Cerebral Living

Westminster Presbyterian Church
July, 29, 2007

Jason Simons, Pastoral Intern
“Cerebral Living”
Ephesians 4:1-16

One of my great interests and passions in my academic life has been the study of the life of the Presbyterian Church and its current and prolonged state of decline. I have written final papers for several religion courses that applied the concepts I learned in that particular course to the real problem of decline in our denomination. I even did an independent study last semester on the role of interest (advocacy) groups like the Presbyterian Lay Committee, the New Wineskins Initiative, the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, and a group called “That All May Freely Serve,” in the decline. I am convinced that these groups, while honestly seeking to faithfully follow God’s call, are causing tension, conflict, and polarization among Presbyterians. They are causing great distrust among God’s people opposite sides of the political and theological spectrum. Simply put, they are causing divisiveness among God’s people. They are causing great tension in the Church, the body of Christ.
In our passage this morning, the apostle Paul is writing from prison to the church in Ephesus, which is caught up in a number of conflicts, which in Paul’s mind, are unimportant to the task at hand. In fact, he doesn’t even take the time to name them. Rather, he is more concerned that people understand that they all are called by God. He wants them to understand just who they are—children of God. He is so concerned with making sure that his message of calling, identity, unity, and love is heard that he doesn’t even acknowledge the conflict in the church until the end of this passage. Even then he does so only because he seemingly has to. He says in verse 14 of the New Revised Standard Version, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” “But, instead,” he says, “speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
This passage is often used to offer a quick and easy explanation for why people are given different gifts and to explain the importance of different church offices. It is often read during ordination services for deacons, elders, and ministers. In fact, those of you who have been ordained to these offices may well remember being commissioned to service with this passage. No doubt, this passage provides important and valuable insights into the distribution of gifts and the importance of church offices, but I believe the heart of this passage lies in what it says about calling.
The term calling is often used to describe why we have pursued the careers that we have. There has been a great push in theological circles in recent years to extend the use of calling and vocation to explain non-clergy career paths. Now, we often speak of being called to medicine, law, business, or education, and speak of them as our own way of “doing” ministry, and rightfully so. We ought to see our careers as ministry. If not, we might want to consider different careers.
One of my professors at Wabash, Dr. Bill Placher, recently edited and published a book called “Callings: Twenty Centuries of Wisdom on Christian Vocation.” In it he compiled passages from great works on matters of vocation and calling from great theologians and philosophers like Calvin, Barth, and Kierkegaard. He explains his motivation for writing the book as being to help his students with what has always been a difficult dilemma, but that is becoming increasingly difficult as we move into a “post-Christian” era. He says that, like early Christians, “we are outsiders in a world dominated by non-Christian values and assumptions,” and knowing the right response to God is not easy. He say that “the values of our culture seem to have so much to do with acquiring the lifestyles of the rich and famous…Advertising surrounds us with images of pleasure and material wealth. Questions like, what is God calling me to do; or, how can I pick up my cross and follow Jesus?” are becoming stranger questions.” He offers this bit of advice- “simply living as Christians could be our calling.”
Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus describes this very sort of calling. Paul is speaking to the very innate and most basic calling that we all share—simply to be God’s children. But what does this mean? How is this a call and how does it shape our everyday lives?
I believe the most important question that we can ask as Christians in answering God’s call, and perhaps one that separates us from the rest of society is the question, “Why?” You may be shocked that this is the question I proposed. You likely expected me to propose a highly complex theological or philosophical question. (After all, that’s what we Presbyterians do best.) It’s such a seemingly simple question. Yet, it is incredibly difficult to answer, especially when phrased in the some of the following forms—Why am I here; Why is there evil in the world; Why do bad things happen to good people? These questions are without a doubt difficult to answer, which is why we often steer clear of them if we can.
One of my favorite things to do as a kid, and you all likely remember doing it too, was to ask the question “Why?” over and over again whenever someone would say something until that person got frustrated. It never got old (as long as you were the one asking the questions). In fact, I did so just last week, and had a lot of fun with it. In my recollection, the game always started with a valid question, but quickly got out of hand, and inevitably ended up with the standard answer of “Just because,” or “Because I said so.” To which, I responded, “Why?” Perhaps this is why our society avoids the question—we don’t like “Just because.” It’s not good enough. But, it is precisely these “Why?” questions that impel us toward faith and toward answering God’s call.
I read a great book recently called “Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road.” It details a three-month journey from Houston, TX to Oregon shared by two then-college-aged friends. The author, Donald Miller, describes his motivations for the journey saying,

I confess I wanted to believe life was bigger, larger than my
presuppositions. Out there, under the cosmos, out in the desert of
Texas, beneath those billion starts and the umbrella of pitch-black
eons of nothingness, on top of that hill. I started wondering if life
was something different than I thought it was, if there was some kind
of raging beauty a person could find, that he could get caught up in
the why of life. And I needed to believe beauty meant something, and
I needed God to step off His self-help soapbox and be willing to say
something eternally significant and intelligent and meaningful, more meaningful than the parroted lines from detergent commercials. I
needed God to be larger than our free-market economy, larger than
our two-for-one coupons, larger than our religious ideas.

Throughout the remainder of the book, he describes their journey and how the happenings on the trip- the van they were traveling in breaking down on several occasions, running into old friends, running out of money, and seeing the great beauty of nature- shape his understanding of the why part of life and his faith. Though it goes unspoken, it is clear that he is searching out his call as a child of God, and he finds it in nature and in the natural order. In it, he finds something bigger than himself that he hasn’t felt before. In the simplest forms of nature, he finds unity.
We all are called to embark on a similar journey. Paul tells us to go out and run on the journey, and he tells us to do it together. He says that we are called to travel the same road and in the same direction. We find the manifestation of this and justification of this fact in the Oneness of God. He says that we all have one Lord, one faith, one baptism and one God. Now, if God is the epitome of Oneness, and we are called as children made in God’s image, ought not our most basic inclination be toward unity and should we not to seek it out in all that we do? Shouldn’t it be the core of our mission?
Frederick Buechner once said, “God calls you to the kind of work that (a) you most need to do; and (b), that the world most needs done. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” We, as Christians seeking to respond to God’s call, ought to think long and hard about what this means for us both individually and as larger body. In doing so, we must ask hard questions of ourselves and of God. For ourselves, we must ask the individual question of passions and interests, and examine our backgrounds and experiences because these shape the way we view the world and one another. We must ask questions of God like: Who am I; where do I fit in with your plan; who did you make me to be? Inevitably, the answers to these questions will lead us into a larger and more pure body of believers because we all are children made in the image of God.
Yet, we must still ask questions of what we are called to as a church, a denomination, and a larger, united body of Christians. We must look long and hard, and with some degree of suspicion, at our current sense of mission. We must ask questions like: What is it what God is calling us to? Is the work that we are doing the kind of work that we need to do? Is it something the world most needs done? Are we coming from the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s hunger?
One of my learning objectives for this summer was to gain a better understanding of calling. I expected that, through prayer and study, I would have a better sense of my future vocation at the end of the summer. I expected to know for certain whether or not I was supposed to pursue ministry. However, much of what I have learned about calling this summer has nothing to do with vocation. I have learned that God calls all of us, as children made in God’s image. However, God does not only call us to service. God’s deepest call is, in the words of the apostle Paul, to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. In doing so, we must grow up with one another into the spirit and body of Christ. We, as ligaments, must take direction from the head, in order to make the church move and grow in this world. The head of the Church, Jesus Christ, calls us to grow up, seek unity, and run on the journey. Now, we must respond as His people.
Amen.