It's called Anguished English. It's an endless stream of outrageous bloopers! One
section focuses on embarrassing Church blunders. Many of them you may ...
“God is Building a Home” Ephesians 2:16-22 (The Message)
“God is building a home. He is using us all in what he is building.” (Ephesians 2:19)
Thanks to a considerate church member this small volume fell into my hands. It’s called Anguished English. It’s an endless stream of outrageous bloopers! One section focuses on embarrassing Church blunders. Many of them you may have already heard, some may be new. • For openers, you’ve got to be careful about your prepositions. Case in point, a bulletin that urged the faithful to “remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community”! • Even verbs need to be chosen with care, as a preacher learned when he intoned, “This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. White to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.” • And then there is the disaster of the tangled conclusion, as in this earnest plea, “Don’t let worry kill you off – let the church help”! • Even our own bulletin today, reporting on the Deacon’s Food Pantry, pleads “Your Deacon’s Food Panty is in need of your help”! With this kind of PR it’s surprising the church is still around! Truth be told, the church would never have survived if it were up to us, which is the very point Paul is making. The church is not about us – it’s not about what we do. It’s about what God is doing.
The Foundation “God is building a home,” starting with “the foundation.”
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This is a familiar idea. I Corinthians 3:11 says the church’s “foundation…is Jesus Christ.” We sing this glorious fact with gusto in the hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation.” Our text, however, comes at this basic truth from a slightly different direction. It says, God “used the apostles and prophets for the foundation.” The thing to get clear is this, the names “apostles and prophets” carry no meaning whatever apart from Christ. By definition “apostles” bear witness to Jesus and “prophets” proclaim his gospel. The “apostles and prophets” link us back to Jesus. This is truly astonishing! Think of it. God has chosen to use the transformed lives of believers in one generation to pass on the faith to the next generation. This is how you and I became Christians, isn’t it? Some person or some group of persons from an earlier generation told us about Jesus. They provided the foundation for our faith. At times I’ve invited small groups of Christians to share their faith story focusing on questions like “Who first told you about Jesus? How did you learn about him?” These are still revealing questions to ponder and nurturing answers to share. Every Christian today is the fruit of an earlier generation’s faith – your parents or grandparents, family or friends. Their commitment – their faithful witness! – has linked you back and back through the generations to those who first responded to Jesus, the “apostles and prophets.” Each generation provides a platform of faith for the next. Before this day is out, take a moment to remember with gratitude those who early along introduced you to Jesus. A few years ago I had a chance to do this. She was my Sunday School teacher at the Shenandoah Presbyterian Church in Miami – the first teacher I remember. She was also the wife of Pastor Dan Iverson, author of the chorus we sang in worship a few weeks ago, “Spirit of the Living God Fall Afresh On Me.” Her given name was Vivian, but everybody called her ‘Bibbi.’ She died at 104, still keen of mind though almost totally deaf. When I saw her last, I leaned close and spoke clearly. 2
“Bibbi,” I said, “you were my Sunday School teacher. I was just one of hundreds of little kids you taught. You helped me know Jesus through lessons and songs and flannel-graph stories. But mostly it was your joyful spirit! You helped me believe that loving Jesus and following him was not only fun, but the finest and most important thing I could ever do with my life.” Who provided a faith-foundation for you? Who stood with you as you grew and matured in faith? Today, set it for yourself to ‘pay it forward.’ Resolve to do all you can to provide a solid foundation of faith for someone in the next generation.
The Building Material “God is building a home…fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone. Some of you may recall the old King James language at this point. It speaks about the church being “fitly framed together.” This English phrase translates a single Greek word. But that one word combines three different ideas, ideas about being together, chosen and joined. It means Christians have been “chosen by God to be joined together.” Or, to use Paul’s image, we are God’s building material! The Message says people of faith are bricks and stones in the church God is building. I’m no bricklayer, though once a very long time ago my dad and I built a barbeque fireplace in the backyard, “laying up brick” as we liked to say. That project not only gave me a backache, it gave me a profound respect for professional bricklayers! More recently at our little summer cottage I have been in the process of building some terraced rock walls for our flower garden. We try to select each rock carefully and fit it into its appropriate place. This calls for a lot of heavy lifting, but the result is very satisfying. “God is building a home,” says Paul and God is doing the lifting! God is fitting you and me into his home “brick by brick, stone by stone.”
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Now let me try and be clear. Christ and Christ alone is “the head of the church.” Having said that – and firmly believing it! – you need to take the next vital step. You need to take ownership. This is your church! Each of you is going to evaluate in your own way the usefulness and effectiveness of this important period in the life of your church – the Interim period. Let me share with you a basic criterion I use for my own evaluation. I will be asking myself the question – have you, as members of this church, assumed fresh ownership of your church and claimed personal responsibility for the ministries of your congregation? A few weeks from now, you will act upon the recommendation of your Pastor Nominating Committee to call a new senior pastor to this church. Be very clear about what you are doing. You are not calling a pastor to do the ministry for you. Ministry is your job! Your new pastor’s task will be to support and equip your ministry, and to cast a vision for the expanded work of ministry you will do together. Right now your church needs your intentional personal commitment to Jesus Christ and your energetic investment in His service. It’s time to ‘reup!’ It’s time to allow God to fit you into what He is building right here!
The Cornerstone “God is building a home” with “Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.” A cornerstone is literally that. Typically it’s a large right-angle stone placed at the corner of a building. It determines the lay of the entire structure. As a practical matter, a cornerstone serves to connect together two walls of a structure. In the Letter to the Ephesians, these two walls represent Jews and Gentiles who had long been at odds, enemies in fact. But now, they have been brought together by Christ – the “cornerstone.” But there is another intriguing idea that is being explored by biblical scholars today. They are urging us to take the word ‘cornerstone’ literally.
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The Greek word for ‘cornerstone’ is made up of two words – gonia which means ‘stone’ and akro which means ‘high.’ So the word we translate ‘cornerstone’ literally means ‘the high stone.’ I Peter 2:7 gets hold of this. It says, “the stone which the builders rejected,” referring of course to Jesus, “has become the head of the corner.” The NIV translates this literally and declares Jesus to be the “capstone” or keystone. A keystone is the last and central stone placed in an arch or a dome. It locks all the other stones in place producing extraordinary strength capable of lasting for eons! Christ locks together everything about the church! Paul said, Christ “holds all the parts together.” Without Christ, the church collapses! Christ is the keystone in the arch, the capstone in the dome. Hagia Sophia is a breathtakingly beautiful cathedral in Istanbul’s Old City. It was built by Justinian in the 6th century. For sheer bulk and architectural beauty it was unrivaled in Christendom for a thousand years! It’s massive central dome is as high has a twelve story building! The dome itself is more than 100 feet in diameter and stabilizes the entire structure. Nothing of this size or scope had ever been built before. Legend has it that when worshipers first entered the church they looked up at this huge overarching and unsupported dome and gasped, believing it to be “suspended from heaven by a golden chain.”¹ Upon reflection this romantic notion is not so far fetched. This turns out to be the way we construct our own towering skyscrapers today. Of course we don’t use a ‘golden heavenly chain,’ but we do use huge construction cranes that literally pull the building upward. This is Christ’s building technique. He is drawing up the church – the whole church! this very congregation! – drawing it up to the highest point, up to the capstone, up to Christ Himself! Christ alone holds the church together and gives to the church His strength, stability and authority.
The Occupant 5
“God is building a home…a temple in which God is quite at home.” In his classic volume Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis sketches out graphically how “God is building a home,” and why God is building it, and who will be occupying it. Listen to the way Lewis puts it. “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. “But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is God up to? “The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage. But God is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”² Right now, right here at the Church of the Palms, “God is building a home… and all of us are being built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home”! ¹Turkey, by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, 1993, page 87. ²Mere Christianity, end of the chapter titled “Counting the Cost.”
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