This message was given by Pastor Gene Preston at
Community Church Hong Kong on January 2, the second
Sunday of Christmas and Epiphany Sunday. Far from being a
"low" or slacking off Sunday following the grand
Christmas and millennium worship events at the APEX, this
was a particularly affectional and friendly family type
of service. The New Year's greetings, the prayers which
were delivered within fifteen or so small groups after
the message, the great songs of hope (Billy Joel's "2,000
Years", "The Jubilee Song," "This is a Time of New
Beginnings") and the Holy Communion brought us a sense of
palpable Christian fellowship. And on this Sunday raised
our fourth liturgical banner, an Epiphany banner showing
the guiding star of Christ and the three wise men lifting
up their gifts to the star. . Thanks to Carlson Leung for
this wonderful tapestry.
The Mark of Heaven - Ephesians
1:3-6
In my regular posted mail and nowadays in my e-mail I
receive frequent announcements that I have been chosen
for some prize or some discount or some travel or
investment award. I seldom read the details because I
know that all these "Gene Preston rewards" are finally
only "come on" solicitations.
If I've been chosen to receive a $25.00 certificate
from Barnes and Noble, the catch is that I must first
purchase $l00 in merchandise; if I've been chosen by
Publisher's Clearing House, to receive a million bucks, I
must first subscribe to a dozen magazines and then hope
to win the elusive cash jackpot.
There are no free lunches and every reward carries an
offsetting, and for me offputting, obligation. Therefore
I hear with surprise and skepticism Paul's announcement
to me, and you, in Ephesians that God has given us a
reward from the beginning of all time. The reward is that
we are made blameless and holy. Let's hear what he has to
say:
BLESSED BE THE GOD AND FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS
CHRIST, WHO HAS BLESSED US IN CHRIST WITH EVERY SPIRITUAL
BLESSING IN THE HEAVENLY PLACES. JUST AS HE CHOSE US IN
CHRIST BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD TO BE HOLY AND
BLAMELESS BEFORE HIM IN LOVE. HE DESTINED US FOR ADOPTION
AS HIS CHILDREN THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, ACCORDING TO THE
GOOD PLEASURE OF HIS WILL, TO THE PRAISE OF HIS GLORIOUS
GRACE THAT HE FREELY BESTOWED ON US IN THE BELOVED.
Do we want to claim this offer and can we possibly
believe that there's no catch about it? Can we accept
that there just may be some free lunches?
The reward of "blameless" is appealing to me. Despite
all our modern sophistication, we know we live with blame
so much so that we can't handle it. Our modern litigation
tries to absolve us from our excess of blame by offering
us no fault accident insurance policies and no blame
divorces. Even so, there's plenty of blame to go around
and it sounds really great that God wants us to know we
are blameless.
The other part of the reward, that we are declared
holy, is more suspect. Many of us have been steered away
from respecting holiness because we have seen overly
pious and excessively religious people get their own lock
on that word. Holiness reminds me of the Jehovah
Witness at my door mouthing endless religious platitudes
and with total lack of humor and grace.
To be rewarded with blameless status sounds too good
to be true while full-time holiness sounds like a lot of
work and no fun at all.
But perhaps we'd better take another look at this
reward which Paul says God has marked out for each of us
before we were even born. And a common illustration from
human relationships may help.
Sometimes when a couple seem especially well matched,
in marriage or friendship, we say that it seems like they
were made for each other. Or we might say, that theirs is
a match made in heaven. Such couples often knew each
other from their shared childhoods, grew up together,
married and lived happily ever after. Surely that kind of
chosenness in which their relationship seems foreordained
from the beginning of time to stability, affection and
permanency, is a very fine model. And that is an apt
model for the spiritual chosenness and reward of a
permanent, never compromised relationship which Paul is
saying is ours.
In Ephesians l, Paul believes that our relationship
with God goes way back, not to when we were children, or
even to when we were born, but before we were born,
before anyone was born, before the world began. God chose
us in love. Before he ever even created anything, God
pictured the two of us, that is you and God, and you and
God, and you and God, and me and God, as committed to one
another. Way before he created you, he chose you for his
own.
The problem as we know, even if what Paul says is
true, is that we're no longer a compatible couple - us
and God. Each of us has grown apart from God. We have
developed a wandering eye. We were made for each other
maybe, but these days we have a tendency to ignore the
one for whom we were made. It seems we're not satisfied
loving one God. We don't give God the sort of attention a
healthy relationship deserves.
And so we get into all sorts of sinful and silly stuff
that makes our heavenly lover heart-sick and strains the
relationship. He made us to be his own, to be holy, which
is to say, hopelessly devoted to him. To be holy means to
be hopelessly in love with God just like those made in
heaven relationships show total adoration and commitment.
God made us to be blameless which is to say God considers
us perfectly compatible with God.
Our problem, which is God's problem, is that this
offered relationship is not one we stick with or just
naturally accept.
We do resist the love of God, and resist falling back
in love with God, because of a variety of reasons and
excuses and defenses: Sometimes we have intellectual
reservations; sometimes we nurse some great hurt for
which we hold God responsible; and more often we just
prefer to go on living according to our interests and
values which we rightly suspect would need to be changed
if we fell back in love with God.
The Rev. Art Bauer who runs the little office in New
York City which counsels ministers in international
ministry sent us this quotation for the new
millennium:
"While sitting on the bank of a river one day, I
picked up a solid round stone from the water and broke it
open. It was perfectly dry in spite of the fact that it
had been immersed in water for centuries. The same is
true of many people, especially in the Western world. For
centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity; they
live immersed in the waters of its benefits. And yet it
has not penetrated their hearts; they do not love God.
The fault is not in Christianity, but in human hearts,
which have been hardened by materialism and
intellectualism"
An Indian Christian, Sadhu Sundar Singh, wrote that
about l920.
With our dry, hardened hearts, we might expect God to
just dump us , write us off, find somebody new to love.
But, it turns out, God is powerfully devoted to us. He
chose us from the foundation of the world and not even
our sinful wandering ways can finally put him off. God's
love is tenacious.
God has gone all the way for us to the cross to keep
the two of us together. God has found a way to give us
the holiness and blamelesssness that we need for a new
compatible relationship with him. He gives us back our
original holiness and blamelessness as a gift in
Christ.
And the holiness and blamelessness God gives us is not
something we struggle to achieve or be. Holiness is God's
gift to us. Holiness is not some struggle to be pious in
order to prove we love God. Paul says: "Praise be to
God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in
Christ." In a mysterious and wonderful move, God clothes
God's sinful, philandering, people with the holiness and
blamelessness of his son, Jesus Christ. And so our
reward from heaven has not been erased, never revoked.
As we worship on the first Sunday of a new year and a
new millennium it's pretty wonderful to realize that God
has clothed us fully in the blessing of Christ so that we
are blameless and holy as we begin a new the year 2000.
Of course, we still need to get used to this
relationship in a process called growing in faith.
Growing into the holiness of Jesus is a life process in
which the Holy Spirit constantly works in our lives to
turn us away from those things that hurt our relationship
with God and to promote those things that move us into a
closer and more intimate relationship with our divine
lover. Our holiness, a gift from God, is simply God
making it possible to be in love with him.
So it seems there may be some free lunches. There may
be some rewards we want to accept with no strings
attached. And when we go to Jesus' supper, which we are
now about to do, we learn again that there are some free
meals, given us in love and for our eternal salvation.
Pastor Gene
Preston
Archives: Sermon
Texts
|