13.08.06      Ed MacKenzie     The Church as Community  Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2  

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Over the summer, Ali and I spent a week in Taize, the ecumenical Christian community in the East of France. Many of you will know the Taize chants in which a line of Scripture is set to a melody and repeated over and over, and I know that some of you have also spent time at Taize. Our week there was a moving and significant experience for us both. Although there were literally thousands of people there, but there was still a real sense of being together as a community in worship.

Community living was also a theme of the TV shows the ‘Monastery’ and the ‘Convent’. The Monastery looked at the life of a group of Benedictine Monks through the perspective of six strangers brought in to join and observe their community life, while the Convent used the same format to explore the life of Poor Clare Nuns. Both programmes showed how living together in monastic enclosures can transform individuals in remarkable ways. Several of the monks and nuns explained that their main difficulty in living their kind of life was putting up with others, living and accepting those whose habits they found irritating and annoying.

Commitment to Christian community is also a theme of the ‘emerging church’ movement. Many of those involved in this have been damaged or disillusioned by their own church experience, and seek to form egalitarian communities faithful to the Gospel and also relevant to our culture.

I mention these different types of Christian community because I think that the question raised in the reading from Ephesians today is what makes a Christian community? What type of life together best reflects God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ?

It is sometimes easy to believe that one particular denomination or community is the best or only model for Christian life, but I think that Paul’s concern in today’s passage is not so much to give a blueprint for church organisation – so that we can privilege one type of church life over another – but to portray what the church is called to be as the body of Christ. And I think that the central theme underlying this text is that our way of living together as church cannot be divorced from God’s grace to us in Jesus. The reconciliation brought by God in Christ spills over and shapes how we live together. God’s love to us invites us love others in community. As 1 John puts it, ‘The commandment from him is this: those who love God must also love their brothers and sisters’ (1 John 4:21).

As Larry pointed out a couple of weeks ago, it’s likely that Ephesians was intended as a circular letter to churches in the West of Asia Minor. Unlike other letters which are written in response to particular concerns or issues, Ephesians gives a cosmic overview of God’s plan in Christ to bring Jew and Gentile together in one community. As Paul puts it in ch.2, Christ is our peace who has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentile. As with all of his epistles, Paul focuses in Ephesians not simply on the vertical relationship between God and humanity but also on how God’s cosmic plan affects relationships between and among different people. The relationship between God and ourselves is reflected in how we treat others.

The passage we are looking at today is part of a larger section in which Paul sketches out what it means to live as God’s people. The ‘ethical section’ of this letter is inseparable from Paul’s theology. Paul integrates faith with practice, Christ with community.

I’d like to focus on a few themes from this passage which may give us ideas and hints for living as Christ’s body today: Paul sees church as rooted in God, as a place where we learn to love and as a distinctive community which witnesses to God’s love for the world.

Firstly, then, Christian community is rooted in God - We have church because we have experienced God’s love which has come to us in Jesus. As Rowan Williams has put it, ‘Church is what happens when the invitation of Jesus is received and people recognise it in each other.’ Paul assumes the presence of the Spirit in the community: people can ‘grieve the Spirit’ by the way they act in church. The passage is also framed by two small sections in which Paul calls on believers to imitate God. Just before the reading we’ve heard today, Paul tells the readers to ‘clothe themselves’ with the new self, ‘created according to the likeness of God,’ and he makes a similar point at the beginning of chapter five, ‘be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.’ What it means to imitate God is shown in Christ. To imitate God means living a life of love which reflects the love of Christ who gave Himself up for us.

Paul here makes the astonishing claim to the small Christian communities around the Mediterranean that they are witnesses to God’s purpose for the world. The church is called to live as ‘Christ’s body’, and so being church involves learning what it means to live like God, showing others what God is like. Church is rooted in God.

The second theme in the passage is that in Christian community we learn how to love. Paul’s focus in this text is on living graciously with each other in the body of Christ.  His instructions assume close, committed groups, and so he begins with a call for speaking honestly as ‘members of one another’ who are seeking to live out God’s calling in the world. ‘Grieving the Spirit’ involves fracturing the community, and so Paul warns against slander, bitterness and anger. He also calls believers to forgive one another and to act kindly and tenderly. Such characteristics are part of what it means to imitate God, shaped by the love which Christ expressed through his life.

I once heard marriage described as a ‘monastery for two’, and I think that the point of that saying is not that marriage is always a peace-filled, loving, haven of hospitality – as I sometimes imagine monasteries might be – but that in living a life with another we inevitably grow – through the times of peace and harmony but perhaps more so through the times of hardship, frustration and irritability. It’s when we bump against those who are different to us that our rough edges are knocked off and we realise our own weaknesses. This seems to me to be the case in church as well as in marriage. At times it’s hard, but by seeking the way of love and sticking with it we can find ourselves transformed, and when looking back later can see how we’ve changed. Church helps us to grow in love.

The third theme in the text is that Christian community witnesses to a distinctive kind of life. Throughout his letter, Paul has drawn a sharp contrast between the life of believers before and after their experience of Christ. The ‘old selves’ are put away in favour of ‘new selves’, which live ‘according to the likeness of God’. Those who were once thieves are now called to work honestly, in order to share with those in need. The church is distinctive in reflecting God’s coming to us in Jesus, and leads to a way of love which transforms individuals and communities.

In the ancient world, the distinctive way of being church led many seekers to embrace Christianity, while others mocked the Christians for what Nietzsche later called their ‘herd morality’. The Christian thinker Tertullian, who wrote about a century and a half after Paul, described the way in which Christians supported the poor and destitute, which led pagans to mock believers with the cry, ‘See, how they love one another.’  Tertullian suggests that Christians were mocked for looking after society’s rejects. Their love of the outcast was a distinctive mark of the church, and we too are called to be distinctive in the way we love one another.

I recently heard about a survey in which people were asked to rate their impressions of different denominations. The denomination which came first by a long short was, in fact, the Salvation Army, a group known for its work with the destitute and poor in society. I’m not suggesting that the Salvation Army is the best church model, or that social action is all that’s involved in being a Christian, but I do think that the Salvation Army is admirable in the way it witnesses to the love of God for the poor in society. Church shows a distinctive kind of life.

In this passage, then, Paul sees Christian community as firstly rooted in God, shaped by the love of God in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit. Secondly, he believes that the church is a place we learn to love, precisely in learning how to live with others. And thirdly, he believes that the church is distinctive community, which reflects the God’s love shown to us in the person of Jesus.

Paul’s view of Christian community may seem hopelessly idealistic, but the same Paul who wrote this text also dealt with churches full of factionalism, selfish ambition and power struggles. Paul believes what he does about the communities of Christ not so much because of the people within them but because of the presence of God with them. God does not abandon the church, even when some of us are occasionally tempted to, but works to form a community which shows forth His love to the world.

The experience Ali and I had at Taize was a glimpse of church at an international level which echoes some of the themes from this passage. Brother Roger, the founder of the Taize community, died last year after being stabbed while serving communion. The community there continues to grow, witnessing as it does to the nature of God’s calling to be church. I’d like to end with a quote from Brother Roger:

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