June 1, 2025
7th Sunday of Easter
Ephesians 1:15 – 23
Paul’s letters are not big on praise. I mean, now and again he does congratulate the churches he’s writing to for doing things well. But mostly, if you were part of a church in the first century and you got a letter from the Apostle Paul, that usually meant something was wrong. In First and Second Corinthians, for example, the church is fighting over everything from who should lead them to how to serve communion to even the basic moral standards that apply to Christians, and Paul feels the need to intervene through his letters. Or in Galatians, Paul writes, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ.” Even in Romans, which is his theological masterwork, Paul is none too happy with the church. In Chapter 2, he writes, “you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things!” So knock it off! (I mean, I’m adding that last part. But you get the gist.)
And even though sometimes they feel kind of harsh, I think these criticisms Paul offers are actually worth paying attention to. We can read first Corinthians, and ask whether we’re conducting ourselves according to the love ethic that he describes in Chapter 13: are we being patient and kind? Are we rejoicing in the truth, rather than simply winning an argument by distorting our opponent’s words? Are we willing to bear with each other and believe in each other when that’s hard to do? Are we willing to endure the hard times in our community, trusting that God can use those hard times to make us stronger, and more loving, and more gracious and more generous people? Above all, are we guided by faith, and hope, and love, knowing that whatever else may come, those three things are of God; those three things last forever?
Or we can read Philippians, with its beautiful poem to the humility of Christ. And we can ask ourselves: are we allowing God to live in and through us, so the same mind and same heart can be in us that was also in Christ Jesus? Or we can look at Paul’s advice from Romans about not judging others, and ask ourselves: are we keeping that in mind as we live our lives? I think these are important questions as we try to follow Christ, even if sometimes the answers are uncomfortable – or at least they are for me.
At the same time, though, I think it’s especially worth noticing when the letters praise a church. Because then we can ask ourselves, what is that church doing right? How can we take that lesson on board for our lives and the life of our faith community?
One of those letters that begins with praise instead of criticism is Ephesians. Now, scholars differ on whether Paul actually wrote Ephesians, or whether it’s written by someone else using his name – maybe one of his followers who read and understood his writings deeply. But either way, the ideas and the writing are somewhat different than in the letters that we know came from Paul. And whether it’s Paul or not, it is unusual for one of these letters to start with praise. The author writes, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the Saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.”
I thing it’s interesting that even given that beautiful compliment, the author is a little vague about what the people of the Ephesian church are actually doing that’s so great. They have a reputation for having faith, so obviously that’s good. And they love the people the letter calls “the saints:” which is a common way in Paul’s letters to refer to all Christians, Christians in general. So it seems like the Christians of Ephesus do a great job at building a community based on love for their fellow Christians. But as I read this and thought about it, I noticed the passage we heard this morning says a lot more about what the readers will do in the future, what they’ll be able to do, the stuff they’re not doing yet, than it does about what they’re doing now.
Paul – or whoever – writes, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a Spirit of Wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for those who believe, according to the working of his great power.” The church community is being praised not because of who they are now, but because of who they may become. And I think there’s something here for us to notice: they have the capacity to become wise, to know God, to be a people of hope, to see God’s great power at work – they have that capacity because of their willingness to love one another and to have faith that God is at work among them. The letter is praising them not for their accomplishments, but for an attitude, a mindset, of faith, and love, and open heartedness.
I think Ephesians is telling us that the key to following Christ may not be all our great spiritual achievements. The key may simply be commitment to a lifelong process of discovery, knowing that our spiritual lives are not a series of marks to be hit or achievements to be attained, but a way of living that opens over time what Ephesians calls “the eyes of our heart” and allows us to know God and know our world in a new way. The key may be a simple willingness to trust that God is at work in that process.
When I was in high school, I had aspirations of being a gymnast. Now these were unrealistic aspirations in every way. I’ve never been athletic. I’m not super coordinated. I was not especially flexible. I’ve never been real strong. And besides, I lacked that basic disregard for personal safety that allows a gymnast to learn those insane aerial skills they do. Bottom line, I was never going to set the world of gymnastics on fire. I was better at hockey than I was at gymnastics – even though on ice skates I could barely stand up.
But part of the reason I persisted in gymnastics even though I was obviously short on talent was my coach, a man named Steve Primis. Primis was in his late 40s or 50s when I knew him. He had dark hair and a thick beard shot through with gray. Somewhere along the way, he’d served in the army. He had also been a professional ballet dancer, even though he didn’t start dance until he was in his early 20s. He excelled both because he was prodigiously gifted and because he worked incredibly hard at everything he did. In addition to teaching gymnastics and PE in High School, he opened a nonprofit ballet academy, and you know all you need to know about Primis when I tell you that in the 1970s, he made high school boys think ballet was cool.
One day, I walked into the gym after school to work on some basic skills (because basic skills were the only skills I had). Most of the lights were out, and no one was there except Coach Primis. He was just standing in the gym all by himself. He didn’t see me come in, and just as I walked in the door he put his hands on the floor and kicked up into a perfect, straight, rock solid, handstand. He held it for probably ten seconds, didn’t move at all. Then he slowly shifted his weight and lifted a hand off the floor, just as stable and motionless on one hand as he had been on two. Maybe it was because he was so modest, but for some reason this felt like a private moment to me. So I backed out the door and waited about 30 seconds before I walked in again. By then he was standing on his feet. He smiled and said hi and never said a word about what he had just been doing.
Primis may have been quiet about his abilities, but he was not a quiet coach. He yelled at us all the time. He was calm and soft-spoken if you met him outside school, but when he was coaching us, he yelled. And to be fair, we kind of deserved it. We were always being squirrely and taking stupid crazy risks on the equipment, doing things we had no business doing. I’m sure we gave him nightmares about liability and getting sued. And then there was just our general lack of seriousness. He’d yell things at us like, “that’s 50 points off your grade for acting like a jerk! Now do 25 dips and get back at it!” We’d say, “Coach…” and he’d yell, “Don’t even start!” We’d all laugh because we knew he loved us, and we’d do our dips and get back to work. Truth was, we would have done anything for the guy.
But the rare moment, the moment that made us feel like we were supermen and we could do anything, the rare moment was when he praised us. He yelled at us then too, but then it was things like, “Good job! Way to go!” Being praised by Primis made you feel like nothing could stand between you and anything you wanted to do, ever – and partly that was because we knew that when he yelled encouragement at us like that, we had done something extraordinary – something we didn’t realize we could do.
As I look back on it now, I realize that Primis wasn’t praising us for being supermen. We weren’t, and we were not going to be. At least I sure wasn’t. Not a single one of us went on to become an Olympic gymnast. A few of his ballet students did become professional dancers, but not many. But in the end, that was not the condition for his praise. That was not the basis of his excitement when we did something right. I think it was more that in those moments, he saw, and helped us see, what we could do, who we could become: not just as gymnasts, but as the adult human beings we would one day grow into.
I think that’s kind of what Paul, or whoever wrote Ephesians, is trying to do. I don’t think Ephesians is praising the church because of what they’ve accomplished, like they’re somehow the best church or the best Christians according to certain widely accepted metrics, whatever those would be. I think the praise for the Ephesian church is more like praise because the author of Ephesians knows who they can be if they take the Spirit and the presence of Christ among them seriously.
I don’t know about you, but I find that comforting. It tells me that we are not the people of a God who needs us to be star athletes in some spiritual Olympics. It tells us the heart of Christian life is not achievement, but commitment: commitment to a life of faith and discovery; commitment to allowing God to shape us so that we learn to love God’s world as God loves it; commitment to following faith and hope and love wherever they lead. If the author of Ephesians is right, that commitment may lead us to a kind of heart knowledge of God’s world and of our lives in it that we can’t yet imagine; the kind of heart knowledge that allows us to truly be the Body of Christ, the hands and feet and heart of Christ, for a world that needs that presence maybe more than it ever has.