Following last week’s unique grocery shopping church service, this was another special Sunday as both of the congregations I serve gathered along with our United Methodist neighbors for a shared worship in the park in Port Washington. This is the second joint worship in the park service I’ve led here, following Jonah’s baptism service last summer. This service included a presentation (but not a video since I couldn’t figure out how to show it outside) from last month’s Lighthouse Youth Ministry summer service trip to Madison.
The texts for this week are John 6:51-58 (the lectionary Gospel for this Sunday) and Ephesians 2:1-10 (since verse 10 was our mission trip theme). A portion of the conclusion is adapted from my 2018 sermon on communion forming community on these texts. No video livestream or podcast since we were outside.
Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and our risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen
Some of the Lutherans are probably sick of me talking about this, but for much of the summer, I’ve been focusing on our call to be together, how Jesus calls his followers to recognize that we are created together, which is a very different message than we hear from our world.
Especially in the midst of an election season, there are so many messages out there trying to divide us, trying to tell us how angry we should be at those fools on the other side, and that’s not Jesus’ message.
We can disagree on policies and the most effective ways to love our neighbors, we can prioritize things differently, we can support various political candidates, but as followers of Jesus, we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, because they bear the image of God just like us. We are called to work together for justice for all, serving together in Jesus’ name, reflecting the love we’ve received from God.
In some ways that’s a naively optimistic message, but it’s what we’re trying to live out as God’s people, and I think this service is one of the ways we do that.
We have people here this morning covering about a 90 year age span, maybe more, we have newcomers to this community and people who’ve spent decades here, people of different genders, different worship preferences, different political parties, and different churches, and we’ve all gathered today to worship together and be community together. So, thank you for coming this morning, and I’m so glad we can worship God together.
In this morning’s reading from Ephesians, I think Paul does a great job of laying out simply and plainly why it is we worship, what God has done for us.
Paul begins by laying out the problem. He only spends a couple sentences on it, because generally, we have a pretty good idea of our situation. “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world.”
Trespasses and sins are good church words, right? We use those words every week in church—and by the way, we’re going to say trespasses in the Lord’s prayer this morning, since Christ the King printed the bulletin. You can say sins if you want, it’s fine.—They’re both good church words, but if you’re not regularly in church, they can sound a bit strange.
Usually words like sin get pulled out when we Christians want to point out someone else’s sins, the ways they’ve gone wrong. We confess our sins in worship like we did a few minutes ago, but that’s not how most people outside church experience the idea of sin.
Usually it feels like pointing out how broken others are. We can all come up with lists of our favorite sins to condemn and judge.
But that’s not quite what Paul’s talking about in this letter. Instead, he defines sin as basically selfishness. He talks about how we all once lived “in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.”
On our own, we decide what to do based on what feels good. Martin Luther talks about sin as being “curved in” on ourselves, taking what God gives us and using it for our own glory, our own pleasures.
And sin is not just something other people do; it’s all of us. It’s our fallen, human nature. John Wesley said, “We learn, concerning man in his natural state, unassisted by the grace of God, that ‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is’ still ‘evil, only evil,’ and that ‘continually.’”
Our selfishness, our curved-in-on-ourselves nature, our evil imagination leads to all sorts of problems in the world. Hunger, violence, war, discrimination, even on a wider scope many of the environmental problems and sicknesses we experience are consequences of human selfishness and sin. Not just someone else’s sin, but our sin. Humanity’s sin.
This world is broken because we don’t live as who we were created to be, because we reject God’s path, we reject the life found in God and instead try to find life inside ourselves.
And then we get to the key, verse 4, right in the middle of that reading. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses.” The God who created you, the God whose image we all bear, the God who we have rejected in favor of being our own gods, God loves you too much to give up on you.
Even when we were dead through our trespasses, even when we were stuck insisting on going our own way hoping somehow we’d find everlasting life in the temporary pleasures of this world, God refused to give up on us. God made us alive together with Christ.
God came to do what we couldn’t. We cannot by our own strength or will overcome our sin. We can’t get there by trying harder or by doing a bit more; we can’t get rid of our selfishness to nature to love God with our whole hearts and love our neighbor as ourselves. But God can change our nature. God has the power to give you new life.
And that’s what God has done. By grace you have been saved through faith. No matter what you’ve done in the past, or what’s been done to you.
This is God’s gift: You are set free from living only for yourself. You are set free to love your neighbors and work for justice. You are set free for a different path than this world offers, forgiven and released from shame and guilt and condemnation. You are given eternal life, not just in heaven, but here and now and continuing forever, eternal life in Jesus Christ.
This is the gospel. This is the good news. And this is what God always intended. By Jesus’ love for you, you are set free to be who you were created to be in the first place.
Paul ends this section by saying, “For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
That was our theme verse for the Lighthouse service trip a few weeks ago. You’ll hear more about it in a minute, but the trip was another great example of us coming together. Between our seven youth, we had six churches represented, including all five Lighthouse churches.
All week, our focus was exploring who God has created us to be. We are created to be free, free from the power of sin by the grace of God, created to be authentic, knowing we are loved by God as we are and that we don’t need to live up to some impossible standard to receive God’s love.
Created to be brave, because when we know that God has freed us from the power of death, we are free to live out our faith in this life, speaking out against injustice, working for peace in the face of brokenness. We are created to serve our neighbors, to do good in this world.
Our freedom comes from Jesus, who gave himself for us. We gather as God’s people to be nourished by our savior who said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”
That’s not cannibalism, although if you keep reading like we will next week, some people thought it sounded a little too close to that, but it’s an invitation for us to receive life—real life, eternal life— from Jesus.
Following Jesus is the opposite of following ourselves, the opposite of our human selfish sin. Sin is looking for life in ourselves; but Jesus invites us to turn to him as our source of eternal life. The one who eats this bread will live forever.
It’s not about the literal piece of bread we’ll eat; it’s about the presence of Jesus, who promises to be with us in this meal.
Sharing Jesus’ body and blood, which is present in, with, and under the ordinary stuff of bread and wine and grape juice, this sharing joins us together as God’s people.
We eat Christ’s body and we become Christ’s body, made one in God’s Holy Spirit, sharing in the life God offers.
Jesus the host and bread invites you to the meal, a foretaste of the feast to come, a preview of the heavenly banquet for which you were created. It’s not because you’ve earned a ticket or paid for a reservation; it’s because God loves you. It’s a gift of grace. This is why we are gathered here to give thanks, for God who is rich in mercy has chosen to love you.
Then, fed and nourished by God’s grace at the Lord’s table, trusting in what God has done for you, go forth to be who you were created to be, God’s work of art, God’s beloved children, the body of Christ.
May we be known by our love for our neighbors, reflecting the image of God. Amen