Walk This Way

Intro

When I was in third grade, my younger brother Josh finally got what he had been asking for for every birthday, Christmas, and, well, just plain day for years: a puppy. This (picture of Amber from puppy years) is Amber. Amber was the sweetest dog I have ever met. Calm and relaxed, but still playful and fun. She's the kind of dog you can't start petting while sitting on the couch because she will continually force her head underneath your arm or hand if you stop giving her what she wants.

Like every dog, though, Amber got older (picture of older Amber). When she was 10 years old, my dad started to think about getting another dog. One piece of information that he picked up around this time was that if a dog owner really like the way their older dog acts, then they should get a new puppy sooner rather than later because the younger dog will instinctively learn how to behave from the older dog.

Well, we really liked Amber and her temperament, so for Father's Day in 2016, we gave my dad the best Father's Day present he likely will ever get: Bella (picture of Bella as a pup). Bella was a lot more rambunctious than Amber, and still is, but over time she mellowed out a lot from her more spastic puppy days and is now a really, really good dog -- not as good as Amber, of course, and much more energetic, but still a good family pet.

Bella no doubt picked up on more subtle behaviors from Amber. Of course, we trained her and did what we could, but there's things that can only be learned by example of another like her.

We're the same way, aren't we? We humans learn by example far more than explicit instruction. That's why parenting is so important to get right: I picked up on things a lot more from my parents' examples than I ever did from direct conversations with them, for better and for worse. We emulate the behaviors of those around us without even thinking about it, but a more sobering way to look at this comes through flipping the equation around a bit:

OTHERS EMULATE OUR BEHAVIOR WHETHER WE KNOW IT OR NOT.

Today, we're going to continue our way through the book of Ephesians. In the first several chapters of the book, we have seen Paul droning on and on and on about our status as saved, sanctified, and secure children of God through our savior Jesus the Christ. No matter our background, no matter our past, we can find hope in that.

Over the last couple weeks, though, as we entered the second half of the book, Paul has begun to pivot his focus from what our status as Christians is to why our status as Christians matters. This week, we're going to take a look at a sizeable chunk of Ephesians 5 that continues that progression. The way this passage is structured makes the opening verse the big idea for the rest of the passage, so let's take a look at it together:

1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. Ephesians 5:1

Paul understands something about how we relate with other people, and he also understands human behavior, or maybe just the behavior of primates -- monkey see, monkey do, right? He even references the parental relationship we have with God to show the kind of instruction God has given us and our responsibility to follow it. David Guzik makes note of the fact that "It does not say, 'Think about God' or 'Admire God' or 'Adore God,' though those are all important Christian duties. This is a call to practical action, going beyond our inner life with God."

Imitation isn't just the most sincere form of flattery: it's also the best way of instruction. One of the best-known and well-regarded teachers of leadership today, John C. Maxwell, has a way of describing this that I have heard time and time again:

I DO; I DO, THEY WATCH; THEY DO, I WATCH; THEY DO.

There is a constant cycle of imitation that occurs in our lives everyday. Whatever we're doing or learning about -- a musical instrument, a new job or career path, a new language, and whatever the heck calculus is -- we all fall into some point on this cycle, and likely multiple points on it at the same time in different aspects of our lives. As we learn things, we teach others -- and as they learn, we release them from our instruction to carry their own responsibility.

Before we move too much farther, we've got to address the "therefore." One of the things pretty much everyone I've ever learned about the Bible from has told me is that "if there's a therefore, then you have to see what's there before." So, what comes right before this? Well, that would be Ephesians 4:32 which reads:

32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4:32

With this coming right before today's passage, we can pretty easily see that the example we're supposed to be following is Jesus, and the chief way we do that is by loving our neighbor. This echoes what Jesus answered when asked about the greatest commandment in the gospel of Matthew:

37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 22:37-40

There is no distance here between loving God and our neighbor: they are two equal dimensions of what we are asked to do. We're supposed to do what Jesus did.

So this first verse is an overall command that Paul is giving to the churches to which he wrote this letter, it's a thesis statement of sorts. The rest of this passage operates around an idea that Paul (and the rest of the New Testament) talks about a lot:

Imitating God gives us a different way to live.

Seems pretty basic, right? God has a different example for us to follow, so we need to follow it. There's a couple things, though, that we need to understand about how this different way of life is supposed to function in this text:

THIS DIFFERENT WAY OF LIVING IS DESCRIPTIVE, NOT PRESCRIPTIVE.

Paul isn't offering instructions on how to achieve a new way of life here; he's just telling them what inward transformation looks like on the outside. There are several points in this passage, as well as the rest of the New Testament, where we will see phrases and verses that mention certain behaviors and try to codify them in order to ensure good, Christian living is done by all in our community. That's a wonderful instinct, and I can see a ton of pure motivations behind doing so, but that's not what Paul is trying to get after. He's trying to describe and encourage the following of an example, not make a bunch of do's and don'ts.

I think in a lot of ways what Paul is doing in this passage is to identify the behaviors of people who are worthy examples to follow and encourage them in doing so. Of course Jesus has always been and will always be the Christian's ultimate example, but we cannot see Jesus' life happening in front of us. Maybe as a substitute, we are supposed to look for people who live the way Paul is going to lay out and imitate them as an extension of the Christ.

WE CANNOT FORCE OTHERS TO IMITATE AN EXAMPLE THEY HAVE NOT SEEN THEMSELVES.

People need to be transformed by God before they can live like God asks them to. People need to see God somehow before they can imitate what God does and how God loves. Paul saw this firsthand in his conversion experience: he was killing those who believed in Jesus as the Christ -- yet Jesus still treated him with love, so he was changed. Wouldn't it be kinda weird if it had happened in reverse, with Jesus calling him into some kind of more loving, Christlike way of living before Paul had been shown what that love was like?

And, in the same way, shouldn't we not ask people who don't believe the same things we do, who haven't seen the same example we have in Jesus and those who live like Him, to act the way we act? Shouldn't we show that love to people as the first thing we do when they walk into the room, without giving them side-eye or being kind to their faces and judging them behind their backs? Shouldn't we let people come as they are and hope they leave changed by the encounters we have with them?

So, now that we've gotten some housekeeping out of the way about the rest of this passage, Paul is going to give us three different ways to look at this new direction to walk: in love, in light, and in wisdom. They're not three options of how to walk, just three different elements of how we imitate God in our lives, and they also describe how our relationship with God is impacted as a result. While last week we went over Paul talking about how our actions help or harm our relationship with our neighbor, this week what Paul is telling us is centered more on how our actions change our relationship to God. And over the rest of our time together this morning, we're going to take a look at these three different parts of our walk: love, light, and wisdom.

Walk in love.

(Maybe riff on Steven Curtis Chapman's "All About Love" and sing a couple bars for fun)

Love is super important in the New Testament. Jesus talks about it a lot; John writes about it a lot; Peter writes about it a lot; Paul writes about it a lot. Basically, everyone that put pen to scroll in the writing of the New Testament realized that love was the reason for the Christian faith. And the first thing we need to understand about why Christian love is different is the first thing Paul talks about in this section of the passage:

JESUS IS OUR EXAMPLE OF WHAT LOVE MEANS.

2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:2

Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are identified here as being the most important example to follow. No surprise, really: Jesus is the reason Paul is writing this letter, the reason he even ministered to the people in and around Ephesus in the first place. Jesus' message is compelling because His words are centered in a radical, society-upending way of loving our neighbors, and this is demonstrated fully for us at the cross.

More broadly speaking, what makes Christianity so different from all the other religions and philosophies floating around in the first couple centuries after its origins is that the divine isn't something to look up at in the sky or on a mountain, but rather the divine came down to empathize and became one of us to reveal more about how we should live. Jesus is a real life example of how to live, and it's to live in love, to live out a self-sacrificing love that cares little about our own privileges and advantages but instead considers others as greater than ourselves. In one of his last times talking with His disciples in John's gospel, Jesus defines the greatest measure of love that we can take:

13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13

This is the kind of love that Jesus shows through the cross, and in doing so Jesus reveals that the true nature of the God that He Himself is is a nature of love. A great way to sum this up is in this quote from Franciscan friar John Duns Scotus: "Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God." We needed to see that God does not want retribution but restoration, and the restorative action we can take is to love like Jesus did.

Sometimes, I think we can be a little hesitant to ask God for the opportunity to do this because we see how Jesus loves and immediately think of the violence of the crucifixion, the actual giving up of one's own physical life, literally death, as how we are supposed to love like Jesus did. I've known people who actually wanted to die for the sake of the Gospel and had almost a death wish for it, and it was really intimidating. I felt deeply inferior to them because of it. Because I was being called into church work, I could sometimes be made to feel like my calling wasn't big enough, like it wasn't what Jesus asked His followers to do.

The thing is, though, Jesus didn't ask for us to lay down our lives violently; he even heeds Peter to not resort to violence in the Garden of Gethsemane when he attempts to free Jesus from the guards arresting Him. David Guzik does a really helpful thing on this topic, putting the example of Jesus being self-sacrificing in a far less dramatic light than we usually see: "We often think we could lay down our life in a dramatic way to show our love for others. But God often calls us to lay down our life little by little – in small coins (as it were) instead of one large payment – but it is laying down our lives nonetheless."

So it's clear that there's a different way of laying down our lives besides, ya know, actually dying. It's a forsaking of our own priorities rather than a forsaking of our actual lives. I think Jesus said it best in the Sermon on the Mount:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:43-48

We need to be willing to not just love those who love us but also love those who are actively seeking to undermine us and antagonize us. There is no one outside of the love of the Christ, and therefore there should be no one outside our reflection and imitation of that very same love. And this, Jesus says, is how to be perfect, complete, and whole: it's to show love to those who otherwise would go unloved, because that is how Our Father acts.

So, Jesus is our example of what love means, and what love means is to lift others up as more important than ourselves, to act restoratively instead of seeking retribution, and to love those who we otherwise wouldn't love. Let's move on to the next thing we need to understand about walking in love: