Ephesians 1:1-12
April 22, 2012
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing
in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of
the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for
adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure
of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us
in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us.
With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will,
according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the
fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things
on earth. 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.
Back
in 1991, I was given a great privilege—something I consider to have been a
great honor. I was asked by a young
woman named Ronda to listen to her for her 5th step. I don’t know if you understand what this
means. She was involved in a 12-Step
program as part of her recovery from alcohol addiction, and she wanted me to
listen to her confession as she completed the 5th step of the
12-step program she was working.
I
had gotten to know Ronda over the previous three years. She had been part of our youth group in the
church I was serving as an associate pastor.
Her attendance had been pretty steady when she was in the 10th
grade, but as she moved through her 11th and 12th grade
years it became spottier. In the fall of
her senior year, her parents spoke with me about their suspicions that she had
an addiction. Knowing that I had a
background as a drug and alcohol counselor, they wanted my help in figuring out
what to do about their daughter. I told
them what I’ve told others: that there
are no easy solutions until the addict recognizes the problem. I pointed out some things they could do to
ensure that they weren’t being co-dependent, encouraged them to become part of
Al-Anon (a program for families of addicts), and to prepare themselves for the
day when Ronda was ready to do something about her addiction.
In
many ways Ronda was just like many teens.
The drinking and drug culture was very much a part of the high schools
in 1989, just as they were when I was a teen in the 1970s, and just as they are
today. For many years teens have faced
significant pressure to party. Their
friends encourage them, saying, “Just try it.
It’s fun. Nothing bad will happen
to you. You’ll love it. You’ll feel so good.” Once the drinking starts, there is a lot of
fun, but that fun masks the dangers.
Abuse of alcohol, and especially addictions, slowly sap life out of
people. All that fun for those with a
predisposition to addiction has a price, and the price is the ripping apart of
families, friendships, and life.
Ronda
attended the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 1990, and her life quickly
fell apart. She immediately found the
partiers, but now, free of her parents, she was able to devote her full
attention to her addiction. Her grades
not only suffered. They barely
registered. She was losing everything,
and in the late fall of 1990, she admitted to her parents that she had an
addiction and needed help. They were ready.
Ronda went into rehab, and afterwards started attending Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings. Through AA she
started working the 12-Steps.
Most
of us have heard about the 12-Steps, but few who haven’t either worked them, or
haven’t been in a relationship with someone who has, understand what they
are. The 12-Steps are a brilliant
program that basically restores people to sanity through spirituality. They help the addict turn over her or his
life by looking for God, and then doing the work that allows God to lead her or
him to a better way of living. Here are
the 12-Steps, along with some commentary by me:
1. We admitted we were
powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a
Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn
our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
v These first three steps are very similar to the Christian idea of
“metanoia” or conversion. In the
Christian idea, we recognize the full extent of our sin, we recognize that
Christ wants to save us, and we turn ourselves over fully to Christ.
4. Made a searching and
fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to
ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. (We’ll
come back to this)
6. Were entirely ready to
have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove
our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons
we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such
people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
v This is a very difficult step. The
addict goes back to everyone whom they have hurt and basically ask forgiveness. Included in this is that we physically do
things to rectify the harm we’ve done in our past.
10. Continued to take personal
inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and
meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him,
praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our
affairs.
When
Ronda asked me to help her with the 5th step, she simply asked me to
sit and listen to her talk about her life.
She had done a deep exploration of everything she had done to hurt
herself or others through her addiction, and was willing to share it with God
and me. It is a real honor to listen to something like this, as painful as it
is. I’ve had the honor of participating
in a 5th step with 6 people over the past 20 years. Few of us, outside of working the 12-Steps,
would ever make this kind of searing confession to another. Ronda did, and it became the background for
dramatically transforming her life.
Do
you know what Ronda was really doing with the 12th steps? It has a connection with our passage for this
morning. She was doing the work she
needed to do to let God redeem her
life. She wasn’t waiting for some
miracle to take away the urge to drink.
Every once in a while I hear of people who say that they prayed for God
to take away the addiction, and “poof!” the desire to drink goes away. That’s not the way it is for the vast
majority of drug or alcohol addicts.
Most have to do hard work to get their lives back. They have to do very hard work to create a
space for God to enter into their lives.
Ronda
was painfully and actively changing her life, step-by-step, to create a whole
new life. And a large part of her
redemption was re-establishing a connection with God by, in a sense, “buying
back” her life.
I
don’t know if what I just said to you made much sense—that Ronda had to “buy
back” her life. It might not, but buying
back our lives is at the core of the Christian idea of redemption. The word “redemption,” which we typically
think of as meaning that we are lifted up and restored to life, actually has a
deeper meaning. It comes from the Latin
word “redimere,” which literally means “to buy back.” The original use of the word meant that when
we lose something we often have to buy it back.
For example, it was used in the ancient practice of slavery.
In
Roman times, people could be enslaved for one of two reasons. Either they were people conquered by the
Romans in a war and brought back to be slaves; or they were people who fell so
deeply into debt that they were made slaves.
Unlike the slaves of American history, slaves in the ancient world could
actually buy back their freedom, either through their family or tribe paying a
tribute to the slave owner, or through the slave actually earning money to buy
back his or her freedom.
Going
back 2000 years ago to the Jewish faith, and their understanding of life with
God, buying back through redemption was very much a part of their faith. The
ancient Jews (as well as the Greeks and Romans) understood life as having basic
economical principles. The Greek word
for economy was oikonomoor “oikonomos.”
The word wasn’t used the way we use it today. Traditionally oikonomos meant the “managing
of a household,” which typically was managed by a slave. If the slave managed the household well, he
could buy his freedom, but if he didn’t manage it well, he could lose his
life. For example, there was an incident
about the time of Jesus when Caesar Augustus was at the home of a wealthy man, who
had a pool in the middle of his dining room filled with electric eels. He kept it there as a reminder to his slaves
to be mistake-free. During dinner a
slave dropped a precious crystal wine goblet.
The master threw the slave into the pool of eels. Augustus was so appalled at this that he
commanded that the wealthy man himself be thrown into the pool.
Anyway,
the Jewish and Greek understanding of a relationship with God, or the gods, was
that if we managed the household of our lives poorly, and let it deteriorate or
fall apart, we lost it. To restore our
lives, we had to pay to get it back in shape.
In other words, God was not going to subsidize our lives freely. For both the ancient Jews, and the Greeks and
Romans, buying back life meant making temple sacrifices. Temple sacrifices were central to Jewish
life. Once a year every Jewish man and
woman was expected to go to the temple in Jerusalem and sacrifice a pure,
unblemished goat, lamb, or dove. That
would “buy back” her or his purity for a year.
But, of course, immediately the sin would accumulate, requiring another
redemption, or buy back, the following year.
Christianity
teaches that because this system of sacrifices was imperfect, and couldn’t lead
to permanent redemption, God wanted to get rid of the system forever. God wasn’t satisfied with these
sacrifices. God wanted a relationship
with us that got rid of the focus on sinfulness forever. So Jesus was a perfect sacrifice that
obliterated the need for temple sacrifice, whether it was Jewish, Greek, or
Roman sacrifice. In effect, Jesus’
sacrifice on the cross was the sacrifice of the perfect man. It was a sacrifice of God on the cross, who
permanently bought back our lives by being a willing sacrifice. There was a price that Jesus had to pay to be
the perfect sacrifice. He bought back
our lives with his faith, selflessness, love, and willingness to be killed for us.
He paid a price that we couldn’t afford, and his sacrifice ended the
sacrificial system for those willing to follow him. This is a redemption that lasts forever by
restoring our relationship with God from God’s side. That doesn’t mean that we don’t harm the
relationship from our side. There are
times when we need redemption in a practical sense, even if Jesus redeemed us
permanently in a salvation sense.
It’s
hard for us to truly understand this idea of sacrificial redemption because
we’ve never lived under a religious system where yearly sacrifices were
made. The ancient Jews, Greeks, and
Romans lived under this kind of system. They understood it in their bones. For converts to Christianity, this theology
of redemption made perfect sense because it meant they no longer had to live
under this sacrificial religious “economy.”
They were free because of Jesus’ sacrifice.
Just
as I said on Easter, that resurrection isn’t just about the cross, but about
how our lives can be resurrected, redemption isn’t just about Jesus paying the
price for our debt on the cross, but about how we also can “buy back” our lives
when we’ve damaged them. Despite the
understanding that Jesus has redeemed us from sin permanently in terms of God’s
role in our lives, that doesn’t mean that we don’t do things that harm our
lives and require redemption.
Whenever
we misuse or abuse our lives, there’s a price to pay to get our lives back in
order. God doesn’t want us to make an animal sacrifice. God wants us to make the kind of sacrifices
Ronda made in her life. God works on the
barter system, and wants actions from us that restore our lives. The prophet Micah spoke about this kind of
sacrifice more than 600 years before Jesus.
He recognized that the Jewish system of temple sacrifices really wasn’t
what God wanted. So Micah said to the people of his day, “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on
high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers
of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body
for the sin of my soul?” He has
told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to
do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Michah 6:6-8)
The word, “justice,” above really isn’t a good
translation of that word. We think of
justice as the law and just punishment.
For the Jews, justice meant a kind of “rightness.” It meant that we live rightly with others in
all ways: the rich care about the poor,
the king cares about the subjects and vice versa, we live in a right way
according to God’s law, etc… Micah was
saying, 650 years before Christ, that God doesn’t want a sacrifice of animals
to redeem our lives. The price God
requires is that we humble ourselves before God, recognizing that our lives
were unmanageable and that God wants a different way. God wants us to live in
kindness towards others so that we restore relationships with them. And God wants us to live in a kind of
rightness where everything fits together again.
Sounds a lot like the 12-Steps.
Let
me take all of this stuff I’ve been talking about and wrap it up for you. What the idea of redemption means is that it
doesn’t matter what happens in our lives—what we do or what is done to
us—redemption is always possible. God
always offers a new life to us, but we have to buy it back with how we
live. We can’t buy it back with money. We have to buy it back with rightness,
kindness, and mercy. Ronda bought her life back through this kind of hard work. We buy ours back through hard work of reaching
out for God, prayer, faith, sacrifice, and “rightness.” We can’t take shortcuts.
A
member of our church once told me about how he had to learn this lesson of no
shortcuts when he was in drug rehab. He
said that in the rehab center they had white lines painted on the floor, creating
a path that meandered through the facility.
To walk anywhere in the facility, you had to stay on the path between
the white lines. If you stepped out of
them, you could be kicked out of the program.
So, in going into the cafeteria, for example, you had to follow the
path, which entered the room, stayed along the wall, and took a circuitous
route to the food. It was teaching the
patients to take the right path, even if it was harder. They were learning redemption.
Keep
this idea locked away in your mind, heart, and soul for when you really need
it. Your life may not be in trouble
right now, but at some point it may end up in trouble because of choices you’ve
made or will make. When you get there, remember
that God is always there, waiting to redeem you. The question you have to answer is whether
you’re willing to do the work to be a part of that redemption? Are you willing to do the work of buying back
the way to a life with God?
Amen.
