Ephesians 4: 1-16 (links validated 4/16/24)

Those who proclaim Ephesians 4 want to look for examples of how God’s diverse sons and daughters who have diverse gifts and talents have united to serve God and our neighbors. I cite the work God has done through our food pantry. For more than 9 years our church hosted a monthly food pantry for approximately 100 of the households of our neighbors who are hungry. When the pandemic broke out, we began distributing food to 600-900 households of our neighbors who are hungry every week. This would not have been possible were it not for God’s people from a variety of denominations and perspectives coming together to donate as well as help distribute food. Members of Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, Reformed as well as non-Reformed churches united to bless more than 5,000 of our neighbors who are hungry each week. Perhaps more amazingly, however, members of several local Orthodox Jewish synagogues joined this ministry by both donating and helping to prepare to distribute food. God’s Spirit, in other words, united people of various faiths as well as no religious faith to serve our neighbors.

William Sloane Coffin was active in the civil rights movement. He marched for justice and spent time in jail. He spoke against the Vietnam War and worked for nuclear disarmament. Let me close with some words that he repeated in several different contexts across the decades. This is the way he said them in 1981, when he was pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City. “We are ordained to unrest, in deceptive times, to reach for truth that seems to many like madness; in the darkness of the world’s hatred and prejudice to keep the small flame of love alight. For the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but love.”...

In his book The Life of Johnson, James Boswell quotes Johnson: “Providence has wisely ordered that the more numerous men are, the more difficult it is for them to agree in anything, and so they are governed. There is no doubt, that if the poor should reason, ‘We’ll be the poor no longer, we’ll make the rich take their turn,’ they could easily do it, were it not that they can’t agree. So the common soldiers, though so much more numerous than their officers, are governed by them for the same reason.”

One day, in a little Episcopal church in the small town of Randolph, New York, which Is just south of Buffalo, someone noticed an anonymous person had spray-painted something on the wall of their church building. It was a question — a theological question, as a matter of fact: “Can I still get to heaven if I kill myself?”Well, what to do? How to respond? Yes, it was vandalism, of a sort, but it was also a serious question: a cry for help from a troubled soul. But who wrote it? How could you get back to that person with an offer of help?Do you know what the leaders of that church decided to do? After some soul-searching, they went out and bought a can of spray paint. Right next to that anguished question, they spray-painted a reply: “God loves you with no exceptions!”...

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I was at USC’s School of Music one summer, when I got to know the resident piano tuner. It’s a full time job just keeping the vast number of pianos tuned and in good repair. The amazing thing is that, at anytime, any two or more pianos can be brought together from any place in the Music School, from any mix of buildings, and they will all perform perfectly in tune with each other. The secret, the tuner told me, is not some amazing computer tuning machine, but his own ear and the tuning fork he carries with him to tune every piano in the school. Any number of pianos, all tuned by the same ear, to the same fork, all are automatically tuned to each other. That’s how it is that any number of worshipers gathered together, each one’s heart tuned by Christ, are nearer to each other than they could possibly be looking anywhere else...

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