Ephesians 5:10 said, “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” What does that mean? That’s easier said than done! It is fine to say to a little kid to be kind and loving to people. Share. Don’t be selfish. …all of the basic virtues we use in our society. But when you become an adult and shoulder adult responsibilities, life gets a lot more complicated! How are we to find out what is pleasing to the Lord? Too many things are gray. We often don’t begin to have clear enough information to go on.
I’m going to lay
out some depressing thoughts but hopefully they will get us to deeply
understand a verse that comes up later in what we read from Ephesians
today. And I think we’ll get some solid
things to go on about pleasing the Lord.
As you may remember, I spent last
week at Camp Lutherlyn in western Pennsylvania.
It was for a course I’m taking called Environment and Religion in
Northern Appalachia. Camp Lutherlyn was
founded shortly after World War 2. Since
then it has grown to 642 acres. It hosts
close to a thousand campers every summer.
It has year-round programming and a full time environmentalist on
staff. During the school year local
districts send their children on field trips for learning and team building. It’s an impressive place.
The environmental program there is
what I’d call a practical environmental program. They have high efficiency buildings. They try to conserve resources wherever
possible. Food waste and paper products from the dining hall are composted and
put on the gardens; which grow some of the food that is eaten. There is a high efficiency solar powered
house built from reused lumber, straw as walls and insulation, and plastered
with natural plasters and stucco.
Someone lives in it year round, but it is a display house and proof of
concept; again at a practical level.
From this description you could
reach the conclusion that Lutherlyn is a quaint model proving that faith,
environmental sensitivity, and kindness can lead us to a utopian society. But not so.
And that is a big part of why the class took place there.
Lutherlyn has an abandoned coal mine
on it that leaches toxic chemicals; which requires monitoring and
clean-up. No one knows how long. There are mines dug by the Romans that are
still leaching toxins thousands of years later.
There is also an abandoned oil well on Lutherlyn. Though the camp wants to preserve its forest
land and mature the trees for carbon sequestration, financial needs usually
requiring timbering off the mature trees every decade or so.
The camp has leases for its natural
gas rites. A gas well pad is located
immediately adjacent to the camp. It has
wells running several directions, including under the camp. Now the camp’s lease was not written by any
ignorant local. It was created by an
industry expert. But the well has
changed hands and the new owner violates the terms of the lease. So, despite the Bible’s discouragement of
lawsuits, the camp has had to sue the well’s current owner for breach of
contract. The well owner has more
lawyers than the camp and the camp can’t afford six figure legal fees to fight
them. So they reached a settlement deal
out of court; which largely undermines the originally well-written lease.
Ironically, next year the camp is
building a forty acre solar array right up against the gas well! I’d love to see an arial photograph of that
when it’s completed!
Here’s the place the camp is
in. Despite having great numbers of
summertime campers and year round programming; all of which brings in lots of
money, it is not always enough to cover the enormous costs of running the
camp. Should they save their trees and
fire the environmentalist? Should they
not have signed a lease for the gas rites, knowing full well that the gas under
the camp could be extracted anyway by just drilling wells nearby. So they’d get nothing? Should they cancel all the faith and environmental
education programs? Should they cancel
the school programs? Or should they
charge more for everything, which would price it out of the reach of many
people?
Try to find out what is pleasing to
the Lord. Quaint thought. Hard to put into practice when you consider
all the complications of the world!
Here’s where you may feel guilt, but
that is not my intent. We humans,
especially us in North America, are extracting enormous amounts of energy from
the earth – far more than can be sustained for all that long; even forgetting
things like climate change and environmental damage. Our lives, our devices, our cars, our homes,
our… just about everything about us, is an unsustainable mess.
Many in our society pride themselves
in being environmentally sensitive, but they don’t understand the whole
picture. They don’t consider the
extraction of resources half way around the world in order to make their phones
or build their cars. They don’t take
into account the decline of medicine, sanitation, communication, and the like
if our extraction of resources were to stop.
There is no good way out. Ephesians 5:16 which we read earlier said,
“…make the most of the time, because the days are evil.” It is easy to think of evil as something
obviously and destructively distinct from good.
Our politicians certainly like to paint that sort of scenario. But that is not the case. Evil does not come in the form of a man in a
red suit with a tail and carrying a pitch fork.
And evil does not come only in the form of obvious seduction, or overt
cruelty, or even a gradual slippery slope away from the good. Evil has many forms. Perhaps we need to include in those forms the
way it can twist its way in and through goodness such that it is impossible to
pull them apart. In Romans 7:21-25 St. Paul
writes, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil
lies close at hand. For I delight in the
law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with
the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that swells in my
members.”
If the “good old days” ever feel
simpler or better think again. If St.
Paul, writing almost 2000 years ago finds evil inextricably weaving itself into
everything good. He couldn’t escape it
no matter how hard he tried. And we
can’t either. Evil is just that tightly
woven into the good.
St. Paul continues, “Wretched man
that I am! Who will rescue me from the
body of death? Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord!”
There we have it. God alone.
When we start our worship services
with a confession and forgiveness it may be tempting to look back over the week
and think yourself a good person. I
certainly hope you can feel that way most weeks. And yet, even if you think you’ve been a
perfect angel, don’t deceive yourself.
Certainly try, try, try with all your might to be good. But if you fool yourself into thinking that
you have actually been perfectly good, then evil has got quite a strong hold on
you.
We do all things with a genuine
sense of humility knowing that it takes the power of God, and God’s power
alone, to truly separate us from evil.
So, we’ll end where we began. The line, “Try to find out what is pleasing
to the Lord.” That is indeed what we
do. Our only hope of accomplishing it is
through the genuine humility of knowing the inescapability of evil but that God
does do it. Notice the text does not
say, “Do what is pleasing to God.” Or,
“Know what is pleasing to God.” No, the
author of Ephesians knows full well the impossibility of our situation. “Try to find out what is pleasing to the
Lord.” It is a goal. It is a desire. It is a driving force.
Perhaps the best news is that God
does have the power to overcome evil.
When you try to do what is pleasing to the Lord, and evil makes it
inevitable appearance trying to undo your efforts, by your very attitude towards
it you are undoing evil.
Evil likes surety and simple answers
and absolutes. That is where it
thrives. Those are all easy
answers. What is pleasing to God is not always
clear, but it is in the striving that God does conquer evil through us.
Let me end be rereading the final
line of our text: “Give thanks to God the Father at all times and for
everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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