Ephesians 1:11-14                                        Ordinary Time

  How did you all celebrate the fourth of July?  We were reminded of the birth of 0ur nation and we were reminded of these words: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness”.  Perhaps you read George Will’s column on the fourth of July from Mecklenburg North Carolina.  He points out that in May 1775, more than a year before Congress agreed to publish the Declaration of Independence, Mecklenburg County North Carolina had already declared their independence.  Mecklenburg County was mostly Presbyterians, and they were incensed by the Marriage and Vestry acts of 1769.  The parliament in London made it illegal to preach or perform marriages without a license, and licenses were reserved for the Church of England, and Presbyterian pastors were fined if they performed a marriage.  Mecklenburgers were incensed by these laws, and when they received word of blood shed at Lexington and Concord they declared “We, the citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby dissolve the political bonds which have connected us to the mother country.  We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people to the maintenance of which independence we solemnly pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor.”  Thus did a settlement on the fringes of the British Empire declare war on that empire.  No wonder that members of parliament in London referred to the American Revolution as “that Presbyterian rebellion.”

  We want such foundational truths as we find in the declaration of independence to be in granite, unchanging, inflexible, and therefore dependable, but he meaning of this self evident truth “that all men are created equal” changed over the more than two centuries since our nation was established, and “All men” which originally meant white men is now extended to women and people of color, and we are far more inclusive today than we were 230 years ago.

Paul had a concern for being more inclusive too, for he understood God intended the Gospel for all, and to include gentiles as well as the children of Abraham.

Hear again these words from Ephesians: “We who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for his glory.  In Christ you also, who have heard the word of truth, the good news of your salvation, and have believed in Christ, were sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit”.

Note the “we” and “you” in this verse.  We Jews who first hoped in this new truth of God’s self-revelation in Christ, but now you gentiles have also received this truth.  Hold on to it!  This letter to the Ephesians is a plea to Jews and gentile to recognize God has called all of us to be part of the household of God.  All of us, Jews are now enlightened by this news, and we are now equal in God’s eyes.  We hold on to this truth that God has made all of equal, which has a familiar ring, doesn’t it?  These newcomers to the faith were the Greeks, out of culture renown for their philosophers, science, and art.  People like us, that is.  But the truth of God is something special, not open to usual scientific investigation.  Rather, knowledge about God is something only God can reveal.

It is only the church that has the mission to preserve this truth about how God has chosen to relate to us, and this truth is the context for all other truth we know.  There have been times in history when the church was closed in its thinking.  Having taught that the earth is the center of the universe for centuries, the church had difficulty hearing Galileo announce his evidence that the earth revolved around the sun, and the church compelled him to say what he knew was not true, while mumbling under his breath what he knew to be true.  How much better it would have been for God and all God’s children had the church functioned like a real master teacher and become a student of new truth.

It is the church that is mandated to preserve this truth. The constitution of our church defines the six great ends of the church as 1)the proclamation of the Gospel; 2) the nurture and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; 3)the maintenance of divine worship; 4) the preservation of truth; 5) the promotion of social righteousness;  and 6) the exhibition of the Kingdom of God to the world.  Today I want to talk about the fourth: the preservation of the truth.

What is this truth?  This truth we are talking about is that God, the creator of all the worlds that are has chosen to relate to us, God’s creatures as we are, and has sent us this special one, this Nazarene who lived so briefly and died so violently 2,000 years ago, who enjoins us to live a righteous and peaceful life, and who demonstrated to all the world the gracious nature of God, and what it means to be fully human.

We proclaim this gospel to a world which looks at the church and asks “Is it true?

This truth that God is a redeeming God is a hard sell sometimes.  Picture this scene from a French novel where a physician is working in the children’s ward of a cancer hospital.  The doctor is by the bedside of a little girl of 12 who has been fighting leukemia.  She has been declining steadily and this day the decline is precipitous and the end seems near.  He goes and calls her parents and returns to her bed and looks at her monitors.  She looks up from her drawn face and whispers “Am I going to die doctor?  He looks at her face, the monitors, and down at his feet.  She whispers “I just want to know”.  Finally he looks at her and says “I can’t know for sure, but I think yes” as a tears runs down her face and tears also well up within him.  He wants to regain composure and goes to his office, shuts the door, and suddenly flings his arms up in the air “Prove to me there is a God and I really shall despair!”   We can resonate with that doctor’s anguish can’t we?  How can our message of a gracious God of love be true in a world where a child dies of cancer or some other dread disease?

Let’s re-write that novel and add a scene from real life, a little girl I knew in MN.

Her parents and sisters arrive and go into her room.  She whispers to them what the doctor had said, and asks them to pray and they hold hands around her bed and she leads them in prayer, thanking God for her family who have been with her and for her all her life and in her illness.  They softly sing a hymn they all know and the doxology.  Who has the truth here?  What is truth?  Jesus told Pilate I have come to bear witness to the truth.  Pilate cynically responds “What is truth?” and turns away from the one who is the very embodiment of truth. 

We hold this truth, not a self-evident truth, this self-revelation that God has given us in Jesus the Christ, and this can be a transforming experience for us when we take it seriously as God’s truth for us.  This truth has the power to change lives.

The marvelous preacher H. H. Farmer recounts an incident that suggests the compulsive power of this truth:

“Many years ago I was preaching on the love of God; there was in the congregation an old Polish Jew who had survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the holocaust and after the war had converted to the Christian faith.  He came to me afterward and said ‘You have no right to preach about the love of God until you have seen, as I have, the blood of your family and friends flowing down the gutter on a grey winter morning’.  Farmer goes on to say “I asked him how it was that, having seen such a massacre he had come to believe in the love of God.  The answer he gave was that the Christian gospel first began to lay hold of him because it bade him see God – the love of God – just where he was, just where he could not but always be – in those blood stained streets and gutters that grey winter morning.  It bade him see the love of God – not somewhere else, but in the midst of just that sort of thing, in the blood and agony of Calvary.  He did at least know,  he said, that this was a message that grappled with the facts; and then he went on to say something the sense of which I will always remember though the words I have forgotten.  He said ‘As I look at that man upon the cross, as I heard him pray “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” as I heard him cry in his anguish “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I knew that I was at a point of crisis and decision in my life; I knew that I must make up my mind once and for all and either take my stand beside him and share in his undefeated faith in God…or else fall finally into a bottomless pit of bitterness, hatred, and unutterable despair.”  I decided to take my place beside him and share in his victory in God.”

“In Christ we have heard the word of truth, the good news for our salvation, and have believed in Christ, were sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit”.  Let us be among those who preserve the truth and sing it on good days and bad, in a world that needs to hear our song!

Amen