Living Words

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

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    They Boldly Spoke the Word of God

    They Boldly Spoke the Word of God Acts 4 by William Klock   Chapter and verse breaks in the Bible are not part of the original text.  Chapter breaks were added about eight hundred years ago and verses about five hundred.  There’s an old biblical studies urban legend that Robert Estienne, the French printer who published one of the early New Testaments with verse division, marked them out while riding on horseback from Paris to Lyon, explaining the often frustrating way they cut through thoughts and sentences.  Chapter breaks can be just as annoying.  I say this because last week we left off our study of Acts at the end of Chapter 3, but the end of Chapter 3 isn’t where this story ends.  You’ll remember that this story about Peter and John and the lame man followed right on the heels of Pentecost.  Peter and John were on their way to the temple to pray when they met a lame man begging at the temple gate.  “Silver and gold have I none,” said Peter, “but such as I have I give.  In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk!”  And he lifted up the man the man began to jump up and down and to praise God.  And as everyone began to gather around, Peter began to preach.  He reminded them of their own story, of God’s promises going all the way back to Abraham, and how all those promises were fulfilled and how the story was brought to its climax in the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. I won’t repeat everything I said last Sunday, but needless to say—and even if you aren’t familiar with the story—you probably knew that trouble was coming.  But that pesky chapter break.  It saved you from an hour-long sermon, but it also cut the story in half.  So we’ll pick up after the break, with Chapter 4, now.  [It’s page 1083 in the pew Bibles.]   Luke continues: “As they were speaking to the people, along came the priests, the chief of the temple guard, and the Sadducees.  They were greatly annoyed that they were teaching the people and proclaiming that the resurrection of the dead had begun to happen in Jesus.  They seized them and put them under guard until the next day, since it was already evening.  But a large number of the people who had heard the message believed it and the number of men grew to five thousand.”   The idea of the resurrection of the dead was a big deal for the Jews and you’d think that announcing that it had somehow begun in Jesus would be good news.  And obviously it was for the thousands who believed.  Not so much for the Sadducees.  They were sad, you see, because they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead.  Okay, not really.  Their name goes back to Zadok, the high priest in the days of David and Solomon.  That name, Zadok, is also related to the Hebrew word for righteousness.  So the Sadducees thought of themselves not only as the sons of Zadok, but also as the righteous ones.  And in the First Century, they controlled the priesthood.  They were aristocratic and they were in power and people like that don’t usually like revolutionary ideas, and if there was there was a great revolutionary idea alive in Judah, it was the idea of the resurrection of the dead.  Resurrection means that things are broken and that God will, one day, come to set things to rights—and that implied that the Sadducees were part of the problem needing to be set right.  So they’re upset at Peter’s preaching.  The Pharisees didn’t like this talk either.  As far as they—and everyone else who hoped for resurrection—were concerned, all God’s people would be raised from the dead at the end of the age.  The idea that Jesus was raised all by himself was like heresy.  And, of course, if Jesus had been raised, it meant he was the Messiah and they refused to accept that idea.  So no matter how many eyewitnesses there were to the risen Jesus, it had never happened, so far as they were concerned.   But back to the Sadducees.  They controlled the priesthood and the priests were the gatekeepers of Israel.  And this talk about Jesus as Messiah and his being resurrected, which means he’d initiated the age to come already, that was the sort of talk that might spark a revolution.  And, of course, a revolution was what was already happening as the gospel and the Spirit were beginning to do their work.  But just as they hadn’t recognised it in Jesus, the leaders of Israel refuse to recognise it now and they have Peter and John locked up for the night.  Even still, Luke goes to the trouble to make the point that thousands believed anyway.  The gospel cannot and will not be stopped!   Verse 5: “On the next day their rulers, the elders, and the scribes gathered in Jerusalem, along with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander, and all the members of the high-priestly family.  When they’d stood them in the midst, they asked, ‘How did you do this?  What power did you use?  What name did you invoke?’  Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit.  ‘Rulers of the people and elders,’ he said, ‘if the question we’re being asked today is about a good deed done for a sick man, and whose power it was that rescued him, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that this man stands before you fit and well because of the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.  He is the stone which you builders rejected, but which has become the head cornerstone.  Rescue won’t come from anyone else.  There is no other name given under heaven and among men by which we must be rescued.’”   Do you remember that scene in Luke 11 where Jesus is confronted after casting out a demon?  “You can only cast them out, because you’re one of them,” they accused him.  The same thing is happening again.  I think Luke wants to highlight that what’s happening here might be an “act” happening through the apostles, but it’s still ultimately Jesus acting.  Or the Spirit, which amounts to the same thing.  Luke makes a point of saying that Peter was full of the Spirit when he answered the accusation.  So just like Jesus, when the council asks them in whose name they healed the lame man, not only is Peter bold to announce that it’s Jesus of Nazareth, they boldly assert that he is the Messiah—the one they crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.  So Peter is reasserting everything: It’s Jesus.  Yes the one they crucified.  And this isn’t just about a lame man walking again, this is about the resurrection of the dead.  It’s about the fact that Jesus is Lord and that the revolution has begun.  The age to come, new creation, the kingdom of God is here.  In fact, they quote Psalm 118 at the council to explain it all.  Psalm 118 is a psalm of the temple.  It’s about people going up to the temple to celebrate God’s new day to claim his rescue, his salvation.  It’s a psalm about God’s life-giving power and it’s about God bringing his people through trouble and rescuing them from danger. It’s a psalm about trusting in God’s mercy and it’s a psalm about God’s victory over the powers of the world.  “It is better trust in the Lord, than to put confidence in man…than to put confidence in princes,” says the Psalmist (vv. 8-9).   So they’re saying, “It’s Jesus.  He really is the Messiah and he really has inaugurated God's new age.  But then it’s like they’re deliberately poking a stick in these folks’ eye.  The Sadducees (and the Pharisees, too, and most people) were all about the temple.  It was the embodiment of Israel’s hopes for God’s rescue and for the fulfilment of his promises to one day come again to dwell with his people.  And so this whole episode started with a man who’d been sitting in the temple gate for years, hoping for a rescue, yet never healed, and now suddenly healed by Peter and John—in the power of Jesus.  So that’s the first thing.  It says that God has, in fact, returned to dwell with is people, but instead of being in the holy of holies, he’s indwelling the disciples of Jesus.  And then, in case they hadn’t made the connection, Peter, inspired by the Spirit, quotes Psalm 118 at them.  Yes, the hope of God’s return is happening—in Jesus.  Yes, God is now present in his temple—but that temple isn’t made of stone, it’s these Jesus people.  And yes, God has come to rescue us just as he promised, to set this broken world to rights, to wipe away the tears—through Jesus.  And at the same time, it would be hard for the council to miss the hint that the mortal princes, the people from whom God’s people need to be rescued are not the pagan nations, but the Sadducees and elders and scribes who are rejecting Jesus.  (Yes, the pagan nations, too, but first, God’s got to deal with the corrupt leaders of his own people.)   It’s the same thing Peter has been preaching, first on Pentecost, then to the crowd who gathered around the lame man when they saw him jumping up and down.  Every time, Peter grounds God’s salvation in Jesus as the fulfilment of his promises and of Israel’s story.  Every time, it’s the announcement that Jesus is Lord; that he’s come to rescue his people; and every time, it’s a call to repentance and faith.  This sort of situational astuteness and gospel boldness is what it looks like to be full of God’s Spirit.  And the council recognised this, even if they didn’t want to admit what (or who) it was.  Verse 13: “When they saw how boldly Peter and John were speaking and realised that they were untrained, ordinary men, they were astonished and they recognised them as men who had been with Jesus.  And when they saw the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply.  They ordered them to be put out of the assembly while they conferred amongst themselves.

  2. Jun 14

    Excuses, excuses: The Parable of the Banquet

    Excuses, excuses: The Parable of the Banquet St. Luke 14:16-24 & Deuteronomy 20:1-9 by The Rev'd Dr. Matthew Colvin I am often asked about “application” in sermons. “I enjoy a good sermon,” someone will say, “but I need to have application so I know what to do with it.” Well, you will notice that neither Fr. Bill nor I, his understudy, do very much with “application.” The pulpit is not the place to give you “ten steps to a better marriage” or “key principles of childrearing” or “the blueprints to build a Christian business.” Rather, we are concerned with the Biblical story, and we want to apply you to it, so that you read the Bible as your story. When Paul says, “These things happened as examples for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come,” he means that to follow Jesus, we need to understand ourselves as being part of the story of the people of God. That is why Hebrews 11 gives us the “hall of faith”; it is why Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7 sums up the entire history of Israel; it is why, when Peter is telling Christian wives to respect their husbands, he calls them “daughters of Sarah.” We are consistently told to inscribe ourselves into the story of God’s people Israel. There is nothing more practical. Indeed, if we do not get this right, no amount of “application” will work. Our lectionary for this morning pairs Deuteronomy’s laws about exemption from military service with Jesus’ parable of the banquet and the excuses made by those who were invited. It is, if we think about it, a very odd transposition, rather as though military language had found its way into a wedding or some similar occasion: “WILT thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?” “Yes, sir, corporal, SIR. Hoo-ah!” So what is going on here? To understand the parable, we need to think about the nature of banquets and the nature of the excuses. Let’s start with the excuses. Verse 20’s excuse, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” is an allusion to Deuteronomy 24:5. That passage gives the grounds for the exemption of any newly married bridegroom from military service for a year: “that he may bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken.” There is here something of the logic of the law against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk: in both cases, one must not mix up life and death, joy and sorrow. In verse 18, we should understand “I have bought a field and must go out and see it” to mean that the transaction needs to be complete. It is the “closing” of a real estate purchase, not an inspection at leisure that could just as easily be postponed for another day. Legally, socially, this is a very good excuse. Verse 19’s excuse about needing to test “five yoke of oxen” recalls the calling of Elisha by Elijah in 1 Kings 19:19. There, Elisha is actually in the middle of plowing when Elijah throws his mantle over him: “Tag, you’re it!” This is an act of sudden investiture. Elisha responds to it with alacrity: “he left the oxen and ran after Elijah” and said, “Please let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” The excuses are such powerful ones that they actually have statutory warrant in Biblical law. Legally, socially, by all the etiquette of ancient Israel, these excuses are golden, unimpeachable, valid. But in the parable, they are not good excuses in the eyes of the host. Who is he? He is introduced as ἄνθρωπός τις, “a certain man.” Immediately, we recall other parables: “A certain man planted a vineyard, leased it to vinedressers, and went in a far country for a long time.” (Mt 21:33) “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none.” (Lk. 13:6) “A certain man had two sons.” (Lk. 15:11) “A certain rich man had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was wasting his goods.” (Lk. 16:1) There are other instances where “a certain man” is someone else, but this is a pretty good sample of instances where “a certain man” is instantly known to stand for God. The parable, then, shows us God’s response to the excuse-makers. Note that the “certain man” operates through servants. God is frequently depicted this way, sending his angels and human prophets to do his bidding and deliver his messages. God’s reaction to the refusal of his invitations is anger (ὀργισθείς). This requires some explanation. In Matthew’s gospel, the banquet is a wedding feast for a king’s son, and the invited guests behave much like the wicked vinedressers: they “lay hold of his servants and treat them violently and kill them.” But Luke’s version has a different emphasis. It is less allegorized and is designed rather to highlight the reversal of fortune and the approaching deadline. “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city and bring here the poor and crippled and blind and lame.” — all of them likely to be beggars, likely to smell bad, likely to be shabbily dressed. Precisely the sort of unsightly people one does not want at a banquet, any sort of banquet. They would never have been invited had not the originally invited guests refused. Just as Esau rejected his birthright and Jacob received it; just as the majority of the Jews rejected the Messiah so that the gospel might be preached to the gentiles, so here, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 1:28, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God.” This is someting God did in history. Unlike every other religion on earth, the Bible makes public claims about events that took place at particular times: “In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against the fortified cities of Judah and took them.” “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Or even in our Nicene Creed, where week after week, we make mention of the name of a corrupt Roman official named Pontius Pilate. Contrast the claims of other religions: that Mohammad was out there in the desert and an angel appeared to him and dictated the Quran. That Joseph Smith was guided by an angel named Moroni and found gold plates inscribed with “Reformed Hieroglyphics” which he translated into King James English. That Siddartha Gautama was meditating under a fig tree and became enlightened. The Mary Baker Eddy or L. Ron Hubbard or some other guru has discovered the secrets of the universe. Even in antiquity, the Stoic sage or Epicurus or the philosopher in Plato’s Republic is never about history. It is always private revelation or special understanding of timeless truths or the realm of forms or deep insight into nature. By contrast, the assumption of Jesus’ parables is that God deals with Israel in time. The invitation to the banquet and the host’s angry reaction to the invited guests refusal, and the verdict at the end of the story that “none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet” — all presuppose that Israel is facing a decisive crisis in its history. The invitation to the banquet is the gospel summons to follow the Messiah — and this is appropriate, since Jesus is so frequently shown feasting during his earthly ministry. He feasts so much that he incurs the charge of being a glutton and a winebibber. Everywhere he goes, he feasts. He feasts in the house of the Pharisee named Simon; in the house of a tax collector named Zacchaeus; at a wedding at Cana; in company with immoral women, and with “tax collectors and sinners.” This was unusual even by Jewish standards, so that some come to Jesus and ask him, “The Pharisees and the disciples of John fast a lot, but your disciples do not fast.” Jesus explains that the disciples of Jesus do not fast because the bridegroom is with them. What is the appropriate response to the invitation? What do etiquette and emotional rightness and social expectation dictate? Jesus’ words about John’s ministry and the Jews’ reaction to it, in Luke 7:32, are couched in similar terms: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; We mourned to you, and you did not weep.” The refusal to recognize Jesus as the one Israel has been waiting for is like the refusal of the invitation to the feast. It is a rejection of the good ending of the story, a refusal to take part in the consummation. It is as if all the actors walked off the stage of a Shakespeare play after act 4. There are times when we want to describe a process has failed to produce its intended fulfillment and consummation — say, when I am talking to my Greek students who are struggling with Greek grammar and vocabulary. If they never go on to actually read Greek literature, I say it is like “a courtship without a marriage.” This is not about timeless truths or Buddhist spiritual enlightenment. A marriage is a historical event. That is the language that God uses about his relationship with his people. The coming of Jesus is the climax of Israel’s story. And to everyone, the invitation poses the stark alternative: either enter into the banquet, or be excluded. Remember the older brother of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15: Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he

  3. Jun 7

    In the Name of the Messiah

    In the Name of the Messiah Acts 3 by William Klock   So what happens after Pentecost?  In the church’s calendar we spend the first half of the year walking through the life of Jesus—maybe we think of that as the “gospel story”—and that closes with Pentecost.  And in the second half of the year we focus on the life of the church as it lives out Pentecost.  But the way the lectionary does that tends to present the life of the church in the abstract.  That’s not necessarily bad.  But the book of Acts gives us an opportunity to see it in real life, in history.  And Acts is important because it makes sure we understand that the life of the church isn’t some application of abstract theological principles.  Acts shows us the life of the church as very much the continuation of the story of Jesus, of that gospel narrative.  It doesn’t end with the Ascension.  It doesn’t end with Pentecost.  Pentecost simply begins a new chapter.  As Luke said at the beginning, in the gospel he wrote he laid out what Jesus began to do and to teach.  In Acts we see Jesus continuing to do and to teach, but now it’s through his church, through his people.   So last week we saw this amazing move of the Spirit.  That’s how I think we mostly think of it: a move of the Spirit.  But if we’ve been following the story through Easter and the ascension it ought to be clear that Pentecost is, first and foremost, a move of Jesus the Messiah.  Having taken his heavenly throne to reign as king until he has put all his enemies under his feet, Jesus has sent the Spirit to enact, to make real the truth of his reign through the church.  The spirit enables the apostles, the rest of the disciples, enables us to put off the old, lie-based, rebellious way of being human and to put on the new humanity brought by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  The Spirit makes us the working model of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.  The Spirit, living within us, make us God’s new temple: full of his presence, his wisdom, his gospel.  And as we fulfil his original command to are fruitful and multiply, we grow and spread that temple until God’s glory fills the earth.   So Pentecost doesn’t stand alone.  It’s not just a stage in our personal spiritual growth.  It’s not even for our own benefit.  It’s to carry the reign of Jesus as Lord to the world.  So, again, what happens after Pentecost?  Look at Acts, Chapter 3. [Page 1082 in the pew Bibles.]  Luke tells us, “Peter and John were going up to the temple at three o’clock in the afternoon, the time for prayer.”   I think it’s worth a pause there.  Peter and John and the rest of the church had become the new temple.  The very thing that was missing from old, bricks-and-mortar temple, the presence of God, had come to dwell in them.  But they still went to the old bricks-and-mortar temple.  It highlights the fact that they didn’t think of Jesus, the Spirit, the new covenant, being the new Israel as being some kind of new religion.  This new thing was simply how to be a faithful Jew in light of God’s promises to Israel being fulfilled in Jesus.  And so these first Christians continued to observe torah, they worshipped with their fellow Jews in the synagogues, and they went with their fellow Jews to pray in the temple.  They didn’t leave Judaism for something called Christianity.  But here’s the thing: You and I don’t do any of those things.  We don’t live according to torah, we’re not circumcised, we don’t observe the Jewish feasts, we don’t go the temple—we can’t, because God judged and destroyed it long ago—but we are part of that same family of Jesus people, that same new Israel, that same church.  Because the new Israel isn’t about torah, or circumcision, or diet, or Sabbath, or biological descent from Abraham.  It’s about faith in, allegiance to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, and his kingdom, and the law of love written in our hearts by his Spirit.  What marks us out is our baptism into Jesus and the law of the Spirit that overflows from within us.   Now, Luke goes on: “There was a man being carried in who had been lame from his mother’s womb.  People used to bring him every day to the temple gate called “Beautiful”, so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple.  When he saw Peter and John going into the temple, he asked them to give him some money.   So every day, probably for many years, this man’s friends would carry him to the gate of the main temple court and leave him there to beg.  He was a fixture of the temple.  Few people probably “knew” him, but everyone was familiar with him.  Peter and John weren’t from Jerusalem, but they’d probably seen the man when they visited the temple.  Maybe they’d given him money before.  But this time they have no money.  They’d left their jobs as fisherman in Galilee.  The church in Jerusalem has been surviving by living as family, pooling their resources.  Luke goes on: “Peter, with John, looked hard at him.  ‘Look at us,’ he said.  The man stared at them, expecting to get something from them.  ‘I haven’t got any silver or gold,’ Peter said, ‘but I’ll give you what I have got.  In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk!’  He grabbed the man by his right hand and lifted him up.  At once his feet and ankles became strong, and he leaped to his feet and began to walk.  He went in with them into the temple, walking and jumping up and down and praising God.  All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognised him as the man who had been sitting begging for alms by the Beautiful Gate of the temple.  They were filled with amazement and astonishment at what had happened to him.”   He got more than he bargained for and what Peter and John give this man is right in keeping with what we read at the end of Chapter 2.  Money had ceased to have any importance for the disciples.  Something far better had come along.  Money is one of those things you need to get along in the old age where things are scarce and people are greedy.  The kingdom of God is about his new creation generosity and abundance.  This is why they lived like a family and shared what God gave with each other.  It was a practical way to live out new creation in way that confronted the scarcity and greed of the old age.  They knew there was something more important, a new power, a new kind of life—something far more important than silver and gold and so they gave it to this man.  The man didn’t even ask to be healed.  He’d probably given up on that idea years and years ago.  But Peter gave this man new creation in the name of Jesus.   Maybe this is why Peter insisted that the man look at them.  Picture Peter looking hard into the lame man’s eyes and the lame man staring back.  Maybe Peter had seen Jesus do that: looking intently into the eyes of hurting people, seeing desperation, seeing hopelessness in some and faith in others.  Making a connection.  Sharing the compassion of God for the victims of the corrupt principalities and powers of the present age.  It seems like Peter saw something there.  Maybe hope.  Maybe faith.  Maybe the man knew who Peter was.  Maybe he’d heard about what happened at Pentecost.  Peter saw something.  And he didn’t just tell the man to get up and walk.  That’s what Jesus would have done and Peter wasn’t Jesus.  Peter had no power of his own to do anything.  Instead, Peter made it clear where the power lies: “In the name of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk.”   The name is as good as the person.  Peter and John were acting as Jesus’ representatives and in that capacity—so long as they were faithful to Jesus’ will, his desire, his agenda, his rule and kingdom—they could act with power and authority and faith on his behalf—in his name.  And so can we.  Sometimes we forget that.  On the one hand, we pray and we add something like “through Jesus our Lord” or “in the name of Jesus” at the end of our prayers without even thinking about what it means or, on the other hand, we use Jesus’ name as if it were a talisman to give our prayers legitimacy or as if just mentioning the name of Jesus will bring our will into reality.  I once prayed and when I was done, a guy came up to me afterward and said, “You didn’t say ‘in Jesus’ name’ so your prayer won’t come true.”  No.  Brothers and Sisters, saying a prayer isn’t like making a wish and adding Jesus’ name doesn’t validate our prayers.  Whether we mention him or not, every true Christian prayer is offered to the Father through the mediation of Jesus the son.  It is through him that we have access to God.  And God answers our prayer not because we add a name, but because our whole prayer is a cry for his new creation to become reality, for it to be on earth as it is heaven.  Too often our prayers are veiled appeals to our old idols, appeals to the principalities and powers, appeals still subject to the fears and anxieties of the present evil age, outgrowths of the flesh rather than the Spirit.  And to those prayers, God answers “No”.  Brothers and Sisters, to pray in Jesus’ name is to submit ourselves to the goodness and faithfulness of God; it is to pray with faithfulness and single-hearted loyalty to him as Lord, and to ask not for our will to be done, but his; to ask not for the fulfilment of our vision of the good, but his; to ask not for our kingdom to be made real, but his kingdom.  It is to understand that heaven is the storehouse of the goodness of God’s kingdom, like the turkey in the refrigerator and the presents stored up under Mom and Dad’s bed, all to be brought out when Christmas comes.  God’s kingdom will come in all its fulness when the church, when we have made God

  4. May 31

    When the Day of Pentecost was Fulfilled

    When the Day of Pentecost was Fulfilled Acts 2 by William Klock   Luke opens the second chapter of Acts writing, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in the same place.”  [Page 1081 in the pew Bibles].  “When the day of Pentecost had come—or some translations say arrived.  The old King James is better: “When the day of Pentecost was fully come.”  Or it might be even better to say, “When the day of Pentecost was fulfilled.”  The Greek word can mean come or arrive, but it has a powerful sense of filling and fulfilment and I think that’s particularly important here.  First, this is the day that the church was filled full of God’s presence and truly became his living temple, but second, it was also the day when the promises of God contained within this ancient festival were finally fulfilled.  It’s about the fulfilment of God’s promises to his people.   You see, Pentecost was one of the great festivals God told his people to observe when he gave them the torah.  It was a harvest festival, when the people would bring the firstfruits of their grain harvest as offerings to the Lord.  But it was also a commemoration of the giving of torah.  The Passover marked Israel’s deliverance from her slavery in Egypt and then fifty days later, Israel met the Lord at Mt. Sinai.  There he gave her his law and established his covenant with her.  You could say that Pentecost was the day that marked Israel’s formal creation as a nation—when the Lord had said, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  And every year, for over a thousand years, the people took their grain offerings to the temple in Jerusalem, laid them before the Lord, and remembered who he was and who they were and they recalled his promises, while looking forward in hope to the day those promises would be fulfilled.  So when Luke writes, “When the day of Pentecost was fulfilled,” we should hear something powerful in that.  Just as Jesus fulfilled the Passover once and for all in his death and resurrection, God is going to fulfil the ancient festival of Pentecost once and for all.   Brothers and Sisters, this is important, because ever since John Wesley, there’s been a powerful tendency to see Pentecost more as a stage of personal spiritual growth than as the once-and-for-all fulfilment of God’s promise happening within the great story of God and his people.  A hundred and twenty-five years ago, a group of Christians in Los Angeles had an unusual spiritual experience that needed an explanation.  They explained it as an end-times renewal of “Pentecost” and the Pentecostal movement was born—a movement that taught—and in most places still today—teaches that while every Christian ought to experience Pentecost and be baptised into the Holy Spirit, it’s a second event, a second blessing that follows a person’s conversion and that many never receive—and those who never received it include virtually every believer between the First Century church and the birth of the Pentecostal movement in 1901.  This highlights the danger of interpreting scripture in light of our experiences.  Instead, we need to let the scriptures do the talking and understand our experiences in light of them.   Because just as every single man or woman who has been united to Jesus the Messiah by faith is a full recipient of the benefits of his fulfilment of the Passover, just so every single man or woman who has been united to Jesus the Messiah by faith is also a full recipient of the benefits of his fulfilment of Pentecost.  The church—the whole church, not just some part of it that began 125 years ago—is pentecostal.   It takes a lifetime to learn to live into both of these realities, but to separate them or to say, as some have, that you have to earn baptism in the Spirit through the process of sanctification is to horribly misunderstand the scriptures and the story they tell.  I have more to say about that, but let’s get straight into that story as Luke tells it and, especially, as Peter will explain it.  So, again, this is Acts 2:   “When the day of Pentecost was fulfilled, they [that’s the disciples] were all together in the same place. [Probably, the upper room where they had eaten the Last Supper.]  Suddenly there came from heaven a noise like the sound of a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.  Then tongues, seemingly made of fire, appeared to them, moving apart and coming to rest on each one of them.  They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other language as the Spirit gave them words to say.”   This is the fulfilment of God’s promises to come and dwell with his people.  After generations upon generations, millennia upon millennia of sin separating humanity from God, this is God’s homecoming.  Jesus’ death as a perfect sacrifice for sin washed his people clean, it purified them.  It made them fit and prepared them to be God’s temple—the holy place where he will dwell.  And now he’s sent his Spirit to take up his dwelling in this new temple.   It’s also a moment of covenant renewal—again, fulfilling God’s promises to Israel.  That’s why the imagery of Passover and Sinai are so important here.  In his ascension, Jesus is like Moses going up the mountain and at Passover, like Moses returning with the law and God establishing a covenant with his people, this time God sends down his Spirit to establish a new covenant with this renewed Israel.  And this time it’s not an external law carved on stone tablets, but God’s own Spirit indwelling, renewing, regenerating and writing his law of love on their very hearts.  Hearts of stone made hearts of flesh.   And this fulfilment of God’s promises, this covenant renewal, this new temple are all part of the answer to Jesus’ prayer that it may be on earth as it is in heaven.  In his ascension, Jesus took a bit of earth—our humanity—to heaven, and on Pentecost he sent to earth, to dwell with us, the Spirit—a bit of heaven.  And that Spirit sent by Jesus, the new Adam, breathes the life of God into the new humanity.  Brothers and Sisters, between the Old Testament imagery that God draws on in doing this amazing thing and the careful choice of words Luke uses to describe it, we ought to see a powerful image here of new creation.   And new creation doesn’t exist simply for our sake.  New creation began with Jesus and now it’s come to his people, but it’s not meant to stay with them.  When he ascended, Jesus told his disciples that they would carry this good news throughout Judea and Samaria and eventually to the whole earth.  Once empowered by his Spirit, their mission would be, not only to live out this new creation, but to go out with the announcement that Jesus is Lord and that world belongs to him.  And right here we get a sense of that dominion as these one-hundred-twenty disciples begin to unexpectedly speak in other languages.  Why?  Look at verse 5:   “There were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem at that time.  When they heard this noise they came together in a crowd.  They were deeply puzzled, because every single one of them could hear them speaking in his own native language.  They were astonished and amazed.”   Thanks to the Exile, Jews were spread out across the known world, but Pentecost was one of those feasts where everyone returned to Jerusalem.  So there’s an international crowd in the city and this work of the Spirit gets their attention.  Luke goes on in verse 7:   “These men who are doing the speaking are all Galileans, aren’t they,” they said.  “So how is it that each of us can hear them in our own mother tongues?  There are Parthians here, and Medes, Elamites, and people who live in Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia…[The international list is a long one.  Jews and proselytes (converts), from the known world.]…We can hear them telling us about the mighty works of God—in our own languages!”   Notice about this gift of tongues: It was a gift of known languages.  The speech was intelligible.  And it wasn’t for any kind of spiritual benefit of the speakers.  This was a miracle—a first work of the Spirit—to announce what God was accomplishing (or fulfilling!) through Jesus and the Spirit and through this renewed Israel—what we call “the church”.  And Luke says they were all “astonished and perplexed.”  “What does it all mean?” they were asking each other.  But some sneered.  “They’re full of new wine,” they said.  Then Peter got up, with the eleven. He spoke to them in a loud voice.”   None of the disciples was expecting this.  They were expecting something.  Jesus had told them to go back to Jerusalem and to wait.  So they did.  They waited and they prayed.  Like I said last week, these were men steeped in the scriptures.  Combine that with patience and prayer and understanding will come.  And despite not expecting this exact situation, Peter immediately understands what’s going on through the lens of the scriptures, of Israel’s story, and of God’s promises.  And so—verse 14—Peter says to them, “Men of Judaea!  All of you staying here in Jerusalem! There’s something you have to know.  Listen to what I’m saying.  These people aren’t drunk, as you imagine.  It’s only nine o’clock in the morning!  No, this is what the prophet Joel was talking about when he said, ‘In the last days, declares God, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.  Your sons and your daughters will prophesy; your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams; Yes, even on slaves, men and women alike, will I pour out my Spirit in those days, and they shall prophesy.  And I will give signs in the heavens above, and portents on earth beneath, blood and

  5. May 24

    On Earth as in Heaven

    On Earth as in Heaven Acts 1 by William Klock   It’s been over ten years since I finished preaching through Luke’s Gospel. I had planned to preach on the Acts of the Apostles after a short break, but it didn’t happen and didn’t happen and didn’t happen, but as I was preaching through Ephesians these last few months and pondering the things St. Paul tells us about the what the church is and what that means for us, I got to thinking that I really shouldn’t put off Acts any longer.  So I’d planned to jump into it last Sunday. Acts begins with the Ascension of Jesus, and then the very next chapter is Pentecost.  What providential timing!  And then scheduling and a trip to a clericus threw me off by a week.  So last Sunday, Ascension Sunday, you got Ephesians 6—which was a bit of an Ascension sermon—and now on Pentecost, you’re getting the Ascension and next week, on Trinity Sunday, you’ll get Pentecost!   Now, in case you’re wondering what Acts has to do with Luke, it’s quite a lot. Luke probably wrote his Gospel around a.d. 59 or 60.  He addresses it to someone named Theophilus.  Theophilus means “lover of God”, so some think that Luke may have used this name symbolically and that the Gospel is for everyone who loves God.  It certainly is that, but an attribution like that seems to have been unknown in Luke’s world, so Theophilus probably was a real person and was probably a patron who funded Luke’s writing project.  Luke was not an eyewitness to Jesus or the events of the Gospels.  As he says in the introduction, he sought out the eyewitnesses so that he could scrupulously record the events surrounding Jesus’ life and ministry.  And now Acts.  Luke wrote Acts not long later, sometime between 60 and 62.  The book ends with Paul, imprisoned in Rome, awaiting his hearing before Caesar.  There’s a debate about exactly what happened to Paul after that time.  He was martyred at Rome, probably during Nero’s persecution of Christians, sometime between 64 and 67.  The traditional view is that Paul’s case was heard in 62, he was released, and may have travelled to Spain to preach the good news about Jesus, before returning to Rome to work with Peter to oversee the church there.  The more “modern” view is that Paul was imprisoned once and was executed between 62 and 64.  Whatever the case, since Luke doesn’t mention such an important event, we can pretty safely assume he wrote during that time that Paul was awaiting his hearing.  And in the case of Acts, Luke was an eyewitness, at least to part of it.  He researched the early part of Acts just as he did his Gospel, but then he took up with Paul at the city of Troas, on Paul’s second missionary journey around 50-51.  Luke spent the following ten or more years travelling with Paul as a missionary and records those events as a participant.   And who was Luke other than a companion of Paul?  He was a gentile.  At the end of Colossians, Paul names him separately, apart from his fellow Jewish workers.  In that same passage, Paul describes Luke as a physician.  Beyond that we really don’t know a lot about him.  He writes as we would expect a Gentile would write when writing to other Gentiles.  He writes in polished, educated Greek and he often describes Jewish customs for the benefit of his non-Jewish readers.  And when it comes to Acts, he jumps in right where he left off in his Gospel.  He ended with a condensed telling of the Ascension and he begins Acts with a more detailed account, so we’ll start there.  It’s page 1080 in your pew Bibles if you want to follow along.   Luke writes, “Dear Theophilus, The previous book which I wrote had to do with everything Jesus began to do and to teach. I took the story as far as the day when he was taken up, once he had given instructions through the Holy Spirit to his chosen apostles.”   Let me pause there.  Notice how Luke writes that in his Gospel he wrote about everything that Jesus began to do and to teach.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus isn’t done.  If Luke’s Gospel were called “The Acts of Jesus”, Acts could very easily be “The Acts of Jesus: Part II”.  Jesus isn’t done.  Remember what we learned from Paul in Ephesians: in the church, Jesus has established a people—purified by his blood from the stain of sin and filled with God’s own Spirit—to be his new creation in the midst of the old, to carry his victory into the world to challenge the Caesars and the gods and the principalities and powers, to proclaim the good news until God’s glory fills the whole earth.  Jesus continues his “acts” through us.  At the start of his ministry he told the people to pray: on earth as in heaven.  Now he’s empowered us to be the people who will actually live out heaven on earth until he’s finally ready to finish what he started that first Easter, and bring heaven and earth and God and human beings back together as they should be.   Now, Luke goes on in verse 3: “He showed himself to them alive, after his suffering, by many proofs.  He was seen by them for forty days, during which he spoke about God’s kingdom. As they were having a meal together, he told them not to go away from Jerusalem, btu to wait, as he put it, “for the Father’s promise, which I was telling you about earlier.  John baptised with water; but in a few days from now you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit.  So when the apostles came together, they put this question to Jesus: “Master,” they said, ‘is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel.’”   Jesus must have been pretty exasperated by their question.  John Calvin wrote that there are as many errors in their question as there are words.  Jesus has spent forty days teaching them what his resurrection meant for them, for the world, for everything.  Think of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter Day.  Jesus walked with them for hours and explained what happened to them using the Old Testament scriptures.  We get the impression that as it all sank in they started to understand.  But clearly not fully.  Not even after forty days.  They’re still thinking of the kingdom in terms of events like the Maccabean revolt.  The Messiah will raise an army and smite the pagan gentiles and put Israel back on the top of the heap—but this time it will take, it will be forever.  They’re still thinking of Jesus as the king in waiting or the king in exile—like some of the Iranians wanting Reza Pahlavi to return to Iran and retake the Peacock Throne.  But that’s not how God’s kingdom works.  Think of all the parables Jesus told about the kingdom: It’s like a tiny mustard seed.  Yes, it will grow into a huge tree, but it takes a long time.  It’s like yeast.  Yes, it grows, but it takes time and the right conditions.  After two thousand years, I think we have a better grasp of this.  But not always.  There are still many, many Christians who still kind of ask the same question, as if Jesus is the heir apparent, in exile, still waiting to become king.  But Brothers and Sisters, he already is king.  The church’s job is to announce his kingship—as it’s carved out on our lychgate: “Jesus is Lord”— and to implement the fact that he really is king.  Now. Not someday.  Now.   So Jesus responds to them in verse 7: “It’s not your business to know about times and dates,” he replied. “The Father has placed all that under his own direct authority.  What will happen, though, is that you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.  Then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth.”   The timing?  How the kingdom is going play out?  When everything will finally be consummated?  Don’t worry about that.  The Father has that worked out in his goodness and wisdom.  That’ not your job.  That’s not our job.  That’ not even Jesus’ job to know.  Their job, our job is to witness Jesus—his death, his resurrection, his ascension, the fact that he is Lord—to be God’s new creation, to put off the old, lie-based way of being human to to put on the new—our job is witness that good news and God’s new creation to the world.  And Jesus reiterates it again: I will make sure you’re equipped for this.  He’s told them already: As John baptised you with water, I will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.  The significance of that didn’t seem to sink in.  It should have.  This is what the Lord had promised through the prophets over and over.  Filling his people with the Spirit was to be the great sign of the Messianic age.  It would be the thing that would finally set the hearts of his people right.  And so Jesus says it again: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.  And then you’ll be my witnesses from Jerusalem and eventually out to the whole world.  The mustard seed.  The yeast.  The king returning from the far-off land.  And then, to make his point, to drive home the fact that, yes, he really is king, Jesus acts out another prophecy.  He loved to do this and so it makes perfect sense that his last act before leaving them would be another acted out prophecy.  Verse 9:   “As Jesus said this, he was lifted up while they were watching and a cloud took him out of their sight.  They were gazing into heaven as he disappeared.  Then, lo and behold, two men appeared, dressed in white, standing beside them.  ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why are you standing here staring into heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven.’”   Jesus acts out Daniel 7—maybe not something we’re intimately familiar with (although we should be), but a passage—a dramatic image—any Jew knew intimately.  That’s th

  6. May 17

    Be Strong in the Lord

    Be Strong in the Lord Ephesians 6:10-24 by William Klock   We’ve made it all the way to the end of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  For just over five chapters, Paul’s been explaining how the church is God’s means of taking what Jesus has done in his death and resurrection and turning it into God’s new creation.  He’s shown us how, in Jesus and the Spirit, he’s given us back the vocation that Adam rejected.  We’ve been restored to our position as stewards of God’s presence and God’s wisdom and God’s glory for the sake of the world.  Even more than that, as Adam was placed in God’s garden-temple, through the gift of God’s indwelling Spirit, you and I—the church—have now become God’s temple.  And as Jesus has been raised from death to go be the new Adam, so in him and in the power of the Spirit, you and I are now called to put off the old, corrupt, lie-based way of being human and to put on the new humanity exemplified by Jesus.  And if we will be faithful to be fruitful and to multiply—whether by having our own children and raising them in the wisdom of the Lord or through our proclamation and living out of the gospel that brings others to the Messiah—Brother and Sisters, the temple will grow and grow and grow, carrying God’s presence to the ends of the earth, spreading his wisdom—the way of new creation and the way of truly being human—to the ends of the earth, until God’s glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.   And having established that this is what the church is and that this is what our mission is, he shifted in Chapters 3-5 to the how of living out this new creation, to the how of putting off the old and putting on the new.  Don’t listen to the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Speak the truth and live the truth of God’s new creation.  Put aside anger and wrath, and start living out love and grace and patience and mercy with all humility—just like Jesus.  And don’t believe the world’s lies about sex and money and power.  Be holy as God is holy and trust in his goodness and faithfulness.  In other words, as I said last week, stop trying to write your own story.  You’re bad at it.  We all are.  God did not design us with the capacity to write our stories for ourselves (or to be gods, as Genesis put it).  Instead, trust in the God who gave his own son as a sacrifice for our sins, to set us to rights at such a great cost, and live the story he has written for us.  And the world will take note.  Live God’s story, and you will challenge the lies of the world.  Live the story in which Jesus is Lord, proclaim that story and seeing that glimpse of new creation, of redemption and renewal, of mercy and grace people around us will believe.  But, too, live the story in which Jesus is Lord and you will challenge the Caesars of this world.  Live the story in which God is good and faithful and generous, and you will challenge the greedy, grasping lies of the world.  And the world, the flesh, and the devil will push back.  Or as Paul puts in Chapter 6, the principalities and powers.  They’ve lost, but they don’t want to admit it.  They don’t like to be challenged.  And this is where Paul picks up in Ephesians 6:10 with his final bit of wisdom for the Ephesians and for us.  [This is page 1163 in the pew Bibles.]   “What else is there to say?  Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.  Put on the whole armour of God, then you will be able to stand firm against the devil’s schemes.  The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, is not against flesh and blood. It’s against principalities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.”   Brothers and Sisters, know who your enemy is.  When things, when people, when systems push back against the gospel.  When we try to bring new creation to the world, when we try to live out the new way of being human we have in Jesus and the Spirit, we will experience opposition.  And it’s critical we stand firm and fight back  But Paul stresses here: Know your enemy.  Because fighting the wrong enemy isn’t going to win us anything.   Paul knew this well.  Consider that he’d been a Pharisee.  The Pharisees were the party that traced its roots back to the Maccabean revolt two hundred years earlier, when the Jews rose up and threw off their pagan Greek overlords.  Paul—like most of his fellow Jews—grew up knowing that the enemies of God’s people were the pagans: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greek, the Romans. In a couple of decades it would happen again in the Judean volt of a.d. 70 and then again in the bar Kochba revolt in a.d. 132.  Neither of those revolts ended well for the Jews.   And when the Jews revolted, they went into battle with passages like Isaiah 11 in mind: The shoot from the stump of Jesse would come, full of wisdom and justice.  “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins” (Isaiah 11:4-5)  But they added their spin to the scriptures.  The community at Qumran—the people responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—the saw it this way:   “With your sceptre may you lay waste the earth. With the breath of your lips may you kill the wicked…May justice be the belt of your loins, and loyalty the belt of your hips.  May he make your horns of iron and your hoofs of bronze.  May you gore like a bull…and may you trample the nations like mud…For God has raised you to a sceptre for the rulers before you…all nations shall serve you, and he will make you strong by his holy name, so that you will be like a lion.”[1]   You can hear Isaiah in that, but then here the warrior girds himself up for battle, to trample the nations like mud.  He gores the nations like an ox and ravages them like a lion.  The picture begins with Isaiah, but it gets lost along the way.  In Isaiah 11 the Messiah’s warfare ends not with a goring ox or a lion tearing flesh, but with the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the goat, the calf and the lion laying down together at peace and one like a little child leading them into a renewed creation where the lion eats straw like an ox.   I fear we fall into the same trap.  Jesus said to his disciples: “Don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more they can do. I will show you who to fear: fear the one who starts by killing and then has the right to throw people into Gehenna. Yes, let me tell you, that’s the one to fear! (Luke 12:4-5)   Brothers and Sisters, God had always urged his people to stand firm and to put up a fight, but our enemy, as Paul says here isn’t flesh and blood.  It’s not the people, however wicked they may be.  It’s the lies the devil whispers—or sometimes shouts—into our world.  It’s been that way from the beginning when Adam and Eve believed the first of his lies.  It’s the lie that we can write our own stories better than God can.  It’s the lie that security or power is to be found in money or in politics or in sex or in education or in all the other things to which we look that are not God—all the things that use and abuse and manipulate and exploit others for our benefit.  It’s the lie that we can fight the gospel battle with bullets or with politics or with violence.  Paul’s people talked about principalities and powers—sort of angelic beings whom God had created and appointed to oversee the nations, but who had fallen under the power of the devil’s lies.  That’s how they thought. I don’t know if that’s how it really is, but there are powers—political, economic, sexual, intellectual—that perpetuate the devil’s lies and keep us in the dark, keep us stomping on each other, keep us at each other’s throats, keep us seeing everyone else as the enemy so that we never stop to think that the real problem is the devil and his lies.   So Paul reminds us.  The enemy is not flesh and blood.  Yes, other people enforce those systems.  Caesar believed the lie that he was the world’s lord.  And his soldiers believed that lie too, when they arrested Christians and threw them to the lions.  But they were not the enemy; the lie was.  It still is.  They needed deliverance from it just like we do.  The enemy isn’t Mark Carney or Donald Trump.  The enemy isn’t greedy bankers or crooked businessmen or the people who run giant pornography websites.  It’s not the abortionist or the therapist pushing gender ideology.  They’re flesh and blood.  They bought the lie.  They need a gospel resuce just like we do.  And so Paul warns us, yes, there’s a battle, put on the armour of God, and stand firm, but know your enemy.  Take your battle to the devil and the principalities and powers that perpetuate the lies.  Don’t shoot their prisoners when what their prisoners need is to know the truth, the wisdom of God.  Brothers and Sisters, to fight them, to take the battle to flesh and blood, is just to fall prey to another lie of the real enemy.  Paul says that weird thing in verse 12, that these wicked spiritual elements are in the heavenly places, but I think his point there is that—as he said back in Chapter 2, we are seated in the heavenly places with the Messiah.  In his death and resurrection, Jesus won the decisive victory and now he’s enlisted us, not to just sit in the church and be holy until he returns, but to be the new humanity who takes his new creation to the ends of the earth and, along the way, confronts the lies and the systems and powers that perpetuate them and declares that they have been defeated.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “he must go on reigning until he has put all his enemies

  7. May 10

    Be Subject One to Another

    Be Subject to One Another Ephesians 5:21-6:9 by William Klock   Yesterday our parish breakfast group discussed C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In the story, Edmund and Lucy make their third visit to the magical land of Narnia, but they also take their cousin, Eustace, with them.  And Eustace, he has no framework, no point of reference, no way to understand Narnia.  Because Eustace came from a “progressive” family.  He addressed his parents by their first names.  He read books about factories and granaries, about modern industry and agriculture.  The one bit of beauty in his home was a painting of a Narnian ship.  His parents couldn’t bear it, but it had been a gift and they couldn’t get rid of it, so they hung it in a disused bedroom.  Eustace couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of being in a land of kings and princesses, magic and dragons, and talking animals.  All he can do in the first few chapters is scream for the British Consul, compare King Caspian’s beautiful dragon ship to modern steamships, and retreat from everyone.   And, I think, if we had to understand God on our own, we’d be a lot like Eustace.  We wouldn’t have the vocabulary, let alone the vision, to even think about God.  When we saw the beauties of his creation, we could do nothing more than reduce it all to physics equations and chemical formulas.  And so, Brothers and Sisters, God has spoken.  He’s given us his word.  (Imagine how much better off Eustace would have been had he read the Bible, the greatest of the “right books” he’d neglected.)  God speaks, not only so that we can know him, but so that we can have the vocabulary and the mental—even the emotional—framework to begin to understand him.  But, most importantly, his word has become incarnate: one of us.  And in Jesus we meet and come to know God at our level: A God who knows our life, who is full of patience and love, mercy and grace, a God who is angry at the sin that has disrupted and broken his creation, a God who will justly judge wrong, but who is also humble and loving enough to die to redeem and to set right.  In Jesus we meet concretely the God whom the Old Testament describes as King, as Father, as Husband.   And then we realise that these relationships—things like king and father and husband—are relationships we understand, because God has established them as the foundational units of human life and society and particularly so the family: husband and wife, children and parents.  And it’s in these relationships, even imperfect and damaged by our sins, it’s in them that we learn our first vocabulary for understanding and knowing—and trusting—God. It’s no wonder that the devil lies to us about sex, marriage, and family.  The devil lies and tells us that sex is about personal gratification, not about mutual self-giving.  And we believe the lie and sex becomes selfish.  He lies and tells us that men and women are interchangeable, and so we create birth control and try to make women like men by robbing them of the defining feature of feminine biology: the ability to give birth to children.  We start seeing God’s blessing of children as a negative “consequence” of sex.  And we create HR departments staffed by women who try to quash all the things that make men men out of their male employees.  And when we believe the lie of interchangeability, men have unnatural relations with men and women with women, undermining and rejecting the very purpose for which God created sex and rejecting his blessing upon us to be fruitful and to multiply.  And if we keep believing the lie, as our culture has, we get ever more absurd, thinking that with surgery and with chemicals and by changing our pronouns, we can turn men into women and women into men.  We reject the good story God has written for us, the one in which he’s given us the vocabulary of husband and wife, of children and parents, and we write our own lie-based story in which, when confronted with God, we can only think of him as a celestial killjoy out to rob us of our fun, our autonomy, and the carefully crafted identities we’ve created for ourselves.  We start to see God’s blessing of fruitfulness as a curse.  We start to see the traditional family as an enemy.  We’re like Eustace, surrounded by goodness and beauty, but only able to see it as threatening and other.  And, like the pagans of old, we reinvent God and remake him in our image and using our new vocabulary.  Instead of Father, Son, and Spirit we start speaking of him as her and addressing Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer or even Parent (or Mother), Child, and Spirit.  Not too far off the mark it seems, but no longer able to be properly known through the relationships, now rejected, that God established precisely so that we can know him and make him known.   And so, Paul writes to the Ephesians in Chapter 4: Put away lies.  Instead, speak the truth to each other.  Don’t be fooled by the dark and foolish ways of the world.  God has washed you clean in the blood of Jesus and he has given his Spirit to live in you.  He’s made you his temple: stewards and priests of his presence, his glory, and his wisdom.  A temple that one day, through the power of the gospel and the Spirit, will fill the earth with God’s presence and glory.  Don’t swallow the lies.  It’s your job, our job, the church’s job to confront the world’s lies with the truth of God’s creation.  So put off the old, corrupt, lie-based way of being human and put on the new humanity exemplified by Jesus, risen from the dead and firstborn of God’s new creation.  And Paul started by urging us to put away anger and instead to put on patience, kindness, and love.  It would be hard for even the most pagan of pagans to argue with that.  And then, based on exactly the same principle of living out the truth of God’s creation, Paul urged us to put away sexual immorality and greed.  And now, without a breath—because in the Greek there’s no sentence break, let alone a paragraph break, between Ephesians 5:20 and 5:21, where we ended last week, Paul writes, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for the Messiah.”  That’s 5:21.  [Page 1162 in the pew Bibles.]   What does new creation look like?  Brothers and Sisters, it looks like Christians being subject to one another.  What does God’s wisdom—his wise way of ruling creation look like?  It looks like his people being subject to one another.  He’s already told us back in 4:2 to “bear with one another in love, being humble, meek, and patient and making every effort to guard the unity the Spirit has given us.  Put away all anger and yelling, sexual immorality and all impurity and greed.  In other words, stop using others as your punching bags, as your means of sexual gratification, and as your means of getting rich.  Instead, be imitators of God and love each other the way the Messiah loved you and gave himself for you.  Jesus’ self-giving for our sake on the cross was a sweet-smelling sacrifice to God and if we’re going to be his priests and his temple, giving of ourselves to each other will be our sweet-smelling offering to God.  And this follows right along with what Paul has said already about our differentiated unity: Jew and gentile, man and woman, slave and free…Canadian and American, white and black, Liberal and Conservative, Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy, and on and on.  Different people with different backgrounds, different identities, Paul even stressed different giftings given by God, but all made one through our union with Jesus.   Our unity, maintained by this self-giving of ourselves is the means by which we confront the lies and foolishness and darkness of the world with the truth and wisdom and light of God’s new creation.  And at this point Paul could write a whole book covering all the situations and relationships in our lives and how this rule of being subject one to another might apply, but he’s writing a letter from prison and so he focuses on three areas that were key to the Ephesians.  I want to spend most of our time on the first, because it’s the most important for us.  But before we look at what he says specifically to wives and to husbands, I want to jump to his summary of the whole thing in the end, midway through verse 28.  As is so often the case with Paul, it’s at the end that he sums everything up and gives us the theology behind it.  So look at verse 28 and following: “Someone who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, nobody ever hates his own flesh.  He feeds it and takes care of it, just as the Messiah does with the church, because we are parts of his body.  [Now Paul quotes from Genesis 2:24.] ‘That’s why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.’  The mystery [the hidden meaning] in this is very deep; but I am reading it as referring to the Messiah and the church.  Anyway, each one of you must love your wife as you love yourself; and the wife must see that she respects her husband.”   So Paul understands marriage in light of the Messiah’s relationship with his body, the church.  He takes us back to Genesis 2 and God’s command that the man will leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife.  Yes, Paul admits, there are some hard things here, some hidden meanings, but the important and obvious thing is that this is ultimately about the Messiah and the church.  There are two important take-aways from this.   First, Paul saw Genesis 2 as a prophecy of God’s son, leaving his home to find his appointed bride.  And once Paul makes this connection, we can see this story weaving its way through the whole Old Testament as the Lord pursues and woos his intended bride in the wilderness, showing his covenant love; as the marriage is ruined through

  8. May 3

    Don’t Let Anyone Fool You!

    Don’t Let Anyone Fool You! Ephesians 5:3-20 by William Klock   The last three weeks we’ve been making our way through the fourth chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Ephesus, just getting into the first couple of verses of Chapter 5 last Sunday.  This is rubber-meets-the-road stuff.  In Ephesians 1-3 Paul writes about what the church is and our part in God’s plan to renew his creation.  By the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice at the cross, God has purified us from the stain of sin and death and set us free from their bondage.  And then, having purified us and made us fit for his holy presence, he’s filled us with his Spirit.  He’s made us—his church, his people—to be his temple.  He has made us stewards of his presence and his wisdom and his life.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, he has given back to us the vocation that Adam rejected.  And now he calls us, as he called Adam, to be fruitful and to multiple and to fill the earth.  And as we fill the earth, we expand the temple.  We carry God’s presence with us.  We bring his light and life into the darkness.  We confront the foolishness and injustice of the world with his wisdom.  As I’ve said repeatedly, we are in the present God’s working model of his future new creation.  We—the church—are the architect’s model meant to show what his grand project of renewal and recreation and resurrection will one day look like.   Which is why Paul has stressed, has said that it’s vital to our identity as the church that we put off the old way of being human and put on the new—the new exemplified by Jesus who is the firstborn of God’s new creation, the new Adam and prototype of God’s renewed humanity.  God told Israel repeatedly: Be holy as I am holy.  That’s why he gave Israel his law.  And this is why God has raised Jesus from the dead—to lead the way—and this is why he’s filled us with his Spirit.  Instead of a law written on stone tablets that our hearts would struggle to embrace, God has united us with his resurrected son and his Spirit has renewed or hearts and has written his law of love on them.  It’s still a struggle.  The world, the flesh, and the devil do their best to make us forget our baptism.  They do their best to drag us back into the slavery from which Jesus has freed us.  But this is why Paul stresses at the beginning of this very practical part of his letter, in 4:25, “Put away lies.  Each of you speak the truth with your neighbour.”   Brothers and Sisters, that’s what it comes down to.  Jesus the Messiah, resurrect from the dead, is God’s truth.  The renewed creation he represents is the truth.  Everything else is a lie.  It began when the serpent lied to Adam and ever since Adam’s disobedience, the world has been filled with pain and tears, darkness and death—because we chose the lie over the truth.  But if we know Jesus, if we have been united with him in faith in our baptism, he is the truth—the truth and the way to life.  Put off the lies and the old way of being human and embrace Jesus, embrace the truth, and be the new humanity God is making us.   And we saw last Sunday, that as Paul gets into the practical details of this he starts with our speech.  It’s not only that we shouldn’t speak lies; he says to put away anger and vulgar speech and, instead, to be kind to each other, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God forgave us in the Messiah.  Instead of letting the pain and brokenness of the world sweep us up into a storm of rage, instead of lashing out at those who hurt us, be God’s new humanity, look to the example of Jesus.  De-escalate, respond to wrongs with forgiveness, respond to anger with tender-heartedness, be kind.  Break the cycle.  This is why we need our hope—that vision of God’s creation set to rights, modelled by Jesus—we need that vision always before us.  We need to remember that we are God’s temple, the stewards of his presence and his wisdom, so that we can make him know to the world, so that we can expose the foolishness of the world with the wisdom of God—with his new creational way of life—with godliness, with holiness, with justice.   And I think Paul started with anger because even the most pagan of pagans knows—even if he won’t admit it—that anger and wrath only make the world worse.  They hurt others, they destroy our relationships, they make the darkness darker.  Even though the pagans might laugh at the idea of being kind to your enemies and showing mercy to the weak—because that was loser talk to the Greek and Romans—when they looked at the church they saw a community of mercy and reconciliation, of kindness and peace that they had to envy.  That witness made the Greeks and Romans constructively curious and won many to the faith.  But, like I said, I think Paul starts with anger and wrathful words because—even if they confront our sins head on—it’s hard to argue with him.  And so he establishes that this is what God’s wisdom for the world looks like.  This is new creation and it’s infinitely better than the darkness of the pagan world.   And now he can move on to the thing that’s going to get everyone’s hackles up, that everyone’s going to want to push back on: sex.  And money.  Mostly sex, but greed is a familiar friend of sexual immorality.  Look at Ephesians 5:3-10 [page 1162 in the pew Bibles]: “As for sexual immorality, impurity of every kind, or greed: you shouldn’t even mention them!  You are, after all, God’s holy people.  Shameful, stupid or course conversations are quite out of place.  Instead, there should be thanksgiving.”   “You should know this, you see: no sexually immoral or impure person, no one who is greedy (in other words, an idolator) has any inheritance in the Messiah’s kingdom or in God’s.  Don’t let anyone fool you with empty words.  It’s because of these things, you see, that God’s wrath is coming on people who are disobedient.”   “Don’t let anyone fool you.”  Brothers and Sisters, this is about truth—real truth—and it’s about God’s wisdom that will set his creation to rights.  Again, ever since Adam believed the lie of the serpent that he could be like God, we humans have been making a mess of God’s good creation.  Instead of living the truth of it and instead of living out the wisdom of God, we live a lie.  We’ve rejected the true story about God and about his creation and about us, the one in which he is good and faithful and loves us; the story in which he created us to live in his presence and to know his generosity; the story in which he called us to care for his garden temple and blessed us with children (and with sex so we can make them) so that we could expand that temple and the place of his good presence until his glory filled the whole earth.  But instead we’ve tried to write our own stories for ourselves.  Brothers and Sisters, we weren’t created to do that.  We’re terrible at it.  Writing our stories for ourselves has corrupted God’s good creation.  Our stories compete with each other.  We hurt each other.  We use and abuse each other.  We even abuse ourselves.  We deny the truth about God and worship idols instead.  We deny the truth about creation.  We even deny the truth about ourselves.  And some of the most powerful stories we try to write for ourselves are about sex and money.   We write our own stories about sex to justify all sorts of awful things: to justify sex before we’re married; to justify affairs when we’re married; to abandon our spouses; to justify the use and abuse of others through pornography and prostitution; to use and abuse our spouses when we are married; to abuse each other through unnatural relations, men with men and women with women; even to deny the reality of how God made us as men and women—writing our stories in which men are women, women are men, humans are cats—the most absurd denials of reality.  And money.  We write out own stories to justify taking and taking and taking, to justify stealing, to justify crushing others, to make ourselves rich, to put ourselves on at the top—idolatry—all the time forgetting the story God’s already written about his great goodness and his generosity.  We write our stories instead of living in the grand story of love and truth and beauty that God has written for us and we make a mess of his creation and each other.   To be clear: Paul was a Jew, steeped in Israel’s scriptures.  He knew that God created men and women to complement each other and, in that, to learn how to share and love and show grace in humility and to learn something about even the nature of God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit in mutual love and harmony.  Paul knew that God created sex and that sex is good.  It’s the blessing God gave in order to fulil his mandate to be fruitful and to fill the earth. Marriage and sex are part of the reality of God’s good creation.  Paul was no prude.  God’s first commandment was about something that results in more delight, physical pleasure, and the glory of mutual love than anything else.  The devil can’t beat it, but he can corrupt and counterfeit it with lies.  He’ll fool us into abusing God’s gift selfishly and in ways that hurt and destroy and that reject God’s purposes for it.   Brothers and Sisters, don’t be fooled by those lies.  God’s word and God’s son, the firstborn of his new creation, show us the truth, the reality of his creation.  So Paul says in verses 3 and 4 that as his people we have been given God’s Spirit that we might know the truth, the wisdom of new creation and model it for the world.  This is why truth matters.  This is why Paul tells us not to tell lies.  Sexual immorality means telling lies about God’s creation.  It means misrepresenting the very new creation h

  9. Apr 26

    Just as the Messiah Loved Us

    Just as the Messiah Loved Us Ephesians 4:25-5:2 by William Klock   Fourth of July weekend in 1998 I had to go on a service call to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.  I did not want to brave the ferries for a one-day round trip to Friday Harbor on a holiday weekend, but this print shop was desperate, so the owner suggested I bring my wife and daughter—Alexandra wasn’t even two months old at the time—and they’d put us up for the whole weekend.  That sounded a lot better.  And, conveniently, the Episcopal church was literally next door to the place we were staying.  Sunday morning we walked over for the service.  The second lesson was from Ephesians—the part of Ephesians we’re just now getting into today with Chapter 4.  And their deacon got up to preach and said, “This morning’s lesson was written by Paul.  I don’t like Paul very much and I know that’s true for all of us.  Paul says mean, nasty, bigoted things.”  He went on to pit Paul against Jesus as he described Paul as a “Pharisaical moralising Puritan”—like Paul had never really understood Jesus’ gospel of grace and made it all about works instead—and a lot of “works” that are just plain offensive to modern sensibilities: stuff that comes up particularly in Chapter 5, like “don’t let sexual immorality be named among you” or “wives, be subject to your husbands”.   I bit my tongue after church as we filed past him.  I really wanted to say, “It’s not Paul who never grasped the gospel; it’s you!”  Because you can’t separate the gospel from ethics as if living out the implications of the gospel is an optional add-on, or something less important that we’ll work on later, or a body of “rules” from which we can arbitrarily pick and choose based on the sensibilities of current secular culture and values—which is exactly what that preacher was doing.   That was the day I realised that even a lot of Christian don’t understand the connection between ethics and the gospel.  In contrast to that deacon, lot of us want to be obedient and we are obedient, so we do what God tells us in the Bible, but we don’t really understand—maybe we’ve never even thought about—why right is right and wrong is wrong.  We just think, “Well, God said so,” and we do our best to obey.  That’s better than disobeying, but it would be better if we actually understood why.  The church has often unintentionally fostered this sort of moralism.  Back in 1560 Queen Elizabeth ordered that plaques be installed at the front of every church displaying the Ten Commandments.  Most churches also included plaques alongside with the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.  It sent a message: Do this, believe that, and pray this here.”  You could certainly do worse.  Elizabeth was trying to help a people who were largely biblically illiterate.  But then the local pastors need to do their part and show how what we believe—the gospel—makes sense of and ties together how we live and what we pray.  And that often doesn’t happen—or it doesn’t happen very well.  And people start to think that when Paul gives us a list of dos and don’ts, that this is just Paul, not Jesus, and, well, maybe his moralising isn’t totally arbitrary, but it’s probably culture-bound so we can feel free to pick and choose what seems right to us.   A big part of the problem is that we’ve sometimes got the gospel—and the big story of God and his people—wrong.  Not totally wrong.  But enough that we no longer understand why right is right and wrong is wrong and why it matters.  I’ve talked before about two sorts of gospel worldviews that we find in the church today.  On the one hand is a view embodied by a famous quote from Dwight Moody.  After surviving a shipwreck he preached, “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel.  God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”  The other is a quote by Abraham Kuyper.  It’s worth noting that both these men were contemporaries, but came from very different church backgrounds.  Kuyper wrote, “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”   Those are two very different understandings of God’s plan.  Moody, shaped by 19th Century Revivalism and Dispensationalism saw the world as corrupted, evil, a problem that God would one day destroy.  The job of the church was to preach the good news and to save as many people as we can from the coming judgement so that we can go to heaven.  At least the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, saviour and lord is still clearly here.  But Moody’s thinking about the world and his vision of the future was basically gnostic—more pagan than biblical in many ways.  In contrast, Kuyper understood that because God created the world, it is good.  It’s we who have fallen and put it in bondage to corruption and tears.  And because God loves what he has made, he won’t throw it away.  To the contrary, God is very much in the process of redeeming and renewing it.  And so in Jesus he provided a new Adam to lead a redeemed and renewed humanity, washed clean by his blood and filled with his Spirit, a new humanity to pick up where Adam failed.  Kuyper knew that if Jesus has ascended and is now enthroned in heaven, he is the world’s true lord and sovereign and he will not let one square inch of his beloved creation fall through his fingers.   Brothers and Sisters, that is the good news.  It’s about God reclaiming what he’s created and what belongs to him.  We’ve seen already that this theme of new creation and the temple run all through Ephesians.  The church is the working model of God’s new creation.  And the church is the temple in which God dwells.  And that just absolutely shouts “Genesis!” at us.  Go back to the beginning and make sure you’ve got the story right to start with.  Consider how the story begins.  God creates human beings, Adam and Eve, and he places them in his garden to live in his presence and to steward it.  The garden is God’s temple.  Humans are his stewards, his image bearers who represent his sovereign rule there.  And not just that, but his only command to them—and it’s more blessing than it is command—but he tells them to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth.  In other words, keep having children who will have children who will have children who will steward the garden and grow that garden until it fills the whole earth.  Until, to use the language of the Prophet Habakkuk, the glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters cover the sea.”   That would have been an easy task for Adam and Eve.  All they had to do was steward the garden and have children.  There was no sin, no death, no tears, no brokenness, no opposition.  Just fellowship with God, take care of the garden, make babies and the mission takes care of itself.   But no.  Humanity rebelled and broke everything.  Now the least of our difficulties in accomplishing the mission are weeds and pain in childbirth.  We’ve become sinful, rebellious, self-centred, angry, greedy, idolators.  We not only lost our knowledge of the mission, we even lost our knowledge of God.  So in he stepped, into the darkness, and called Abraham.  And through Abraham he created a people to be light in the darkness.  And he gave them a law.  Not arbitrary rules, but a way of life meant to teach the people his character and to keep them pure and holy so that he could live in their midst.  Preparing a people to become his temple.  God was taking the first steps toward creating a renewed humanity to whom he could restore Adam’s vocation and mission to fill the earth with his presence and his glory.  And that’s just what he’s done in Jesus.  We’ve seen in Ephesians: In Jesus, God has taken on our flesh, he has died and been resurrected to be the new Adam, to be the firstborn of God’s new creation.  And he calls us to himself and he purifies us with his blood and once we’re clean and fit for God’s presence, he fills us with God’s Spirit.  And he makes us the temple: the place of God’s presence, a people called to be stewards of God’s wisdom—of his good and just plan to renew his creation.   Brothers and Sisters, our vocation, our mission is Adam and Eve’s vocation and mission: to serve as the priests and stewards of God’s temple, to proclaim and to live out his wisdom, and to be fruitful and to multiply—through our own children and through the proclamation and living out of the good news—until God’s presence and the knowledge of his glory cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Until that day when creation no longer groans under the weight of corruption, because the sons and daughters of God have accomplished the task entrusted to us and finally been fully renewed—resurrected—ourselves.   Of course, the difference is that the mission should have been easy for Adam.  Ethics didn’t matter.  Just steward the temple and have children.  It’s so very, very hard for us.  We’ve filled the world with sin and corruption and they push back.  The false kings and the false gods we created will not go away easily.  And we ourselves, face the daily challenge to, as Paul put it in last week’s lesson, to put off that old way of being human and to put on the new one that we’ve learned in Jesus.   And all of this, Brothers and Sisters, is my long way of helping you to understand that ethics, that right and wrong, that how we live as Jesus’ people is bound up in that mission and in our vocation as stewards of the gospel, of God’s presence, of his new creation.  You know how architects build models so that people can see what the finished building will look like?  That’s what the church is supposed to be: G

  10. Apr 19

    Put on the New Humanity

    Put on the New Humanity Ephesians 4:11-24 by William Klock   Back in the Fall of 2007—after you’d hired me, but before we’d made the move here—I came up for a standing committee meeting in Victoria and then a visit here.  The trip from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay started out like any other trip, but about half an hour in, the winds picked up.  It got bad enough that the terminals were shut down for the rest of the evening.  But there I was.  It was one of the big Spirit-class ships.  But there I was on a ship in the middle of the storm.  What was supposed to be a two-hour trip took a little over three hours as the ship drove into the winds and the waves.  Every few minutes the ship would hit a wave and the loud “thud” and the shudder would reverberate through the ship.  But we made it.  It took longer than it should have.  And all through, even though we could feel the reverberation of the waves through the ship, it was steady as a rock on the churning strait.  Its design, its stabilisers all did what they’re supposed to do.  I was a little impatient to get to the destination, but no one was seasick and  never once did I fear we wouldn’t make it.   Brother and Sisters, in the midst of the wind and waves of the world, that’s how the church should be.  The church should be the great ship, rock steady, in the middle of the storm, not being tossed this way and that way.  The church should be the ship, dead on course, sure of its arrival even if the storms slows her down.  The church should be the ship—like Noah’s ark—a place of security, a place of peace, a place of safety in the midst of the wind and waves.  But the ship won’t be that steady rock in the storm if we don’t get the preliminaries right.  Those big ferries that sail the Strait are carefully engineered: precisely designed hulls, precisely designed stabilisers, paired with precisely designed engines.  And just so the church.   Remember last week as we began our look at Ephesians 4. I said that what Paul was doing there was a bit like designing a three-legged stool to support what comes next.  And so he stresses, first, that we—as individuals, but then collectively as the church—need to be humble, meek, and patient, bearing with each other in love.  You can build a church without those things, and it might even be rock steady in the storm, but it’s going to the sort of place—or the sort of ship—that throws people overboard when there’s a problem, or it’s going to be the sort of ship that sees someone floundering helplessly in the sea and runs them down instead of rescuing them.  It’s going to be a ship sailing to the wrong port.   And, second, the church needs to be one—to remember the unity it has in the one Spirit, the one Messiah, the one God and Father of all.  We’ve all been baptised in one baptism and strive forward toward the one hope shared by the one church.  It’s hard to be steady in the storm if we forget that.  Instead of all pulling together to accomplish our gospel mission, this person is doing this and that person is doing that and someone else is doing something else over there and the ship goes nowhere or drifts aimlessly off course.   And then, third, and closely related are the gifts.  Paul wrote in 4:7-10, loosely quoting Psalm 68:18, that when Jesus ascended to his throne, he sent the Spirit to bring gifts to his people—so that he might fill all things.  That was temple language and a reminder that God’s ultimate purpose is to fill the whole of creation with the knowledge of his glory and ultimately with his presence.  And that’s our job, our purpose, our mission.  It’s the port our ship is headed for as we proclaim and live the gospel, making God known.  But we don’t do it on our own.  Our knowledge and experience of God’s glory will only go so far, and so he’s not only filled us with his Spirit, but the Spirit the equips us for the mission.  In the Spirit, the presence of God goes with us.   And that brings us to our text today as we pick up with Ephesians 4:11. [Page 1161 in the pew Bibles.]  As Paul wrote verses 11 to 16, it’s one really long sentence.  In English we have to break it up.  It has two “movements”.  First, look at 11-13.  Paul writes, “The gifts he gave were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for their work of service, for the building up of the Messiah’s body, until all of us come to unity of faith and the knowledge of the son of God, to maturity, measured by the standard of the Messiah’s fullness.”   This is one of those lessons that it seems the church has to learn over and over and over.  We’re all different.  Paul, thinking in terms of the First Century, talks all the time about Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor, man and woman, but we bring all sorts of difference.  We come from different cultures and backgrounds, different socio-economic classes, different languages, different levels of education, different sorts of families.  We have different interests and different likes.  We have different personalities and different skills.  Sometimes we find that those who were once enemies—soldiers on different sides, criminals and their victims, people from different political parties—are now brought together by the gospel.  The Spirit binds us together.  We share one baptism in one Lord who is the son of the one Father and we all yearn towards that one hope in which the earth is full of God’s glory and creation set to rights once and for all.  And it’s not only that, but the Spirit gifts us all differently.  What those gifts are and how they work and how they’re received isn’t fully clear.  I think sometimes we’ve had a tendency to try to nail this down too much.  To say, for example, that the gifts Paul talks about are all somehow miraculous gifts that we wouldn’t have without the Spirit or we take Paul’s lists of gifts (and there are several lists and they’re all different) and we tell people that they have to have one of those specific gifts from his lists.  Brothers and Sisters, I think it’s more organic than that.  The Spirit can give someone an entirely new gift that they could never come by naturally, but many of the gifts are just who we are and what we’re gifted with naturally, but now empowered and given gospel direction by the Spirit.  And I think the full list is as diverse as the church is.  None of us is entirely quite the same as anyone else.   So there’s a vast panoply of gifts, but Paul puts his focus here on the ones that steer the ship: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.  I wonder if Paul puts his focus here because of his own experiences with rejection as an apostle.  Or maybe it was because he’d seen churches torn apart when leaders and teachers put themselves above the unity of the church.  Some people followed this teacher and other followed that teacher.  It’s still a big problem today. I’m always suspicious of men and women who develop big ministries that aren’t anchored the church and who name those ministries after themselves or ministries, again not really tied to a church and all centred around a person or personality.  We just don’t see that in the New Testament.  It’s the opposite of the model for ministry scripture gives us.  And it’s also sadly common these days for churches to split because people have decided to follow this teacher, instead of that one.  When the gospel is being compromised and the people doing it refuse correction, that may be just cause for division in the body.  But an awful lot of our divisions today are the result of leaders and teachers who have forgotten the great importance of maintaining the unity that Jesus and the Spirit have given us.   Whatever Paul’s reason for focusing on these kinds of leadership or authority or teaching gifts, it’s not exhaustive, and his point is that the Spirit gifts us—not just some “saints”, but all the saints, all of God’s people—in order to equip us for the work of service.  Some translations say “ministry”, but I think “service” is probably better in our context.  When we think of “ministry” today, a lot of people immediately think about the clergy, about pastors.  The way we talk about the clergy can be misleading.  We often use the term “minister” for someone who is ordained.  Or we say, “He’s in the ministry.”  And that can leave people with the false impression that people like me or like our bishop are the ones who do the real work.  But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  We’re all ministers and we’re all equally involved in ministry—or service.  The Greek word is diakonia.  That’s where we get the word “deacon”, meaning one who serves.  But that’s what we all do.  The church isn’t like a ferry, where you’ve got a few people who run the ship and everyone else is just along for the ride.  In his providence, God has brought us all together and each of us has a natural place to serve.  If we struggle to find it, it might just be because we’re thinking too narrowly of what “ministry” is or looks like.   And that ministry, whatever it is, Paul is stressing, is for the building up of the body.  Paul longed for the Ephesians to grow into maturity.  And that meant growing to the point where they—not just as individuals, but as the body—the point where they faithfully put on display the truth of Jesus the Messiah.  It happens through a combination of unity in faith and knowledge of the son of God, of Jesus.  And the standard for measuring that maturity is the fullness of Jesus himself.  Think of it this way.  The risen and ascended Jesus is the embodiment not just of God’s new creation, but more importantly he is the new huma

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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