More Vile

Ephesians 2:1-10

June 9, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Have you ever ended up going the wrong way? We had been at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with family and I knew it was going to be a long drive home with a toddler, so we got up early in order to “beat the traffic.” We got on the interstate, and I got on the right interstate, only I was going the wrong way. We drove for a while until I realized that the signs we were passing were not what they were supposed to be. I was headed somewhere other than where I wanted to go. That’s when we passed a sign that said the next exit wasn’t for something like twenty miles, and knowing how many miles we had to go to get home, I didn’t want to drive twenty extra miles just to turn around. Luckily, not too far down the road was one of those crossovers that had the big sign saying “Authorized Personnel Only.” I authorized myself and crossed over. However, the officer who then pulled me over didn’t agree that I had been authorized. The whole morning was an expensive mistake, and it was pretty quiet in the car for a while after that.

Ever been on the right road going the wrong way? Even worse, have you just continued going the wrong way, utterly convinced that it is the right way? Stop pointing and looking at each other! N. T. Wright says that’s often the way it is. “Human beings, left to themselves, not only choose the wrong direction, but remain cheerfully confident that it is in fact the right one” (Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, pg. 18). And that’s the sort of situation Paul is describing in the midst of this letter to what might have been his favorite church, the church at Ephesus. Humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, have been happily moving forward—but going in the wrong direction. In two thousand years since Paul wrote these words, very little has changed. The problem is the same, and thankfully, so is the solution. The answer is grace.

“Grace” is not only a huge Biblical word; it has also figured prominently in the story of the Methodist movement. For the last couple of weeks, we have been looking at the life of our founder, John Wesley, and the movement that grew out of the revival he led. As I’ve said, I believe that the solution to the struggles of the present time might be found in our past. If God has done it once, he can do it again. Not that God will move in exactly the same way as he did in the 18th century, but there are things that happened then that we can learn from in order to respond to the present crisis. Last week, we talked about the need for our hearts to be strangely warmed. We need to have an honest experience with Jesus, as Wesley did at Aldersgate. But…then what? For Wesley, after that moment, he began preaching about the need to experience Jesus, to not be an “almost Christian,” and he found himself shut out of pulpit after pulpit. “By the end of 1738, only five churches in the London area would still have him in their pulpits” (Hamilton, Revival, pg. 88). Pretty much no one in the established church wanted to hear what Wesley was saying.

That led Wesley to a town called Bristol, the town where John’s brother, Charles, eventually settled down after he had married. Bristol is where he raised his family. A few weeks ago, I was in Bristol, and I was honestly surprised that, compared to many places we visited in England, it was kind of a rough town. There was graffiti and a sense that it just wasn’t as clean a town as the other places we had been. But Bristol has always been kind of a rough town. In Wesley’s day it was a major shipping port and a mining town. And being a shipping port in the 18th century meant it was involved in the slave trade. Ships would leave Bristol and sail to Africa, where they would trade goods for slaves. Then they would sail to America, where they would trade slaves for other goods. Then they would sail back to Bristol, and the whole process would start all over again. Over 2,000 slave-trading ships sailed from this port, and the community that surrounded it was mainly full of what today we might call “the working poor,” living at poverty level and working so much that they weren’t able to be part of a normal church schedule.

One of John Wesley’s associates, George Whitefield, was from all accounts a passionate preacher, maybe a better preacher than Wesley. Whitefield has also been banned from preaching in the established pulpits, so he came to Bristol and started preaching outside to miners before they went in to the mines or after they got off work. When he heard that Wesley had also been shut out of preaching in the churches, Whitefield invited Wesley to join him in Bristol. Now, what Whitefield was doing was against everything Wesley believed in. He believed that preaching should happen and souls should be saved in a church building. Wesley wrote, “I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.” But when he visited in Bristol and saw Whitefield preaching to 30,000 miners and their families, he had to swallow his pride and admit that maybe God was up to something here. Here’s the way Wesley himself described it: “At four in the afternoon I submitted to ‘be more vile,’ and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.” He had never spoken to so many people at once. And the crowds just kept coming. Within a month, he had preached to 47,500 people. Outside. And it wasn’t long before the Methodists were building their first preaching house, in Bristol. It was called the “New Room” and it’s still there.

Two things I want to highlight from this part of Wesley’s story. First of all: people were desperately hungry for grace. For whatever reason, this was not a message they had heard, even though it’s right there in Paul’s writing all throughout the New Testament. But, of course, many of them either could not read or did not have time to read. And so they did not know the truth Paul writes about in our Scripture lesson today. Twice in this passage, in these short verses, Paul says the exact same thing twice: “It is by grace you have been saved” (2:5, 8). He wants the Ephesians to get this because it’s the difference between death and life. In the very first verses of this chapter, he tells those who are Gentiles (non-Jews) that they were “dead” because of their sin, because of the ways they separated themselves from God, the things they had done against God (cf. Dunnam, The Communicator’s Commentary: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, pg. 168). Before they knew Jesus, they had been involved in “praying to statues, consorting with temple prostitutes, and sacrificing children to appease angry gods” (Davis, Come Alive: Galatians and Ephesians, pg. 55). They followed the ways of the world and of the devil (2:2) and they were “disobedient.” They were in bad shape. But before the Jews get too haughty, Paul includes them, too. In verse 3, he says, “All of us” were just like them at one time. “We were by nature,” he says, “deserving of wrath” (2:3). It’s the same thing he tells the Romans: “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). It would be easy at this point to feel pretty hopeless.

Except for the next verse. “But…God…” (2:4). “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.” And then comes that beautiful phrase that we say even when we don’t know what it means. “It is by grace you have been saved” (2:4-5). Grace is a beautiful word. And yes, there are all sorts of cute acronyms and analogies to explain grace, but the simple reality is grace is getting the good that we don’t deserve. Grace is who God is. God is not an angry old man waiting to zap us for things we do wrong. God is grace, wanting to love us back to life if we will allow him to. God is mercy, willing to forgive and embrace all who come to him in humble faith. All those things Paul was talking about that cause us to be the walking dead, all the ways we are deserving of wrath and punishment, all the ways we have been separated from God—grace heals all of that. Grace is how God restores us to what he meant us to be in the beginning. And we are never more like Jesus when we are extending grace to someone else, when we are blessing, serving and helping others (cf. Hamilton 80). Because God doesn’t just give grace. God is grace. That’s the message those miners needed to hear in the town of Bristol and it’s the message every single person needs to hear today in the town of Terre Haute and around the entire world.

Author Philip Yancey calls grace “the last best word,” perhaps the only theological word (in his estimation) which has not spoiled (What’s So Amazing About Grace?, pg. 12). And Gordon MacDonald says grace is about the only thing the church can do better than the world. He writes, “You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace” (qtd. in Yancey 15). Even though those words were written several years ago, I think they’re even more true now. We see less and less grace in our polarized world around us today. Make a mistake, you’re branded for life. Say the wrong thing and you’re unfriended at best or cast out of society at worst. Even in the church where grace should abound, we find ourselves turning more and more to legalisms in order to be certain about everything. Grace is squishy, uncertain, “ridiculous” as the Tauren Wells song says. And yet it’s what we need. “It is by grace you have been saved.”

Oh, we try to save ourselves from the sin and the death and the hurt and the pain and all the rest. We try. We do good works. We go to church. We listen to Christian music and watch Christian television. We clean up our speech and our habits. We even take communion once a month and sometimes go to our small group. And we present ourselves to God and say, “See what a good job I’m doing? How do you like me now?” We tune out Paul who says, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (2:8-9). God says to us, “You’re doing all this stuff. But I just want you to receive the gift, to allow me to love you and save you. Trust me, I’ve got this. I can do it, better than you can.” It is by grace we are saved.

But for what purpose? Is this all just about some eternal reward for being good? Is it just about going to heaven when we die? Because if that’s the case, as some people like to reason, I’ll just wait until I’m about to die and then let God save me. But do you notice in this whole passage Paul doesn’t mention heaven once? Or eternity? Or living forever? He doesn’t mention those things because that’s not the point of being saved. It’s bigger and deeper than that. The point, which Paul knew and Wesley understood, is being able to get on board with God’s plan of redeeming the world. We don’t do good works to earn our eternity. We do good works as evidence that we are people of grace, that we have been saved from sin and death. Paul put it this way at the end of this morning’s passage: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (2:10). The word translated “handiwork” is the word poiema. I like that word; you hear the word “poem” in it? We are God’s poem. We are God’s masterpiece. We are God’s way to bring beauty into the world. So when Paul talks about “good works,” he’s not talking about something radical and huge that would change the world. Well, maybe. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. We could use some big change. But the ordinary person is probably not going to be able to carry out something like that. Instead, we do what we can in our corner of the world to make the world a more beautiful and grace-filled place. Plant a garden. Sing a song. Write a poem. Bless a child. Hug an older person. Be kind to a stranger. Listen to a friend who is having a bad day. You get the idea. We are saved by grace so that God can use us as his agents to redeem the world because, as Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “Beauty will save the world.”

And there’s one more thing God wants us to do: tell others about this grace that comes through Jesus. This is the second thing I want you to take from Wesley’s story. The Gospel spread in John Wesley’s time because he was willing to do something new and uncomfortable. He was willing “become more vile,” by which he meant he doing something he never thought he would do, something he even thought to be sinful. For him, that was preaching outside, which he did a lot. Bristol was just the beginning. Wesley spent fifty-two years traveling and preaching. He traveled some 250,000 miles on foot, horseback or by carriage, often preaching fifteen times a week. During his life, he preached over 40,000 sermons (cf. Hamilton 99). Because he was willing to be “more vile,” God used him to bring revival to the Great Britain of his day. What might God be calling you to do in that same vein? Probably not preaching outside, or maybe not preaching at all. For us, in our day, we might start with simply sharing our story about our life in Christ with someone else. While surveys say that eighty percent of Christians believe it’s important to share our faith, over 60 percent never do and never have. The average Christian today shares their faith once every 37 years or so, whether they need to or not! And about half of us have never invited anyone to come to church with us. And then we scratch our heads and say, “I wonder why people aren’t coming to know Jesus,” Maybe it’s because the “more vile” thing for us today is sharing our faith. We don’t do it nearly often enough. We assume someone else will do it.

Is it easy? No, not at all, especially in a world that seems increasingly opposed to the Gospel. In fact, when asked, most people say the reason they don’t share their faith is because they are afraid—of offending someone, of losing a friend, or of seeming intolerant. It’s a hostile world out there! But part of the hostility is because, again according to the research, they’ve misunderstood it. We’ve not represented it well. We’ve been people of judgment and legalism rather than people of grace. We’ve misrepresented God. What might happen if, instead of yelling and posting on social media about how bad the world is, we picked up a hammer or a shovel or a blanket or a tray of food and we showed the world grace through serving, helping, loving? Yes, Wesley preached outdoors but the early Methodists also went to the prisons and to the places where people were hungry. Wesley gathered people together in what we would call small groups so that they could care for one another and encourage one another. The early Methodists didn’t just preach grace; they lived it and through their lives demonstrated it to a world that was then ready to hear about it. They lived the words of Jesus and in both their actions and their words, they shared Christ. I’ve said that I believe the secret to our future is in the past. What if it’s a matter of becoming “more vile” and loving a world that won’t often love us back? What if it’s about becoming more intentional about sharing the message of grace? Because it’s only by grace—the grace of Jesus Christ—that the world will be saved.

I’ve always appreciated the mission statement that Craig Groeschel has for his church, that they will do anything short of sin to reach people for Jesus. That’s a true Wesleyan mindset, to even become “more vile” for the sake of Jesus. I think I learned to appreciate that at least to some degree while I grumbled about serving at a homeless shelter. You see, when you’re in seminary, you have this idea that you are going to singlehandedly change the world. And so a friend of mine and I decided one way we were going to do that was by volunteering at the local homeless shelter one night a week. I know, “one night a week”—we were oh so generous with our time. So we went with this idea that we were going to talk to the people who came and change their lives. That would be our role. When we got there, the director was glad to see us. He needed dishwashers that evening. What? Washing dishes? But don’t you understand? I’m a seminary student. I have all this Biblical knowledge to share. And you want me to wash dishes? Yes, they wanted me to wash dishes. That’s where the need was that evening. So do you know what I did? I washed dishes. Yes, I grumbled about it in my mind, but I washed dishes. And in the midst of that time of service, God got through to me that this is how you change the world—by doing what is needed, even if it’s not something you necessarily think you should be doing. Wash the dishes. Become “more vile.” And change the world. Let’s pray.