George A. Mason 8 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 15 July 2018 Dallas, Texas Meant to Be Ephesians 1:3-14

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 8 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 15 July 2018 Dallas, Texas Meant to Be Ephesians 1:3-14 The world held its collective breath this week as we all followed the harrowing rescue of the twelve young teenage soccer players and their assistant coach who were trapped deep inside a cave in Thailand. They were all saved. They are all alive and doing well. But that outcome did not seem foreordained. The boys left their soccer practice on their bicycles and convinced their coach to go on a cave adventure. This is the wrong time of year to do such a thing. It s monsoon season in Southeast Asia, don t you know?! And there were warning signs posted that they ignored, the way young people do with their intrepid sense that they are immortal. Once they found themselves deep in the cave, the rains drove the waters into the cave, flooding the treacherous pathways and blocking their exit. They could not save themselves. For days their frantic parents worried, while professional rescue groups failed to find where they were trapped. Finally, a British expert convinced authorities they were looking in the wrong places. At long last, they located the cold and hungry trapped explorers. Things only got worse as their oxygen was running out and every possible rescue plan seemed impossible. One Thai Navy SEAL died in the process. (By the way, who knew the Thai military had Navy SEALs?). The man had been transporting oxygen tanks to the cave hostages and tragically his own tank ran out. Hundreds of pumping machines lowered the waters to no avail and all other ideas such as drilling escape holes into the cave had been ruled out; time was running out. They finally came to the moment of truth when they had to try, as they said, to save some or lose them all. The creativity and courage required to get these boys and their coach to safety is something we will all learn more about in documentaries and made-for-tv movies. But thanks be to God, they were all saved in the end. The world exhaled and praised the rescuers. We saw photographs of the boys

2 together in the hospital, signaling their gratitude. Those boys clearly violated the rules. They trespassed and transgressed. They could have been left for dead in their sins, so to speak. The world could have viewed them as foolish youths and let the wages of sin be death, teaching others by their folly what happens when you sin. But no one was willing to treat them as expendable. They were and are precious human beings who crossed a boundary they shouldn t have crossed. But getting them reunited with their parents and giving them a future with hope was everything. I wonder what they will say and do in the years ahead as they reflect upon being saved? I can t wait to hear. The whole thing made me think afresh about salvation and what it cost God to redeem us. It made me think about whether we Christians have lost our sense of having been lost and saved. How do we talk about it? Do we even understand how precarious our predicament was that led to God moving heaven and earth by moving from heaven to earth to save us? Do we realize what love must have motivated God to act in such a dramatic way, giving his only-begotten Son to die that we might be saved? When we start to read the first chapter of Ephesians, we hear the writer expressing gratitude in extraordinary words for those early Christians who hadn t forgotten what the onlybegotten had done for them. You heard it read a few minutes ago, but if you could read it in the original Greek language, the difference would be striking to your ear. You see, these eleven verses are really one long run-on breathless sentence. It is a great eulogy a blessing of God for what God has done for them. These Ephesian Christians understood that they had been lost and were found, they had been rescued by the God who had loved them in a way that truly astonished them. How could it be that God had loved them so much that Christ would die for them? How could it be that they should enjoy the spiritual blessings of being adopted into the family of God and knowing that their future would also include the inheritance of the saints? None of this could have been expected. The way the Roman 2

3 world was organized in that time didn t make any of these Christians in the churches around Ephesus in Asia Minor assume they were special to anyone or deserving of being redeemed. For one thing, the church that was all Jewish at first had welcomed these Gentiles as brothers and sisters in Christ. That was certainly not a foregone conclusion. The Jews as a people had once been rescued from slavery in Egypt. They had been considered less than human by their Egyptian oppressors. They were mistreated and used as manual laborers. They were considered bodies to be exploited in a foreign land, not souls to be cherished. God had delivered them unexpectedly and adopted them as a beloved people of God s own choosing. So, it wouldn t be a surprise to Jews that God would remember them again in their suffering under Roman occupation and send a deliverer out of love. And it shouldn t have surprised them that God would extend that deliverance to the Gentiles and open the membership of Israel to these people whom they once thought of as dirty pagans unfit for inclusion among God s holy people. Jews, among all the peoples on earth, had been commanded by God to treat outsiders with kindness and dignity, no matter how unclean they considered them to be. But full inclusion without demanding them first to change and become like them in ways like circumcision and keeping kosher, that was a bridge too far. But we all tend to do that, don t we? Instead of remembering that our own salvation was a surprising gift in the first place that we didn t deserve, we take it for granted now and focus on how undeserving others are of the very love and grace that was shown to us. The other surprise for these Gentiles in and around Ephesus was in how they should be adopted into God s holy family with all the right and privileges of legitimate children of God. They had two fields of understanding for all this. First, Judaism; but then also Roman society. Roman citizenship was coveted status. You were entitled to legal and commercial privileges not accorded to aliens. But Roman society was based upon a system of blessing that derived from your class status. To receive maximum blessing 3

4 and favors, you had to be a full citizen as a free male. But even then, everything depended upon your cooperating with the benefactor structure of things. People above you would grant you blessings or privileges in direct proportion to your gratitude and praise of them. If you withheld your praise of them and gratitude to them, you could be denied blessings, because the benefactor had the power to give or withhold. St. Augustine illustrated his frustration with this system when he bemoaned the fact that when he was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Milan, he was expected from time to time to deliver speeches of praise for the emperor. In a speech to the emperor, he said, I had to tell many lies and be approved by people who knew I was telling them. This was just considered normal behavior, to have people telling the benefactor how wonderful he was and what an honor it was to be in his service. Well, these Gentile Christians, Roman citizens all, did not waste their breath praising the emperor; they went over his head. They understood that Caesar was not really Lord and could not save. The whole system had been upended. They praised the God and Father of Jesus Christ who had given them all things out of love, rather than out of a need for their worship. All this was astonishing to them. All things were theirs, and they did nothing for it. Paul even says that this is the way God had always intended it. They we, all of us, you, too, and every living being past, present and future had been chosen by God in Christ from before the foundation of the world. There s that sneaky interesting phrase "before the foundation of the world. And along with it, in the same breathless blessing, he uses other words like God s will, God s plan, and destined. This is important. We were all of us meant to be included all along. God didn t start out choosing some and not others until having a change of heart and finally letting some of the rest of us to get in on the blessings of heaven. Neither did God choose some for salvation and others for damnation, although that s been an unfortunate claim of the religious righteous for ages. The Jewish Essenes thought that 4

5 way about things, as did the Protestant reformer, John Calvin. Each believed that God had decided before all creation to save some and not others. They were among the saved, of course, and those not of their tribe were the lost. Ephesians talks about the church as an inclusive community in Christ. Christ is the head of the church, and the one in whom all the saved are saved. The more the church consists of different kinds of people who previously felt excluded, the more we bear witness to God s amazing grace. But this meant to be doesn t just extend backwards; it stretches forward, too. We were all meant to be included in the family of God from the beginning of time and we are all meant to be mature and honorable members of God s family to the end of time. Privilege and responsibility go hand in hand in the Christian life. We are meant to be a people who praises God for our being included and who join God s mission to the world of including others. This is our holy task. My father-in-law, Bill O Brien, reminded me of the words of W.O. Carver this week. Carver was a missiologist who liked to remind his Baptist kin that the church doesn t have a mission for God; God has a mission for the world and we just join it. Which means that if God has chosen the whole world in Christ no exceptions then we are not permitted to get into the business of sorting who s in and who s out, who s deserving and who s undeserving, who gets forgiven and who doesn t, who gets to join our church and who doesn t. The church s job is to proclaim this good news in word and deed. We are to sing God s praises and invite others to feel the astonishing grace of being chosen and saved and blessed alongside those who already know it. If you are here today (or reading this sermon anytime) and wonder what God thinks of you, quit wondering. God loves you Every Body, as our church sign says out front. God has saved you in Jesus Christ. If you feel unworthy, all the better. It should make you grateful and want to live up to it and into it. I ve been thinking about what those boys went through for twenty-one days in that dark 5

6 cave. I ve wondered what it might have been like if only some were saved, and some were left. Thank God they were all saved. Thank God those rescuers cared so much for every single one of them that they stopped at nothing one even giving his life until they were all saved. Thank God. It s almost as if it were meant to be. Amen. 6