Ephesians 4:25-5:2
5:1 Therefore be
imitators of God, as beloved children, 2 and live in love, as Christ loved us
and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
What makes up a community? What does it take
for a community to exist? I suppose one might say geography, a measurable
amount of land and space for several people to inhabit wherein they might cross
paths from time to time as they travel to work, to school, to the store, to
church. After all, aren’t there those green signs along Nisbet Lake Road and
Pleasant Valley Road that say, “Williams Community?” Most of you know far
better than I do where the line is between the Williams Community and Pleasant
Valley Community, and I’ve been told a time or two about the difference between
Cedar Springs, Williams, and Webster’s Chapel. So, I suppose one could claim
that a community is defined by the borders drawn around it, the green signs and
brick entryways that tell those who are traveling through that they are
entering the Williams Community or Gateway or Whispering Pines. But I’m not so
sure geography is a good way to make a community, so maybe it’s something else.
Maybe biology is what it
takes to make a community, a group of people who all share some measurable
portion of genetic material. I remember when we lived in Texas and I was
pastoring the little Osage Baptist Church just across the Coryell County line.
We lived just on the other side of Lake Waco, and the drive to Osage was a good
30-40 minutes. We would drive through Crawford, Texas and turn onto
Farm-to-Market Road 185, heading out to Osage. You knew you had really arrived
in Osage when you started to notice the same names on the mailboxes, the same
“W” over the cattle guards on the driveway. There was one family that owned
most of the land around the church, and brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, and
nephews all lived within walking distance of one another, and most all of them
worked in the family farming business. I remember having a conversation with a
member of that family (and a member of Osage): she said, “Yeah, the whole
family lives here in about a five-mile radius. We’re our very own community.”
Relation, biology, and marital connections—I’m not so sure that’s a good way to
make community either, so maybe it’s something else.
Maybe it’s
socio-economics: how much money one makes, how much education one possesses,
one’s ethnicity, race, or creed. That seems to be the most readily available
way we define community isn’t it? I mean, we refer to the “Black community” or
the “Hispanic community” or the “Evangelical community,” right? Or how about
whenever someone talks about a place like Mountain Brook outside of Birmingham
or Buckhead outside of Atlanta? Folks almost can’t talk about those places
without saying something like, “You know, those are among the wealthiest zip
codes in Southeast,” which is true, but of course, just outside of those small,
wealthy zip codes are people struggling to make ends meet, standing on the side
of the off ramp in some of the poorest zip codes in the Southeast.” Of course,
you can drive around any big city and catch a glimpse of what I’m talking
about: Korean Supermarkets in the middle of a shopping center where none of the
signs are written in English, a strip mall full of restaurants that all
advertise Halal specials. If you want to get a little closer to home, I hear
people talk about West Anniston as if the devil himself had moved into one of
the crumbling houses off Gurnee Avenue. While it may be easy for census
collections, sociological studies, and (if we’re honest) our own sense of
comfort and identity, I don’t think things like socio-economic status, race, or
ethnicity are good measures of what makes a community.
To tell the truth, I
don’t think there’s any good way to make community. On the one hand, you can’t make community. What I mean is, you
can’t just go around collecting folks who live in a certain radius, folks with
the same last name, same color eyes, similar annual incomes or education and
say, “We’re now a community because we’ve got all this stuff in common!” That’s
just not how it works. But the main reason I don’t think there’s any good way
to make community is because every way we may ever devise to make community
really only makes division. In other words, attempting to make community can’t help but make divisions, including some in the
circle, while leaving others out. What’s more, most of us (all of us) have no
choice when it comes to what community or communities in which we are included. So maybe we’re asking
the wrong question. Maybe we shouldn’t ask, “How do we make community?” but
instead we should be asking, “How do we live in this community to which we
belong?” with the understanding that the actual community to which we belong is
humankind. That, as far as I can tell, is what the author of this text before
us today (let’s just say it’s Paul for now) is driving at: the question isn’t
about what we can do to create community; rather, it is about how we, as
Christians, are called to live within the communities of which we are a part.
With
that in mind, how do we live as Christians in this broader community of
humankind? I know many Christians who have their own answers. There are those
who’d like to say that we are the gatekeepers of the community, the moral check
on societies richer excesses. We decide who’s in and who’s out, who’s wrong and
who’s right. We Christians are, by, the very nature of our blessedness, the
ones who get to determine the social direction of our countries and the world.
I don’t know, maybe. Maybe we are the ones who get to stand at the door,
checking folks’ IDs, asking questions, running background checks, giving
theological quizzes disguised as everyday conversation. Maybe we’re the ones
who scan the social media pages of those who may want to try to get in to be
sure we don’t see anything too liberal, too conservative, too laced with
profanity, or too ignorant to make any sense. Maybe, but I sort of doubt it.
After all, who checked my credentials? I don’t honestly recall. Do you?
Maybe
we’re supposed to be less gatekeepers and more like law enforcement. That is to
say, maybe those of us who’ve already made it to this side are the ones who
have to make sure that those who are over here with us are doing all the right
things and putting away all the wrong things. I can’t tell you how many times
I’ve come across someone who reads Scripture that way, those folks who, when
Jesus said, “Forgive seven times seventy times,” are keeping tabs in their
mental notebooks for when that four hundred ninety-ninth time rolls around. You
know these folks, right? They’re the ones who, after you’ve told them your
plans for Sunday lunch, tell you that they never eat out on Sunday because it
causes folks to work on the Sabbath. The folks who see the Bible as a rule
book, an instrument for determining whether or not one is in line or out of
step with God. Don’t get me wrong, the Bible is a rich library of all sort of
literature ranging from poetry, myth, history, and law, but I just can’t
imagine that what we’re called to do is commit it to memory, so we can catch
folks (or even ourselves) in an act of non-compliance.
It
would be easy to see this text that way, I suppose, as a list of dos and
don’ts, a moralistic review of the author’s ideas about living in the community
of faith in the late first century. Those final verse of chapter four read
almost like something borrowed right our of the book of Leviticus (at least in
their matter-of-fact, legal presentation): “So then, putting away falsehood,
let all of us speak the truth…Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go
down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up
stealing…let them labor and work honestly with their own hands…Let no evil talk
come out of your mouths… do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God…Put away from you
all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all
malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as
God in Christ has forgiven you.”
While
those are beautiful words, I cannot help but think of how they might be
weaponized by the legalists out there, how such words may be taken to their
ultimate literal end—not so much so that they may be put into practice, rather
that they may be used as a way of judging the righteousness of others over
against our own. Isn’t that what we do after all? I mean, no matter whether
we’re in a social club, a fraternal organization, or even at our jobs or
schools, there are those instances where we are tempted (and perhaps give into
such temptations) to use the rules against
someone else, to call out someone’s else infraction as greater than
whatever small, insignificant thing we’ve committed. We find ourselves saying
things like, “Sure, I may have told a little lie, but at least I’m not lazy!”
Or maybe we’ll say, “I’m not saying I do or I don’t, but if a man looks twice
at a woman in a certain way, at least he’s not gossiping about his neighbors.”
Or one I’ve heard a time or two goes something like this: “I know we’re all
sinners, but I’m not that kind of
sinner!” (as if there were grades and ranks!).
It’s
what we do. It’s how we naturally find ourselves trying to live in this broad community
of humankind. If we don’t get to make our communities, at least we get to
decide what position we get in them. That’s what we tell ourselves, and I
suppose—I suppose—we could tell ourselves that and always be in the right. We
could tell ourselves that there are laws, there are rules, there are certain
expectations to which one must hold in order to be a successful, functioning,
and welcomed part of this community called humanity. We could tell ourselves
that God has given us these rules, this book, this disposition to common sense
and moral righteousness in order to differentiate between the good guys and the
bad guys. I suppose we have every right to climb into the captain’s chair, into
the judge’s seat, to stand at the gate of existence and decide who’s in and
who’s out, to call attention the sins of others by pointing the void of such
sin in our own lives. I suppose we could take these verses and run with them, telling
others to tell the truth, to only be mad for the right reasons and for not very
long, to actually work and earn a living, to stay away from gossip and vile
talk, to put away all kinds of evil thoughts and talk, and just be nice to each
other—not one of those things is bad! But just like trying to make community inevitably leads to
division, trying to live in any literal, legalistic sense of the law, of
scripture, only leads to judgement and condemnation—not just our judgement and
condemnation of others, but to our very own.
What
then? How do we live in this common community of humankind of which we are
inextricably a part? How do we live with one another if we can’t draw
boundaries, put up signs, issue correctives, or call each other out on our
transgressions? Well, it’s there in the text, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not in
chapter four, but we put the chapter and verse in there way later, right? The
author gives us all these direct instructions about how to talk, how to
interact with one another, about what to say and what not to say, how to feel
and for how long, but then, in chapter
five, verse one and two, he 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.”
“Live
in love.” This isn’t some flower child philosophy of just letting people do as
they please, of just letting people alone so long as they don’t hurt anyone. This
“life of love” isn’t about treating everyone as if you are some sort of
inoculated nanny, forced to like them because that’s your job. No, to “live in
love” is to (as the verse goes on to say) love as Christ loved us, which means
to live a life in complete service to others—without regard for whatever
community of which they claim to be a part, to live a life of service even to
the point of death, to love others so fully and completely that it would cost
us everything.
Friends,
that’s not easy. It’s not easy because people do lie: they lie to us and about
us. It’s not easy because people do let the sun go down on their anger—they let
many suns go down on their anger as they hold on to a grudge so long it festers
into hatred. It’s not easy because some folks steal, some folks are lazy, some
folks speak evil about everyone (but especially about you), and a lot of folks
a bitter, filled with wrath and anger over things they cannot change and the
fear of the inevitable. No, this calling to live in love as Christ loved us is
not easy. To live such a life of service to others—even to the point of
death—is not easy because, if we’re honest, we just cannot help but think that
there are some folks who just aren’t worth dying for…and that’s why it’s
absolutely necessary that those of us who call ourselves followers of
Christ—imitators of God—must strive to do it! Because until we can look into
the eyes of every single person who crosses our path and see Jesus, until we
can see in every stranger a brother or sister, until we realize that all the
communities we create, all the lines we draw, all the fights we fight are
foolish and futile, the world will need those who stand up to say, “I’m willing
to give up my want so someone else can have their need…I’m willing to sacrifice
my well-being so that someone else may have their dignity…I’m willing to die so
that someone else may live!” Until we fully take hold of the truth that we are
all brothers and sisters in this world, until we fully take hold of that truth
that we are all members of one another, we will need to show each other what
that truth looks like as we live in love, the love with which “Christ
loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment