Ephesians 5: 8-14
Northridge Presbyterian Church
April 3, 2011
“Within the Circle of the Faith”
Have you ever spent time wandering around an art museum? Perhaps you like me enjoy taking the occasional free day and wander through galleries and experience the gift of creation as expressed on a canvas, in a Culver mobile, or a vase. Maybe, you take joy in looking at the handiwork of a particular culture, and seeing how they incorporate aesthetic beauty with function. If you are ever at The Philadelphia Museum of Art a portion of the American collection is devoted to folk art, crafts from various eras of history. Folk art is one of my favorite art forms as I love to see how folks handcrafted items of beauty for a common use. As you round a corner from a hallway of cases filled with exquisite silver, Colonial American samplers, and case after case of china, you enter a sparse room meant to recreate a Shaker home.
The space is simple. Your eye is drawn to the clean lines of the chair with a thatched seat, the curve of the rocking chair in the corner, the vibrant color of the granny smith apples in a hand woven hickory basket. There is no clutter. Everything has been made by hand, even the birch broom that takes residence in the corner.
The Shakers are in a museum in part because they cloistered themselves from the world in intentional community. They began each day with worship, worked in their gardens and in their furniture shops, prayed, ate lunch, and worked until the evening meal in community, but also in relative isolation from the rest of the world. They also did not believe in pro-creation, adding to their number by way of adoption, receiving foundlings or orphans, or welcoming converts.
Valuing ascetic simplicity and egalitarianism they thrived and grew to number 6,000 in 1840, but over time have dwindled to just 3 in part due to their lack of procreation and their isolation. Many of the Shaker communities are museums, the furniture so lovingly crafted copied and made by other artisans or mass marketed at Crate and Barrel. The museum exhibit contains lovely artifacts of a community that could not sustain itself as it withdrew from the world, focusing so much on the present it had no future. What remains of the community is limited to museums and memory.
The letter to the Ephesians stands in marked contrast to the Shaker museum exhibit. This letter was a baptismal sermon written to a lively growing community of faith. Recall that as the gospel spread post Pentecost, folks were figuring out what it meant to follow Christ in their context. Drawing on metaphors and pieces of hymns from the baptismal liturgy and creeds, Ephesians does not make a linear argument, but circles around themes. The purpose of the letter was to remind these followers of their identity in God. Scholars note that, “The Gentile Christians who were streaming into the church in this region were adopting an easygoing moral code based on a perverted misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching. At the same time, they were boasting of their supposed independence of Israel and were becoming intolerant of their Jewish brethren and forgetful of the Jewish past of salvation history.” (Interpretation, page 5)
These new believers were forgetting their past, disconnected from an understanding of God who adopted them, and in the present they were defining themselves, forgetting the ethic set forth by Jesus.
The entire letter builds a case for living faith mindful of the past…deliverance of Israel from slavery, the ethical code set forth in the Torah, as well as the present and future challenge to follow Christ in a changing world.
Chapter five, our reading for today centers on Christian conduct and identity and the threads that weave together past, present, and future. Keep in mind that this is all in the context not of individuality, but of community. Our reading points out that being the church always entails a relationship to God. The imperative in verse 8: “now in the Lord you are light, live as children of light” is grounded in identity. In the Lord, you are light.” What is central to this identity is a relationship to God in Christ who is the light of the world. God is light, you are children of God, therefore you are light.
What is at stake for the hearers of this letter is a choice to live in the tension of the world and the darkness, or some would say powers of sin and evil…Rather than be subsumed by the darkness, or cloistered off, the author of Ephesians points to their identity as light, and the challenge to live in the world, shining that light. ..it’s a circle, from your identity springs your function.
The command is simple, live as children of light in the world. The challenge, is all-encompassing, and implies that it is not what you do, but who you are.
Preacher Will Willimon tells this story. Back in high school, every Friday and Saturday night, as Will was leaving to go on a date, his mother, saying goodbye to him at the door would leave him with these weighty words, “Don’t forget who you are.”
Will recounts “You know what she meant. She did not mean that I was in danger of forgetting my name and my street address. She meant that alone, on a date, in the midst of some party, in the presence of some strangers, I might forget who I was. I might lose sight of the values with which I had been raised, answer to some alien name, engage in some unaccustomed behavior. ‘Don’t forget who you are,’ was her maternal benediction as I left home.”
Perhaps you can identify with Will Willimon. It is sometimes difficult, amidst the conflicting messages, advertisements, and busyness to remember who we are. There are a myriad ways to define your identity, who we are. You are a consumer…meant to use your choice and purchasing power to support the capitalist enterprise, living your life in an endless loop between the grocery store, gas station, Target. Home, grocery store, gas station…
Who are you? You are intellect, studying for that history test, writing those papers, living only to learn so that you can get through high school, to get to college, to pursue that graduate degree, to get that good job, to buy that first house, to start that new family, to raise those kids so that they can get into a good school to live to learn…
Who are you? Scripture and the Church has a different answer to that question. The church stands at the intersection of the world, and tells you “you are a child of God.” You are baptized, and that covenant of grace is not dependent on you, but on God. Your identity rests not in what you do, how smart you are, or how much money you make, but in who God is as the light of the world and has chosen you.
When someone asked Martin Luther, “How do you know that I am a Christian?” the pastor replied, “You know you are baptized – that’s all you need to know.” Similarly, in times of great doubt, when struggling through his dark night of the soul, Martin Luther would sometimes touch his forehead and say to himself, ‘Martin, be calm, you are baptized.”
I saw another folk art exhibit the afternoon I first saw the Shaker house. As we left the Shaker house we entered a room filled with the Quilts of Gees Bend. Gees Bend is a small, rural community in Rehobeth and Boyken Alabama.
"Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850.
After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world. During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in to purchase land and homes for the community, bringing strange renown — as an "Alabama Africa" — to this sleepy hamlet."
"The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present."
While Gee’s Bend is still geographically isolated, it is no longer disconnected from the rest of the world. The quilts were discovered, and soon these patchwork masterpieces connected Gee’s Bend to the rest of the world. The Gee’s Bend Quilt exhibit started in Houston and has made its way around the country, its influence far reaching.
As I walked through the exhibit, I learned generations of women gather at the quilting circle in Gee’s Bend to this day, passing along the craft to the next generation. If you have seen the Gee’s Bend quilts, you’ll notice the vibrant colors and unique patterns, fabric pulled from a variety of sources and era’s, weaving together a story of the past, present, and future…another generation of quilters mentored and shaped, woven in to the new community of faith, connected to the larger world.
You are children of light . Remember, you are children. You are connected to God, who is your parent…mothering and fathering you, caring for you and the rest of the family of faith. If your parent is light, you will resemble your parent. You are meant to shine and move around in the world as living children of God. You do so, not in isolation, but in community as part of the family of God.
Who are you? As members of the Body of Christ, the Church we are children of light, children of God, that identity cannot be lost. You carry that identity with you as you go out from this sanctuary each Sunday.
We embody a circle of faith. Each week we come to this sanctuary to be reminded of our identity as children of God, grounded. We come mindful of the past, noting ways in which God has shepherded us to the present with our questions and doubts, joining together to worship God.
Last weekend we marked 10 years in this sanctuary, we made another turn in the circle of faith, adding another patch to this quilt of faith. Northridge looks much different today than it did ten years ago, or over 100 years ago when it was the old East Dallas Presbyterian Church. Saints have gone on before us, and other saints are yet to come.
Today we make yet another turn in the circle of faith. We will take time to remember our baptismal identity as we welcome confirmands and hear their profession of faith. Some might view this as a pinnacle, an achievement. Confirmation and membership is not an achievement. Confirmation and church membership is yet another turn in the circle of faith that weaves your future as well as your past and present together.
To be fair, this is an important day, one which celebration is due. But, confirmation or church membership is not an achievement, it is not a graduation from church or Sunday School. If it is, then we will quickly become cloistered and stagnant, much like the Shaker museum exhibit. But, thankfully you and I are not artifacts. We are living, moving children of God.
Whether you are the one being confirmed or welcoming, confirmation is an important moment where you are reminded in a tangible way of who you are, a child of light, a child of God, and that you are part of something larger than yourself, the Body of Christ.
This is a day when the covenant promises made at your baptism take on new significance. This is a moment where you might pause and reflect on the hand of God that has shepherded you to this place, sewing you into the patchwork quilt of the body of Christ. You stand today professing a faith that is still in process, still dynamic, and for that we give thanks and rejoice!
We are reminded that “when you and I came into this life, God called us by our name. Within the circle of the faith, as member of your cast, you take your place with all the saints of future, present, past.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
References:
Will Willimon quotes from "Remember Who You Are: Baptism A Model for Christian Life."
Hymn quote from #522 "Lord, When I Came Into This Life"
Image: Gee's Bend Quilt by Allie Pettiway, Housetop
http://www.quiltsofgeesbend.com/images/quilts/tn-alliepettway-housetop.jpg
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