January 21, 2024

“From belonging to becoming” (Full Service)

Passage: Ephesians 4:1-16
Service Type:

Sermon starts at 28:10

 

“From belonging to becoming”

Scripture: Ephesians 4:1-16

 

Years ago, one of my favourite TV shows was Cheers.  It was set in a Boston bar, had some great and quirky characters, and always began with what, in my opinion, was one of the best TV theme songs ever written.  It went like this:

‘Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.

Wouldn’t you like to get away?

Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name,

and they're always glad you came.

You want to be where you can see

our troubles are all the same.

You want to be where everybody knows your name.’

 

Besides having some great lyrics, I’ve always thought that song also provided a great description of the Church as it was meant to be.  In fact, someone actually once wrote that the very best imitation of what the Church is meant to be might well be the neighbourhood bar – in other words, a place where everybody knows your name!

 

Now, last week, we talked about belonging, that sense of connection to one another, that gets summed up in the biblical word “fellowship”, in being part of and connected to the body of Christ.  And in our reading for this morning, Paul again uses that image of the body that we encountered last Sunday in 1 Corinthians.

 

Here in Ephesians, though, Paul also gives us this list of all the things we have in common as Christians – those things that form the basis of our fellowship, the basis of our oneness in Jesus.  We heard these, last week, as well: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.

 

As we move further into the passage, we also find Paul reminding us that we’ve all been given some grace-gift – each of us, he says; not one person left out -- enabling all of us to do our part, to serve this body to which we now belong.  So this is something else that unites us.

 

Now some of those gifts are given to allow people to fulfil particular roles in the life of the Church, and we’ll talk about all of that in a couple of weeks.  But, here, what I really need to point out is that the purpose of all these gifts is to ‘build up the body of Christ’.  So, not only are we to be a body – a fellowship -- where we live out our connection with one another…  We are also to be a body that is being built up – in other words, a body that grows.

 

Now you can measure growth in a lot of different ways.  As I’ve said before, many of us have had some place in our homes, a piece of wall or a doorframe, that’s become covered in little pencil marks – marks that form a record of the growth of our kids from toddler to tween.  And that growth is something that not only are kids almost universally keen to measure, but it’s something that, as parents, we’re keen to observe as well.  And that’s because we know that a growing kid is likely to be a healthy kid.  And we all want our kids to be healthy…  And God is no different.  He wants to see the body of Christ be healthy too.  He wants to see it built up.  He wants to see it grow.

 

Now, again, you can measure growth in a lot of different ways.  And numbers are certainly one of those.  These days, we can’t help but see the impact that the COVID years have had on us.  We look at the spaces in the pews around us, and we can’t help but know that things have changed…  And that certainly means there’s work to be done.  There’s no denying that.

 

And, yet, as a congregation, we’ve come through all this with a remarkable degree of health.  That may not always be evident from down in the trenches, but from a bird’s eye view, from attending Presbytery, I can tell you that it is.  We have a lot to be grateful for.

 

So here are a couple of numbers we ought to know.  On average, last year, we had about 100 people in the sanctuary each week.  That’s about 60% of where we were before the pandemic.  And yet, each week, we’ve also had an average of about 140 people participating in worship online – meaning our worshipping congregation is actually about 30% larger than it was before the pandemic.  You should also know that, after carrying a financial deficit through a good bit of last year, we actually ended the year having more than covered our expenses – and we did so, not from bequests or special gifts, but through the faithful offerings of St. Andrew’s people.  So, while there are certainly numbers that we ought to be concerned about, there are also many that you and I can celebrate.

 

In this passage, however, numbers are not Paul’s real concern.  You might say, based on the last verse of our passage, that Paul also knows health leads to growth -- that a healthy church will be a growing church.  He says that when each part of the body is working properly, this promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

 

Now Paul actually points us to three different kinds of growth in this passage, growth that moves us from simply belonging as Christians to becoming as Christians – becoming the people, the church, the body that Jesus intends us to be.

 

And the first kind of growth Paul points us to – the first goal of building up the body of Christ, of this ‘becoming’ that we’re called to – is unity.  We see that in verse thirteen: “until all of us come to the unity of the faith”.

 

Now, last week, we talked about how fellowship grows out of having things in common.  And the things we have in common can be quite varied.  For instance, I have a particular connection with some of you because we happen to share an interest in railroads.  With others, I have a connection because we’ve travelled together to the land Jesus that called home.  And with some of you, it’s simply based on decades of working together, praying together, studying together.  And I’m sure all of you could come up with your own lists of things that you share with some of the others here at St. Andrew’s…

 

But, here, Paul is concerned about one point of commonality in particular – one basis of unity – and that’s “unity in the faith”.  If we share that, then we share one of the essentials for the body of Christ here to be healthy and grow.  Now, notice that Paul, here, doesn’t just say “unity in faith”.  It’s not just “faith”, but “the faith” which is meant to bind us together.  So it’s not about simply believing.  It’s about believing something in particular.

 

And if we asked Paul what that something was, I think he’d point us to the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 15: “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved…  For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day… and that he appeared…”  At its most basic level, that is what defines “the faith”.  It’s through belief in that that we are saved.  And it’s a belief in that which also defines the unity we’re to have as the body of Christ.  If we’re not united around Christ’s redeeming work on the cross and the reality of the resurrection and the testimony of scripture to all of that, the Church is in trouble -- because sharing a belief in that good news is what makes us the body of Christ on earth.  And that unity is something in which we’re meant to grow.

 

And then the second kind of growth that Paul points us to is growth in knowledge – and specifically that knowledge is meant to be “knowledge of the Son of God”.  Now, that knowledge certainly involves knowing who Jesus is, and what he’s done – those very basic things we’ve just talked about from 1 Corinthians 15.  But it also involves knowing what Jesus taught, what he said, what he thought…

 

One of Jesus’ final instructions to the disciples was that they were, themselves, to “make disciples of all nations” – in other words, they were to reproduce themselves, disciples making disciples.  They were to baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  But they were also to teach these new disciples to obey everything that Jesus had commanded them.

 

Now some of what Jesus commanded most of us would be more than happy to embrace, even if we sometimes find the follow through somewhat challenging.  For instance, we’re happy to embrace Jesus’ command to love one another, aren’t we!  And many of us might at least try to be persistent in prayer…

 

But, if we were really paying attention, a lot of us would probably struggle with Jesus’ statement that if we don’t forgive others, neither will the Father forgive our trespasses.  Equally challenging would be the clear priority Jesus puts on storing up treasures in heaven rather than storing up treasures here on earth…

 

And, often it seems, the Church today has largely lost sight of the fact that the Bible Jesus read was simply the Old Testament…  That this was where he turned in temptation…  That this is where he pointed in helping people understand who he is…  And that this is the Word of which he says not one tiniest bit will ever pass away.  Meaning that, as Christians, we can’t ignore the two thirds of the Bible that comes before the gospels.  Jesus’ coming didn’t make this part of the Bible irrelevant.  It’s all part of how God speaks to us and shows us who He is…  It’s all part of how we find our place in God’s amazing story.

 

And so, to put it bluntly, as the body of Christ, there are things that you and I need to know – and we’re to grow in that knowledge.  And, yes, that’s going to involve some effort on our part…  But, if we don’t – if we don’t grow in that knowledge – then we run a very real risk – a risk that Paul actually warns us about in this passage: the risk is that we remain “children”.  In other words, we never get out of spiritual kindergarten.  And, as some people we know might tell you, kindergarten can be the hardest six years of your life.

 

And then, mixing his metaphors a little, Paul tells us that, without that knowledge, without that grounding, we remain vulnerable – vulnerable to the shifting winds of doctrine…  On Wednesday this week, you could hear the wind howling outside my office as I was writing, and, every so often, you could see stray leaves being blown here and there, this way and that, as the wind whipped around the building.  What Paul is saying here is that, if we aren’t growing in the knowledge of the Son of God – if we don’t come to know Him and his Word deeply -- then we end up being just like those leaves.  Blown here and there.  Tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.  Tossed about in our thinking every time the world’s thinking changes because we’re not anchored, not moored, not grounded in the truth of God’s Word.

 

As we heard in The Bible Course on Wednesday night, people like William Tyndale lost their lives trying to make God’s Word available to us in a language that we could understand.  Others have devoted a lifetime to it.  I think of the Presbyterian Church’s Paul McLean, who’s spent his ministry translating scripture into the languages of Taiwan.  So this is a gift that we dare not ignore or neglect.  It’s come to us at incredible cost.

 

And then, finally, the third kind of growth that Paul points us to is growth in character.  Now Paul actually begins this passage by calling us, as the body, to a new way of life – a way of life that he characterizes with a list of what we might call character traits, or at least expressions of character: humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

 

And then, later on, he lets us know who our model for that needs to be.  We’re to grow up in every way into Christ, he says.  We’re to build up this body that we’re a part of until we all come to maturity – to the measure of the full stature of Christ.  So, Jesus, and his character, is our measuring stick.  He is our model -- our measure of real maturity as the Church.

 

So, it’s not just about believing the right things, even though Jesus himself leaves us in no doubt that are right things – true things – we need to believe.  And it’s not just about stuffing our heads full of knowledge, even if that knowledge could make us Bible scholars or professors of theology.  It’s really all about growing up – growing up into him, allowing his character to shape our character.  Letting his story become the basis of our story.  Letting his purposes and priorities become the thing that directs our own.

 

You see, it’s hard to be the body of Christ in this world if the world can’t see a similarity between the body and its head.  It’s hard to be the body of Christ if we ourselves don’t know what we believe.  And it’s impossible to be the body of Christ if the world can’t hear from us about this saving faith that we’ve been given.  And that’s why it can’t simply be about belonging.  It needs to be about becoming as well…  Amen.