"A Worthy Life"

August 5, 2012

Ephesians 4:1-16

¹I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ²with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, ⁵one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

⁷But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift. ⁸Therefore it is said, "When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people." ⁹(When it says, "He ascended", what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? ¹⁰He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) ¹¹The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, ¹²to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, ¹³until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. ¹⁴We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.

¹⁵But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, ¹⁶from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.

SERMON: “A Worthy Life”

As you know, I just returned from vacation in Texas, y’all, where I spent a lot of quality time with Tex-Mex food and my adorable nieces.  I call them The Interrogators because of their insatiable curiosity about everything, but for once I was the one doing the asking. 

“Girls, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Natalie’s response was immediate and decisive.  “I want to be a fairy mermaid princess with hair like Rapunzel.”  Ah.  Good choice.  Gianna (whom we call “Gigi”) took a bit longer to respond.  Finally, her face lit up with joyful clarity and she declared, “I want to be a rainbow pony!”  Excellent. 

Not understanding the (most likely erroneous) adult assumption that we are what we do, my nieces showed the wisdom that only children have, in understanding being as imaginative, whimsical and far beyond simply what fills our time. 

Whether we are four or eighty-four, when we question what we want to be, that is a question of vocation.   My shaky high school Latin has left me with the memory that this word for “call”, vocare.  You can’t call yourself, and so a vocation can never be discovered without God first calling.

But vocation is often confused with career.  They are not synonyms.  A person whose career is cleaning in janitorial services can have the vocation of being an exceptional Grandfather.  To understand the difference between the two, it’s helpful to dust off that Latin book once more.  (Last time I promise.)  “Career” also takes its root in a Latin word.  It means “chariot wheel ruts”, what we today would call, “race track,” or in a real stretch, Nascar.

Race track is a fitting descriptor for career much of the time.  Our career is what we do, running this way and that, trying to keep up with the hectic pace of life.  Our vocation is who we are.  Paul, or as often was the case, a protégé of Paul, writes to the Ephesians urging them to “live a life worthy of the calling to which they’ve been called.”  I imagine rainbow ponies and mermaid fairy princesses were not what he was referring to.

He goes into detail about varying callings, and it is tempting to simplify this text into a formula: select the category that describes you (a. apostles b. prophets c. pastors d. evangelists e. teachers f. none of the above?), add to that a willingness to serve for God’s glory and, there you have it, nice and neat: your calling.  Your vocation.  But with scripture, as with life, things are never as simple as they seem.  You see, there is a gaping flaw in our formula: it begins and ends with me.

This text spends a lot of energy speaking about God’s call as an act of community.  We are not the center of God’s call on our lives: God is.  We are not called in isolation where God places us above others for a task that only we can do.   We do not earn or possess our vocation: we ourselves are possessed by it.  We are called in and for relationship, and relationships are complicated.

And so the formula is replaced by a question: are we willing to imagine a new reality where the meaning of our lives is found, not in the race to succeed, but in the bewildering, persistent call of God?  Is it even possible for us to turn notions of success upside down and embrace the gifts God gives us to the extent that we seek unity and wholeness for the whole body above anything else?

If I’m honest with you, I don’t know if such a radical worldview is possible in a society that idolizes individualism and rewards greed with power.  I don’t know if such an idealistic understanding of the body of Christ can be reality when Christianity is often a battle for who can speak their opinion the loudest, instead of a transformative, diverse community who serves those who fall between the cracks of our world. 

But if there is any hope of discovering not just how to run the race of this only life we’re given, but how to really live it, that hope lies in sticking with one another.

Or as this letter puts it, “With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.”

These words are pretty.   Poetic, even.  The reality is extraordinarily demanding.  Following God’s call into radical unity and service, built up by love, means that each of us as individuals and all of us as a community, expand our vision and mission to embrace the other.

The body of Christ cannot be built up in love when its walls are clogged with the rubble of self-importance and ego, when pride and intolerance creep in like subtle but deadly weeds, fracturing the foundations of wholeness and unity.

The good news is, just as our calling is not about “me” but is about “us”, our calling isn’t centered around just “us”, it’s centered around the God who will never stop calling to us. 

Our calling is rooted in the One who spoke and light was, who called an entire people out of slavery to freedom and called a tired, older fellow to lead them.  Who called the prideful pietism of the religious elite what it was, hypocrisy, and who called those who followed back to a faith where difference was valued and not feared and where all were fed. 

We do not call ourselves, our Creator calls us.  We do not answer that calling alone, God’s Spirit breathes in us the power to change entire communities, to wake up from the stupor of racing through our lives in order to actually live them.  And, though we in the church will constantly fracture ourselves along political, theological, social or economic lines, that Calling Voice will gather us back once more, filling us with the only thing we need to be built together again: love.

Living into this reality of a loving, called community, not just with those who think, worship and look like us, requires great faith in the imaginative work of God.  Like my nieces imagining an entirely new being when they grow up, we have to let go of childish ways of “us and them” or of “it’s always been done this way” to embrace a childlike vocation, where unity is possible.  So, how do we live a life worthy of our calling?  Empowered by the Spirit, driven by our love for each other, we imagine it, and then we become it.  Amen.