Growing Up – A sermon based on Ephesians
4. 1-6 (CEV). Preached at Valley United Presbyterian Church, Waverly, New York
on Sunday, August 4, 2024
In his book, Practice Resurrection, the
late Eugene Peterson wrote of growing up while reflecting on maturity, which
is one of the outcomes the Ephesian letter.
He noted that he was turned onto the writings of Baron Friedrich von
Hugel by one of the trusted mentors he had met along the way, a Quaker named
Douglas Steere.
Peterson recalled that “Much of von Hugel’s deeply and extensively pondered experience as a Christian layperson, rooted and grounded in the life of Christ and at the same time in the earthly and domestic realities of wife, three daughters, and a dog (named) Puck, comes to us via letters written in his own hand to an astonishing number of correspondents. A constant note in his counsel, insistent-ly sounded, is that the road to a life of maturity is not a ‘yellow brick road,’ but involves considerable difficulties that cannot be bulldozed away.”[i] Peterson then added a quote from a letter von Hugel wrote to his niece:
“When at eighteen, I made up my mind to go into moral and religious training, the great soul and mind who took me in hand—a noble Dominican—warned me—‘You want to grow in virtue, to serve God, to love Christ? Well, you will grow in and attain these things if you make them a slow and sure, an utterly real, mountain step-plod and ascent, willing to have to camp for weeks or months in spiritual desolation, darkness and emptiness at different stages in your march and growth. All de-mand for constant light…all attempts at eliminating or minimizing the cross and trial, is so much folly and puerile trifling.”[ii]
Let me pause there to share my
reaction to that. First, I heard the echo of John Lacy, who was a seminary
student assigned to teach our Senior High Sunday School Class and guide our
Youth Group at my home church. Speaking
to us of one’s life as a follower of Christ, he said time and again: “No one
ever said it would be easy.”
Several years later, I was working for John as summer
Youth Director at the church he pastored along the Oregon coast. Each time I complained about a rough time I
was having with the senior high fellowship, or the unreliability of “Betsy,”
the 1955 church bus used for our elementary aged Adventurer’s Club, guess what
he said to me?.
“No one ever said it would be easy.” It wasn’t.
It isn’t. It probably never will be!
Yet, along the way there are those moments when something happens to make you smile. Back to that quote from Baron von Hugel. Realizing that it was written somewhere between 1896 and 1924 accounts for some of the archaic vocabulary. At first pass the last phrase, “puerile trifling,” had me wondering. Then my three years of Junior High Latin kicked in. Puerile comes from the root word “puer,” which means, “boy.” “Puerile” means boyish or more inclusively, “childish.” So the old Baron was saying that expecting life to be all sweetness and light is nothing more than a childish fantasy. The smile came to my face as I heard the echo of that long dead Latin teacher, who told us studying a dead language would one day help to figure out what a strange word meant! Old vocabulary contributing to a new insight! Nice!
Woven through these last few
paragraphs are threads illustrating how lessons of life grown from experience
are passed along. Peterson spoke of a mentor, who turned him on to the writings
of someone wise, who in sharing a tip with a relative, recalled a powerful
lesson learned from someone who had guided him.
To that, I added memories of bits of wisdom that have helped me make
sense of life now and then.
The author of the Letter to the
Ephesians employed this same, matter-of-fact, let-me-share-what’s-worked-for-me
method when training up those children of God in the way they should go. The old master biblical interpreter William
Barclay prepares us to hear what is coming:
“With this chapter the second part of the letter begins. In the first three chapters Paul has dealt with the great and eternal truths of the Christian faith, and with the function of the Church in the plan and design of God. Now he begins to sketch what each member of the Church must be if the Church is to carry out her part in the plan and the purpose of God.”[iii]
I found it fascinating to read what
Barclay wrote about the importance of Paul’s words. What you are about to hear was probably
written in the year I was born, yet despite some non-inclusive language, it is
spot on in describing the world in which we live today, and God’s plan and
purpose. To lift up the central thought of the Ephesian letter, Barclay said:
“In this world there is nothing but discord, disharmony and disunity. Nation is divided against nation, and man against man; class is divided against class, and in man himself there goes on an inner and unceasing battle between the higher and lower part of his nature. It is God’s design and God’s purpose that all this disunity and disharmony should be resolved in Christ, that all men and nations should become one in Christ, that in Christ the differences should be abolished and the separating walls torn down. It is God’s aim that in Christ there should enter into the world… ‘a sacred oneness.’ and what we would call in modern language ‘a new togetherness.’ Jesus Christ supplies the one center around whom and in whom all men can be gathered into one.”[iv]
It is in pursuit of that ‘sacred oneness’ and ‘new togetherness’ that the author of Ephesians urges those who hear his words to grow up into Christ. The urgency of his message emerges in the words used to translate these opening words of Ephesians 4. The “prisoner for the Lord put it this way in today’s reading: “…I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God.”[v]
Other translations use words like “beg or “urge.” instead of “encourage.” Commentator Pheme Perkins explains: “We all know the difference between begging or pleading with someone whom we doubt will follow our advice, and encouraging someone to continue an effort already begun. Let us assume,” suggests Perkins, “that the author is encouraging Christians in a way of life already well begun.”[vi]
Such encouragement would be familiar
to the people to whom the author was writing. They were non-Jewish converts to
the way of Christ, living in Asia Minor. Perkins explains: “Ancient moralists
held that people should be reminded of what they know so that they will act
accord-ingly.”[vii]
The Contemporary English Version of
the Bible describes the life to which we have been called with words like
humility, gentleness and patience. It uses images of building up, growing up
and maturity, all in order to equip one another for the work we have been given
to do. Listen now as I read the passage
again, this time using Eugene Peterson’s translation from The Message:
In light of all this, here’s what I
want you to do. While I am locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want
you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to
travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want
anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do
this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring
yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences
and quick at mending fences.
You were all called to travel on the
same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly.
You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who
rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think is to be permeated
with Oneness.
But that doesn’t mean you should all
look and speak and act the same. Out of the generosity of Christ, each of us is
given his own gift. The text for this
is,
He climbed the high
mountain,
He captured the enemy
and seized the booty,
He handed it all out in
gifts to the people.
It’s true, is it not, that the One who climbed up also climbed down, down to the valley of earth? And the One who climbed down is the One who climbed back up, up to the highest heaven. He handed out gifts above and below, filled heaven with his gifts, filled earth with his gifts. He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christians in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.
No prolonged infancies among us, please. We’ll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for imposters. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.”[viii]
To grow up “healthy in God;” to grow
up “robust in love;” is what we are called to do and be. That the world needs such love expressed in
healthy ways is an understatement. That
the world, and particularly our nation now, needs to regain the kind of health
that builds up instead of tearing down is obvious. With humility and gentleness, we are called
to build up.
“No one ever said it would be easy!” Still, though we hear mostly about the
divisions and the disharmony, there are stories that provide us the
encouragement, to live a life worthy of our calling. Pheme Perkins tells one of
them. She teaches at Boston
College. She writes:
“God has distributed gifts to all members of the church so that it can be built up. At our college, the most popular spring break activity is not getting drunk on Florida beaches. It is the volunteer option, spending the week in some poor area of the East Coast, from Maine to North Carolina, building housing, cleaning out old houses, painting houses for the poor, fixing parks for children, and the like. Even students faced with twenty-hour bus rides, rusty cold showers, rats, bats, and garbage come back encouraging their friends to sign up. What did they discover that made such an impact? A spirit binding people together in a common effort to build up the human and church community. Those who have never used tools before discover some gifts they never knew they had.”[ix]
Growing up in Christ is
all it is cracked up to be.
Growing up in Christ is not easy.
Growing up in Christ is worth it.
Growing up in Christ is what we are urged to do!
Growing up in Christ is made possible by the gifts of
God, freely given, which we are about to experience once more as we come to the
Table of the Lord where we are nourished and strengthened to be “healthy in
God” and “robust in love.”
[i]
Eugene H. Peterson, Practice Resurrection
– a conversation on growing up in Christ, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
2010), p. 182-4
[ii]
Friedrich von Hugel, Selected Letters
1896-1924, ed. Bernard Holland (New York: E.P. Putnam & Co., 1933), p. 266
[iii]
William Barclay, The Letters to the
Galatians and Ephesians – The Daily Study Bible, (Philadelphia, The Westmin-ster Press, 1958), p. 157
[iv]
ibid.
[v]
Ephesians 4. 1b
[vi]
Pheme Perkins, The New Interpreter’s
Bible, Vol. XI, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), p. 424
[vii]
ibid., p. 419
[viii]
Ephesians 4. 1-16, The Message, p.
2130-2131
[ix]
ibid., Perkins, p. 424-425
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