Do's and Don'ts!

 Do's and Don'ts


11 August 2024

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

A few years ago, SBS ran a series of short films on the seven deadly sins-one each on anger, sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, greed and pride.  But they weren’t quite what you'd expect. The overall message, in so far as there was one, seemed to be that it is a matter of good mental health to get these things out of our system. A healthy angry outburst, for example, makes more sense than bottling it up and getting an ulcer. The film on gluttony dwelt in loving detail on the unimaginably varied appetites of its main character in a celebration of passion and pleasure until he finally ate himself into an early grave. Every film had a twist in the tale, but even as they came unstuck the characters just seemed to be doing what the rest of us secretly long to do but don't dare. Envy drove its protagonist into a lifestyle the rest of us could only-well-envy. The film on lust suggested a healthy dose of libido was not just useful but essential.  The film on pride seemed to suggest that it's impossible to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys. In fact pride got a really good rap, the film portraying it almost as the primary modern virtue of assertiveness and self-esteem. Well, it was all good fun.

But, what's with the lists of dos and don'ts in the New Testament? Especially in Ephesians, which up until now has followed St Paul's line that the law of the Torah with all its do’s and don’ts had failed rather miserably in keeping human beings in right relation with God. No more arbitrary and legalistic dos and don’ts, St Paul wrote to the church in Rome, from now on it's about living in Christ. Many New Testament scholars suggest that Ephesians, written most likely not by Paul himself but by a church leader a generation or so later, comes at a time when the original radical Christian message of unearned grace and forgiveness had started to lose its shock value. The church had settled in for the long haul, Christians were leading ordinary middle-class lives in polite Greco-Roman society, and the household code of Ephesians was simply aimed at affirming the cultural value of good manners. A slightly more generous reading might be that we can't actually get the point of the new state of being, or the new relationship we have with each other in Christ, unless we also recognise the practical changes we need to make to synchronise the inner and outer selves. We need to be consistent - our behaviour has to match up with what we say we believe. We can't make big claims about the new lives we live in the risen Christ, without thinking seriously about the things we actually do. We need to get concrete, to recognise the implicit beliefs that lie behind our everyday behaviours. And so the lists.

Modern preachers, especially me, get a bit nervous at the idea of preaching about sin. For one thing if the congregation I'm preaching to hasn't already worked out that falsehood and slander and gossip are incompatible with Christian faith, then it is unlikely that a wittily worded exhortation from me is going to make much of a difference. On the other hand, if, as seems more likely, the people I'm preaching to are already leading lives that are more disciplined and reflective than mine is, then it seems a trifle presumptuous. Ancient writers on the other hand, and not just biblical writers, loved nothing better than a good list of virtues and vices. The list of peccadillos in Ephesians is actually fairly standard fare, and we shouldn’t really read into it that the congregation at Ephesus were leading particularly exciting lives. But - like the Ephesians - we need to consider what the connection is between what we believe and what we do. Sometimes we are forced to admit that our actions contradict what we say we believe - psychologists call this dissonance.

And we don’t need to think about it too hard to find some systematic contemporary expressions of the ancient deadly sins that are alive and well in our own time: racism, for example, or stereotypes about class or religion or gender; or unthinking consumerism and over-consumption in Western countries while the two-thirds world lacks basic food and medical resources, or the abuse of the environment that threatens the entire planet with global warming, inequitable access to water resources and the loss of natural habitat that drives species to extinction. And we are all implicated in some of these deadly sins.

A book by theologian Sallie McFague makes the point that the way we behave comes out of an unacknowledged set of assumptions about what it means to be human.  Sometimes our underlying beliefs cause us to behave in certain ways; more often it's the ways that we behave that gradually form our unconscious attitudes and assumptions. But either way, McFague says, the supposedly value-free individualistic society that we live in makes a fundamental assumption about what human beings are. And that assumption is that each of us is our own moral universe. That each of us is perfectly justified in putting ourselves first, that we are separate from the world we live in, and that all the other human beings around us, all other living creatures and the earth itself are just resources that we relate to for our own purposes. 

But in fact our lives, which come from God, are necessarily and organically connected not just to the lives of other human beings but to the life of the whole planet. Which also come from God. And when we forget this then we act in ways that produce inequality, we don’t see the problem with consuming more than our share of the planet's finite resources, and we put our own interests ahead of what is sustainable for all Earth's creatures. 

Not only that, McFague says, but for centuries now the church has actually colluded with that false assumption. If we think of God as remote, unaffected and uninvolved with creation, and salvation as being only about eternal life in the next world, then we don't pay as much attention as we should to God’s creation. We simply don’t see our own lives as being connected with all Earth’s creatures.  But when we understand that our own lives are connected with the lives of everybody, and with the life of the whole planet, and when we understand that God's life is bound up with the life of the whole creation, then we start to understand Christian spirituality as being about accountability and sustainability. 

McFague says we need an incarnational spirituality, which means we need to understand God as being present in creation from the very start, and she uses the metaphor of childbirth to describe the intimate connection between God and the world. That’s also in the Bible, incidentally. It’s in Job chapter 38, also Isaiah 42. And it's a metaphor that becomes explicit when God chooses to live among us in the person of Jesus Christ.

And this, I think, is where the list of vices in Ephesians is grounded. Because, says Ephesians, you are members of each other. That's verse 25, right at the start of today’s reading.  You can’t separate off your life from the rest of creation and live it as an individual because all that you have, and everything that you are, comes from a common source which is God.  And because ultimately your flourishing, and the flourishing of all Earth’s creatures, human beings, other living creatures and the living systems of our common home are interconnected.

Ephesians tells us in this reading that when we accept the limitations of living as a blessing to others, when we learn to see the flourishing of other people as a blessing, then we ourselves are set free. Compassion and generosity become part of our way of life, and the Holy Spirit gets to flow through us. The opposite is what Ephesians calls grieving the Spirit, locking up the water of life in a stagnant pool.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is still talking about bread.  About himself being the bread come down from heaven to be the life of the world.  Jesus sees himself as being like bread that is broken and shared out, as food for a hungry world. There’s something in this image that tells us about the nature of God’s own life – never static, always on the move outwards from the centre like ripples when you throw a stone into a pool of still water.  The nature of God, that we see in Jesus Christ, is to be poured out so as to fill up our emptiness.

It’s an image of love that’s so all-embracing that it keeps looking for new horizons of self-giving.  And Ephesians wraps up the list of do’s and don’t’s in today’s reading by telling us - we have to imitate that. You can’t love Jesus without imitating Jesus, without imitating the character of God which is to be poured out in love.  It means the focus keeps widening.  Not just focused on ourselves, not just focused on the inward spiritual Jesus, but working out the meaning of who we are in the challenge of living with others and for others.

Amen.

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