The following is the sermon I preached at Pasadena Covenant Church on August 31, 2008. The biblical text is Ephesians 2. [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

Do you ever feel like you’ve been a rut and the mundane “blehs” of life surround you and then all of a sudden, you’re filled with awe and wonder? You encounter something new or something you’ve seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted countless times and then, surprisingly, you wake up to a deeper mystery surrounding you. What has evoked that awe in you? Is it a piece of music like a Sufjan Stevens song? Standing before the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Hearing children laugh? What about a movie like WALL-E? Or a favorite book or story such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Maybe a mathematical formula? Perhaps seeing a perfectly turned double play in baseball or watching Michael Phelps set records these past Olympics? Or is it a favorite meal whose flavors remind you of home? Isn’t it amazing to experience those moments when we feel God’s grace like a cool breeze, when we can sense that there is something special to this life?

I grew up in Sanger, California, a small farming community plopped between Fresno and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. My family spent a lot of time in those mountains. It was a great way to grow up, having granite domes and giant sequoia trees just an hour’s drive away. As a kid, I didn’t think the mountains to our east were all that special—seeing them was as much a part of our daily lives as homework or the street in front of our house. I even worked in those mountains during a couple of summers in college at a Christian camp. The tall trees were beautiful, but they were just the backdrop of my life. Then, one time when I was home from school, my dad and I went on a drive up to Sequoia National Monument. As we drove past trees I must have seen hundreds of times in my life, I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. Here were these behemoths shooting up out of the ground, topping out at a couple of hundred feet into the air. Their bases were fifty feet around or more. They began to grow around the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem. I couldn’t help but stare out the window in awe of these magnificent wonders of God’s creation. If you’ve never seen the giant sequoias, I’ll try to give you some perspective: Pasadena city hall is the tallest building in the city at 163 feet. The General Sherman tree stands at 276 feet. It had a branch that before it fell off was 100 feet tall. What powers of imagination does God possess in order to make trees like that? As we drove through the forest, I felt like I was the first person to ever see them. I remember saying to my dad in shock, “Do you see these trees? They’re awesome.” He just laughed and said he felt the same way the first time he saw them after he moved to California from North Carolina. When I saw those trees that time, I understood the words of the poet E.E. Cummings who wrote, “now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” [2]

“Now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” Isn’t that a beautiful image? How often do we see this world and don’t perceive its God-infused beauty, wonder, and mystery? I don’t usually walk around amazed at what God has done. It’s easier for me to whine like Luke Skywalker about my life than to stand in awe at the fact that I’m alive in the first place. Isn’t it remarkable that God has combined these chemical elements in such a way to make bones and blood and skin and lungs and then to animate them? But, I rarely think of that when I wake up in the morning. I take this body for granted. Even though I think we’re made to appreciate the mysteries of life, we can often miss them altogether. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt so much as it breeds indifference and apathy.

Our Scripture this morning from Ephesians reminds us of the mystery of our common life in Christ. Of course, we can be so familiar with the Bible that we grow numb to its power and beauty just as I began to look past the giant sequoias when I was a kid. Our text this morning has some of the New Testament’s “greatest hits.” And like songs that become familiar to us, we may no longer listen attentively to the words we hear. Instead, we reflexively mouth the lyrics, not really focusing on what we’re doing. The mystery of the narrative in Ephesians 2 doesn’t seem as remarkable as it once did. Of course we were dead in our sins. And of course God made us alive together with Christ—that’s what God does. Many of us have memorized verses 8 and 9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” We know without thinking about it, that Jesus has “broken down the dividing wall.”

And the same goes for the life we share as the Church. You and I have lived in a world where the Church has existed and grown on nearly every continent. That we read the same Bible, partake in the same baptism, and share the same food and drink at communion as people who speak entirely different languages and live in other countries than we do is just reality. This morning, did we have a sense of awe as we gathered here in the sanctuary to worship God? I usually don’t ponder how unlikely it is that Jesus has gathered us, oftentimes working against our tendency to separate ourselves from each other. We may marvel at God taking chemicals and making living, breathing humans—isn’t it just as amazing that God would bring people together of all ages, ethnicities, genders, and economic classes? Do we have a sense of wonder at the fact that this body of believers breathes and eats, moves and rests?

If we listen closely to the story told here in Ephesians 2, I think we can hear a tale of awe and mystery. We can hear a narrative of who we were, who God is, what Jesus Christ has done, and what that now makes us. If we listen again, we can hear some beautiful miracles in these stories.

Let’s look at the first miracles of the story. The author writes to the Ephesians, “You were dead through [your] trespasses and sins.” Dead. D-E-A-D, dead. Remember Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride who says that Westley is only “mostly dead” and not “all dead?” “Mostly dead” means there is a bit of life left in him. According to Ephesians, we were “all dead.” Nothing. Kaput. And as Miracle Max says, “With all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do. Go through his clothes and look for loose change.” Ephesians says, however, that God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ.

Did we catch that? We were in rebellion against a gracious God who created and sustains the world. We chose death by following our lusts and the powers of this world. We were deluded enough to think that this death we chose was really life. Yet, God didn’t write us off. Instead, God delved deep into the love he has for us and made us alive again through Jesus Christ. This is grace, as Art preached about last week. More than merely waking us up from our death, God has seated us in the heavenly places in Christ. To go from rebellion and reeking of the stench of death to being made fully alive—more alive than we have ever been—and sitting next to God in the ordering of the universe, now that, brothers and sisters, is a story that puts my jaw on the floor. We worship a “God who is rich in mercy.” We benefit from the “Immeasurable riches of his grace.” This is the kind of stuff that should knock the breath out of us. Can we say that “the eyes of our eyes are open” to this grace?

God takes us from our death and gives us new life. And if that wasn’t more than enough, God sets us on a path to participate in the good works he performs. We aren’t just made alive again, we are made right. Listen friends to these words: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” I think this verse acts as the spiritual hinge to this chapter. We were dead and our way of life was marked by trespasses and sin. But God has made us alive in Christ and has changed our identity so that who we are is now wrapped up entirely in his work. He gives us a new way of life—a way of life marked by good works. “For we are what he has made us.” This new identity shapes our interactions with each other and leads us to the second set of miracles.

This second set of miracles contains what I like to call miracles of grammar. At its most basic level, grammar establishes the rules for language. If we all didn’t have a basic sense of grammar, there would be no understanding what we say to each other. Without grammar, how could you tell if I was asking a question or making a grocery list? Even though we may not pay attention to it directly, a lot of our communication happens in grammar.

This story we read in Ephesians addresses two elements of grammar: the noun and the adjective. As we know, nouns are persons, places, or things, and adjectives modify nouns. It seems our inclination as human beings is to focus on what makes us different from each other. We focus a lot on the adjectives. We want to be special, unique. We want to have healthy boundaries between ourselves, our families, and others. We need these boundaries, but we seem to take these distinctives too far and we begin to exclude others who are different than us. We take those markers of specialization and turn them into entirely different entities. Grammatically speaking, we take adjectives and turn them into nouns. In politics, conservative and liberal used to describe a person’s beliefs, but now these terms stand for the person themselves. When I hear people say, “He’s a liberal,” I want to ask, “He’s a liberal what?” Or, “She’s a conservative.” She’s a conservative what? A conservative cook? A conservative Zanzibari?

Our grammatical tendency to build dividing walls has seeped into the Church too. We don’t have mainline Christians and evangelical Christians, we have mainliners and evangelicals. Instead of focusing on the commonality we share with others, we emphasize our differences, making the differences our whole identities rather than just aspects of who we are. The Ephesian church seemed to have this problem as the animosity in their culture between Gentiles and Jews had entered into their community. Distrust and outright hatred existed between these ethnicities. We have Jewish writings from the ancient world that tell their audience to, “Separate yourselves from the Gentiles and do not eat with them, and do not perform deeds like theirs. And do not become associates of theirs, because their deeds are defiled, and all of their ways contaminated, and despicable, and abominable.” The Gentiles of the age held a similar disdain for their Jewish neighbors. One Selucid ruler had advisers who exhorted him, “to destroy the Jews, for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races and saw everyone else as their enemy.” [3] Leftovers from this racial enmity showed up in the Ephesian church with ethnically Jewish Christians calling themselves “the circumcision” and labeling the Gentile Christians “the uncircumcision.” For centuries, the mark of circumcision defined the Jewish people as a race and a religion. This mark determined who were citizens of Israel and who were aliens. Being circumcised meant you had access to the covenants of promise and to God. Being uncircumcised meant you were godless and had no hope of partaking in God’s promises.

The miracle of grammar is that God takes our nouns and turns them back into adjectives. In Jesus’ body, God tears down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles who wanted to exclude each other because they were different. In Jesus’ body, the differences between us are put back in their proper place. Sure, the people are still circumcised or uncircumcised, but that mark or lack of a mark no longer encapsulates the entire person. There is a new, greater identity found in Christ. “For we are what he has made us.” Isn’t it incredible that God could come into a space brimming over with such distrust and hatred and could make a new, unified family out of these two groups?

We’re two thousand years removed from these debates in Ephesus, but our world hasn’t changed that much. All we need to do is watch a newscast, listen to the radio, or pick up a newspaper to know that ethnic and religious hatred still exists in our world.

We also don’t have to look too far into the history of the Church to see how we build up walls of division between each other. The Pocket Dictionary of North American Denominations says there are thousands of denominations in North America. The book’s index lists four Lutheran denominations, six Methodist denominations, seven Pentecostal, seven Presbyterian, and seven Evangelical and free denominations, of which the Evangelical Covenant Church is a part. [4] The history of the Church in America is one of split after split after split. Let’s face it, we’re pretty good at building walls. We’re good at saying who is in and who is out.

Can we hear the miraculous good news in this text? Are our ears open to the fact that Jesus has destroyed our enmity and inserted himself as our peace? We may erect dividing walls, but Jesus graciously and wonderfully tears them down and begins to build something new. He doesn’t construct something between us or around us—we have become the building materials. Jesus comes, sees all these disparate bricks, wood, and joints scattered around. He gathers all the fragments, Jews and Gentiles, young and old, rich and poor, those near and far, and builds a dwelling place for God. Jesus gives himself to be the cornerstone and holds everything together. “For we are what he has made us.”

Pasadena Covenant, we have been through a lot in the past few months. Charlie’s departure has rocked many of us to our core. People are tired, excited, hurt, hopeful, anxious, mad, and confused. I’ve heard friends express all sorts of thoughts and feelings and lots and lots of questions about who we are as a church. We are in a tender spot. As we recall what has transpired, as we take stock of where we are at, and as we look into the future, I pray that we would read texts like Ephesians 2 and let these Scriptures read us as well. One of my favorite questions to ask our small group is what would a community that is shaped by the text we read look like? What would an Ephesians 2 congregation look like? I think that these verses give us a fantastically beautiful picture of what the Church is supposed to be.

If we are shaped by Ephesians 2, I think we need to agree that through this next season, our anchoring point is the person and work of Jesus Christ. Who we are is not rooted in our preferences or our opinions, no matter how strongly we may hold them. Our identity, our whole reason for existence as people and as a church is found solely in the wonderful love of Jesus Christ. “For we are what he has made us.” What unites us is far greater than what makes us different. Let us allow God to work miracles in our grammar so that we can keep the adjectives as adjectives and not turn them into nouns. During this season, how can we foster an openness to seeing the mysteries of God’s work in our lives? When we look at the history of the Church in the world, or the history of Pasadena Covenant, is it not a miracle that we exist? What powers of imagination does God possess in order to make a dwelling place for himself out of people?

We need to pray passionately that we do not let our differences divide us and that God would continue to break down the walls that separate us. Like the church in Ephesus, I pray that the variety in our community would be the materials Christ uses to continue building a wonderful place for God. It is my belief that one of the greatest witnesses the Church has to the world is that we let the Holy Spirit work amongst us and bring us toward reconciliation. This is real reconciliation, not the I’m OK, you’re OK, let’s just smile and never step on each other’s toes flimsy reconciliation. No, the reconciliation of God is the kind that takes dead people and makes them alive again. God’s reconciliation recreates people for good works. The reconciliation of God destroys the ethnic, economic, social, and political barriers we set up to exclude ourselves from each other. The reconciliation of God embraces our diversity and creates a new family.

In this new life Jesus creates, we become like the majestic giant sequoia trees. The Christian camp where I worked was within hiking distance of Nelder Grove and we took the campers there regularly. We used the giant sequoias there as a metaphor for the life of the Church. You won’t see fully mature giant sequoias standing by themselves—they only grow in groves. The reason for this is that even though these natural wonders are extremely tall and weigh several tons, the majority of each tree’s root system goes down only four or five feet beneath the surface of the ground. This shallow root system is not deep enough or strong enough to hold the trees upright by themselves. To compensate, a giant sequoia’s roots spread out one hundred fifty feet around them. As they grow together in groves, the root systems of several trees begin to interlace with each other and create a support structure so that each tree holds up several other trees. [5] Isn’t that a beautiful picture and one that relates so easily to life in the body of Christ? None of us can grow into maturity alone. But together, we can support each other, share one another’s burdens, offer encouragement, and point each other to the wonders found in Jesus Christ. In the Holy Spirit, our congregation can stand like a giant sequoia grove, a testament of the immeasurable riches of God’s grace.

I pray that we would let the beautiful mystery of God’s work seep into our lives and that when we gather to worship or discuss church business, when we meet in each other’s homes, when we do good works in our neighborhood, we can look around us and have a sense of wonder and awe at God’s presence, and we can say, “Now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”

1. All biblical quotations and references come from The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989).


2. E. E. Cummings, “i thank you God for most this amazing.”


3. Charles H. Talbert, Ephesians and Colossians, Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament, ed. Mikeal C. Parsons and Charles H. Talbert (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 80.


4. Drew Blankman and Todd Augustine, ed., Pocket Dictionary of North American Denominations (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).


5. http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=1151

Further Bibliography:

1. Andrew T. Lincoln. Ephesians, vol. 42. Word Biblical Commentary. Ed. David A. Hubbard and Glenn W. Barker. Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1990.


2. Heinrich Seesemann. “πατέω.” In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey William Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964. 5:944.