To You Who Are Beloved of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Our Scripture for this week is Ephesians 2: 1-10:
You were dead through the trespasses
and sins 2in which you once lived, following the course of this
world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at
work among those who are disobedient. 3All of us once lived among
them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses,
and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.
4But
God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5even
when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by
grace you have been saved— 6and raised us up with him and seated us
with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the
ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness
toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9not
the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are what he
has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand to be our way of life.
Oh, to be brand
new to the gospel. Like the people of
Ephesus. ‘The course of the world’ was
that of trespasses and sin, disobedience, passions of the flesh, desires of
flesh, by nature children of wrath…
While new
Christians were sorting out their understanding of where they came from, they
received something brand new. God, rich
in mercy, out of great love for us, grace for our salvation.
And it is not
the result of works. Now, in my mind,
working for our salvation is about a theology (an understanding of God) that
says we must earn our way into heaven, tip the scales to good over evil in our
life. But Paul has a different
spin. It is not about the works
themselves, earning God’s favor, it is about boasting over the
results. So, “I don’t do this sinful
thing and Jesus loves me, but you do this sinful thing and you are going
down.” Literally, down into hell in
terms of Biblical imagery.
I get caught in
Reformation thinking. In the 1500’s when
the Protestant church formed, breaking with the Roman Catholic mother church
over indulgences and abuses to essentially ‘buy’ salvation. It was ‘working’ for salvation taken to its
logical extreme, just pay for it. Martin
Luther was so against the idea of works, he wanted to pull the letter of James
from the New Testament because works, practicing our faith, was so central to
the message.
But its also
central to Paul’s message. We do not do
good works to earn our way into heaven, faith alone is the truth of the
matter. But it is not “either/or”, faith
or works. It is “if/then”. If we receive the grace that God has intended
for us, ‘then’, verse 10, we are what he has made us,
created in Christ Jesus for good works.
We were created
to do good works because that is how God made us. We were created to love. But then we broke the system. Till God fixed it in Christ Jesus.
And the fix
that God put in was the healing of the world, of our souls, of our brokenness,
of our sins. That is the good work of
God. In faith, the good work we are, in
turn, called to is the healing of the world.
Person by person, moment by moment, problem by problem.
This Sunday is
our healing service. We will take this
Sunday to be reminded that we are called to heal because Christ has first
healed us. We know the work of healing
is effective, because we have lived into the results of God healing us. We know the work goes forward, because God’s
healing of we, God’s people, continues.
Because this is
what we are made for, created in Christ Jesus for good works.
Peace,
Pastor Pete
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