Living Words

The Rev'd William Klock
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Living Word Reformed Episcopal Church, Courtenay, British Columbia

Episodes

  1. 46M AGO

    A Sermon for Passion Sunday

    A Sermon for Passion Sunday Hebrews 9:11-15 by William Klock   I’d like to put our study of Ephesians on pause.  We reached a good stopping point last Sunday.  Now Easter is fast approaching and we need to switch gears for a few weeks.  It’s often the case that the lessons for the Sunday before a major feast day are meant to prepare us and to explain what’s about to come and that’s just what Passion Sunday does—not just for Easter, but for Palm Sunday and all of Holy Week.  That said, today’s Epistle from the book of Hebrews dovetails remarkably well with what we’ve been reading in the letter to the Ephesians.  In Ephesians, Paul’s been writing to a cluster of little churches in what today we call western Turkey.  The people in those churches were mostly gentiles—non-Jews.  They had been pagans who knew the world is not as it should be.  They longed for a way out.  Some of them, no doubt, had taken note of the Jewish diaspora communities in their cities and those communities had got their attention.  The Jews had a sense of holiness.  They kept themselves apart from the moral filth, from the sexual immorality, from the dog-eat-dog world of the Greeks and Romans.  The Jews had a sense of compassion, of love, of mercy that was foreign to the pagans.  Maybe most of all, they saw in these Jewish neighbours a sense of hope—that history wasn’t just going forever round and round, never changing, that their God actually cared for the world and for his people, and that one day he would do something to set the world to rights.  The God of Israel was a God who cared, who was faithful, who would one day wipe away the tears and deal with evil.  There was nothing and no one like that in the pagan world.  But that wasn’t their story.  The God of Israel wasn’t their god.  They had no right to it.  The best they could do was hang out on the fringe and hope maybe something of it would rub off.  If nothing else, it gave them at least a little hope to know that it was possible to be different.   And then Paul came along and he proclaimed the good news about Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who was crucified, buried, and who rose to life.  Paul told them how the blood of Jesus—if they would only believe and submit themselves to him as creation’s true Lord—how the blood of Jesus would purify them from the stain of sin and of idolatry and of death.  And they did believe.  And in response, the God of Israel adopted them as sons and daughters.  He filled them with his Spirit—drawing near to them, just as he’d promised to draw near to his people Israel.  And so Paul wrote his letter to them to say that in all of this, they’ve become the new temple of God—the place where he has drawn near, the place where he dwells, the place where a renewed humanity—Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, slave and free, men and women—are all being brought together, the vanguard of God’s new creation in the midst of the old—a people to challenge the principalities and powers, the gods and kings of the old world with the Lordship of Jesus and the inauguration of new creation.   And Paul’s chief word for those gentile believers in Ephesus—so far as we’ve got in the letter to this point—is that this story that belonged to Israel is now fully their story.  Jesus and the Spirit have brought them into it.  The promises of the God of Israel are now their promises.  The hope of Israel is now their hope.   And then the book of Hebrews.  It takes the same themes and flips them around.  We don’t know who wrote it.  Possibly Paul.  Probably written in the mid-60s.  To Jewish believers, probably at Rome.  These were people who had been part of that story all along.  They were the natural sons and daughters.  They were the original branches of the olive tree—not gentile branches grafted in.  And, just like Paul, they were confronted with the risen Jesus and recognised that he was the long-promised and long-awaited Messiah who changed everything, who brought the old promises to fulfilment.  And they believed.  And they, too, became part of this community, this new Israel, purified by Jesus and filled with the Spirit.  They too became part of this new temple in which God had come to dwell.  But then persecution came, too.  And with the threat of persecution hanging over them, it was all too tempting to go back to their old ways.  The Jews had a long-standing arrangement with Caesar.  They would pray for him and he would let them worship and live in peace.  And so these Jewish Christians began to withdraw: back to their synagogues, back into their purity codes, away from their gentile brothers and sisters.  Hebrews was written to them—to remind them of the same things Paul wanted the Ephesians to be sure of.  That in Jesus and in the church, their hopes are being fulfilled, that God’s new creation is being born, and that there’s no going back.   In fact, this is just what Hebrews does: it reminds these Jewish believers—in case they’ve forgotten—that their old way of life fell short.  The tabernacle was wonderful, it was the sign of God’s presence with his people, but they couldn’t actually enter it.  The priests and the sacrifices they offered were great.  They purified the people from their impurity and from the stain of sin and death so that God could dwell in their midst, but despite being offered continually, they were never able to perfect the conscience of the people who came to worship.  No, all these things were good, but the writer of Hebrews repeatedly makes the point: The tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices the torah itself, they were part of the promise.  Jesus and the Spirit are the fulfilment.  Again, you can’t go back.  This is where today’s Epistle picks up: Hebrews 9:11-15.   But when the Messiah arrived as high priest of the good things that were coming, he entered the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands (that is, not of this present creation), and not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood.  He entered, once and for all, into the holy place, accomplishing a redemption that lasts forever.  For if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer, make people holy (in the sense of purifying their bodies) when they had been unclean, how much more will the blood of the Messiah, who offered himself to God through the eternal Spirit as a spotless sacrifice, cleanse our consciences from dead works to serve the living God!   When the Israelites built the tabernacle in the wilderness, on their way from Egypt to the promised land, it was a house for God to dwell in.  But it always pointed to more than that.  It’s very structure, layout, and design were meant to evoke the garden of Eden.  It reminded the Israelites what humanity had lost in our rebellion against God.  And it pointed forward to a future in which God would, someday and somehow, set the world to rights and once again dwell with his people.  Human beings were created to live in and to enjoy God’s presence, to receive life from him, and in turn to steward that life back to his creation.  But when we tried to become gods ourselves, when we sinned, we drove a wedge between ourselves and God, between earth and heaven.  We began to die and we brought death and chaos into the very world into which God had meant us to carry his life and his divine order.  But in the tabernacle, Israel saw the beginnings of restoration: God once again, dwelling in the midst of a people purified—albeit imperfectly and temporarily—from the stain of sin and death.   The tabernacle was a promise.  Its imperfection made this clear.  God was with his people, but not fully.  They camped around his presence and they could draw near, but there was a great veil that separated them from God.  Even the sacrifices that purified them couldn’t make them pure enough to pass that veil.  God had made them a holy people, but even a holy people could never enter the most holy place where God’s presence dwelled.  Sin and death still separated the people from God.  But that remaining separation—so close, but yet so far—drove home the promissory nature of the tabernacle and the priests and the sacrifices.  If God was going to all this trouble to draw his people this close now, then one day he would surely bring them fully into his presence.  One day he would fully heal the breach.   But as the centuries passed, Israel took the tabernacle (and later the temple) for granted.  The people forgot the promise.  Like the dog in the meme, sitting in the midst of a burning room, but contentedly sipping his coffee and saying, “This is fine,” Israel eventually just came to see the tabernacle and the priesthood and the sacrifices as the solution, the fix for sin.  Yes, God still had to deal with those wicked gentiles and one day he would smite them and put Israel on top of the political heap.  One day God’s presence would return to the temple.  But the priesthood and the sacrifices would go on and on.  That’s what it would mean for the world to be set to rights.  They stopped seeing the imagery in the temple that pointed forward to a day when Eden would be restored.  They forgot about the vocation God had given to Adam and Eve in the beginning.   I think we too often do the same sort of thing as Christians.  We come to the Lord’s Table and somehow it becomes hum-drum for us.  We no longer think of the end goal, of the great feast that awaits on the day when this work of new creation is finally done and the knowledge of the glory of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.  We just try to be good and we wait for Jesus to take us to heaven so we can escape the evils of the world.  We lose sight of the big picture, of God’s grand plan, of us and creation actually, somehow and someda

  2. MAR 15

    Infinitely More than We can Ask or Imagine

    Infinitely More than We can Ask or Imagine Ephesians 3:14-21 by William Klock   Eugene Peterson, one of my seminary professors, used to tell the story of a little Haitian girl named Addie.  She was an orphan.  When she was five, she was adopted by an American family.  This man and woman travelled to Haiti to pick her up.  As they walked toward the plane to go home, little Addie reach up and slipped her hands into the hands of these two strangers she’d never met before. In that moment, they became Mom and Dad.  In that moment, this scared little girl put her fearless trust in these loving strangers.   That evening, back home, they all sat down to dinner.  There were heaps of pork chops and mashed potatoes and Addie watched, wide-eyed, as everyone dug in—and particularly as her two teenaged brothers dug in and dug in and dug in—until there was nothing left.  She’d never seen so much food before and she’d never seen people eat so much.  And when it was gone, Addie became very quiet.  Mom and Dad realized something was wrong.  And it occurred to Mom that it was the disappearing food.  This little girl had lived her whole life hungry.  When food was gone, it was gone and it might be a day or more before there was more.  And so she took Addie to the kitchen and she showed her the bread drawer, which was full of bread; and she showed her the refrigerator, which was full of milk and eggs and vegetables and meat; and she took her to the pantry and showed her bins full of potatoes and onion and shelves of canned goods.  She showed Addie that no matter how much her hungry teenage brothers ate, there would always be plenty of food and she would never go hungry again.  And notice, that Mother didn’t just tell Addie she’d never have to worry about going hungry again.  She showed her.  She named the meats in the fridge and the ice cream in the freezer; she let her handle the potatoes and the cans of soup.  She gave Addie confidence and reason to trust.[1]   Or as Paul has said to us in Ephesians 3, “confidence and access” (v. 12) to the “Messiah’s riches, riches no one could begin to count” (v. 8).  None of it was ours—or the Ephesians’—by birth.  We—and they—are gentiles.  The promises of God, the Messiah, those things belonged to Israel.  And yet, Paul has stressed over and over, the great mystery revealed in Jesus the Messiah is that through him, God has welcomed everyone—Jew and gentile alike—whoever believes—into the inheritance of Israel and into the vast riches of Israel’s God: forgiveness of sins and a promise of life, both for us, but also for the whole creation, one day to be renewed, made new, resurrected as Jesus has been, to be what God created it, created us to be in the beginning.  The world set to rights and us, living forever in fellowship with God.   That is good news.  And those gentile believers in Ephesus—and we—we’re captivated by that good news, by the promise, and we slip our grubby, sinful, idolatrous little hands into the hands of the Messiah and he washes us clean, he introduces us to his—now our—Father, and he begins to lead us home.  Not on an airplane for a short little hop across the Caribbean, but a lot more like Israel being led through the wilderness for forty years—only this time the promised land is God’s future, his new creation.  And maybe it’s because we didn’t see for ourselves the army of Pharaoh drowned in the sea, maybe it’s because we never experienced the manna in the wilderness, but when the journey gets difficult—Paul knew that times of persecution were coming—but when the journey gets difficult, it’s easy to worry whether God will come through—whether there will be enough.  It’s easy to hedge our bets and to compromise—trusting in the things of this world to see us through the hard times rather than trusting God and letting him lead us.  It’s even easy to let go of his hand altogether.  To just go back to Egypt—or in our case, to paganism, to the rule of the principalities and powers of the old wicked age.  Things are familiar there.  It might have been bad, but at least there was food.  Paul knew these Christians would one day face uncertainty, he knew they’d be tempted to compromise their faith and their allegiance to the King, and he knew that if they did that, they’d fail to be the church Jesus and the Spirit had made them.  They’d become just like the shabby and drab world around them instead of shining forth the Technicolor glory of the God who indwelt them and the wonders of his new creation.  So knowing that, what does Paul do?  Brothers and Sisters, he prays for them.  Look at Ephesians 3:14: “Because of this,” he writes, “I am kneeling down before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.  My prayer is this: that through the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power, through his Spirit, in your inner being; that the Messiah may make his home in your hearts through faith; that you may be rooted and firmly founded in love; and that you may be fully able to grasp, with all the saints, the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the surpassing love of the Messiah, so that God may fill you with all his fullness.”   Maybe we should start at the end of the prayer—with the thing that Paul wants most for the Ephesians and for us—the thing that he’s praying all the other things will lead us to.  He prays that God will fill us with all his fullness.  Remember, that language of filling is temple language.  That’s what Paul’s been talking about all this time.  We are God’s temple.  The blood of Jesus has purified us from our idolatry and from the stain of sin and death so that God can come and dwell in us through his Spirit.  And just as God’s glory shone from the old temple on Mount Zion, revealing his presence with his people, just so God wants his glory to shine forth from us, from the church.  We don’t just proclaim the good news about renewal and new life and new creation and resurrection in Jesus.  Brother and Sisters, we’re to live it. We’re to be the beginning of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.   And Paul knows this won’t be easy.  It wasn’t easy for Israel on her journey and neither will it be easy for us.  So,, ack to verse 14: He gets on his knees and he prays.  We’d do well to do the same, probably even the kneeling part.   You can pray sitting or standing or walking or riding a bike, but this got me to thinking about kneeling. It’s not mandatory, but I wonder if it would do us well to kneel more often.  Our tradition is to kneel when we pray in church and I know we don’t do that here because we don’t have kneelers and, even if we did, God bless the Presbyterians who made our pews a hundred and fifty years ago, but they made them so that only a child’s feet can fit underneath them without major contortions.  But maybe we need to kneel—at least in our private prayers—more often.  I don’t often read Eugene Peterson.  I’m just not on his wavelength.  To quote Eugene Peterson again: “While on my knees I cannot run away.  I cannot assert myself.  I place myself in a position of willed submission…On my knees I am no longer in a position to flex my muscles, strut or cower, hide in the shadows or show off on stage…I set my agenda aside for a time and become still, present to God.”[2]   Prayer is the place where we come to the Father as adopted sons and daughters, reach up, and trustingly place our hands in his.  And maybe it would do us good, when we pray, to put ourselves in a posture where that’s all we can do, knowing just how prone we are to running away or cowering in fear or showing off.  As we kneel, we empty ourselves, and with Paul, we pray that God will fill us up.  Again, the point of our being filled is to shine forth God’s glory, but what we’re filled with to make that happen is God’s love.  In verse 15 Paul starts out appealing to God as Father—the one in whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.  In verse 17, it’s the love that fills our hearts, that is the root of the great tree, and the foundation of the temple itself.  I expect, if he wanted to, Paul could just keep piling metaphor on metaphor to describe the riches of God’s love, because he wants us to know that it’s in knowing God’s love that the church will find the power to be what God has called us to be.  Would that we would remember that.  How often have we put something else in the place of love?  There are all sorts of things that are important to our being the church.  There are all sorts of things that are even essential to being the church.  But without love at the centre, without love as our taproot, without love as our foundation, we will never be the church that Jesus and the Spirit want us to be.  Think of Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians.  They were a church full of spiritual gifts.  The people were doing amazing and astounding things in the name of Jesus.  But Paul writes to them and says, “Without love, it’s nothing.  Without love, you might as well be a clanging cymbal, a bashing gong.”  You Canadians might say that the church in Corinth was a “gong show”, because it wasn’t built on love.  Without love as the root and foundation, it’s all for nought.  Without love, there is no glory.   This is what Paul’s getting at when he prays: “that through the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power, through his Spirit, in your inner being.”  Paul wants us to see the riches of God’s glory laid out for us.  Like little Addie going to the kitchen to look in the refrigerator and the pantry, to see the bacon, to see the ice cream, to see that big bag of potatoes, to handle the cans of soup.  To know

  3. MAR 8

    Prisoner of Jesus the Messiah

    Prisoner of Jesus the Messiah Ephesians 3:1-13 by  William Klock   Ask yourself what happens when the church is being faithful in its gospel calling and life. As we’ve worked through the first two chapter of Ephesians, Paul has explained that the church is God’s new temple. It’s a people purified by the blood of Jesus so that God can draw near in the person of his Spirit to dwell with us. That’s always been God’s plan for humanity and for creation. The garden was his temple and he placed us there to steward it well, on the one hand, and on the other, to dwell with him and to enjoy his presence—life with him.  And ever since we rejected that calling, God has been working to restore us to it.  And so the church, this people washed clean of sin and death by Jesus, and then filled with his Spirit, this new temple, we’re the working model of God’s coming new creation in the here and now.   And if we’re faithful in being that working model, what happens? The ideal, the hope is that people hear our proclamation of the kingdom and they see the first beginning of God’s new creation when they look at the church. In the midst of the darkness, the church should be light.  In the midst of death, the church should be life.  The church should be here to show a better way through the cross.  To prophetically wipe away the tears of the hurt and mourning and to confront the principalities and powers, the false lords and the corrupt systems of the world with the truth of the gospel and the lordship of Jesus.  And people do hear and see and experience the faithfulness of the church.  In us they meet the living God and the Lord who died for them and they encounter his glory and they kneel in faith and are, themselves washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit. But our idea of the faithful church often stops there. Maybe that’s because we think of the church, not in terms of faithfulness, but in terms of success.  Butts in the pews. Money in the plate. Acclaim by the world.  And yet for the first Christians the opposite was true.  They were small.  They were poor.  They were persecuted and imprisoned and martyred by the world around them.   And that’s because, when the church is faithful in living and proclaiming and witnessing the presence of God’s new creation and the Lordship of Jesus, the principalities and powers—that was how Jews like Paul thought of the unseen powers, once placed by God to oversee peoples and nations, but now in rebellion against him—those principalities and powers, earthly kings, and the powerful people invested in those kingdoms and the corrupt systems that run them—Brothers and Sisters, if we’re doing our job showing that God’s new world is breaking in and that Jesus is setting things to rights, those powers will fight back.  They will try to shut us up or shut us down. They will throw us in prison.  They will kill us.  Or they will try to corrupt us. They’ll divide our loyalties: Sure you can worship Jesus, but you’ll also need to kneel to Caesar.  They’ll get us to adulterate the gospel with materialism and commercialism or politics.  They’ll convince us we can have one set of values in the church and another in business or in government.   With that in mind, look at Ephesians 3. Paul rites, “It is because of all this that I, Paul, the prisoner of Messiah Jesus on behalf of you gnetiles…”  Paul sort of interrupts himself there for rhetorical purposes, but we should pause here too.  Paul was in prison. Probably this is when he was in prison in Rome, but it could have been in Ephesus.  And for a lot of people in his word, that meant that Paul was out of favour with God.  How often do we hear that sort of thing today? There are parts of the church that have been corrupted and compromised by the idea that faith means health and wealth, happiness and prosperity.  That you can name it and, by faith, claim it.  And if you don’t get it, well, then you don’t have enough faith or you’re out of favour with God.  If we were to turn over to Second Corinthians we’d see that that’s how the Corinthians interpreted Paul’s imprisonment.  But this is pagan thinking.   But Paul knew better. In verse 13 he tells them, “Don’t lose heart because of my sufferings on your behalf. That’s your glory!”  In other words, he’s imprisoned because he’s been faithful to the calling God gave him.  He’s imprisoned because of his great faith.  He wants the Ephesians to understand the paradox of the cross: God’s power is made perfect in weakness.  We’re prone to forgetting this.  When we bail on a church because we think it’s too small, when we start adopting sales tactics as if the gospel is something to sell, when we cozy up to corrupt leaders and rulers looking for favour, when we think we have to project or pursue strength in order to win, we’ve lost the plot that is centred on the cross of Jesus.  You can’t adulterate God’s new creation with the old.  If we do, we lose our witness and we stop challenging the principalities and power of the old with the lordship of Jesus and the glory of the kingdom.   So Paul was in prison because he was being faithful, because he was establishing, just as God had called him to do, these little communities that were breaking the rules of the old order: bringing Jews and gentiles, men and women, slave and free together into a single family.  This was the family through which God will make his glory known throughout the earth.  Remember the priests mocking Jesus on the cross, to come down if he was really the son of God, then they would believe. But Paul knew—and the people in those little churches in Ephesus knew—it was because Jesus is the son of God that he had to stay on the cross.  It was through his weakness, through his death that the great enemy, death itself, would be defeated and the battle won.  Weakness is the powerful way of the cross.   Paul had got the attention of the powers of the present evil age and it landed him in prison, but instead of thinking that God had failed, Paul knew that this was actually the sign, the proof that the gospel and the Spirit were doing their work, that they were truly rising to challenge the old gods and kings.  So he goes on in verse 3, “I’m assuming, by the way, that you’ve heard about the plan of Gods’ grace that was given to me to pass on to you?  You know, the mystery that God revealed to me, as I wrote briefly just now.  Anyway…  When you read this you’ll be able to understand the special insight I have into the Messiah’s mystery.  This wasn’t made known to human beings in previous generations, but now it’s been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.  The mystery is this, that, through the gospel, the gentiles are to share Israel’s inheritance.  They are to become fellow members of the body, along with them, and fellow sharers of the promise of Jesus the Messiah.”   God’s great mystery, his secret purpose that was there all along, promised to Abraham and to Moses, to David and to the Prophets, but missed by so many people in Israel—and of course totally unknown to the gentiles who did know about those promises—that mystery hit Paul like a ton of bricks the day he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus—or maybe it was three days later when Ananias prayed for him and his eyes were opened.  Paul started to rethink everything his Jewish Pharisee brain knew—and it knew the whole story—but suddenly he was looking it at through a new lens, through the reality that this Jesus who was crucified as a false Messiah had been raised and was, in fact, the Messiah after all.  And if that were true—well, that wall outside the temple, the one carved with the warning that gentile must not pass on pain of death—that wall was now irrelevant.  In fact, that whole temple had become irrelevant because of Jesus.  He’s said this back in 2:19 and now he says pretty much the same thing again, “The mystery is this, that through the gospel, the gentiles are to share in Israel’s inheritance.  They are to become fellow members of the body…fellow sharers of the promise in Messiah Jesus.”  In Greek he drives this point home with real force using three words that all begin with the prefix syn that means “with”.  The gentiles are with-inheritors, with-body, and with-partakers—to put it very literally in English.  For those in the Messiah, the distinction between the Jews and the rest of the world is gone.  And we often read right past it, but this was absolutely key, heart of the gospel stuff for Paul.   Israel’s story reached its climax and the promises were fulfilled in the Messiah and in his death for the sins of the whole world.  In that moment the whole sacrificial system, the whole system of purity and impurity, the temple itself became irrelevant for everyone—whether or Jew or gentile—for anyone who throws himself or herself at the feet of Jesus in faith and love to be purified once and for all and forever by his blood, to be filled by God’s Spirit, and thereby to become a part of God’s new temple.   When the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, he was the first to really grasp all this.  The other apostles back in Jerusalem were still debating whether gentile believers had to be circumcised or not.  So Jesus sent Paul to go announce to the gentiles that it’s not necessary.  There’s now a single people defined by faith in the risen Messiah.  Of course, Paul first went back to Jerusalem to make sure his fellow apostles understood this, too.  But his mission was to proclaim the good news to the nations.  I expect most of the his first converts were those gentiles who were already on the fringe.  The “god fearers” as the Jews called them.  Greeks and Romans who encountered Jewish society and saw something t

  4. MAR 1

    A Place Where God Will Live

    A Place Where God Will Live Ephesians 2:11-22 by William Klock   In today’s Old Testament lesson we hear King Solomon praying at the dedication of the temple.  The temple was finally completed and Solomon gathered the elders of Israel at the tabernacle, where they offered sacrifices too many to number.  Then with the priests leading them with the ark of the covenant, they processed up the mountain to the temple.  When they’d placed it in the holy of holies, the presence of the Lord, the shekinah, the cloud of his glory descended to fill the temple as it once had the tabernacle.  And Solomon prayed.  He prayed for the new temple and he prayed for his people.  He prayed that they would be faithful.  And then, our lesson today, he prayed for the foreigners, for the gentiles who might come to the Lord’s temple having heard of his great name, his mighty hand, and his outstretched arm—that coming to the temple, they would know his glory.  Solomon’s kingdom was, however imperfectly, a fulfilment of the Lord’s promise to Abraham to make Israel a light to the nations.  And the nations came to Israel and to Solomon, because they saw and because they heard of the Lord’s reputation.  Not only had he blessed his people, but in him they saw a god unlike their own.  And so they came, and they saw for themselves the goodness of the Lord, the God of Israel.  And Solomon knew, too, that they would come to the temple that he’d built.  So he prayed that when these foreigners came and prayed, that the Lord would answer them, that he would make himself known to them, so that “all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel.”  Again, this wasn’t some one-off prayer that Solomon came up with.  Solomon’s prayer is rooted in the promises of God and in the story of his people.  Solomon knew that the world is not as it should be; Solomon knew the Lord’s promises to set it to rights; and Solomon knew that God had given an integral role to his people to bring the fulfilment of those promises.  And Solomon great desire was for his people to be faithful to that calling, to that vocation—faithful to be a temple people.   Now, this imagery and idea of the temple wasn’t new with Israel; it goes all the way back to the beginning of the story.  The garden was God’s first temple.  And the man and woman he created—he created them—us—to bear his image.  That means to be his representatives in the temple, to serve him, and steward his goodness to the rest of creation.  We rejected that vocation and the story ever since has been about God restoring his temple and his people.  Two weeks ago, when we looked at Ephesians 2:1-10, we saw how Jesus—the one in whom God and humanity have come together—represents God’s work to restore his temple, but we also saw there that, as Paul stresses so much, what is true of Jesus is also true of those who are in him.  One day his people will be raised to be like him—heaven and earth people—but in the meantime, God has filled his church—filled us—with his Spirit as a foretaste and a down payment of that hope.  Brothers and Sisters, that means that we, purified by the blood of Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit, we’re now the temple—not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a temple of people filled with God’s presence.   Just as Solomon prayed that the nations would know the glorious reputation of the God of Israel through his people and come to meet him at his temple, our prayer, our desire, our commitment ought to be that the world will know God’s glorious reputation through us and come to meet him here.  What God promised to Adam and Eve, to Abraham, to Moses, to the people through the Prophets is now reality in us.  The promise isn’t completely fulfilled.  One day the knowledge of the glory of God will fill the earth.  On that day the new creation that began when Jesus rose from the dead will come to full fruit.  Creation and us with it will be made fully new.  God will wipe every last remaining bit of evil from the world and sin and death will be no more.  But, Brothers and Sisters, here’s the really important thing here: The church—you and I and everyone else who is in Jesus the Messiah—we are God’s vehicle to get the world to that point.  The church is God’s means of making his glory known until it fills the earth.  And that ought to get us reflecting on how faithful we are to our mission.  When the world looks at the Church, when it looks at Christians, does what we say and do and live declare the glory of God: his great name, his mighty hand, and his outstretched arm?  (To put it as Solomon did.)  Does what we say and do and live give the world a desire to come to the church to meet God?  Do we at least make the world constructively curious?  If not, we need to reflect on our priorities and on what we’re doing.   And this is true of everyone who is in Jesus the Messiah, but Paul, writing to the Ephesians who were mostly gentile believers, wants to stress to them just how significant it is that through Jesus and the Spirit they have been made a part of this temple people.  Brothers and Sisters, this is something that we don’t spend enough time talking about and reflecting on.  For Paul, the unification of Jews and gentiles in the Messiah was at the heart of the gospel.  It was the proof that God was fulfilling his promises.  This church, made up of Jews and gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, all together, unified, one body was a testimony to the glory of God.  In fact, for Paul, it was the testimony of the gospel’s power.   And I don’t think it’s even on the radar for many of us today, because we’ve become so used to and even so complacent about divisions within the church.  Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Romans, and Eastern Orthodox—and those are just some older divisions amongst us before we got really split-happy in the last century or two.  And it’s not just theology and polity.  I suspect Paul might have at least a little sympathy for those sorts of divisions, especially over serious, gospel-compromising theological matters.  But Paul would be furious to see how we divide over things like language and ethnicity.  The English are here and the Germans are at that Lutheran church and the Swedes at that other Lutheran church and the Italians and Spanish and Filipinos are at the Roman church and the Greeks at the Greek Orthodox, the Russians at the Russian Orthodox, the Ukrainians at the Ukrainian Orthodox, the Syrians at the Syrian Orthodox.  The Dutch are in their Reformed church and the Scots are in their Reformed church.  And there’s a church just for Chinese-speakers and another for Afrikaans and so on and on.  And you’ve got Messianic Jews forming their own synagogues.  And Paul would be shouting at us and asking, “Haven’t you read a single thing I’ve written to you?  Your divisions are undermining the very gospel you claim to preach!”   Paul did not want this to happen in the Ephesian churches, but even more than that, he wanted the people in those churches, especially he wanted them to appreciate just what God had done for them in Jesus and the Spirit, because if we understand what God has done to make us one, we’ll hopefully be far less likely to let it be undone.  So, Paul writes in Ephesians 2:11-12 and reminds them of what they used to be: “Therefore, remember this: In human terms—that is, in your ‘flesh’—you are ‘gentiles’.  You are the people whom the so-called circumcision refer to as the so-called uncircumcision—circumcision, of course, being something done by human hands to human flesh.  Well, once upon a time you were separated from the Messiah.  You were alienated from the community of Israel.  You were foreigners to the covenants of promise.  There you were in the world, with no hope and no God.”   You were gentiles.  Of course, Gentiles didn’t think of themselves that way.  They were just regular people; it was the Jews who were weird.  But the fact that Paul can say this to them, “You were gentiles” means that they’ve now been brought into the family of Israel.  And just in case they might have forgotten the significance of that, he describes them as having been outsiders with this string of descriptors that work up to a crescendo of alienation.   First, they were separated from the Messiah—from the rightful King.  The Messiah was some weird thing the Jews were into.  What would Greeks or Romans—who were oh, so superior—want to have to do with him?  And even if they did, the Messiah wasn’t part of their story.  Then second, Paul says that they were alienated from the community—the commonwealth as the King James puts it—of Israel.  They were foreigners.  Israel was not their nation and Israel’s God was not their God.  Even if they did see something attractive in Israel and went to the temple in Jerusalem—think of Solomon’s prayer for the foreign visitors who would come—there was a wall between the court of the gentiles and the court of the women.  In Paul’s day there was an inscription on that wall warning that foreigners passed it on pain of death.  Gentiles could look from a distance, but they were cut off from the living God.  And third, they were foreigners to the covenants of promise.  Most of them had never heard of Abraham or Moses, but if they had, that simply wasn’t their story and it certainly wasn’t their family.  They didn’t belong there.  Whatever promises the God of Israel had made, those promises were not for the gentiles.  And Paul then sums it all up and says: You were in the world without God and without hope.   I think Paul intends a bit of irony there.  When he says they were without God he uses a word that essenti

  5. FEB 22

    A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

    A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent Ephesians 2:1-10 by The Rev’d Dr. Matthew Colvin             Week after week, I see Pastor Bill preaching the Bible to you on Sundays, and I want to commend him to you. I’m not sure you are aware how rare it is to have a pastor who does his own translation work in the Hebrew and Greek, and who attempts, with diligence and great effort, to read the text of the Bible anew, divide it up properly, and serve it to you. What matters to Pastor Bill in his preaching to you is what the Bible actually says — the actual point of the gospels’ stories, or the actual meaning of the prophecies of the prophets, or the actual meaning of Paul’s arguments in his letters — not what famous theologians have used the Bible to say, or what scholastic medieval philosophy says it can and cannot mean, or the way modern self-help gurus can use Bible verses out of context to tell a very different story. If you attend to the words delivered from this pulpit, you are being trained to understand the Bible on its own terms, rather than watching as a slick speaker uses the Bible to express his own ideas. The story needs to be your story; you are to think of yourself as a child of Abraham, as a sharer in Israel’s Messiah, as someone in covenant with Israel’s God. Since it is the first Sunday in Lent, we are confronted with the very first episode of Jesus’ public ministry after his baptism by John the Baptist. This story has much to teach us about Jesus’ work as the Messiah, the nature of his sufferings, and ultimately, the way we ought to think about God Himself. I want to start by thinking about what it means when the Messiah goes into the desert. In Acts 21, when Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, the Roman centurion is surprised that he knows Greek: “Are you not the Egyptian, then, who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand men of the Assassins out into the wilderness?" -Acts 21:38 (I joke to my Greek students that knowing Greek is handy if you are ever suspected of being a terrorist.) In Acts 5, Gamaliel mentioned Judas of Galilee and Theudas, false messiahs who also started their rebellions against Rome by going out into the wilderness. Why do so many messiahs begin this way? Because they are attempting recapitulate of Israel’s story. And the true Messiah also relives the story of Israel, embodying it in the events that happen to him: he has already gone down to Egypt to escape a tyrannical attempt to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem, much as Pharaoh tried to kill all the male Hebrew babies; he has already been baptized in the Jordan, as Paul says Israel was “baptized in the cloud and in the sea” of the Exodus; and now he goes into the Wilderness to be tempted for 40 days, as Israel was tempted for 40 years. Covenant history rhymes, as the saying goes. So that is why Jesus is in the desert. There remains explain why he is being tested, and how he resists that temptation, and what these things tell us about the Messiah and about God. We must recognize that Jesus resisted Satan’s temptation as true man, as a matter of his messianic office. Jesus’ self-understanding as the Messiah was in terms of the latter chapters of Isaiah, i.e. the suffering servant. This understanding of his calling is why he girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper; it is why he set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem; it is why he undertakes to drink the cup of suffering, and sheds sweat like drops of blood falling to the ground during his agonized prayer in Gethsemane. Being this kind of Messiah involved contradicting the expectations that other men had about what the Messiah would be like. When Jesus is on trial, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, for instance, asks him — in a question whose statement-like word order indicates incredulity — “You are the king of the Jews?” (that is the word order, sarcastic or incredulous), and then puts over his head a sign reading “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” in three languages, so that everyone could get the joke. Pilate mocks Jewish pretensions to even have a king. That is why he refused to change the sign to say only “He claimed to be the king of the Jews.”  It is also why he also brings out Barabbas and asks the Jews, “Whom do you want me to give to you? Barabbas, or the king of the Jews?” Pilate is operating with the standard pagan understanding of kingship: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:25-28) Pontius Pilate and the Romans were expecting someone taller, perhaps. Of course, Jesus could have met those expectations, as he told the soldiers who arrested him in Gethsemane: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53) It isn’t that he couldn’t just blow the Romans away with fire from heaven. But that is not his agenda. That is not what the Messiah has come to do. He has come “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus also has to correct the expectation of the Jews about what the Messiah is to be like — even the expectation of his own disciples! It is this self-understanding that makes Jesus tell his disciples in Mt 16:22-23 that “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Peter’s suggestion that Jesus could be the Mesiah without suffering and dying is so inimical to Jesus’ self-understanding and his mission that he calls Peter “Satan.” And rightly so, because what Peter is suggesting is pretty much of the same spirit as what Satan himself suggests in our gospel lesson this morning. So that is the background: Jesus as the true Israelite, the Messiah, is in the desert, not to lead a rebellion or a gang of terrorists, but to be tested as Israel was tested. Against all this background, we are ready to hear the words, both of Satan tempting, and of Jesus answering, and hear them with richer and fuller meaning — meaning not from Greek philosophy or self-help gurus or even systematic theologians, but rather, from the story of Israel. With his first temptation, Satan seeks to exploit Jesus’ hunger:   “The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written,  "'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" (Matthew 4:3-4)   Any of you who have ever been hangry know exactly why Satan is doing this. Jesus, no less than we, lived his earthly incarnate life in a body, and that body was subject to weakness. Jesus is not like Superman, so that bullets or nails would bounce off his skin. He was capable of suffering, and he did suffer. Satan is suggesting that Jesus should exploit his Messianic status — for that is what is meant by “If you are the Son of God” — and use it to avoid this suffering. Take your authority over all creation and use it to transform stones into bread. This is not a ridiculous suggestion. It is similar to Jesus’ first miracle in John’s gospel, where he turned water into wine for the wedding at Cana. But the aim of the action here would be quite different. Satan’s meaning is basically the same as Peter’s suggestion: “Suffer from hunger? Why put up with that? This shall never happen to you!” Jesus’ answer is a quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3. (In fact, all three of Jesus’ answers to Satan are from Deuteronomy. (Dt. 8:3, 6:16, and 6:13). That is, they are taken from Moses’ instructions to Israel about how to live with the Lord. Jesus is the one who follows Deuteronomy’s description of the faithful Israelite perfectly.) As so often, however, Jesus’ quotations of the Old Testament are metaleptic —a fancy Greek word that means “takes along with it.” The idea here is that if I say, “We stand on guard for thee,” it would be a mistake for someone to try to understand that utterance merely by using a dictionary to look up “stand” and “guard” and so forth. The meaning of that phrase is rather to be found in the larger context of the Canadian national anthem as a whole, because that is how everyone who hears it will immediately start thinking in their minds: all the other verses will come flooding into your minds; you will perhaps recall occasions when you sang it: in school, or at sporting events; or watching a Olympic medal ceremony. Just so, when Jesus quotes the Old Testament, every Israelite hearer will not just think of the words he quotes; he will think also of the surrounding context, the story in which those words first occurred. So when we look at Deuteronomy 8:3, we should also think about the immediately preceding verse:   "The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.” (Deuteronomy 8:1-2)   And then it goes on to say, in the very nex

  6. FEB 18

    A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

    A Sermon for Ash Wednesday St. Matthew 6:16-21 by William Klock   “When you fast, don’t be gloomy like the hypocrites,” Jesus said.  “They make their faces quite unrecognisable, so that everyone can see they’re fasting.  I’m telling you the truth: thy have received their reward in full.”   Every year, when this lesson from Matthew comes around for Ash Wednesday, I find myself thinking that I’ve never actually met anyone who does this.  Fasting is kind of a lost discipline in our culture—even in the church.  I suspect most of us don’t even think about fasting until Lent comes around.  And what do we do?  We give up chocolate.  We give up Coke.  Last year in a clergy group we were discussing a bit of instruction on fasting that was going around.  It encouraged people to eat one normal meal and then to eat less for their two other meals so that those two other meals equal one normal meal.  A friend who was a missionary commented that the people he ministered to in Africa ate less than that all the time, so it wasn’t really much of a fast.  Maybe this is why we’re so often spiritually impoverished in our part of the world.  We’re rich.  We have too much and when you have too much, when you don’t know what it means to fast, well, we never really learn to trust God.  That’s why we need this discipline: to fast is to voluntarily put ourselves in a place of poverty, of need, of exile—a spiritual exercise to remind us what it means to trust in God.  That’s why prayer always goes hand-in-hand with fasting.  The more we learn our need to trust God, the more we’ll pray.   Brother and Sisters, that’s the point of Lent.  It’s not to look good in front of others.  It’s to remind us to look to the Lord.  So Jesus goes on and says, “No: when you fast, comb your hair and beard the way you normally do, and wash your face, so that others won’t notice you’re fasting—except your Father, privately.  Then your Father, who sees in private, will repay you.”   Jesus says the same thing about prayer immediately before this: “When you pray, you mustn’t be like the hypocrites.  They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on street corners, so that people will notice them.  I’m telling you the truth: they have received their reward in full.  No: when you pray, go into your own room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in secret.  And your Father, who sees in secret, will repay you.”  But why?  This is where we really need to hear what Jesus says.   He says: “When you pray, don’t pile up a heap of words!  That’s what the gentiles do.”  Remember the gentiles worshipped fickle, capricious, unfaithful gods who never spoke—gods who weren’t worthy of any trust.  Jesus says, “The gentiles think that the more they say, the more likely they are to be heard.  So don’t be like them.  Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  So this is how you should pray.”  Now, listen closely to what Jesus says.  We pray the Lord’s Prayer so often that we don’t even think about it.  So listen.  “This is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven; may your name be honoured; may your kingdom come; may your will be done; as in heaven, so on earth.  Give us today the bread we need now; and forgive us the things we owe, as we too have forgiven what was owed to us.  And do not bring us into the great trial, but rescue us from evil.”   Notice how Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom—of heaven coming down to earth—how it’s at the heart of everything he says.  But that’s the heart of our prayer.  On one hand prayer, like fasting, is simple, but there’s also a mystery to it.  Sometimes when I pray I feel like my prayers are bouncing off the ceiling, but then I remember what Jesus says here: You’re heavenly Father is with you in that secret place.  My prayers don’t have to get any further than the ceiling, because the Father is right there—right here—with me.  He sees and he hears and he knows what’s in my heart.  He hears the things I say and he hears the things I want to lay before him but struggle to put into words.   Over the years I’ve read quite a lot of books about prayer as I’ve tried to unravel the mystery, but none of them has ever really helped.  Instead, what has helped is simply to remember what Jesus says here.  And to pray the psalms.  To let Jesus and the inspired scriptures remind me that to pray is to remember that in him heaven and earth have come together and to pray is to recognise this reality, to put myself at the intersection of heaven and earth.   And if prayer is about heaven and earth overlapping in the here and now, it’s also about them coming together in the stuff of the world—and in the clay from which God has made us.  To pray is to claim—now think about how amazing this is—to pray is to claim that the living God, enthroned in heaven, is making his home with us—even in us.  And this is why Jesus says that to make a point of this, go into your room in secret and pray there.  By all means pray in church, pray with other people, pray when you’re out in nature, pray in the temple, but sometimes it helps to take God seriously and to shut yourself up in your room, here on earth, and know that heaven—that the Spirit, and Jesus, and his Father are here with and in you.   And if we do this.  When we pray and when we recall that in us, by the power of Jesus and the Spirit, that heaven and earth are meeting together—and if they’re meeting together in this little lump of clay that is me—or that is you—it’s going to transform me and it’s going to transform you.  It’s going to change us in a lot of ways, but Jesus stresses first and foremost that it’s going to make me and it’s going to make you forgivers.  This is where the kingdom begins.  With the cross of Jesus.  With the forgiveness of sinners.  And as Jesus forgives us, that forgiveness spills out of us.  We’ve all been hurt and wounded and sinned against by other people.  How much more have we done that to God?  But he hears us because, in Jesus he has poured out his grace on us, he has forgiven us, because in Jesus he has invited us into his presence where heaven and earth meet.  The privilege of prayer is a constant reminder that because we have been forgiven, we ought to forgive others—to let God’s grace pour from us as it has been poured from Jesus.  That’s the kingdom.  That’s “on earth as it is in heaven”.   And in that Jesus’ great prayer comes together.  So simple, but so powerful.  So simple we can pray it as children, but so powerful that we never stop—not even the holiest and wisest of saints stops praying these simple worlds.  Because we know that heaven isn’t far away; it’s where we meet the God whom we can address as “our Father”.  To whom we can bring our needs, knowing that if he has given his son for our sakes, he will surely give us the bread we need for today and rescue us from evil.   Brothers and Sisters, our fasting reminds us of our need for God and for a saviour.  In prayer we come to him with that need.  And in prayer we’re reminded that God is trustworthy and faithful.  That’s why, after Jesus warns us about hypocrisy and reminds us what real prayer and fasting are all about, he says, “Nobody can serve two masters.  Otherwise, they will either hate the first and love the second, or be devoted to the first and despise the second.  You can’t serve both God and wealth.”  The kingdom demands our all.  If we’re going to pray “on earth as in heaven”, we’d better remember what that means: that the things of the old, evil age are passing away and that the new age, God’s new creation, his kingdom is being borne today through the power of the gospel and the Spirit and that we would be fools to divide our loyalty between the two.   Think on that as we begin another season of Lent: that when we fast and when we pray, when we say “on earth as in heaven” we’re not just saying empty words, but we’re actually in the place where heaven and earth already meet, that we’re already in the presence of God, because we’ve been forgiven by Jesus’ death, raised to new life by his resurrection, and been plunged into the Spirit to be made his temple.  And then let us go out from our prayer and fasting to really be the heaven on earth people who fully trust in God, ready to carry his gracious mercy to everyone around us.  Amen.

  7. FEB 15

    But God!

    But God! Ephesians 2:1-10 by William Klock   Earlier this week Veronica and I watched an episode of the X Files that unintentionally had some pretty sound theology embedded in the story.  Agents Mulder and Scully were called to investigate some strange goings-on in a small town—as usual.  As it turned out, a guy cleaning out an abandoned storage locker found a genie.  And the genie gave him three wishes.  As you would expect, it didn’t go well.  He wished to be able to make himself invisible so that he could spy on people.  And not being terribly bright, he prompted got killed crossing the street, because he was…invisible.  His brother claimed the genie and didn’t fare any better.  His wish ended up blowing up his house with him in it.  And so Mulder ended up, unexpectedly, with the genie and three wishes.  And he asked the genie why the wishing thing always ends in disaster and the genie told him that it’s because people are stupid and selfish.  So Mulder thought long and hard and in his best effort at altruism, he wished for world peace.  St. Paul would call it shalom.  And he went outside to discover that he was the only person left on earth.  Because the genie knew fallen human nature and getting rid of all of us was the only way to bring world peace.  Thankfully, Mulder had two more wishes so he could undo the first and set the genie free with the third.   And I thought that St. Paul would probably have a bit of a chuckle at that.  Because Paul knew the same thing the genie knew: we are all sinners, idolaters who worship anything and everything but the God who created us and loves us.  And, like Agent Mulder, but unlike the genie, Paul also knew that there is no shalom without human beings in our rightful place.  Creation groans in eager longing for the day God will finally set us to rights, he says in Romans, Creation waits for the day when God restores us to our position as his stewards, to rule creation and to serve him in his temple.  That, Brothers and Sisters, is shalom, peace.  Creation can never be complete without us in our proper place—filling the vocation God created us for in the first place.  That’s why God doesn’t just “Deal with evil” like so many people want him to.  Like the genie, he’d just have to remove us all from creation—and that’s not how creation is supposed to be.  This is why Paul practically shouts out ho de Theos, at the beginning of Ephesians 2:4: “But God!”  Because he knew that in setting creation to rights, God can and will, first, set us and our fallen, sinful hearts to rights—something no genie could ever do.   And so far, in Ephesians 1, Paul has begun with a great shout of praise for what God has done in Jesus the Messiah and then he’s told the Ephesians how he prays for them—that they would know, that they would understand this great story of redemption, the power behind it to renew creation, so that they can be part of this story that ends with the knowledge of the glory of God filling the earth.  Remember at the end of chapter one, closing his prayer for them, he wrote about the church, united with Jesus and full of the Spirit being the “fullness of the one who fills all in all.”  It’s a prayer that God, that Jesus, that the Spirit, that the scriptures would form and shape them and truly make them the church.  And while we might miss the significance of Paul’s language of filling and fullness and being all in all, it was not lost on the Ephesians.  This was temple language.   It’s the language of God coming to dwell with his people.  The way he did with Adam and Eve in the garden.  The story ever since has pointing in that direction.  The restoration of God’s temple, the return of his presence, and God dwelling with his people forever.  This is what the Exodus was all about.  God rescued and created a people, he gave them a law to make and to keep them pure and holy, so that he could take up his residence in their midst—so that he could tabernacle with them.  It wasn’t perfect.  The people needed to offer sacrifices repeatedly so that they could be purified by that blood.  A veil separated them from the direct presence of the Almighty.  But this model of new creation pointed forward to the day when God would set his people and his creation fully to rights.  The long exile, first from the promised land and the temple, then from the presence of God, primed Israel with hope for that coming day.  And now Paul’s ready to explain to the church that they—that we—are the beginning of that fulfilment.  In us, God has established a new temple.  By the blood of Jesus he has purified us.  Through the gift of his Spirit he has taken up his dwelling in us.  He has begun the work of setting our hearts to rights.  And in that, he has made us the working model of his new creation and stewards of his good news—that we might, to use the language he used with Adam and Eve, that we might be fruitful and multiply, spreading the gospel, until the earth is filled with the knowledge of his glory.   Brothers and Sisters, this is the story we need to inhabit.  Too often Christians have got it backwards.  We think the gospel story is a story of escape from creation—that in Jesus, God forgives our sins, so that someday he can take us away from earth and up to heaven to live with him.  But it’s really just the opposite.  Through the blood of Jesus he has purified us and made us fit to be his holy temple, so that he can dwell with us.  Jesus is the model, Immanuel, God with us.  This is the story Paul wants to get across in Ephesians 2.  Ideally we’d cover the whole chapter all at once, but we’ll have to break it into two halves.  This temple story will jump out at us in the second half.  The first half begins with our sin problem.   How did these mostly Gentile Christians in Ephesus find themselves in this oh so Jewish story?  He writes beginning at verse 1, “Well, you were dead because of your offenses and sins in which you used to walk, keeping in step with the world’s ‘present age’; in step, too, with the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit who is, even now, amongst the children of disobedience.”   “You”—he’s addressing them as Gentiles.  In verse 3 he’ll link them with “us”—the Jews.  You were dead.  Because you walked—there’s that great word peripateo again—you walked, you lived a life of offense and sin against God.  And we can’t hear these two words sin and death together without it taking us back to Genesis.  And if we go back to Genesis 3 and Adam and Eve’s choice to listen to the serpent’s lie, not just to disobey God, but to reject their vocation as priests of God’s temple and to try to become gods themselves, if go way back to the beginning of the story there, we should understand that sin and death aren’t about God just setting up a bunch of rules and then condemning the people who disobey them.  Sin, and especially “offence”, are what we call it when human beings, created to bear God’s image—that means to be his priests and his representatives in the temple, in creation—sin and offence are what we call it when we reject that vocation.  When we try to take the temple for ourselves.  And death is not an arbitrary punishment, but the natural result of turning away from the God who is the source of life.  That’s why the wages of sin is death.   And, of course, once humanity chose that path of disobedience and death it just snowballed.  Human culture and even those unseen powers that God had put in place to oversee the nations went horribly wrong.  The Jews called it the present evil age, because they lived in hope of the age to come when God would set creation to rights.  But the Gentiles had no hope.  They just went with the sinful flow.  We see it today as the world rejects Christianity.  Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal of degenerate, paedophile friends would have been right at home in pagan Greece or Rome and they’re exactly what you get when a people rejects God.  The devil didn’t just tempt the man and woman to reject God.  He and his cronies continue to steer and influence fallen humanity.  Paul will have more to say about this later when he writes about “principalities and powers”.  In our baptismal rite, we put this in terms of the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.   All these forces work together to keep humanity lost in idolatry and sin.  And so far as this goes, Paul is just restating the standard Jewish analysis of the Gentiles.  But then in verse 3 Paul goes on and writes, “We all used to live this way, in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of flesh and mind.  We, too—he means he and his fellow Jews—were by nature children of wrath, just like everyone else.”  Paul recognised that even though his own people had the torah, God’s law, and were trying to live by it, they were suffering the same problem as the Gentiles.  The corrupt desires of flesh and mind had just as much a grip on Israel as they did the peoples of the nations.  The whole world, all of humanity was mired in darkness, Jew and gentile alike.   And this where, at the beginning of verse 4 Paul interjects this powerful, earth shattering: “But God!”  Into the darkness, into the hopelessness, into the condemnation, into the death, God intervenes to bring light, to bring hope, to bring deliverance, to bring life.  “But God,” Paul writes, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, he took us at the very point where we were dead through our offenses, and made us alive together with the Messiah.  Yes, by grace you are saved!”   Israel knew about God’s mercy and love.  The story they told of their history with God was full of mercy and grace.  And occasionally some gentile would hear t

  8. FEB 8

    A Sermon for Sexagesima

    A Sermon for Sexagesima Luke 8:4-15 by the Rev'd Dr. Matthew Colvin Inspired by Pastor Bill’s saga of his war against the churchmice, I will now confess my sins to you all in the matter of my backyard, with apologies to Isaiah the prophet. In 2021, we bought a house in Port Alberni. It met all my criteria: lots of room inside, an attractive appearance, a good view of the valley, and the tiniest yard of any house on the block. Because I am not a gardener. But when I moved in, I discovered that it has five fruit trees at the top of a very sloping yard. But did I dig around them or make a wall or a winepress or a tower, like the song of the Vineyard in Isaiah chapter 5? No, I neglected them and let a huge mass of Himalayan blackberry brambles grow up around them. And I let the pear tree get so heavy with fruit that one of its main branches snapped off in the wind. And I didn’t do a good job of picking the fruit, so that many apples and pears and plums fell down among the blackberries to become attractants for raccoons and bears. And what did I do instead? I bought solar panels for my house, and tile and hardwood floors, and a light-up number sign that doesn’t even work properly. Judge now, between me and my fruit trees. What more could have been done for them that I have not done? Well, quite a lot, actually, and Lord willing, this will be the year to eliminate the blackberries. I have sinned against heaven and against my fruit trees. Our gospel lesson this morning is the parable of the soils. The term parable is from the Greek παραβάλλω, to put side by side for comparison, to make an analogy. It is one of about forty that Jesus tells in his public ministry, and indeed, the telling of parables seems to have been Jesus’ signature or hallmark device. It is a form of speech that has its origins in situations where the teller needs to speak carefully because he faces danger from someone powerful. Aesop’s fables were originally devised as a way for a slave to speak to his master: “No, sir, I wasn’t talking about you and your slave. It was just a story about a lion and a fox.” Telling parables is therefore a valuable tool in Jesus’ toolbox as he is leading a kingdom movement that is an affront to the authorities. He has a fine line to walk: how to attract followers of his movement while not bringing the authorities down on him until his hour has come. Doing miracles is always somewhat risky for this reason: indeed, his first miracle at the wedding of Cana is wrung out of him by his mother, and he rebukes her with the words, “τι εμοι και σοι” — which is best translated, “What do you have against me?” Why are you trying to get me in trouble by making me reveal myself by doing a miracle. In order to launch his kingdom movement and win followers before laying down his life in Jerusalem, Jesus has to be careful and speak in such a way that he doesn’t give any rope to the spies that might hand him over to Herod and the Romans. So Telling parables is a way to do that. Notice that after he tells his parable of the sower, Jesus’ final words to the crowd are, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” – a challenge to the listeners, implying that if you do not have understanding, it is because you are lacking “ears”, i.e. the ability to understand. It punctuates the parable with a finality and a challenge. It is rather similar to the challenge in the book of Daniel “Let the reader understand” – the astute reader, the gleg reader, the reader who can read between the lines. Now, to the parable. It is a parable about plants. Ever since the last chapter of the book of Jonah, plants have been a treasured object lesson for the people of God. There are many features that makes them an attractive metaphor: their slow growth, their dependence on their environment, the patient work with which they must be reared and cultivated, their greenness as a manifest index of their health, their relation to water and to soil, their ability to suffer cutting and burning, and above all, the fruit they bear. For plants are in many ways like human beings: both have the ability to flourish and to be productive, and that is the goal, the well-being, the health and salvation of both plant and human. In the Bible’s stories about fruit and crops, it is always God who figures as the farmer or gardener or landowner. He is the one who plants the vineyard, sows the seed, grafts wild branches, and prunes to encourage more fruit. And it is always Israel that is his “pleasant plant”, his field of wheat, his fig tree, his vine which he brought out of Egypt and planted, his trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord. In nearly every God-and-Israel plant image, there is a focus on the necessary and vital connection between Israel and her Lord. The righteous Israelite is like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf does not wither. You do not support the root, but the root supports you, says Paul in Romans 11. There is a theme in the Bible that runs from the garden of Eden with its four rivers and its tree of life, to the trees planted by the rivers in the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The plant near the river - in Eden, in the New Jerusalem, in Psalm 1, in Jeremiah 17 - is Israel connected to her God, nourished on his kindness and hesed as a plant sucks up life-giving water with its roots. And the parable of the sower is another of these agricultural metaphors. But it is best understood in connection with three other parables — two others by Jesus (the Wheat and the tares and the parable of the Wicked Vinedressers), and one from the Old Testament, Isaiah 5’s song of the vineyard. To help you see the repreated pattern here, I’d like to show you some diagrams that express the plot of these stories. First, the parable of the soils from today’s gospel reading: farmer —->   fruit ——> himself                        | fertility —> seed   fruit ——> himself                        | tower, etc —> vineyard     fruit ——> himself                                 | messengers —> tenants     fruit (grain) ——> himself                                 | planting —> harvest — weeds/tares Now, each of these stories has a different bottom row because there are various problems: enemies who sabotage the field by planting weeds, wicked tenants who try to keep the field and its harvest for themselves, vines that unaccountably bring forth wild grapes, or, in today’s reading, three different sets of problems – rocks, birds, shallow soil, thorns. And these different sets of problems change the meaning of the various stories, to make them reflect the different situations of God’s people that they are devised to illustrate. But I want you to notice that in all of these stories, the top line is identical: God desires to receive the fruit of His field or vineyard. That’s the goal: fruit. God wants a crop of holy people bearing fruit for him. Remember John the Baptist’s command? “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.” Remember the fig tree that Jesus withered? He first went up to it and looked for fruit. The tree was Jerusalem, the fruit was what God always looks for: loyalty and obedience. That’s why he called Abraham in the first place; that’s why he planted the vineyard and cultivates it. That’s why the sower sows seed. What is preventing that in our parable? What’s the opponent? All kinds of things: the fact that many people never believe the gospel in the first place, and so never become members of God’s people and never grow in His grace and bear fruit for him. Or they believe, but not with the sort of faith that lasts to the end, and so they become Christians but when persecution or trouble comes into their life, they fall away. Gardening is a work of patience. He bears with us, tends us, prunes us, labouring that we may become mature and bear fruit, no matter how long it takes. He isn’t deterred by our wildness, our perversity, our sinful lives. He grafts us into His tree anyway, feeds us with the sap of the root of the covenant He made with the patriarchs, and which has been fulfilled in Christ. And he waits. Oh, he waits, years, decades, striving with us by His spirit to produce the fruit he desires. God also wants us to have patience, or endurance. And his tool for producing this quality in us is the trouble that comes our way in life. Not that he is the author of trouble, or that our troubles are from him, but that he uses them to produce patience. James 1:2 says: “count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.” Testing produces patience when mixed with faith. Reliance on the gardener, trust in Him, unswerving allegiance even in the face of trouble — that is what is shown by those “who having heard the word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience.” that is what Job showed, and God rewarded him for it. Let’s focus for a minute on verse 14, with the verse that touches us most nearly in modern North America, especially here in BC. These plants are choked — the Greek word means “strangled” by cares, riches, and pleasures of life. These are the Himalayan blackberries of North America. These are things that can interfere with our allegiance to God. It is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy 6, “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their gre

  9. FEB 1

    To Know the Surpassing Greatness of his Power

    To Know the Surpassing Greatness of his Power Ephesians 1:15-23 by William Klock   Do you ever wonder how I pray for you as your pastor?  You know I pray about the needs and concerns each of you shares with me, but I’m talking more generally about how I pray for you all as Living Word Church.  It occurred to me this week that in all my years in ministry no one has ever asked me that.  But I do pray for you and our text today from Ephesians—it’s 1:15-23 if you want to follow along—this text is one of my favourite prayers.  For you.  In fact, I have this printed sheet taped inside my prayer book.  And what’s on it is five prayers, all taken from Paul’s letters; prayers he prayed for the churches he cared for.  Prayers inspired by the Holy Spirit.  About fifteen years ago it struck me that I should pray these Spirit-inspired pastoral prayers for you.  And so I typed them up, tweaked the wording a bit to fit the form of a collect, printed them out, and stuck them inside the back cover of my prayer book.  And each day at Morning Prayer, I pray one of these prayers for you.  And this one is, I think, maybe the most important.   This prayer is still part of Paul’s introduction to his letter to the Ephesians.  Last week we read that long run-on sentence that’s all about the Father fulfilling his promises to Israel in Jesus; how we as Jesus’ people share in the inheritance that was promised to Abraham, to Jacob, and to David; and how God’s indwelling Spirit is the downpayment and guarantee of that inheritance.  And we heard that this inheritance is God’s new creation.  That long run-on sentence was sort of Paul’s opening shout of praise to God for what he’s done.   Starting with Chapter 2, Paul’s going to use the rest of the letter to unpack this great shout of praise, to preach it, and to explain how it applies to us—how it shapes the church.  But first, there’s this prayer.  Paul prays that his brothers and sisters in Ephesus will really and truly hear this message, that they’ll take it to heart, and that they will be transformed by it.  In short: Paul’s told them about the promised inheritance they have as the Messiah’s people, now he prays that the knowledge of that inheritance will transform them.   Before we get into Paul’s prayer, there are three Old Testament passages we need to be familiar with, because they’re what give shape to Paul’s vision of the Messiah and the church.  The first is Psalm 110.  Psalm 110 is one of those Old Testament passages it’s worth getting into your memory, because it echoes so powerfully throughout the whole New Testament.  It is, far and away, the most quoted Old Testament passage in the New.  This is the psalm, written by King David, that begins with the words, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”  When the first Christians wanted to stress that Jesus isn’t just Saviour, but that he’s even more importantly Lord of all, the King of kings, this was their favourite Old Testament passage.   And then there’s Psalm 8.  It’s a close second behind Psalm 110.  It’s the psalm that begins, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”  For Paul writing to the Ephesians, the really important part begins in verse 4, where David praises God for what he has made us as human beings.  David sings, “What is man that you are mindful of him?…You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honour.  You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet…O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.”  The psalm echoes Genesis and God’s creation of human beings as his image bearers.  That means to be the priests and stewards of his garden-temple.  That’s what we were created to be and it’s the vocation we rejected when we, instead, chose sin—to try to be gods ourselves.  In Paul’s day many of the Jews saw not only the human vocation in Psalm 8, but they saw it as a prophecy of the Messiah who would be the truly human one—a new Adam who will get it right this time; a Messiah whom, according to Psalm 110, God would raise to his right hand to reign until he’s put all his enemies under his feet.   And then, what does the Messiah’s victory look like?  Isaiah, especially chapter 11, was a favourite of the early Christians.  “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.”  So Isaiah is talking about the king who will arise from the line of David.  “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”  That’s the Messiah.  And his kingdom?  It should sound familiar: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat…the lion shall eat straw like an ox…and a little child shall lead them.”   This was the new world that Israel expected the Messiah, the great King from the line of David, this is what they expected him to usher in.  God’s Spirit would rest on him—That sounds like what happened at Jesus’ baptism, doesn’t it?—and through his wisdom and understanding, his counsel and power, his knowledge and the fear of the Lord, he will set this broken world to rights.  He will bring God’s justice to warring nations and hurting people.  Peace will reign and the knowledge of God’s glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  This was an incredibly important passage for Paul, because when Paul looked at the little churches that were popping up all over the Greco-Roman world, in pagan cities, right under Caesar’s nose, challenging the old gods, and most importantly bringing Jews and gentiles together in one family in the Messiah, Paul saw with absolute clarity the beginnings of the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy.  Through the Messiah, in these churches where Jews and gentiles were becoming one, where they were worshipping together the God of Israel across their social, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, the wolf and the lamb were lying down together at peace.  In them, Paul saw a foretaste of what’s to come.   Putting all these layers together, we can sum up what the Messiah was to be and do in four points.  Israel expected the Messiah (1) to be the King who would defeat the powers of evil; (2) the King who would rescue God’s people from their bondage to those evil powers; (3) the King who would build a temple for God to dwell in; and (4) the King who would bring God’s justice or righteousness and his peace to the whole world.  That’s the Messiah.  And in doing those things, Jesus inaugurates the new creation.   But Paul also recognised that the Church, that we who are united with the Messiah by faith share in that messianic ministry begun by Jesus.  Filled with God’s Spirit, we are the temple Jesus built.  And we confront the powers with his victory and proclaim the liberating gospel to those in bondage.  We live out God’s justice and peace.  And most importantly in this passage here: As a people full of the knowledge of God and his purposes for creation, we anticipate that day when the whole earth will be full of “knowing-God” as the waters cover the sea.  The church is the beginning of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.   So now we’re ready to understand Paul’s prayer.  It begins at verse 15: “Because of all this and because having heard of your faithfulness to the Lord Jesus, and that you show love to all God’s saints, I never stop giving thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.”   Now, they weren’t perfect Christians.  No one ever is.  They weren’t a perfect church.  No such thing exists this side of eternity.  But Paul had lived with these people.  He’d got to know them.  When he was away from them, he heard what other visitors had to say about them.  And he knew that, however imperfectly, they were faithful to the Lord Jesus.  Faithful.  What does that mean?  It means not just believing the right things about Jesus, but more importantly, committing yourself to him.  That’s probably why Paul calls him “Lord Jesus” here.  You can believe all the true things about Jesus you want, but what makes a Christian is when you give your loyalty, your allegiance to Jesus as creation’s true Lord.  When we repent and turn away from our sins and from our selfishness, when we stop trying to play at being gods and to write our stories for ourselves, and instead choose to live for him and to live in hope of his kingdom, his new creation, and not just as some thing in the distant future, but something we are beginning to live out here and now, Brothers and Sisters, that’s what a Christian is.  Paul saw these men and women doing that.  He saw how much it cost them.  They were shunned by their families because they’d stopped worshipping the old gods; losing their jobs, because their guilds kicked them out for the same reason; their fellow citizens considered them disloyal for not taking part in the civil religion of Ephesus and of Caesar; just waiting to take the blame for bringing down the wrath of the gods on the city should some natural disaster strike.  Faith in Jesus cost them something.  It cost a lot.  And Paul saw that they were willing to count that cost.  And, too, he saw their love for each other and for their brothers and sisters struggling in other places.  Poor as they were, they sent money to the even poorer Christians in Jerusalem.  They supported and cared for each other like family.  However imperfect their faith may have been, in them Paul saw clear evidence of the gospel’s power at work.  And he prayed for that power to continue to work in them

  10. JAN 25

    To the Praise of his Glory

    To the Praise of his Glory Ephesians 1:3-14 by William Klock   We’ll be looking this morning at Ephesians 1:3-14.  It never ceases to amaze me the riches that come from simply slowing down as I read the Bible.  Over the last several months I’ve taken multiple occasions to just sit down with Ephesians, to read it slowly, to pay attention, and to be immersed in it.  To pay specific attention to Paul’s choice of words and his grammar.  To notice how his choices of words and phrases bring echoes of the Old Testament into his letter and to meditate on how what Paul says here fits into the great biblical story of Israel’s God and his people.  As I said last week, in Ephesians Paul gives us the view from the mountaintop.  He shows the whole panorama of the great story of redemption.   Verses 3-14 are an invitation into that story.  I think a lot of us—especially if you’re a theology nerd—a lot of us reading these verses easily lose the forest for the trees.  We see words like “election” and “predestined” and they stir up modern controversies over whether or not God chooses us or we choose him; over whether God elects specific people for eternal life or if he also positive elects others for damnation.  This is the fuel for heated arguments.  And, I suspect, were Paul to hear these arguments he’d ask something like, “Wait?  That’s what you got from what I wrote?”  Because I think the thing that Paul wants us to notice here, what he wants to centre us on, is the praise of God in light of that great story.  In fact, I’d never noticed before, but in Paul’s Greek, this whole section is one long sentence proclaiming the mighty and saving deeds of God.  It’s like Paul wanted us to hear one, beautiful, heart-stirring musical chord, or get a single amazing impression from a beautifully painted image, but since words and language don’t work like that, since you have to express them one at a time, Paul composed this as one, single rush of words meant to move us to praise.  Consider how be begins in verse 3, “Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah.”  Blessed be God.  It’s not meant to just be a factual statement that God is blessed.  To really get the sense of it in English it might be better to say, “Let us bless God.”  Because, Brothers and Sisters, that’s Paul’s real point here.   Pagans praised their gods.  But Jews did something more: they blessed the God of Israel.  In fact, the word that Paul uses is one that for the Greeks simply meant to speak good of someone, but the Jews gave it a much fuller and deeper meaning to translate their Hebrew words for bless and blessing.  To understand this takes us all the way back to the beginning of the story.  When God created the world and filled it with life, he blessed that life that it might be fruitful, that it might multiply, and that it might fill the earth.  The fish, the birds, and eventually the man and the woman.  God blessed them.  And in the Hebrew worldview, it was God’s blessing that brought human flourishing and that provided all that is good in creation.  And so, in return, the Jews blessed God.  Obviously, human beings don’t have the ability to grant the goodness and flourishing with our blessings that God can with his, and so to bless God took the form of praise and thanksgiving for his goodness, for his faithfulness, and most of all for his mighty and saving deeds in history.  And all that is summed up in those words, “blessed be God”.  To this day, Jewish prayer begins with the words Barukh Attah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha-Olam, Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe.  But then when we unpack it, what we find is that at the heart of blessing God is telling his story, not just to rehearse for ourselves his greatness, but to proclaim it to everyone else.  Read through the Old Testament and you see God’s people praising him first and foremost by telling the story of his mighty deeds: sometimes what he’d done for the person giving the praise, but more often for his creation and his providence, and most of all for his recuse of Israel from their Egyptian slavery.  The Exodus was the great act of God in history that showed his blessing and for which his people blessed him in return.   When the people of Israel gathered together, they rehearsed what God had done, whether it was Israelites in the days of David, sitting around campfires and hearing those stories faithfully passed down from generation to generation, or the people of Paul’s day reading the scriptures in the synagogue, they told the mighty deeds of God as an act of praise.  Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us.  I suspect a lot of us hardly ever think of it this way.  We read the Bible for knowledge.  We read the Bible to win arguments.  We read the Bible because we know it’s a good thing to do or because we hope God will speak to us.  But, first and foremost, we read the Bible—in public worship and in private worship—to rehearse the mighty and saving deeds of God as an act of praise and as a call to praise.  Just read the psalms and see how they proclaim the great story as an act of praise and a means of blessing God.  The modern trend in worship, I think, gets this precisely backward.  We begin our services with praise—I often hear people say it’s to get us in the right frame of mind—and then we hear scripture, then we receive the Lord’s Supper.  The biblical model is the other way round: To read and to hear scripture is the first act of praise, everything else follows in response.  Thomas Cranmer, the architect of our liturgy, understood this.  In Morning and Evening Prayer, we first hear the scriptures, and then we sing the canticles (which are themselves mostly scripture).  At the Communion, we hear the scriptures, we receive the Lord’s Supper, and after all that, we sing the Gloria in praise and thanksgiving.  So this is what Paul’s getting at in verse 3: “Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah! He has blessed us in the Messiah with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.”   But why?  Because, in Jesus, God has already blessed us.  With what?  With every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.  That means, with the life of the Spirit, that foretaste of the age to come and the day when we, ourselves, will be resurrected to life with God just as Jesus has been.  Because, in Jesus and the Spirit, God has blessed us by making us heaven-on-earth people.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, God has begun the work of bringing heaven and earth, God and man, separated by sin, back together—in us.   But Paul doesn’t just leave it at that.  He tells the Jesus story, the church story, but he does it in a way that echoes the bigger story all the way back to creation.  He never mentions Adam or Abraham, the Exodus or the Exile.  Instead, he describes what God has done for us in the Messiah using the words and phrases that Israel typically used to tell those stories.   Now, because this whole passage is one long sentence and because it’s clear Paul wants us to hear it sort of like a music chord, let me read through the whole thing in one go starting with verse 4.  Here’s what he writes: “He chose us in him before the world was made, so as to be holy and without blemish before him.  In love, he foreordained us for himself, to be adopted as sons [and daughters] through Jesus the Messiah, according to the purpose of his will.  So that the glory of his grace, the grace he poured out on us in his beloved one, might receive its due praise.  In [the Messiah], through his blood, we have deliverance—the forgiveness of sins, through the riches of his grace, which he has lavished on us.  With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his purpose, just he wanted it to be and set it forward in him as a blueprint for when the time was ripe.  His plan was to sum up the whole cosmos in the Messiah, everything in heaven and on earth in him.  In him we have received the inheritance.  We were foreordained to this, according to the intention of the one who does all things in accordance with the counsel of his purpose.  This was so that we, we who first hoped in the Messiah, might live for the praise of his glory.  In him you too, who heard the word of truth, the good news of your salvation, and believed it—in him you were marked out with the Spirit of promise, the Holy One.  The Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance, until the time when the people who are God’s special possession are finally reclaimed and freed.  This, too, is for the praise of his glory.”   So Paul begins with the language of having been chosen.  It’s almost like he’s rehearsing the Passover story.  Being chosen resonated with the Jews.  Their father, Abraha, had been chosen and called from the paganism of Ur.  In the Exodus, the Lord had declared Israel to be his chosen.  Paul wants that mighty act of God’s goodness and mercy to echo into our story—to hear the Lord declare to Pharaoh that Israel was his beloved, his firstborn son.  Paul writes in verse 5 that we’ve been marked out as sons and daughters of the Father because of his love for us—love poured out in Jesus, love poured out at the cross as he shed his blood—blood that has marked us out as holy and washed us clean of sin.  Blood that has united us with Jesus, his son, and made us his children by adoption.   And the language of deliverance and redemption in verse 7.  This is what Paul’s getting at.  Again, his choice of words is important.  The word he uses is the one used most often in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to refer to the deliverance, the redemption of his people from Egypt.  It’s a word that often carries the idea of buying a slave so that he can be set free and in the Bib

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out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Living Word Reformed Episcopal Church, Courtenay, British Columbia

Information

  • Creator
    The Rev'd William Klock
  • Years Active
    2008 - 2026
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Living Words