A Fourth Church Sermon by Joyce Shin

September 2, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Sermon on Ephesians 4:1-6

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 86:1–12
Ephesians 4:1–6

There is one body and one Spirit,
just as you were call to the one hope of your calling,
one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.

Ephesians 4:4–6

In May the church celebrated Pentecost. Reading from the book of Acts on Pentecost Sunday, we remember the birth of the church. We recount the story of how the Holy Spirit descends upon the followers of Christ, giving them a mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.

During the month of September, we begin a new church programming year, living out together the mission that we have inherited from those Christians who lived so long ago and so far away. That the gospel reached us truly amazes me. Despite all the rejections, twists, and perversions the gospel has endured throughout its history, somehow it has made its way into our lives and deep into our hearts. What a gift.

The letter of Ephesians celebrates this gift. Perhaps more than any other letter in the New Testament, this letter celebrates the life of the church, the church’s calling, its God-given purpose. Written most likely after Paul’s ministry ended, the letter nevertheless carries forward the spirit of Paul’s missionary purpose and establishes it as the reason for the church’s existence. Paul understood himself to be an apostle to the Gentiles. He grounded his mission upon his radical insight into the will of God: that in Christ there is no longer Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. In Paul’s world, each contrasting pair was universally comprehensive. If you weren’t a Jew, you were Greek. If you weren’t a slave, you were free. If you weren’t a male, you were female. Paul saw that in Christ, God was revealing the universality of God’s plan to reconcile all peoples, not only with God himself but also with each other. The letter of Ephesians, written most likely by a disciple of Paul, understands the church as having come into existence for this universal purpose. Listen again to Ephesians 4:4–6.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

The church exists for a purpose. That purpose is for us to become one. Not one among many, but one humanity under God. As Christians, we have a universal calling, because we worship a God from whom, as is written in the letter of Ephesians, “every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.”

We live in a time when we hear more about diversity than we do about unity. This is understandable given that we are encountering a greater degree of cultural and religious pluralism today than we have ever seen before. Describing this country’s new religious diversity in the book A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation, author Diana Eck paints this religious landscape:

The huge white dome of a mosque with its minarets rises from the cornfields just outside Toledo, Ohio. You can see it as you drive by on the interstate highway. A great Hindu temple with elephants carved in relief at the doorway stands on a hillside in the western suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee. A Cambodian Buddhist temple and monastery with a hint of a Southeast Asian roofline is set in the farmlands south of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In suburban Fremont, California, flags fly from the golden domes of a new Sikh gurdwara on Hillside Terrace, now renamed Gurdwara Road.

Whereas not too long ago it seemed that most people unconsciously assumed that Americans were Christians, today Americans are becoming consciously aware of religious communities different from their own.

In addition to our more frequent encounters with different religious groups, we also hear in the news about the threat of globalization to communities that want to maintain their traditional practices and cultures. Some argue that we need to preserve the diversity of the world’s cultures by protecting traditional cultures from homogenizing market forces that will make available the products of one culture to everyone everywhere.

I began to think about this issue more concretely last summer when I spent some time in rural France. About a week before returning home, I remembered that I needed to find a few gifts to give to my mother, my sister, good friends. So on market day, I walked to the center of town, looking for something small that would convey the experience I had in France. Other than some of the cheeses and dried slices of horse meat, which fascinated me, I couldn’t find anything that I wouldn’t also be able to find in a store here or in a mall somewhere else. So I returned home empty handed and feeling a bit sad. I remember telling my husband, “It’s too bad that even though we can find all these products at home, we can’t recreate this whole experience in Chicago.” Of course, that would be impossible. Everything from the climate, vegetation, and food to the hues, architecture, and pace of the place seemed to fit together so organically that if one element were taken out of the equation, or another added, the organic unity that we found so peaceful and restful would most certainly be lost.

Having traveled to other countries, I have observed an amazing diversity of cultures, some of which seemed at the time to be self-contained worlds. This was, of course, an illusion. None of these cultures developed in a vacuum. They have interacted with and been shaped by the world’s geopolitics, economy, labor market, and energy supply. Even though all of us are familiar with this reality, we still appreciate the illusion. There is something comforting, attractive and seductive about a scene in which everything fits together harmoniously, in which all the parts together create an internally unified picture. We might even say that there is something beautiful about it.

But beauty, we know, depends on the perspective from which we are looking. Something that appears to be beautiful from one perspective may appear grotesque from another. Up close we see things differently than we see them from far away. An insider’s view is rarely the same as an outsider’s view. So something that looks unified and coherent from one perspective may look arbitrary or ugly from another perspective.

Writing during the eighteenth century, American theologian Jonathan Edwards responded to people who held views about beauty and unity that he thought were overall too simple. Beauty and unity, he argued, are complex, especially when we try to see something from the divine perspective. It would be impossible for human beings to see and appreciate the complex beauty of even the simplest single thing as God would, because we do not have the perspective of God who can see a thing from far and near and in relationship to everything else.

Yet as Christians we are called to seek unity—not the unity of a self-contained society, but rather a unity on a much grander scale. We are to seek a universal unity worthy of the God we worship: the one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. Given our limited view of things, though, we can’t depend on our own perspectives from above and below.

We have to depend instead on love. Like Paul who in 1 Corinthians 13 wrote that love is the highest of all virtues, the author of Ephesians stresses the priority and necessity of love. Throughout the letter, he repeatedly exhorts listeners to live in love.

For the church, whose reason for existing is to unite all of humanity, love is the only means by which the church can survive. Love is not fearful of difference. Love does not force anyone to conform. In love, we are free—free to be united, and in that union we are transformed into a new creation. That’s what we hope happens whenever two people choose to get married. We hope that in love the couple is free to become a new creation, no longer as they once were but rather united in marriage.

If the church sought unity in some way other than love, I don’t believe that you and I would be here at church worshiping this morning. I don’t believe that the gospel could endure for 2,000 years, be transmitted into almost every spoken language, and take root in the hearts of so many people in different social and cultural settings, if it lacked a spirit of love.

As long as the church’s uniting principle is love, the church doesn’t need to feel threatened by religious and cultural diversity. Being church has always required continuous reengagement with a diverse world. Transforming both itself and the world through continual interaction, the church is able to survive and to thrive. The real threat to the church’s existence arises from our own tendency to be satisfied with some simple unity and our resulting failure to reengage the world around us.

Now is an exciting time to be Christians in America. Given the religious and cultural diversity of American society, we have opportunities that we never had before, opportunities to engage in loving relationships with individuals and communities we never knew before. With each new relationship that we form, we might even be able to increase the complex unity and beauty of God’s world.

In the next couple of weeks, as the new church programming year begins, the occasions to be church will multiply. Join in! Not simply so that you can find a place to fit in, but so that together we can be true to our calling as a church, exercising our hearts in a ministry of love for all God’s people.