Life sometimes really does seem a lot like a shell game. It moves faster than you can keep track of and what you reach for is often disappointingly empty. For many people life feels just plain random, a big gamble but at least it's not rigged against you. But sometimes life may feel like a cruel con game, as if you're playing with a stacked deck, with the "in-the-know" folks raking in the chips while the hapless tourists are getting fleeced everywhere they turn. As the Psalmist says,
"...I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked....They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment... hey scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth. Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them. And they say, 'How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?' Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches." [Ps 73:3-10]
We've all read the Psalms that promise prosperity to the righteous, and we've all heard the laments of those whose righteousness has not been rewarded. Most of us have cried out with the prophet Habakkuk, "O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?" [Ha 1:2]
One of the things that you will see as you study the Scriptures is that God keeps stretching out his time line. Remember that Abraham was promised land and descendants. God waited to give them Isaac until Sarah was so old that the very idea of her getting pregnant made them laugh out loud. He waited another 400 years - the Egyptian captivity - until Abraham's great-great-grandchildren came into the Promised Land. Isaiah first preached of a Messiah some 800 years before the birth of Jesus, and as you know we have been awaiting the second coming for almost 2000 years. God's time is not ours. So if when we read these promises we expect immediate fulfillment of our wishes, we will be disappointed. We may, in fact, live rough and die poor. But that's not the last word. God's horizon lies beyond what we can see right now. But standing on Paul's shoulders we can get enough of a glimpse to know it's there.
God's values aren't ours, either. The health-and-wealth movement in American Christianity promises everything from business success to miraculous healing, as if God were more interested in our outsides than our insides. But think about it for a minute. If material possessions were actually good for us, would Jesus have said, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." [Mt 19:24]?
Part of the reason God has designed things so that we struggle and strive in the present is to prepare us for heaven later, for us to develop spiritual and moral muscle, as it were. And he spends a great deal of time trying to convince his wayward, greedy people that they should see it in that light, too. James makes that clear when he says, "My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing." [Js 1:2] As someone else once said, God's purpose isn't to make us happy, but to make us holy. And that - whether we can see it from where we now stand or not - is what will bring us to the lasting joy that is our heritage in Christ.
Now, another thing that people often think is that God is a great big spoilsport. I thought it was the famous Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken who defined a Puritan as someone who was afraid that someone, somewhere, was having fun, but I was unable to track it down, but I'm sure you know people who think like that. Don't do this, don't do that. Don't swear, don't drink, don't party, and the Scottish Presbyterians even went so far as to teach that laughing on Sunday was an offense against God. Now, we've thankfully grown out of that particular bit of nonsense, understanding that laughter is one of God's great gifts and that He intends us to enjoy God, creation and one another. But is there perhaps some little corner in your heart that secretly wonders if it God hasn't maybe drawn the lines too narrow, and that he - and we - should perhaps loosen up a little? What harm, after all, in just having a little nibble at a forbidden fruit?
What Paul is trying to get at in this chapter is that following God is not just a matter of giving up the dubious pleasures that characterized the pagan Mediterranean life-style. Paul is not just warning us against doing bad things. He's pointing us to where we go to find the good, to where we go to meet our deepest desires, to the choices we should make to become truly fulfilled and whole. God wants us to make good choices, not bad ones; all of these instructions are for our benefit, to turn us toward what will make us truly happy. The "danger" signs at the wrong turns and dead ends are not designed to keep us from getting any fun out of life, but in order to keep us out of trouble and headed toward the clear waters and green pastures we look to our shepherd to provide. "Be careful then how you live," says Paul, "not as unwise people but as wise." [v. 15a] It's just not smart to ignore the manufacturer's operating instructions.
But let's face it. The minute someone tells us not to do something, that's immediately the thing we most want to do, isn't it. That's why Paul puts each of the instructions in this passage - and the one previous to this - in pairs. It's not just "don't do that" it's "instead of that, do this." You all remember when your kids went through the "terrible two's." Some of you are still going through that stage. Well, every time you say "no", your kids echo it right back to you in spades. My mother - yes, that woman who is playing the piano for us today - had this really sneaky underhanded trick. She rarely actually said "no." Instead she would remove the "no" item and replace it with a "yes" item. And there we'd be, with nothing to complain about, because there wasn't a "no" to rebel against, and the "yes" item was actually more fun.
The last passage concentrated on the negatives, the "don't's". Don't be greedy. Don't be sexually immoral. Don't hang around with immoral people. Don't indulge in obscene, silly, and vulgar talk. Don't be foolish.
This passage gives us the "do's", the positives: what we are to fill our lives with, instead. Paul gives us guidance for how to make good decisions, decisions that will lead us into the kind of life God wants us to have, the kind of decisions that will grow us into the kind of people he wants us to be.
The key to the passage is to make good use of our time. That's how our translation puts it. The NIV charges us to make the most of our opportunities, but the Greek is stronger than either of these. Paul says to redeem our time, that means to buy back something that we have lost, or to buy it while it's still available. The offer is good, as it were, for a limited time only... not because God's grace will run out, but because windows of opportunity are never left permanently open. If we don't use our time for good, it will be used for evil.
Spiritual maturity only comes with work, and spiritual immaturity is only appropriate for new Christians. After awhile, immaturity becomes stagnation,
and gives off a bad smell.
Paul tells us to watch closely how we walk. That requires attention and intention. We can't succeed in life with God by accident, because there are too many influences that pull against us: habit, society, our own ingrained selfishness. We have to budget our time just the way we budget our money. We all know that if we aren't careful our money will run right through our fingers like water through a sieve, and there won't be anything left on bill-paying day.
But it's not so much that we have to watch ourselves, although as we saw last week some attention to our own internal condition is necessary. But too much self-analysis can paralyze. Living in constant awareness of our inability to live up to God's best can discourage and even ultimately defeat us. What we have to keep our eyes on is Jesus Christ. Any farmer can tell you that you can't plow a straight furrow if you keep looking down or back; only by keeping your eyes front can you keep your path straight. That's what Martin Luther meant when he said, "Love God and sin boldly," and what Augustine meant when he said, "love God with all your heart, then do whatever you want." What both of them mean is that even though we are completely unable to live up to Jesus' example, as long as he's what we want and who we keep reaching for, we can't go too far wrong. And that's what the will of the Lord is, that we follow in the footsteps of Christ, that we make him the center of our lives, the one we want to spend time with and become like.
Right in the middle of this passage comes a speech about alcohol, a warning against drunkenness. What is it doing there? Are the Ephesians more prone to drunkenness than other people? Were they getting tipsy on the communion wine? Now, most commentators think this is just a general warning against a dangerous and unacceptable practice, and to contrast the high you get from alcohol with the very different high you get from the Holy Spirit. And I agree with them. But I also think that it's in here because what Jesus asks of his followers is pretty difficult, if you stop and think about it. Jesus is asking his followers to live lives of purpose, lives of awareness, lives with direction and meaning. And that means living life without anesthesia.
Remember that Christianity had an enormous appeal for the poor, the oppressed, the lost and uprooted. And one of the few outlets they had to forget the difficulty of their lives was drink. The biggest problem John Wesley had when he brought the gospel to the Welsh miners and the dispossessed urban poor, drunkenness was the vice that was the hardest to uproot, because it was their chief defense against the pain of their lives.
Similarly, when we are faced with the brutal reality of evil in our world and the painful reality of our inability to shape life according to our own wishes, it is very tempting to resort to painkillers of one kind or another. And we indulge in a whole variety. Alcohol is probably the most widely abused painkiller in human history, but a lot of us deaden our pain response with entertainment or food or work or drugs. But Christians are meant to live with our eyes open. Although we've occasionally been charged with being so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good, that's not our call.
Paul knows we need times of joy and relaxation and refreshment and relief. But the place to go for those things is not the corner bar. It's by gathering with the people of God. "Do not get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts." [v. 18-19] The wonderful thing about the pick-me-up provided by the Spirit is that it doesn't let you down with the same kind of painful awakening. Worship provides the kind of life that can actually carry you through the week with a feeling of purpose, a sense that your life has meaning; whereas drinking - or any other over-indulgence - only deepens the need for oblivion.
Don't get drunk. Be filled with the Spirit. Sounds good, doesn't it. But it's not as easy as going down to Monster Beverage and picking up a bottle of scotch or a six-pack of beer. Anybody can do that. You pour it, you drink it, and pretty soon everything seems funny or blurry or disappears altogether.
But how does one actually go about being filled with the Spirit? The Greek uses the imperative, as if it were something we could do by our own actions, by willing ourselves full. Somehow it may seem more spiritual just to think of ourselves as passive vessels awaiting God's inscrutable pleasure. But God doesn't perform magic on passive instruments. God calls for our will to respond to his call, and to align ourselves with his purposes. Now there are a lot of metaphors that can illustrate this point. Jesus uses wind as a metaphor for the Spirit: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes." [Jn 3:8] It's true that the wind blows where and when it chooses, and so does the Spirit. But that doesn't mean we should leave our sails unattended and pick up the oars; what it means is that we have to be smart about having the sails ready and rigged for the maximum effect when the wind does come up. It's amazing how much you have to know, and how hard you have to work to get your ship to make the best use of the wind. Or perhaps you should visualize a windmill farm, the kind that are being built in many places across the country to generate electricity. One windmill isn't enough; but when we gather together and present ourselves to the spirit's power, it's amazing what can happen. Or if you still prefer fossil fuels, think about what pilots have to do to refuel in the air. It takes skill, and attention, and a steady hand. New Jersey drivers may have to wait for someone to come fill our tanks, but you do have to drive up to the pumps and open the gas tank. We have a part to play, and it doesn't do anybody any good to blame God for a flatness in our spiritual life if we haven't been doing our bit.
Life is not a shell game or a con game, neither a treadmill nor a rat race. Life is a gift and a journey, with value and direction and help. And the help we have is the very Spirit of God. Christianity is a religion of the Spirit. It's not an optional add-on, or a treat for the privileged few. The Spirit of God is the agent of God's work in the world and the power that fuels our walk with the Lord. And we do not receive the Spirit just by saying "No" to a list of prohibited actions. We receive him by saying yes to the call of God, and yes to the commands of God.
