Years ago there was a farmer from a very small village in Germany who was just itching to get out and see something of the world. His big chance came when his nephew got a job on a barge that would sail up the Rhine River to Rotterdam. Even if it only stayed there for one day to drop off one load and pick up another, it was his big chance to see the outside world. And his wife wouldn’t let him skip out on his chores any longer than that, anyway. So he hitched a ride on the barge with his nephew.
His adventure began as soon as they pulled into Rotterdam Harbor. It was full of the largest, most beautiful sailing ships he had ever seen. He saw a passerby and asked, in German, who owned all the ships. And the passerby answered in Dutch, kannietverstan, which means, I can’t understand you. The farmer thought about that for a moment, thanked him and headed into the city center. Pretty soon he passed a big store, so big that they could take all the shops in their village and fit them into just the ground floor of this one grand store. He had never seen anything like that! He asked another passerby who owns it, and got the same answer, kannietverstan. He saw a great mansion, asked who lived there, and the answer came again, kannietverstan. In the central square, there was a statue of someone who looked very important. He asked who it was, and was told, kannietverstan. On the way back to the harbor, he passed a funeral procession with the fanciest carriages he had ever seen, one after another. He asked a passerby who had died, and was told, kannietverstand. He was deeply moved at that. He took off his hat and stood very still until the last carriage had past.
And when he got back to his village he told everybody about his great adventure. He had learned all about an amazing man, who owned a whole fleet of beautiful sailing ships, lived in a great mansion, a national hero who had his statue in the city square. And he, the farmer, had been there and seen his funeral procession with his own eyes. And this wonderful man’s name was Kannietverstand.
I love cross-cultural adventures. But I always try to do a better job than that of understanding what I am seeing.
This morning I invite you to join me on a cross cultural adventure in the coming weeks, to meet some of the earliest Christians in the city of Ephesus. We are going to start a series of sermons from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. There are two difficulties in reading this letter. It was written in a culture very different from ours. That makes it hard for us to understand at points. And besides that, when we read the letter it’s like we are only hearing one side of a conversation, like you’re on the train and somebody is talking on their cell phone and you can’t help but overhear and you’re wracking your brain to try to figure out what they are talking about as you only hear one side of the conversation.
So this morning we’ll start out with just the first 2 verses of the letter. That will give us an opportunity to get our bearings a little bit before we really jump in. Maybe today can be the tourist brochure you read before you even leave home. May it open up for us new understanding of one of the most precious books of the New Testament.
Would you please stand for the reading of God’s word?
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Ephesus was a port city on the Mediterranean Sea. Today it’s in Turkey. It was build at the mouth of a river, and it was the seaport where goods came and went from one of the most prosperous provinces in the Roman Empire. It was a provincial capital, so important government business was done there. It’s hard to say today, but the population was probably at least 250,000 in Paul’s time. It was a big, bustling, prosperous city, one of the four biggest cities of the Roman Empire, sort of like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston in the US today.
There was an outdoor theater built into a hillside with stone seats for 24,000 people. I assume they brought their own cushions.
Like many big cities, many religions were present there side by side. It was a very pluralistic city. The main deity of Ephesus was Artemis, sometimes called Dianna. The temple of Artemis in Ephesus was one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world. It was made entirely of marble, 220 feet wide by 425 feet long, with the roof held up by 127 marble columns, some of them 60 feet high. It was beautiful. The temple was an important part of the city’s economy.
The arrangement with Artemis was that it was the people’s job to bring sacrifices to Artemis and do the appropriate ceremonies and say the right words. And then Artemis would give them babies and make their crops grow well and protect them from invasion. And it all seemed to be working very well with Artemis because these were good times for Ephesus. And if someone didn’t want to serve Artemis there were already many other similar gods available. Take your pick. It may not seem like fertile ground to bring in a new religion.
But one of the very earliest Christian churches did come to birth in Ephesus. It became one of the most important of the early churches. In our text, Paul already calls them “saints… who are faithful.” That sounds like quite a compliment to me, considering the way that they were surrounded by so many other religions as competition.
And how did Christianity travel the 700 some miles from Jerusalem to Ephesus? That’s the other voice in our conversation. The Ephesian church received the letter. The Apostle Paul wrote it. And they had a long history together.
In our text for this morning, Paul describes himself as “an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.” It was a miracle that Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t what he set out to be. If they had taken a vote in his high school class to elect the student least likely to start churches that would worship Jesus as the Messiah, Paul would have won.
Let me give you his background, quickly. He was born into a devout Jewish family, but not in Israel, in Tarsus, another large city in what is today called Turkey, another city where many gods were worshipped. His father was a Pharisee, the strictest branch of Judaism. His parents gave him a good Jewish name, Saul, for the first king of Israel. And he grew up being reminded every day that he was different from his neighbors, who continuously came into his father’s shop. ‘We rest on the Sabbath because we worship the God of Israel. We’re different from them.” “We don’t eat pork because we worship the God of Israel. We’re different from them.” His parents even sent him off to Jerusalem for school to be sure he stayed different from their neighbors. They sent him to the very best school, to study under the greatest rabbi, Gamaliel.
Young Saul of Tarsus was a brilliant student. He became a Pharisee, like his father. He mastered the Old Testament and the teachings of the rabbis. He kept all the rules. And when he got wind of this group that proclaimed that a carpenter from Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah, a carpenter who had been such a total failure that he was crucified by the Romans, and that Jewish people were believing this, he was furious. We don’t know that he ever saw Jesus face to face in the flesh. But when they caught one of the earliest Christian leaders, Stephen, and they stoned him to death, Saul of Tarsus was in the middle of it. When he heard that the infection had spread to the city of Damascus, he got authorization from the chief priests to go up there and throw all the Christians in jail. You might call Saul of Tarsus the hatchet man for the chief priests, or maybe the enforcer.
But on the road up to Damascus something incredible happened. He had a vision of Jesus the Messiah, who really had risen from the dead and claimed Saul to be his servant, his messenger to the Gentiles, all the people who weren’t Jews. And Saul did a 180. When he arrived in Damascus he started preaching that Jesus really was the Messiah. The Christians there didn’t know what to think! He started going by a Greek name, Paul, instead of his Hebrew name, Saul. He took a long sabbatical to reread the Old Testament over and over again and to see how it fit together with his personal encounter with Jesus Christ. And it did fit, at point after point after point.
And Jesus had told him that his job was to be an apostle, a messenger to bring this message to the Gentiles, those neighbors that he grew up despising. And he was the perfect man for the job. He knew the Hebrew scriptures inside and out so that he could argue with any rabbi in the synagogues and hold his ground. He had the theological background to take this precious message and reword it for the Gentiles, who came from very different cultures and religious backgrounds, in ways that they could understand, but were totally faithful to the Old Testament. And he knew the Gentile world from all the times that the Gentiles had come into his father’s shop and from watching the people of Tarsus worship the Greek gods.
So Paul set out and traveled from city to city and one day came to this great city of Ephesus. He went first to the Jewish synagogue. He was a trained rabbi, so they were glad to have him teach them. They were really surprised when he told them that the Messiah had come and it was Jesus, from Nazareth, but they listened for 3 months. The story is in the Book of Acts, chapter 19. Some of the Jews came to believe that Jesus really was the Messiah, and were baptized in his name. Others refused, and the day came when it was clear they weren’t going to listen to him any more. So Paul opened a store front church, in the lecture hall of a Greek teacher named Tyrranus. And he started taking the message to the general population of the Ephesians.
He warned them that it was a waste of time to worship idols made with human hands. He prayed for the sick in the name of Jesus and many were miraculously healed. Many Gentiles believed in Jesus and Paul organized them together in churches.
There was a silversmith, named Demetrius, who earned his living making statues of Artemis. He realized this was going to be terrible for business, so got the silversmith union together and sounded the alarm that if Paul kept this up their business would be hurt.
They went looking for Paul to stop him. But when they didn’t find him, they grabbed two of his lieutenants and they dragged them into that huge theater and the crowd just shouted over and over for two hours, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.’ It was almost a riot. And what did Paul do when he heard what was going on? He wanted to go in and preach even to this crowd, but his Christian friends held him back.
Paul stayed in Ephesus for three years. It became a ministry base from which he sent out teams to other nearby cities. He poured his heart into that church. He taught them’ the whole purpose of God,’ everything they needed to know, building them up into a strong church. And then he moved on to do the same thing somewhere else. That was the birth of the church in Ephesus. That’s the background to the conversation that we get to read in Paul’s letter.
Years passed. The church grew and grew. And it changed dramatically, as all churches must. Once, the core had been the Jews that had come from the synagogue. But more and more it became a church of Gentiles, many of them former worshippers of Artemis. New little house churches sprouted up all over the city. Some of them had no Jewish believers in them at all. Maybe they were splitting up and some of the house churches were made up of Jewish Christians and the rest were Gentile Christians and the two groups just weren’t talking to each other much anymore. Satellite churches grew up in all the towns in the region. The church had to wrestle with the full spectrum of ideas and other religions that had come together in this big city.
The day came when Paul was in prison, probably in Rome. And he loved this church back in Ephesus and, with time on his hands, he wrote them a pastoral letter to be circulated among all those house churches, to help them keep on track. It was to be delivered by his assistant, Tychicus.
And what did this great apostle have to say to them? And what can this ancient letter say to us?
It seems that the most urgent message on Paul’s heart was to those new Gentile Christians. Don’t wander away from your Jewish brothers and sisters in Christ. There is one church of Jesus Christ. God wants his family to stand together. We need to hear that message today.
And it was still very hard for these little house churches to stand firm, surrounded by so many different religions, especially to live in the long shadow of the temple of Artemis. They needed to be reminded of the wonder of Jesus Christ, that he stood far above all the petty gods of the nations. Don’t try to mix Christ with a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Don’t be afraid to tell the world that he is the one who holds all things together. We need to hear that message today.
And it seems that the Ephesians were disturbed to hear that Paul was in prison. He had always been there for them. He was the one who had built the church. If he died, who could they turn to? So Paul reminded them of the wonderful gift of being part of the church. When all the members come together, with the Holy Spirit flowing among them, each bringing his or her gifts, the church builds itself. Every member has something to contribute. Every member needs every other member. When we live that out great things will happen. We need to hear that message today.
Well, that’s a little introduction and a few snapshots of what’s ahead for our visit to the church in Ephesus. I really encourage you to take what you just heard and start reading through Ephesians. It is so rich you can read it over and over again and still keep finding treasures in it. May God use our time there to build this church, to unite us as one body in Christ, and to glorify his name in our world and. AMEN
