Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, "Imitating God," Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Sermon 8/8/21

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Imitating God

For many years before we merged with our nearby conferences to become the Upper New York Annual Conference, I was the Conference Youth Coordinator for the North Central New York Conference Council on Youth Ministries - CCYM. One of the tasks of the CCYM every year was to interview candidates for the Mission of Peace, a trip for young people from the Northeastern US to visit young people in countries around the world, to build relationships, connections, and peace. The interview team was made up of youth leadership, past trip attendees, and a couple of adult advisors. Well, one year, there were only two candidates who applied, and we had three positions we could fill from our area. We were going to interview them anyway, but a bad winter storm meant we had to cancel our interviews, and we decided to go ahead and affirm the candidates for the trip, even without the interview. They went on the trip, had a great experience, and came back ready to be part of the interview team the next year. 

The next cycle, though, a funny thing happened. Even though these two young people never had to go through a Mission of Peace interview themselves, they were incredibly tough on the candidates they interviewed for the following year. They asked the new applicants really hard questions, had grim, unsmiling faces, and I think they left our new group of candidates feeling pretty discouraged about their prospects. I tried really hard to radiate some encouragement to the new applicants in the midst of all challenging questions. In the long run, everything worked out fine, but it struck me as so interesting that the youth who had not even had to endure an interview themselves would in turn be so hard on the youth who followed them in the process. I wondered about why that was, and I could only imagine that these youth - relatively inexperienced at that point in their lives in many ways - were drawing on some images they had in their mind of what interviews should be like. They knew that their assumptions about others’ cultures had been challenged when they went on their Mission of Peace and they wanted to prepare those who would come after them, not realizing that these new candidates would have to learn in the same way they had the year before - through experience. And so when these youth stepped into the role of interviewer, they stepped into this imagined picture of a hard-nosed questioner, even though that didn’t match their own experiences. They seemed to be imitating some vision of this interview process that they drew from other sources - maybe from TV or movies, maybe something they’d experienced at school, maybe what they’d read about or been told about how stressful an interview might be - instead of modeling their behavior on what they’d actually experienced - an application process that was flexible and encouraging. 

These youth are now thoughtful, compassionate adults, but thinking back on this story always makes me smile. And it was on my mind this week as I read our scripture lesson from Ephesians. At the conclusion of our passage, the author of the letter to the church at Ephesus - maybe Paul, maybe one of Paul’s proteges writing a bit later - says “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” We’re called to be imitators of God! That’s a pretty big ask, a pretty big task for us to attempt - to imitate the creator of the universe. And this isn’t the only place the scriptures call on us to imitate God, or to be imitators of Christ. It’s not just a passing comment. We’re meant to shape our lives in such a way that we are as Christ-like as possible, that we show in our living that indeed, we are created in God’s image and so we live lives shaped by God, shaped into mini-images-of-God in the world, being Christ’s body, Christ’s hand and feet in the world. We’re called to imitate God. 

And yet, sometimes, I think we’re a bit like the CCYM kids. We’ve got the message - imitate God - but what we end up imitating is some picture we have in our minds of God’s character, instead of what God is really like with us. We’re kids playing dress-up at God, and we’ve got some stereotypes of God in our minds, some bad images, some caricatures of God, and that’s what we try to imitate. What is God like? According to our imitation attempts, it seems that we have sometimes understood God to be harsh, judgmental, unforgiving, and unrelenting. Sometimes, in the name of imitating God, we seek out faults in our neighbors, and we hold each other to standards that have us set for failure. Sometimes, in the name of imitating God, we imply that people can be beyond redeeming, and we imply that we have it figured out, that we’re superior in judgment, in morality, in choosing what’s right. We’re trying to imitate God - but we skip over our own actual experiences of God in favor of some picture of God that isn’t quite right, and ends up doing more harm than good, as we pass off harsh treatment of others with a claim tying our actions to the divine. 

What is God like, though? What has been our experience of God? In our reading from Ephesians, the author gives us just a few statements, but a lot to go on: God’s Holy Spirit marks us for redemption. He says that we should “be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another” as God in Christ has done for us. God is tender-hearted and forgiving! And if we want to imitate God, we should “live in love,” loving as Christ loved us, which was by giving himself up for us, putting aside his will for God’s will, acting for us instead of for himself - a love poured out for others. That’s what God is like, and that’s what we’re called to imitate. When we imitate God in this way, through lives of love, our text says, it’s like a sweet gift to God. 

Having started at the end of our reading today, I think we can now go back to the beginning of our passage reading with a different perspective. As our author gives a series of instructions, culminating in the call to imitate God, we can read the whole section as a pattern offered to us for how we might go about imitating God. My Bible calls this section “rules for the new life,” and what came to mind for me are the various groups I’ve been a part of where we spend the beginning of our time establishing a covenant - an agreement between two parties outlining how we’re going to behave, how we commit to treating each other, promises we make to each other for care and compassion that help us live in community. I have a professor in my PhD program who does this at the start of every class, no matter how experienced and seasoned her students are. And I have a supervisor in a nonprofit I work with who does this at every step in every process she leads. I was part of an interview team with her organization, and we had a covenant for the three people involved in that process, even though we’d all worked together in various ways before interviewing folks together. Sometimes I’ll admit I’ve thought: do we really need this? Again? But then I think about my young CCYMers, and I think about my own failed attempts at imitating God, when I’m imitating a caricature of God instead of the real thing, and I think that a covenant is a way to help us keep a clear picture in our minds and hearts of the values we hold. 

Here’s what’s in the Ephesians “rules for the new life”: Put away falsehood. Speak the truth about each other. Remember that you’re part of each other. We’ll all get angry, but don’t sin out of anger. Don’t hold onto your anger. Don’t give space to the devil, to something ruling your heart and life that is not God. Don’t steal. Work to share with those in need. Speak with an intent to build each other up, not tear each other down. Speak with the intent to give grace - because that’s certainly what God does for us! Don’t grieve God - you’re marked by God for redemption! so put away bitterness, wrath, anger, slander, malice. We don’t need it. We need kindness. We need tenderheartedness. We need forgiveness. We get all that from God. And so, to imitate God, to live in love, we commit to living in this way with one another. I don’t know about you, but I need the reminders of this rule of living, because otherwise I’ve talked myself into believing I’m imitating God when I’m really just copying a cheap imitation, a twisted image of God that’s more about my power and my will and my way than God’s way. 

Friends, we’re called to the boldest of tasks - we’re called to imitate God! But as we go about imitating God, we need to make sure that we know God’s character well, so that what we present to the world as like-God, as Christ-like, is a true representation. No, we won’t be a perfect reflection, seeing, as we do, only dimly - but we have to be faithful, to be accountable to who God really is. We have to study God’s character closely, so we can make as true a representation as we can. And to study God closely? We have to be in deep relationship. We have to journey with God everyday. We have to learn as much as we can, talk to God as often as we can, open our hearts to God as wide as we can. We can help each other do that, as we live in community, in covenant, building each other up, so that our words and actions communicate God’s grace - to ourselves and to all who hear them. Let us therefore be imitators of God, living in love, as Christ loved us, an offering to our loving, forgiving, grace-full and tender-hearted God. Amen. 

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, "One," Ephesians 4:1-16

 Sermon 8/1/21

Ephesians 4:1-16

One

This summer I’ve been taking a  tutorial with my advisor - I'm currently working on my PhD at Drew Theological School, studying Christianity and Ecology with a focus on Animal ethics. In my tutorial, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about Christians who are concerned about the environment and climate change and what motivates them, and conversely, what motivates Christians who are distinctly not concerned about the environment and deny that climate change is happening. I’ve learned that studies show a couple of things that I find kind of disconcerting and discouraging. First, Christians are actually less likely to care about the environment than the population as a whole, and more likely to deny that climate change is happening or that climate change has human causes. But second - and this is the one I’ve really been chewing on - the biggest predictor of whether or not someone prioritizes care for the environment is not faith or religious affiliation, rather, it’s our political identification. (2) This is actually true for our beliefs on social issues broadly, not just the environment. Whether we are Republican or Democrat or whatever on the political spectrum is more likely to tell us something about what folks believe than a person's religious affiliation. I wonder: what does it say, that our faith isn’t the thing that most seems to shape us and our beliefs? Why have we become so invested in our political identities? Why is our political identity more likely to predict what we’re like, what we believe, what we’re committed to than is our identity as Christians, proclaimed followers of Jesus Christ? 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad, truly, that there’s a wide range within Christianity, that there’s a spectrum of expressions of Christianity. Christianity isn’t monolithic - we don’t all believe exactly the same things or worship in the same way, we’re not structured in the same way - I think that’s good. Our goal as Christ-followers, even as part of the one body of Christ, isn’t sameness - as the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians, if the whole body were made up of eyes, where would the hearing be? And so I don’t think sameness is a goal of Christianity. But what about unity? Is unity a goal? What does Christian unity mean? Our scripture text today from Ephesians talks about unity in some of what I find to be the most poetic language in the New Testament - the author, possibly Paul, or possibly a later disciple of Paul, writes to beg readers to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” because there is “one body and one Spirit … one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.” So - we can have a wide range of expressions of Christianity, and yet still be united under one body, one Spirit, one God, right? 

Except that doesn’t seem to be so simple either. As I was thinking about “unity,” a couple of things popped into my mind. First, I thought of a meme I’d seen going around, with a lot of variations, but that basically said some version of the same thing: “‘We can disagree and still be friends’ does not apply to racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia.” In other words, it’s ok if we have different ideas about what makes good church music, for example, but we can’t have different ideas about the basic wrongness of racism and still be friends. I think of the struggles of our denomination, and our march toward a probable denominational divide at General Conference next year. I read the statement you just recently adopted, “We celebrate God’s gift of diversity and value the wholeness made possible in community equally shared and shepherded by all. We welcome and affirm people of every gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, who are also of every age, race, ethnicity, physical and mental ability, level of education and family structure and of every economic, immigration, marital, and social status, and so much more. We acknowledge that we live in a world of profound social, economic and political inequalities. As followers of Jesus, we commit ourselves to the pursuit of justice and pledge to stand in solidarity with all who are marginalized and oppressed.” It’s a beautiful statement, and a statement that takes a stand. And I think of my friends who are in the LGBTQ community who have decried calls for church unity over these last decades that have felt very trite - unity at the expense of their full inclusion in the church. What does it mean to find unity, they’ve asked, with people who don’t want the LGBTQ community to be allowed to get married, or be pastors, or be full members with full rights within the church? How can they be unified with folks who see them this way? There is no unity if it comes at the expense of others. 

So, here we are in this conundrum - finding that an identity as Christ-followers doesn’t seem to shape us or predict what we’ll value as much as our identity as Republican or Democrat does, and yet feeling we can’t compromise for the sake of some false, trite unity if it means prioritizing unity over justice, unity over eliminating oppression. What do we do? 

My friend Allan, a United Methodist pastor serving in Ohio, is more theologically conservative than I am, but I’ve appreciated his writing, his words of wisdom, especially during election seasons, calling the church to remember its identity and purpose. In the leadup to the 2016 election he wrote, “The problem is that we Christians in America have aimed our message too low because the church has become just one more special interest group in the wrangling of [national and state] politics - mainliners have become an extension of the Democratic Party, while evangelicals have become an extension of the Republican Party. We have less of a hearing in the city because what we offer is really nothing other than what everyone else is offering; and people have discovered that one can be a progressive or a conservative just fine without Jesus and the church. Both Christian progressives and conservatives keep fighting to revive a declining Christendom (in their own image) refusing to admit that it is a losing proposition … If and when the church understands itself once again as its own nation, its own politic with its own integrity and that it has no stake in anything other than the mission of Christ in the world, who is also the missioning Christ, it will then truly be able to seek the welfare of the city because it will by its very existence offer to the city only what Jesus can provide.” (2) 

Do we understand that we - the church, and the members of the body of Christ that make the church - have no stake in anything other than the mission of Christ? I don’t know about you, but I feel called to account. And I feel like Allan’s words help me understand our epistle lesson better. The letter to the Ephesians calls us to conform our lives to Christ. If we’re members of the body of Christ, Christ is the head, the core to which we’re all joined, and what we’re meant to be part of, who we’re meant to be modeling ourselves after. I think, then, that the unity the author describes isn’t about sameness of belief - it’s about clarity of purpose, and commitment to prioritizing our lives with following Jesus as our number one purpose, and everything else falling in a way that supports and doesn’t detract from that purpose. One body, one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God - not because we all understand God in the same way or because we have the same baptismal practices across traditions or because we agree to disagree even when it means silencing those who are oppressed. No, rather, the author is calling us to be united, as Christians, in our one purpose, leading a life worthy of our calling as disciples of Christ, giving God our whole hearts, loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbors with the same God-centered, God-driven devotion. In that - our God-centered lives - is our primary purpose, our identity-shaping purpose, in that purpose, we’re meant to be one, and as much as we forget and fail to let Christ be our first purpose, we’re on the wrong track.

But when we are grounded in the hope of our calling, and when we seek with all our hearts, with our first purpose, to live lives worthy of God’s call to discipleship, then we glean from this letter a direction for how to live in community. We use our gifts to build up. In the writings of Paul and his disciples, that’s a message that’s repeated throughout. How do we live as the body of Christ? By building up, not tearing down. Just like we build up our own bodies by developing muscles, giving good nutrition to our bodies, tending to our bodies’ needs, we build each other up through figuring out what practices, what actions, what acts of care and love and devotion will nurture each other’s flourishing. We figure out how we can use our gifts to serve others. We seek to build up those who have been torn down through oppression and injustice. And as we build each other up, our author says we grow up, maturing in our faith, and measuring up to the stature of Christ. 

I started by telling you about being discouraged in my tutorial, realizing that studies show that being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, doesn’t have as much impact on what we believe and what we do as I would have thought, as I wanted. But there’s hope. I also read about some studies that show that seasons of reawakening, revitalization, and revival happen in seasons when people realize that there’s a big disconnect between our values and what we see happening in the world around us, or when we realize that there’s a disconnect between our beliefs and reality, our beliefs and what we’re doing. Sometimes, the discomfort of that disconnect can spur transformation - in ourselves, and in whole cultures. (3) I think the early church emerged from an awakening, led by Jesus and then his followers, inviting people to transform their lives. The invitation is extended to us today. Can we live lives worthy of the calling to which we have been called? Indeed, we are called to one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, one priority to shape the whole of our existence. Let’s claim a unity of purpose, and build each other up into Christ, as we endeavor to be his hands and feet, his body in the world. Amen. 

(1) Taylor, B., Van Wieren, G., and Zaleha, B., (2016), “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr., to Pope Francis” (with Gretel Van Wieren and Bernard Zaleha), Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10(3), 306-378. 

(2) Emphasis mine, https://www.facebook.com/allan.bevere/posts/10209247941669131) 

(3) Kearns, L. (1997). “Noah's ark goes to Washington: A profile of evangelical environmentalism.” Social compass, 44(3), 349-366.