Ephesian 2 vs 11 to 22 Resident Aliens

Context for this message is a congregation in a midsize city in the Midwest of the United States. The people are from many walks of life and generally are middle-aged with kids and aging parents. At the time there was a somewhat intense conversation in our community about who belonged in the city and did they have any rights.

Scripture reading is Ephesians 2 verses 11-22

Victor Hugo, in his novel Les Miserables, paints for us an unforgettable portrait of a man who doesn’t belong in his world. Jean Valjean has no place of safety for himself. He is haunted by a police inspector named Javier who seems obsessed with the capture of the man. Valjean is a man who has lost his right to citizenship in his native France because he stole some bread one day in a moment of desperate hunger. He is a man who after his release from prison is forced to carry papers that make him an alien in his own land. He doesn’t belong anywhere. And the only way he can live with any sort of quietness is to assume false identities, to disguise himself, and to avoid the mainstream of society.

Before his crime, Valjean had been just another hungry French man on the streets of Paris. After it, he is no longer a fellow citizen, he is a dangerous alien. A moment had come and gone in which he was forever changed in the eyes of those among whom he lived.

Before and after. 2 words that tell us of what a moment in time can be. 2 words that describe for us the transition that happens when a pivotal event, whether it be great or small, happens.

Before and after pictures are common when people want to show what became of a decision. Before our house looked like this, we had it repaired, and now it looks like this. Before I looked like this, but after I lost 125 lbs, I look like this. These are pivotal moments when decisions are made and the power of that moment lives on. And then remains, the before and the after.

We all have moments in our lives that are before and after moments, too. Before my wedding day I was free to choose any eligible woman for a wife, after that day I’ve had to live with my decision. Before I went to pick up a babysitter one night, I never collided with a drunk driver, but ever since that night in the spring of 1985, I know what it is to be terrified by a drunk driver.

I’m sure you could add many of those sorts of lines and so could I, but the point is that these pivotal moments occur and once they occur, you can never go back, no matter how much you might want to.

There’s another before and after scene I want us to take a moment to consider. It’s one that leaves a mark on us for our whole lifetime. It’s the before and after of when we find ourselves face to face with a saving God. Once you have met God face to face, you are forever changed. Even if you decide to turn your back on God after you have met him face to face, you will always have to deal with this fact. You met God. It will always haunt you. Because God changes us when he comes into our lives with his grace. And if you embrace this saving God in faith, then something better and something worse than haunting will happen to you.

First of all, there’s something better.

The apostle Paul speaks of what it was like before the Ephesians became Christians. In the former times, he says, remember what it was like? It wasn’t good, was it? Remember he says in verse 12 you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and you were foreigners to the covenant of the promise, without hope, and then he says this. without God in the world. In Victor Hugo’s novel, it was a crime against society that Jean Valjean had committed that made him an alien in his own land. In the scriptures it is a crime against God that makes humanity an alien in the world God made him master of.

Do you see what sin does to us? It makes us strangers in our homes. It drives a wedge between friends. It seizes our vision for the future away from  us. It puts us at odds with God. The apostle Paul says remember!! Don’t ever forget the before picture, because it makes the after picture so amazing.

How many of you here this evening are Jewish? The rest of you remember you were separated from Christ. The Greek word here means you were without Christ. You had no one who was anointed by God to bring the gospel’s refreshment to you. No one. The Kingdom of God was real, but you were not allowed in. You were an alien, you had no rights at all in God’s Kingdom, remember this says the apostle Paul. You were without hope. You had nothing to look forward to. You had no reason to think tomorrow was going to be better. If you were at the brink of death, you had no reason to want to go on living, and what would meet you beyond the grave terrified you! Remember says Paul. You were without Christ, without hope, and you were without God. Without God. The words have an ominous sound. Without God. We have this built-in desire to worship someone or something, but in this picture, there is no God. Remember that!

Then in verse 13 he goes but now in Christ Jesus and he goes on to tell the glorious good news that there is another picture. The after picture. The picture that is in the shape of a cross! And then in verse 19 he says consequently, you’re no longer foreigners and aliens, but are fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household!

A decisive moment has happened. It pivots on the death of Jesus Christ. For at that moment all the old stuff, remember, says Paul, all the old stuff is done away with and something brand new takes its place. There is peace now with God. There is peace with God’s people. There is hope! What a tremendous gospel message! Jesus brings us peace. He changes us from outsiders to insiders! He gives us hope and a vision for what the Kingdom of God can be. He makes all things new!

But, that’s not the whole story. One day, it will be the whole story and we look for that day. But it’s not the whole story right now. When Paul is talking about you are no longer foreigners and aliens, he’s talking about the Kingdom of God but, you see, what he doesn’t say here, and what is nevertheless true, is, that the Kingdom of God is alive in the world and it’s alien to the world. It’s actually not welcome here. And so as we become a part of God’s family, we commit a crime against the Prince of darkness. And the Prince of this world is not pleased.

So what do we do? What can we do? We do what many do in our world today, we become resident aliens. If you become a resident alien in the United States you have to carry an ID card. Whenever you are asked for your green card, you’d better be able to produce it or face deportation.

Resident aliens don’t make a great deal, usually, of the fact that they are citizens of a different country. They don’t make a point of trumpeting their citizenship in another land but when the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the USA is said they don’t join in, for their allegiance is elsewhere.

Do you begin to see what’s going on here? You and I as we go about our everyday affairs, may not look all that different from the man on the street. But when it comes to pledging our allegiance to the gods of this world, we have to draw the line.

What are the gods we find are find looking for our Pledge of Allegiance? The god of sensuality is a common one in our culture. We live among a people that glories in sensual pleasure whether it be eating in horribly wasteful ways, or adoring the bodies of the opposite sex just to satisfy our sexual curiosity. The God of the love of money has taken hold so that our culture is stymied and trying to pay its bills both personally and as a nation. The God of violence is served by so many who believe that might makes right whether it be in a movie, on the playground at school, or in the boss’s office.

The Pledge of Allegiance to these gods sounds so inviting to so many people, even Christians. How inviting are they to you? None of these are going to come right out and tell you they’re gods, they are innocent pursuits of pleasures or gain or whatever.

We need to learn where to draw the line, however. For we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, if we listen to God’s call to us in Christ. When we have peace with God, we don’t have peace with the world.

Resident aliens have it rough sometimes. They never can be assured of not being hassled by some government agent. And they know they belong to their land, whatever it may be. I haven’t finished the book les Misérables, so I don’t know if Valjean ever gets his citizenship back. I don’t know how it ends. I do know however, that those who are citizens of God’s Kingdom and who are resident aliens in this world will one day inherit the whole earth for the Kingdom of darkness will be destroyed. And the eternal Kingdom of God will be established, and all the aliens will then be at home in God’s good earth!

Colossians 3 vs 1 thru 11 Living as Those Made Alive in Christ   

Context for this  message is a suburban congregation as we come to the end of April here in the Northern Hemisphere. This is about doing some spring cleaning, not of our homes, but of the home of our lives.

News Flash!! Spring is in the air!! Yes, contrary to all appearances and all of our own personal observations of the weather, it is spring!!! In fact, it has been spring for over a month already even if we do not yet personally feel that it is spring.

Now, I will grant that I am going by what I have been taught in years gone by. One of the ways I know it is spring is that, before we switch to that awful thing called daylight savings time, when it is the days right when it is turning to spring, when I get on Leonard street by my house, and head to the east in the morning or west in the afternoon, the sun is going to be shining right in my eyes just after sunrise and just before sunset.

I’ve learned over the years that the sun is how I can know it is spring. I see what the sun is doing and I know that spring is here. But, as I was talking to my sister in southern Minnesota on Thursday morning, I heard  her say, and I don’t think she was lying to me, she told me that it was snowing so heavily where she lived, that she could not see a block down the street.

Now, does that snow mean that the sun is wrong? I don’t think so. Appearances are one thing, but the reality is something else! Since it is spring, one of the obligations we have is to do spring cleaning.

 At least that is what my mother taught me. It was an annual duty. When spring arrived, she would select a week during which she went through the whole house and cleaned it thoroughly. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Even things that did not look all that bad to me got a spit polishing. It was a matter of pride to her that she would have her house cleaned and ready for summer.

One of the truths about our lives is that we too need a thorough spring cleaning. If you have been raised with Christ, you need to set your minds on things above, where Christ is, seated at God’s right hand. When Easter comes along, for us in the spring, it reminds us of the truth that Jesus is alive!!!

Think of him as the spring sun, as he rises his light blinds our eyes to the things around us and we find that what we can do is set our minds on the things that are above.

So we find that it is time again to do some spring cleaning. What I think is so disturbing about the passage before us this morning is that Paul gets at the stuff of our life foundations. We would rather not have to deal with these things.

 Really, I have to ask you, if you knew I was going to be dealing with the mess that Paul describes in Col 3: 5-9, would you have thought, you know, I think I’ll just stay home. We don’t deal with these things very well.

In our culture today, the things Paul mentions are how most of us live. The significant thing to notice about each of these practices is that each one drives a wedge between people. I’ve had a chance to get to know many, many people over the years, and one of the most significant things they have to deal with is the results they have found in their lives when they have pursued these activities.

Paul lays out a list :  sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed. Kind of reminds me of the MTV movie awards show from last week. While I will grant the point that the MTV generation is always looking to shock the older folks with what they will do, the thing that it says to me is that this is becoming what is normal for people who are in their teens thru their 20’ s.

 A couple of years ago, you had this guy and young woman standing on the stage fondling one another sexually and saying there was nothing going on. This year had guys dropping their drawers on stage. At the academy award where the Oscars for best picture and so forth are handed out, the opening bit was a song, supposedly meant to be a joke about how we saw various actress’s boobs at one time or another.

 The 50 shades of gray series of books has sold over 60 million copies around the world.

Now my issue here is that this is becoming normal even for those who call themselves Christians. I find myself torn between what Paul is calling for here and the desire to be hip and cool.

, I admit it is pretty hard for someone with gray hair to be cool and hip, but you know what I mean. So how do we do this house cleaning project? My mother did hers because that is what you did when you were living on a farm in NW Iowa in the fifties.

And you will probably have noticed by now that I am not talking about my wife’s practice of spring cleaning! Paul tells us to put it to death. Yeah, put it to death.

 Each of these practices deserve capital punishment. Do you know why? Because you have, yourself, already died. On your way home, find a cemetery. Pull in and ask yourself how many of these people there in front of you are having a tough time with sexual immorality, evils desires, lust or greed. How many do you think will be struggling with those things?

 You already know the answer – NONE. Not one person who has died has trouble with these practices which bind us to this world in unhealthy ways. And not one of them has to deal with it anymore. Paul says, since you have died with Christ, set your mind on things above!

 Get rid of anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other. Why, every one of those is about breaking down a bond between you and someone else. When a person blows up in rage, they simply isolate themselves. When we lie to others, we break trust with them. In fact, every one of these practices in Paul’s lists do that.

Every one breaks down the community. Every one of these is a detriment to our being brothers and sisters to each other in Christ. Paul gives us another list. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all

. Each of these designations was a reason for one person to not allow another into their circles. I am a gentile, in the days before Jesus opened the way for us all, I was outside of the family of God. Without God and without hope in the world. But God has given us a new resurrection life, one that blinds ort eyes to earthly differences so that we will only see others with God’s eyes.

In Christ there is no Greek or Jew. In Christ there is not circumcised or uncircumcised – people in the covenant with God and people who were not in relationship with God. No more.

The blinding light of the resurrection shows us that we have to clean our houses of all that old crap that only brings pain and heartache to those who insist on pursuing it. Instead, God is in Jesus renewing relationships. Changing us from people who are skeptical of one another into those who welcome each other with the hand of fellowship. Here there is not slave or free. No, Christ is all and is in all.

That is the good news. So often I have heard people like John Stewart making fun of what someone who is still caught in the pre-crucifixion way of life and who call themselves Christians because they make some really bad statements. Ones that show they do not see their lives as being hid with Christ in God. Instead, these people, and too often it is the guy in the mirror talking, who say things that divide us.

God has given us the ministry of reconciliation says Paul in another of his letters.  That means that in all we do, we are to be building a new family that is based on grace. That is good news. That is so freeing! Let’s do some house cleaning this week. Our hearts need it!