Reconciliation and Unity Sermon Summary (Ephesians)
Note: this is only a summary. The full sermon given at our church is below.
1. “Sin” “Breaking the Law”
Actual sin: prejudice Virtue: Kindness
A.
-Weird things that are illegal
-Weird things people thought others should get arrested for
B. Romans 15:14. Paul defines Christian law as separate from secular law. He calls Christians to correct one another like family.
C. Ephesians 5 :14 Paul calls us to act in Unity, as a family.. He expects the people to unite and gives authority to all Christians as one body.
2. Sin: Pride Virtue: Encouragement
A. Contrast AME lay ministry with Anglican liturgical requirement. Talk about access to education. Talk about history within a church and “membership” All the ways we exclude people, even through our prayers. The truth and reconciliation prayer I attended with Shannon, us/them prayers that exclude as much as they invite.
B. Ephesians 15:5 live in complete harmony with eachother.
C. Humility of churches, the need to truly listen to the congregation, how hard it can be and how much harder we should and most work to include those who feel excluded. Talk about the work your church and others have done/are doing. Identify places for change.
3. Sin: Pride. Virtue: Humility
A. We exclude people by assuming our narrative is THE narrative.
B. Ephesians 4:24-31
C. Re-state ephesians 4:24-31 in plain language. God calls us to…
4. Prayer for unity
I Weird Illegal Acts for Slide Show|
|Scare the queen| Bring your llama to a national park | Bring cows inside the house in St. John’s, NFLD. | Excessively use nickels. | I hadn’t done most of these things. I was feeling pretty good. Until she went in for the kill. | You can’t paint a wooden ladder in Alberta | You can’t publicly fart in Florida after 6pm. Yes, I have been to Disney, thank you. I have seen the parade. I have smelled the parade. | You’re not allowed to climb a tree in Oshawa. |You can’t own a crime comic book. No more Batman. Throw it away. | You can’t toboggan in Hamilton.
|Weird Police Reports for slide show|
NS: fire=sunset | OT vet tinder date | OT bird stuck in tree | EDM overflowing toilet | bad haircut refund | OT chicken wings not breaded.
Full Sermon
1. Have you ever broken the law? I bet you have.
A. My daughter said that to me the other day and I was very offended, ma’am. Pause. . But she was right. My first though was I have never! Not I! Not me! Not little old innocent me, why I swear I have never done one single thing wrong in my entire life.I felt hurt. Accused. Then she gave me “the list”
-As it turns out, a lot of crazy things are illegal in Canada. Let’s see how far you can get down the list before breaking the law. *ascending order of frequency)
• Scare the queen
• Bring your llama to a national park
• Bring cows inside the house in St. John’s, NFLD.
• Excessively use nickels.
• I hadn’t done most of these things. I was feeling pretty good. Until she went in for the kill.
• You can’t paint a wooden ladder in Alberta
• You can’t publicly fart in Florida after 6pm. Yes, I have been to Disney, thank you. I have seen the parade. I have smelled the parade.
• You’re not allowed to climb a tree in Oshawa.
• You can’t own a crime comic book. No more Batman. Throw it away.
• You can’t toboggan in Hamilton.
-It seems like you can go to jail for anything these days. And all that is funny but…what if people started being arrested for them? What if someone came into your house and went through all of your comic books and hauled you away? (Speculate more) What if someone reported you to the police for eating ice cream, and they came in with guns?
- Police receive millions of calls each year. Most of them are emergencies. But every year, police release a list of ridiculous 9-1-1 calls in an effort to educate the public about only calling 9-1-1 in an actual emergency. I have that list, too.
-
• In Nova Scotia a person called to report a fire he couldn’t see properly because it was a distance away. Emergency services frantically searched the area. They were running out of time! A short time later the person called back to say he made a mistake. It was only the Sunset.oof.
• Someone in Ottawa called police to ask if the person they were thinking of going on a tinder date with had previous police involvement. Police checks are going to be the new vaccination record
• Ottawa police received a call about a bird stuck in a tree
• Edmonton police got a call about an overflowing toilet
• A woman called from a hair salon demanding that police force the manager to give her a refund
• In Ottawa, someone called to report chicken wings that hadn’t been breaded.
-It’s positively criminal.
But what if we arrested people for these things?
What if we arrested some people and not others?
Well it does happen.
- On September 6, 2018, Botham Jean was shot dead by an off duty police officer while sitting on the couch eating ice cream. The well trained officer came home one night and mistook his apartment for hers. She didn’t check the address. Ignored the sudden complete change in décor and furniture. She saw a black man eating ice cream and watching television, and she panicked. That’s her story. She panicked, and she shot him dead.
- On February 15, 1978, serial killer Ted Bundy was driving right past the Pensacola police station in a stolen car when David Lee pulled him over. Ted Bundy had brutally and violently abused and murdered several women and one 12 year old child. He was a dangerous man. An actual killer. He was not sitting in his own apartment eating ice cream. Ted Bundy violently attacked the arresting officer, who fired two warning shots, and then politely arrested Bundy.
- On July 16, 2009, Harvard University Professor Henry Lois Gates Jr. was arrested by Sgt James Crowley for committing a break and enter. He was entering his own home, using Neighbours and police saw a black man in an affluent neighbourhood and just assumed he was a criminal. Barack Obama disparaged the behaviour and the treatment of black Americans by police.
- In 2022, in Canada, a group of heavily funded domestic terrorists, mostly white, mostly male stormed the capital with the goal of unseating parliament and the prime minister. Many of them displayed racist and anti-government views, proudly. There were no arrests. They were not stopped, despite obvious concerns related to national security.
- In 2022, in Canada, a handful of protesters, mostly female, many indigenous or otherwise racialized, much less heavily funded, gathered at fairy creek to protest logging in an old growth forest. There were over 800 arrests. People were abused, assaulted, and trampled by horses.
- Who you are, what you look like, where you come from. Bias often defines secular law. Defines the standard.
B. I want to talk to you about another prisoner. Apostle Paul. And the letters he wrote while in prison. Paul was living in a different, but perhaps all-too-similar, world to our own. The standards, the laws, were defined by elite ministers, emperors and kings, financiers, artists, writers. People assigned by the crown to do the work of assuring that history reflected exactly what they wanted it to reflect. Paul’s letters have lasted as long as those. Longer than some. They were written by a man who gave up any wealth, any position, any status, and chose a nomadic life of homelessness and poverty in order to spread the Word of God. A man who was shunned, persecuted, arrested, and eventually murdered. For who he was, ethnically. For what he believed in.
- Paul wasn’t the kind of guy who was invited to the pulpit. He was the kind of guy who showed up to preach without permission and got kicked out (Acts 19).
-In Romans 15:14 Paul invites all Christians to profess God’s word and His will in the same way.
Romans 15:14
And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another.
But I have written very boldly to you on some points so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me from God,
to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
-Paul defines God’s law as separate from secular law. He calls on each and every one of us to correct each other as we would correct family. To make the kindest version of our laws the standard.
-He calls us to live by a higher standard of love. A higher standard of acceptance. A higher standard of Unity.
2. What does that mean for the modern church?
A. I grew up in a very religious family that followed two very different conventions. My father attended an AME/BME church, and my mother’s family was in the high Anglican tradition.
- There’s an idiom in English: riding two horses at once. It’s used to describe trying to do two things at the same time, and failing at both of them. I think mixed race children growing up in the church feel this idiom acutely. We have to ride two horses at once.
- The AME and BME churches have a lay ministry. That doesn’t just mean we go around thumping the Bible, public preaching, and trying to bring people to God through salvation. We do, but that’s not the point.
- The Methodist churches here developed a lay ministry to protect their ministers from being unseated. Up until the 1970’s, it was almost impossible to find domestically trained racialized ministry staff who had the proper qualifications because in North America, they couldn’t go to University. My dad was the first member of my family to obtain a University degree in 1980s . Black men had been preaching in the BME church since before emancipation. My family had been there a long time.
- I have never seen a black minister in an Anglican pulpit. I have seen an indigenous one. One. To become an Anglican minister, liturgical college is a requirement. A number of members of my mother’s family were ministers in the Anglican Church. It was a family legacy.
- But I didn’t feel like I could go to liturgical school, and neither did my teachers. The ones who cared (and there weren’t many) told me to get a degree in something like math or science. Anything where grading was objectivr . Otherwise, my grades would fall victim to the colour of my skin. I’d never fing a job
- Two horses.
- For the BME, the only way to remove barriers to ordination was to state, in governing documents, that the church would employ a lay ministry. The Catholic Churches decided to employ their own training and education programs, allowing people who could demonstrate their knowledge and dedication to be promoted into preaching positions. The Anglican and United churches have made statements in their respective disciplines that they will attempt to improve inclusion and access for racialized peoples.
- A lot of things have changed. But then, I’m only 42. It will be two generations of ministry before some doctrines see the effects of this change.
B. Paul calls us to unify the church, and not to wait.
Ephesians 4:11
Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the Body of Christ. Then we will no longer be blown around like children.
-Paul gives authority to all Christians who have studied the scripture and who follow God’s law to live and preach as one body.
-Paul doesn’t tell us to exclude people with differing perspectives, because they don’t preach “properly.” Because they may challenge us with things we don’t want to hear. Because our congregation may not want to accept them.
C. We are called to truly listen to the entire body of our congregation and to make corrections that will move us forward, encouraging and supporting the efforts of everyone who feels called. Not just to worship. Not just to show up on Sundays to open their wallet, but to lead. God calls Christians to a higher standard.
3. We exclude people by assuming that our narrative is the narrative.
A. I went to a truth and reconciliation service and prayed with my friend Shannon. She is an indigenous person raised in the Catholic Church by white foster parents, and only started exploring her indigenous heritage as an adult. She reconnected with her family and found out that the story she had been told about them wasn’t true. They had been heavily victimized, heavily injured by the residential school system. But she was raised Catholic. She loved her parents. She had been taught, despite looking like me, looking “different”…that white Christians were good and racialized people were inherently “bad” she used to say “and they would have gotten away with it too, if only I hadn’t looked in the mirror!”
- Here are the words of the reconciliation prayer
- “We acknowledge that we have caused people pain and suffering”
- “We acknowledge the hurt and fractures we have caused.”
- “We acknowledge that we have exploited the work and destroyed the homes of others for our own gain.”
- Shannon pulled me aside. She said do you realize that when they talk about “them” they’re talking about US and when they talk about “us” they’re talking about them? Are they really fighting racism with more racism?
- I said, they’ve got good lemon squares.
- I can always predict, based on the audience, whether people are going to laugh at that joke.
B. Ephesians 4:24 Paul says this:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put onthe new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,
and do not give the devil a foothold.
Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.
Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
C. Paul warns us against upsetting the unity of the church and of Christian’s by living against God’s law. Specifically, he warns the church. To put off it’s old self, which has been corrupted by deceitful desires.
-What are the deceitful desires? What is the boasting? Where is the rift?
-Put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour. Are we vouching for people? Who are we choosing to trust, and why? How many people come to us without family or friends or references because they have turned away from sin, turned away from rage and anger, brawling and slander and joined the church? How often do we say, I don’t trust him? How often do we say, I don’t know, she seems weird. God calls us not to “know” what we don’t know.
-Like Shannon’s birth parents, many members of our churches may be sensitive to the assumptions people make about them. We can indulge in the higher forms of advocacy like assisting refugees in finding work and housing while ignoring the smaller, less obvious opportunities to include everyone. Is there someone we are talking over in groups? Is there someone we ignore because of their language skills? Is there a parent in our church who we have just assumed is “bad” without asking what they are facing? God calls Christians to a higher standard.
-Anyone who is stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands. Are there people in our churches who, despite all of their hard work, are invisible to us? Are there people taking credit for their work because it’s easier for us or for our congregations to believe? To trust that the work was “actually” done by someone else? Or another group of people? Are we telling racialized congregants what “the research says” instead of listening to their stories? God calls Christians to a higher standard.
-Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs. As a church, we must speak to every member of our congregation and of our community, whether we have known them for days, months, or years, and ask about their needs. When we ask about the needs of our congregation, are some voices being ignored. Are there some people we choose not to help, choose not to hear?
-We are all members of one body. All of us. Paul preaches unity but not uniformity. He says that each one of us is given talents, strengths and abilities. Yet church elders can fight against their own congregations by elevating one and belittling another. Are we going against the will of God by elevating people into positions because of who they are or what they have, instead of their individual gifts, talents, and interests?
-The Bible has several books written by and for a number of people. Paul’s letters sound very different from Mark’s, since their experiences of life were very different. Yet Jesus accepted all of his apostles. Not because they had the right education. The right friends. Went to the right schools. That was the other guys. It was because Jesus said “come follow me” and they came. And followed Him.
-Do we have malice? Do we have bitterness? Do we believe that “those people” are all the same, all a problem, all a waste of our time? Maybe we have a historical reason, years of personal experience, abuses and attacks, to make us feel that way, God calls us to forgive. To listen. To support. To care.
-To respect our differences, talents, and personal needs, and to see the whole person. Not to refer to a group of individuals with (mildly) similar traits as “the poor”; “the addicts”; “the homeless” pause…
the refugees. The conservatives. The old people. The blacks.
-To move forward, before we can even discuss let alone commit to truth, to anti racism, to reconciliation: we need to get rid of every form of malice. Every form of anger. Of judgement. Of hate.
-God calls Christians to a higher standard.
Father God, creator of heaven and earth, you know our hearts. You know if we are harbouring anger, if we are harbouring hatred, if we are limiting the progress of called people who love God because we feel uncomfortable around them. Because we don’t know how to talk to them. Because our society has deemed them “better” or called them “worse”
Lord in Heaven, we ask you to bring us into a new life of understanding, unity, and grace. We ask that these walls be a place of belonging for all who enter, and that we can look for ways to serve them; in so doing, to save ourselves.
Grant us the strength and solidarity to defend our brothers and sisters who are limited, ignored, or oppressed, not only in the worst of their pain but in the height of their strength. To see others, even as above ourselves. Grant us the humility to listen when people we have made to feel “other” speak their truth. In Jesus name we pray amen.
