Melville or the Cello?
Text: Ephesians 6:10-20 (NRSV)
James F. Cubie
Preached at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church,
8/23/09, Sunday
Will you join your hearts with mine in prayer?:
Gracious Lord, sometimes we set our hearts on something other than You. When we do, we learn we cannot love what you have created rightly. Help us to keep from turning something you’ve made into something like You. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen
I am blessed to have a niece and nephew who are very precocious. I get almost weekly reports from my mother on each new project they undertake: a musical instrument they have begun to practice; a book, or series of books, they just completed; or, a soccer game in which one or both of them scored most of the goals. Most recently, my mother was telling me that Emma – my niece – has just finished reading Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick (she’s 10…), and Billy – my nephew – has taken up, and apparently is very proficient at, the cello (He’s 11, and this is his second instrument).
Now, as I listened to my mother describe these most recent conquests, I confess I immediately imagined holding Moby Dick in one hand, and a cello in the other, while asking Lina – my 3-year old daughter: “Okay, what’s it going to be: Melville or the cello?” I began to imagine Lina as a teenager, poring over everything Melville wrote, eventually becoming the finest Melville scholar in the world. Then I imagined her practicing the cello for hours, gracing our home with the suites and sonatas of Bach and Brahms.
I’m glad I snapped out of that reverie, because at the end of our phone conversation, my mother relayed something my nephew said that helped me frame what I want to say here today. Billy’s grandfather asked him all the relevant questions about his cello-playing experience: How was he enjoying his lessons? What was his teacher like? Had he played any pieces for his class or family? And, finally: Did he like to play the cello? To this last question, Billy responded: “I like it fine, but I don’t plan to devote my life to it…”.
Most of Paul’s letters have two, basic parts: the first is a description of the depth of God’s gracious love for us – a love that precedes and leads us in every good work we do to honor God; the second part, is usually an extended -- sometimes highly specific – exhortation: “Do this.. Don’t do that, if you want to honor what God has done in Jesus Christ.” Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is no exception.
So Barrie just read the part that tells us what to do, but not the part that tells us how to do it, or how to understand it. Put another way: We’ve been told to look out for some things that are potentially very dangerous: “rulers… authorities… spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (v. 12) There are also, apparently, weapons of war that we have to be on guard against: “the flaming arrows of the evil one.” We are told to pray and keep alert (v. 18), but what should we pray for? And what do rulers, authorities, and these flaming arrows look like?
All of this, surely, makes us a little anxious, but doesn’t relieve the anxiety because we haven’t been told how to tell the difference between something that is harmful and something that is helpful: we are, after all, told our battle is not against flesh and blood, solid realities – we are told about spiritual realities that use the material world for their own ends. In order to understand what Paul has said in this, final chapter, let’s circle back to the first chapter and then return to the 6th. It is in chapter 1 that we find the all-determining reality that helps us to understand the fight Paul believes we’re engaged in. And it is in this same chapter that we find a clue to help us understand the profound response of my 11 year old nephew, Billy.
There are two verses in Ephesians 1 that are crucial for understanding the entire letter. They are verses 3 and 4: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.”(vv. 3-4) Notice, in the 3rd verse, Paul mentions the “heavenly places” that he writes about in the 6th chapter, except here Paul affirms that we are blessed with Christ in those places, whereas in chapter 6 Paul warns us about the spiritual forces of evil in those same places.
So here’s the first part of the good news that will help us to understand what Paul wants us to do: We have already been claimed, made holy, set apart in Christ – this is what it means to be blessed. Christ’s blessing rests on us, and in the conflict happening in the heavenly places, this blessing is a promise that we shall always be God’s people, no matter how dire that conflict becomes. More about what this conflict means in a moment.
The 4th verse gives us the second part of the good news: We are chosen -- we are blessed -- to be holy and blameless before God in love – in love. To be holy simply means to be called by God to be his people, and the blameless part, I think, is both about what Christ has done for us on the cross (taken our sin away – made us blameless), and is something like an ideal that Paul is setting before us. But it is the “in love” part that I think is especially important. If I understand him, Paul is not saying that being holy or blameless is the primary part of what it means to be chosen, or called – in fact, both of those descriptions help us to understand what we are in virtue of being members of Christ’s body. God declares us holy and blameless – God calls us his saints.
The primary part of the fourth verse is that we are to orient our love in God’s love for us. God in Jesus Christ is the center of how we are to understand all that we say, think, and do in this world. And that center reminds us, again and again, that: As important as all our projects, desires, gifts, and loves are, nothing is to supersede the love we owe God. And what is more: God’s love re-orients and properly orders our love for everything -- and everyone -- in the world. This is not a love that calls us to reject the world, but one which helps us to love it rightly. This love, in fact, is what helps us to keep the first commandment. And it is the keeping of the first commandment that keeps us from setting our hearts on anything other than God.
And so, to return, the strong language of Ephesians 6 – “put on your armor, get ready for battle…” is meant to warn us against all those things that try to separate us from the love of God -- “the flaming arrows of the evil one” that cause us to stagger, and our love to wither. That strong language points to the same idea we find in the first commandment: the aim is to keep us from taking a good thing, making it a God-thing, so that it becomes a bad thing (M. Driscoll).
This also brings us back to what I took to be the profound insight of my 11 year old nephew. When his grandfather asked him whether he liked the cello, Billy said: “I like it fine, but I don’t plan to devote my life to it.” I take it Billy was saying something like this: I love it enough to develop my gift for playing it, but I’m not going to love it so much that it is the absolute center of my life. And if I may add to what Billy said so well: the way we love something rightly is to understand the difference between the Gospel and salvation by any other method.
We just got a glimpse of what the Gospel is when we looked at those two verses from Ephesians 1. But now I want to drill down a little deeper, so that – together – we can think about what it means to be: husbands and wives, life partners, parents and children, members of a church charged with raising our children in the faith, without confusing the things -- and even the people -- we love with God; without making anything we enjoy the thing that should save us.
What does “salvation by any other method” mean? It coincides with the “flaming arrows of the evil one” that Paul mentioned, and the warning we find in the first commandment. And by it, the Bible means at least two things: first, anything we do to try to compel God to bless us, or to gain control in our relationship with him: We believe that because we’ve established an impressive list of good works that God should not only accept us, but also reward us; And, second, any person or thing that we invest with God’s attributes: “You should be willing to go to the ends of the earth for me…. You are my everything…. If I don’t have this or look like that, I do not want to go on….”
The conflict I mentioned earlier – what does that mean? And what does it look like? It means the struggle to stop trying to save ourselves, and let God alone be our Savior. Let me give you three examples to indicate what it looks like.
In Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, Salieri a relatively well-known composer, and Mozart’s chief rival, says this: ‘I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of. “Lord, make me a great composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music – and be celebrated myself! Make me famous throughout the world, dear God! Make me immortal! After I die let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote! In return I vow I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. And I will help my fellow man all I can. Amen and amen!’
Salieri wants to strike a deal with God: “If You, God, will do all of this, in return I will do this….” Humility and love for my neighbor will only come, if I see these three things visibly growing in my life: fame, fortune, and a great career as a composer. Salieri wants to compel God to bless him, and when God does not give him what he wants, and instead sends Mozart onto the scene, Salieri says to God: “From now on we are enemies, You and I….” And for the rest of the play pretends to be Mozart’s friend while destroying his reputation, humiliates his wife when she comes to him in need, and ends by trying to take his own life. The one thing he wanted most in life – to be a great composer – the thing he wanted more than God, has been denied, and the end of his project of self-salvation is an attempt at self-destruction.
A second example comes from our culture, and the extent to which it tries to compel us to define ourselves by who loves us and how much. I sense this especially in a lot of the music that we and our children listen to. So many songs encourage us to believe “You’re nobody until somebody loves you…” – come to think of it that would be a great title for a song. Songs about love between two people often show us something amazing and sacred about being together in a relationship. But there can also be a dark side to songs like these – an aspect that is used to try to separate us from the love of God: What if you are in love with someone who has fallen out of love with you? Or your wife or husband has left you? What if someone you’ve loved for years has died? Instead of resting and trusting in God’s love -- that it will be enough, and can sustain us -- we are immediately sent to find that someone who will love us, and make us somebody.
A final example: a close family member of mine battled anorexia for years, and has come out the other side stronger and wiser. We only just found out that while she was in the midst of her battle, she found websites that actually encourage women suffering from this affliction to continue to exercise, diet, and starve themselves, to achieve the “image that really matters”. These kinds of websites are what Paul means by “rulers and authorities” because they try to direct people, not toward life and love, but death. They are what Paul means by the “spiritual forces of evil” because, under the guise of a project of self-salvation, they actively encourage self-destruction. This is the kind of thing that attempts to separate us from the love of God, and that calls us to engage in prayerful, gracious, but firm conflict.
The good, humbling news in all of this is that there are not two kinds of people: one group of really good, smart people who get the Gospel, and another group, a little less good, a little less smart who don’t – we all set our hearts on things or people other than God and his love. But that’s why we come to church: We discover, week by week, that it is a joy to confess our need to re-orient and renew; to make progress in overcoming our projects of self-salvation. We hear God’s word read and preached to us, and we pray as forgiven sinners who dare not withhold forgiveness from one another. These three: God’s Word read, preached, and prayed, are the three square meals we can count on every Sunday that will sustain us until we meet again.
