Ep 2:1-10

26 March 2006

4th Sunday in Lent

“Just Because We were Dead”

            Earlier this month, the Motion Picture Association of America held its annual Academy Awards show.  The show itself was rather boring, but at least the majority of the Oscars didn’t go to a single movie, as has been the case in some years.  And for the first time since 2000 (when it was Gladiator), the award for Best Film went to a movie that I had actually already seen and liked.

            This year, it was Crash, which was directed by Paul Haggis.  The movie’s title comes from “a car wreck,” says one reviewer, “that serves as a metaphor for the collisions between ordinary people that unleash the rage that is normally suppressed by superficial social bonds.”[1]  One of the movie’s actors, Don Cheadle (star of Hotel Rwanda), says that sometimes “we crash into each other, just so we can feel something,” just so we know that we’re alive.

            In Crash, we see what lies just below the surface.  We see the darkness, the racism, the misunderstanding.  In one scene, Matt Dillon (who plays a cop with the LAPD) tells his rookie partner, “You think you know who you are, but just wait a few years.”

            Of course, many artists have portrayed the darkness within us.  The cover of our worship bulletin features a painting you may have seen somewhere.  (It’s been used in a lot of different ways.)  It’s entitled, “The Scream.”  The painter is said to be…evoking the anxiety—the anguish—the alienation—of human life.  It’s either that, or someone has gone and told the poor soul, as a friend of mine in Texas once put it, “the dang cold truth about Santa Claus!”

            As with artists, so with apostles.  Paul has been accused of many things, but rarely of sugar coating his message.  He begins our epistle reading in Ephesians 2 by saying, “You were dead.”  You were dead.  It’s hard to get much grimmer than that!  “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived” (vv. 1-2).

            Besides being grim, it doesn’t seem to make sense.  How can we be dead through something in which we live?  It sounds like Paul is speaking of the living dead.  But when we look at what often passes for life in our world, and in our own lives—even those of us who are in Christ, “dead” might be a pretty good description!

            It’s such a struggle for us to do the things that give us life—to be the people who are truly alive!  We need help for that.

            At journeywithjesus.net, Daniel Clendenin maintains what he calls “a weekly webzine for the global church.”  Speaking of our appetite for the dark side, he says:  “The daily newspaper chronicles our will to death and darkness—political corruption, violence as media entertainment, corporate greed, beheadings in God’s name, and a…war that has slaughtered tens of thousands of human beings precious to God, squandered $250 billion, and demonstrated just how [deadly falsehood, arrogance, and] stupidity can be.

For the garden variety struggles of sickness, death, drugs, joblessness, and the like, cast a compassionate glance toward your colleague or neighbor.”[2]

Why are we like this?  Why are we so stubborn?  As Rodney King famously asked (or infamously, depending on your point of view), “Why can’t we all just get along?”  The apostle Paul wonders about the same thing in Romans 7.  “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (v. 15).

Even the best and the brightest among us describe their sense of fallenness, their sense of brokenness.  Maybe that’s precisely why they are the best and the brightest.  They haven’t quit struggling with these things.  They’re more aware of them than are the rest of us.

Clendenin quotes the Jewish writer Gabriel Josipovici, “who argues that, much to our frustration, the Bible leaves many questions unanswered.  As ‘pure narrative,’ [as pure story or description], the Bible favors brutal realism about our human condition over superficial consolation or theological explanations:  [It doesn’t gloss over the hard facts.]

‘It does so, it seems to me, because it recognizes that in the end, the only thing that can truly heal and console us is not the voice of consolation, but the voice of reality.  [That’s] the way the world is, it says, neither fair nor equitable.  What are you going to do about it?’”[3]

I’m reminded of a scene in the movie we watched last Wednesday night, Friday Night Lights.  In it, the coach of the high school football team, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is at the home of Mike Winchell, his starting quarterback, played by Lucas Black.  Mike feels like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.  In a scene later on, he tells the coach that he feels like he’s cursed.

But during the visit to his house, the coach says, “Now I’m gonna assume that, by now, you’ve learned that the world’s not fair, and sometimes you get the short end, and that’s all you get.  And if you don’t do something personally to fix it, then that’s all you’re ever gonna get.”

Mike tells him, “My Ma’s not right.”  His mother takes medication for mental illness.  He never has any friends over; he feels like he has to take care of her.

His coach responds, “One of these days, you’re gonna have to get out of this house.  You’re gonna have to leave her.  You gotta accept the fact that people gotta take care of themselves, and that includes you.”  And then, in a way that only Billy Bob Thornton can do, he adds, “The truth is, against some pretty overwhelming odds, if you do decide to accept that—look at me, Mike—if you decide to accept that, you’re gonna seriously fly, son.”

The coach isn’t telling him that caring for his mother is a bad thing.  What he is telling him is that at some point, he has to face reality.  He’s simply unable to care for her.  And the burden of guilt and depression he carries around helps no one.

Some people believe that confession of sin, as well as the season of Lent itself, is all about beating ourselves up—that it’s about being pessimistic and hating oneself.  A lot of modern, popular psychology has taken that approach.  I would submit that a viewpoint such as that refuses to face reality.  I agree with Martin Luther, who I quoted last week, in that, “God does not save people who are merely fictitious sinners.”

It’s important to understand that confessing one’s sin and dwelling on it are two different things.  Confessing one’s sin leads us to face reality and the path to freedom.  It is liberating.  Dwelling on one’s sin only leads to the downward spiral that the apostle Paul would have us avoid.  That is, he and the coach in Friday Night Lights as he talks to his quarterback!

Halfway into our epistle reading, we encounter something incredible.  Verses 4 and 5 tell us that “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”  Even when we were dead in sin, God made us alive with Christ.  Markus Barth, son of Karl Barth, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th century, believes that phrase should be intensified to read, “Just because we were dead.”[4]  Precisely because we were dead, God has shown mercy.

Why is it so difficult for us to admit our faults, our sins, and our failures?  In one of the Lenten meditation books we’ve provided in the Jerusalem Chamber, Henri Nouwen says this:  “Most of us distrust God.  Most of us think of God as a fearful, punitive authority or as an empty, powerless nothing.  Jesus’ core message was that God is neither a powerless weakling nor a powerful boss, but a lover, whose only desire is to give us what our hearts most desire.”[5]

It seems that Paul really wants to underline the point about God’s mercy.  The phrase, “by grace you have been saved,” appears twice in our passage.  The second time it appears, in verse 8, the point is really spelled out:  “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Maybe it’s difficult to admit our faults, our sins, and our failures because we feel the need to make something of ourselves.  We may deny it, but we may feel down deep inside that we have to do it all by ourselves.

According to verse 10, “we are what [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”  To be our way of life.  Last week, I said that seeing the Ten Commandments as simply a list of rules to obey was to miss the mark.  It’s much better understood as a way of life.

According to St. John Chrysostom, one of the church fathers, there is “a ‘road’ prepared by God.  On this highway built by God, the commandments of God are fulfilled.  Those walking on it rejoice in the law of God, because it is spiritual, righteous, and good.  From the beginning, it was the sole purpose of the law to point out, or to direct, the chosen people to and upon, this way.”[6]

Some may think the phrase, we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand,” indicates that we have no choice in the matter.  God has already decided it.  But don’t forget how I started my sermon!  We are quite capable of choosing the dark side!

God has already made something of us, something more wonderful than we can ever imagine.  When it says in verse 10 that “we are what [God] has made us,” the Greek word used is poivhma (poiema).  It means “something made,” “handiwork.”  But it can also mean “poem.”

In Romans 2, Paul uses a related word, poihth" (poietes), in referring to the “doers” of the law (v. 13).  But the same word is also used in Acts 17 when he speaks to the people in Athens about their “poets” (v. 28).

The point is, we are much more than something God has made.  (As if that weren’t amazing enough!)  We are the poetry of God.  We are truly the products of divine inspiration.

We need God’s help to make something of ourselves; but God needs our help in turning us into a masterpiece.  Markus Barth says that “completion of the work done in Christ includes not only the will of God, Christ, and the Spirit, but also the mission, conduct, and action of the saints.”[7]  We co-create with God.

How much different would the world be—how much different would we be—if we were determined to be artists with God?  Just because we were dead, our canvas becomes life itself.

back to home page