A Gentle Reminder
2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19; Ephesians 1:3-14
The most important word in our text from Ephesians is only two letters. That means it is not the word “destined,” which some have latched onto and created an entire theology of predestination. No, just two letters: “us.” Granted there are some other important words in the text that are much larger, but none more important than that little, inclusive pronoun “us.” Hold that thought, and I’ll come back to it.
I’ve got to confess that I found this to be a difficult text. That word “destined” did trip me for a while. My normal practice is to read and re-read the text until it begins to come into focus. Well, that didn’t work this week. All I could see were the words “chosen” and “destined.” I went through my commentaries and still didn’t get it. I picked it apart looking at certain Greek words and phrases, analyzing this idea and that concept. And still I wasn’t getting it. Finally, I took a break and set the sermon aside for a while. You may not know that preachers agonize over sermons sometimes. After lunch I decided to back away from the text and look at the big picture. If I had been one of the first to hear this letter read, what would this section have meant to me? That’s when I thought of a friend who is a master with the “soft touch.” I’ve worked with her on church projects and community projects. She is an effective leader, and here’s what has made her so effective: she has a soft touch. When she sends an email to remind us of a meeting, she writes something like this: “This is a gentle reminder that we will meet this Sunday at four o’clock at Starbucks.” No heavy-handiness. No guilt. No pressure. Just a beautiful, effective soft touch!
A gentle reminder.
That’s what Paul is doing in the text from Ephesians. He is giving his readers a gentle reminder. Here’s the big picture of this text: everyone who heard this letter originally was Gentile. Scholars believe the letter of Ephesians was a circular letter, meaning it circulated from community to community. The church in one community would gather, and one of the leaders of the church would read the letter aloud to the congregation. Then they would forward the letter to the next community where the same thing happened. Then to the next and the next. The letter was finally discovered in the community called Ephesus, hence the name Ephesians. The communities that read this letter all shared one thing in common: they were Gentile communities. They were the outcasts. The not chosen ones. The left out. The kind of folks who, if you bumped into them at the market, made ritually unclean. You couldn’t eat with them. You couldn’t even eat with the same dishes they used, even if they were cleaned afterwards.
The Gentiles were the not chosen ones, until Jesus came and announced God’s welcome of all people. And until Paul, who actually became a missionary to the Gentiles. And in this letter of Ephesians, Paul reminds these Gentile churches of God’s welcome. God chose you, he told them. Yes, you outcasts. God loves you and includes you as part of God’s family. This text then is not so much a great theological treatise. It is more important than that. It is a reminder, a gentle reminder, that God loves and welcomes those once thought to be unloved and unwelcome.
And I love the way Paul does it, with that little, inclusive pronoun. God has “blessed us,” he writes. God “chose us.” God “destined us.” Not you. Us. Paul was a Jew, remember, one of the chosen people, an inheritor of the land flowing with milk and honey, descendant of King David, an heir of the great prophets of Israel. Paul was a Jew, and he was saying to these Gentile communities, “God blessed all of us…God chose all of us…God destined all of us.” With that little two-letter word, Paul included them in the family of God. That’s why I say that little two-letter pronoun is the most important word in this entire text.
This is a gentle reminder we all need to hear from time to time, isn’t it? So here it is. God loves you. Don’t let that float over you. Let it lodge somewhere in your being. God loves you. And you. And you. The choir back here behind me. The tech folks up in the balcony. Gary over here on the piano, and Aleta on the organ. Every one of us. God loves us. And I’ll bet someone is thinking, “But, Pastor, you don’t know what I’ve done. What about all those other sermons I’ve heard through the years about the Judge sitting on the great white throne.”
You’re right; I don’t know what you’ve done. But I do know this. We’ve all done things we regret, everyone of us. If we could take some things back, we would certainly do them differently. Every one of us. But we can’t do that. That is why this message of God’s love and grace is so powerful. And we must try to hear it deep in the core of our being. God says, “I choose you. Yes, I know what you’ve done, and I choose you. I bless you and call you into my family.”
When Roberta Bondi was here, she put it this way: “God is smitten with you.”
Today, then, is just a gentle reminder. And here’s why we need it. The world sends us all kinds of messages, many of them negative, many of them damaging, I mean soul damaging. In fact, a lot of us have a tape that continuously runs through our minds. It says something like this.
God is sure mad at you. You have let God down. God loves you enough to send his only begotten Son, and this is the best you can do? Shame on you!
We need this reminder because over time we begin to believe the tape, and it is shaming to our core. The ones who heard Paul’s letter read had a different tape. It probably went something like this.
You’re just a Gentile. You’re not really one of God’s chosen people. You never will be. You are spiritually dirty. What makes you think God wants you in the family? Shame on you!
I’ve got four more months, you know. Not that I’m counting. I find myself reflecting over that past forty years of my ministry. Kelly and I have had some great experiences and have known some of the finest people on earth. I remember early in my ministry everybody was reading Dr. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist. His book, The Road Less Traveled, was very powerful for me. I did not know when I read it that he wasn’t a Christian when he wrote that book. It has spiritual content, but he wasn’t a Christian. Someone actually congratulated him for disguising his Christian faith in order to get the message across to a mass audience. He said, no, he wasn’t disguising anything. It was C. S. Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters, that moved Peck toward Christian faith. He studied the world’s great religions to discover where he belonged. At mid-life he chose to be baptized as a Christian because of the Christian doctrine of sin and forgiveness. As a psychiatrist, he saw those tapes running through people’s minds, telling them how bad they were, how mad God was, shaming them in the core of their being.
Dr. Peck wrote in another book, Further Along the Road Less Traveled, that he chose Christianity because Christian faith allows for sin. In fact, Christian faith acknowledges that all have sinned. And the flip side of that doctrine is forgiveness. If we acknowledge our sin with contrition, “then the slate can be wiped clean,” he writes. This is what the psychiatrist says:
It is as if the sin never existed. You can start over again, fresh and clean every time. (Further Along the Road Less Traveled, pp. 156-158)
Fresh and clean, as if it never existed. That is powerful! Let me ask, Does anyone here need that? A new tape, a new message, that lifts the shame, that helps us hear in the core of our being this gentle reminder from Paul: God loves you. God chooses you. You and you and you. The choir. Let’s use those two little inclusive letters from Paul. God loves every one of us. Thanks be to God.
Closing Prayer
Lord, the messages of the world constantly blare at us, telling us how bad we are, how unacceptable we are. Help us hear your gentle reminder. We’re yours. We belong to you. For that we bless your name today and forever. Amen.
