UCC Church of Charlotte

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Sermon for March 22, 2009 - Fourth Sunday in Lent
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Sunday, March 22, 2009 8:17:43 AM
From:
Phil Hobson   
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To:
Phil Hobson 


You Were Dead
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
Some lines are so familiar that I am hesitant to preach on them, for fear that the backlog of assumptions and Sunday School lessons drown out any new light that might spring from the word.  Today’s is such a passage.  Last week in our discussion of music, we were reminded that God so loved the world that God did not send a committee.  God so loved the world that he sent his Son, and in that mysterious grace, created a new community, a new way of living in relationship with one another and with God.
    
Being in this new community, called by the Holy Spirit, guided by the Gospel, living in covenant with God and one another, is a difficult thing.  For as much as the yoke is easy and the burden is light, the gate is narrow and the way is hard.  It is far too easy to step off the path one way or the other, to stumble or to falter.  
    
It is far too easy to become overly triumphal and seek to lord our faith over others.  
    
It is so easily tempting to think of outreach and missions as reaching down to those who are beneath and below us.
    
We can slip a pace off the path to the left and forget prayer and praise and Sabbath-keeping for the sake of service, or slip a pace off to the right and forget service and compassion for the sake of our images of righteousness.
    
We can stumble over speaking the truth, or we can falter and forget that what truth we understand must be spoken in love.
    
If being the church were easier, Paul would not have written so many letters, encouraging and cajoling and challenging and rebuking the first churches. 
    
You were dead, Paul writes.  You were dead because you were living in the ways of the world, which are the ways of death.  Yet, while you were dead, God did something.  And you were brought to life.
    
This seems a strange way of talking.  Ed Middleton reminded his congregation as they embarked on reading all the way through the Bible that they needed to be aware they were entering a world that at first (or second or third) reading may not resemble our own.  This is true when we speak of death and life in the Bible.  We think of life and death in physical, biological terms, informed by medical science.  Life is respiration and blood flow and brain function, that is, the physical functions of an individual.  When these things stop, it is death.  As the EMT’s say, blood goes round and round, air goes in and out; any changes in this pattern is a problem.  But this view of the life and death is not shared by the language of the Bible.
    
The psalmist speaks of death in poetic terms, of being redeemed from death, of not going down to the pit, exile as death.
    
Walter Brueggemann reminds us that in the Bible, life is not medical and individual.  Life is covenantal and communal.  Life is living as a part of a covenantal community, being related to others in covenant.  Death is about isolation, being cut off from that community.
    
We live in an individualistic society.  We have seen the powerful ways that conformity and getting caught up in the group can mess life up.  But have we not made an idol of rugged individualism?  Is our quest for being on our own a representation of true humanity at its best or simply another way to try and duck the difficulties of being a community?
    
(And I have to confess I keep getting it wrong.  There are people who need strokes, who need connection early and often.  And there are people who just want to be left alone, who desire to be in community on their own terms.  And one of my failings in ministry is I seem to consistently guess wrong.  So I bug the ones who want to be left alone, and I give space to those who need more connection.  And both have come back to bite me in the backside.
    
If anyone has the right answer, please let me know.  It is almost as if I need to guess which it is and then do the opposite.  But it does not work to second guess oneself either.)

And maybe we hear these words and we remember those times when we were dead - when grief ruled the day, or when we lived as if there were no community worthy of us, or no community we were worthy of.  Some of us could speak of our dead years, when we lived in the shadow of the unforgivable or in the gloom of shame.  Some of us may even today feel that life is something for someday in the future, and right now we are just settling for what we have settled for.
    
And some of us may be hearing these words like the disciples of the parable of the king.  Lord, when did we see you naked and not clothe you, or in prison, or thirsty, or hungry?  We don’t recognize such a time.  What do you mean I was dead?
    
But was there not a time when life seemed tossed and scattered, when meaning and purpose were far from us, when we felt less than a beloved and blessed child of God, gifted by the Spirit for the building up of our neighbor?
    
The message of both the Gospel of John and the letter of Paul is simple.  God has worked out our salvation, our health, our place in the new community, by the grace of God through Jesus.  We simply need to claim it.
    
It is not like being in or out of an HMO network.  It isn’t a membership card that we can show at the door.  

Being in the community of life, it will be seen in our living.  What is inside is most important.  And it will be seen in how we relate to one another, how we pray and praise, how we live the love we share.  Not that we are any more likely to get it right than the disciples of the early church.  And not that we should stop for lack of perfection.  For that is a part of this new life as well - forgiveness.
    
Thanks be to God.
Amen.