Kathy and I have a Siamese cat, named Ling. For the purposes of being a pet, she’s really good. She’s quite affectionate, for a cat. She’ll come and sit in our laps several times a day, and if you scratch her in just the right spots, she really purrs. She plays amazing games with her balls and other toys. Our dog, Annie, is getting a bit old for it, but sometimes Ling can provoke her into a play fight. Ling is an amazing athlete. She’s very entertaining.
But she can also be a pain in the neck. When I’m reading the paper and she feels like some attention, she jumps into my lap and, while she’s pretending to make herself comfortable she just keeps moving around, jealously pushing her way between me and my paper. She wants to be the center of my attention for that moment.
When she feels like scratching she used to head to the nearest furniture, but we have her partly trained to use a scratch pad. And now she wears cute little pink plastic claw covers, glued on to keep her from doing any damage.
It’s fun when she plays with her toys, but when she feels the need for new entertainment, she used to go down into the basement into Kathy’s craft supplies and pull out balls of yarn, carry them upstairs, with the yarn unwinding behind her. We once found half a dozen balls of yarn up in the middle of the living room carpet, with streamers going all the way down the basement stairs.
And if it’s our time to sleep, but she wants to play, she has no scruples about walking on us and rubbing on our faces to wake us up. That’s why she usually spends the night closed in a bathroom. And last night it was time for everyone to go to bed and she didn’t want to be caught and closed in the bathroom, so we gave up and we spent the night closed in our bedroom and she had the run of the house.
Ling is a cat. She behaves the way cat’s do. Those are her instincts. She feels like doing something and she does it. And there’s that strange instinct in humans that many of us really get attached to them for it.
But Ling can’t go beyond her instincts. When it’s time to pick up the balls of yarn in the living room, will she help? No way! When it’s time to put her in the pet carrier for a trip to the vet, will she come when you call? No way! If her needs are met she’s very content to just sit in the window and watch the world goes by, accomplishing nothing at all. She is the perfect hedonist. If it feels good, do it.
In a cat, those behaviors are very endearing. But God has created human beings for so much more, to be useful, to think about the impulses they feel and choose wisely which ones to follow and which ones to deny. God calls us humans to focus our lives, to bring order and goodness and love on this earth. And if we fail to live up to that high calling, it’s a tragedy.
We are working our way through the letter from the Apostle Paul to the Christians in Ephesus. The first chapter is really fun. I called it “You’ve Got a Lot Going for You.” Paul tells us that we have been blessed, in Jesus Christ, with every blessing in the heavenly places. And when he explains that, we learn that all those blessings are in God himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God is one God, life giving, eternally existing in three persons with perfect love and harmony and servanthood among them. That was fun to preach.
Then we moved on to chapter 2. I call the first few verses “You’ve Got a Lot Going Against You.” Because Paul warns against another threesome, but these are spirit killers, the world, the devil and the flesh. These aren’t as much fun to preach about. But they bring reality into better focus. “So that’s why the world is so messed up.” And it gives us specific places to start in dealing with it. Paul is wise to also give us a diagnosis to explain why life is so often hard. And you don’t have a chance of a cure until you’ve had the right diagnosis.
Two weeks ago we looked at ‘the world,’ the social, or should I say anti-social, environment in which we live, pressing us out of the shape of being in the image of God and into a new form that is very different. And the mark of the world on our lives is substantial because it has been pressing us every moment of our lives. Its pressures have destroyed many people. They influence us all.
Last week we look at ‘the devil,’ this shadowy being, created by God, but leading a vast rebellion to destroy God’s works. And he doesn’t have all that much direct power. But he’s really sneaky about whispering things in our ears that turn us away from God. He’s tricky. And he’s deadly.
And right about now it would be easy to say, ‘yeah, I was sure somebody’s done me wrong. It’s not my fault. My mother raised me wrong. My neighborhood had bad values. My boss is a jerk. And the devil made me to it. It’s all their fault.
But today the passing of the buck has to stop. There’s something inside of us that listens to all that garbage, that’s all too quick to go along on the road that leads to destruction. And the Bible calls this ‘the flesh.’
And it’s sort of like we get punched once by the world, sucker punched once by the devil and then punched again by our own flesh, and it’s a knock-out combination. That’s the problem. And we have to accept this diagnosis before we’ll be ready to take our medicine. In fact, God’s medicine is our only hope.
Our scripture for this morning is, again, Ephesians 2:1-10.
1 You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3 All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5 even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-- by grace you have been saved-- 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Verse three of our text gives a very basic definition of ‘the flesh,’ “following the desires of flesh and senses.” God gave us our five senses, these wonderful monitoring systems, hearing, taste, smell, touch, vision, to keep in wonderful contact with our environment, to enjoy his blessings, to warn us when food has gone bad, to be able to gather information about our world and put that information together to make it better. God created Adam and Eve in his image and put them in the garden to rule, to think and make decisions like God does, and bring order and goodness to it. That’s the paradigm for our calling on earth. And our five senses are an important part of that calling.
But all too easily those five senses start to take over, instead of being used to enjoy the blessings that God gives us and give information to our brains for how to serve more effectively. And they are not very good at running the show.
Does anybody here have taste buds that have noticed that food with a lot of animal fat in it or a lot of salt or a lot of sweet can taste really good? Don’t those greasy, salty French fries taste good? Well, I don’t think God is against the enjoyment of good foods. But have you ever had a moment, or a day or a week when you just let your taste buds have their way? What happens? I get heartburn. I gain weight. My brain clouds up. Our nation has an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, clogged arteries, and the list of damage done by an undisciplined diet goes on and on and on. When those taste buds control our diets, we have created a nation of super sized fast food addicts. When the taste buds control our diets we just can’t get enough grease and sugar and salt. It’s addictive.
And what Paul calls ‘the world,’ has fed the epidemic by surrounding us with all those enticing food ads. And I suspect the devil whispers temptations in our ears. But the bottom line is that the buck stops here and habits of letting the flesh control us have to be broken deep in our hearts. Even Jesus had to go and fast for 40 days in the wilderness to get this sorted out. And our current self-inflicted medical crisis is a measure of how much we are losing the battle.
The flesh knows how much easier it is to just stay home and watch TV. It takes no work. Our chairs are so comfortable. And God calls us to be building relationships with our families and building relationships with our church family and investing our time constructively. We are suffering today a social crisis of people in social isolation. We find it harder and harder to get a group together to do something for society. That’s a measure of the current social crisis, largely caused by the flesh, being controlled by what’s comfortable for me.
I’m sure that God must sometimes feel like he’s herding cats. He puts out the call for his people to work together to make something good happen, but they’re off in every direction following their own whims. That’s the rough idea of the external idea of the flesh.
Specifically, you can see from the rest of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that in the pagan culture from which they had come, bondages to the flesh included sexual immorality and alcoholism. Those devastated cultures in the first century. They are doing tremendous damage in our culture today.
But I want you to notice just one choice of words in verse 3 of our text. He didn’t say, “You pagans once lived in the passions of your flesh.” He said, “All of us.” There are the outward obvious manifestations of the flesh in the “worldly” people. There are equally destructive manifestations of the flesh in religious people, too.
For the over-religious Pharisees in Paul’s day, the flesh expressed itself in legalism. They would pick out a few rules and observe them to the nth degree and then figure they had done their duty to God and go off their own way, with their hearts bloated with pride at how much better they were than other people, filled with excuses for neglecting God’s concern for justice in society and for the poor among them. It made them feel self-important and gave them excuses for disobeying God. That’s the flesh coming out in religious ways.
And legalists for centuries have reduced this important warning against living by the flesh to a superficial list of taboos. There’s the old joke that defines a Christian as someone who doesn’t smoke, drink or chew, or go with girls that do. But there’s so much more than following rules.
And those past lists of taboos have often left Methodists with an allergy to telling people they have to say no. But the flesh wages a life and death battle with our souls. And we do need to learn to keep it in its place. We need to learn to say no. And that’s hard.
You can’t say yes to God and say yes to the flesh at the same time. God will call us to build a servant heart and the flesh will insist on drawing attention to ourselves.
God will call us to get out and serve and risk, and the flesh will keep us home, safe and comfortable.
God calls the church to make disciples, to work together to change the way we’ve always done it before, to stir each other up to go out and serve, even when it makes us scared. The flesh can push us to be an easy chair church, where we just come seeking comfort. And God will give us wonderful comfort when we need it, but that is never a replacement for humble service. We find his deepest comfort when we forget about ourselves and our fears and our desires and follow him in service to others. And that means saying no to the flesh.
As we come to the communion table, let’s remember our Lord who sacrificed every comfort for us. Let’s open our hearts to His Spirit, who will fill the empty places deep inside and set us free to love and serve others. AMEN
