We’ve slowly made our way through Ephesians, word by word and wonder by wonder. We’ve seen how serious Paul is about getting the life of God—the large, eternal, infinite life of God—inside us.
The letter to the Ephesians is Paul’s attempt to wake us up to all the ways that, through Christ, God startles us into resurrection living. Throughout our summer’s exploration of Ephesians, we’ve heard one message said a dozen different ways: practice Jesus. In everything you do, in every place you find yourself—practice Jesus. His is the only life large enough for us. Everywhere else is cramped space.
The Christian life is lived on God’s terms. Our ways need changing. The details of our lives, especially our relationships, take on new form. Jesus-form, servant-form, cross-form.
In the back half of this letter Paul trades in his telescope for a microscope. He drills down into the particulars of our lives, because it turns out that it’s the particulars that make us who we are. How do we take the largeness of God and put that reality to work in the small details of our lives?
Now that we know about the infinite holiness of God, what will it look like when all our minutes, hours, and days, and every one of our relationships, take on holy significance? Paul wants us to think eternally but act locally, to practice resurrection right where we are. This is the way to spiritual maturity. So he zooms in, turning the dials in on the microscope. He gives us instructions for how to behave and treat one another, what our relationships will look like as we practice Christ together.
When he’s done addressing life in church community, he zooms in even closer. Now, Paul wants us to pay attention to what happens at home. How spouses are to regard each other. No longer with an attitude of dismissiveness as if we own one another, but with reverence. No longer is it okay for women to be talked down to. Now we are to look at one another in the eyes, with equal measure, and search for Christ inside of each other.
I love this! I love this because this movement from the eternal to the specific confronts us every time. We tend to think of God in impersonal, ethereal ways. In ways that have nothing to do with how we live with others.
Those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” love to talk about how spending time with other human beings inside of religious community is unnecessary when they can just get up every morning and see God in the sunrise, or in the birds soaring through the sky, in the crisp cool air, or the quiet sound of wind rustling through the leaves. They say these things as if no one else sees God these ways—like they’re in on something new. Paul will have none of that. I’m not impressed when someone tells me they believe in God. That’s too easy to say. It means very little. I am impressed when someone can tell me how God changed their day. That goes past mere believe and into the realm of robust relationship.
The farther we go in his letter to the Ephesians, the more Paul insists that God is discovered and uncovered in sacred community. God becomes flesh and blood this way. God is more than some transcendent idea; God is the capital “S” Someone who is real and present, calling us to say no to all the ways our culture is disconnecting from what’s real and personal. All of scripture, and Jesus Himself, points to a God who is found in, and in between, flesh and blood relationships.
“Place these words inside your hearts. Get them deep inside you.”
Those are the first words from our passage in Deuteronomy for this morning. Deuteronomy is about the particulars. It’s Moses’s last sermon before he passes away. And after he’s gone, he needs the Israelite people to remember how God has changed their life. In Ephesians, Paul drills down to the specifics. That’s what Moses is up to in Deuteronomy. God lives in, and cares most about, the details. And the most detailed layer of our lives—the closest our microscopes can zero in on, is what happens at home.
“Inscribe these words...on the doorposts of your houses. Teach them to your children. Do all of this on the soil that God has promised to give you. Get all this deep inside of you.”
God is not happy being left outside of anything. It’s not enough to find Him in sunrises and sunsets or in crisp, cool mountain breezes, in the sound of crashing waves, or the soaring of seagulls. That’s not the stuff of diligent discipleship; it’s the stuff of soggy Hallmark cards. God wants into our houses! Our kitchens and bedrooms. Our living and dining rooms. This is ground zero for our faith: what happens at home.
It turns out that the most significant thresholds of our faith are the physical ones we step across every morning and evening as we leave and return home. Home is where faith begins, where it’s formed and how it gets stuck inside. Home is where our faith matures.
When my parents first told my brother and I they had decided to sell the house we grew up in, I found myself surprised that I wasn’t at all sad. I questioned was why I wasn’t grieving it. I spoke to my brother about this and found out he wasn’t grieving, either, which made me feel better. As the house went on the market, childhood memories began surfacing.
It was in the front yard that my brother and I and all the neighborhood kids tore up the grass playing baseball. Ghost man on first and third. And what about the pile of unused bricks that sat in the same place in the backyard for 30 years, the ones we used to build forts with or hide behind whenever we played outside?
And then there was the panel of unfinished drywall in the garage with pencil etchings all up and down it, where my parents measured our height every few months with the dates scrawled next to each marker. What would happen to that?
Our lives are lived, and we are formed, in-house. Nowhere else is it more important to live out our faith—to practice resurrection—than in the space behind our front door. Everything begins at home, and everything about who we are and how we are, mirrors home. Home and how we speak to one another in it, how we grow inside of it, should mirror Christ. I am who I am, and you are who you are, because of what home is like.
As your pastor, I can lose my voice and my breath teaching Christ to you. I could lead Bible study after Bible study, preach to you for twenty years’ worth of Sundays; I could run around all week long, and still, I wouldn’t have as much an impact on your family’s faith as you do. Research bears this out: the most important influence on the religious and spiritual lives of children and adolescents is their parents.
So, this sanctuary is not the space within which faith is formed; it is more so the place in which it is celebrated. As it turns out, our faith is instilled, grown, and brought to maturity in the same space we are instilled, grow, and brought to maturity, on our front porches and in our kitchens and living rooms. The primary responsibility of fostering Christ in our children resides with you, parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. You are painting a portrait of God for your children. There’s no way not to. What does that picture look like? What happens at home?
The thresholds around the front doors, side doors, back doors of your homes—they’re also the thresholds of faith. This shouldn’t be surprising. Jesus did most of His earthly ministry around tables, the ones inside other people’s homes, sharing food and drink with friends and enemies, with outcasts and the well-connected. We believe in a God who was born into a family. In a stable that was adjacent to a house. This is to say, we have a flesh and blood faith. A home-faith. A God-in-house faith. Teach your children well.
The invitation and challenge we’re given as we enter the last chapter of Ephesians is to live a specific faith in a specific space. Speak no more flighty, five-syllable words! No more floaty theological conjectures will do! No more sentimental, syrupy nonsense that too often passes for faith. God is not a good feeling, nor is He a concept or notion. God is a person who longs to take up residence among us.
So, what happens at home? As it turns out, faith is shaped inside of the havens of our homes. As it turns out, it’s the soil in which we have been planted that we grow, strong and mature in body, in mind, in heart, in house…in Christ.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.