“Share the Wealth”

Ephesians 1: 1-15

Will you pray with me….

I suspect that most of us as Christians and reasonable students of the Bible have a scripture passage we like the best and can recite from memory. Sounding more like William F. Buckley than an apostle, Paul may or may not be your favorite writer. Yet, what he says in our scripture from Ephesians, when unpacked a bit, is quite lovely. Some observers say that this language is dense and too challenging a scripture for a summer service. Try not to lose your congregation, advisors say about some scriptures like today’s.

A young boy asked his mother what was the highest numbers she had ever counted to? She thought and said, “I don’t really know. What is the highest number you have counted to?” He answered, “5,676.” “Why did you stop counting,” mom asked? “Well, church was over,” the boy replied.

I‘ll try not to forget that lesson…

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians living in Ephesus, Turkey is, in essence, a beautiful song of hope and praise for God. His intent is to strengthen the church of Jesus Christ, to help the followers be faithful to their discipleship even in the midst of struggle. Paul’s words remind us of who we are and whose we are, leading us back to the sheer joy of living as God’s people. Verse 3 is a reminder of blessings; three times Paul uses the term:  First we bless God, who blessed us in Jesus with every spiritual blessing, just as God chose us in Christ, even before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless before God. In spite of the brilliance of scientific theory, we did not just happen here on earth or in Dennis for that matter. God has adopted us as God’s own children, made us to be God’s own people, and has given us an inheritance in Jesus Christ. That sounds like we are to share in the wealth of God’s endless love and presence. As Paul says, we are adopted by God. We are adopted and absorbed into God’s family. We are fortunate, wealthy followers of Jesus.

Some of our own family members were also adopted into our human families, with the same love of God that Paul describes. Edy Nelson is a new friend of Betsy and me. You may remember me mentioning him at Christmas.  Edy’s family adopted him in Guatemala, in an effort that took over two years. Eddy had been abused as a baby. He could neither walk nor talk due to a damaged spine. His abusers abandoned him to the care of a Catholic orphanage.  Edy and his mom arrived home on Christmas Eve…on the last plane to land on the one open runway at Logan due to snow and weather. His dad, brother, and two sisters were waiting inside.  Eddie is now five, and has made great progress in his new and loving family. He is able to gingerly walk the parallel bars at Children’s Hospital. The Nelsons are deeply thankful for Edy’s warm and welcoming smile that surely reflects their love for him. Steve calls Edy, “Son” a lot. He feels Edy is truly his and theirs. And so it is for us, as we are chosen by God to live in Jesus. We are washed in the waters of baptism, making us new again. Edy has been born again, if you will. His new family says, “Had Edy not been abused and nearly died, left in an orphanage, we would not be together as a family.” A strange and ironic truth. In a similar way, had Jesus not died for us, we might not be together as a family, living in the inheritance of His Love. But we were chosen, just like Eddie. We were chosen, blessed, and now share the wealth of Jesus’ inheritance.

The truth is that not all of us always feel like we are blessed and adopted. Not all of us, all the time, feel God’s Presence in our lives, let alone realize our share of the inheritance in Jesus. Paul’s words are blessed, chosen, adoption, and grace. Some of us may see words like fated, guilty, rejected, and failure. Sometimes our hearts are not so able to be open to the glorious praise words of Paul and others. As the metaphors of “adoption and inheritance” invite us to see how our lives have been woven into God’s presence, we can see how we all are alike as children of God.  As adopted family members, it’s the responsibility of each of us to care for one another.

Mother Theresa, the Saint of Calcutta, offered her hands and love to people the world would otherwise choose to ignore. Mother Theresa believed it is a sin to just administrate the poor; we are to love them as Jesus loves us. She called her sisters and brothers, and us, to see the face of Jesus in all we love and serve. Just this week we had an informational meeting with the Director of the Cape Cod Human Rights Commission here in the sanctuary. We talked about how to see, embrace, and support immigrants as the newest members of our community family here on the Cape.  I have to admit, like many in the meeting, I came away feeling the full weight of the challenge.  It’s not clear what we’ll do to be involved and be of support.  But it is clear that this is a journey for all of us to share.  Paul’s letter offers a counterpoint to the tendency of the world to assign minimal value to many people.  As we all are adopted in God’s Grace and we share in the inheritance of Jesus Christ, we are also called to see what it is we can do to help someone settle into life here in the US and the Cape. Jesus, through the blessing of God, called us to bless another with our inheritance.

Just this week, last Sunday to be specific, our church was robbed of about $1500 at last estimate. All of us feel angry to some degree, and violated to be sure. While we’ll recover some amount through our insurance coverage, we still feel different. But the truth is, the money wasn’t really ours anyway. It belongs to Jesus Christ, the head of our church, the administrator of our inheritance. While we may never get the money back, we will carry on without it. Jesus calls us to manage under different and difficult circumstances sometimes. As a beautiful act of faith and love, a lovely woman came by the church and wrote a check to make a dent and a difference in the loss. I guess she felt inclined to share a part of her inheritance to help heal the church. She came to share the wealth, for sure.

Let’s go back a minute to 2^nd Samuel that Andrew read for us.  Jewish tradition said that Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, and the tablets were protected within the Ark of God.  Remember that the Jewish people spent much of their lives over the course of centuries wondering when their adoption would be confirmed and their inheritance received through their covenants with God.  So no wonder David is dancing through the streets with joy and celebration at being so close to the Ark and the fulfillment of his peoples’ covenant with God.  Paul’s letter is the fulfillment in his time of the covenant with God through the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  In this somewhat modern time of Paul’s, the Ark of God is received again.  God is still in contact with God’s people, and He still is today, through Jesus Christ. 

The minute we become Christians, we have the intimacy of relationship. We get rich quick, whether we accept it or not, because everything that Jesus Christ has accomplished is transferred to us. We become beautiful and spiritually rich in him.

In other versions of this text, Paul uses patriarchal language that, respectfully, puts some people off.  They argue, "Wouldn't it be better to say that we become sons and daughters of God, rather than just sons?" It would, but to focus on that alone is to miss the deeper and more spiritual point. Tim Keller, author of “The Reason for God” and pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan, tells a story that sheds light on Paul’s real meaning, that I’ll paraphrase here.

Some time ago, says Keller, a woman helped me understand this issue of gender insensitive language and its relationship to God. She was raised in a non-Western family from a very traditional culture. There was only one son in the family, and it was understood in her culture that he would receive most of the family's provisions and honor. In essence, they said to her, "He's the son; you're just a girl." That's just the way it was.

One day she was studying a passage on adoption in Paul's writings. She suddenly realized that the apostle was making a revolutionary claim. Paul lived in a traditional culture just like she did, in a place where daughters were second-class citizens. But when Paul said—out of his own traditional culture—that we are all sons in Christ, he was using the language of his particular time in history with the label “sons.”  What he was really saying was that there are no second-class citizens in God's family.  Imagine what a revelation this was to this young woman.  It was to me, too.  When you give your life to Christ and become a Christian, you receive all the benefits a son enjoys in a traditional culture, says Keller. He continues, “As a white male, I've never been excluded like that. As a result, I didn't see the sweetness of this welcome. I didn't recognize all the beauty of God's subversive and revolutionary promise that raises us to the highest honor by adopting us as his sons and daughters.”

So our adoption means we are loved like Christ is loved. We are honored like he is honored—every one of us—no matter label the world assigns us. Our circumstances cannot hinder or threaten that promise. In fact, our bad circumstances may help us understand and even claim the deepest beauty of that promise. The more we live out who we are in Christ, the more we become like him in reality. Paul is not promising us better life circumstances; he is promising us a far better life.  He's promising us a life of greatness. He is promising us a life of joy. He's promising us a life of humility. He's promising us a life of nobility. He's promising us a life that lasts forever.

So let’s review the terms of our inheritance as adopted sons and daughters of God. We are blessed. We are chosen. We are adopted into the love of God’s family. Will the family of God say….AMEN?