In your worship bulletin is a blank sheet of white paper. Here is your task for it. You are to pull it out and fold it into the paper airplane design of your choice. I’ll give you four minutes to fold it. If you have forgotten how to fold a paper airplane, or you want some help, you may ask someone else to help you. You have four minutes to fold the airplane. Also, within those four minutes you can write on it or decorate it any way you’d like.
To help you know how to design your airplane I’m going to tell what you’re going to do with it. After four minutes are up, you’re going to throw your paper airplane into this big plastic bowl that I’m going to put up front. You can stay in your seat and throw it from there. Or, you can come up here to this line, which is 12 feet back, and throw it from there. You are allowed a couple test throws to see how it flies. But once you get ready to throw it in the bowl, you get one and only one shot. If you make it in that one shot, great! If you don’t, you’re out of luck.
(4 minutes later)
Are you ready with your paper airplanes? Are you ready to try throwing them in the bowl?
I’ve decided to change the rules on you. Instead of the bowl being 12 away and you have to hit it, I’m going to attach a string to the bowl and let one of the children drag it around through the aisles. He or she can drag it fast or slow, and he or she may determine where to go. The bowl may or may not come back your aisle. You’ll just have to see.
(select a child to pull the bowl)
Ready? Go!
(after a few minutes)
How’d you do? How did it feel to have the rules changed on you midway? You may or may not have changed your design. And was it fair?
The blank unfolded piece of paper is your life. You get it clean and blank. It’s smooth. It’s perfect. But you can’t just go through life as a blank piece of paper. Folding the paper airplane was you shaping yourself the way you wanted, but still shaping yourself into something useful. The bowl represented success, or being successful – whatever that may mean. Being successful for you may mean, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” Or, whoever is the wealthiest or most prestigious. Perhaps it is having a large and successful family. Perhaps “success” is living in a way that you get to go to heaven when you die.
But I changed the rules on you at a crucial point. You shaped your airplane and then the goal changed. What it took to be successful changed. It became unpredictable, and even chaotic. What were you to do? How were you to know? It was no longer under your control. Yet you only get one shot at it, because life doesn’t really allow for do-overs.
I wanted us to do this exercise because, while all images have flaws, it’s somewhat of an approximation of life in our culture today. The bowl moving is a lot like the fluidity of our culture’s current morality. What is right? What is wrong? What is a virtue? What is a vice? Things that were completely unacceptable not that long ago are now considered perfectly fine, if not celebrated. And things considered virtues are now laughable or forbidden.
If your employer requires you to have gender justice training, or anti-racism training, or anti-implicit bias training you’ve probably been offended. Perhaps you were smart enough to sit there quietly biting your lip as the foundations of your morality are questioned and condemned. Bring up something about Christian faith and ethics and be prepared to be labeled a racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-science, judgmental, hypocritical, a misogynist, a prude, a patriarchist, or something else.
Our society is, at least in my opinion, a moral cesspool. And while many will call it “enlightenment” I call it this ever-shifting morality the relativism necessary to excuse the endless craving people have for more stuff.
When I say “moral cesspool” I am not making a reference to sexuality. You may include that if you want, but you don’t have to. We humans who are alive in the developed world today are consuming gluttonous amounts of energy in our lives. We want comforts, conveniences, and entertainment. We want everything to be easy. What many call a hardship today a century ago would have been called a mere inconvenience, or life as usual.
We call things “progress” but we are really just consuming more. We live lives divorced from reality. The only way to consume more is to change the morality.
I long to hear a presidential candidate give a speech about honesty and humility, about conscientiousness, about greed avoidance, about being satisfied with less, about agreeableness, about delayed gratification, about working harder. These are things I brought up a few weeks ago when we looked at Ecclesiastes and its recommendation that all take satisfaction in toil and hard work.
All of this is a very long introduction to the book of Ephesians. We read only the first 14 verses. They are the greeting and the thanksgiving portions of the letter. Ephesians gives us a solid foundation to build upon. It tells us how to fold the paper airplanes of our lives. It gives us solid ground for our morality. And if getting the airplane in the bowl means going to heaven, it tells us how that happens too.
The letter starts off with who its from and to – from Paul to the saints in Ephesus who are faithful in Christ Jesus.
Then what? What is the opening of verse 2?
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
These may sound like throw away words. Words like when you ask someone, “How are you doing?” Or wish them a happy Labor Day. But they are not throw away words.
The first word is fundamental to everything that follows in Ephesians. “Grace”… unmerited favor from God. And then “peace” from God. Grace and peace. This means God’s favor and God’s peace; from God to them. It is saying that they are in right relationship with God. It is not their doing. It is God’s doing.
Let’s have our helper who pulled the bowl around earlier get the bowl again. We have paper airplanes laying all over the place. If we consider “success” in life to be living in right relationship then watch what happens. Now I’d like our helper to be God here. God goes around and putting in the airplanes. It doesn’t matter if your design and construction were good. It doesn’t matter if your throw was good. You’re getting into the bowl by God’s work. It is not your own. That is grace.
That is the foundation of our Christian faith. That is what we build everything upon. You’re in. You’re successful. God has made it so! So now what? What are you going to do? How are you going to move forward in life? The remaining verses of what we read today start to open that up. We’ll return to it in more detail and with a greater answer next week when we read the next verses. But we spend a couple minutes with these.
Verses 5 and following say, “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.”
Grace, grace, and more grace. We have to always remember that when reading Ephesians.
Let’s read a couple more verses to the core of this text, “With all wisdom and insight he had 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…”
That may make us scratch our heads. What does that mean? How are we supposed to know God’s will? What is this plan for the fullness of time?
Don’t make it harder than it is. You know the mystery. You know the plan fully already. Ephesians has just reminded us of it. God’s plan is the redemption of the world through the death of Jesus. That is the plan for the fullness of time. We are reminded that God has had this plan from the beginning of time. And God will surely bring it to completion.
We’ll learn about how we participate in that plan in the verse we read next week. For here, the point is that God has this. God’s in charge. God knows. And God is moving things forward exactly as God wants things to go.
Do the ways of society and the world make sense to us? Do we know where they are going? I doubt it. But we do not ultimately worry about that. God is taking the creation forward into its conclusion.
While I certainly encourage you to care about the upcoming political elections (and please pay attention to a lot more than just the presidential race), ultimately nothing can happen that will derail God’s plan. Ephesians wants us to live and move in confidence.
We are “in the bowl” of success. God has put us there. No one can take us out. We do have work to do in God’s kingdom. We do not become lax or lazy. But we do live with bold confidence that all is secure. All is well. All is in God.
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