“Paul’s Vision for the Church” (Ephesians 3:8-21)

Many years ago (I’m embarrassed to admit how many!) a wise friend passed on to me a little book entitled The Gospel Blimp. Maybe some of you are old enough to have heard of it. Perhaps some have even read it! The story opens with a group of friends from church gathered for a barbecue in the back yard of George and Ethel Griscom. At some point someone notices the Griscoms’ next-door neighbours, who are sitting on their porch drinking beer and playing cards. This leads into a conversation on the Griscoms’ side of the fence about how to reach people with the gospel.

In the midst of the conversation an airplane flies very low overhead—so low, in fact, that everyone on both sides of the fence stops what they are doing to look up and gaze at it—and out of that there sprouts the germ of an idea. That low-flying airplane caught everybody’s attention. How about using a blimp with a message trailing behind it to glide slowly over people’s homes to proclaim the gospel to all the unchurched citizens of the whole town?

Well, the story goes on from there. And lo and behold, the idea becomes a reality. After that it doesn’t take much longer for someone to suggest a further step. How about using the blimp to sprinkle evangelistic pamphlets over entire neighbourhoods? Soon someone else comes up with the further brainwave of installing speaker horns to broadcast sermons and Christian music. Well, as you can imagine (or perhaps you’d prefer not to!) the story goes on from there. And it doesn’t take very much longer for the whole project to collapse in disaster.

But meanwhile, quietly in the midst of all this energy being devoted to the blimp, the Griscoms’ neighbours do become Christians. Not because of the blimp, which only ever served to upset and annoy people. But because somewhere along the way George and Ethel actually began to get to know their neighbours and ended up helping them through a serious health crisis.

All of this reminds me of some advice another friend passed on to me early in my Christian walk: “Be careful not to get so caught up in the work of the Lord that you lose sight of the Lord of the work.”

So it is that Paul is writing to the believers in Ephesus to remind them of their true calling, and to help them focus on God’s intentions for his church. And I hope I’m going to make it easy for you to remember if I summarize what he says under three headings: They needed to be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power, and continuous in praise. 

Clear our Purpose (8-13)

First, then, the believers living in Ephesus were called to be clear in their purpose. Paul sets out that purpose in the opening verse of this morning’s passage. And it is this: to proclaim the boundless, unfathomable, infinite riches of Christ—a riches that beggars all human calculation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” he writes elsewhere. It’s as though, in spite of all his scholarly training and oratorical eloquence, Paul is scarcely able to find the words to express himself. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

John, at the very end of his gospel, after setting down more than twenty chapters of his memories of Jesus, finds himself coming to a similar conclusion: “Jesus did many other things as well,” he writes. “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) He just couldn’t ever say enough about Jesus.

So it is that Paul writes that his whole calling—and by extension yours and mine—is to make plain God’s eternal plan, which has now been realized in Jesus Christ. The verb that Paul uses here is photizo. Perhaps you can hear in it our English words photograph, photoelectric, photon, photosensitive, photosynthesis… They all have to do with light.

Of course, behind Paul’s words is the command that Jesus gave to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:16). So it is that you and I are called and empowered and commissioned to live lives shining with the light of Jesus—his all-embracing love, his unchanging truth, his pure goodness—in what today seems to be an ever-increasingly dark and threatening world.

And that light will shine only as our words are backed up by our actions, by the quality of our lives. It is our lives that give authenticity to our words. A century and a half after the apostle Paul, believers were going through a period of terrible persecution. Yet the church continued to grow. Why? It was the Christian author Tertullian who recognized the reason when he wrote, “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, … how they are ready even to die for one another!”[1] Theirs was a love that also overflowed outside the Christian community to the poor, the destitute and the hungry, to widows and orphans. And it was through that love tangibly demonstrated that people also discovered the love of a Saviour. Through their integrity people encountered him who is the truth. And through their willingness to be tortured and even to die for their faith that people found him who came to bring life in all its fullness.

Conscious of our Power (14-19)

It is a calling of truly heroic proportions. But we will never live up to it unless we are conscious of the power that alone can make it a reality. We need always to be aware the light with which Jesus calls us to shine does not originate in us. It is a reflected light. And its source is the ineffable glory, the unquenchable love, the unchanging truth of Jesus himself. Paul writes about being strengthened in our inner being through the Holy Spirit’s power. And in verses 16 through 19 he gives us three images of how that happens. So let’s take a look at each of them briefly.

Paul first writes in verse 17 about Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. Many years ago (about as many years ago as when I was given The Gospel Blimp!) someone else introduced me to a little booklet entitled My Heart – Christ’s Home. It’s based on that verse which I am sure is familiar to most of us in Revelation 3, where Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” In it the author takes us through the various rooms of a house—the living room, where we relax; the dining room, where we eat; the study, where we read; the bedroom, and so on…

The whole point was that when you open your life to Jesus, it isn’t a matter of merely allowing him to stand in the entryway like some door-to-door salesperson. Rather, you are giving him free rein to move and to exercise his lordship throughout every room, every nook and cranny in the house: your thoughts and appetites, what you take into your mind through the books and media you read, the music you listen to, what you watch on TV and the internet and social media, your friendships, your sex life, your finances, your leisure time, and the list goes on…

Secondly, Paul calls us to be grounded in love. The image moves from a home to a forest. We are blessed with an almost endless forest behind our house. It stretches pretty well all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. But it is all on semi-swampy, rocky ground, which means that many of the trees can’t put down deep roots. So every time there’s a major windstorm (and we’ve had our share of them in recent years) there are trees that are blown over and end up falling to the ground and dying.

So how do we become properly rooted, so that the winds of temptation and misfortune and adversity don’t cause us to fall? I want to suggest three ways. We need to be grounded in holy Scripture—to spend time daily reading the Bible, seeking to grasp its meaning and then applying it to our lives. We need to be rooted in prayer—to bask in God’s great and unfathomable love in Christ and to lay our lives, our concerns and our deepest needs before him. And we need to be rooted in community, which means more than just spending an hour or so in church on a Sunday, but really engaging with God’s people, being nourished in an environment of mutual love and care.

So it is that, with Christ dwelling in our hearts and with our lives rooted and grounded in his love, we will find ourselves being filled to the brim with the fullness of God—and by his grace that fullness will overflow into and enrich the lives of others as well. That doesn’t mean that life will be easy or that we will always go around with a smile pasted on our face. Far from it! Christians are not immune to sorrow and tragedy. But it does mean that we are never alone in them. For we are graced with the constant presence of the one who has promised to be with us always, to the very end of time (Matthew 28:20).

Continuous in our Praise (20-21)

And so we are to be clear in our purpose and conscious of our power. Which brings us to our third point: and that is that we are to be continuous in our praise.

At this point my mind is drawn back years ago once again, when I was serving in a church in Montreal and we were graced with a visit from the Archbishop of Uganda. His name was Erica Sabiti. He had grown up in the church but it was only when he was in his thirties that he came into contact with the spiritual revival that was sweeping across East Africa at the time, and his life was forever transformed. In a word, he fell in love with Jesus.

I well remember the woman who was hosting him at one time remarking to me under her breath, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! All he ever talks about is Jesus. If I hear him even mention that name once more, I think I’m going to scream!” This was nearly forty years after his conversion, yet this man still found himself totally captivated by, utterly in love with Jesus.

It was clear that this man’s praise was no shallow, surface phenomenon. It sprang from a deep and unshakeable faith in God. Sabiti’s ministry as archbishop occurred during the tyrannous dictatorship of Idi Amin. And when Amin ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Uganda, Erica Sabiti opposed him publicly and stood up for them. He soon received a summons to appear before Amin, with every likelihood that, as with others who had taken a stand against him, the dictator would personally shoot him.

There was a tense two-hour wait before Amin appeared and sat down across from him. After what seemed an interminable period of silence, Amin burst out, “You Sabiti, do you know I can kill you? Why do you talk about the children of Israel?” Twice more Amin repeated the threat, after which the archbishop reached down into his bag and pulled out his Bible. Then, with a calmness in his voice he said, “Your Excellency, this Bible is full of the history of the Jews, so is your Koran. People have died because of the truth, which is in this Bible. The children of Israel are special because they are a chosen race and we shall talk about it.” Amin did not say a thing, but shook his head and walked out of the room.[2]

This was the man who could never stop praising Jesus. God grant that our worship in this place might powerfully engage our minds, stir our hearts and strengthen our wills. By his grace may it be a mighty upswelling of praise that arises out of a profound and unshakeable experience of God’s saving grace in Jesus—an experience week by week that accompanies and upholds us through all of life’s circumstances and irresistibly leads us ever deeper into him.

Paul’s God-given vision for the Christians in Ephesus was that they might be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power and continuous in praise. I’d like to conclude with Paul’s challenge to them, as Eugene Peterson powerfully worded it in The Message:

And I ask [God] to strengthen you by his Spirit … that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

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[1] Tertullian, Apology, ch 39

[2] https://ugandansatheart.blogspot.com/2015/04/uah-emarchbishop-sabitis-near-fatal.html

“Growing into Spiritual Maturity” (Galatians 3:23-29)

 One of the great things about being a follower of Jesus is that you quickly discover that you are a member of a vast international family that encircles the entire world. I am not a huge traveller, but it has been my privilege to worship with other believers in such faraway places as Australia, Britain, France, Haiti, India and Libya. While some of the customs in each of those places may have differed somewhat and while we may have stumbled at points during the service, what was far more evident was the deep bond that we shared through our common faith in Jesus Christ.

I remember too the day we welcomed the first of several dozen refugees from Burma into the congregation where I served in Minnesota. Our primary means of communication initially was through an interpreter. And so much of what they were experiencing was utterly strange to them (not least the weather!). Yet there was no question that when they were with us they were at home among their spiritual family.

I suspect too that there are some in the congregation here this morning who, when they first came to Canada, found a number of our customs—things that seem perfectly normal to us—strange and mystifying.

In many ways, entering the world of the New Testament and meeting with the believers there is much the same. Some translation is required—and I am not speaking just from Greek to English. I’m also thinking of the many customs that were observed in the Jewish and Roman worlds of the first century that require sometimes considerable explanation if we are to gain a proper understanding of the message of the Bible.

For example, when Jesus told his parable about the woman and her lost coin, we may not be aware that her loss would amount to more than a hundred dollars in our world of today. Or when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink (which may seem like a perfectly normal thing for us to do on a hot day), he was breaking with nearly a thousand years of open hostility.

Well, welcome to the churches in Galatia in the middle of the first century—in the midst of a culture about as far removed as any in our world today. If we are to gain a proper understanding of the message the apostle Paul was seeking to get across to them, we will need to go behind his words to delve into the cultural background that underlies them. So let’s turn to Galatians 3:23-29 and see what we can learn from these verses and how we can apply it to our lives today.

The Pedagogue

When you read the opening verse of this morning’s passage, it appears that Paul has a very negative view of the Old Testament. “We were held captive under the law,” he says, “imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” It sounds as though the people of Old Testament times had been languishing in some kind of dark dungeon for fifteen hundred years.

And there are lots of people today who share that point of view about the Old Testament. On more than one occasion I have heard someone say to me, “I don’t like reading the Old Testament. It’s all about sin and punishment. I much prefer to read Jesus’ words about love and peace in the New Testament.” I don’t like to remind them that Jesus spoke about hell and judgement in some of the most vivid and frightening terms in the Bible. Just think of the parable of the rich man who ended up in anguish in hell and pleaded for Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31) or Jesus’ warnings to be careful not to be thrown into hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).

But I want to say that it was never Paul’s intention to be critical of the Old Testament. In fact, in the course of his thirteen letters Paul references the Torah forty-five times. He quotes from the prophets fifty-three times. And he draws from the psalms twenty-three times. Indeed, his reverence for the Old Testament scriptures comes out in the next verse of this morning’s passage. There he speaks of them as “our guardian until Christ came”.

Now the word our Bibles translates as “guardian” is has a very specific meaning. Elsewhere it is translated “guide” (1 Corinthians 4:15) and it refers to a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school, to teach him manners, and when necessary to inflict punishment. However, the guardian was not the child’s teacher. His role was simply to bring his charge to the teacher.

These guardians (the technical term was “pedagogues”) were often known for their harshness and strict discipline. Yet the fact is that many developed life-long relationships with their charges. Whatever the case, however, their duties came to an end when the boy reached the age of maturity.[1]

Paul recognized this fact. And he recruited it as a perfect image for the role of the Old Testament. Like the guardian who did not teach his charge, so the Old Testament cannot bring us to salvation. But through its stories and instruction about righteousness and sin, it brings us to the point where we can recognize our need for salvation and, more specifically, our need for a Saviour.

I rather like the way Eugene Petersen put verses 23 to 25 in The Message:

Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors … who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for. But now you have arrived at your destination…

The Toga

That was Paul’s first picture: the pedagogue responsible for bringing a child to his tutor. Paul’s second picture was another that was familiar to everyone living in the Roman Empire of the first century. And it was this:

In ancient Roman culture when a boy reached an age of somewhere around sixteen, he was considered to have entered maturity. Until that time he would always have been dressed in a child’s toga. Then, in a solemn family ceremony, he would discard the toga of his childhood and it would be replaced with the pure white toga of adulthood. From that day on, wherever he went, whatever he did, everyone would recognize him as a man.

Now we can’t be altogether sure about all the details involved in baptism in New Testament times—whether it was by immersion or sprinkling, whether it was in standing water or running water as some insisted, whether or not candidates removed their outer garments, and a host of other details.

However, we do know that very early on in the tradition of the church—and very much like the tradition of the toga—the newly baptized, on coming up out of the water, would be clothed in a white robe. That white robe was a visible reminder that Jesus had taken away the stain of their sins. More powerfully still, it was a dramatic anticipation of the day when they would join with that great crowd that we meet with in the book of Revelation—“the multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)

Whatever the case, just as the young man of Roman times put on his adult toga, so you and I through faith have put on Christ. Elsewhere Paul writes about our calling to attain to maturity, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13-15)

So it is that part of our calling in Christ is a challenge to spiritual maturity. When I was a very young Christian, a popular book that was doing the rounds had the title In Understanding Be Men. The title was based on the old King James Version of 1 Corinthians 14:20, which in our more contemporary translation of the Bible runs like this: “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

What are the marks of a mature faith? I think the best list was given to us by Paul himself. He calls them the fruit of the Spirit, and we will come to them in a few weeks in our study of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And if I could add a tenth, it would be humility: never to make the mistake of thinking we have arrived, that there is no more room for personal growth in our lives, but to keep on maturing in our faith—seeking to love Jesus and others more and more day by day.

The Church

So far Paul has focused on faith from an individual perspective. It is as though we have been looking at the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread out across the table. Now in the last two verses Paul fits all those pieces together. And what emerges?

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. 

It is a glorious picture. Suddenly all the things that once seemed to make a difference and had the potential of dividing us pale into insignificance: nationality, status, gender… And no doubt Paul (and you and I) could continue the list: age, political persuasion, education, tattoos, musical preferences and a whole host of other things that differentiate us and could easily cause us to drift apart or even drive wedges between us. But our unity in Christ is far more valuable, infinitely more precious than any of those things.

I wonder how many of you are familiar with the law of entropy in physics. The law of entropy states that when left alone in its natural state, everything tends to greater and greater disorder. I had a friend who used to talk about the law of spiritual entropy. That is, when left to itself, everything in the church tends to greater and greater disorder—and sometimes even to outright chaos!

The challenge for you and for me is, that if we are to avoid that spiritual entropy, if we are to be the community that Paul is describing for us in these verses in Galatians, it takes commitment and it takes hard work. We can’t be satisfied just to be pew warmers.

Unfortunately, the way our church building is structured (and most church buildings for that matter) it looks as though the great majority of us are an audience, with a few performers on the stage. Well, in my Anglican tradition, the area of the church where you are sitting right now is called the nave. It sounds a lot like navy, doesn’t it? That’s because the two words are related. “Nave” means “ship”. And in olden days, long before engines or even sails were invented, ships were powered by oars. And that’s where you come in! You are the oarsmen. You are the ones who are meant to be powering the ship.

Now I know that there are already an awful lot of people putting in an awful lot of sweat to keep this ship moving ahead. (In fact sometimes I worry that some of them are going to burn themselves out!) But let’s each ask ourselves, “How can I use the gifts that God has given me to help make this church the Christ-honouring community that God is calling us to be—where people looking in from the outside say, ‘See how they love one another!’ and yearn to come in?” This was the kind of church that Paul was yearning for in Galatia. And this is the kind of church that the world is yearning for today.

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[1]     See https://scispace.com/pdf/the-figure-of-the-paidagogos-in-art-and-literature-eubcjb89ko.pdf

“Some Things Bear Repeating” (1 John 2:7-14)

Last month Karen and I went on a road trip. It took us a little over 4400 kilometers in all, and along the way we enjoyed some wonderful scenery: the picturesque former mill town of Almonte just outside Ottawa, the quiet lakeside village of Haliburton, the thundering roar of Niagara Falls, the serene Thousand Islands, and the tree-covered slopes of New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains.

However, stunning though much of the scenery was along the way, none of that was the main intention of our trip. No, our real purpose was to spend time with relatives and friends from the past fifty or more years. And one of the highlights along the way was to worship with the church I had served more than forty years ago, back in the early 1980s. It was a delight to see faces and reminisce with worshippers we had not been with for decades. Admittedly there were those among us who had put on a little weight and others who had lost a little hair (and some of us both!). And the grey-bearded gentleman who read the Scripture had barely reached his teen years when we had last seen him. And there they were, continuing faithfully today.

Being with these people again was a living reminder that as believers and followers of Jesus Christ we are in it for the long haul. Jesus talked about the life of discipleship in terms of abiding in him, or as one rendering of the New Testament puts it, making ourselves at home with him.[1] And for his own part Jesus has promised that he will be with us to the end of the world. And that is what forms much of the background behind the First Letter of John, from which we have been reading over the past few weeks.

John is writing as a long-term pastor and he is writing looking back on his own even longer-term walk of discipleship with Jesus. We can’t be entirely sure, but the likelihood is that John was just a young teenager when with his brother James he left his fishing net behind in his father’s boat and heeded Jesus’ call to “Come, follow me.” Three years later he would be the only one of Jesus’ male disciples to be found standing by the cross. And the third morning after that he would be the first to peer inside the empty tomb and look with amazement on Jesus’ disused grave cloths lying discarded in a heap.

Now, as we read from the first of his three letters, the scene moves a thousand kilometers north, from Jerusalem to Ephesus, near the coast of what is modern-day Turkey. We learn from Irenaeus, who lived a generation later, that John ministered there until some point in the reign of the emperor Trajan.

Now Trajan ruled from 98 to 117 ad. So it is now approaching seventy years after the events in the gospel and John is nearing the end of a long and fruitful ministry. We don’t know much more about him, except for one little story that somehow managed to survive through the generations and was recounted three centuries or so later by Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin. It runs like this:

The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’ The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John: ‘Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’[2]

A word to all

Accurate or not, that little anecdote is certainly consistent with that we read in 1 John chapter 2 this morning. There we find John using his authority both as one who knew Jesus personally and as their long-term pastor to gently lay down the law with his congregation.

It was not as though he was coming up with anything new, says John. Indeed the commandment he was leaving with them was as old as Scripture itself, going right back to Moses. And it is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

Of course John had been present when Jesus cited it as one of the two great commandments (Matthew 22:37-40). But then John had been there again when Jesus upped the ante, when he raised the command to love to a whole new level. It was on the night before he was to give up his life for them on the cross that Jesus said to his followers, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

What Jesus was challenging his disciples to, and what John was reminding his congregation of, was that the love to which Jesus calls us, the love that is to characterize the church, is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling. It is the love of which the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13: a love that is patient and kind; a love that does not envy or boast, that is not arrogant or rude; a love that does not insist on its own way; a love that is not irritable or resentful—a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

You don’t have to think of it for long to realize that the Bible sets the bar pretty high for us! Yet all too often our love falls so far short of that. Sometimes it can be cool and formal at best. It’s great that we’ve adopted the practice of sharing the peace as a part of our worship, and that there are those who take the time and effort to make sure Sunday by Sunday that there is an opportunity for fellowship over a cup of coffee after the service. These are concrete expressions of the love that binds us together. And I know that that is just the tip of the iceberg, that both formally in our home groups and informally in other ways, again and again the love of Jesus is being demonstrated visibly and tangibly in our midst.

And that love is something we can never allow ourselves to take for granted. On the contrary, we need to treasure it and encourage it and to make every effort to ensure that it flourishes and deepens and grows. For it is fragile and it can all come tumbling down like a house of cards—sometimes over what are seemingly the tiniest of issues. And that is exactly what seems to have been happening in John’s congregation.

There is a part of me that is tempted to think that John addresses his readers as “children” because that was the way they were behaving. There were members who claimed to be living in the light of God’s love, yet within their hearts they were harbouring dark thoughts of bitterness and resentment towards their fellow believers. John does not reveal to us what the controversy was that sparked this state of affairs. Sometimes church squabbles can be triggered by the most insignificant of differences. Perhaps it was over the new colour of paint for the sanctuary. Or whether decaf should be served at coffee hour.

But then again there was a much deeper and more noble reason for John to call his congregation children. (By the way, he does it no fewer than thirteen times in the five chapters of this short letter.) His addressing them as such was not to demean or belittle them in any way. Rather, it was an expression of his deep and abiding affection for them, because spiritually they were his children. They had come to know God’s forgiveness through John’s proclamation of Christ and his blood shed on the cross. They had come into a personal relationship with him as their loving Father through John’s wise counsel. They had been born again, they had been nurtured and trained and helped to mature in their faith through John’s ministry.

A word to seniors

Yet although they had all of this in common, something was dividing them. And the fault line seems to have lain been between the older and the younger members of the congregation. So it is that John has two words of counsel for the “fathers”—for the senior members of the congregation and then another two for their juniors.

Speaking as a senior, I’m willing to admit that I can become set in my ways. It’s easy to slip into the habit of thinking that things were better the way they used to be, to long for the good old days. Yet that is a dangerous trap to fall into. Indeed, if we consider it for any length of time, we will likely come to the realization in most cases that the good old days weren’t really all that good after all, just different. And besides, it can be a dangerous thing to dwell in the past. Because in doing so, we stand a very good chance of missing the opportunities of the present.

One of the valuable lessons that I’m grateful I learned in the early days of my ministry was that there were women and men in the congregation whose perspectives and opinions I could value because they were able to take the long view of things. (Or as John puts it, they “know him who is from the beginning”.) They had lived through the high times and weathered the storms. They had seen fads that came and quickly faded away like the flowers of spring. But they also had the wisdom to recognize when God the Holy Spirit was leading us in new directions, to embark on new adventures—and perhaps to discard some of the things that had become hollow traditions, sometimes even impediments to the gospel.

I used to think of them privately as the wise old owls. And I don’t know what I, or we as a congregation, would have done without them. I continue to be humbled by their long-term commitment and service to Jesus and his church. And again and again I have found myself grateful both for their time-tested wisdom and also for their willingness to give the younger members of the congregation the rope and the freedom to try out new ideas, new approaches, and on some occasions to ward off disaster with some wise words of caution—and all without a hint of judgement or a critical spirit. How much we have to gain when we learn to listen with respect to the senior members of our congregation!

A word to the young

John’s words aren’t for the seniors only, however. He also has something to share with the younger members of the church. And by the way, John is not talking about the youth group here (although they too have important roles to play). The word John uses refers to those somewhere in the twenty-five- to forty-year-old bracket. These are people in the prime of life—people who are newly married, starting families, early in their careers.

It is all too easy for those important and significant commitments (commitments which I want to affirm are God-given) to mushroom and to consume all our time and resources, to the point where we have little energy left for anything else. (I don’t deny that embarking on a career and raising a family are hard work and take a lot of juggling!) Yet, as I have been grateful for the “wise old owls” I am also thankful to God for giving to me and to the churches where I have served those younger people who were willing to devote a significant portion of their time, their energy and their creativity to contribute and to follow through on fresh ideas and new directions given to them by the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why Jesus ever thought up the idea of the church. It can be so messy and complicated! Yet I thank God that over the years he has given me the opportunity to see that there is a riches when people from all different backgrounds and experiences, young and old, rich and poor, out of their common love for Jesus and energized by the Holy Spirit are committed to working together in the service of God’s kingdom.

My prayer is that we may be that kind of church. And indeed in many ways we are already that kind of church. We have old and young, students and retirees, young families and grandparents, single, married and widowed, ancestral Nova Scotians and newcomers from nearly a dozen different nations—all the ingredients for a powerful multi-generational, multinational witness here in Halifax. And so the question lies before us: Are we willing to lay aside our own agendas and follow God’s agenda—to use this wonderful variety he has given us, not to serve our own needs but to shine the light of Jesus into an increasingly dark and needy world?

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[1]     The Message, John 15:7

[2]     Commentary on Galatians, 6:10

“Consider Jesus” (Hebrews 3:1-6 – 1998)

 This is a sermon I preached on 15 February 1998:

As he drew to the conclusion of his gospel the aged apostle John reflected, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” It was a common characteristic of those early Christians that they could not say enough about Jesus. At a much earlier stage in his life John had been arrested, along with his fellow fisherman-turned-apostle Peter, for publicly proclaiming the name of Jesus. When confronted with a court order not to do so any longer, they replied, “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

In a similar vein a number of years ago, when I was a curate in Montreal, we had a visit from Erica Sabiti, the Archbishop of Uganda. During his time there, he was hosted by a family in their home in the suburbs. After he had left, I remember the wife commenting (with some consternation) that all the time he was with them he never stopped talking about Jesus. Apparently that was something quite uncustomary for her as an Anglican!

It seems that our author to the Hebrews is a member of the same camp. He cannot say enough about Jesus. He began by extolling him as the exact representation of God’s being, shining with all the radiance of the divine glory, whose majesty is such that even angels are barely worthy of comparison with him. He is the eternal Son of God, to be worshipped and adored. He is the King of kings, to whom we owe our fullest allegiance. He is the unchanging Creator of the universe, who holds all that is in the palm of his hand. Yet we also know that that hand is a nail-scarred hand. This same Jesus, whose glory is beyond our power to conceive of it, has entered the sphere of our human existence. He has suffered and died in order to be the captain of our salvation. He stands alongside us in our weakness and need as our faithful brother. He is our merciful and faithful high priest.

You might think that after all of this the author might have run out of things to say. In fact, he has only begun. What we have been reading thus far is hardly more than an introduction to what he yearns to tell us about Jesus, who means everything to him. And so, as though we had not been doing so already, he calls upon us to “fix your thoughts on Jesus”. The word means to consider, to contemplate, to observe carefully, to focus our minds and hearts, for we have still more to hear about Jesus.

Jesus the Builder

Who is this Jesus? We have already l earned in chapter one that he is beyond comparison with the angels. Now the author compares Jesus with the towering figure of Jewish history. Although the Hebrew nation traced its origins to Abraham, it owed its identity to Moses. It was Moses who h ad led them out of their generations-long slavery in Egypt and in their trek to freedom in the land that God had promised them. It was Moses who communed with God atop Mount Sinai and brought down with him the laws and decrees which form the heart of the Old Testament. It could easily be said that Moses was the builder of the Jewish nation.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews begs to differ, however. Moses is not the builder of God’s house; he is just a part of it. He is a brick, a board or perhaps a piece of the foundation. That is not to deny the important place that Moses occupies in history. (Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets [that is, Moses’ contribution]; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.") Nor is it in any way to diminish Moses’ role within God’s purposes for his people. Yet it is to say that, as great as Moses was, there is one that is yet greater than he; and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you remember what Jesus said to Peter? “On this rock I will build my church” Jesus is the builder of God’s house. The word employed here is one that was commonly used for shipwrights. It was used to describe what Noah did as he sawed the wood and hammered the nails into the ark. But of course, what the author is speaking of is not a physical structure such as the ark. He is speaking of a spiritual reality. And what we find is that this picture of Jesus as the builder of God’s house points not only to who he is, but also to what we, his followers, are called to be.

In the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke gives us a marvellous snapshot of the early church. He tells us of the devotion of the first believers to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to prayer and to a remarkable spirit of generosity. Then he comments, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” What Luke recognized was that the church was not being built by its members. It was being built by the Lord. That does not mean that we are free to sit back and do nothing. Just the opposite: we must be as faithful as those first Christians in committing ourselves to teaching and fellowship, to worship and prayer, to generous giving according to our means and sharing with those in need, and to exercising the gifts that God has given us. Yet we do so, not in a frantic effort to prop up an institution, but in faith that Christ will use our contribution in the building of his church.

Jesus the Son

As we move from verse 4 to verse 5, the picture of a house and its builder shifts into a picture of a household and its members. Until very recently we have been accustomed to think of a household as a combination of a husband, a wife and 1.7 children or some variation on that. In ancient times family structure was much more complex. A household would include not only parents and children, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, perhaps some cousins, and the household servants. In any family in the ancient world a son (particularly the first son) occupied a place of honour. As the bearer of the family name, the heir of the family fortune, he held pre-eminence. And so it is with Christ and the church, the family of God. Christ is the first-born son. Christ is the head. The church exists for him.

And so just as Moses and you and I may be characterized as parts of a house with Jesus as the builder, so we may also be seen as servants in a household where Jesus is the son. We may understand the place that a servant had in a household in New Testament times from a remark that Jesus made to his disciples:

Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, “Come along now and sit down to eat”? Would he not rather say, “Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink”? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty” (Luke 17:7-10).

The glory of membership in Jesus’ household, however, is that he does not treat us as servants. As he said to his disciples at the last supper, “I no longer call you servants Instead, I have called you friends.” It is our inestimable privilege to be included in Christ’s family, not as servants, but as his friends. More wonderfully still, Jesus comes among us as one who serves. “Who is greater,” he once asked his disciples, “the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (John 15:5; Luke 22:27). And so we discover one of the miracles of God’s grace: a son who comes to us as our servant.

Jesus the Apostle

We have looked at Jesus as the builder of God’s house and the son in God’s family. Yet there are two important words about him that we have skipped over. They occur in the first verse of the chapter. One of them is familiar to us, but the other, I suspect, is less so. Jesus, the author tells us, is “the apostle and high priest whom we confess". The concept of Jesus as our high priest was introduced in the previous chapter and receives a fuller treatment in the next. But this is the only occasion in all of the New Testament where the word “apostle” is used with reference to him.

Commonly we think of apostles as those whom Jesus appointed to be his representatives in the world: Peter, James, John, Andrew, Simon, Jude, Matthew, Bartholomew, Thaddeus and the rest. These were the ones who accompanied Jesus to the towns and villages of Galilee and on whom he conferred authority to proclaim the good news and to cast out demons. After the defection and death of Judas Iscariot, the apostles met to find a suitable candidate to fill their ranks. Their criteria were that, whoever the person was, it must be someone who had been with them throughout the whole period of Jesus’ ministry, right back to his baptism by John and through to his ascension. Their primary task, as they saw it, was to bear witness to Jesus’ resurrection and that was what they faithfully did from the day of Pentecost onwards.

How, we may ask, does Jesus fit into this picture? Certainly we cannot speak of him as an apostle in the same sense as Peter, John and the others. In what sense, then, does Jesus fit the title of apostle? The answer lies in the meaning of the word itself. Our English word “apostle” derives from the Greek verb apostello, which means “send forth". Simply put, an apostle is someone who has been sent out by someone else. In the Greek-speaking world the word was used to denote an envoy, a delegate or a messenger. The twelve apostles were sent out into the world by Christ to bear witness to him. But Christ has been sent by the Father.

So it is that we hear Jesus repeatedly speaking of himself as having been sent. Quoting from Isaiah he announced at the outset of his ministry, “The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Taking a little child into his arms, he instructed his disciples, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” To a woman seeking healing for her daughter he said, “I have been sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” And in the upper room after the resurrection he addressed those who had gathered with the words, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.” (Luke 4:18,19; Mark 9:37; Matthew 15:24; John 20:21).

Once again, when Hebrews refers to Jesus as the apostle of the faith we confess, it is telling us something both about Jesus and about ourselves. Just as Jesus was sent into the world by the Father, so he sends you and me. And just as Jesus entered fully into the suffering of sinful humanity, so he sends us to the same costly participation in our world today. To use theological jargon, what we are talking about is the principle of the incarnation. That is, just as Jesus took flesh to make God and his love a reality in the world, so he sends us to do the same: not merely to proclaim a message of words from pulpits of brass and stone, but to share in the lives of those around us, to make God’s love a reality by the kind of people we are, by our willingness to be with others and to give without an eye to the cost. To confess Jesus as our apostle is not only to acknowledge him as the one sent by God, but to recognize that he sends us today.

This point was brought home to me very forcefully this past week. At the suggestion of members of our Bible study group I watched the video Dead Man Walking. It is the true story of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who became the spiritual advisor to a man who had been sentenced to death for the brutal rape and murder of two teenagers. This was an emotionally wrenching experience for her, not only as she sought to relate to this twisted and manipulative individual, but as she also attempted to offer love and understanding to the parents of the two victims and to enter into their grief. As he was being taken to receive a lethal injection, her final words of advice to the convicted killer were that he should look into her face as he died, so that the last thing he saw would be the face of love.

I have no doubt that when people looked into Jesus’ eyes that was exactly what they saw. And as Jesus was sent by the Father, so he sends you and me into a needy, hurting and often twisted world that others might see in us the face of God’s love.

* * *

Heavenly Father,
we can never thank you enough
for sending Jesus into our world: 
grant that he may so live in us today
that we may serve you in all that we do
and that others may see in us
your face of love;
for the glory of your name.