KING’S
ACRE CHURCH, 30 MARCH 2003
“FOR WE ARE HIS WORKMANSHIP”
Introduction:
Such lovely readings as
they have set for today, haven’t they?
That wonderful, wonderful passage in Ephesians, and then that very
famous passage in John’s Gospel. Old
friends, both of them, and I’m not sure how much new there is to say about
them, but let’s see.
Ephesians:
So, firstly, the passage
from the letter to the Ephesians. This
is one of the most wonderful letters in the New Testament, I think. It may have been a circular letter, meant to
go to churches in places like Laodicea as well as Ephesus, and I have heard
that some scholars aren’t totally sure that it was written by Paul. Put it this way: they aren’t as totally
certain that Paul wrote it as they are certain that he wrote the letter to the
Galatians, for instance, or the one to the Romans. Not that it matters too much, of course; the fact that it was
decided to include it in our Bibles means that its message is authentic, even
if its author is a little dubious. On
the other hand, though, it’s quite possible that this was one of the letters
that Philemon took with him when we went home from Rome; we know that he had the
letter that bears his name, and the letter to the Colossians, and also the “letter
to the Laodiceans”, and it’s quite possible that this was it.
Anyway, what a
letter! If you’ve never read it, today
would be a good time to sit down and do so.
It is a wonderful message of hope and love and unity, with some
practical instructions for Christian living – some of which have perhaps been
seriously misunderstood down the ages – and concluding with that lovely picture
of “The whole armour of God”.
In the passage that was read just now,
Paul is talking about our life in Christ.
He reminds us that once upon a time we were "dead" spiritually, and enslaved to “the ruler of
the kingdom of the air”, in other words, the devil. And the devil still rules over those who have rejected the call
to faith, the disobedient – but not, by implication, over Christians. "All of us", both Jews and
Gentiles, once lived self-centred lives, apart from God's redemptive power. We were descendents of Adam, and as such in
danger of God’s wrath against sinners, because we had not yet turned to
God. Even if we reckoned we were doing
a pretty good job of being human – which we probably were, let’s be fair –
spiritually, we were dead, separated from God’s love for us.
Now, the next bit is probably more memorable
in Greek than it is in English; Paul tells us that even though we were
separated from God, God loved us so much that he brought us life together,
raised us together and enthroned us together - "with
Christ" And in Greek, those verbs
all start with the same syllable, “syn”, like in our word “synergy”. A nice bit of alliteration, which doesn’t show
up in our translation!
Anyway, we have been given new status, new
life and new freedom, and totally renewed through Jesus. Paul stresses that this is nothing to do with
anything we could have done – even our faith is a gift from God. Our job now is to go on being God’s person, and
to find out what God wants us to do. For
we, we are told, are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do
good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
John’s Gospel
So much for Ephesians. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but for now,
let’s turn to that wonderful and familiar passage from John’s Gospel. Jesus, you may remember, is
talking to Nicodemus, the lawyer, who has come to him to ask about
salvation. And Jesus says that one must
be “born again”, and goes on to explain that the Son of Man – he means himself –
must be “lifted up” so that people can look at him and be made whole.
Jesus is harking back to the passage in
Numbers here; it’s the first reading on your sheets. We didn’t have it read this morning, but you remember the story,
I’m sure. The people of Israel were in
the desert, on their way between Egypt and the Promised Land, and they began
grumbling about their quality of life, saying it had been so much better in
Egypt and they were sick of quail and manna, which was basically what they ate,
and they wished they hadn’t come, and yadda, yadda, yadda…. And God sent a whole load of poisonous snakes
among them, which you would have thought would only make them grumble
more. Anyway, if they got bitten by the
snake, that was about fatal, but Moses was told to make an image of a snake, in
bronze, and put it up on a pole where it could be seen by the whole camp, and
anybody who’d been bitten only had to look at the snake and they’d be
healed. It’s rather a weird story, and
I don’t like it much; it seems to be so strange that Moses should be commanded
to make an image of a snake, given that making images was one of the things
Jews mustn’t do. Plus I don’t
like the idea of God sending snakes like that.
Mind you, I’m reminded of when
kids are grizzling and their mother says, “If you don’t stop that, I’ll give
you something to cry about!”
It’s quite probable that they found the
image of a snake in the Temple, perhaps brought in during one of the times when
Israel worshipped other gods, or tried to worship God in ways that were more
suitable to worshipping other gods, and this story arose to explain it. But it is a good illustration for Jesus to
use, all the same.
The point is, the Israelites didn’t have
to do anything with the snake in order to be healed; all they had to do
was look at it. How hard is that? And in the same way, Jesus says, all we have
to do is believe. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only
Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
No, believing and looking,
here, aren’t really two different things; after all, the Israelites had to
believe that looking at the snake would cure them, or they’d not bother
crawling outside their tent.
However, Jesus doesn’t stop
there. He goes on to explain that those
who believe have already passed from death into life; we don’t have to go
through any form of judgement, when the time comes. And those who turn their noses up are already condemned, simply
by virtue of the fact that they chose not to believe.
Complications
Hmmm – chose not to
believe? Well, I think it must be,
mustn’t it. St Paul tells us that the
faith we need to believe is actually a gift from God. And while I do know that some Christians think that this means
God has limited his love to a minority, that’s not what we believe as
Methodists. Or as Anglicans, for that
matter! We proclaim that everybody both
can be, and needs to be, made whole by God.
All need to be saved; all can be saved; all can know they are saved and
all can be saved to the uttermost! So
if the faith we need to be saved comes from God, then how come some people don’t
believe?
Well, the answer is, I don’t
know! Perhaps some people really do
choose not to believe; perhaps others don’t really want to; others still may
have never thought about it. All of us
have our moments of doubt, of course, that’s normal and healthy! But there’s a difference between not being
too sure and going on trying to be Jesus’ person anyway, and just not bothering
about it.
Of course, some people just
simply don’t know about Jesus. How can
they learn? They don’t go to church,
they don’t really learn about him at school, and they probably don’t learn
about him at home. So how can they
possibly know they’re supposed to believe in him?
Well that, of course, is where
we come in. If our friends can’t learn
about Jesus any other way, we have to tell them! How else are they going to learn?
Of course, what is important
isn’t so much what we say – some of us aren’t good at putting things into
words, and would be horrendously embarrassed if we had to try to explain our
faith – what we say isn’t always important, it’s who we are. It’s not, as they say, how you talk the
talk, but how you walk the walk that matters.
We can actually be horribly off-putting if we rabbit on about our faith
and yet it doesn’t match up with the way we live.
We can take comfort from the
last sentence of our first reading: For
we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God
prepared in advance for us to do.
We are God’s workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. God has prepared the way for us and if any
friend actually needs telling in words about Jesus, then we will find the
words! We are God’s witnesses, simply
by virtue of the fact that the Holy Spirit has come.
Our job, then, is to keep on
walking with Jesus. I’m sure all of us
here this morning have said “Yes” to Jesus – if you haven’t, and would like to,
see me or Henry or someone afterwards, and we’ll help you – we may have said “Yes”
to Jesus, but it isn’t a once-and-for-all experience. We have to go on renewing that commitment day after day. Each year, we make our formal commitment in
the Covenant service, and each week we implicitly renew that when we make our
Communion and when we say “Amen” to the prayer of confession, acknowledging
that things have, perhaps, gone pear-shaped between us and God and we need to
have them put right. And sometimes, I’m
sure you’ve found, we need to do that each day, or several times a day, or even
several times an hour when things are really tough!
But let us never forget that, when all is
said and done, it is God who loves us first and foremost. All of us.
Even the ghastliest person you know.
Even Saddam Hussein. Even George
W Bush! It was all God’s idea, not
ours. We are God’s workmanship, and God
loves us. Amen.