Co-missioners,
The writer scheduled for today begged off at the last minute, so our editor rummaged in his personal storehouse and dug up this. It’s most of a sermon he preached three years ago when the covid pandemic was still a pressing concern in the U.S. The texts that day were the same ones we heard at church this past August 18th—a few verses from Proverbs 1, a snippet from Ephesians 5, and the second-to-last slice of a five-week feast on John 6. What struck our editor is how so much of what he said in 2021 bears repeating as we think about the messes we’re still contending with in 2024.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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A Homily by Jerome Burce
I want to focus this morning on the little snippet we heard from Ephesians 5 just now, verses 15 to 20. It’s short enough to read again. Here goes–
Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Two things. First, let’s take a moment to sort out what St. Paul is driving at as he says these things. Second, let’s think about how important it is for the Christian people we are to take these things to heart in 2021, living as we do in days that are as evil in their own way as were the days in the city of Ephesus around 60 A.D. when this letter was written, sent, and read out loud for the first time ever.
Paul’s key point to those long-ago Ephesians is that God was working in them and through them to address that evil. The same is true for all of us right here, right now. We all have a piece—a role to play—in God’s grand project of remaking heaven and earth into the kind of heaven and earth God has always wanted his human creatures—his whole creation, for that matter—to enjoy. The heavy lifter in the project, of course, is Christ Jesus. He’s the one who died to make it possible. He’s the one God raised to launch the project in earnest and oversee it with the Holy Spirit as the power of God that pushes it forward.
Along came that Spirit, the Holy One who used the preaching and teaching of Paul to snag those folks at Ephesus as frontline operatives in the project. Lately he’s done the same with you, with me. He’s doing it this very morning with the baby who’s being baptized here today. She needs to learn about this, by the way, as she grows up. The rest of our children do too. And even people my age and older need to learn about it more and more and grow into it as well.
We are God’s baptized, Jesus-trusting people. As such we are the billboard God has erected in the world—the announcement, the advertisement to our neighbors that the Grand Project is underway; that even now—already now—our Lord Jesus Christ is putting an end to the sin and suspicion and enmity that tears people apart and dumps them in separate camps where they grind their teeth at each other until they’re all dead with nothing more to hope for.
We function as this sign individually, yes. Though we do so best and all the more brightly as God’s church, people brought together and bound together through their faith in Christ Jesus. Think about it. Apart from Jesus most of us would have nothing to do with each other. Apart from him it would never cross our minds that those people on the other side of town who look and sound so different might in fact be our sisters and brothers in some kind of genuine way. As it is—with Jesus in the picture, that is—we’re at least required to feel embarrassed when we fail to see them that way. This embarrassment is itself a sign that something new and different is afoot in the world because Jesus died for us all and lives for us all. Before Jesus came along nobody felt at all embarrassed about hating the people on the other side of town. It was simply what you did. No wonder the world was so ugly, dark and cruel. Not that it isn’t today, but it has been worse. A lot worse.
Anyway, these are the kind of things Paul is driving at in Ephesians. We’ve been listening to it these past few Sundays, of course—not all of it, but most of it. In the three first chapters Paul sings incredible songs about what God has accomplished for us already in Christ Jesus. I’ve encouraged you more than once to return to those chapters during the week for a slower, closer reading. I do so again. We so undersell each other. We so undersell God. And when we do that, we don’t advance his project, we undercut it. Only God can fix this, of course, and for that we need to immerse ourselves again and again in what he says. Only then can the Holy Spirit go to work on us to get us thinking and believing as big as God wants us to think and believe.
“God has seated you with Christ in the heavenly places.” Imagine that. Imagine it so well that you start behaving that way as you go about your daily lives. That’s what the last three chapters of Ephesians are about. This includes the little piece of Chapter 5 we’re hearing today. It starts with Paul urging us to step into and through this coming week like people with a clue. They know who they are in Christ Jesus. They’re wise to God’s plans for the world. They don’t waste time fretting about the future God has in store for them. They trust God when he tells them they’re already in on it. They don’t fall for the nonsense of worrying about whether they’re good enough for God. Of course they aren’t. They couldn’t be if they tried. “So what?” they say. “We’ve got Christ,” they say. “A Christ so good that he’s good enough for us all. What more do we need to live forever?” they say. And with that they get busy living for each other and for the people around them. They make it their aim to honor Christ in the way they spend their days. They’ll do that even if it’s inconvenient—even if it costs them.
That’s the wisdom Paul is pushing this morning. Of course he knows how prone we are to live like fools who are stuck on themselves and afraid of the future. That’s why he pushes. “Be filled with the Spirit,” he says. In other words, open your ears, open your hearts, and let God fill them up with not only with his astonishing promises, but with his power to trust them. The power to act on them.
I said that Paul sings some incredible songs in those opening three chapters of Ephesians. Again, see for yourselves this week. As you do, keep asking God to put those same great songs of faith and thanks in your hearts too—or if you’re singing already, ask God to ramp up the volume and keep the song going stronger than ever, to the point that the people around you start calling you crazy. You’ll be in some very good company if that should happen. Don’t forget that you’re in real good company if that should happen. St. Paul is there, of course. Even better, so is our Lord Jesus. They called him crazy too, remember? Then in their wisdom—the world’s wisdom—they crucified the Son of God.
Guess who came out looking foolish when that was all done.
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As for you, Paul says, live smart. Live “Jesus-smart” as you and I might put it these days.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s a new slogan for us to chew on right here, in this congregation, for the rest of this year—next year too, for that matter. Why not? “
Live Jesus-smart. “Do it!” Paul says.
Do it because the days are evil. Do it because people trapped in these evil days need a sign from somewhere that God in God’s mercy has not given up on them. A lot of people do think that, of course—more and more of them as our American years go by. Some of them will proudly tell you that they’ve had the sense to give up on God. That’s how evil and foolish our days have gotten. It doesn’t help that too many Christians—too many of us—have lost our wits too. And suddenly we imagine that our God-given job is not to suffer sinful fools as Jesus did, but rather to beat up on them; to somehow grind them into submission as Jesus refused to do.
We Christians have no business stomping around in public with our angry faces on. Let’s save those angry faces for each other when we let our Lord down and embarrass him with our own bad behavior. There’s a lot of that bubbling up from Christians these days.
So again, live smart, as Paul says. Live Jesus-smart. Remember when you come to communion this morning that Jesus abides in us and we in him, exactly as he promised in this morning’s reading from St. John. Time was when people could see Jesus directly. Now, if they see him at all, they see him in us. They see him through us. Again, we are the sign, the living billboard, the one flashing the message that Easter happened, that Jesus lives, that mercy, patience, forgiveness and love are real gifts from a real God for a world that needs them so badly.
And with that, let me push you as Paul is pushing us today. I have a thinking-and-praying assignment for all of us this week. So much the better if you can find others you trust to talk it over with.
The assignment centers on a question. For us right now, a pressing question. What does it mean to live Jesus-smart in the evil days of a pandemic—a pandemic made worse by the evil divisions that have plopped Americans in different camps, each despising the other?
What’s the Jesus-smart response to the person you meet in the grocery story this week who has chosen the opposite side in the great mask fight? What’s our Jesus-smart response to that other person who gets all her news from the sources we ourselves refuse to watch or read because, as wesee it, they’re so biased and wrong, the vile tools of all those “other people”?
How do we flash the promise of God to neighbors we have fundamental disagreements with? We are all so quick to bristle with what we imagine is God’s righteous anger. That’s what everybody does. But we’re not everybody. We’re the Jesus crowd. Our job—our specific God-appointed, Spirit-driven job is to shine with God’s ridiculous grace in Christ Jesus who died for us all when we were all still sinners.
So how do we shine with this grace in the specifics of the mess we’re living through this year? How in the context of this mess do we give “thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”?
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I won’t stand here pretending that I have the “right answers” to all these questions. I will stand here thanking God for the Jesus-centered wisdom the Spirit has sparked in each of you, and in all of us together. It’s what makes it possible for us to ask the questions in the first place, and then to face them without fear as we talk them through together.
God grant this kind of conversation among us all—and guide us through it!
