Making Change

Ephesians 1:3-14

Not too long ago, I visited a small rural town,

not much bigger than Acworth

and had the opportunity to sit at a table in the church’s parish house,

and listen to some of the community leaders,

a nurse, a pastor, a funeral director, a state representative among them,

as they talked about the issues that their community faces.

They told a story that grieved them and grieved me to hear it.

How a teenage boy a few years before had overdosed on heroin and lost his life.

And this was a wake-up call for the whole community.

They grieved together, they held a memorial service for him,

But then they did something more.

They gathered together in the school gymnasium.

People from the church, people from the school,

people from the community who were not connected with either church or school. 

And they talked. 

They talked about how awful it was that this happened in their community. 

This young man who played soccer on the team that this neighbor coached. 

This boy that the community had watched grow, suddenly and senselessly gone.

They gathered, and they talked, and they listened.

And out of that meeting, out of their confronting of an issue that came before them,

They began their own local chapter of an initiative called “Making Change,”

A recovery group for adolescents struggling with addiction.

The truth is that more and more young people are gaining access to and becoming addicted to narcotics. 

How do we respond to this with faith and not fear?

I think of the example of this small community,

Of talking together as a community, of speaking the elephant in the room,

Of compassionately listening to those who have suffered loss as a result of this trend,

And of joining together to help each other and build up good community.

Recent studies on addiction have shown that environment plays a huge role in addiction.

Something as basic as family attachment and community involvement

Give people a sense of belonging and inner strength that helps them resist the pull into substance abuse.

Belonging and loving relationship makes a huge difference in the resilience and health not only of teens, but of adults, young and old.

This is an issue that I really want to talk more about.

And I think our region could use a meeting like that community had.

Because the proper response to substance abuse is not condemning the ones who suffer from addiction.  That leads to further alienation and exile of the ones who already have experienced isolation from their community and family.

The response is not condemnation and neither is it ignoring, turning a blind eye,

Willfully saying it’s not happening.

It is happening.  But it’s not happening without a context.

And I think the context is a disintegrated community life –

The best thing we can do in response to reports about rising drug use among rural communities is to come together, like they did in that small town,

and address the elephant in our midst.

Talk about our experiences – not rushing to trying to cure or fix,

But sitting with the problem, with one another and our concerns, our stories.

And then, build community.

Be strategic, be intentional – but build community.

Community founded in both grace and truth.

Caring enough to talk honestly and openly about painful realities so that healing can become a possibility.

That is what happened in that small town.

They got together and they worked with a local organization called Second Growth and they started a group that met in one of the church’s buildings and had a weekly meeting for adolescents struggling with addiction and the pressures of their lives that led them to such self-destructive behaviors.

Moving from caution to courage requires conversation in compassionate community.

Moving from caution to courage requires conversation in compassionate community.

This morning’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians shows us a grand vision of God’s salvation of individuals and liberation of communities,

Through grace and by the work of the Holy Spirit.

And it’s crucial, I think, for us to realize that the way that God saves is not just by changing individuals’s hearts from self to God, from hate to love, from fear to faith,

That’s a real part of how God saves,

But the scope of God’s redemption is wider,

The scope of God’s redemption is communal.

God brings healing through community working together, praying together, loving one another and giving one another the gift of belonging.

This passage from Ephesians is a blessing –

It’s like the prayers prayed at Passover seders – “Blessed are you, King of the Universe.”

When God is blessed in the remembrance of God’s liberation of the people of Israel out of bondage into the promised land.

But here in Ephesians, the blessing of God is for a new story of liberation,

This blessing speaks of salvation.

Through forgiveness of sins, God overcame our alienation.

We are given freedom in the knowledge of God’s love.

By grace, we read, we have been called out for spiritual blessing,

and empowered by the Spirit to reimagine our humanity in light of Christ.

The spiritual vision of Ephesians is of a world brought together in Christ.

This is the movement of the Spirit of God,

The Spirit is called in verse 14, a “guarantee”

An installment of future blessing.

The Spirit’s dwelling in the believer is the promise of new creation.

And we have become a part of the realization of that promise.

From Ephesus in the first century to Acworth in the 21st.

I love this passage.

Not just because in the Greek it’s actually one long, run-on sentence.

That’s an interesting factoid.  And makes for fun translating.

But I love this passage because it gives a cosmic picture of the story of liberation that God is bringing about in the world.

The already but not yet reign of God.

It gives us the cosmic context of salvation

in which our own life-changing encounters with Christ fit.

It helps us to tell our individual stories of salvation

in the context of our congregational story of salvation

and to tell our congregational story of salvation

in the context of the world-community’s salvation.

Our hope for salvation is defiant of the cynical despair that is often channeled to us through news media.  Our hope for the world, is grounded in the grace of God and the work of the Spirit – confidence a Creator who has not and will not abandon the creation.

And we believe that God’s grace is at work both locally and globally,

And it is into this local-global movement of the Spirit that we have been called.

To the degree that we find freedom or that our community finds freedom

From the alienating and oppressing realities of 21^st century existence,

We are participating in a much larger movement of God in the history of the universe,

For the realization of love and grace,

Most fully manifest in the crucified and risen savior.

What does it mean for us, in 2015, this community of 40 to 50 people

To live into that story of God’s salvation?

What does it mean for this blessing of Paul’s to apply to us?

It means that the same Spirit he and the Ephesians experienced then,

empowers us and is at work in us now,

The same Spirit empowers us to overcome within ourselves the fear and hate that keeps us from God and our neighbor

The same Spirit calls and invites us to realize ourselves by faith as children of God, sisters and brothers in the family of God.

And in this coming together as community of faith,

to empower one another and strengthen one another against the forces around us

which aim to undo our spirits, which prey upon the most vulnerable in our community,

and destroy the relational connections that make for belonging.

The Spirit empowers us to confront these and overcome them

 by the love that binds us together and gives us vision and courage.

Verse 5 says “Because of God’s love, God had already decided that through Jesus Christ God would make us God’s children – this was God’s pleasure and purpose.”

Realizing our spiritual kinship and taking up the way of Christ

To become lifelong learners and lovers others,

We join the movement of the Spirit that has been going on from all eternity and will continue into eternity hence.

And in very particular ways in very concrete times and places,

We talk and make decisions. 

And so become agents of the realization of this movement.

Decisions as varied as where we’re going to walk for the CROP walk this year,

Or whether we are going to support this new initiative called the Fall Mountain Area Food Shelf (that was a conversation that was had in the mid 1980s)

Or whether we should have a Bible study, or prayer meeting,

Or if anyone is willing to provide temporary shelter for Bosnian refugees.

The Spirit has been at work in concrete conversations and decisions of this congregation.

And as we trust God and seek to follow the way of Christ,

we continue to join in the liberating and saving work of the Spirit,

both for individuals and our life together in community.

But I think something we need to do more of if we are going to enter more fully into what the Spirit is doing here and now, is pray – pray at home for the mission of this church,

And pray together in worship and at other times – asking God to show us what the Spirit will do through us and among us here to bring healing to this place.

And something more.

And this might be considered a form of prayer:

Active and ongoing conversation – both sharing and listening.

Cultivating prayerful imaginations:

Keeping our ears to the ground, and our eyes wide open,

Like the small town in my story– so we can discern together what we might do to be responsible to the issues that we experience.

Because, as a result of that small town conversation, something happened.

One young man who fell headlong into heroin addiction

just months after his schoolmate died from overdose,

Became one of the first and most active participants in the church-hosted

“Making Change” recovery group, that gathered for meetings in the fellowship hall.

That church’s space became a site of healing conversation

for this young man and his peers.

And this because a community talked about their issues and compassionately worked together for change.

This is how the big picture of God’s salvation gets manifested in concrete and local and here-and-now ways.

I want to begin having conversations about how we see ourselves

and our place joining in the movement of the Spirit.

Stayed tuned for when and where

and let me know if you are interested in praying and talking about this too.

What is the Spirit saying to us?

How are we being called into the vision evoked in verse 10:

“This plan, which God will complete when the time is right,

…to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head.”

(Eph 1:10, GNT)

All creation together.

Let us pray.

O God, we ask that you give us the Spirit, who will make us wise and reveal God to us, so that we will know God.  I ask that our minds may be opened to see your light, so that we will know what is the hope to which you have called us, how rich are the wonderful blessings you promise your people, and how very great is your power at work in us who believe.

Amen.