As you almost certainly know, the Bills play their opening game this afternoon. Football is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, culture-wide thing in our nation. Even if you don’t care about football at all, about the only thing there is more conversation about is the upcoming election.
I wonder if football will hold its prominence for years to come? I wonder what it will be like, say, 50 years from now. Will there be the same fervor? Will it be stronger? Will it be weaker? And centuries from now I wonder how anthropologists, and possibly archeologists, will describe the football of today. What will make sense? What won’t?
I sometimes wonder how they will interpret the “Bills Mafia”? I think we all know what that means. But will someone understand it decades or centuries from now? Will they think that instead of it referring to loyal fans, will think it is some sort of a regional violent organized crime ring? It is the “mafia” after all! I can see the doctoral dissertations now contemplating the connections between sports, huge expensive stadiums, politics, and organized crime!
This is an example of why things need to be kept in context. Pull the Bills Mafia out of context and you quickly end up with absurdity. And yet, ignore the excitement around football and enthusiastic football fans and you’re missing a big piece of our culture today.
When we read the Bible we need to remember that we are reading just an excerpt from a complex society a couple millennia ago. While they certainly didn’t have the Bills Mafia, there were certainly major regional cultural dynamics that were just for fun. Just like today, society was a complex mix of: politics, economics, theology, science, and geography. What appears confusing our complex to us may have been very clear then.
One thing that may be very confusing for us today is one particular line from Ephesians in our Bible readings. What does it mean when it says, “…following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient”? It sounds sinister, evil, demonic. But is that so? Is the Bills Mafia a violent organized crime ring?
It's impossible to exactly know what the power of the air is. But it is helpful to remember the scientific understanding of that day; which wasn’t as ignorant as we might think. Remember, most educated people knew things like the earth was a sphere. Mostly they lacked the sophisticated testing equipment of today.
In those days they didn’t have the Periodic Table of Elements that you probably had to use in chemistry class. They believed there were only four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.
Air was particularly complex because it could be contaminated so easily. It was chaotic. When there was a rain storm the air was also conveying water. When there was a dust storm the air was carrying earth. Thunder storms that caused tornadoes were a chaotic and dangerous jumble of earth, air, water, and fire.
Despite knowing the earth was a sphere, they lived in what they thought was a three-fold universe. Hell was literally down in the ground. Living people lived on the surface. Up and high were the sun, moon, planets, and stars. They were the heavens.
When you combine the way the air could be a chaotic mix you start to understand how they saw the air as a murky polluted region between the earth and heaven. It wasn’t necessarily bad. It just couldn’t be guaranteed to be either good or bad.
Again, we can’t be absolutely certain of this, but the ruler of the power of the air was something that was unknown, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. If you are living in a world where you have to work hard to survive, and you die because of either warfare, disease, or the breakdown of your body because of the intensity of labor needed to stay alive, you don’t want unpredictable and uncontrollable. You want stability!
There is no way to pin down the meaning of the next verse, “All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.” Scholars debate that one a lot. What they all agree on is that is was chaos and instability.
That, then, is in contrast to what comes next: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…”
However you understand the ruler of the power of the air, those in Christ have been elevated to the heavenly places. That does not mean that you have actually gone to heaven before you die. There is too much wrong in our world to call it heaven! But it does mean that despite living in this chaos, our ultimate place is a place of stability and surety. We live now with that surety.
If in the chaos of this life you have created for yourself a place of surety…, well…, it isn’t all that sure. It is pretty precarious. It’s the false security of wealth. And if in the chaos of this life you have not created for yourself a place of surety, then you need not worry. You are alive together with Christ and that is the ultimate place of surety. Whether you have created a life of surety for yourself here and now or not, the task before us is the same.
The perennial weakness of Lutheran theology is that inadvertently creates laziness. Lutheran theology is built on Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
The problem with that is that we humans tend to be opportunists. We think, “If I don’t have to work for my salvation, and if I don’t have to work to prove my worthiness to God, then I don’t have to do anything. I’ll just sit back and enjoy this life to the fullest. Then after I die I’ll get the benefits of heaven too.” It’s a win-win situation for us! It promotes laziness.
The author of Ephesians will have none of that. Almost as if he knew laziness was going to be what happens, we get the very next verse, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
So, we may be saved by grace though faith, but we are created for good works. They are the way of life prepared by God beforehand for our way of life.
If you’re prone to laziness you’re huffing in disgust at this news. The way of life God has prepared for us is a life of work.
If there’s anything we humans don’t like it’s work. We want to do the minimal amount possible yet still get the most benefit. The idea of reducing work is the heart of innovation and efficiency. Why should I push hard to slide a heavy object when I can put it on a roller? Or why should I push on an object on a roller when I can put it on a cart with wheels. And why should I push on a cart with wheels when I can invent something that will propel the wheels for me?
The work God prepared beforehand for our way of life is not meant to undermine our inventiveness. To the contrary. God gave us brains to use them to make the work better.
The good works God has in mind is a direction of our lives that is focused outside of ourselves. Yes, we are to work to earn our keep. But we are also to work for the betterment of our community. The ruler of the powers of the air – whatever that may be – will always be creating chaos and uncertainty. We, who are solidly with Christ, work to create order and solidness in this world.
Life is not about leisure. Life is about applying your skills to the world around you. It is about developing your skills more fully for the world around you. That goes for a strapping teenage boy who is all muscle and energy, and it goes for an elderly woman in a nursing home whose frail body is failing.
Use what you have. Think, stretch your limits, grow, and use that for the world in which you live.
It is my opinion, admittedly not backed by lots of research, that the biggest reason why so many people in our world today are struggling to find themselves is because they do not have meaningful work to do. Meaningful work does not mean highly paid work, or even paid work at all. Meaningful work is a life orientation of commitment of your energy away from yourself and instead directed to the world around you.
That is the honor and the dignity and the purpose God has given you. While we certainly need to take breaks, and we need to do fun things too, work is what fulfills us.
Today is God’s Work Our Hands Sunday. We have some work projects planned. The weather is probably thwarting them. But we will do them when we can. It is our privilege to work for God.
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