A Different Life in Christ

Do you remember what a difference Jesus Christ has made in your life? It can be so easy to miss, forget, or underappreciate what a difference God makes. You may be starting in your faith and you are just beginning to see that something is different. You may have believed for a long time and so the difference is normative now. Perhaps you grew up in the church and you don’t remember a time without God. No matter what our situation, it is important to look at what God has done for us and to see what an amazing and wonderful God we have.

This is what Paul is doing as he writes the Ephesians. Here are these recent non-Jewish converts to Christianity who, like us all, need to be reminded of what God has done in our lives. He says to them, remember what you were before Christ. You were aliens. Before you believed in Jesus Christ, you didn’t belong. It was like you were from another world. As Paul says, he is primarily talking about their being alien and separate from Israel - but to Paul, this has a lot of connotations. This means that before faith we didn’t belong in God’s family, we didn’t have a place of intimacy with God, we were devoid of a Godly lasting hope and promise. Yet, it goes even deeper than that, because what we will find is that we don’t even have true belonging in the world or in ourselves. Without faith, we don’t have a meaningful connection with our creator, which means that we can’t meaningfully connect with this created world, or even our created selves. Sometimes we will feel comfortable, but other times it will become painfully clear how disconnected, how much we don’t fit, and how wrong things feel even in ourselves. Have you ever been uncomfortable with silence, either alone or in public? I think most of us have, and most of the time that is because we are uncomfortable, we are not at home in ourselves and that place and moment. You see a faithful, committed and growing relationship with God changes that. He is not just that friendship that we find great comfort in, but he is the one who leads us into belonging in ourselves, this world, and in his godly family. And this is lasting, deep, rich belonging. Not just belonging that is there one minute and gone the next or belonging because we have one thing in common.

We need to remember this Christ difference, because if we forget we can easily go back to our old way, or the way of the world. We can seek belonging in other things and find only fickle veneers of belonging. We all need to return to God in prayer, in study, and in-service daily so that we might find belonging in our singular relationship with God.

One quick note, it is impossible to find true belonging in the world humans create. You might feel it for a moment for any number of reasons that don’t last, but you don’t have to look far to find communities, people, institutions, coworkers, family, or friends that are starkly separated from us, who we can’t talk to about certain things, we we are not at home with. This impossibility for truly belonging is because, without faith in God, everyone is trying to make things in their own image - even when we serve one another. People end up trying to make the world, their relationships, the government, etc. all in the way they think things should go. That is why things can go so wildly in different directions. Sometimes we feel like we belong more because we have more control, or things seem to be closer to our image, but those are only moments and nothing truly binds us to anything if we are living in this worldly way.

Jesus Christ breaks down all of those barriers that separated us. He tears down those things that we held onto in ourselves and leads us forward together. You can barely imagine a more starkly different people than the Roman Gentiles and the Israelite Jews. Most of the time, they would barely talk outside of necessity. Their cares, their lifestyles, their practices, their communities, what they ate, how they worked, their faith, their romantic life, their understanding of the world, all were starkly different. Trust me, this is greater than the difference between conservative or liberal, Biden or Trump, or something else. What could connect such a people?

The Romans had a way of creating fake harmony through power and gentle freedom. This is different than our modern surface-level harmony, but we can relate. The only way we can be united in this broken and divided world is through Jesus Christ. Paul calls the Gentiles those who were far off and the Jews those who are near, but now they are united and one in Jesus Christ. Notice, in these other faiths there was a comparative closeness to truth and God, but only through Christ was their actual connection. I don’t have time to go into other faiths, but only our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a God of unity in himself. He is the only one who destroyed our brokenness by becoming human and dying for our evil on the cross. He is the only God who sends his Holy Spirit to bind and guide all those who seek him in faith.

Now, our belonging through Jesus Christ is far different than anything else. We don’t just find a home in him, God finds a home in us. It is a two-way belonging - a kind of belonging that every marriage and friendship strives to become. Yet, as Paul says and as we should expect, this belonging is not an individual endeavor. It has to be done in the community. We together become the temple for God to live in. Jesus is our cornerstone, the faithful followers saints before us have left a foundation, we each become a stone to build up this great house for God. This means that as we find unity, belonging, and purpose with God, we also find it with one another. We find our belonging in God, but also in his community as he descends on us as well.

This new kind of unity and purpose leads to peace, both within ourselves and our community. Of course there is still difference and of course we will still experience a stark difference from those outside of the faith, but our unity with God transcends that. If we share Christ as our main goal and hope, nothing else should divide us from other Christians - not sex, not politics, not culture, history, or background. If we are united with the creator, we can know that we have our place and purpose, and home wherever we go. In this new reality, what are the struggles of this world, but the squabbles of children who don’t understand. Even our own struggles are a sliver, a thorn in our side, or labor pains, that we must endure for a time, knowing that with God we will overcome.

As always there is far more. The Bible, our Anglican liturgy, our fellow Christians and God’s work in our lives, are all trying to consistently remind us of what a difference faith in Jesus Christ makes. Already we have been looking at some grand and fundamental things that God in Jesus Christ gives us in powerful and lasting ways like belonging, unity, closeness, purpose, peace, and a new family.

Now, as we are reminded of these things, this may stir up something in you. You might have forgotten these great benefits. You might not be experiencing them yet. You might never have experienced them. Or you might want to experience them far more. That is okay. It is important to recognize where we are so that we might move forward. If you want these things, which we all do, the only way to get them is through God and his community together. Being here today is a great start, but think about ways that you might instill faith into your daily lives through prayer, reflection, reading, and Godly listening. Think about other Christians that you can connect with regularly to do the same thing. There are so many ways to grow in our relationship with God and his body and so there are so many ways to realize this changed life. Let us seek the truly good things and put off those false comforts so that together we might live in God and God in us. AMEN