“…for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true)” (Ephesians 5:7-9)
Perhaps, 21 centuries removed, we are a bit inoculated against Paul’s call for the Ephesians to turn from their sinful identities and embrace the fullness of a life devoted to Christ. To us, this impassioned plea may sound like one more person telling us how to improve our lives. I certainly know I am bombarded by countless daily emails and letters and phone calls from people telling me how to live a better, fuller life. “Don’t eat sugar, drink red wine, take these diet pills, talk to your kids more, get more “me” time, have an affair, don’t have an affair, exercise more, eat kale, gluten is the devil,” and on and on until we get to church and hear St. Paul lining up a big list of our failures, and we tune him out like the 200 ED commercials airing during the average football game. We are like a room full of punch-drunk boxers unable to hear or care if our manager is telling us to fight one more round. We want peace, not another pep talk or sales pitch. Thankfully, St. Paul’s words are meant to be the cure for that exhaustion. Today’s epistle is not just another empty exhortation designed to make us work harder; no, it is a statement of who Christians are and why: a reflection of what Christ has done for the world and how that saving act shapes and molds every part of the Christian life. The question laid before us today isn’t, “Are you going to try harder?” Rather, the questions asked of us today are, “What do you love, and how do you show that love to the world?”
Now, the hardest part of understanding Christian morality is separating the ethical demands of the Kingdom of God from the well-meaning suggestions of a dying world. You really could temporarily benefit from a regular exercise regimen, but no amount of pushups will save your soul. Further, and perhaps even more importantly, what makes the moral commands of the Holy Spirit, speaking through St. Paul, important is not the benefit they will bring us but the reality our participation in them reveals. The grounding focus of every one of St. Paul’s ethical instructions, including the hard teachings we hear today, is what God has done for us in Christ. It is for this reason that Paul begins as he does:
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 5:1-2)
Everything that comes after this statement must be understood through the lens of what Christ has done for us. We cannot rip these statements from the light that reveals what they mean. We cannot take these ethical commands and drag them back to the dark corners of our hearts to dismantle and defang. In that darkness, we can pretend we don’t need them or they don’t apply to us, but in the bright light of true love cast from the cross we see the truth: I am not qualified or worthy or capable of disagreeing with the God who gives me air to breathe, hands to hold my children, and died a traitor’s death in my place; a death which makes all my goodbyes as temporary as the black moments before sunrise. What can I possibly deny that God? The answer is nothing. St. Paul could tell me to paint my face purple every Sunday morning, and I would have to be the purple faced pastor of Connersville, not because the purple dye would save me, but because the king who has demands it; not out of selfish greed like the kings of this earth, but because He graciously allows us to be part of His mission to save the world. In these oft ignored lists, St. Paul is not calling us to be better; he is relaying our purpose and mission in life.
Which brings us to the actual behaviors prohibited in today’s epistle. Our willingness to recognize their importance, and live accordingly, is directly proportional to how faithful we are to our King and the mission and purpose He has entrusted to us. We may proudly proclaim to all who ask that we are Christians, but what we are willing to sacrifice, in humble imitation of our Lord, speaks in a language all men know to be far more convicting than any canned testimony. And make no mistake, sacrifice is exactly what St. Paul is asking of both the Ephesians and all Christians who share in the great pressures exerted by a dying world. Paul is demanding that the Ephesians culturally separate themselves from every person they know, to become strangers in their own city, unable to partner in the distracting obsessions which make decay and death seem a little less terrifying for the lost. That is a big ask, but it serves as a dividing line between those who trust in the assured hope of salvation made sure and real by Christ’s empty tomb, or those who have nothing to turn to but the idols of word and stone and silver around which they huddle—backs turned to the encroaching darkness.
And that is exactly what St. Paul is trying to attack when he brings up matters relating to sexuality here. He is not being a prude or old-fashioned. How can he be old-fashioned as he relates the radical decrees of the God who is love? The God who wants our love to be a living reflection of the pure love that exists within the Trinity: the true love that created and is recreating the world. This eternal love predates the universe, and we are called to live in its warmth and light. Our enemy, and those who serve him, would have us believe that love is as fleeting and temporary as a child’s favorite food, but who in their right mind would subjugate themselves within a conception of love so small and undeveloped? We don’t let children vote, but we far too readily accept a concept of love a three year old could have invented: “I feel; therefore it is true. I want; therefore, I am.” Jesus calls this sincere position what it is, nonsense, as St. Mark tells us:
And [Jesus] said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Our Lord, later echoed by St. Paul, enlists the common metaphor of the heart as the center of will and emotions and identifies it as the central dispensary of evil in the world. It isn’t that humans just walk in darkness; it is humans who have eaten all the lightbulbs.
As Christians then, there is a real sense that we shouldn’t turn on the news and be shocked there are rapists in the world; no, we should read a text like today’s epistle and be confronted by the fact that rape, incest, bestiality, fornication, and adultery are so closely related in the inspired mind of St. Paul that he can use a single word to describe them. The word, πορνεία, is translated as “fornication” in the King James Version, but in modern English, fornication has come to have a much more limited meaning than the apostle’s full condemnation of illicit sexual activity. For God, there are no special categories of sexual sin that are ok as long as nice, middle-class people do them in the dark. There are only physical relationships that positively contribute to the war against evil, or there are physical relationships that aid the enemy in his campaign against us and our loved ones. We are either shining lights, illuminating the world, or we are part of the black fog blocking mankind’s view of eternity.
And this darkness is nothing to laugh about either. St. Paul is so concerned about the cancerous nature of sexual sin that he doesn’t even want the church in Ephesus to joke about it. We may chuckle at St. Paul and his deathly serious concern for the normalizing effects of jokes and stories about sexual sin, but we cannot deny that we have been affected by powerful normalizing forces in our own culture. For example—imagine this scene—a cute, young couple moves onto your street. As we go over to welcome them into the neighborhood, we happen to notice that they aren’t wearing wedding rings, but we don’t give it a second thought as we wish them the best in their unmarried cohabitation. Now, imagine the scene involves two men. Would we feel the same way? Why not? We wouldn’t feel the same way because we have been inundated by story after story that normalizes “heterosexual” sin. We have been conditioned to, at best, shrug our shoulders at this far more prevalent sin and condemn the sin we haven’t yet become used to seeing. Millennials and Gen Z, who increasingly see no problem with homosexuality, are simply a step ahead of the generations who thought they could pull one thread of Christian sexual ethics without unraveling them all. Don’t get me wrong, Millennials and Gen Z are still insufferable and wrong, but they aren’t unique: they are simply the moral children of the last two generations.
So, maybe before we look askance at St. Paul and think we modern people have all this figured out, we should recognize that we stand fairly well condemned as a nation, as a people, and as a society before the sexual ethic God reveals in His Word. The great tragedy of our settling for smut, one-night stands, and pretend marriages is what we are giving up. Against the common slander often leveled against Christians, St. Paul doesn’t tell us to be ashamed of the true love that glorifies God and man. Instead of shame and guilt, we are to replace our desire for darkened conversations and our hunger for sexually compromised stories with “thanksgiving.” Instead of using the destructive sins of others or ourselves to numb us to the real terrors of the fallen world, we are called to give thanks for the real love God has placed in our lives. And, I don’t even mean just that of a sexual nature. Our culture’s dreary focus on sex as the thing that most defines one as a person has robbed us of the joy of friendship: real, self-giving friendship between people who have no ulterior motives, real friendship that seeks nothing but to give and give and give some more because we recognize that whatever we give of ourselves in this world will pale in comparison to what we have and will receive from the Lord of the Ages. This far richer tapestry of love, most perfectly represented by God the Son loving humanity as we murdered him on a cross, will always be more complicated and alien to us than the simple slogans and suffocating half-truths of our enemies, but the people of God must not trade the beautiful colors of that lush tapestry for the monochromatic dreariness of a cheap motel towel. We are called to live our lives in color, in communion, and in thanksgiving. St. Paul wants us to choose the tapestry, not the towel.
The 21st century American church must face a question it has too long ignored, “How long before we have awoken to the reality that by choosing to fill our hearts with people and stories normalizing a sexual ethic God has condemned, we have literally catechized ourselves against the true love God has given us as a precious gift?” I recognize that to many people I am speaking a foreign language, but the sooner we realize that we need to inundate ourselves with the Word of God and build the loving community that exhibits true love to the world, the sooner we can wake up from the nightmare that pushes us farther into our darkest selves and further and further away from the light that is mankind’s only hope. This turn back to God will not be the work of a day or a year; after all, years of neglect have created this problem, but every day we waste is another day we live in the dark and another day we need to hear from the apostle who loves us enough to shine the light of truth into our lives:
Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. (Ephesians 5:14)
Let us pray that the church may once again embrace her great truth: Christ is our light, and His love is our story.