Rev. Jennifer Whipple
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
6th Sunday After Pentecost
July 12, 2009
"Adopted"
Ephesians 1:3-14
Prayer:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our minds and hearts
gathered here this day be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, our Strength and
our Redeemer. Amen.
When
I first sat down to read the scripture lessons in the lectionary for this week
and thought about preaching on the one from the letter to the Ephesians I
thought, “Oh boy! What am I going
to say about this?” I thought it
was better option to preach on perhaps, than the recounting of the beheading of
John the Baptist, but as I spent time with it I was stuck – having a little
bit of preacher’s block, I guess. Then
a funny thing happened, I read the story of “the Sneetches” with Brayden
during our 4 B’s nightly ritual – Bath, Bottle, Books, and Bed– and then
started thinking back to some of the experiences I have had in the past few
weeks – many of them interactions with our own church members and friends.
It is amazing what happens when you read Dr. Seuss with the words of
scripture running through the back of your mind.
So I am hoping that by sharing some of these experiences we can do some
unpacking of the letter this morning.
This weekend I had the privilege of marrying two folks who have been
attending worship here since last fall – and, lo and behold, they chose a
scripture passage to be shared during their service from the Letter to the
Ephesians. At the end of the
ceremony one of the bride’s good friends who lives in Virginia looked at me
and said, “Hey, can you do me a favor? Just
share a few words of encouragement with her each week if you would.”
At first my response was, “Okay.”
Then, as my brain kicked in a bit, I thought out loud, “I think
that’s our job each week.” The
joy and challenge of preaching on Sundays is that we do get to share the good
news with you, to share words of encouragement.
And we are called, at the same time often, to share words of challenge
and commission as well.
So, my friends, let me tell you, the first chapter of the Letter to the
Ephesians is full of encouragement. In
it we are promised that we are all adopted children of God – God’s Beloved
– through our faith in Jesus Christ. The adoptive parents that I have known in
my life, some of whom are in our own congregation, are a testament to the kind
of love God has for us. They have
gone into adoption processes not necessarily knowing what would happen on the
other end, but with an immense love for life and the willingness to face
whatever would come their way. We
can imagine that is how God sees us perhaps.
It says in one translation of Ephesians, “Long before he laid down
earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his
love, to be made whole and holy by his love.”
God had and has an immense love for us and a willingness to go with us
wherever life might take us. If that
is not a word of encouragement then I am not certain I can offer you much
better! We are invited into this loving relationship with God.
We are loved despite the wrong decisions we have made or the imperfect
things we have done. One of the
quotes read at the wedding was, “Love isn’t finding a perfect person.
It’s seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
I can see that as how God sees us, he sees us as his wonderful, gifted,
and beloved children – despite the imperfections, and he challenges us to
strive toward perfection in our own lives as individuals and in community.
There is still debate to this day as to who officially wrote this letter
to the churches at Ephesus. Some say
it was Paul, writing as his days were numbered from a prison cell in Rome.
Others think it might have been a follower of Paul’s who wanted to
preserve Paul’s teachings about Christ and to share Paul’s knowledge with
the churches in Asia Minor. Whoever
the official author was one thing is certain, he wanted anyone who read this
letter to realize how blessed they were to be members of the family of God in
Jesus Christ. In the past month or
so I have had the opportunity to speak with some of our newer members and
friends in all different circumstances – one a young adult during a service
project in Hartford, one a woman in her 90s who I was able to bring a prayer
shawl while she heals thanks to the folks who are participating in our prayer
shawl ministry here, and the others the couple I married yesterday.
All of them said in one way or another how blessed they are to have found
this community – how amazing it is to be part of something larger than they
are, and among people with whom they are able to share their faith and feel
supported. They have spoken to me
about how finding a community of believers has changed their lives, giving them
the ability to share their faith with others, making them hungry for more, and
inspiring them not to miss an opportunity to gather together or to grow in their
relationship with God.
The letter to
the Ephesians celebrates the life of the church, the unique community
established by God through the work of Jesus Christ.
It stresses the unity of the church despite the diversity among
believers, love as the imitation of God, and separation from impurity.
The letter was written to a community of both Jews and Gentiles who, for
no other reason, would have come together besides their belief in the message of
Jesus Christ. The focus on the
community emphasizes that the church’s potential to serve as a dwelling place
for God relies on our ability to come together despite our differences, to come
together in our diversity – much like the Sneetches came to realize in the
end, and to model God’s plan of reconciliation, good stewardship of all of the
gifts we have been blessed with, joy in our faith, service to the world, and
love for God and our neighbors – in our faith community, our homes, and out in
the world.
I had the opportunity to see God’s plan of gathering all people
together this past week as we gathered for a young adult work project with
Family & Children’s Aid in Danbury. We
gathered an interestingly diverse small group of folks for the project – the
head of development for the organization, our associate conference minister for
youth and young adult ministries, one of our newer members, Thomas and Bassma
– our refugee friends, and myself. Together
we worked to serve abused and neglected children living with Family and
Children’s Aid in Danbury by sorting through donations and helping to make
their home a bit more hospitable and able to meet their needs.
It was an opportunity to gather together in our diversity, to give back,
and share God’s love with those who most need it – those little ones who are
lost and abandoned.
Next to the message about the ways we are blessed to be members of
God’s family and called to share our blessing through love of and service to
others in Ephesians, is the importance of our reconciliation to God and one
another through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for us.
A member of an Associate Pastor Colleague group I used to belong to would
come in to the group each month and mention the issues that she had with her
Senior Pastor. She said that the
most important thing for her to do was to remember that reconciliation through
Jesus Christ and to be sure that she was reconciled to her colleague by the time
they came together at the Communion Table. Whether
it was through conversation together or prayer together that was necessary for
their relationship as sisters in Christ and their ministry together.
Our reconciliation is the center of who Christ was – it was why he went
to the cross, so that differences and sins could be reconciled and so we could
receive the amazing gift of God’s love.
In the introduction to the book of Ephesians in the translation called The
Message, the analogy is made between our need for reconciliation and broken
bones. Eugene Peterson writes,
“What we know about God and what we do for God have a way of getting broken
apart in our lives. The moment the
[relationship between] belief and behavior is damaged in any way, we are
incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created…Once our
attention is called to it, we notice these fractures all over the place.
There is hardly a bone in our bodies that has escaped injury, hardly a
relationship in city or job, school or church, family or country that isn’t
out of joint or limping in pain. There
is much work to be done.” In the
midst of this Jesus is working to do the difficult repair work and calling us
urgently to be a part of it all. With
war raging, natural resources being depleted at an astounding rate,
discrimination everywhere we turn, we need to realize the interconnection that
we have with God’s world and everything in it.
Everything we do either contributes – or is a hindrance – to what
God’s plan is – “a long range plan in which everything would be brought
together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on
planet earth” including us.
So the first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians is pretty chock full
of words for our lives even today. We
find encouragement on our own individual journeys as God’s adopted children
and on our journey in community as a closely tied family of faith.
We hear once again the joy of the many blessings God has afforded us and
are reminded, as well, of the reconciliation we find in Christ.
In the verses that follow our scripture for today the author writes about
a prayer for the people reading this, which would include us, that God would
make all people intelligent and discerning in our relationships with God – in
order to see clearly exactly what it is that we are called to do.
We are called, brothers and sisters in Christ, to be a positive part of
God’s plan – to make the choices to fight those things that fracture our
relationships and world. Often it is
not an easy fight, but we are blessed to know that through God’s amazing grace
Christ gives us endless energy and boundless strength to accomplish the tasks
ahead. May we open our eyes, ears,
and hearts to the opportunities to do just that.
Amen.
