Rules of the Road

Based on Ephesians 4:1-16

These past few weeks we have been taking a leisurely summer road trip through the letter to the Ephesians. We have pulled over to gaze at three glorious scenic vistas along the way. These vistas have shown us glimpses of the glory of God. We marveled at the mystery of how God contains the entire universe, how God influences everything that is happening everywhere, how everything that exists contains the presence of God. We gazed at the glorious vision of all humanity joined together in its beautiful diversity offering worship and praise to God. It has been an inspiring overview of the majesty of God and how all of us are knit into this glorious tapestry of harmony. It’s been a lot to take in.

We are going to pivot this morning. I want us to take a step back. We got on this road trip but didn’t take the time to talk about the rules of the road. Before you go on a road trip, especially with children, there ought to be a brief conversation about what the rules are so that everyone can have an enjoyable time. You will be spending many hours crammed inside that car so it’s a good idea to make sure people know what it will take to make those hours more pleasant.

A few of the ground rules our parents set for us were that we needed to keep our voices down, especially if we are in traffic. We are not to throw any trash out the window. We are to keep our arms, feet and heads inside the vehicle while going down the road. We are to stay buckled in. But most important of all, my sister and I were not to cross the invisible line that separated the two of us.

The first half of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, as we have seen, is filled with language that pushes the boundaries to express the mystery and glory of God and the grace that has been showered on us. The language strains to communicate the cosmic harmony that God has established in Christ Jesus and how there is now one new humanity to replace the two; no longer Jew and Gentile but one humanity woven in with the rest of the cosmos, one intricate network of relationships all held together by Christ. This has been accomplished by God through Jesus.

Now, as we move into the second half of the letter, Paul starts focusing on some practical applications. He will be giving some rules of the road so to speak. These rules, when followed, help to make real the unity that has been given to us by the grace of God. I want to stress this point, it’s one of the primary reasons why this letter was written. We all want to experience harmony in our relationships, our families, our community. We want everyone to get along. The divisions and ugliness and all the “-isms” that pull us apart nobody wants. And it seems that no matter how hard we try, the things that separate us never seem to go away. The divisions are deep and seem permanent. The divisions that we are dealing with now may have different names and forms but division has always been part of the human experience. There were certainly all kinds of division in Paul’s day. He named one of the big ones, the division between Jews and Gentiles. But this is one of Paul’s big points: God has done something about it. In some mysterious way that Paul does not fully explain, God has removed all the divisions and forged universal harmony in Christ. This has been accomplished. Unity is not something we create. Unity has already been created by God. Whether we acknowledge it or not we are all in this together. Our lives are already tangled up with each other. All of creation already is all linked together in a mind-blowing web of relationships. This unity already exists. Our challenge is to manifest that unity, to live our lives in this reality and to reject the false reality that we are divided. This is one of the big points that Paul is trying to make here.

You clearly see the challenge. On one hand, God has already unified all that exists within the body of Christ. On the other hand, our lived experience reveals how divided and dis-unified we are. So, what is the deal? Paul is saying that by God’s grace and sheer force of will unity has been achieved. Our task is to live out of this God generated reality and to reject the false reality of division. Paul is calling on us to decide to live in the truth that is being revealed to us by the Spirit of God rather than continue to live in the lie of division. OK. So, how do we do this? How do we manifest the unity that God has already accomplished in Christ?

Paul starts with some basic values that we are to abide by: humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love. It’s interesting. Think about the times in your life where you were going through some kind of orientation. Say you were starting a new job with an organization. Or you were going through orientation at university or a civic association or club. At these orientations you usually receive some kind of booklet that contains policies and procedures, in other words, rules for how the club, organization, school or business operates. But before you get to the rules, there is often a vision statement that communicates what the club, organization, school or business is about. After the vision statement there is usually a list of values that guide the work of the organization. Once the vision and values have been communicated, then come the rules, the policies and procedures, that attempt to make practical how the organization goes about realizing the vision guided by the values. There is a logic in how this is all laid out in these orientation handbooks.

Paul has done the same thing. He spent the first few chapters naming the vision. Now he lays out the values that guide the work of manifesting that vision. Humility is the first value that is named. The opposite of humility is arrogance, the attitude that it is all about me. That attitude is a buzzkill when it comes to manifesting unity. Humility acknowledges that you are special and precious…just like everyone else. Gentleness is the next value. This has to do with being, well, a gentleman if that’s the gender you align with, or being a lady. Gentleness has to do with being polite, respectful, and gracious. Then comes patience. That value goes without saying when we are dealing with people. For healthy community we have to be patient with other people and we have to be patient with ourselves. We don’t always get it right and other people don’t always get it right. Patience and grace go together. And that leads the fourth value Paul names, bearing with one another in love. One way I think of it is there are times my kids, my wife and my dog annoy me, but I’m not kicking any of them to the curb or throwing them out of the house. We are going to do life together through thick and thin, in good times and in bad, when we are our best selves and when we are grumpy and insensitive, or when my dog will not stop barking when I’m trying to sleep. We stick together because we love each other. That’s the value being named here, to not give up on each other when times are hard. Although, it has to be said that some relationships require separation when emotional or physical harm is happening. I shudder to think of how many women have been advised by their pastors to stand by their abusive husbands. No one should sacrifice their emotional or physical well-being for a relationship. Relationships can take many forms and sometimes the best form is when the two people in the relationship decide to live in different states. It’s ok to love some people from far away.

I digress. After listing these four values, Paul then speaks of that unity that God has accomplished by using the word “one” seven times: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God of all. The number “seven” symbolizes wholeness or completion. I think Paul might have done this on purpose. He can’t seem to stress enough the unity that we have with God and each other that God has already provided for us. The body of Christ, the Spirit, the hope, the Lord, the faith, the baptism, the God of all, these are all divinely sourced. None of this comes from our own effort or creation. We are woven into the body. The Spirit dwells in us. Our hope is in God. Jesus is our Lord. We receive the faith and the sacrament of baptism. God is the source of all that is. Again, all these aspects of our unity have been given to us and we have come to understand these aspects and acknowledged them in our lives. We acknowledge that we are part of the body of Christ. We acknowledge that the Spirit lives in us. We acknowledge our ultimate hope is in God, we acknowledge Jesus as our Lord, we acknowledge the faith that has been passed down from the apostles, we acknowledge the baptism we have received, we acknowledge God as the source of all. Each of us acknowledge these things and this serves as the foundation of our unity that has been provided for us. You have to give credit to Paul in his persistence in reinforcing the central thesis of his letter.

Before Paul gets to more specific rules on how to live together and manifest this unity God has already provided us, he wants to make note of the various roles people play to facilitate the expression of that unity. I am reflecting again on those policy and procedure handbooks you may have seen in your life. After naming the vision and values of the organization but before you get to the policy and procedures, you may find an organizational chart so you can see how the club, school or business functions. You see who reports to who and what are all the different departments or committees. It’s an overall structure of the organization that you see in those charts.

Paul doesn’t give us a chart, but he does name the different positions that are held by people, all of which assist in the building up of the community in love. We could classify the first three positions as the ones who are involved in community engagement: apostles, prophets, evangelists. These are the ones who are out there in the wider society trying to let people know what is the truth, telling the story about what God has done in Christ. They are about consciousness raising, waking people up. The last two roles, pastor and teacher, are the ones who focus more on getting those who have had their eyes opened connected and nurtured in this new reality, this new way of life. These five positions all contribute to the common work of getting people on board and engaged in this way of life, or, as Paul puts it, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until everyone come to the unity of the faith.” This is our common work, building up the community in love, demonstrating the reality of the unity we have in Christ so that all would make the move to join us in this one human community held together in Christ Jesus. 

These beautiful visions of harmony that we have gazed at over the past few weeks are inspiring. They stir within us a yearning to experience this community of harmony, of mutual love for each other, a community that delights in God and in each other. We all want to experience this kind of harmonious and loving common life. It takes diligent effort to manifest this harmony, to live out these values, to claim the truth about what unites all of us, and to do our part in building each other up in love. The falsehoods and lies that divide us all up and prompt us to look askance at or even despise others has to be firmly and intentionally rejected constantly. My sister and I had that invisible line between us in the back seat of the station wagon when we were on those road trips but that doesn’t mean we didn’t cross that line from time to time and poke each other’s legs or pull each other’s hair. Our parents gave us that invisible line and gave us the rules to follow. It was up to us to diligently abide by what had been given to us. The same principle is here. We have to be diligent to live out the values and tend to the roles given to us to build up the community in love so that we can manifest the unity that has been provided us by God.

I want to leave you with a spiritual practice that came to me just yesterday morning. I was reading the paper and came across an opinion piece. The title of the piece asked if this particular politician, I’m not going to name him, is actually a “moron.” My kneejerk reaction was to verbalize, “Yes, he is a moron, and a hack, and gutless.” But then something got triggered in me. “Kevin, he is a child of God.” And I was prompted to pray for him and to forgive myself. That dawned on me as a practice I should take up. Whenever I am prompted to think disparaging thoughts about someone, usually a politician, I am going to give myself permission to name what I am thinking, even verbalize it if I can do that prudently. And I’m going to let that be my prompt to acknowledge that person as a child of God, a member of my family, and I’m going to pray for that person and for me. That’s one practical thing we can do to build that beloved community God has given us. Next week, we are going to continue to investigate the practical applications that Paul shares with the people in Ephesus.