an easy place…hasn’t science given us enough insight that we can leave the Bible’s instructions about how to treat lepers behind?  There are any number of prescriptions in the Bible that deserve to be left behind.  Many of them have to do with women and slaves and foreigners and others who were deemed to be of lesser value.  If you really read the book, one of the major things that got Jesus in such hot water was his work in real time trying to challenge such prejudice.

So, maybe the big news is not that there’s old, antiquated stuff in a letter that’s 2000 years old.  Maybe the real news is that there are actually some pretty powerful insights which still speak.  Whoever wrote it, whoever they were addressing, despite the morally compromised sections of the letter, there’s something in this letter that has kept Christians studying it for centuries.

The first great insight of the letter to the Ephesians is about unity.  Ephesus was a multicultural place.  Churches in that place were shaped by that multiculturalism.  One way around multiculturalism is to just try to do an end run around it.  (Oh shoot…here comes more honesty.)  This is why Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. is often referred to as the most segregated hour in America.  We sort ourselves into groups of people who look like us and think like us and act like us.  As I suggested last week, this has to do with the human desire to feel comfortable.  However, it is at odds with the calling that is clearly there for us in Scripture to stay uncomfortable enough that we might actually grow.  

The churches in Ephesus didn’t sort like that.  The price they paid was that they had to face the same challenges that any diverse group of people will have to face:  how in the world are we going to get along.  Sometimes people think the answer is to substitute uniformity for unity.  So, if we can just get everyone to dress like us and eat what we eat and think what we think, then we can hold this together.  Getting people to feel the pressure to fit in, in ways that are subtle and not so subtle, has been a time tested strategy.  Again, though, conformity and uniformity are not unity.

The author tells the churches that they should seek unity.  The way to do this—and this is the heart of Pauline theology—is not to find that unity in how much we like each other or in how much we are alike.  No, unity for Paul rests in God as the source of us all and in Christ as the head of the church.  What brings us together is the fact that we are all children of God and that we all share a desire to deepen our relationship to that God, to live, as Paul says at one point, “a life that is worthy of Christ’s calling.”

When we embrace this perspective, diversity is not a threat.  Rather, the fact that there are so many different people who think and believe so many different things and do different things would seem to be God’s plan all along.  (I remember a day that I spent in the rain forest in Brazil and realized the incredible diversity of life forms that existed in that place.)  Diversity is not chaos.  All the evidence would seem to suggest that diversity is God’s design and God’s greatest delight.  We’re not supposed to just tolerate each other.  We’re supposed to look each other in the eye and say, with a wink, “I know that God’s in there somewhere if I just keep looking!”

So, think of this point this way.  On any given communion Sunday, there are as many understandings of what communion means as there are people participating.  I know that this fact drives church hierarchies crazy but it is true.  The point of communion though is not supposed to be what we think or believe.  Rather, the point is that everyone is invited and God invited us!  Inclusion is the sacred heart of the sacrament, even though some people have worked to exclude others from communion for as long as it has existed.  (Darn…more truth. I can’t stop myself.)

So, point number one is that what holds us together is God and we shouldn’t make it our mission to get in God’s way.  If God says everyone’s in, they’re in.  The second point is that this first point should really change how we live.  If you don’t have to fight to be “in” and if the point of your life isn’t to fight to keep someone else out, that frees up a lot of energy, right?  If you’re not going to spend your life being aggressive and defensive and hateful, then what are you going to do with all your time?

Here’s a different way to put this point.  As one author put it, “Your changed life might be the only Gospel some people ever read.”  I know that there’s a lot of energy for some people about how if you’re really a faithful person then you’ll talk about Jesus all the time.  That’s not my point.  I’m saying if you take faith seriously then the most open someone may ever be to actually hearing what matters to you is the moment when they look at your life, your choices, your commitments and they notice that you’re not doing what everyone else is doing. You are living differently.  And, one day, they may even ask you, “What’s up with that?”

Faith should change us.  Let’s tell the truth that needs to be told right now.  One of the most impactful choices that people are making in our world is how to deal with the virus.  A lot of people have changed how they live and work. They have worn masks and been vaccinated.  They’ve done all these things for a full spectrum of reasons:  some didn’t want to get sick; some wanted to win the lottery or wanted some other prize; some had a higher notion of responsibility and community well-being.  

A host of other people have made different choices for a wide spectrum of reasons.  These is no vaccine for children under twelve.  Other people are sick enough already that their immune system is impaired.  Still other people are waiting for the F.D.A. to grant fully approved status to the vaccines.  (Couldn’t we just go ahead and take care of that?)  For other people, not being vaccinated is a political statement or a claim about their freedom.  Still others have been so infected by social media claims that they just don’t want that “microchip in their arm” or “their DNA altered forever.” (Because the internet said so…that’s why that’s true!)

Here’s the thing.  As I wrote this sermon, an evangelical pastor was quoted saying, “Throw away your masks.  Don’t believe this delta variant nonsense!” That’s the line in the sand.  As followers of Christ, we’re supposed to see things differently.  Let’s start here.  Jesus pretty much down the line insisted that we prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable, people like our children and those who are sick.  Do you really think Jesus would tell us to toss our masks?  Beyond that though, do you remember the parable Jesus told about the great banquet?  All the cool people were invited.  Not many people showed.  So, the invitation became more and more inclusive.  So, ask yourself, as a follower of this man, when we, as a society are stuck on deciding if the vaccine is actually worth it, how would we explain to him that the whole rest of the world, especially the poorest of the poor in our world, are dying—literally dying—to have access to it?  I think he’d look us in the eye and say, “Okay, then… maybe it’s time stop waiting for the folks who are hedging and share more with the rest of the world.  You remember…they’re your neighbors, too.”

“Tell the truth.”  “Be kind to one another.”  “Share.”  Such ancient Gospel truths begging to be lived in our world.