“I’ve got good
news and bad news.” What’s your reaction when you hear
those familiar words? Are you a “good news” first and then
“the bad news” kind of person or are you like me and want to
get the “bad” over with first so that you can savor the
“good”? Funny too how what’s good news to one person can be
bad to another. I remember as a kid going to Six Flags with
my family. At the end of what was always a long, long day
of roller coasters, water rides and countless trips up
hundreds of feet and back down again on the Texas Chute Out
the voice over the loudspeaker would announce, “ladies and
gentlemen, the park will be closing in thirty minutes.” For
my siblings and I and whatever cast of cousins or friends
who happened to be with us you would have thought that the
dog had died, but for my parents and any other unwitting
adult who had tried to keep up with us throughout the day,
it was as if they’d won the lottery.
Listening to the
message from Ephesians this morning strikes me as an
exercise in “good news, bad news” or rather the other way
around. First is the bad. “You were dead through the
trespasses and sins…and we were by nature children of wrath,
like everyone.” And then there is the Good. “But God…made
us alive and raised us up.” So, if God says, “I’ve got good
news and I’ve got bad news.” Which way will we have it and
what does it all mean for us all?
Of course, in
life, it’s never really a matter of minimizing or
eliminating the bad in order to enjoy the good. Life is
about both. Somehow, someway you have to learn take the
good with the bad, the highs and the lows, the joys and the
sorrows, the roses along with the thorns. And there’s
always a sense of back and forth. The good and the bad walk
hand in hand. Somebody once made the keen observation that
“when things really start going well, you’d better watch
out!” Do you know what I mean? Just when you feel like
you’ve come into your stride and you’ve found your groove
you experience some sort of set back, unforeseen
circumstances. A couple of years ago, I went out to the
mailbox and discovered a fairly substantial check from the
IRS with a note that I’d miscalculated my taxes that year.
Well you can imagine that before I even got back in the
house, I’d already started spending that unexpected
windfall. But sitting at the traffic light the next day,
the water pump and timing belt in my car went out and in the
time you I could say “snap, crackle, pop” the money was
spent. So much for all my big plans!
Of course there
are far worse things in the world than having to deal with
shredded timing belts and broken water pump. And one knows
this better than the writer of Ephesians. In a culture that
avoids the negative and simply doesn’t want to acknowledge
the bad, he expresses a kind of brutal honesty unlike
anything we’re apt to hear these days. And with God, we
can’t experience the good news until we reckon with the bad,
until we look ourselves square in the face. “You were dead
to through the trespasses in which you once lived, following
the course of this world, following the ruler of the power
of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who
are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the
passions of our flesh, following the desire of our flesh,
following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by
nature children of wrath.”
That the writer of
Ephesians speaks in the past tense is no comfort to any of
us today. Until we come to terms with yesterday, there can
be no freedom today or hope for tomorrow. Somebody once
said, “Those who forget the past are destined to repeat
it.” So, there is a price to be paid for forgetting our
sinful broken past and the ways that we still cling to it.
“Passions of the flesh and desires of the senses” certainly
calls to mind a host of personal failings and
transgressions. No doubt there is a personal aspect to sin
in our lack of self-control and our inability to keep our
behavior in check. But the powers and principalities of
this world extend beyond us into our communities, our
culture, our national priorities into the very fabric of
creation itself. On every level, we have made a mess of
things. We’ve said and done the wrong things. We’ve failed
to do the right things. We’ve not loved our neighbor as our
selves. We’ve failed in our calling to strive for justice
and peace in all the earth. Whether through fear,
self-interest or apathy, we have deprived justice to the
most vulnerable in our society, our children, the poor, not
to mention the alien and the undocumented. What does it say
about us as the church that we spend so much time, attention
and resources wrangling over issues like human sexuality
about which the Bible doesn’t have a whole lot to say when
human tragedies of epidemic proportions continue to
unfold—in East Africa, to the South of our borders, even
here in our own cities and communities? What Word can there
be amid the sheer hopelessness of our human condition?
“But God.” “But
God.” There two of the shortest words you’ll find anywhere,
but it seems to me that they are among the most powerful
words that God speaks to us, the pivot on which not only our
own lives, but on which the whole creation turns, a word of
hope, a word of life. We can’t undo the mess we’ve made of
our lives and of our world. We can’t bring an end to
poverty and injustice. We can’t heal the rifts that divide
people and nations. But God. But God. But God
comes to us while we are yet sinners to set us free to live
as new beings in Christ, to live in accordance with his will
for us and for the world. With one another, in community
with others we are led by God’s word for us so that together
we can discern what God’s word means for us in this
particular moment, in the specific situations and
circumstances in which we find ourselves today.
Now, the subject
of “good works” is one that can get die hard Lutherans up in
arms. (Lutherans up in arms--can you imagine that?!)Usually
it boils down to whether or not they are necessary to make
God happy or to show that we really are Christian. Of
course the official Lutheran party line is “no, absolutely
not. We are saved by grace.” We don’t have to do anything
to earn God’s favor. But other well meaning folks would say
that’s a sure fire recipe for apathetic, disengaged
Christians going through the motions in an apathetic,
disengaged church slowly relegating itself into obscurity.
One of the early reformers, I forget his name actually
suggested that good works were in fact detrimental so we
shouldn’t do them at all. (That might be taking things a
little too far, I guess.)
Maybe its time then for us to
think about works from a new and fresh perspective.
Lutheran seminary Professor Marc Kolden maintains that Marin
Luther “saw from the Bible that good works are commanded by
God, so they are not optional. But what makes them good is
not that they are done for God, but that they serve people
in need. Luther said, ‘A good work is good for one’s
neighbor.’ Good works are not for eternal life, but for
this life, here and now. God commands them because God
loves this world and wants to get it loved through our good
works.”
So the question for us today
is really quite simple. How does God want to use us, our
time, our talents, and our treasure to get the world loved,
and in so doing bear witness to the “immeasurable riches of
God’s grace”? Maybe it’s as simple as offering a cold cup
of water to the least of these, visiting the sick, welcoming
the stranger, offering hospitality to others, walking or
running in the shoes of the immigrant.
But when all is said and done,
at the end of the day it’s not about what any one of us
does. It’s about who God is for you and for me for the
whole world, the one who loves us beyond all knowing. In
her book, The Cloister Walk, writer Kathleen Norris
tells of a fifth grader she once met who wrote a poem about
his father. “I remember him like God in my heart, I
remember him in my heart like the clouds overhead, and
strawberry ice cream and bananas when I was a little kid.
But the most I remember is his love, as big as Texas when I
was born.”
As big as Texas and even more is God’s love for us. The God
who hears us, who receives us, who makes us his own is among
us today. With the assurance of His love, let go forth to
serve him in all that we do. Amen.
