Imitators of God
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (B), August 8, 2021.
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
An article published on one of my favorite websites, Brainpickings.org, recently caught my eye. It begins:
Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of –from the small luxuries of naps . . . to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love –are the stories that shape our lives.
Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.
The more vulnerable making the endeavor, the more reflexive the limitation and the more redemptive the liberation. [1]
There is no more vulnerable making an endeavor than to live in love; to be imitators of the one who is love: God.
Yet, this is, of course, what Saint Paul asks of us in his epistle to the Ephesians.
And yes, by us I mean us. Jesus called and commissioned Paul as the apostle to the gentiles. That’s us. You and me. We must take heed of the words Paul wrote and consider what they ask of us as Christ followers.
Many of Paul’s epistles read as if purely aspirational, yet given what Paul endured for the sake of the Gospel, we can be assured that he was indeed serious.
Remember that this man turned apostle Paul risked everything again and again as he traveled around the Mediterranean in the most challenging of conditions, risking persecution, imprisonment, and even death at every turn. He risked it all for the Gospel.
So yes, there’s a lot being asked of us in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, even in just the small snippet we are treated to today.
Put away falsehood. Speak truth. Be angry, but do not sin. Don’t steal. Speak no evil. Put away bitterness, wrath, wrangling, slander, malice. Be kind. Tender-hearted. Forgiving. And, finally, do not grieve the Holy Spirit.
Who does this? Who lives this way? How might this impossibility be made possible?
And, of course, Paul offers us an answer by way of another admonition: Therefore, be imitators of God.
Imitators of God.
This is, Paul suggests, our true locus of possibility –to grow into the promise of divine, rescuing love as found in Jesus Christ, Himself.
As one commentator suggests, Paul knows that “we grow into the identities we choose to have and so he invites us to do what comes unnaturally as a means to making it natural.”
God as known in the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit –this is our origin story, and this is our end game: Alpha and Omega.
And yet, to accept this is difficult. Because, to accept this is to challenge all other stories that we tell ourselves and that the world tells us about what we deserve. To accept this is to put away all our defenses, all our offenses. To accept this is to become truly vulnerable before the world, before ourselves, and before God.
Because it’s not just anyone that we are called to imitate, it’s the very Son of God. The one who from love and for love acted in love, emptying himself, as Paul reminds us in his epistle to the Philippians, emptying himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (2:6-8).
From love and for love and in love he became love for the sake of you and me.
And as James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, writes
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
Put away falsehood. Speak truth. Be angry, but do not sin. Don’t steal. Speak no evil. Put away bitterness, wrath, wrangling, slander, malice.
At their root, what Paul calls us to put away are all just expressions of our inner vulnerabilities; all coping mechanisms for a lack we feel in a world we have created.
Sufi Mystic Rumi suggests that “sometimes we put up walls that we believe will keep us safe, but those walls only end up blocking us. Seek out those walls, and gently tear them down so that your vulnerability can shine through.”
At the root of Paul’s impossible asks of us is a desire that we put away our masks, tear down our walls, and empty ourselves of all apprehensions, pretensions, and selfish intentions.
Not all at once, forevermore, but as we can, as we go and with God’s help.
Because imitation is a lifelong pursuit; as Baldwin suggests, a tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth, but one that is made for us and worth everything.
And the one we are called to imitate, Jesus the Christ, is the one who made a way where there was no way. As Fleming Rutledge so beautifully notes,
He rewrote the book of love. He is the only one who could do it, and he is the only rewriter we will ever need. He rewrote in his life and death, by being perfectly at one with God’s will all his life, and by giving himself up to the worst we could do in his death, so as to pour out his divine life into our sinful human nature.
That’s what love really is. [2]
It is this grandest luxury, this large and impossible love made possible, that is our story. It is what we should expect from life, it is how we should tell the world to treat us, it is the invitation to which we should always say, “yes.”
Perhaps this is difficult to believe –that you have been brought into the safety of Christ’s realm of perfect love forever. The world certainly consistently and persistently suggests otherwise. And most of us, if we are being honest, house secret places –things done and left undone that feel too shameful to speak of and too ugly to allow us anywhere near Jesus.
But here’s the Good News: “To him all hearts are open, all desires known, and from him no secrets are hid” (BCP 323). God sees us – without the masks we wear and the walls we build –God sees us more clearly than we see ourselves. And in that is the grace, because he sees us, knows us, and loves us still.
His is the love that makes the impossible possible, that takes our meager faith and claims it as enough, that empowers us too to live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Amen.
[1] Maria Popova, “The Truelove: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About What We Deserve,” Brainpickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/07/26/david-whyte-the-truelove.
[2] Fleming Rutledge, “Rewriting the Book of Love,” Help My Unbelief (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2000), 107.