All Saints’ Sunday
Ephesians 1:11-23October 31, 2010
The Riches of God’s Glorious Inheritance
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Does anyone know what today is? Halloween? No. Well, yes, it’s Halloween, but that’s not what I’m thinking of. We’re in the stewardship campaign and today’s the last Sunday before Consecration Sunday. Next Sunday as we are gathered in church we’ll fill out our pledge cards and bring them forward as a way of committing ourselves to the support of the congregation’s mission and ministry in the coming year. We’ll you’ll be filling out cards. I’ll be in New Jersey, but don’t worry, Carol and I will be filling out one of these cards and bringing it in. We’ll just be a little late.
Theoretically, you could make your decisions next Sunday, but the reality is that you’ll probably make up your mind this week, if you haven’t already. That makes today the last chance that I’ll have to influence you. Of course, if you’ve made up your minds already, then you don’t have to listen to the sermon. Listening to my preaching today will be like watching political ads if you’ve already voted.
This is a task that falls to the preacher at least once a year. I preach about stuff more often than that, and I firmly believe that money is an important area of Christian discipleship. After all, Jesus talked about money a lot. But today I have the specific and focused task of parting you from your hard-earned coin. It’s actually even more challenging than that. My task is to part you from your hard-earned coin and leave you feeling good about it. Most people think this is done best if I manage to persuade their neighbors to increase their giving without implying that they themselves should give more. Of course, that isn’t going to work. Any time someone comments on my sermon with words like, “You sure told them,” I know I’ve failed.
So, ideally, I will persuade you to give more without your even noticing that this is what I’ve done. That’ s a pretty tall order. I skipped the class at seminary entitled, “Hypnosis for Stewardship,” so, instead I have to kind of sneak up on it, kind of sidle into it. Maybe a little misdirection is called for, a little slight of hand, that directs your attention to where the trick isn’t happening.
So let me start again: Everyone knows what today is: it’s Halloween. It’s time for diminutive versions of ghosts and goblins, superheroes and celebrities, witches, monsters and princesses, bugs and sports figures to dash in the twilight from house to house demanding to be paid off with candy in exchange for which the trick-or-treaters will...will do what?
Centuries ago when I was a participant, trick-or-treat used to be a sort of protection racket. Those who refused to give out treats or whose treats were not good enough for us were liable to our revenge in the form of soaped windows or teepeed trees.
Halloween gets its name from Scotland where, in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, it was the shortened form of “Allhallows Even,” that is, the Eve of All Saints’ Day. So it seems at first blush to be originally a Christian festival, but the ghosts, goblins, witches and monsters suggest something else. In fact, there is a much older festival in all Celtic lands, called in Scottish Gaelic Samhain, that marks the last day of the Celtic year. It fell on the 31st of October and marked one of the times in the year when the walls between this world and the next were especially thin. Ghosts, banshees, the so-called “little people,” who were in fact the old gods were apt to break through the wall and move about in our world. And those in this world were, if not careful, liable to get pulled into the next world from which they might never return.
When November 1 was set as a day to recognize the many unknown and unrecognized saints, it was a more or less unsuccessful attempt to baptize the pagan Samhain and turn it into something Christian. It never really worked. It’s not hard to see why. I can picture it now: Who do want to be for Allhallows, sweetie—Hroswitha of Gondersheim or Hanna Montana? Sebastian of Rome or Spiderman? No contest!
The saints may not be able to hold their own in the costume aisle at Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve a more prominent place among us than they have gotten. We have our local saints, of course, but their place in our hearts is usually limited to the time before living memory of them fades. We have a couple of saints that we celebrate—the Wesley brothers on the Sunday closest to May 24 and maybe Martin Luther King, Jr., on the second Sunday in January. And you can bet that they’ll be singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in every Lutheran church across the land today as they mark 1483rd anniversary of Luther’s nailing the “95 Theses” on the door of Wittenberg church. But aside from assigning their celebrations to the wrong days—saints’ days are celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths, that is the day they victoriously finished the course of their lives—these few celebrations miss the amazing breadth and variety of the people who, like us, have struggled to live faithful lives in their own place and time.
We know very little about most of them, of course. Famous saints have always been pretty rare. Most of the saints live lives of anonymous holiness, then as now. So it’s fitting that we have a reading from Ephesians today. It’s called the Letter to the Ephesians, but the only indication of its addressee is a phrase that is missing from the oldest and best manuscripts. On top of that and for a number of reasons, the great majority of scholars are convinced that Paul was not its author. Instead, it was written in the generation after Paul by an author who stood in Paul’s tradition. The letter is an exercise in “What Would Paul Say?”
So here we have a letter written by an unknown author to an unknown addressee and it is our text on the day when we celebrate the lives of the unknown saints. It’s kind of fitting, I think.
Still, we do know something about the people to whom it was written. We know what we can guess from the letter itself. We can guess that they felt a little overwhelmed. The Christian church was very small in the early days, even in the larger cities. Take Ephesus as an example: the church was probably not much bigger than ours in a city that was about the size of Des Moines and its suburbs. By the time this letter was written, the trial separation of the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue had become a finalized divorce. Christians had lost the protection of being part of a legal religion. They were on their own.
The writer—and I’ll just call him “Paul” with quotation marks, since that’s easier than saying “an anonymous writer who wrote in Paul’s name and from within the tradition associated with Paul”—the writer tells the readers—and I’ll just call them the “Ephesians” with quotation marks—“Paul” tells the “Ephesians” that the power that raised Jesus from the dead also enthroned him “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” And terribly weak? Otherwise “Paul’s” argument makes no sense. If he is reminding them that the power at work in Christ (and therefore at work in them) is so strong it must be because he thinks that’s what they need to hear.
They believed—as Paul did—that the world was crowded with spiritual realities. Every city, every permanent political arrangement, had its own spiritual counterpart, a “power” or “authority” that was the invisible reality behind the visible. There were free-floating spirits that could inhabit and “possess” a crowd or a person.
This was not as far-fetched as it sounds. We still speak about “team spirit” in a stadium at game time. The morale of a military unit is called l’esprit du corps, literally, “the spirit of the body.” People sense the spirit of an office or of a congregation and they aren’t really conscious of how they do it.
The people of the church at “Ephesus” felt very small compared to the spirits that surrounded them—the spirit of the city itself, the spirit of Roman Empire, the spirit of crowds gathered for pagan festivals. Paul reminds them that all these spirits and many more besides have been brought under the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. They have nothing to fear.
They were not a rich people—the early Christian movement was not popular among the rich and powerful—but they have become the heirs to an unimagined wealth. In the first part of our reading there is a cluster of words that are property terms: “obtain an inheritance,” “seal,” “promise,” “down payment,” “inheritance,” and “redemption.” Through what God has done in Jesus Christ, they have received a promise of great wealth. They have even received a down payment, a pledge, earnest money against the fulfillment of that promise. Against this wealth the riches that they have now, or rather the riches that they don’t have now, are not to be compared.
Those ancient readers were not the only people ever to have felt overwhelmed, by the forces that they perceived in the world around them. Those ancient readers were not the only peopleever to have felt overpowered, frightened, and intimidated.
There are lots of folks today who are frightened.There are lots of folks in our country who are deeply afraid of government, especially the federal government. They see government as a threat to practices and identities that they hold dear. They are afraid that the government will take away their guns. They are afraid that the government will take away their religious practices. They are afraid that the government will take away their choices about health care or even the health care itself.
Me, I’m not so afraid of the government as I am of corporations, especially the very large, multi-national corporations. I see corporations as limiting my choices, imposing a certain set of values on our culture, while operating in nearly utter disregard for the welfare of people who are deeply affected by their actions. I’m afraid that the fear of government will strip away our last protections from corporations and leave us at their mercy.
So which of these sets of fears are right?
According to “Paul,” both sets of fears are misplaced. The power of God which raised Jesus from the dead has overcome every every government, every corporation, every brand name or trademark. The power of God has overcome the military-industrial establishment. The power of God has overcome the liberal-biased media. The power of God has overcome the health care industry. The power of God has overcome Obamacare.
That same power is at work in us. We do not need to be afraid.
When people are afraid, they have a hard time being generous. But we do not need to be afraid,so we can become an even more generous people than we already are.
(Did I sneak up on separating you from your hard-earned coin quietly enough? Was that indirect enough?Or did you see me coming?)
There are all sorts of reasons for being generous. And there are many ways to be generous. We can do it with our time, with our skills, with our money. Far be it from me to say that the only way to be generous is to fill out a pledge card. And there are other vehicles of generosity than this congregation. But committing ourselves to significant giving through First United Methodist Church is one way, and it’s a good way to commit ourselves to growing in generosity.
But it’s the generosity that is vital. What comes out of this text is that generosity is a gesture of resistance against the fear we’re living with. Generosity is an act of rebellion against the powers that swarm around us. Generosity is a demonstration of the power of God at work in us. Generosity is an declaration of the freedom that we have in Christ.
The unknown author of today’s reading invites us just as he invited the unknown first readers of the reading to say, “I am Christ’s subject and no one else’s. The power that raised him is at work in me. I have already seen the evidence of that power in my own life. Therefore I will live under no other power. I will live in anxiety no longer.I will live in fear no longer. I am free.”
©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
