How You Live

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Ordinary 20B

Text: Ephesians 5:15-20

Theme: Living as if your faith mattered

“15 Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, 16 making the most of the time, because the days are evil. 17 So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. 18 Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, 19 as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, 20 giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

At some point in everyone’s life -- and I do believe this happens to everyone -- we are confronted with the choice to believe that there is something more to life than just what we can see, hear, taste, feel and smell. There is a yearning that raises it’s head and calls out for that which is at that point unknown, and that yearning is straining to hear a reply to it’s call.

If one is in an environment that lends itself to allowing that reply to be heard, it can be the beginning of a beautiful journey of discovery - of both one’s self and of that which is outside of one’s self. In other words, a growing realization that to be truly connected to the material, physical world, one must also be connected to the immaterial, metaphysical world. It is a growing understanding that the two were never meant to be separated - to be divided, to be at odds, at war, in competition.

We live in a world that -- at least since the fall of humanity -- has consciously or subconsciously chosen on the whole to ignore the transcendent aspects of existence for those more immediate, but much more impermanent aspects of existence. That would rather overwhelm the senses with that which can ONLY be seen, heard, tasted, felt, and smelled to the detriment of those other aspects of the universe that are experienced on what would almost seem to be another plane of existence.

Facing the possibility that none of this faith-stuff is real can be -- and IS -- just such a moment. For one who was raised with no memory of life apart from the presence and the influence of faith, having to face that question head on was both a thrill and a terror. It was a thrill because that act of questioning, that act of stepping into the mental/spiritual discussion with what I now understand and choose to call the Holy Spirit, and not knowing how that conversation would wind up - whether with me walking away from all matters spiritual or possibly ending up in a tradition far removed from that in which I was raised - gave me a stake in the outcome that I had never had before -- not that I never recognized the importance of faith, but that I had never gone through the spiritual exercise to own my own faith. This conversation was the closest I was going to come to the experience of someone who had never been exposed to the Gospel, never heard of Jesus, never read the stories of the faith or heard the hymns and songs of the faith that reach down and ‘GET YOU‘ right ... right ... THERE.

It was a terror for the same exact reasons. The prospect of leaving all that had to one degree or another, even absent the ownership I was looking for, been so integral a part of my formation up to that point in my life was ... breathtaking in the WORST way -- I literally found it hard to draw breath when I thought of the possibility that I might come out the other end with a caustic attitude towards all matters of faith.

For a time I had intentionally marginalized myself from active involvement and participation in the life of a community of faith -- a church. I had gone for all my life meeting the expectations that I perceived others had of me as the son of missionaries, so my first step in ... stepping out ... was to actually, physically DO that ... distance myself from the familiar Sunday routine of getting up, getting ready, and going to Sunday morning Bible Study and Worship. To be honest, that ended up meeting with somewhat mixed results ... there were times when I would go for a couple of weeks or maybe three, where I would not find myself in a gathered community to worship ... but it never became the norm. It was always the exception. There was too much of a habit ingrained in me to get up and go on Sunday mornings for me to feel comfortable NOT doing it.

What ended up happening was that I would go to worship and the conversation would be going on in my head as I was preparing to go, as I arrived, as I interacted with the people that were there, and as I went through the motions - the prayers, the bowed head, the standing and singing, the listening to the readings and the messages.

Ultimately, the question that all the angst boiled down to was “is God real, does God exist?”. I had to answer for myself the question of whether or not I believed in the existence of God. At that point, having taken philosophy of religion classes, I was already somewhat familiar with the different arguments for the existence of God, such as Pascal’s Wager (if God exists, then to live as though he does results in infinite rewards; if he doesn’t, you have lost little or nothing, etc), The Ontological (because we can conceive of a God that exists, God must exist), Cosmological (the first cause/purpose argument), Teleological (i.e. the argument from design), and the Moral Arguments (knowing right from wrong implies there is an ultimate authority), and The Argument from Religious Experience. While some of them were persuasive, none of them really sealed the case for me. It ultimately came down to a decision about whether or not faith was going to matter to me.

Is the proposition that God exists, and that in that existence God chose to come to this plane of existence in the form of a human so outlandish an idea as to be rejected outright for it’s basic outrageousness? I think what finally swayed me was what Paul called the foolishness of the Gospel. That it is counterintuitive -- it flies in the face of so-called “common sense” to believe that ... and BECAUSE of that, because I had experienced and seen what the wisdom of man ended up producing ... I’m not saying humanity isn’t capable of doing some wonderful things, we ARE ... but there are basic, critical things, like world peace, hunger, poverty, that we are CAPABLE of addressing but cannot successfully for a whole list of reasons that we really would rather not talk about ... because they show us that we are really not all that advanced as we would like to believe.

So why have I taken up so much time talking about my wrestling with the decision of whether or not to believe and pulled up all this religious philosophy stuff? Because I’ve also discovered that this is a question that needs to be revisited -- sometimes often -- to keep in the front of our minds how we are to deal with a world that is -- sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously -- asking itself the same questions.

Paul’s entreaty to the Ephesians to be careful how they lived -- as wise, not unwise people -- and to make the most of their time, brought together two cultural streams. His reference to living wisely drew from the Hebrew concept of wisdom, which is more an attitude towards life, and not a knowledge-based concept. And his reference to making the most of the time they had was a Greek economic term - it literally means a snapping up of all the opportunities that are available -- picture a marketplace, and a customer is faced with multitudes of REALLY good bargains ... a first century equivalent of a clearance rack or shelf. He says clearly, don’t occupy yourself with foolishness, with things that don’t matter in the long run, that are so much fluff, but find out and DO what God wants you to do!

A friend joked about that next verse - don’t be drunk with wine, but if your beverage of choice is beer or vodka, you’re off the hook ... :-)

Seriously, Paul is both closing the argument of the previous statement as well as setting up the next statement he makes. Drunkenness - and daily drunkenness -- was literally a way of life at the time. Think of how hard it was to just get through the day in the first century ... not that I’m excusing the practice, but on some level, it would seem to make sense to escape the harshness of living by drinking yourself into a stupor each night. It was even an expected part of the rituals for the multitude of gods that were worshipped in the Greco-Roman world. So for this new, upstart group to come along and say that they were no longer going to be involved in the daily ritual of drinking your supper, but were rather going to engage in helping out the widow down the street, or the orphans around the corner, or the beggar that always sat at the city gates ... it just went against the NORM ...

Paul’s suggestion that, instead of being full of wine, Christ’s followers should be more about seeking the fullness which the Spirit gives is pointing them in the direction that will engage them in the worship that WILL fill their lives, that WILL draw them closer to God, that WILL fill them.

I hope we’ve all had that experience -- of hearing a song, or singing a song that brings a knot to our throat and a tear to our eye. One that we just throw back our head and sing long and hard because it is SO where we are at THAT PARTICULAR moment ...

That is the spirit moving ... that is God drawing close, tuning our hearts and singing along with us ... and molding and making us into his beloved children.

Let’s pray.