LENT III

March 7, 2010

St. Augustine Anglican Church

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,

but rather reprove them.”

The Rev. Gerald Parks +

          To today’s hearers, our Epistle (Eph. 5:1-14) may have a quaint and almost nostalgic quality to it.  We are not used to having—nor are a lot of us willing to have—discussions about human behavior that include the assertion that some things are just wrong and have eternal consequences.  That is too judgmental we say, too old-fashioned.  It is true that today we live in a society that is freer than any in history.  We are free to live our lives in mostly any way we choose without fear of criticism from the world and without guilt, even though we know that some of what we do would surely not pass the “smell” test, or win the approval of our parents or grandparents.  With all this freedom, though, has also come a general coarsening of our culture, where “doing your thing” (whatever “your thing” might be) is permissible and encouraged.  And this has been accompanied with a coarsening of our speech, and humor that degrades rather than amuses.

          Many of us, in fact, seem to think that all this is the logical progress of modern man toward his ultimate goals of enlightenment and intellectual maturity, but it really is not.  What is happening is the opposite of progress: we aren’t moving forward toward anything; rather, we are retracing our steps and moving backward in time to the pagan ways of which St. Paul so often wrote.

          In many ways, pagan society was not very different from our own: pagans, too, could be loving and caring, generous in their giving, loyal and brave.  But they lacked something we have available to us in abundance: the knowledge of a living God, by whose grace and mercy we may receive the gift of salvation unto eternal life.  It was St. Paul’s mission, given to him by our Lord’s own command, to bring the saving news of Christ to the Gentile world, which, through no fault of its own, was ignorant of it.  And this he did for as many years as he had, establishing churches and enduring many hardships until his ultimate martyrdom in Rome.  That he was successful in his mission cannot be denied, and many were converted by the power of his message to the new religion he preached.

          Yet, in a way strangely reminiscent of today, a lot of these new Christians had no problem in reconciling their new beliefs with their old ways. They didn’t understand that professing belief in Christian principles without living by those principles produces nothing of worth.  It is only a dishonest attempt at saying one thing while doing another.

          St. Paul’s letters are literally full of reminders, exhortations, and sometimes serious scolding, about what it means to be a Christian.  And so we know he was constantly aware of the dangers of Christ’s religion being absorbed and, thus, diluted, into the pagan practices of the Gentile world.  It is one of the miracles of Christianity that Paul’s letters to his various Churches—the sum and total of his teachings—are so well preserved for us in Holy Scripture, making up as they do slightly more than half of the New Testament.  They have influenced the thinking and beliefs of Christians literally for centuries; yet, the application of them as guides to basic morality and decency—in other words, human behavior—has not always followed suit.  And the reason for that is the same thing St. Paul encountered among his Christian converts: the seeming ease with which Christians reconcile the opposites of what they want to do with what Christ commands that they do.  And it has never been more so than today.

          St. Paul wrote, “Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.” (Eph. 5:6)  Modern theologians are fond of parsing Scripture, that is, breaking it down into individual words, and focusing on each one, rather than considering the meaning of the whole.  Their reasoning is that doing so makes it easier to understand what they call the “real” meaning.  In light of that, considering the slant some of them give to Holy Scripture in reaching their version of a “New Theology,” one can wonder how they deal with those words whose meanings seem pretty clear.  Such words as “fornication” and “adultery,” for instance, and “covetousness” and “idolatry,” and several others, must give them “fits,” although they always seem to find a way to avoid attaching sin to them.  And yet, St. Paul tells us that none of the people who do such things “hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” (Eph. 5:5)

          People who try to use Holy Scripture (or at least their version of it) to prove their so called “enlightened” assumptions that, for example, wrong is somehow right, or that sin is not really sin, or, indeed, that God is not God, are using what St. Paul properly described as “vain words” to support what can only be called pagan ideologies.  We may not approve of such posturing, but that is not all that we should do when people are being led by them into unrighteous disobedience.

          When St. Paul tells us, “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them,” (Eph. 5:11) he is stressing not one point, but two.  First, we must keep ourselves away from the various forms of what he described as “uncleanness” or “filthiness,” but that is not enough.  We must also “reprove” them; that is, we must not be silent in our response to sin in the world, lest others might think our silence denotes approval, and thus be led astray.  Being “followers of God, as dear children; and [walking] in love, as Christ also hath loved us, (Eph. 5: 1) means that we must always reprove by voice and action all those “unfruitful works of darkness” that try to tempt the willingly weak into the vanity of disobedience.  By reproving them we expose them, or as St. Paul puts it, make them “manifest by the light.” (Eph. 5:13)  In the light of Christ, “the unfruitful works of darkness” cannot stand or prosper: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead. And Christ shall give thee light.” (Eph. 5: 14)