Ephesians 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Matthew 2:1-12
It’s the 35th day of the current church year. It’s the 12th day of Christmas. It’s the 5th day of calendar year 2014. Regardless of which year you are following, what are you doing with your year? If you are following the church year, it’s already one twelfth gone. Time flies when you are having fun!
A lot of people make resolutions at the beginning of the year. My observation is that fewer people are doing that. I think that is because making resolutions is a futile business. Many new year’s resolutions never get achieved, usually because the individual resolution is unrealistic or because there are too many of them. In one of this past week’s comic strips Morris Middleton tells his wife Midge that he has made two resolutions – to quit swearing and to fix the snow blower. She wants to watch, so she can see him break two resolutions at the same time.
Christmas is a new beginning. Yes, it does mark the end of the shortest days and longest nights. The bright lights help to lengthen the days. But that only holds for us who live north of the equator. Our Chilean, Aussie, and South African friends are heading towards Fall not Spring. So we need to remember that the new beginning of Christmas has nothing to do with weather or climate. Christmas is about God, and more specifically, God-with-us. Christ is the first gift of what we have come to call Christmas. Jesus has nothing to do with season of commercial activity that starts imposing itself on us sometime in October. If human living were likened to the ocean, then the Christmas shopping season is a barnacle encrustation on the good ship Church. There is no way that we can emulate God’s gift of Christ. Our hearts and our pocketbooks will never be big enough.
Because we can’t out-gift God, that takes a huge burden off of us. And at the same time it puts a large and precious responsibility on us. Paul writes to the Ephesian believers to remind them of “the responsibility to distribute God’s grace,” which God gave to him for the Ephesians. God revealed to Paul what may be variously translated as a “mystery,” a “secret plan,” “mysterious ways,” an “inside story.” That responsibility, that grace, has been handed down from generation to generation until it was handed to us.
God’s grace. What a gift! What a responsibility! Even the database of Amazon.com can’t cover all the aspects of God’s grace, which is a transforming power that is able to heal, restore, and renew broken lives, communities, institutions, and even nations. Johnny Hill, who teaches homiletics at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, says that this part of the Ephesian letter presents the church as a cosmic organism for revealing and understanding God’s divine will for humanity and all creation. God discloses God’s self through the Epiphany.(1) And because we are the current holders of the gift of Christ, we have the same responsibility that was laid on Paul.
When Paul wrote the Ephesian letter, he was a prisoner of Caesar. When he was accused by the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem of subverting the Jewish faith, Paul pulled a legal maneuver on the plaintiffs, claiming that they had no legal standing to accuse him since he was a Roman citizen. That set in motion a whole legal process that took him to Rome and, ultimately, to death. He was a technically a prison of Caesar. And that would give him a lot of street credibility. He was in the position to be a kind of cause célèbre of the oppressed. Here was someone every Christ believer could identify with and get behind. But Paul didn’t put that spin on his situation. He described himself as a prisoner of Christ. He was in manacles of the gospel. For Paul, that meant that the link between him and Jesus Christ was unbreakable. Paul’s identifying as a follower of Christ was not a whim or a passing fad. And it certainly was not something to be taken lightly, something to be added to his Facebook or LinkedIn profile to puff it up. The privilege of being connected with Christ did not make life easier or more luxurious.
Paul says that anyone connected with Christ is a prisoner. Perhaps all of us should be wearing day-glo colored jumpsuits to identify us as Christ’s prisoners, like the orange jumpsuits worn by prisoners held by the Sheriff’s Department. If we are prisoners, then we are held to a stricter accountability enforced by the shackle that connects us with Christ. That shackle is the responsibility of being a steward of God’s grace.
God’s grace is not like a windfall surprise that we can either hoard up for a rainy day emergency, use for some hitherto unmet need, blow on some wished-for but unnecessary bauble, or evaporate in a fit of recreational self-indulgence. To be a steward of God’s grace is to be constantly aware of its significance and treasure which are not to be taken for granted. Grace is not something that only a select few can receive. Nor is it a commodity that can be bought, sold, bartered, or earned. It is freely given. It pours forth from God’s abundant love made absolutely clear in God’s redemptive plan for humanity birthed into the world in the manger child. This grace must be cared for, cherished, respected. It’s not to be tossed carelessly in the corner, shoved under the bed, or hidden in the back of the closet.
Paul said that earlier generations weren’t let in on the details of God’s plan. But in Paul’s own lifetime the holy mystery has been revealed the apostles and contemporary prophets through the working of the Holy Spirit. This plan, this mystery, “is that the Gentiles would be coheirs and parts of the same body, and that they would share with the Jews in the promises of God in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
The world of today, which lives mostly for the pleasures of the moment, would see the hope of the gospel as just another worthless new year’s resolution, overblown, unattainable, and easily broken. And it would be, if only one of us had to carry the whole responsibility. Thanks be to God that isn’t the case. All of us share it. The seventy of us here, the hundreds of people in the village of Waverly who are Christ-followers, the millions of believers in the United States, and the several billion all over the world. As the saying goes, many hands make light work.
But work it is. Hard work, important work. We cannot shirk our duty. This is our stewardship of the gospel which we have received. This stewardship has little to do with our checkbooks, although they could be a useful tool. The responsibility of God’s grace entrusted to us means that we are stewards of ourselves as conduits of God’s grace to others. In a blog post last summer, Shane Blackshear wrote,
“If I had to say the one thing holding the American church back today, it would be a consumeristic culture. We’ve come to expect that the latest technology comes standard in our cars. Our movie theaters should have wide rows with extra padded seats and that lean way back.God in Christ does not call us to be the entertained, but to be those who entertain, those who tell the Good News. A song out of the American gospel tradition begins, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations, that shall turn their hearts to the right, a story of truth and mercy, a story of peace and light.”(3) That story began with Christ, was passed to the apostles and Paul, and handed down across the centuries to us. Like an ongoing internet blog, each of us adds a post, a chapter – our story, the story of God’s love active in our lives lived in relationship to Christ and to each other.
“Unfortunately, we think our church should be no different. Just like the movie theater, we come when the production starts, sit in our seats, are entertained, and think we should leave satisfied when it’s over.”(2)
We are stewards of our stories. We have encountered our own faith and the faith of others in strange and mysterious as well as ordinary ways. Grace lives as the intricate web of God’s connecting Spirit work – that shackle that binds us to Christ.
You are the steward of your faith story, woven lovingly by the Holy Spirit together with the faith stories of others. Stewardship of the God’s gospel of grace is not to be treated like a new year’s resolution, to be quickly discarded. It is from forever ago to forever to come. Shane Blackshear wrote,
“Sadly many people go through life thinking the perfect church is just around the corner, or as many young evangelicals do, they decide that they don’t need church at all and embark on solo-Christianity.”(4)
Solo-Christians deny the gospel and break faith with God. They are not stewards of the mystery, the inside story, the secret plan revealed in Christ. Epiphany, represented by the magi, means that the Good News is truly good, and it is for all the world.
Glory to God in heaven and on earth peace among those whom God favors. Amen.
(1) Johnny B. Hill, “Ephesians 3:1-12: Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word; David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), Year A, volume 1, page 206.
(2) Shane Blackshear, “Five Ways to Be Unsatisfied with Your Church,” www.shaneblackshear.com posted July 15, 2013; accessed January 4, 2013.
(3) H. Ernest Nichol.
(4) Blackshear, op. cit.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment