Essays in Ephesians #20, Part 1
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, Ephesians 3: 7 – 8
Paul describes himself as the least of all saints. In his humility, Paul trusted God.
Humility and trust can feel vulnerable, unnatural, not safe. Pride’s protective shell can fool us into comfortable illusions of safety and superiority. I know.
This is about me— a questioning elderly woman—sorting out memories and thoughts; for Scripture commentary, scroll down.
I was raised to value pride. As a child, I was taught that some people were better than others. Family backgrounds, homes, ethnicity, beauty, money, material success, education, intelligence and reputation mattered. I absorbed the idea that it was good to be “better.” Not for the joy or beauty of excellence for its own sake, but because being “better” moved people up on an invisible pecking order based on comparisons. I was proud of being the best reader in fourth grade—not because I loved to read (which I did), but because it felt good to be first. It made my parents happy too. When my sister asked our Dad why she could not play with the neighbors, he said, “Because we are better than they are.” She asked, “What makes us better?” Our Dad replied, “Because we have books and they don’t.”
My parents joined the throng families who came out of the depression and WW 2 with an intense drive for upward mobility and looking good. They had tasted poverty and wanted their children to move up in the world. They didn’t want us to work as hard has they had—or know the deprivations they had felt. My sisters and I agreed; we all wanted to grow up to be beautiful, rich, smart, successful and famous—like movie stars. We were expected to conform to our parent’s wishes and wanted them to be proud of us. In turn, they boasted in our achievements and criticized our weaknesses.
Pride, “looking good”, being “better than” or “best”, was attached to comparisons about polished shoes, clean hair, ironed clothing and favorite ball clubs—win or lose, we were Cub fans. There was a “better” political party as well as a “better” religion and ethnicity. Many “best” values —like practical health standards and principles like “Thou shalt not steal or lie” were Biblical. But double standards were normal. Because I was taught to obey the Ten Commandments, I was disillusioned to learn that some grown ups thought that it was acceptable for businesses to break God’s commands, When I protested, my father said, “That’s different. It’s business.” Billy Graham was honored, but schoolmates who talked about loving Jesus or being born again were “not cool.” Drunks were bad on Skid Row but drinking too much was normal for the rich and famous. Frugality, saving and staying out of debt was honorable—but so was conspicuous consumption.
Despite these inconsistencies and double standards, the world that I grew up in, the 1940’s and early ’50’s, was a culturally Christian world where my friends and I still honored our parents, our families were more important than peer groups, and everyone I knew gave lip service to God’s Ten Commandments. But, while in college, I’d was wooed away from trust in God and taught to think that moral relativism, critical thinking, scientific materialism and humanism were more relevant than Christianity.
In the 1970’s, when an experience with Jesus convinced me of His reality, the atmosphere in our nation and culture had changed. The faces on magazine covers no longer smiled. The trend toward generational communication gaps, family breakdowns, and the pressures toward subjective value clarifications, moral relativism on the inside and cultural homogeneity and peer agreement on the outside, were intensifying. When my children were in high school Levi’s were “in”, Wrangler jeans were “out.” Evolution was “in,” a Creative Creator was out. Although I was shocked to hear my daughter’s junior high teacher take the Lord’s name in vain, it didn’t bother my children.
Looking back on my brief eighty-five years of life, it seems to me that changes like computers, cell phones, jet planes, driverless automobiles and atomic energy are small stuff compared to the changes in our spiritual and moral climate. Despite the horrors of my youth— WW II abroad and the double standards in the USA—my friends and I grew up in safety. Mass murders and identity theft were unheard of, many excesses were capped and punished, many values were generally agreed upon as objectively true. Natural reason made sense.
My grandchildren, however, have grown up in a world of palpable fear, visible carnal paganism and uncertainty. Absolutes are out, relativism has surged and the Judeo-Christian values that have undergirded Western civilization for centuries are being bent, reinterpreted or denied by many. At times, respect for one individual person’s subjective feelings is more important than respect for Godly principles and the good of the community. Selflessness is out and selfishness is in. So is syncretism. And entitlement. And anger. For many who ride the secular cultural bandwagon, Jesus’ faith, hope and love are not only untenable, but His ways are also unrealistic, dangerous.
These huge changes in spiritual climate came home to me recently while watching a PBS DVD hosted by Henry Louis Gates about the origins and influence of Gospel music. Gospel music began in the 1930’s on Chicago’s South Side. Between 1939 and 1953, I lived on Chicago’s North Side. The photos from black churches on Chicago’s South side from the 1920’s through the 1950’s pictured a sliver of the world I grew up in. I’m white as white—I didn’t see my first black person until I was at least six years old. My world was segregated, but I recognized the light of God shining on the faces of the African-American men and women on Gate’s DVD—both those singing gospel music as well as those singing the English (from England) hymns of more conservative African Americn churches. On walking out of their South side churches on Sunday morning, black believers carried themselves straight and tall and dignified; they shone with the same light shining on their faces that I saw on the faces of the white people I saw walking out of the North side churches I attended on Sunday mornings. I felt it, I saw it— in their carriage and on their faces. Love. In many ways our worlds were the same.
Such a mixture—I was raised to be proud—to do good and be proud of it, with an eye set toward earthly success and the lusts of the world and the flesh. I was also sent to church on Sundays, where I met men and women whose eyes were set on eternal values—humility, justice, faith, hope and love. I met Jesus. Somehow, the thought was imprinted on my heart that despite the evil of economic and social injustices, the divide between people was not black vs. white or rich vs. poor but was good vs. bad, kind vs. mean, honest vs. dishonest, believer vs. unbeliever, righteous vs. unrighteous. I didn’t know it then, but know now, that I grew up in a world where Christians salted the city, on the North side and the South. The world was a churched world. A world, yes, with horrendous problems, but nevertheless a world where believers and principled men and women walked on the Chicago streets—men and women, black and white, with shining and hopeful faces, a world where courteous smiles were common—and I could safely ride the Lake Street bus or El from the Loop to the Garfield Park-West side—as the only white passenger. Was I safe? Naïve? Ignorant? I don’t know. Most likely all—
In many places, that community is gone. I know it survives in scattered communities, salted by humility, hard work, and service. But the attitude of servanthood is waning— communities where men, black or white, smiled and said hello as they washed our car windows and filled our gas tanks are gone. The Judeo-Christian values, the Biblical faith, hope and love of the last century are counter-cultural today. The sense of community, unity, patriotism, willing self-sacrifice and purpose that marked the war years is a memory. After living through the post war hopes of the 1940’s and ’50’s, after joining in loss of faith that marked the disillusionments of the 1960’s and the fads of evolutionary moral progress and I’m Okay—you’re Okay, I had a lot to unlearn in the 1970’s when I returned to faith and began to grow up in Christ.
It would have been impossible— but, fortunately, the same God who made Paul a minister “according to the gift of God’s grace” was at work in me, and continues to work in every believer, conforming us to the image of Christ, making us into His beloved servants. We need the Holy Spirit. We need to line up our lives to agree with the life of Jesus Christ indwelling our beings. In a culture where temptations to doubt God are real, and the influence of our friends and families who don’t yet know the Lord is strong, it is easy to lose perspective— to doubt.
This, is about Scripture
But— enough of my eighty plus year digressions—
Temptations and doubts are nothing new. Satan tempted our first parents. Satan tempted our Lord. Of course Satan would use the world, the flesh, and all the little devils he could muster to tempt each one of us to doubt God and—with arrogant double-mindedness—he continues to tempt men and women to think that they might even be gods themselves.
The very idea that God is humble is difficult to accept. Thoughts of being like Paul, who saw himself as “the least of all saints” or the can be painful—especially if others think we might be the least of all saints too. The temptation to judge those looking down on us as less intelligent, or foolish or wrong can hit us like a knee-jerk reaction. . Uh – Oh. Ouch! And of course we deserve the sting to our own pride. Embracing the humility of Paul and of Jesus Christ, who emptied Himself of all but love, is counter-cultural. It smacks of poor self-esteem and low self-image, of self-rejection, self-hatred, an orphan-spirit, abandonment and all those confidence draining accusations that send men and women to put on masks, join support groups or seek psychological counseling.
The idea that we might be greatly beloved by God is also counter-cultural. The truth is that God loves us enough to die for us. He loves us enough to give us gifts of grace, peace, divine power and the unsearchable—yes—the fathomless, endless, glorious unsearchable riches of Christ.
So, on one hand, we are challenged to humble ourselves, to accept that compared to the goodness of God, we are all unworthy, miserable, needy, sinful wretches and then, on the other hand, to believe that Jesus took our separation from God, the death that we all deserve, and that His sacrifice opens the way for us to receive God’s great love for us. God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, the source of all power, truth and beauty loves you and me. Not because we’ve earned it, but because we are. We are so important to Him that Jesus died to give His Holy Spirit not only to His beloved followers and to Paul, but to everyone who accepts and returns His love.
Paul “got it.” By God’s grace, he learned to abide in the reality of his own unworthiness and in the power of God’s love. And because Paul “got it” God could entrust him with the love, the zeal, the capacity to perform a pivotal task in the history of mankind. By God’s grace and the working of God’s power, Paul taught the unsearchable riches of Christ to the Gentiles and changed the face of Western Civilization and global history.
As we begin to “get it” — to get the humility and receive the love of God that Paul knew, then God begins to use to us bring His kingdom to others too.
It’s not easy for our human natures to understand and get hold of humility—or perfect love—and, objectively, very few of us have been quite as humbled by God or quite as rotten as Paul. And, the truth is, before Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul was a real rotter—totally unkind. It is hard to picture Saint Paul before his conversion: seething with self-righteous rage, pulling believers from their homes, tearing them away from their families, sending them to undeserved punishment and prison. What drove the superiority and self-deception that inflamed him? That let him stand by and take self-righteous responsibility for the murderous men hurling stones upon Stephen’s defenseless head?
DETOUR: Do you ever wonder (as I do) if Paul was demonized and driven by the same controlling legalistic principality that once deceived the Pharisees? That drove the Crusaders? That hovers over the Middle East and currently seeks to find a foothold in our country, infusing legalists of all political persuasions and faiths—including Christians—with zealous hatred and rejection for all those whom their faith/value system defines as infidels/outsiders/intolerant/dangerous?
But—Paul was delivered. I wish I knew the full story. We only know what the Bible tells us, but I like to think that some unrecorded quiet prayer or some small hidden choice known only to God tipped the scales before Jesus descended to earth to confront Paul on the Damascus Road and deliver him out of proud pharisaical judgments and into the freedom of humble, divine love.
We don’t know anyone’s full story. We don’t Stephen’s full story. We don’t know what choices the young virgin Mary made that prepared her to meet the angel Gabriel and readied her to carry our Lord to human birth. We don’t know what small decisions, what forks in the road prepared Judas Iscariot to betray our Lord. Our full stories are known to God alone—and some details are nobody else’s business. We don’t know the impact our small choices will have on history— our words, our smiles and frowns, our willingness or refusal to welcome the Holy Spirit’s dealing with the motives of our heart all matter. We matter. Each one of us. Greatly. And some seemingly trifling something, someone, sometime, somewhere —some act of love, choice, word or prayer prepared Steven to forgive Paul and the men who buried his living body under those deadly stones.
That said, Stephen’s dying prayer of forgiveness and the anguished mourning cries of persecuted believers must have filled the heavenly censers until they reached the tipping point. Were they filled to overflowing with petitions for Saul of Tarsus’s salvation? We know the history—how Saul, the rabbi, set off from Jerusalem with a warrant to persecute believers in Damascus. Along the way, a blinding light from heaven electrified the atmosphere—knocking Saul off his high horse and bringing him down to his knees in complete surrender to God. Because of Paul—the least of all saints—I —me— a 84 year old grandma am sitting at a computer thousands of miles from Jerusalem, is filled with gratitude to God, to Jesus and for Paul, a man who considered himself “the least of all saints.” Dear Holy Spirit, will You please give me and all my readers a full portion of the trusting humility of Jesus Christ that once filled our Lord, and the soul of His servant, Paul.
To be continued —
