Truly Alive?
Ephesians 2:1-10[1]
When I look at the way we as a
people live our lives today, I have to wonder what happened to the concept of
“sin.” Now, I would be the first to insist that, contrary to what some may say,
sin is not the basic truth of our existence. I firmly believe that our basic
truth is that God loves us unconditionally and irrevocably.[2]
And yet, if we take a good look at the way we live our lives, I think we’d have
to say that there’s plenty of sin going around. I’m not much for some of the
typical approaches to sin: the “devil made me do it” doesn’t hold much water
for me.[3]
And I don’t believe it’s some deep stain or flaw that defines us. I think that
sin is what we do when we’re trying to avoid the real truth of our lives.[4]
I think most of us would have to
admit that we really, really don’t want to have to face the facts of our lives.
We’d much rather just let the television wash over us, or lose ourselves in
busy work, or just simply escape with alcohol or food or shopping. Not all of
those things are “evil” in and of themselves. But when we lose ourselves to
them in an attempt to avoid having to deal with what’s going on with us and
especially what’s going on inside us, these things can leave us feeling
profoundly lost and empty. When we’ve done everything we can to avoid feeling
the pain of life, we also lose the capacity to feel anything. It’s as if we’re
dead inside. I have to ask the question I think we’ve all sensed at one time or
another: when we live our lives that way, are we really living at all?
St. Paul addresses this question
in our lesson for today. He faced this spiritual deadness head-on. He made it
clear that, on our own, we are “dead through our trespasses” (Eph. 2:5). In fact, he uses some language that may seem
strange to us. He says that our deadness comes from “the trespasses and sins in
which you once lived, following the course of this world” (Eph. 2:1-2). That’s
not the way we tend to describe our lives these days. We might say that we have
a weakness for something, or maybe we struggle with some bad habits, or perhaps
we are dealing with certain issues. But we don’t tend to describe our lives in
terms of “trespasses” or “disobedience.”[5]
But St. Paul won’t let us off the
hook at this point.[6] When get
lost in those pursuits that leave us feeling dead inside, he calls it following
the “course of this world.” I like the way the Phillips translation puts it:
our problem is that we’re drifting “along on the stream of this world’s ideas
of living.” Paul is quite blunt about what that constitutes: sin. When try to
ignore the real truth of our lives, the truth that is rooted in our very souls,
we are living in disobedience. Paul makes it clear that living that way is the
cause of the sense that our lives are empty. If it seems like we’re not truly
alive at all, it’s because we’re trying to avoid the truth we’d rather not
face.
Fortunately, that’s not the end of
the story. Paul makes such a strong point of emphasizing how dead we can be in
order to point us to the fact that God is the one who makes us truly alive.[7] In
fact, Paul insists that, just as Jesus was dead, but God made him alive again,
so also God exerts the power of the resurrection to bring back to life all of
us who are living in a kind of spiritual deadness.[8] In
our lesson for today, Paul says that the basis for this amazing transformation
that we can all experience is God’s grace.[9] It
is because God is “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4) that God steps in to do something
about the emptiness of the way we live. Just as death didn’t keep God from
raising Jesus from the dead, so the reality that we may be “dead through our
trespasses” (Eph. 2:5) doesn’t prevent God from giving us new life. In fact,
Paul’s whole point is to assure us that God has already “made us alive together
with Christ” (Eph. 2:5). By the power of what God has done for us in Jesus
Christ, we have the chance to become truly alive.[10]
I realize that my approach to
being “dead in sins” is probably a bit different from what St. Paul had in mind
originally. I would imagine he was thinking of other kinds of behaviors, like
pleasure seeking, immorality, promiscuity, and other vices we still have with
us today. But I wonder if it isn’t the case that, then as now, those excessive
behaviors aren’t just another way to escape from the emptiness and the pain we
suffer in the depths of our soul. While we may use more acceptable ways of
avoiding what’s really going on with us and inside us, the result is the same:
we’re dead inside. By keeping ourselves from feeling the painful truth of life,
we lose the capacity to feel anything. Unfortunately, all those things we work
so hard at avoiding have a way of coming back to haunt us. I find this is
especially true in when we’re sleeping—or trying to sleep. That’s when the
truths we’ve been trying avoid come back to remind us that we’re not really
living.
But this is where the power of the
resurrection can make all the difference in the world for us. Think about it:
if God’s power is great enough to overcome even death, then what part of your
suffering can’t God overcome? I think the answer is obvious. The new life of
Jesus’ resurrection is so powerful that it spills over into our lives. It gives
us the courage to face the struggles we’d rather avoid. When we do that we can
come alive in a way that we may never have thought possible. As we face the
reality of our lives, the pain that can haunt us slowly loses its hold over us.
Through God’s mercy and love, by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, we can come
back from the emptiness of trying to escape from life and instead we can become
truly alive!
[1] ©2015
Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 3/15/2015 at Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf.
Pheme Perkins, “The Letter to the Ephesians,” New Interpreters Bible IX:394: “Ephesians has placed its
description of sin in subordinate clauses. The focus of the opening period is
God’s grace and love experienced by the redeemed.”
[3] Cf.
Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, 117,
where he recognizes that the text speaks of the spiritual power that influences
humankind toward sin. Nevertheless, “This explanation of sin does not, however,
do away with human responsibility, for in the next breath the writer can say
that not only the readers, but all believers, were at one time those who chose
not to obey.”
[4] Cf. Karl
Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2:260,
where he speaks of the human condition as a self-enclosed “imprisonment” where “we
only fulfil [sic] our own possibilities and only believe in our own
possibilities.”
[5] Thomas
G. Long, “Just As I Am,” The Christian
Century (Mar 21, 2006):18, where he says of Paul’s language that we are
“dead in sin” and in need of salvation: “To see this statement as applicable to
us, to swallow even one ounce of this claim, we must admit a cluster of truths
about ourselves we would rather not face—that we are captive to cultural and spiritual
forces over which we have no control, that they have drained the life out of
us, that we are unable to think or feel or crawl our way free, and that we are
in urgent need of a God who comes to rescue. In short, we need saving.”
[6] Fred
Craddock, “From God to God,” The
Christian Century (Mar 22, 2003): 18. He says, “The language is vivid: You
were dead. This is to say, you were caught in a futile way of life obedient to
desires of the flesh, seeking the approval of your culture, heeding every
inclination that led away from God, aimless and helpless to extricate yourself.”
[7] Craddock,
“From God to God,” 18: “For all their power to cripple, control and alienate,
all hostilities in the universe will not only cease ultimately, but will be
reconciled. For redemption in Christ to be complete, it must range as far and
wide as the forces of evil. And his liberating work has already begun in
setting free the person caught in the passions of the senses and enamored of
this worlds offerings.”
[8] Cf. Lincoln,
Ephesians, 116: “the parallel he
draws between the supreme demonstration of God’s power in the resurrection and
exaltation of Christ (1:19–21) and his activity on behalf of believers. He
wants them to realize that just as Christ was physically dead but God raised
and exalted him, so they were spiritually dead but God raised and exalted them
with Christ.”
[9] Cf. Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A
Vision of Hope for Our Time, 32, where he offers what I think is an
excellent definition of grace: “There is nothing we can do to make God love us
more” and “there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.” Cf. also Barth,Church Dogmatics 2.1:278: “God’s love is not merely not
conditioned by any reciprocity of love. It is also not conditioned by any
worthiness to be loved on the part of the loved.”
[10] Cf.
Lincoln, Ephesians, 118: “With grace
as its ground and faith as its means, this salvation can have nothing to do
with any notion of merit. That it is ‘by grace’ means that it has not
originated from a human source but comes from God as a gift. That it is ‘by
faith’ means the exclusion of human effort and, therefore, of any pride or
boasting in the presence of God. The writer wants his readers to be absolutely
clear that it is God, and not humans, who is to be given the credit for
salvation, and that means the whole of salvation, including believers’ good
works.”
