Today I want to clear up some misconceptions. I have come to believe that one of the reasons people have a hard time coming to grips with God is because God is not living up to their expectations. And when God is not the God that they expect God to be, they go back to the old gods. The door to salvation may be thrown wide open but we have a propensity for trying to pull it shut again.
You think that sounds strange, but I’m right about this! In the letter to the Ephesians which we read this morning, the writer says, “God chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in love. God chose us from before all time to be children of God for no good reason except the good pleasure of God’s will.” That sounds to me like God wants to throw the door wide open but to welcome people like you and me in.
But we can’t handle a God like this – a God who chooses us. Just who does this God think he is? This God of Ephesians sounds like a God of grace. You know what grace is? Unmerited love and acceptance. Love that comes our way even when we don’t deserve it and haven’t earned it. What kind of deal is that?
I run into people all the time who have rejected God and who don’t seek out the church because they assume that if God is really God and believes in justice that God will require them to be something different than they are in order to be accepted. God will require them to have their act together and to look perfect.
Or if God doesn’t require it, at least the church people will. Do you realize that there are people who won’t come to church because they think they have to dress a certain way or be of a certain economic class or have a spotless background? You might have had to overcome it yourself to get you in church. “Those people won’t accept me the way I am, so I’m not going to go.” Behind that is another notion: “If that’s the way God’s people act that must mean that God will not accept me the way that I am either.” Do you see how important this radical hospitality thing is?
So people will not come because they believe God is too strict and too judgmental to be able to handle who they are. And if they ever get passed all the obstacles to actually get to church and to hear Paul talking in Ephesians, they hear about this God who has chosen them from before the foundation of the world to find salvation and adoption through Jesus, and they say, “You’re not the God I rejected. So maybe you can’t be God at all.” Then they quote a little Groucho Marx who once resigned from a social club by saying, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me for a member.”[i]
People will reject the good news because they can’t believe they would be worthy enough to receive it. They will also reject it because they can’t believe that God won’t let them earn a spot in heaven. I mean, God has the ultimate prize and just wants to give it away! What kind of parenting is that? How will the children ever learn to be responsible if the parent is willing to give them something for nothing? God is supposed to be a taskmaster, right? Making sure that we toe the line? Not giving us the time of day until we straighten up?
Once again, though, God doesn’t live up to our expectations. The God that Ephesians talks about is a God who talks about our salvation in the past tense, as if it had been won for us long before we were even born. “In Christ,” the book says, “we have already obtained an inheritance.”
Wait a second! We were accepted by God before we were even born? Where is the sense in that? Isn’t that a risky thing to do? God accepted me without the promise that I would return that love? Did God know I was going to turn out to be such a mess? Did God know that I was going to have so many quirks and flaws? Did God know that I was going to fail in so many ways to live up to my potential? And God obtained an inheritance for me anyway? I don’t know that I want to accept salvation by a God who would do such a foolish thing.
So God is not living up to our expectations that God be uncompromising and that he do a little means-testing to see if we’ve earned our way in. But there’s another way that God is not living up to the expectations that many people in our world have for God. God is too inclusive.
The popular image out there is that Christians believe that holding onto Jesus is a way of shutting out the rest of the world. They believe that when we say things like, “Jesus is the Way,” we are putting down other people. We are building a safe, little wall around our community. We are condemning non-believers. In particular, there are many people who believe that every time we profess our faith in Christ we are saying that people who believe differently cannot be loved by God.
It is a real stumbling block for a society that wants to believe that love and salvation are inclusive. There are many people for whom the first question they have is, “What about people of other faiths? What about Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims? Am I cutting myself off from the world by professing that Jesus is Lord?”
So this time the misconception is that God is so exclusive that God cannot love those who do not call upon Jesus. But the message of Ephesians is just the opposite. It is because God has come in Jesus that we know that God wants all of the world to recognize their adoption. Jesus did not come to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved. The purpose of this whole Jesus business is to make clear the mystery. As Ephesians says, “God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he set forth in him, unto the plan of the fullness of time to bring together all things in Christ – everything in the heavens and in the earth in him.”
God is bringing together all things in Christ. God’s not building walls. God is not standing around with a checklist to see whose names can be crossed off because they didn’t earn it. God is throwing open the door and it all becomes clear in Jesus. God is planning a great reunion and hoping that we will accept.
The creation knows what’s going on. The creeping things of the earth and the flying things of the air and the swimming things of the water – all the creatures of the earth know already who they are and they are just waiting for the humans to get it. “Maybe today,” the pelicans say as they fly along the coast. “Maybe today they’ll get it.”
“Maybe today,” the foxes say as they watch the lights in our houses in the dark of night. “Maybe today those humans will know who God really is and where this whole thing is headed.”
They know, I tell you. They know that God is not a sadistic ogre waiting for us to slip up but a lover who seeks us out to the ends of the earth. And, of course, God wants us to be “holy and blameless before God.” That’s part of what Ephesians says, too. But that is not a call to pride; it’s a call to being the people we were called to be. God does want us to do right and give up the things that keep us from God and to start growing in holiness, but that never stands in the way of God’s acceptance of us and pursuit of us. We can grow once we know that we are children.
I often think about my last year in seminary. Suzanne and I were living in a one-room efficiency apartment on the SMU campus in Dallas. Every night we had to move the sofa so we could pull the bed down out of the wall. That room was so small you could cook your breakfast while you were still sitting in the bed. And I did my studying at night in a closet so that I wouldn't keep Suzanne up. And we lived in the SMU apartments for four years.
That last year in seminary it all seemed to be coming together. I had just finished a year's internship in inner-city Dallas and I was coming back to school work with a purpose. I knew what I wanted to know and I jumped into my classes in a way I had never done before.
That year I was working in the seminary's audio-visual and copying department which was the perfect job for me. The A-V room was right on the main floor of the main building and it was sort of like the school's general store. Students and professors would stop by to chat and to have things run off. It was information central for anything going on on campus. And there was a lot of time, when the copier was running, when I could study. I usually came in to work with a ton of books.
Every afternoon Roberto would come by. Roberto was one of the custodians at the school and he only spoke Spanish, which was good for me because I needed to practice my Spanish, which was still pretty shaky, even though I had used it all through internship. It was also good because Roberto was a down-to-earth, even earthy kind of guy. He wasn't intimidated by this academic environment at all and I kind of got the feeling that he was often shaking his head in wonder at all the things we did.
So Roberto kept this fantastic year in perspective for me. It seemed like I always had my nose in a book when he came in. One day I remember he interrupted me to tell me a story. He was from a small town in Chihuahua, Mexico. He told this long story about a man in his village who was brilliant. He could speak and read seven different languages. He had the best library in the pueblo and he was always reading and thinking. Everyone in the town was in awe of him.
One day something happened. The man just snapped. All of a sudden he couldn't put a sentence together in any language. He spent his days wandering the streets raving like a madman. Having said that, Roberto left the room to continue his work. Who knows what his message was for me?
I didn't think too much more about that story. Fortunately my mind didn't snap then. Some folks say it's snapped since then, but I held it together through graduation. I graduated at the top of my class. There were several professors urging me to think about a PhD. It was all very heady stuff.
Beyond that I was beginning to think that I had it all figured out. There was a lot of mystery still about God, but I could talk about that mystery for a long time. I could define theological terms. I could tell you why I believed what I believed and who believed it before me and how I had improved what they'd believed. But I was headed for crisis.
That summer we stayed on campus while I did a unit of work as a chaplain at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. It's called Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, and it's required of all ministers in the Virginia Conference now. What it was for me was a good healthy dose of reality.
Suddenly I was dealing with people on a daily basis who didn't care a lick for the papers I'd written at school. I was dealing with patients who needed a listening ear and a hand to hold and a faith to guide them. I was dealing with people who struggled, not with Karl Barth and Martin Luther, but with pain and illness and tragedy. And I was also dealing with weekly seminars where my supervising chaplains and the others in my CPE group would challenge me on everything I did. They didn't allow me any screens to hide behind and they didn't care how well I wrote or what I'd read.
Well, let me tell you, it was devastating. I got into a major fight with the head chaplain at the hospital and we almost had a major incident at the hospital cafeteria one day. I felt more picked apart and threatened than I ever had in my life. I really wondered if I was cut out for the ministry business.
One day in July, about two months after I had started at the hospital, I came home to our spacious quarters in the afternoon and I could not shake this feeling of being put upon and torn apart. I paced the apartment from one end to the other, which was about like turning around in place, and finally decided I need to get out. I went to the track and ran several miles hoping to run some of the frustration and failure away. Finally I came back to the steps of the seminary chapel and sat down, still not feeling much better.
That was when Roberto stopped by. He saw me sitting there and he just stopped. Didn't say anything for a few minutes. I felt like he was studying me to see what kind of condition I was in. I must have looked like a mess. Not only was I hot and sweaty, but I'm sure there were bags under my eyes from the lack of sleep and a general droopiness and depression.
Then Roberto told me another story. It was a long story and for about five minutes he gave me the benefit of his wonderful, earthy wisdom. He gave me great detail in this story. But he was speaking in Spanish and I was too distraught to pay attention and I have no idea what he said. But you know what? It didn't matter. Because Roberto's face and his presence and his tone of voice said something even without the words and that is what touched me.
On that day Roberto reminded me of who I was. He reminded me really of who I had always been. He had tried to remind me once before, but I was too caught up in the swirling world of academia. He reminded me that I was human. Because I was human I was going to stumble and fall and make mistakes. I was going to run up against people and situations that seemed to threaten all the achievements I thought I'd made. But God could use me anyway, just as God has always used broken vessels and outright failures.
Don’t get me wrong. God doesn’t want us to be failures. There is a lot God wants us to do. But God knows a lot about picking up people who feel like they are nobody’s and making them somebody’s. God is not going to live down to our expectations. God is going to keep drawing us into the mystery and showing us that God’s intention is shown clearly in Christ. It all comes together in Christ. All our ‘whys’ are answered with one ‘where.’ In Christ, we find the life we’ve been missing. And the world needs to know it. Thanks be to God.
Ephesians 1:3-14
Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one blessing us in every spiritual blessing in heaven in Christ, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world to be ourselves holy and blameless before him in love, predestining us into childship through Jesus Christ unto him according to the good pleasure of his will, unto the praise of the glory of his grace with which he graced us in the Beloved.
In this one we have redemption through his blood, forgiveness of trespasses according to the wealth of his grace which he poured out in abundance on us in every wisdom and understanding. God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he set forth in him, unto the plan of the fullness of time to bring together all things in Christ – everything in the heavens and in the earth in him.
In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.
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