Sermon 20th October 2013

Today, Simon Brindley, one of our Lay Readers, continues our study of Paul’s letter to Ephesus. 

The reading is from Ephesians 4: 17-32

New Life in Christ

I have very occasionally heard people say that the only future for sport is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, that are otherwise legal to use, and then everyone will be on a level playing field (if you will pardon the deliberate pun) and cyclists, runners, weightlifters and others can just get on with seeing who can be the most professional in their chosen discipline. These are the same people who tend to say you can’t stop doping anyway, the chemists are always going to be at least one step ahead of the testers and there are always going to be some who will use performance-enhancing drugs. So why hinder the others who don’t currently take the drugs? They will simply try to win the medals and titles but fail because the dopers will always find a way to win…

Even if you do not follow sport very closely I am sure you will know something of the way this whole debate has gone in recent years. There was a time a few years ago when the use of performance-enhancing drugs in competitive road cycling was so prevalent that all the professionals knew the only way you were going to get anywhere in that sport was to join in. In fact the demands of long distance cycling on the human body were so great that taking drugs had a long history of being the only way some could even get around the Tour de France, it is such a tough event.

(By the way, don’t worry, on the Parish of Herne Hill Whoosh cycle rides we use only alcohol and then only occasionally at lunchtimes and slightly more often in the evenings and then only in appropriate moderation….well…nearly always in appropriate moderation!).

But for now at least that whole recent era of doping in professional road cycling seems to have been put in the past and endless famous cyclists have been exposed or admitted illegal drug use. Not just the infamous Lance Armstrong but a whole string of riders including some you may just have heard of: Marco Pantani, Floyd Landis, David Millar, Alberto Contador, Jan Ulrich. If you ever want to read a tragic account of the impact of drugs on a talented professional road cyclist read, “The death of Marco Pantani” by Matt Rendell.

And we seem to be entering an era with first Sir Bradley Wiggins and then Chris Froome (co-incidentally, I am sure, both competing as British athletes!) where cycling at the top has, we sincerely hope and believe, largely cleaned itself up. I don’t know about you but I now feel I can start watching the Tour de France again without thinking I was just witnessing an elaborate chemistry experiment. Long may it continue!

And, continuing this theme briefly, thank goodness the Olympics last year were largely drug-free although then by the time of the World Athletics Championships in Moscow in August of this year, sadly, we faced yet again widespread allegations, against some of the long-standing sprinters like Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay, to say nothing of large swathes of the Turkish team and others.

But we are at least in a place, it seems to me, where the drug cheats are seriously on the defensive and the moral war is being won, in the sense that the public mood remains firmly set against the cheats.

Two things stand out for me in this whole debate. The first is the abiding sense that using performance-enhancing drugs to succeed and gain an unfair advantage is just, plainly, wrong. The vast majority of people simply do not want to see it. No, no and no again says the public. Keep it clean, whatever the temptations to you as the individual sportsperson. I would rather watch a clean race than see my favourite win unfairly.

And the second abiding sense for me is that for those who are caught it is impossible to see their unfair victories as anything other than shameful personal defeats to be wiped from the record books and leave an indelible stain over a career and a life that, to be honest, is highly unlikely ever to be fully erased.

In the end the golden vision of glorious victory and a career at the top just turns almost literally to dust. As much as anyone the athlete themselves has been completely deceived. Even if they are never caught they must know later in life that their victory was tarnished and their name in the record books and the medals on their mantelpiece are really just fake and hollow trophies.

St Paul could have been writing to the entire world of competitive sport when he said to the Ephesians,

“Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; [and] be made new in the attitude of your minds; and put on the new self.”

St Paul goes on to link this expressly to faith in a loving Creator when he adds that you are to put on the new self because you are “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” God did not make you for falseness and cheating. He made you to live a better life than that. Trust Him and you will find that it is better in the end, whatever the temptations; in the case of competitive sport, the temptations of false and vain and deceitful victory.

So, in competitive sport at least, it does appear compelling, to me, to suggest that all this rings very true. The public just about everywhere say, “Don’t cheat!” The Christian adds, “Don’t cheat! You were not made to cheat. You were made for better than that.” There are plenty of Christians in the sporting world and I am sure this is how they will understand all this. God made me fast but God did not make me to be a drugs cheat.

Pause…

You could summarise Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as follows. God’s plan for his people has been gloriously revealed in Jesus Christ, raised from the dead and now completely glorified in heaven. In this big context, each one of us was dead in our wrongdoing, following the ways of the world, following our sinful natures. But now through faith we have been made alive in Christ. But we are not saved by any good deeds. In fact we are saved for good deeds.

The Jews and Gentiles can at last therefore be seen as exactly the same. All can approach God with confidence, not guilt, freed from the burden of failure and created to do good things. This seismic change is all summed up in the glorious picture set out in Ephesians 3 vv 14-21: the love of God that surpasses knowledge, the God who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine.

Pause again..

And then Paul begins to hit home the implications for our lives, our new lives in Christ, of this message. If this is your glorious calling, he says from Chapter 4 onwards, then I urge you to live a life worthy of it.

If this is your glorious calling, then I urge you to live a life worthy of it…

Live in unity he says first. Then, he says, you should understand your different roles in the church and so the context for your life of service. Then, he says, you should be grown up in your understanding of your faith, not tossed around by every whim of teaching or doctrine.

And then he comes to our passage for today. If, says Paul, the new freedom from sin and death achieved by Jesus Christ is your glorious calling, then I insist, in the Lord, that – as the Good News Bible puts it, you must “Live in the light”. The New International Version of the Bible heads this section, “Living as children of light”.

My example of drugs in sport was just one illustration. So what, when we stand back and look at this for the whole of our lives, might God - through Paul’s letter -be saying to us this morning?

Well first, it seems to me at least, at various points in today’s passage, Paul sets out some good, solid, pretty practical advice. For example, we all get angry. Things and people annoy us, we get frustrated when things do not go our own way, we get tired, we get irritable. But here’s the advice. Do not go to sleep without letting go of your anger or as Paul puts it, don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Let it go, say sorry to those closest to you if you need to. Or the danger is it that that anger will carry into the night and disturb your sleep and then carry into the next day and wrongly disturb your life and the lives of those around you…or as Paul puts that, it will give the Devil a foothold, the Devil who loves to disrupt and destroy.

Good, sound and very practical advice.

And another one, potentially perhaps more serious? If you are in the habit of lying to those around you says Paul, whatever that might be about – your job, your assets, your plans, your relationships, your past  - then stop that way of life and just start speaking the truth to those around you: in your home, in your community, in your work. I remember as a 19 year old going to live in a completely new town for me, near Birmingham, working in a youth project run by a priest. There were a few of us youngsters and as impressionable 19 year olds we were really pretty impressed by one lad called Trevor who had grown up locally. Goodness he had had a lot of girlfriends he very convincingly told us night after night after we had finished our work for the day……at least until an older man from the same community let us know that he had never actually had a girlfriend yet and was just sadly trying to impress.  You may not have lied to try to impress in quite that way… but in other ways perhaps? A very successful City lawyer in London was very recently exposed as having completely made up a degree from Oxbridge and another from Harvard in his applications for senior posts. He claimed he had an Oxford scholarship called an Eldon scholarship and it was only when interviewed by someone who had actually had an Eldon scholarship in the same year as this lawyer claimed for himself that the sham was actually exposed……..and tragically in his case. There were colleagues who said he was in fact actually really good at what he did.

Just think for a moment …..where might be the deceit in all this……we lie or mislead because we think it will do us good but actually either the lie catches up with us in the end or we get tangled up in a web of lies or we may never get caught but the gains are false and hollow. Our gains or our successes are built on sand…… 

And deceit is likely to impact not just on you but on those around you. “Speak truthfully” says Paul “because we are all members of one body.” I remember when I was 18, growing up in an army environment in Germany, and hearing a young soldier on a school expedition we did to Norway say that when he was away from home he did not worry too much about what he got up to. “What the wife don’t know won’t hurt her,” he said. Oh yeah! Does anyone really believe that key emotional relationships are not damaged by the unseen serious misbehaviour of one party?

“Don’t damage your life by falling for the real deceitfulness that can come with your desires,” Paul might say……You were not created to be damaged in yourself and your relationships by anger continuing to eat away at you. You were not created to build false relationships, false impressions, false success on lies, whatever subtle forms those lies might take for you. You were created for better than this…..

Who says Christian faith is just about God wanting to stop you enjoying yourself? I am one of those who is convinced there is a strong case to be made that Christian faith in this regard is rather about God simply wanting what really is best for you!

And Paul gives other really practical examples. Don’t go round slagging other people off all the time he says. Try and build them up instead. Everyone has their needs and needs to improve. Focus on that and helping them get there and everyone who hears you speaking will benefit more in the end. Gossip and constantly putting people down can be destructive…..it can eat into the fabric of our communities..

And stealing…an obvious one perhaps?  You may think what you are getting through stealing is good but can it ever really lead to a good and wholesome self -respect if the things you have, have been gained dishonestly? Do something useful with your hands instead, says Paul. You may even find that not only do you have what you need but you might have something to share with others. 

In this sort of territory I heard the Labour MP for Birkenhead and veteran welfare campaigner Frank Field speak in a church on Friday just gone. He described young men in his constituency who say why bother going to work for anything less than £300 a week when you can get that easily from benefits and a bit of petty crime and drugs. Frank Field, who is as passionate about a fair welfare state as anyone, is also passionate in his rebuttal of this attitude. And why? Because where is the true self respect and what is the future for your children and what is the hope in your community if you just fall for that one…

So, first, plenty of sound practical advice from St Paul about things that all of us must come across from time to time: anger, the temptation to lie or mislead, the temptation to talk others down and the temptation to take things that do not belong to us.

But secondly I do think there are hints in this passage of the risk of even more serious temptation and conduct and for me those hints are present at the beginning and the end of the passage for today.  At the beginning Paul urges his readers not to live without any understanding and in ignorance of God, with hardened hearts. Don’t live like those, he says, who have lost all sensitivity but indulge all kinds of impurity with a continual lust for more.  I wonder if here Paul is talking about conduct that can, if we are not careful, powerfully take over our lives and lead us to have to harden our hearts and become insensitive to those around us – whether that is greed perhaps, or selfish ambition or sexual misconduct – or any other thing that risks taking hold of our lives and will not let us go. I wonder if here Paul is thinking about things that can lead to addiction.

Why might it be that what you could call addictions, whatever form they might take: material personal, sexual or whatever do - it would appear - from all we read about and all we hear and all we know in your own hearts and minds uniformly in the end, lead people really… nowhere. Why might they uniformly fail, in the long run, to deliver? Why might they uniformly deceive? Might it be again that we were made for better things than these?

At the end of the passage for today Paul urges his readers not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God. Can you imagine God our Creator hurting for us, grieving over us if he sees our lives dominated by behaviour that he knows and longs for us to understand is actually wrong because it is not what is best for us? It is not the life for which we were created?

I had a picture in my mind as I was preparing the sermon for this morning and it was of a wine glass. Have you ever tried to make a wine glass sing, you know where you dip your finger in water and rub it round and round the top rim of the glass till a fine high note comes out of the glass. But if the glass is cracked or damaged there is no way any note will emerge. I wonder if God longs to make our lives sing because he knows what we were made for.

There are of course, in the Christian story, other critically important elements that must come into this, but the detail of those is for another day. Thank God that he is the great glassmaker,  that any crack can be repaired and the glass can sing again. And thank God that he is the great winemaker,  that he longs to fill our lives with the good things he has for us.

But for today I think the message from Paul’s letter is that we urged not to be deceived. Don’t break the wineglass that is the life God gives you, Paul might say. I urge you, indeed I insist on it in the Lord. Live as children of light, not of darkness. This is what you were made for.

Amen