Geoff Pritchard 5.0 pm July 12, 2009 5 pm Ephesians 1, 4

 

One day I'd like to buy a mind-reading machine that really works. If you agreed to be tested, just once,  I wonder what you would be thinking about, just before the choir processed in, and just before we all sang the first hymn?

 

It is human nature to spend spare minutes day-dreaming about trivia: things like the price of petrol, our latest attack of hay fever, what's on the telly, or the score in the Test match.  If we were instead to think too much about what really mattered, such as the future of the planet, the decline and fall of Western civilisation, or our own inevitable deterioration, we might get rather depressed.

 

So here's a list of distracting thoughts to choose from. You can try them out next week. Notice, they are all perfectly legitimate, and there are some good points about most of them, though perhaps we really should finish with them before sitting down.

 

“Am I on a rota today? Should I be making the coffee? Why isn't so-and-so here to-night?  Is he ill?  He looked ill last week.  I wish somebody else was preaching. Is that another crack in the ceiling? I forgot to put the cat out. Who is that woman just coming in, never seen her before? She looks worried. I hope it won't be raining when we go out”.

 

Whereas we come here to reset our compasses and to lay aside temporal worries, to remind ourselves of what really matters most. We come here to think about God and try to express our relationship with him. You will already know from what I have said before, that I don't believe you have to come to a special sacred building to do that. But it does help if we all agree to meet together at the same time in the same place.

 

Nor is having thoughts about other members of the congregation, about whether they are ill,  whether they are new, whether they need coffee afterwards, is inappropriate in a church. On the contrary, if we did not have such thoughts, if we wore a carthorse's blinkers and noticed nobody, there would be something seriously wrong.

 

Even the apostle Paul probably had distractions at the moment he started leading a meeting in someone's house, or when he began the tricky job of writing an epistle, which he did before anybody had invented  the typewriter, the fountain pen, the biro, Microsoft Word, Open Office, or  even paper. 

 

But he doesn't bother us over-much with what those thoughts were. 

 

He must have been concerned with where his next meal was coming from, and whether the house he was lodging at for a few days would be raided by those who wanted to silence him.

 

I was reminded of the pressures on him when I was in Cyprus earlier this year. I took my 15-year old grand-daughter to attend Easter Day service (it was held at 6 o'clock in the evening, because Catholics of various sorts and different languages had grabbed all the morning slots in the same building). It was at the main church in Paphos. 

 

Our PCC secretary, Christine Haig, used to belong to that church, and two of our All Saints morning congregation, John and Dorothy, are actually still fully paid up members of Paphos church,  as well as this one. They attend each one for six months of every year, living in Cyprus when it's cool, and Broad Heath in the summer.

 

Outside the Greek Orthodox building there are a large number of tall white stone pillars, rather as if an earthquake had demolished everything else and left a few pillars untouched.

 

One of the pillars is only about half the size of the others, and it carries an inscription near the ground on a small plate, saying that the apostle Paul was tied to it, and flogged with 39 lashes. Maybe that sort of thing came into his mind, as one of his day to day distractions.

The inscription reminds you forcefully that the things we read about in his letters and in the book of Acts were real events.

 

Yet when he wrote his letters, he wrote mostly about things of eternal significance, the things that should be the framework of all our lives. Things we don't expect to find mentioned much in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. 

 

How many All Saints people have you heard saying to each other, as Paul says in to-day's text,  “God chose us, you know, long before we were born, before even William the Conqueror and the dinosaurs and the big bang”? Not many.  Yet that is what Paul says (in slightly more complicated language) in our Ephesians passage today, in chapter 1.   Starting at verse 4:

 

“For he chose us, in him, before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in his sight”.

“In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”

 

Our understandable pre-occupation with “now”  tends to stop us thinking much about the bigger picture. The closer something is to us, the more it dominates our thinking.

My winter flu always seems more pressing, somehow, than your arthritis or even your second cousin's cancer. 

 

One of our morning congregation has been working abroad as a volunteer doctor in various war zones for a a few months every year. The conditions in which he has worked would amaze us--- often no mains electricity, sometimes hardly any water, occasionally one or more fellow doctors have been shot dead, as happened recently in Sri Lanka.

 

Yet he said that when he came home to Droitwich, having managed OK with the bare minimum of facilities for several months, both in the operating theatre and in his personal life, he soon loses his sense of proportion.

 

Finding on getting home that his dishwasher had packed up while he was away depressed him far more than remembering that the people he'd left behind in Somalia had no electricity or running water and too many insects deeply embedded in their clothes.

 

It's human nature. Our immediate thoughts blot out the important issues.  No wonder very few of us save enough for a decent pension! Buying CDs and fixing up the annual holiday always get in first.

 

Where is all this going? Think about the things that do matter, the big picture Paul paints for us.

 

It says in our text for tonight that we are special. Why? Because God chose us.

 

It's harder nowadays to believe we're special, because we live in a celebrity culture.  We are encouraged to think that special people are rich, famous or beautiful. Ordinary people like us are not supposed to be of much interest; our life stories do not sell many magazines, or promote many CDs. Sorry if I imply you are not beautiful; I'm sure somebody thinks you are.

 

I met someone the other day who had just retired from the music industry.  He said so many people wanted to become famous quickly today, by getting into the music business as performers, that his company sometimes had a quarter of a million demonstration songs to listen to, all from people who wanted to become special—and famous--- by singing solos or playing in a band. It had become a huge problem to sift through them. The selectors didn't want to miss the next Madonna or Jacko. But all the selectors, the marketing men, could find time to listen to, was the first bar –yes, the first bar—of each bit of music. 

 

If it was very good, they might be patient enough to listen to the second bar.  If the music didn't grab anybody after that, it went straight in the dustbin. A quarter of a million is too many.

 

Most of us here to-night have never even been on Britain's Got Talent Show, let alone made the charts, but the Bible nevertheless maintains that we are special, because we have been chosen by God, and this makes us celebrities.

 

Sir Mark Tully, the BBC's India correspondent, says in one of his early morning broadcasts that even our ordinary lives can be special. We are constantly being encouraged by commercial pressures and trendy people to use our spare time to do something  exciting.

To travel a very long way for our holidays, to have hot air balloon rides or go bungee jumping, and to impress our friends with stories of how far we have travelled, what exotic food we have tasted, how we were within an ace of being sentenced to life imprisonment in some Asian dungeon.

 

Whereas he believes that for those with eyes to see, ordinary life around us is exotic as it is, because God has provided so many things to fascinate us.

Our daily routine already has the potential to be special and fascinating, without spending lots of money or touring the world. Happiness is best found in being interested in the many remarkable things --and people--- that God has surrounded us with. And it needs a bit of practice, like anything worth doing. The type of person called an “anorak” has discovered something of this.

 

In contrast, the late Michael Jackson's life seems to show that fame doesn't always bring contentment.  He made  a great many attempts to look like somebody else.

 

Some of our forefathers, living as they did in a more or less Christian culture, had reason to see themselves as special. They spent every day knowing they were under the benevolent watch of  their creator, the one who, as Paul said here, made us “to be holy and blameless in his sight”.

 

Now I don't know how that strikes you, but being watched,  twenty-four—seven, all the time, by God or anyone else might seem rather worrying. It sounds as though everything we do is under surveillance by a giant closed-circuit TV camera that never breaks down, with a hawkish and critical God getting up from his desk and looking at it every so often, frowning and putting our names in a big black book.

Because we British naturally associate closed circuit TV surveillance with a veiled threat of punishment by authority whenever we step out of line. Nobody in the world has as many closed-circuit TV cameras as this country does, and we are getting further and further ahead in the surveillance stakes. We may not be much good at cricket or tennis,  our economic future may be gloomy and our Parliament, like our banking system, in disarray, but there's one thing you must admit we do rather well.

 

Snoop.

 

Sue Townsend has written a satire, set in the near future, called Queen Camilla, in which England becomes a republic and has six million people under surveillance in special fortified housing estates, watched continually even in their own homes. They are the AZBO types, the criminals, the drug addicts, and of course fat people. Plus the royal family. Nobody can say anything, even in their living rooms, without the local police knowing. We don't like being watched.

 

So it's important to reflect that surveillance doesn't have to be threatening.

 

Many conscientious parents have electronic tracking devices to keep an eye on their children, and not for any sinister purpose.  It is done simply out of love and concern.

Car insurance companies ---and at least one Midland local authority------are persuading parents  to monitor electronically how their 18 and 19 year old children drive. They then know how many times their offspring have gone over 60  when driving between speed cameras or in country lanes.

 

Where people have taken this idea up, there has been a significant drop in teenage car accidents and deaths, and fewer lives have been ruined by peer pressure to take risks. 

French parents put tracker devices in their small school children's satchels before they go to school, in case of abduction.

 

So, please, when you think of God's CCTV system, of being watched by a celestial policeman, think of loving parents. The fact that God monitors us day by day is not sinister.  He bothers to watch us because we matter to Him. We are not insignificant.  We are special.

 

The comparison with parents is right and proper, because as Paul said in our text for tonight,  “In love God predestined us to be adopted as his sons”.

My wife and I once tried to adopt, because it was not thought safe for her to have a second pregnancy, but as it happened we were turned down as unsuitable.

 

If we had been accepted, we would have put the adopted child on the same level as our own daughter, and would have treated them both equally. The Bible implies that our status before God is  as special as being adopted into his family.

 

We can probably imagine what it would be like if as children we had been adopted by the lord of the manor. That's about as far as my imagination can stretch.  Being adopted by the royal family is probably not attractive now they get too much media attention.

 

But when the Bible talks of our being adopted as a son of God, we can only flounder. One thing is sure, there can be no more justified claim to celebrity than being an adopted son of God. No greater claim to be special.

 

I did not intend this talk to cover difficult things like predestination, but unfortunately Paul mentions it in tonight's passage. I promise won't spend long on it, I don't think we would get very far. Nevertheless we can't avoid the topic altogether, because our specialness can be traced back directly to the fact that God has chosen us.  Our specialness does not come from any imagined superior morality.

 

Nor from any superior spiritual insight, which might have enabled us to seize an opportunity of salvation that had been missed by our slow-witted neighbours.

If it had been otherwise, we could have congratulated ourselves; we could boast, like someone who has picked a winning share investment in a bull market. But we can't.  

 

Being chosen will probably seem to our eyes to be very unjust; after all, shouldn't everybody be chosen, not just some? Or does Paul mean that everybody really is chosen,  but some of them decline to go along with it?  And what about babies who die as babies? Could they be chosen? If they were chosen before the beginning of the world, if they had an identity but it simply wasn't disclosed by a life on earth,  why not? Yes, it does lead to some hard questions. A guy on the radio this morning complained that preachers only talk about the easy parts of the Bible. To-day's different.

 

After all, if we worship such a clever God, one who can make a whole universe and populate it with enough strange creatures to keep David Attenborough happy for eight decades,  then we are surely dealing with a super-genius. We should not expect to understand completely everything he or she says and does. It might even be disappointing if we did.

 

A thoroughly understandable world  that makes immediate sense to us, with no loose ends, no mysteries, no questions left to ask, might be a bit of a let-down, like finding we could do the Times crossword in five minutes.

 

It might be rather like meeting a famous Nobel prize winner while on holiday; we would expect scintillating conversation, brilliant humour, pearls of wisdom, and more deep meaning than we could take in at one sitting. But what if we find that all he wanted to do was play bingo all day?  It would be a let-down.

 

So perhaps it's only natural that we find we have more of God and his world than we can handle right now.

 

After all, He's special too!