March 2, 2008

Scripture:         Ephesians 5:8-14

Sermon:           “Turn On the Lights”

            Turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Ephesians.  Our scripture lesson today will come from the 5^th chapter, verses 8 through 14.  If you’d like, you can find that easily on page 262 of the New Testament in the Bible provided in the pews.

            Now, before we begin, let’s talk a little bit about what we’re looking at.  It’s always helpful, I think, to know something about what you’re reading.  Helps put it in context, you know.  Helps bring out the meaning a little more clearly.  And that’s always a good thing.  Although these words themselves are pretty powerful just the way they are.

            Somebody wrote this letter because there was something to say.  You don’t just write a letter to show folks how much you know.  There’s got to be a purpose.  And in most of Paul’s letters that we read the reasons for his writing a letter a fairly obvious.  You see churches struggling with all sorts of things:  bad leadership, lax attitudes towards the gospel, people arguing over church stuff, folks teaching things that aren’t right.  So, Paul would write a letter to address these things, and in the end we learn so much more than Paul probably ever bargained for.

            With Ephesians, those things aren’t so clear.  This may have been a letter written to be passed around from congregation to congregation in order to uplift them and just correct some more general concerns.  And in that way, this letter to the Ephesians might as well have been written to us, too.

            One student of this very text, Andrew Lincoln, observed that the problems those folks were having went something like this:  powerlessness, instability and a lack of resolve, and all these things can be seen to result from an insufficient sense of identity.

            You see, a church’s problems might not always be that the folks are misguided, or troubled with folks who love to argue and fight.  Sometimes, as you may know, a church is just not so determined to be the people of Christ because they don’t have a deep sense of just how important and life changing that is.

            The writer of Revelation referred to a church like this as “lukewarm”.  He said, “you’re neither cold nor hot.  I wish that you were either cold or hot.  You’re lukewarm.”  That’s what happens when folks lose their sense of identity in Christ.  They’re just not excited about the mission and ministry they’re called to do.

            And so we have this letter to the Ephesians.  And today’s text seeks to wake us up to the excitement of life in Christ again.

            Listen for the Word of the Lord…

            For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.  Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.  Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.  For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.  Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake!  Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

            As of last October, we only have one dog living with us in our house.  We had to find a new home for the one that was just too cantankerous to keep with a baby in the house.  Chili was his name.  An unlovable beast if ever there was one.  He growled and snapped at our daughter one too many times for us to feel comfortable with him anymore.

            And I’ll tell you that it was a heart-breaking day to ship off that mutt.  He’d been a member of the family for over 7 years.  But, we’ve also come to terms with the fact that Chili was really a bad boy.

            You know, the dog was well aware of his name.  But, you’d call after him and he’d just turn the other way.  And he’d run away anytime that he saw the chance.  I mean just a little opening, and BOOM he’d be gone.  I was forever chasing after him through the neighborhood.  To his credit, he was made to hunt defenseless little creatures.  And we just never gave him the chance to do it.  So, he just went on the hunt for squirrels and cats whenever the urge struck him.

            I had thought that the worst parts of this dog’s spirit were obvious enough.  He didn’t much care about people.  He was as smart as a dog gets, but he chose not to listen.  He was always sick, so he coughed and hacked and spit up all the time.  And he smelled pretty bad.  Julie’s sister said that he had “halitosis of the fur.”  But, after he left the house, I discovered something devious.  One day a couple of months ago I was in the basement where Chili used to take up residence.  And I went into the old coal bin to check on the furnace.  It’s a dark, remote, damp cavern where no man dare’s to trod for fear of the dark and the awful things that lurk within.  Heavens, there could be monsters down there.

            I turned on the lone light bulb in that dark hole.  And suddenly the light revealed a terrible secret.  Chili had been using the old coal bin in our basement as a toilet!  There were little land mines scattered all over that floor.  That darned mutt had been sneaking into the one place nobody ever dared set foot in so that he could just conveniently relieve himself without asking to go outside.

            The things you discover when you turn on the lights.

            You have places in your house like that?  I mean you think the place is clean sometimes.  And for some reason you have to look under the kitchen sink.  Maybe there’s a clog in the drain or the disposal isn’t working.  So, you take a flashlight and look up under there.  And suddenly, it’s “Oh my goodness!  Look at that stuff growing under the cabinet!  No wonder it never quite smells fresh around here!”

            The light exposes stuff, doesn’t it?  Stuff you didn’t know about.  Stuff you didn’t want to know about.  Stuff you wanted to forget about.  And there it is.  Funky stuff, too.  Stuff you just want to kind of see only through the corner of your eye.

            Paul says it’s shameful to even mention what folks do secretly.  You turn on the lights, you know, and that funky stuff is staring you in the face.

            Ah, isn’t that what Lent is all about?  Turning on the lights.  Exposing to ourselves the stuff that’s lingering out of sight.  And then doing something about it.  Well, that’s dirty work.

            Lent.  Did you know that the word Lent actually is an old Germanic word?  And it doesn’t mean anything other than the season of Spring.  Lent means springtime in its origin.  And even though we seem to be stuck in the middle of Winter here in the Sunny Side of Louisville, the church calendar says it’s Lent.

            So, you might consider these ideas about seeking to follow Jesus more obediently and more fully as a kind of spiritual spring cleaning.  And just like it happens when you get serious about shaping up the house where you live, spring cleaning in your soul is likely to turn up some really funky stuff.  Stuff you didn’t know about.  Stuff you didn’t want to know about.  Stuff you wanted to just forget about, pretend it wasn’t there.  You turn on the lights…and there it is.

            That’s what the Bible is talking about here, you know.  One you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  So, live like it.  You’ve got to come to terms with the stuff that’s still lingering around in your heart.  And in your soul.  And in the recesses of your mind.  You are light, so those things are going to be exposed.  When you turn on the lights, your stuff is going to be visible.

            But, at least you can see it and do something with it.  Start cleaning it up.

            I heard a comedian a few years ago talking about a long night out on the town.  It was a weeknight, so he really should have been home in bed.  But, as the hours passed by, he and his friends kept coming up with new rationale for extending their night of revelry.

            It’s 2 o’clock in the morning.  I can still get a few hours of sleep and then I’ll take a nap when I get home later.  No problem.

            But, 4 o’clock comes and they’re still at the bar.  The thinking has changed to believing that sleep isn’t really necessary.  You can miss one night of sleep.  And if you only get a couple of hours, you’ll just be more tired than if you didn’t sleep at all.  Might as well stay out all night.  You can get a good breakfast.

            It’s six o’clock in the morning.  They are emerging from some shady place in a part of town they would never in their rights minds go to.  It’s been a night to remember.

            The comedian said, “And then the most wretched sight in the world occurs.  There are people making their way to work, fresh with smiles on their faces.  And on the horizon the sun begins to appear.  Never has the sun been such a terrible sight!  It’s like God’s flashlight shining down on you to say, ‘I see you there.  I know what you’ve been up to.’”

            We feel that way sometimes.  We feel like God knows the truth that we’ve been good at hiding from others.  God knows the truth about what we’ve been hiding from ourselves.  And if God confronted us with a flashlight into our souls, we’d be in a pretty bad place trying to explain it.  We do feel that way sometimes.

            And I imagine that some folks don’t have anything to do with church because turning on the lights is not exactly their idea of a rewarding experience.

            Take Peter for example.  The most prominent of Jesus’ disciples.  The one that Jesus said was like a rock for building the foundation of the church.  Take Peter for example.  There’s a story in the 5^th chapter of Luke about Peter.  It goes that these seasoned fishermen had been out on the lake all night long without so much as a guppy to show for their efforts.  And Jesus got in the boats with them and told them to drop their nets one more time, which seemed like a foolish thing to do after such a disappointing night.

            But, they did as they were told, probably to humor the man as much as anything.  They’d say, “you can preach a pretty good sermon, Jesus, but leave the fishing business to us.”  You know, of course, that so many fish wound up in their nets that they starting breaking.  The boats starting sinking, for crying out loud.  Turns out the preacher was pretty good at miracles, too.  So much so that he could only be the Son of God.

            Now, that’s the kind of experience that turns a light on.  Oh my goodness!  I’m standing in the presence of the Lord!  Which is why Peter fell to his knees like he was ashamed of himself.  He said, “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

            You see what turning the lights on can do to us.

            But, that doesn’t seem to be the point Jesus wanted to make.  Jesus wasn’t all that interested in bringing to the surface our shame and our guilt so that we wouldn’t dare to wish to be even in the presence of God.  No, he wound up saying to Peter and everybody else, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

            The truth is that the stuff is there.  Isn’t it?  Whatever your stuff is, it’s there already.  And it isn’t God who needs a flashlight to see it.  The bitterness.  The secret prejudices.  The greed that causes us to do and say things we know better.  The lust for things.  The lust for people.  It’s there.  Really, we could use the flashlight to see what God is already quite aware of.

            Let’s be clear.  God knew about all of that stuff inside us when making the decision to give us grace in Jesus Christ.  Right?  God knew.  Loved us just the same.

            It’s us that need the flashlight.

            And I know that our stuff isn’t all that pleasant to look at.  Some of it stinks so bad we’d just rather close the door and spray some Lysol.  You do that long enough and it’s going to grow into something so monstrous you’ll have to call in professionals to get it cleaned up.

            But, turn on the lights and you’ll see just what it is that you’re dealing with.  And you can start getting it turned around before it eats you from the inside.

            The truth is that God needs us to be honest with ourselves, and be daring enough to challenge the darkness within us.  When we do that, we are so much brighter witnesses to the goodness of God to the world around us.  When we do that, we become the very evidence of Christ in the world ourselves.  We say with the lives that we lead that Jesus Christ has changed me forever and given to me hope to be something so beautiful and meaningful.  We know darkness.  We once were darkness.  But, now in the Lord we are light.

            Turn on the lights, Christian.  Turn on the lights.  Do not be afraid.  Turn on the lights.  You turn on the lights and say to yourself:  Sleeper, awake!  Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)