Trinity Presbyterian Church

Rev. Craig Hunter

July 20, 2008

Scripture: Ephesians 2:1-11

I spend a lot of time listening to music, as I drive from home to work, or go for a walk, or at home while cooking or cleaning. I spend that time thinking about all sorts of things – sometimes I think about what I need to do, sometimes I pray, sometimes I think about the sermon I need to write, sometimes I am too numb or tired to think about much of anything. Well, recently I was listening to some classical music on my stereo and strangely enough, by some weird idiosyncrasy perhaps peculiar to preachers’ minds, I thought of the Ephesians text for today.

If this text were a piece of classical music, I wondered, how would it sound? “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived,” this is dark, heavy music, you will listen in vain for a melody here, this sounds more like a dirge. As someone who played the cello as a youth, this is music played heavily on the lower-pitched G and C strings. Listen as the tone just keeps descending, going deeper and deeper. “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.” And then the music hits bottom, I imagine only a few, slow, monotonously repetitive notes of the bass as Paul concludes, “All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.”

The music, like the lives of the people Paul is describing, has become all too lifeless, it is a dreary funeral song. Do you hear it?

Paul would know. After all, I suspect Paul is speaking a bit from personal experience here. Reading between the lines of Acts and Paul’s own writings, before his conversion, Paul was a self-righteous man. He had fed his ego by the power he had acquired by persecuting the relatively powerless bands of Christians that had arisen in the years after Christ’s resurrection. Nor do we have to look a few thousand years in the past to find examples of self-absorbent lifestyles. Look at the lives of many of the rich and powerful in our world. Look at how the salaries of corporate CEOs, professional athletes, and movie stars have gotten out of hand, and look at how few of them exhibit any kind of lasting commitment to any deeper cause. Or look at ourselves. Look at how wasteful we are. Look at how those of us in industrialized countries consume far more than our proportion of the world’s resources. Look at how I can go to the store tonight and eat almost anything I want, probably without giving a moment’s thought to the 2 billion people on this earth, one-third of the world’s population, who live on less than two dollars a day. Look at how our society is increasingly becoming one in which we are taught to expect low-cost, instantaneous happiness. This sentiment is well-expressed in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip in which Calvin exclaims “Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!”

Think of astronauts in space. Everything has to be nailed down, self-contained, and sealed shut or else it will drift away. Even basic items such as pens had to be redesigned so that they don’t depend on gravity to deliver their ink. And even the most simple tasks become difficult – how do you get the toothpaste to stay on the toothbrush? The atmosphere of zero gravity is one in which astronauts have to re-learn even the most basic of tasks, it is an atmosphere in which nothing can be taken for granted.

In some ways, our society is in danger of becoming more and more an atmosphere of zero morality, an atmosphere in which everything is permissible, an atmosphere in which we are forced to re-learn how to relate to each other in the absence of moral norms. Family structures break down. Economic boundaries expand for the platinum-card set, while they contract for those who see their pensions cut. In the United States, basic health insurance becomes a luxury that over 40 million Americans cannot afford, while the rising cost of drugs becomes almost too much for many of the elderly.

For the astronaut, one of the most dangerous moments is the space walk when they step outside of the safety of the shuttle. If the astronaut’s tether breaks, they drift away into the limitlessness of space, with nothing holding them back. Similarly, in our pursuit of our self-absorbent lifestyles, nothing holds us back from the abyss of despair and nothingness.

The greatest lie perpetuated by those who are adrift in this zero-morality atmosphere is that they are “free.” Yet freedom is not the ability to do anything you want. Does the freedom to never establish a loving, committed relationship bring happiness? Does the freedom to destroy one’s mind with alcohol and drugs bring contentment? Does the freedom to turn our backs on the problems of our neighbors give us joy?

To live in this atmosphere is not to be free, rather it is to drift away from the relationships with God and each other that ground us and give our lives meaning. The tragedy of this drifting existence is compounded by the fact that those who realize that they are drifting away all too often reach for the wrong tethers. They reach for possessions – they tell themselves that they will feel better when they have the newest car, a freshly remodeled kitchen, the newest iphone, or whatever device the newest technology brings down the pipe. And while it may be true that money can improve the quality of your misery, it cannot bring happiness. Others reach for new knowledge, thinking that if they just knew more, if they just had deeper insight into the human condition, contentment would inevitably follow. Think of all the self-help books, think of the rise of New Age religion. Others reach for power, thinking that once they get the next promotion, everything will be perfect, that will solve all of their important problems, they will feel good about themselves.

That is the church’s greatest task – to witness to God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Paul talks about this in verse 4. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

Those two little words, “but God,” they symbolize a revolution, God breaks into our condition, introducing new life, new love, a different way of being in the world.

Listen to some of the other “But Gods” in the Bible:

“The patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt; but God was with him.” (Acts 7:9)

“As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20)

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26)

“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)

In many ways, the Bible is a collection of “But God” stories, stories of how a God who is rich, not so much in knowledge or in power as in mercy or love, how this rich God saves us and makes us alive, even when we are dead, even when we don’t deserve it, or rather, especially when we are dead and do not deserve it. Why? Because that is who God is, out of the great love with which he loved us, that is the gospel right there.

Remember the dark music of death that ended verse 3? Suddenly, you can hear a new note here in this verse, it is introduced with those two small words, “But God,” it is like the lone sound of an oboe coming out of nowhere with a high note, a melody, and leading the rest of the orchestra as it rises. Listen to it rise, hear the introduction of the melody, hear the whole orchestra joining in as Paul continues, “so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Now comes the crescendo, the whole room resonates to the sound of the orchestra’s melody, if you surrender yourself to the music, maybe like the other half of a tuning fork, your soul will resonate with it as well, listen to the notes of Paul’s words as he writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

“by grace.” By grace you have been saved. God’s grace is the only lifeline that saves, it is the gravitational pull that snags us back from the edge of the abyss and grounds us firmly in loving relationships with God and each other. As Paul says, this is not the result of works – in other words,

we cannot save ourselves. Indeed, sometimes we have to do the most difficult thing of all, which is to resist the impulse to reach out for all the other false lifelines of this world, and to just let go and let God’s gravity of grace pull us back to a gravitational field for the human spirit that is God-breathed, Christ-centered, and Spirit-driven. To open oneself up to this gravity of grace is not to subject oneself to a restriction of one’s freedoms. Rather, it is to discover the only real freedom that exists. Only when we have been brought back by the gravity of grace can we experience the levity of life lived in the Spirit. Only then can we breathe the fresh, joy-filled air of a life lived out of love for others. This is the way God created us, so that when we seek joy for only ourselves, the joy always eludes us, while in seeking to bring joy to those around us, we often end up becoming full of joy ourselves. Hans Seyle, in Stress and Distress, talks about the self-satisfaction and personal pleasure that comes from a life lived for others. A life where the orientation is toward “Is there anything I can do for you” and “Is there anything I can do to be helpful?” is paradoxically the most selfishly satisfying life one can imagine. Think for example about being in love, about how when you are in love, you get the greatest pleasure by doing something that pleases your lover. To put it one way, “Those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who surrender their life for the sake of love will save it. Or to put it another way, “To have a heart you have to give it away.”

God gave us God’s heart in Jesus Christ. Do we have the courage to listen and respond to the music of God’s grace, to let go and let God’s gravity pull us in, and to live lives filled with love for ourselves, our neighbors, and even our enemies?