This morning we continue our series on community in the epistle to the Ephesians. Our society is fastly changing, and especially the way we communicate and relate to each other. This has a profound effect on the way we think of community and what it means to be in relationship. A friend of mine sent me this email this week. It said …

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2005, WHEN....

1. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.
2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
3. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.
4. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.
5. You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.
7. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

We’ve never had so many ways to communicate, but yet never have so many people been so lonely. Everywhere I turn, I hear people longing for community. Maybe there was a day when people felt confined to their villages and never left. But not anymore. Now we are free, and even encouraged, to leave home and chase our dreams. Our children are spread around the country and across the globe. Ten years ago, no one looked for friends on the internet. Now it is often the first place people turn to find new friends, or even a relationship. Our friends and mates used to be the people we knew – the people we met in the business of just going about life.

Some of that is a good thing, but often it has meant trying to find a social community of convenience for an otherwise independent solitary life. For quite some time now, we have lived in a society that teaches us to define the self or individual apart from community. “Be yourself,” “express yourself,” “get in touch with yourself,” “follow your star”. We have spent these years trying to figure out who we are, and what we want, and having finally reached the bottom of ourselves, we have discovered that we still are lonely and unfulfilled. And so we bring our lonely, needy selves to discussion groups, internet chat rooms, the gym, and even to church to see if we can find what is missing.

So there is a lot of talk about community these days. New homes are being built with front porches again. Employees are turning down promotions that would require them to move. People are abandoning long lonely commutes from the suburbs, and we’ve seen in many cities a return to city neighborhoods. TV shows keep coming at us that depict lasting and fun friendships. Starbucks has made a lot of money – not selling coffee – but selling a place for conversation. And some people are even finding themselves back in church in search of community.

In the letter to a group later manuscripts called the Ephesians (earlier manuscripts don’t actually name the addressees), Paul or his disciple after him wrote about the kind of community we can find in church, or the community this writer calls “the Body of Christ.” What he describes in this letter is not the communities of the 1950’s or 1960’s, nor is it a contemporary support group where we get together and talk about the stresses of our isolated solitary lives. We think of community as a place where we can find some friends, or where everybody knows your name. What Paul has in mind is something that may include those things – but it is far more sacred and cosmic than that.

Paul begins his discussion about the church, or the community of faith, by claiming that the real reason we long for it is not because we are looking for friends but because we are made in the image of a communal God. We all long for God, and we may have so distorted His image in our lives that we do not recognize it, but there is a created imprint on every one of our hearts that craves God. Since God is communal – He exists as three Persons – and when we crave God, we also crave community as a way of finding Him.

God always has existed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in a perfect triune community. This Holy Family isn’t a broken, dysfunctional or needy family. But out of perfect love, they extended their family through adoption. And that is where you and I come in, and that is the family – the communion – we long for all of our lives.

These verses are difficult to unpack because every phrase is important, and it seems as though significant theological weight hangs on every word. In Greek, verses 3-14 are one sentence. Paul seems to be saying that you were chosen to be adopted by the Holy Spirit into The Son’s relationship with The Father – to be swept up into their Trinitarian community. There you were given every spiritual blessing of heaven. Every one? How many of you feel that you’ve received every spiritual blessing? That is exactly what you have been given. God the Father “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 1:3) That does not mean you will get everything you want. It means that you were chosen to be brought into the family of God, and you were made an heir of God – joint heirs with Jesus Christ. In other words, what Jesus has by rights, you have received by adoption.

Paul says in verse 4, “He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him in love. He destined us for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ.” Do you remember how good it felt when you were chosen for something? Remember when you were picked for the team as a child, or selected for a dance performance, or when you were admitted to college? Or when you were chosen for the job you really wanted. Remember when someone with starry eyes said, “I love you and want to marry you.” Paul is telling us that you were chosen by God. And like a parent who picks a child for adoption, you were not chosen because you were just so loveable, or because of your promise for future success, or because you were so good for God. You are chosen because The Son was dying to love you to bring you into the community of the Holy Family.

Over the centuries, many theologians including Augustine and Calvin have reflected on the meaning of this predestination. Theologians have sharply disagreed, and whole churches and movements were born out of this disagreement. We do not have time to discuss those nuances this morning, but I think this passage teaches one essential truth, which is a truth taught from Matthew to Revelation: The Son of God was predestined to come to earth to find us. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, to die for our sins, and to bring us home to the waiting Father. As the theologian Terence Fretheim so ably said, “The cross was in the heart of God long before the cross was planted at Calvary.”

How are we adopted into this Triune community? That brings us to verse seven, “In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us.” In the process of trying to find ourselves as individuals, we have made a lot of mistakes, committed a lot of sin, hurt a lot of people, and hurt the image of God imprinted on our souls. So I think that we are searching for more than a social experience when we search for a community. We are searching for absolution. Grace. We have tried managing our sins, denying our sins, protesting our innocence. We have tried running from our sins into something else. But none of that has worked too well, has it? The only thing that will work is to be forgiven of our sins. We do not need to find ourselves. We need to know that God has found us.

There are some things an individual can do alone with God – pray, read the Bible, or choose to follow Christ. But when it comes down to hearing that we are forgiven for our sins, we need a priest. That is the role of the church, God’s community of priests. We do not give absolution, but we announce that Jesus Christ has given it. And we announce this to each other. We even forgive each other of wrongs done to us, and to our community. And it is that word of grace that makes us free. That is why you need a community to know of your adoption, a church where you can grow into your forgiveness. You need a community where you can bring all that you are – including your sin – and know that you can be truthful yet forgiven.

In the words of the early church father Athanasius, “The church is the place where access to The Father through The Son is grounded in space and time.” Grace has been lavished upon you – and it is learned and received and lived in the church. But, you say, “The church seems so splintered, so human, so hypocritical, so conflicted. It certainly doesn’t feel like heaven to me.” Well, you’re right. But how else would you learn that you are forgiven if you were never part of a community where you had to ask for it, or give it, or struggle for it? Out of the rough and tumble of our lives together, we experience the forgiveness of each other, and then we come to know something more of the forgiveness of God.

To be part of the church is not primarily to find a social experience. There are other places where you may find people you like better, or who you know better, or even people with whom you can share better. But to be part of the church is to hear the wonderful news that, in Christ, you are forgiven and brought home. You won’t hear that word alone. You must hear it from others – others that we call “church”.

So the church proclaims you are chosen. And it proclaims you are forgiven. Then in verses 9 and 10, Paul says that in this sacred community we hear something so astonishing, so surprising, and so groundbreaking, that Hebrews said even the angels stop and listen. We hear “the mystery of God’s will … a plan … to gather up all things in Him in the fullness of time.” (Ephesians 1:10)

We lose a lot of things in life, and sometimes it feels like we are losing everything. The hardest thing to lose is not your job, your health, or your loved one. The hardest thing to lose is all the pieces of your heart that are lost from the disappointment, from the guilt, from the suffering. The mystery of God’s will, the plan of God’s Spirit, is to gather up everything in your life that has been lost – the suffering, the sin, the death – and to restore them. And even more breathtaking than this – God is doing the same thing with everything that has been damaged and lost in the whole universe. God is putting it all back together again.

So the church proclaims that what has been lost is found, what was broken is being repaired, what was estranged is now welcomed. Broken families can be restored. Where there has been injustice and oppression, it’s going to give way to justice and freedom. Violence can give way to peace. Broken hearts can be healed. The imprint of God on your life can be restored. Even innocence can be yours again. Every spiritual blessing of heaven can be restored to you in Christ – and it’s all happening in the church.

We don’t know a lot about the church or churches which Paul addresses with this letter. But if we can infer anything from this letter, it seems that they are having an identity crisis. Perhaps they doubt that the church is really where God is doing His work. Perhaps they have been seeing only the human side of the church, and it’s looking pretty ugly from where they sit. Perhaps they feel powerless and weak in the world. Or maybe unforgiven. Paul says to this church, “You are chosen. You are adopted. You are forgiven. You are where it is all coming together.” So if you want to find yourselves, find yourselves here – amidst a community of forgiveness and healing. This is where you will find who you are.

It really is about coming home – at home, we remember that it is never about us. It isn’t about what you have done or what you have not done. Paul could not be clearer in this text that all of the truly important things happening in your life, and in the cosmos, are being done by Jesus Christ. In Him, God the Father is choosing to adopt you. In Him, we continue to have our sins forgiven. In Him and by Him, The Spirit is gathering all of life into one Holy Family. Your role, and my role, is to receive this community which participates in the God Life – the community that Paul calls the Body of Christ.


» Back to top