A sermon based on Ephesians 1:3-14
Don Friesen
January 3, 2010
Ottawa Mennonite Church
Early flights from Ottawa to the west are difficult for some people. Last fall Dorothy flew to Calgary for her nephew's wedding. She set her alarm for 5:00 a.m. in order to catch an early flight, and at one point in the night awoke to find that 5:00 a.m. had arrived! No alarm had sounded, but fortunately she was up in time, and she hurried to shower and prepare for the trip. When she returned to the bedroom she noticed that her clock still read 5:00 a.m. She glanced over at my clock and noticed that it was only 2:00 a.m. She was all showered and pumped to go, only there were still hours left before she had to leave. The commotion woke me, and Dorothy's explanation set us both to giggling, which made sleep almost impossible. She made her flight, and arrived in Calgary, albeit in a groggy state.
A few weeks ago, however, a young woman who has adopted us as her Ottawa parents intended to catch an early flight to Winnipeg to be with her real family for Christmas. Since we're fairly close to the airport she stayed at our place overnight, but refused our offer to take her to the airport. She called for a taxi to pick her up at 5:15 a.m., set the alarm for 4:30, but when I woke just before 6:00 I had a feeling she hadn't left. Sure enough, she was still there, the taxi had never appeared or called, her alarm never roused her, but nevertheless Dorothy rushed her to the airport for her 6:30 flight. The airline refused to take her luggage with only minutes of boarding time left, so they returned to the car park, only our car wouldn't start! The lights had been left on, and the battery was quickly drained of its power. They then dragged the various pieces of elephant-sized luggage onto a bus and returned home. It was no use calling me for a ride, since we had unplugged most of the phones in order that the call from the cab driver wouldn't wake us. That was, after all, the point of calling a cab!
Some days start off badly, and then accumulate more badness along the way. We all have bad days. As the saying goes, you know it's going to be an bad day when your twin sister forgets your birthday, or when your toddler decides to fingerpaint your walls with peanut butter. "Some days are born ugly," wrote novelist John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley, 1962), and you know it's really going to be an ugly day when your car horn accidentally goes off and remains stuck as you follow a group of Hell's Angels on the #17 highway.
Far as the Curse Is Found, and it's Found Everywhere!
A bad day is one thing, an ugly day is another, but a cursed day is quite another. Curses, other than the foul-mouthed kind, are a foreign concept to us, but they appear early in our biblical tradition. Already in the Garden of Eden, a garden of blessings, the serpent's duplicity earns it a curse. In Genesis, chapter 3, God says to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life" (Genesis 3:14), prompting comedian Ricky Gervais to ask, incredulously, "How is that punishment for a serpent?!?" Within a short amount of time curses also land on Adam and Eve (3:15-19), on the ground, which will become harder to cultivate (3:17-18), and on Cain (4:11-16) and others.
A biblical curse is the antithesis of a benediction. We close each worship service with a benediction, a prayer invoking God's blessing upon us as we go from here. A curse is a malediction. If we were to re-word a benediction into a malediction, it might sound something like this:
We are prone to think that we create our own curses. For example, there is a story of a man who moved into a cottage equipped with a stove and a few simple furnishings. As the sharp edge of winter cut across the landscape, the cottage grew cold, as did its occupant. He went out back and pulled a few boards off the house to kindle a fire. The fire was warm, but the house seemed as cold as before. More boards came off for a larger fire to warm the now even colder house, which in return required an even larger fire, demanding more boards. In a few days the man cursed the weather, cursed the house, cursed the stove, and moved away. (Craddock Stories, page 18) Sometimes the curse of human experience is of our own doing, and it's hard to blame the devil or any other practitioner of maledictions.
The author of Deuteronomy takes a more philosophical approach, and frames blessings and curses in terms of a basic life choice. In Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verse 19, God says, through Moses:
One of our most joyful Christmas carols, "Joy to the World," has a curious verse, reading:
(Hymnal: A Worship Book, #318, verse 3)
Gardens do produce weeds. Fields produce thorns and thistles. Humankind is plagued with a host of infestations too numerous to mention. We toil and toil, often without anything to show for it. We weep and weep, and weep alone. Isaac Watts' phrase captures it well, "Far as the curse is found...." Far as the curse is found, and it's found everywhere!
A Euphoric Paul Is a little Hard to Take!
If you're convinced that the curse of human sin is pervasive, you may find the Apostle Paul's euphoric little rhapsody in Ephesians a little hard to take! Good grief! He talks of blessings here, blessings there, blessings everywhere, and of God's pleasure in providing them! He praises God's glorious grace that God lavishes on us, it being yet another thing in which God takes pleasure. (Ephesians 1:3-14) I marked up all of the positive words in our reading from Ephesians with a yellow highlighter, and it took on a decidedly jaundiced hue.
Paul's upbeat bounciness is a little over the top, difficult for a miserly, under-stated Mennonite to take! It reminds me of a letter of recommendation that a Chicago bank received from an investment house in Boston. The investment house could not say enough about this young Bostonian. His father, they wrote, was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell. Further back was an attractive blend of Saltonstalls, Peabodys, and other first families of Boston. Their recommendation of this young blue blood was given unreservedly and without hesitation. Several days later the Chicago bank sent back a note expressing its unhappiness with the recommendation. The note read: "We were contemplating using the young man for bank work, not for breeding purposes."
Granted that blessings are good and all, but lavish?!? It's as if the Apostle Paul is swept off his feet with euphoria and elation. Someone (Edward Markquart) has suggested that Paul sounds like a young man or woman who has fallen in love for the first time. The first time you fall in love is a bewilderingly euphoric experience. Falling in love for the fourth time, while good, can't help but be tempered by experience, if not a little wisdom and perspective.
It's not as if Paul is unaware of the curse upon human existence. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God," he told the Christians in Rome. And to the Christians in Galatia he listed the works of the flesh (Galatians 3:19-21), knowing full well that they would recognize themselves in that ugly list. They were imperfect people, much like us, but the glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for God to love us. All through Scripture God lavishes His love on visibly imperfect people (Madeleine L'Engle, Glimpses of Grace, page 194), people like Jacob, a cheat and a rascal; people like Simon Peter, a bumbler; and people like Paul himself, who had done terrible things in God's name!
It may be, of course, that because Paul was painfully aware of his flawed nature that he was so euphoric about God's grace. The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ means that the curse upon the world is overturned! It has lost its power to dominate our existence. And Isaac Watts caught this so well with his phrase, "He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found." God's grace will flow into every crevice and crater the curse has created.
Blessings and Curses
There is in the Scriptures a curious combination of blessings and curses, evident, for example in Jesus' beatitudes. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3), says the Gospel of Matthew, but being poor in spirit sounds more like a curse! If the curse of human existence means that your meekness is no match for another's aggression, it's difficult to see how blessing can emerge out of that. If the curse of human existence means that your purity of heart is mocked and exploited, it's difficult to spin that into a blessing!
It's difficult to reconcile the incongruity of grief and mourning alongside blessing! It's a spiritual paradox, yet saint after Christian saint has discovered its truth. Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is known throughout Christendom as "the father of the English hymn," having written over 600 hymns, and many people, no doubt out of respect for him, mention that he was often ill, but fail to specify the nature of his illness. The truth of the matter is that Watts was often deranged – deranged for extended periods of time. During those times Watts wrote nothing, waiting in the care of a kind family until his sanity returned. Someone (Victor Shepherd) noted that it's difficult to decide whether to describe Watts' existence as episodic sanity, or episodic derangement.
Watts attempted to describe his experience during a particularly long episode in a poem cited in a book entitled, A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction (2008, by Mark S. Bauer). The poem itself is entitled "The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders" (~1712). Watts writes:
The throne of reason shakes. ‘Be still, my thoughts;
... When nature's meaner springs,
... O ‘tis all confusion!
Like some light worthless chip of floating cork
Short rest I find; for the next rolling wave
Ah, when will these tumultuous scenes be gone?
Invoking Blessings for the Year Ahead
Often, at the beginning of a new year, we look back on the past year, and recount God's blessings and faithfulness. It's a good thing to do, but I suggest that it might also be good to focus on the year before us. The New Testament book of Hebrews, in its list of heroes and heroines that lived by faith, says, at one place, "By faith Isaac invoked blessings for the future on Jacob and Esau." (Hebrews 11:20; compare Psalm 72:15) I like that idea, invoking blessings for the future, on each other.
Jesus commanded his disciples, "Bless those who curse you" (Luke 6:28) – counsel repeated by the Apostle Paul (Romans 12:14) – and at the conclusion of the New Testament we are given the promise of a new heaven and a new earth in which "the curse will be abolished." (Revelation 22:3, NJER) Nothing that has cursed (hu)mankind shall exist any longer...." (PHL) "There shall be no more curse!" (KJV) That's why we can sing, with another hymn-writer, "Great is God's Faithfulness!"
("Great Is Thy Faithfulness," 1923; words by Thomas O. Chisholm; music by William M. Runyan; Hymnal: A Worship Book, #327)
"May the Lord curse you and abandon you. May the Lord keep you in darkness and give you judgment without grace. May the Lord turn his back upon you and remove his peace from you forever." (R.C. Sproul)
It almost gives me the shivers verbalizing it, for calling down a curse is much more than an insult. It's also more than a mere wish that disaster overtake the person in question, any more than a benediction is a mere wish that things will go well for whomever it may concern.
"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live...."
It's a basic choice proffered throughout the Scriptures, most vividly set out in the first chapter of the Psalms, where you can choose either to live a blessed life beside a stream in some verdant valley ... or ... you can be chaff – worthless, dead, insubstantial! The choice is a bit stark, akin to the choice people have in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon with regard to alcohol: you're either a teetotaller, or you crawl right into the bottle! You either go to church and sing hymns ... or ... you howl!
"No more let sins and sorrows grow,
A lot of Christians omit that verse, uncomfortable, I guess, with sin, sorrow, and thorny infestations alongside cute renditions of a rosy-cheeked baby Jesus contentedly cooing "Away in a Manger". That particular verse is a reference to Genesis, chapter 3, in which God said to Adam, "Because you have ...eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you...." (Genesis 3:17-18)
nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found
far as the curse is found
far as, far as the curse is found."
"My frame of nature is a ruffled sea,
This is the same mind that wrote "Joy to the World". Watts' recurring psychiatric illness often incapacitated him, yet "whenever he was well enough to preach, crowds hung on words they knew to pour from a heart wrapped in the heart of God." (Victor Shepherd) Strange, this combination of blessings, and what must have been a cursed existence, yet out of this cauldron of suffering emerged blessings that have endured for centuries!
And my disease the tempest. ...
Peace and be still.' In vain my reason gives
The peaceful word, my spirit strives in vain
To calm the tumult and command my thoughts.
Fired to impetuous ferments, break all order;
When little restless atoms rise and reign
Tyrants in sovereign uproar, and impose
Ideas on the mind; confused ideas
Of non-existents and impossibilities,
Who can describe them?
If I but close my eyes, strange images
In thousand forms and thousand colours rise,
Stars, rainbows, moons, green dragons, bears and ghosts,
An endless medley rush upon the stage
And dance and riot wild in reason's court
Above control. I'm in a raging storm ...
Is tossed from wave to wave: now overwhelmed
With breaking floods, I drown, and seem to lose
All being ...
Snatches me back again; then ebbing far
Sets me adrift, and I am borne off to sea,
Helpless, amidst the bluster of the winds,
Beyond the ken of shore.
When shall this weary spirit, tossed with the tempests,
Harassed and broken, reach the ports of rest,
And hold it firm? When shall this wayward flesh ...
Ungovernable, return to sacred order ...."
"Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
AMEN
(God's) own dear presence to cheer and to guide,
strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow;
blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!"
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.