"Work in Progress"
August 13, 2006: 10th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
Ephesians 4:17-5:2
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.

Sermon: Who among us has not been cornered by a more evangelically minded friend or associate or even a complete stranger and asked, point blank: "Friend, have you been saved?"

Sort of sends shivers down your spine, doesn't it? Indeed, few questions are more likely to raise the hackles of progressive or even mainline Christians more quickly. How are we to answer a question that seems to assume such a radically different understanding of the nature of our shared faith? "Have I been saved? You mean, is there a single moment I can point to and say, 'Yeah, that's it, August 13, 2006, 10:53 a.m., that's the when it happened, that's the when I gave myself to Jesus and everything changed forever.'? Well, um..."

Myself, I've always wanted to have a snappy comeback I could write down and keep in my wallet for just such occasions. I'd like to, but, truth be told, in those situations, even I tend to fold, despite all my years of seminary training. But I'm clearly not the only one who chickens out; in fact, it's such a common reaction that entire books have been written about what to when so confronted. A colleague of mine from my days in the Presbyterian church in Stillwater, Oklahoma co-authored one titled eing Presbyterian in the Bible Belt: A Theological Survival Guide for Youth, Parents, and Other Confused Presbyterians (Ted V. Foote and P. Alex Thornburg).

But of course, we all know that the Bible Belt isn't so much a belt in America these days, but more of a turtleneck sweater, and the influence of conservative Christian faith isn't limited to Oklahoma points South. We feel it here in Connecticut. A story is told in this congregation of a youth mission trip to West Virginia not so very long ago, when, after some conversation about the differences between our UCC ways of believing and the local Baptist and Pentecostal traditions of the folks among whom they would be working, an absent-minded young man piped up to ask, "Ooo, I forgot: What am I supposed to say if somebody asks if I've been rescued?"

Well, what are we supposed to say? The calm, cool, and collected answer for us as practicing progressive Christians would go something like this: "Hello, neighbor! Why, yes! I am being saved every day by the grace of God in Christ through the activity of the Holy Spirit. Thank you for asking!" In other words, words we might actually manage to muster, we believe that salvation is not a black and white, a yes or no, a now but not then sort of proposition. We do not believe we are damned before entering the waters of baptism and then handed a "Get Out of Hell Free" card and a towel on the way out. We believe that salvation—and we can use other words here, like redemption or liberation or healing or right-relationship with God—we tend to think of salvation as an on-going process, a quiet transformation of our lives unfolding through the ineffable movement of the Holy Spirit over an entire lifetime.

So, then, that sort of begs the question, doesn't it?: How's that salvation working out for you? Hard to say, huh? Yeah, well, it seems that our honest theological anxiety around what we feel is an almost magical evangelical understanding of salvation and our own deep-seated baggage about the institutional church and faith in general conspire to limit our expectations for a more personal Christian transformation to the something akin to the geological time scale. We talk about the Holy Spirit being at work in our lives, gradually making us the better people God intends us to be, but honestly, sometimes it seems as though continents drift faster than we change.

The author of the letter to the Ephesians—whether that was the Apostle Paul or someone writing in the style and spirit of Paul—believed that if we are followers in the way of Christ, if we are in Christ, then we ought to be able to touch and see and taste the transforming power of salvation in our lives. We shouldn't just be seekers, but also finders—not of everything all at once, to be sure, not salvation in one lump sum, but finders of real, palpable grace as we gradually break down and put away the pieces of our old, unhealthy selves and begin to clothe ourselves with something different, something new, ourselves as we were created to be, "in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."

Our faith ought to make a difference in our lives not only over the long haul, but right here and now. Falsehood and pretension should be being overcome here and now with a renewed spirit of truthfulness. The desire for profit at the expense of others ought to be being replaced here and now by honest labor and a spirit of generosity. Anger should not left festering, but righteous anger should be allowed to burn clean, like a forest fire, and then pass away. The daily grind of gossip and senseless chatter that chips away at the ties that bind us in community should stop—stop right now. As the writer urges us, we should "put away... all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another" as we have been forgiven by God.

Now, you know I have to ask: How are you doing against that checklist? It's quite a tall order, this salvation stuff. I, for one, am glad we don't get monthly report cards to take home and have signed. On my not-so-good days, it's pretty hard for me to imagine what life would be like without bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander. After all, there are entire segments of our economy devoted to exploiting these human weaknesses. Soap operas and "reality television" together seem to have the market cornered on wrangling. They don't call it "drama" for nothing. But of course it's not just a Hollywood problem. I have my own personal drama to deal with day in and day out, and even less amusing. I don't know, maybe it's just my inner Calvinist acting up, but all in all, these sins appear to be so ingrained in our lives as individuals and communities as to be an essential part of our human nature. Our lives do seem awfully nasty, brutish, and short. So, with all due to respect to Paul or whoever, how much transformation can we really expect?

Well, contrary to the oversimplified Hallmark-card vision of the early Christian Church popular in some circles, I don't think of Paul as a Pollyanna. He understood the way of the world. I think the reason he and his protégés included this exhortation to transformation here and again almost verbatim in the letter to the Colossians and in some form in almost every other epistle was not because they thought salvation was as easy as "just add water." Far from it. It's clear they felt the need to encourage one another to be better because being the better people God calls us to be in the example of Jesus is hard, hard work. Note that when Paul tells his audience here to stop acting like Gentiles, he's addressing Gentiles newly joined to the Church. He understands that he's asking them to go against all their instincts, against all their upbringing and habits and act like different people, like forgiven people. Salvation is not something to be undertaken lightly, but with "fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). Frankly, I agree with Paul on this point: Real, deep transformation is probably just plain impossible task if we can't trust that a "higher power," the highest power, God's own self, is committed to working on us and in us and with us through the Holy Spirit to bring it about.

Lucky for us, though, God is committed to doing just that. That's part of what it means for God to share our life in Jesus. In Jesus, who was tried, tortured, and crucified to satisfy our all-too human appetite for sin, God knows just how deep our addiction to sin runs. It runs right from our doorstep to the foot of the cross, the ghettos and barrios of our cities, to the not-so-quiet desperation of our suburbs, to the hushed lush boardrooms of greedy corporations, to the battlefields of Iraq and Lebanon and the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur, and down through our whole bloody history. God knows this. God knows all this. It's as plain as the wounds in Christ's hands and feet, and yet it is God's great and faithful intention to help us break the cycle and change.

But as the old adage goes, we have to really want to change. It's true, we are welcome here in God's house "just as we are, without one plea." But we are invited here not only for affirmation of who we are now, but transformation into all we may yet become in God's good grace. As we heard in the call to worship this morning and every time we approach Christ's table to share in his holy communion, we come here not because we are already fulfilled, but because we know we stand in need of God's mercy and assurance. We come not to express an opinion we already hold but to pray for God's Holy Spirit to enter into our lives and make us new. Ultimately, being church is about opening ourselves to being changed by the experience of intimacy with God in Christ.

So maybe our evangelical sisters and brothers are on to something when they talk about being saved like a concrete thing, a very real change in their lives. If, as we say, we believe that the experience of salvation not just once and for all, but an on-going process, we need to ask ourselves how that process is unfolding in our lives day by day. It doesn't have to be a matter of "every day in every way we're getting better and better"—the 20th Century has given the lie to the myth of unimpeded progress—but we need to ask ourselves what kind of honest-to-God difference our faith is making in our lives on a daily basis. Just where is our faith? Where is our salvation? Where is our transformation?

I have faith that we are indeed part of God's work in progress in the world as individuals and as a congregation. God is not done with us yet—thank God! So sometimes smoothly, but more often in fits and starts, dragging our heels and kicking and screaming, God is changing us. We are learning to leave behind long-held sinful habits and instead embrace the practices of right-relationship.

But I think we could do a better job supporting one another in our common pursuit of holy transformation. We need to learn to offer one another more truth and grace and testimony for this journey we're making from what we are now to what we will be in Christ. We are here as part of this community of faith not only to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us but also to forgive one another our faults and failings as God has forgiven us and to encourage one another as in the safety and power of the Holy Spirit we join with God and one another to work out our salvation in the on-going transformation of our lives and our world.

And as Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, and as we will say at the close of this service, "I am confident of this, that the Holy One who began this good work in you will bring it to completion." God will get it done. Thanks be to God.