If you go into Chicago, maybe to the loop or North Michigan Avenue on a warm evening, you might see a strange sight, a 19th century horse and buggy out in the street in the 21st century. It’s wonderfully quaint to be brought back in time to ‘the good old days,’ and see a real horse in modern America. You might wonder how a horse can function in the chaos of traffic that scares many humans away. But if you look closely you can see one of the tricks that make it possible. Most likely the horse has blinders on, little black squares on the halter to block out part of the horse’s peripheral vision. It makes it less likely that the horse will be startled by something happening in the corner of its eye. That helps the horse relax and do its job.
I can vouch for the value of blinders. My first appointment as a United Methodist pastor was to two churches, Winthrop Harbor and North Prairie, up north of Waukegan. I was there for North Prairie’s 150th anniversary. It had been founded by Salmon Stebbins, a pioneer circuit rider, who built his cabin at a spot that the Indians called North Prairie because it was on the line where the Illinois prairie ended and the Wisconsin forests began. As other settlers arrived, he gathered them into a Methodist class meeting that met in his one room cabin. His daughter opened a school as the number of children grew, also in the Stebbins’ one room cabin.
And besides all that, and farming to feed his family, Salmon Stebbins’ assignment was to ride a circuit twice a year, from North Prairie up to Green Bay, then out to the Madison area, and back, preaching the gospel and organizing Methodist class meetings anywhere he could find people,. He was a great hero of the faith and the founder of many churches in Wisconsin.
That little church that met in his house outgrew his cabin and eventually multiplied into three churches, North Prairie, Yorkhouse and Zion Memorial. They have all been successful in reinventing themselves for each generation and are all alive and well today. And for the 150th anniversary we had a joint celebration service outdoors in one of the Zion city parks. I got to play Salmon Stebbins. I dressed up in the best period costume I could find. A farmer brought a horse for me so that I could ride up in costume and then preach to the crowd as Salmon Stebbins. The farmer assured me that the horse was very tame. But it was a windy day and pieces of paper were swirling and bouncing along the ground all through the park. And the horse got very nervous. It kept seeing things moving out of the corner of its eyes. And I got very nervous. I was waiting, up on the horse, a couple of hundred yards away from the outdoor service, waiting for people to sit down, waiting for the first hymn to finish so I could make my entrance. The plan was for me to arrive on horseback like any experienced circuit rider would do. Someone would take the bridle of the horse and I would dismount in a relaxed way, as smooth and confident as the real Salmon Stebbins would. But by the time I got there, I called out to my helper, “Quick, grab the bridle,” and I got off very quickly. I wish my horse had been wearing blinders that day so it wouldn’t have seen so many of those papers blowing in the wind. Blinders can be very useful for horses. But they aren’t good for humans. God calls us to go through life with our eyes open, always ready to respond to whatever he brings across our paths. And he gives us everything we need to do it.
This morning we move to a new theme in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He has described to them the wonderful gift we have in Christ, that we can experience the creator of the universe. We can meet our savior, Jesus Christ. We can be filled with the very Holy Spirit of God, right in our hearts. God gave that gift to the Ephesian church so that the entire world could see in them what he wanted to give to everyone. And for that to happen, the church needed to work very hard to build unity. Each member needed to know his or her gifts and dedicate them in service to the other members of the church. And a church was coming into being that was a living entity, with every part helping every other part grow, where real honesty was safe and a blessing to all. God had started a beautiful thing among them.
To make it all the more amazing, by the time Paul wrote this letter, most of the members of the church in Ephesus were people who had grown up in pagan families, worshipping idols. They had been brought up to see religion as a matter of getting what you wanted from the gods. Just bribe the gods by bringing a small sacrifice and doing a few religious duties and they will make your farm prosper. It didn’t matter much how you treated your fellow worshippers, your family or your neighbors. Just do the duties of sacrifice.
They had been brought up in an atmosphere of terrible sexual abuse. The temples held prostitutes, male and female, who would service the worshippers. And with that sexual immorality entrenched in the middle of the religion, the level of morality in society at large was very low.
And so there was a constant battle in the church to hold their members in lives of purity before God. It was so much easier to worship those gods who didn’t care how you lived.
Can you understand the battle that the early church faced? But that is not just ancient history. The church in every age has to fight to maintain its purity, to be sure that when people look at us they will see something different, something special in the way we live, a living demonstration of wholeness and the wisdom of God’s plan for family stability and right relationships with all we meet. The world is always out there, offering God’s people an easier way, cheap moral shortcuts, a life where moral compromise is easy. And whenever Christians choose that easy way, choose to accept blinders that keep them from seeing God’s call to holiness, the mission of the church is ruined because the world looks at us and says, ‘What’s the difference? I don’t see anything special there.’ Our mission to be a light to the world is compromised.
And so today we move into a new passage in which Paul explains the pull that the world can have on the church and how the choice to go through life with spiritual blinders on, a choice to harden our hearts against God, can horribly diminish us as persons and cripple the mission of the church. It’s a warning for all ages and all cultures.
Please stand for the reading of God’s word, Ephesians 4:17-24.
17 Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. 19 They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 That is not the way you learned Christ! 21 For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. 22 You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
In the first 3 verses of our passage, Paul paints a most unflattering picture of the pagan world around him. He definitely is not politically correct. But Paul knew this world well. He said, in verse 17, that the thinking in their minds was futile, which means empty, useless, it didn’t get them anywhere. He said in, verse 18, their understanding was darkened. Sin had made them dumb. They were alienated from the life that God wanted to give them. In verse 19, they were insensitive. They had abandoned themselves to licentiousness, which means they had lost all boundaries for proper relationships between the sexes. When it came to the holy God who created us and loves each and every one of us, they just didn’t have a clue. Has our modern culture outgrown those problems? Just turn the TV on any time of day. Surf through a few channels to see what entertains us, and you’ll have your answer.
And how can we humans be so dumb? How do we get into that mess? Paul says, in verse 18, that it happens because of our ignorance and hardness of heart. I’ll put it into different words. We ruin ourselves because we too easily choose to go through life with blinders on. I’m a firm believer that we humans are the least rational of all God’s creations. We fool ourselves. We are our own worst enemies.
It started with Adam and Eve. God gave them one rule, just one rule. And it was easy to follow. Just don’t disobey me by eating from that one tree. It’s bad for you. But they chose to believe the devil instead of the God who had given them everything. They chose blinders. They chose to doubt the God who had been there with them every day, who had blessed them in every way he could. And pretty soon all they could see was some fruit that they had never tasted before that was pretty and might make them wise. And once they had shut the goodness of God out of their minds, they made a very dumb decision and they paid a terrible price.
The next time God came to walk through the garden with them, what did they do? They tried to hide from God. Duh! Does anyone here know of a hiding place where God can’t see you? No. But a futile, useless attempt to hide was a whole lot easier than coming to God and admitting the truth that God already knew, anyway. So they hid. And we can pretend God doesn’t see. We can go ahead and disobey him today. But is anyone ever going to pull one over on God? He sees it all.
It’s not unusual for pastors to be in a conversation with someone who lets loose a swear word and then said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that in front of a pastor.” But pastors aren’t the ones you have to worry about. God hears every word, whether there’s a pastor there or not. But we put on blinders to that.
And even though God had explained it to them, and they knew the rule, and they knew that God really loved them, Adam and Eve chose to turn away from the one who was everything to them and follow the devil, who was just there to make trouble. That’s even dumber than trying to hide. Sin makes you dumb.
Whole nations can put blinders on. We Americans, who pride ourselves for being a shining light of liberty to the world, were once totally blind to the evil of slavery in our midst. Thomas Jefferson sat up in Philadelphia writing the immortal words that all men are created equal, while slaves were doing all the work on his farm back home and paying his bills. That’s a very cozy arrangement, to have slaves to do your work and you keep the money earned by their labor. Slavery made a whole lot of people very rich. By the 1830s the value of cotton exports from the United States was greater than the value of all other exports combined. But you had to make an adjustment in your vision to live like that. You had to focus on the money you made and put on blinders to keep you from seeing the injustice. Human beings were bred like cattle. Children were sold away from their parents. Husbands and wives were separated, and often risked being whipped or branded with red hot irons, like cattle, if they ran away to try to reunite their families. And it wasn’t that long ago that some towns wouldn’t allow blacks to use public bathrooms, public drinking fountains, sit in the front of the bus, and all that evil foolishness.
And in order to keep the horror of it all out of their sight, people developed theories that people of African descent were genetically inferior to people of European descent. Slave owner churches prostituted themselves by developing theologies to reinforce their blindness. They said that God had cursed Canaan in the Old Testament and he was the ancestor of Africans so it was our job to subjugate them. When Quakers started shining light on their sin, they developed a theology that they called ‘the spirituality of the church,’ which said that the church should stick to religious things only and not ask questions about economics and national policy. You still hear that today. All too often people say ‘keep the church out of politics’ when they mean that they just aren’t willing to examine their business practices or politics by the light of scripture. They have blinders on.
For many years the tobacco industry knew that smoking causes cancer, but publicly denied it. They lied. They secretly manipulated nicotine levels to make cigarettes more addictive. They gave us all those ads of the Marlboro man who looked so healthy and had such a beautiful life. They chose to look at all the money they were making. And to do that they chose to go through life with blinders on to prevent them from facing up to the millions of people they were poisoning. And that sin made them dumb. Do you know how the actor who played the Marlboro man died? Of cancer, of course.
But it isn’t just people in other regions; it’s not just people long ago or far away that do this. It’s a danger to all of us.
We all face the temptation, when there is a conflict with someone, to choose not to think about what we have contributed to the problem, but to fixate on their weaknesses, and fill our minds with criticisms of them rather than going to them and taking responsibility for our part of the problem and finding out the truth and working through it. Putting on your blinders is a whole lot easier, than walking in the light. But it makes us dumb. It makes our hearts hard. It destroys community. It turns us mean.
We read in the newspapers that some inner city school districts are so strapped for cash that there is no way that they can cope with the problems and needs of their students and so dropout rates are way high and the success of the students is way low. And we may still carry the blinders of our racist past, dismissing it by saying, “My kids are OK. That’s just the way it’s always going to be for ‘them.’ They’re less important.’” And pretty soon we feel nothing for those who are hurting around us. Our hearts are insensitive. And the blinders we put on ourselves narrow what we see in the world. And we all pay the price of having thousands of our fellow citizens doomed to a life of poverty because they never got the education to be contributors to society.
We know we should be studying our Bibles, but watching TV is so much easier, so we fix our eyes on the TV and just push the Bible out of our minds. The blinders narrow our vision again and pretty soon we hardly think about God at all.
Every choice to look away from God makes our field of vision narrower and our hearts duller.
And Paul tells us, don’t go there. Don’t go back. Sin makes you dumb.
And if you are sitting here today realizing that you have been living in darkness, that you have let your own blinders separate you from your God, remember that there is hope. We serve a God who specializes in shining light into dark places. He calls us together so that we can help each other see what we are missing. Our next three weeks we’ll be looking at how Paul had trained the Ephesians to keep their hearts sensitive to God, their spiritual senses sharp, their ability to say ‘no’ to immorality strong. He doesn’t give up on us. If you return to him he will be there, with his arms out wide to you. AMEN
