Scripture: Ephesians 2:1-10; Luke 7:41-43; Matthew 7:3 Series: 2021
Fourth in the Lenten ‘Restless’ series, this sermon addresses restlessness with the past. Using Ephesians 2:1-10, the preacher argues that two distortions—seeing the past as too sinful or as too golden (‘glory days’)—both deny that God is present now. Through the parable of the two debtors, Israel’s longing for Egypt, and John Wesley’s journey from moralism to his Aldersgate experience of grace, he urges hearers to look at their personal and national past with clear eyes, reject moralism and antinomianism, and rest in the God who is Alpha and Omega. Like Ilsa boarding the plane in Casablanca, we let the good past go because greater things are still to come if we respond to God’s grace.
Illustrations: casablanca-past-vs-future, hastings-film-completist, parable-two-debtors, israel-wishing-for-egypt, wesley-aldersgate-heart-warmed, wesley-denies-sarah-communion, moravians-storm-faith
March 14
Ephesians 2:1-10
Growing up, not only did I like Star Wars. I liked old movies. I loved to watch movies. I loved thinking about films how they were made, thinking about the history of them. When I was a kid, there was an American Film Institute list put out with the top 100 films of the 20th century and there was a section at the Hastings down the street that had those movies. And so, I systematically would walk to Hastings with any money I had saved in order to rent a movie. I watched all of them at some point. I have always been a completest of sorts. One of them was Casablanca from 1942. Now, Casablanca was one of the biggest movies of the 20th century. I don’t know how many people of my generation or younger have seen it, but it’s a story set and filmed in World War II staring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It’s about this night club in Casablanca, Morocco, run by an American. At the time, the Vichy government was nominally in charge of the area. If we do our World War II refresher course, after the Nazis invaded France through Belgium, thus completely avoiding the Maginot line which had been built in order to protect against the Germans. Well, it didn’t work. Germany occupied Paris within 10 days but, at the time, France still had a far larger active army. A week later, Marshall Pétain signed the Second Armistice at Compiègne which disbanded the Third Republic and began the neutral Vichy Government of France, centered on the Southeast of the Country, which also oversaw the colonial territories. This included French Morocco. So Vichy is nominally in charge, but the Nazis are also there. The movie center’s on Bogart’s character, Rick, who used to be a rebel. He fought in Spain and ran guns in Ethiopia, and what happens after his former girlfriend, Ilsa, arrives in Casablanca, and we have this nice flashback of their time in Paris together. But Ilsa comes with her new fiancé, Victor Laszlo, who is an important leader in the resistance. Rick and Ilsa have this moment where they’re struck by the song As Time Goes By, a song that takes them back to their relationship long ago.
You must remember this A kiss is just a kiss A sigh is just a sigh The fundamental things apply As time goes by
And basically the whole movie turns on this crux of a choice between the past and the future. Should Ilsa and Rick get back together for old times sake, or should Ilsa stay with Laszlo? Should we live in a past that was good and ignore the consequences of that or should we live towards a better future when we have the opportunity to make a better future? My friends, we are continuing our series, in the season of Lent, on restlessness. On the first Sunday of Lent, we talked about being restless with temptation. How temptation is always tempting and how it leaves us restless unless we rest in God. The next week, we talked about being restless with suffering and how suffering blinds us from seeing who we are and whose we are. Last week, we talked about being restless with foolishness, and how following the wisdom of the world leaves us restless, but through the foolishness of the cross we have peace. Today, our theme is being restless with our past, with the glory days, with those things we used to be able to do. Most of us have an idea of the Glory Days, whether or not it was high school or college or your 20s, maybe even younger. Maybe when we were small kids and we thought, “Life was fun and enjoyable then.” We think about the glory days of our country, the glory days of our city, our community. In Ephesians 2, Paul doesn’t speak of the past as glory days. Paul speaks of our lives before we are aware of Jesus as our lives of sin. We need to see our past both as the mistakes we have made but also what we lift up as sources of inspiration. When we hold on too tightly to the past, we miss out on the present. Paul speaks of what can happen with lives of sin and with lives of addiction and pain and hurt and mistakes. There’s a parable that Jesus gives, a quick one, when he’s asked about forgiveness and he says there was a man who owed 50 denarii and a man who owed 500 denarii. And the debt collector forgave both debts, who is the more grateful? The one who owed 500, that’s the point of the parable. when we see in our lives and in our past just how much Jesus has saved us from, we hold on closer to God’s love. And this doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a great conversion story, you’re less of a Christian. I think sometimes, for those who have grown up in the church, we may feel like we have never strayed very far and it may be more challenging to see the absolute depths that God has rescued us from but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. So we have these two ways of seeing the past and they both distort our present: seeing the past as so bad because of who we used to be and seeing the past as so good that it makes the present a shadow of that past. Both of these deny the present reality that God is in our lives today. This can also happen with mountaintop experiences and powerful conversion experiences. This can happen with youth camp. It can happen with Walks to Emmaus. Those experiences are so powerful and so moving and so meaningful that it can be such a letdown to think of where we are now compared to what we felt at that moment. What I want us to be aware of is that this is a form of restlessness, that our past can give us restlessness. When we don’t fully address it or come to grips with it, it can take hold of us and take us away from the highest peace of God. So, how do we do that? How do we come to grips with our past? A major part has to be with actually thinking about it and looking back with clear eyes and not with rose colored glasses. And this form of reflection is not just important for us as individuals. I think we should look with clear eyes at the history of our country, at the history of our state, the history of the church. Often, the past we hold up as golden or idyllic really had problems with it. I mean, thinking back to the good old days goes back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece and even goes back to the Hebrew people in the wilderness after God freed them from slavery when they cry to God, “I wish I were back in Egypt. At least there, we had full bellies.” This fixation on the past keeps them from understanding and seeing what God has opened up for them. For God, you aren’t who you are because of something you did in the past. Your past doesn’t make you good or make you who you are. When we seek validation by where we’ve been and who we were, we miss out on the true freedom God gives us. As Paul says here in Ephesians, “for we have been saved by grace through faith. It is not of our own doing.” We’re not saved because we grew up in the church. We are not saved because we had a powerful conversion experience. We’re not saved because we had Glory Days. We’re not saved because we had days of sin. You have not earned it. I have not earned it and we don’t need to earn it. Being saved by grace doesn’t mean we should go on sinning. Later, in a different letter, Paul is asked, “if I have been saved, should I just keep on sinning?” He says, “By no means.” This is called antinomianism. This is the belief that there is no natural law or way of life, but the way of life we are called to is a response to God’s grace and God’s love. Not a response to our past or our history, not a response to the glory days, not as a response to seeing an old girlfriend or an old boyfriend not as a response to getting antsy with a midlife crisis or quarter life crisis or a three quarter life crisis. It is grace all the way down. John Wesley the founder of methodism had a very strict idea of faith and salvation early in his life. There was a Christian way and a heathen way and they were very different. He did some good in that time. He started the holy club with his brother and his brother’s friends. They asked each other, “how is it with your soul?” They tried be holy and read books on holiness, but it wasn’t enough. Wesley went to Georgia and tried to convert the Native Americans. It did not work. He tried to get married. It did not work. He was petty and vindictive in that, too. As he was trying to be holy, John Wesley’s early life mimics a lot of the history of the church. There has been this restlessness with the past that often leads the church to practice the sin of moralism. What I mean by the sin of moralism is fixating so much on the actions and deeds of others that we ignore God’s work in our life and in their life. Jesus speaks directly to the sin of moralism when he says, “don’t look for the speck in your neighbors eye until you address the log in your own eye.” John Wesley practiced the sin of moralism when he refused communion to his former fiancee Sarah Hopkey, who was tired of waiting for him and got engaged to another guy and John Wesley was upset with that and kind of passive-aggressively, he just denied her communion. He was living in the past and not willing to let Sarah live in her present. On his journey to the Americas, Wesley had met some Moravians, these German pietists. He was very impressed by them. On that ship, there was a great storm and the ship bounced up and down. It was hard and Wesley was scared. The Moravians were not. They prayed together and sang together during the storm. So when Wesley came back to England and came back to London, he started to go to meetings of the Moravians on top of his other duties. One night in London, he went to evening prayer at St. Paul’s Cathedral, evensong, the Anglican Vespers service. And after that service, he went to a prayer meeting near Aldersgate Road in London. At the meeting, there was a reading from Martin Luther’s preface to the letter to the Romans and something happened. Wesley writes about this in his journal and says: I felt my heart strangely warmed, that I, even I, was loved by God. That day, for Wesley, was a transformation of faith in him. A transformation that transitions him from faith as duty to faith as grace. From faith as who we are and what we’ve done to faith as who God is and what God has done for us. The only antidote for being restless with our past is resting in the God who is our present and our future. The God who was with us in our past even when we weren’t aware. The God who is Alpha and Omega. It is for us to see rightly that God has been with us all along. That God is with us now and that our future does not lie in ourselves or our deeds or even our great retirements, but in the presence of the Living God. That is where peace is found. And so, my brothers and sisters, I encourage you, in this season of Lent, to hold on to your past for as much as you see God in it. To hold on to your present, to hold on to your future as much as you see God in it. To see grace all the way down. In Casablanca, Ilsa got on that plane. Rick didn’t stop her. The past was good in itself. It did not need to be prolonged. There were greater things than the glory days. For us, in this church, there are greater things to come. For our city, for our nation, for our world, there are greater things to come. If we are willing to let God lead us and respond to God’s grace. May we receive God’s peace this day. In the name of the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.