Rev Sue preached this sermon on Wednesday 21 October. Here it is for you again.
When our daughter was about six or seven, I came home from work to hear that Margaret, one of our PCC members, had been round to our house in a very agitated state. She was a lunchtime supervisor at the local primary school and had heard our daughter say that her mum was in prison. What she meant was that I had been in the prison, helping the Methodist chaplain to lead a Bible study. Margaret was very relieved to hear that I’d come out again!
When a similar misunderstanding happened with a friend, he assumed I’d been arrested for some sort of activism, and was prepared to be impressed. St Paul very much takes the second view. Chapter 3 begins, “This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles”, and today’s reading is Paul interrupting himself to explain the ministry that landed him there. For him, imprisonment is a mark that he has given everything for the Gospel. (Many scholars think Ephesians was written in Paul’s name by a later admirer, but for simplicity I’ll speak of Paul.)
That ministry was welcoming Gentiles into the Church on an equal footing. It brought him into conflict with Peter and the Jerusalem Christians, and he was eventually arrested in Jerusalem when people claimed he had brought a Gentile into the Temple. Without Paul, it’s hard to imagine Christianity becoming a worldwide faith, and none of us would be here today.
His message of radical inclusion was so unexpected that Paul says it came by revelation: a mystery hidden from earlier generations, now revealed by grace. Everyone is equal in Christ. Paul puts it three ways: the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in every promise of the Gospel.
This isn’t a criticism of Judaism. Any group that sees itself as privileged is tempted to hold on to that privilege and keep others out. The Church has done the same again and again whenever it has become powerful and elitist: the attitude that only people like us belong here.
In his letters, Paul can come across as arrogant and dictatorial, so we might wonder whether he really means it when he calls himself the least of all the saints. But at the back of his mind is the fact that he persecuted Christians before his conversion, and even approved of the stoning of Stephen. He came to believe in the boundless grace that made him acceptable to God even after that, and in comparison, the shame of imprisonment was nothing.
The good news of the Gospel is that if even Paul can be forgiven, so can we. And if Paul could live without shame despite being rejected by community after community as he travelled around the Mediterranean, then we too can live without shame. And so can all those who are made outsiders in our society. We all stand equal in the sight of God, and together we form the Church.
