“It’s Not About You” (Ephesians 4:25-5:2)

“It’s Not About You” (Ephesians 4:25-5:2)
Preached by Sam Locke on 8/12/18 at First Presbyterian Church (Connersville, IN)

Audio File

Ephesians 4:25-5:2
25So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. 26Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27and do not make room for the devil. 28Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. 29Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. 30And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. 31Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

1Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

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Being just thirty-six years old, many of you will roll your eyes as I lead off with the phrase, “When I was younger,” but, nevertheless, here we go. When I was younger, or we’ll just say a decade or so ago, I was a lot more insecure about myself than I am today. This manifested itself in many ways, but perhaps most clearly in taking professional criticism. If I got wind of a problem, I’d find myself defensive and angry … how dare someone question the way I’ve thought through an issue, the solution I had come up with or have the audacity to look at a situation differently than I did. I was always ready for the fight. Every question, every criticism was nothing short of an affront to my personal sense of fairness and justice.

About halfway into my career working for the denomination, I started working for a woman who would become my mentor, someone like family to me. In what I understand now was out of her respect for me, she’d often seek my opinion on things not directly related to the work that I was doing and, understanding my natural defensiveness about things, she would lead off the conversation by saying, “Now Sam, put down your guard, this just isn’t about you.” If I started to go back to those natural instincts she wouldn’t hesitate to interrupt abruptly with the simple, yet firm, reminder: “Still not about you.”

When studying Paul, it is helpful to heed my former boss’ wisdom: “This isn’t about you.” Then, as we are pulled into the compelling, beautiful prose associated with the Apostle, imagine that caring but firm voice chiming back in: “nope, still not about you.”

I’m just going to come right out and say it, sometimes we use the Bible, particularly the letters from Paul, to give ourselves some pretty bad advice. Advice that was never intended for us to heed in our own individual contexts. Our lectionary reading this morning, taken from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, gives us one of those gems. It’s okay to be angry, Paul tells us, but don’t act out on that anger and … heaven forbid … don’t let the sun set while still angry. We most often hear this advice in the context of our relationships. You may not have known this piece of advice even had biblical roots, but here we are. It’s okay to be angry at your spouse, the logic goes, but don’t go to bed angry...what a distinction. I suppose this is all well and good if both sides of an argument over a minor problem can actually reach resolution before going to sleep. But I suspect I’m not alone in recognizing the absurdity apparent in such a proposition. I don’t know about you, but I’m not generally in my best conflict-resolution mindset when angry just before bed. Anger is often not rational to begin with then add into the mix that I’m tired and hungry? I smell disaster brewing. I’m either going dig in over something exceedingly dumb or give in all together, perhaps conceding a debate where I might have a very legitimate reason to want a particular outcome. So, if this isn’t great advice, why would Paul set us up like this? Surely this guy who hasn’t even finished Seminary isn’t questioning the wisdom of the Apostle Paul? While it is true that I’ll never be accused of loving Paul too much, I’m also not questioning Paul’s words in our passage today. I am, however, channeling my former boss when I say this morning: Paul’s words in this passage, indeed in all of his letters to the church, aren’t about you. They aren’t about me. They are about US. Paul isn’t writing a letter to me. He isn’t writing a letter to you addressing whatever state of joy or tumult you find yourself in this morning. Paul is writing a letter to the Church as a whole in Ephesus, with a particular purpose in mind. Our job together this morning is to learn about what that purpose was and what we, as the manifestation of the church today, can learn from this ancient wisdom.

I mentioned just a second ago that I’ll never be accused of loving Paul too much. It’s true, I don’t like preaching from the Pauline letters. The hard truth about the Pauline letters is that they have been taken out of context way too often by well meaning Christians to marginalize already oppressed members of society. If you hear new testament scripture being quoted to justify submissive roles for women, to further the exclusion of the LGBTQ community from the church, or to ignore the plight of the poor and enslaved, the quote is probably from Paul, and like our passage today, it is probably being applied out of context. Paul’s theology, when viewed holistically, redeems these concerns, with Paul serving as a constant voice on how to live out our values as an exceptional Christian community. When studying Paul, I think it is always important to ask ourselves three questions. First, why was Paul writing this letter in the first place? Second, what can we learn about Paul’s message based on the format of writing he has chosen? And, finally, what can we reasonably infer about Paul’s message based on his rhetorical style. Let’s take a look at today’s passage through this lens. I know this congregation has more than a few language arts teachers in your midst. Today is your day.

So, first, why did Paul write this letter to the Ephesians in the first place? The quick answer is, he probably didn’t. The vast majority of Biblical scholarship agrees that Paul was likely not the author of the Letter to the Ephesians. Applying today’s values, we would gasp at such a reality with the insight of relatively modern ideas surrounding plagiarism and intellectual property. In antiquity, however, the practice of applying someone else’s name to your work of writing would have been commonplace, even seen as the highest form of compliment. Ephesians is likely a pseudepigraphic work, meaning a work written to honor the namesake, likely by a student or follower. In Paul’s authentic writings, he typically refers to the church in a geographic context, as though they were the only church that existed. Paul’s target’s usually had the authors undivided attention. In Ephesians, the author radically changes their language by referring to the church in a more universal context, much like what we see in the Apostles Creed. One hypothesis is that Ephesians is an attempt to extrapolate Paul’s teaching to specific religious communities like the Corinthians and Romans onto a more universal definition of the Church with Christ as the head. Paul’s message to these communities was largely a message of reconciliation - how different sects of Christians with Jewish and Gentile backgrounds should work together in becoming the best manifestation of the church. Applied to a more mature Church, the focus of the reconciliation moves to the church being reconciled to God and the community around it. This type of reconciliation speaks to the belief that we can only be reconciled to God when our actions as a unified Christian community live up to the ideals of forgiveness modeled by Christ - not expecting one another to live in the absence of sin, but forgiving one another when - not if -  we fall short. This later Pauline writing suggests a church becoming more entrenched in its surroundings, engaging with the outside world in ways earlier iterations of the Church might not have.

Second, what can we learn based on the format of the writing? Regardless of authorship, Ephesians is a letter to a specific group of people, intended to incite a specific response at a specific point in time. Letters aren’t written for us to pick a couple of sentences out as our marching orders. Letters are intended to be read and understood in their entirety. One of my most prized possessions is a set of letters my late grandmother wrote to me nearly everyday while I was at Air Force field training. If you were to just lift out a sentence in one of these letters, you might get the wrong idea about my grandmother. You might surmise that she didn’t like what he preacher was talking about that week or something the neighbor might have done to annoy her, but it misses the entire point of the letters: that she loved her grandson. Paul should be read the same way. What point is being conveyed … is there an overall story we miss when we just pick out a few verses? In the case of the Ephesians, our passage today picks out the application without acknowledging the background….We like to have a laugh when we see a silly rules like, and then someone reminds us, “If it is a rule, someone must have done it.” This is Paul’s style. He likes to indict us on the things we all know we are guilty of, while projecting that anger onto someone else. Members of the church were doing all of the vices Paul mentioned - foolish anger, stealing, talking bad about one another. Paul is telling us all to wise up, without focusing directly on a single individual.

Finally, what can we learn from Paul’s rhetoric. Here is the thing though about Paul and, I suspect, my former boss. Even when it isn’t about me, sometimes it really is. I’m just perhaps not the centerpiece I thought I was. Maybe an example from someone else is being used to convey actions that I should really be mimicking. Paul is a master at this form of writing, you might even say that Paul is the original guilt tripper. What I think Paul might be saying is that I’m important to the conversation but it isn’t all on me. Paul’s early audiences were apocalyptic Christian communities, the audience in Ephesus is likely living with the duality of desiring this new realm of Christ while facing the reality that it isn’t coming as soon as we would have hoped. A reality we struggle with even today. In that sense, how do my actions bring about the new covenant of Christ to the best it can today, not waiting for that magical date in the distance. And how do our collective actions work toward our communal vision for Christ’s new covenant, the world dominated by love and acceptance.

With this as a backdrop, how do we apply this ancient letter to our lives as individuals and our life as the church today.

“Your words may give grace to those that hear.” This is the part of the passage that stood out most to me. How do we, as Christians, learn to be graceful in our anger? How do we learn to forgive one another in the way Christ forgave us? I don’t pretend to have all the answers and, as an individual, I know I fail in that task often. As the Christian community, we also fail too. I think finding a balance between hope and reality lies at the core of today’s passage. Can we keep a foot in both of these worlds? Not letting the sun set on the idea that the realm of God promised to the Corinthians and Romans might somehow be on the horizon, while living within the reality of the Ephesians, striving to create a just and equitable world that Christ could be proud of today.

I think the metaphor of the sun setting on our anger isn’t meant to be a literal and arbitrary separation between two days but rather a separation between a God-filled sense of existence and a world where such grace doesn’t exist. It is our call to not let our anger override our values, it is a call to not give up on the church’s mission of love and reconciliation. Knowing that we won’t always get it right, let’s work together as a community to make our words be instruments of grace to all who hear them. Amen.