"A Life That Is Pleasing to God”

Ephesians 5:1-14

In the fall of 1998 Sandy and I attended the third gathering of the Presbyterian Coalition. At that gathering the Coalition finalized and adopted a document entitled “Union in Christ.” This document reaffirmed the church’s call to holiness. Later on in the sermon I will refer to that document.

Not long after returning home from the gathering, on a bright and beautiful Saturday morning in October, I participated in a fund-raiser for the Beverly Presbyterian Church. Before setting out that morning, I put on a clean undershirt. As I was putting it on, I noticed that it had a stain on the front, the result of my clumsiness with spaghetti sauce and subsequent failure to treat said stain prior to washing and drying the shirt. But I wasn't worried. I'd be wearing a sweatshirt over it, and nobody would ever see it.

Wrong. It was a much hotter day than expected, and stained undershirt or no stained undershirt, that sweatshirt was coming off. And it did. I was there two or three more hours. When the time came to go home, I happened to look down. Lo and behold, the stain was gone. How did that happen? What had I done? The answer was simple; I'd spent a lot of time in the sun that day. The strong sunlight had bleached the stain away.

Such is life in Christ. If we are in Christ, we can bring our sinfully stained selves into the healing, cleansing light of his love. There, in that light, our stains are banished. Sin cannot exist in the presence of Christ's healing, saving love. The light of Christ destroys sin, much as the sunlight did away with the spaghetti stain on my undershirt.

If that Saturday had been cold or cloudy, my undershirt would never have been exposed to the sunlight. There, safely hidden under my sweatshirt, that stain would have survived, and may never have disappeared. So it is with our sin. As long as we keep it hidden, refusing to admit its existence, it stays with us, continuing to stain and damage our lives and our relationships. But if we will confess our sins - if we will honestly expose them to the light of Christ - they can be forgiven. We can be forgiven, healed, and cleansed.

More than that, as we continue to live in the light of Christ's love, that light will be reflected on others, bringing their sins into the light of that same love. And as Christian people steadfastly live out their congregational and denominational lives in that light, it will shine on society and culture, exposing every kind of sinful stain to the possibility of healing. The Church of Jesus Christ is called to be a holy nation; living out and proclaiming God's mighty acts to those in darkness. We are called to be a confessing people, a repentant people, a transformed people, people constantly striving to live a life pleasing to God.

And a life pleasing to God is a life spent imitating God by following Jesus in the way of the cross. It is a life of love in which we love God by obeying his commandments and by loving one another. It is a life that tears down all the barriers that separate us from God and one another. It is a life free of prejudice, bigotry, self-righteousness, pettiness, envy, jealousy and all those other hateful aspects of sinful humanity that destroy lives, disrupt relationships, and tear churches apart. It is a life free of idolatrous greed that leads us to lust after the gods of this world. It is a life lived in loving thankfulness in response to God's grace, mercy, and love.

It is a life lived in the light. Peter and Paul both remind us that we have been called out of the darkness into the light. We can no longer live in the darkness, doing those things that cannot survive in the light. We can no longer hide our sinfully stained selves in the dark. We cannot deny our sins. If we do, they'll simply go further underground, and there, deep in our souls, eat us alive. We have to confess. We have to repent. We have to constantly seek out the light in a world that condones, rewards, and encourages darkness. We have to be light instead of darkness, shining as God's counterpoints in a world of sin. The church must differentiate itself from the world.

That’s easier said than done. It wasn't easy for those early Ephesian Christians whom Paul was addressing. They were recent converts, called to come out of the moral and ethical cesspool of their cultural experience. As Christians they were no longer free to indulge in the immoral excesses of their recent pasts, excesses still practiced by their friends, neighbors, and relatives. Furthermore, Paul exhorted them to not even speak of such things. Talking about them could easily lead to thinking about them. Thinking about them could lead to dwelling on them. Dwelling on them could lead to doing them. Doing them would lead them right back into the darkness from whence they had come.

Those old pagan ways of theirs weren’t even to be considered a joking matter. They were to find no humor in the smutty, off-color, or snide little innuendoes that are so much a part of so-called witty and sophisticated conversation. Such conversation is simply another way that the Evil One seduces us back into the darkness. Much as the recovering alcoholic's first sip of booze is often his or her first step back into the self-destructive world of active addiction, the little dirty joke, the slightly off-color remark, the too long-held lustful look are sometimes all it takes to put some of our brothers and sisters in Christ back on a path to destruction. Whether it destroys them or not, it's a road no one needs to follow.

But it's one of the many paths our culture tells us that it's okay to take. We live, work, play, and witness in a culture that promotes blatant lust and greed. A current ad for a certain make of car even uses the Seven Deadly Sins as positive reasons to buy that car. Ours is a society that teaches us to dance around the shadowy edge of excess. Too much to eat. Too much to drink. Too much sex. Too much money. Too much debt. Too much preoccupation with ourselves and our pleasures. Far too little concern for the good of others.

And when we voice our fears of being corrupted or destroyed by such living, the cultural message to us is, “Just keep running, you'll outrun the fear. Just keep drinking, you'll drown the truth. Just keep spending, you'll numb the pain. Just stay in the darkness where no one can see the sinful stains on your soul, where you can deny they exist.”

That, my friends, is a message straight from hell. And I'm sad to say, it is a message that is being prettied up, cast in fancy religious terminology, and being preached from some of our pulpits. Honest confession of sin and sincere repentance of it are all too often no longer politically correct in the modern church. Holiness isn't real popular in some corners of American Protestantism. But as the earlier mentioned “Union in Christ” says, it is time for the Presbyterian Church (USA) and every Presbyterian Christian to "turn away from forms of Church life that ignore the need for repentance... discount the transforming power of the Gospel... [and] fail to pray, hope, and strive for a life that is pleasing to God."

We have answered a call to be children of light, not children of darkness. We have answered a call to confess our sins, turn away from them, and follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We have answered a call to be a light to the nations. We have answered a call to live lives of holiness, lives that are pleasing to God. Such lives will bring real peace, purity, and unity to Christ's Church. Such lives will not isolate us from society, but lead us to model for our society ways that will bring healing and wholeness to others, even as we ourselves are healed and made whole.

We all bear sin's ugly stains on our souls. But there's no stain on any soul, nor is there any stain on our culture that the loving, healing light of Christ's love cannot eradicate. All we need to do is confess the sins that stain our lives, repent of them, and bring them out into the healing light of God's grace, mercy, peace, and love.

Let us no longer hide in the darkness. Let us step out of it into the light of Christ. And let us not be afraid to brightly shine the light of righteousness into ever sin-darkened corner of our world. Amen.