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Foundry United Rev. |
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Out of the Great Love Sunday, October 16,
2005 |
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Ephesians 2: 1-7
John 3: 11-17
Rev. |
I have
a lot of affection for the Cookie Monster. He is a loveable guy with googley
eyes and blue fur. But he appears to have a cookie problem. I was searching
on the Internet this week for information about the Cookie Monster because I
was thinking about him when I discovered that the Cookie Monster is now being
used to promote the eating of healthy fruits and vegetables. Someone
walked past my office today while I was watching a cartoon on the Internet with
the Cookie Monster and Grover at Grover’s fruit stand. After they walked
past, they whispered to someone else in the outer office: “Is the pastor
watching Cookie Monster and Grover cartoons?” Yes. But
even in the cartoons, the Cookie Monster only eats the fruits and vegetables
in the cartoons because he knows that after he eats his fruits and
vegetables, there will be a cookie. The Cookie Monster is a loveable guy. But,
he’s got a cookie problem. I empathize with the Cookie Monster. One of
the things I am doing this fall is trying to pay attention in my own personal
study life and in my preaching to the book of Ephesians. It is a small book
in the New Testament, only six chapters, but it is thick and dense, full of
material. The
book of Ephesians was most likely written after the death of the Apostle
Paul. It attempts to summarize the teachings of the Apostle Paul, using his
own voice, and then to move beyond the Apostle Paul’s teaching, because the
Apostle Paul’s theology was no longer adequate for the Church fully at this
point in history. For one thing, the Apostle Paul had assumed that Jesus
Christ would be returning for a second time quickly. The Apostle Paul’s teaching
and theology, valuable as they are, were written with a sort of stop-gap mentality
of how do we live in this brief in-between time between Jesus’ ascension into
heaven and Jesus’ return to establish the By the
time the book of Ephesians was written, it was clear that the time between
Jesus’ ascension and return was not going to be so brief. It was not going to
be just one generation as so many people had supposed. The church was
beginning to realize that it had to start figuring out how to be the church
for the long haul, not just how to hold on until Jesus came again. The church
had to start figuring out how to live in the world as Christians. Day by day,
the church was beginning to realize that it had to take a new look at the
meaning and the significance of Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ was doing
in people’s lives and in the world. The
book of Ephesians is the beginning of a theological search that frankly we
are still engaged in today – to understand what Jesus Christ means for our lives
here and now, and not just in some future Now in
the verses read from the second chapter of Ephesians this morning, the writer
of Ephesians lays out his kernel understanding, his core understanding, his
basic understanding of what he believes Jesus Christ accomplished in his
life, death and resurrection. There
are many, many implications of this that have to be lived out, but the writer
of Ephesians says in these few verses we heard this morning what he believes
Jesus’ basic and essential accomplishment was, what God did through Jesus
Christ. His
description of this has two parts: The first part is a description of our
human condition. The second part is a description of what God does in Jesus
Christ in response to our human condition. First,
our human condition: Ephesians 2:3 says: “All of us [meaning everyone: Jew
and Gentile; in our time we would say: Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male
and female, straight and gay, differently-abled, big and small, all
ethnicities, races, all of us] once lived … in the passions of our flesh,
following the desires of flesh and sense, and we were by nature children of
wrath, like everyone else.” Now
this is where I need to go very slowly. I need to keep listening, because as
soon as I start using words like “passions of the flesh” and “desires of the
flesh and senses,” some of you are going to stop listening because you have
heard preachers use this to scold you. I want us to try to understand what
Ephesians is really saying here. It’s not about scolding us because we have
been bad or because we have succumbed to passions of the flesh or to desires
of the flesh. This is about something much more profound than you think it
is. So,
first of all, I want you to stop and stay with me and not think I am talking
about what you assume I am so that you can hear what I think the writer of
Ephesians is really saying. What
the writer of Ephesians is saying is that we are all addicted to cookies. We
are all Cookie Monsters. There are cookies that we are chasing and that we
need because those cookies make us feel better about ourselves. When the
Cookie Monster is eating his cookie, he doesn’t feel like a monster. When we
are eating our cookies, we don’t feel like the children of wrath, at least
not for that instant. But as soon as we have eaten the cookie to keep from
feeling like the children of wrath, to keep from feeling like the universe
condemns us, cannot accept us, and cannot love us, we need to chase another
cookie. One cookie... Another cookie... Another cookie… The
real powerful cookies that we chase are not physical. This isn’t about the
flesh in the sense that we usually assume the term is used. This is about
living in the world where so often we don’t feel like the universe can accept
us. We are children of the wrath that the universe is scolding and angry with
and condemning of us. The cookies make us feel, at least for a moment, that
we are O.K. Those
cookies can be anything. One of the things that the Apostle Paul taught us is
that, as often as not, religion can be a cookie. The most altruistic things
in life can be a cookie. Read again sometime the 13th chapter of
First Corinthians. “Though I speak in
the tongues of mortals or of angels…. Though I am a profound articulator of
truth.… Good thing, great thing – but if I do it in order to feel O.K. about
myself and not because of love, I am merely a loud noise. If I have all prophecy and all knowledge,
if I have enough faith to move mountains, but I do it in order to feel O.K.
about myself and not because of love, it doesn’t make any difference.” The
Apostle Paul even says: “If I give all my money away to the poor…” [not such a good thing to talk about maybe the Sunday
before Stewardship Sunday, but let’s be real]. The Apostle Paul says: “Even
if I give away all my money to the poor and give my body to be burned, and my
motivation is simply to feel O.K. about myself and not to feel like a child
of wrath, I gain nothing.” All of
us have cookies that we use to keep from feeling like monsters, like children
of wrath. They are much more sophisticated than the usual things to which we
feel ourselves addicted. I can
tell you what my cookie is. My cookie
is competence. I feel O.K. about myself if I think I am performing
competently. As soon as I feel as though I have screwed up, I feel like a
child of wrath. As long as I am feeling competent, I feel like maybe the
universe doesn’t hate me. But as soon as I screw up, I feel like a child of
wrath. What is
your cookie? What is the cookie that keeps you from feeling like a child of
wrath, at least for a moment?
Anything, even the most lofty and altruistic of human activities can
be cookie, and probably is. That’s part of the teaching of the Apostle Paul.
Even the law turns out to be a cookie. Now let
me say again that Ephesians isn’t scolding us because of this. It isn’t
saying we are bad because we use these things to keep from feeling like
children of wrath. Ephesians is saying it is the human condition we all are
stuck in. Ephesians
goes on to say that it is a condition that is killing us. Ephesians calls
this condition “death.” Ephesians says: “You were dead through the trespasses
and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world,
following the ruler of the power of the air…” [breathing
the same air we all breathe, doing the same things we all do in order to feel
O.K. about ourselves]. This
always needing another cookie, another cookie, another cookie, is – Ephesians
says – death. For one thing, it doesn’t work. If I need to feel competent to feel O.K.
about myself, I will never be competent enough. It never ends. As soon as I
get through one day without screwing up too badly, there is another day that
I got to be competent in, and then there is another day I got to be competent
in. I am never competent enough not to feel like a child of wrath. If your
cookie is somebody loving you, there is no one who is going to be able to
love you enough. If your cookie is success, you will never going to be able
to be successful enough or long enough. If your cookie is attention, you are
never, ever going to get enough attention for long enough to feel good enough
not to feel like a child of wrath. So this
is our human condition. All of us are Cookie Monsters and there aren’t enough
cookies to keep us from feeling like children of wrath. In
Ephesians, the meaning and the significance of Jesus Christ is understood in
the context of this mess we’re in, this human condition, living in the
passions of the flesh, always looking for something to make us feel O.K.,
like we’re not children of wrath. God
responds to this in Jesus Christ, responds to our human condition in Jesus
Christ. What Ephesians says is that God who has seen the situation we have
got ourselves in and who is rich in mercy, “out of the great love with which
[God] has loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us
alive together with Christ – saved us by grace – and raised us up with Christ
and seated us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to
come [God’s] kindness and mercy and love will be shown to everyone in Christ
Jesus.” In
other words, out of God’s great love, we are raised from this condition of
needing more and more of whatever it is that we need to feel O.K. about
ourselves. We are raised out of that condition by the great love of God of
which there is enough for everyone, of which there is enough for me, of which
there is enough for you, of which there is enough for our hungry spirits.
It’s not anything we do, Ephesians says, it is something that is given to us
and we simply receive. The
biggest problem with needing all the cookies is that it destroys community,
and without community there isn’t really any love. You never see the Cookie
Monster sitting down with a plate of cookies, and people gathered around him,
and everyone munching on and enjoying their cookies together because as soon
as the Cookie Monster gets there, there are no cookies left for anybody else
since he needs them too desperately himself. If
competence is my cookie, and I need to be competent all the time, I can’t let
you have any. If my cookie is success and I need to have success all the
time, you can’t have any. If my cookie is attention, you can’t have any. If
my cookie is control, you can’t have any. Our
need for whatever it is that helps us to escape the sense that we are
children of wrath creates a wrathful world. It creates a cycle where our
wrath is more and more empowered as the world becomes more competitive and
more warlike and more angry in this endless cycle
that Ephesians calls death. Out of
the great love, which is God, God pours love into the world, bucketful after
bucketful, so that it can wash over us and we can experience love rather than
wrath. This is what will free us from our cookie problem and bring us to life
and raise us to heavenly places with Christ. God’s love is a great love and
there is plenty of it for everyone. If you feel like you need to compete for
it, it’s not God’s love. God’s love is a free gift of grace. So you can’t get
it by competing with other people for it. If you feel like you need to earn
it, it’s not God’s love because God’s love isn’t earn-able. You can’t do
anything to deserve it. All we can do is to surrender to it, to let it come
to us, this great love of which there is enough for everyone, for everyone. I’ve
decided to give up trying to be competent for a while. I’m just going to give
up trying to be competent for a while. I’m going to give everybody else
around me the chance to be competent. You all be competent for a while. I am
going to experiment with giving up my cookie. I wasn’t doing a very good at
being competent any way, so I’m going to give it up for a while. I’m just
going to blunder around for awhile, and see how it goes. I want to experiment
with giving up my need. There
is nothing wrong with being competent. There is a problem with needing to be
competent. There is nothing wrong with success. There is a problem with
needing to be successful. There is nothing wrong with power or control. There
is a problem with needing to have power and control. If it
is not a free gift that we simply receive, it is not the great love of God.
It is, instead, a passion of the flesh which keeps us enslaved in the place
where we are and feel like children of wrath. So,
what is your cookie? God’s
love is so great that if we will surrender to it and receive it, we can live
in community. We can live in Christ rather than in competition. We can be
reconciled to one another. We can let the walls that we keep between us come
tumbling down. We can eat the bread which has been broken for us instead of needing
the cookie. www.foundryumc.org |
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