There's good news and bad news. The good news is we're saved. The bad news is...

Ephesians 2:1-10

Have you ever heard the phrase "word salad"? It's pretty much what it sounds like: a bunch of different words thrown together in some random way that seems to make sense on the surface. But the minute you start to think about it, it falls to pieces.

At first blush, this morning's reading from Ephesians is a bunch of word salad. The writing style is convoluted, to say the least. Phrases pop out here and there referring to things that aren't obvious to the average reader, or that require careful explanation. We could be here all morning, and I would probably bore the socks off of most of you. So I'm going to skip most of that.

What I am going to do instead is try to help you understand the larger theme of the text. And on that score, I have good news and bad news.

First the good news.

According to Paul, there is nothing that can prevent our being saved from death, which he seems to understand as eternal separation from God.

When Paul speaks of "following the ruler of the power of the air," he means dancing to the devil's tune, more or less. Today we think of the devil as ruling the underworld. But people in Paul's age often thought of him as inhabiting the air between the earth and heaven. He's sort of like the interminable cloud cover of a Wisconsin spring blocking the warmth of God's sunshine, if you want to think of it that way.

In any case, Christ establishes a direct connection to heaven, freeing us from the devil's interference. Therefore, even though we live sinful lives deserving ultimate punishment, God can show us grace, mercy and love. That's about 90% of Paul's theology in a nutshell.

More good news: we don't have to do anything to earn God's grace, mercy and love. In fact, we cannot earn it. There is nothing we can do, nothing we can know, nothing we can believe, that will save us in the end. It is God and God alone who saves us. Not only that: we are made alive after death, and we become equals with Christ. We are "raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places."

Now, humans being what we are, we tend not to trust this unconditional and unmerited grace. And humans being what we are, we also like to believe that we have it right and other people have it wrong.

Stereotypes

For example, Protestants used to say that Catholics believe that you must do good works in order to earn your salvation. That isn't what the Catholic church teaches, of course. It's a stereotype. Catholics believe that it's up to Christ to forgive sins, whether someone is saved or not. Still, the stereotype is that Catholics think you can earn your way into heaven by giving money to the poor or to the church, or by praying or fasting. 

The Catholic church does emphasize living (or doing) your faith. So it's not surprising that even many people who have grown up in the church feel this way.

But it's a trap that many Christians fall into, Catholic or not. Some people decide that they literally have to feed the hungry, tend the sick, clothe the naked, or visit people in prison, for example. Nothing wrong with that. Much good has come out of people trying to live out Jesus' commandments. Point is, there are many ways to become anxious and worried about salvation.

Mainliners

Meanwhile, the stereotype of mainline Protestants — that's churches like the UCC, the Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians — is that we think we have to know enough to get to heaven. Mainliners have historically emphasized knowing and understanding scripture and theology, as well as informing themselves about issues out there in the world.

You might be saying at this point, Well, that sounds like you, Pastor, but it doesn't sound very much like me. Precisely. I'm an egghead! I am somebody who constantly seeks after knowledge, who's tempted to think he can think his way out of sin and error, who writes these solid, knowledgeable sermons that educate but maybe don't get people fired up.

But it isn't just me. Many people fall into this trap. Whenever somebody says you have to know your Bible, or understand this or that Bible code, or know what the Book of Revelation really says, or read the Left Behind series, that's the trap of knowing. Get smart so you can get saved.

Evangelicals

Last stereotype. Evangelicals, or conservative Christians, think if you only believe the right things you will go to heaven. Think about John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Some people like to toss this passage around like a club: believe in Jesus, or else.

Believing in this sense often means agreeing with some intellectual proposition. We have to agree that God exists, that God created the world and Adam and Eve, that Jesus is God's only Son and the only way to heaven, and so on. This understanding of belief is actually a pretty late development in Christianity. It only really became important after about 1880. Before that, most people thought that to believe in God meant to trust in him. 

Sometimes, people think that you not only have to believe the right things, you have to believe them hard enough. You have to really, really believe in God and Christ, or you're not going to heaven. If you aren't leaving church on fire for Jesus, if you're not going out into the world ready to testify to The Truth of Christ Jesus and defend him in the court of public opinion, then you're not doing what you need to do to be saved.

This is a real trap, for you and for me. For me, because it says that I've failed if I'm not provoking some emotional state in you. If I'm not sending you out with a warm and fuzzy glow or getting you to think happy thoughts or sending you out to conquer the world, I'm not doing my job. It's also a trap for you. Because it says that if you don't have the warm and fuzzy glow, or if you have doubts about what you believe and why, you're not really a Christian.

Humans

In fact, we all have doubts. We all have questions. We all have times when being a Christian doesn't make us feel all snuggly in love with Jesus. That doesn't mean we don't believe. It certainly doesn't mean that we are not saved. It means we're human.

Having said all that, the good news that Paul wants us to hear is only this: don't worry about it. Being human is enough. "By grace you have been saved by faith." Jesus went to the cross to correct our mistakes, forgive our sins, and give us eternal life with God the Father. We don't need to do anything. We don't need to worry about anything. We just need to be the people God meant us to be.

Remember the bad news?

It's here that the bad news comes in. Paul says Christ saves us from death. That does mean death in the physical sense. Sounds great, right?

But it also means being dead emotionally and spiritually. I have just outlined for you some ways people worry themselves to death about their salvation. They worry that they need to do more to be saved. They worry that they need to know more to be saved. They worry that they need to believe more, or believe harder, to be saved.

But some people don't worry. Some people only show up on Sunday morning out of habit. Others were taught that being a Christian means putting a token amount in the collection plate, memorizing a few Bible verses in Sunday school, and believing what the pastor tells them to believe.

Some people, I am sorry to say, only maintain their church membership so they can earn a low-cost plot in the graveyard. 

Yes, there are such people. They live and move among us. For them, Paul's words are very bad news, because those words are a summons to become actually alive and faithful in Christ Jesus.

"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."

We don't do good works so that we can go to heaven. We don't do them if and only if they cost us nothing. We do good works because we are people of Christ. Good works are who we are, they're what we do. What makes them good works is precisely that they cost us something.

We learn about God because we're people who want to learn about God. The cost for that is sitting through one of my sermons. We believe (or trust) in God because we are people who believe. The cost for that is that we don't believe in other things, even when we find believing in them very comforting. 

Going the extra mile

Who we are as the people of God, in other words, are people who go above and beyond the least we could do. The people of God are active people shaped and built in Christ. They are people freed from worry about death or about what comes after death to be their better selves. When we are the people of God, in short, we are free. We are most fully ourselves.

Paul challenges his readers to live up to their potential as the people of God. Christ has in a sense given us salvation like a safety net. There is no reason we can't live lives of faith fully, secure in the knowledge that we have already been saved and forgiven. 

I usually temper such challenges with words like "Don't feel bad if you can't do more," but I'm not sure that I should today. Paul's words, and the gospel itself, are a challenge to us. They do push us, and rightly so.

Part of being a Christian is forever learning and growing and living into our promise. We should feel pushed or challenged by it.

That is bad news only in that it calls us to get up off our duffs. We ought to do what we ought to do, know what we ought to know, trust what — who — we ought to trust. We are in fact created in Christ for good works. If there is a good reason we should not be about that business in one way or another, I have yet to hear it.

So: Go forth into the world to be what God has made you. Be fully alive, enjoy God's grace, mercy and love. Be free to become more and more Christian in all that you say and do and know and believe. And whatever else you do, do more than the bare minimum. It's the least you can do for Christ who has won you the victory over sin and death. Amen.