Second Sunday after Easter /St. Mark the Evangelist, 2010

Text: Ephesians 4:7-16

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

 

“Henceforth No Longer Children”

 

I had to laugh when I started to come up with a title for my sermon this morning. I originally went with the King James Version, but that yielded “Henceforth, No More Children.” I thought that might have sent the wrong message. You might have gotten the idea that I was wanting us to go “adult-only,” or that I was going to teach some strange reversal of Mormonism: “No more kids! Stop having babies!” Some of you men are thinking, “Amen! Preach it, brother!”

 

Needless to say, that’s not my message this morning. You can have all the babies you want. It’s still the best church-growth strategy there is! Nor I am suggesting that we not let our kids come to church till they’re eighteen. That has never even crossed my mind. Okay, maybe once or twice.

 

No, the truth of the matter is you kids are, in many ways, the heart and soul of the church. You are the future of the church. And so, you’re really important to who we are as a church, and who we will become. In a sense, the future of the church rests on your shoulders. And that’s why your parents and I, your Sunday school teachers, and Deacon Alan think it’s so important that you be taught and trained in God’s Word, and in the Faith of the Church – so you’ll have the right foundation to stand on. That’s why we make you do your lessons. That’s why we force you to memorize all those Bible verses and catechism answers. It’s so, as you grow to physical maturity, you’ll also grow to spiritual maturity. It so, as you grow in age, you will also grow in grace and be equipped to take on spiritual responsibility in the church, and to do the work of ministry God calls you to with the gifts He’s given you.

 

That’s really the message of our Epistle lesson from Ephesians: that henceforth we should no longer be children; that as we grow up physically we also need to grow up spiritually; that God has given some in His Church to be apostles, some to be prophets, some evangelists, some pastor-teachers, to equip you the saints to do the work of ministry, to build up the Church, till we all come together to the unity of faith and to that level of spiritual maturity where we as a body reflect the fullness of the stature of Christ; that we should no longer be like children, tossed to and fro by every tantalizing breeze of the latest doctrinal fads.

 

You know, we have to grow up physically. We don’t have any choice in the matter. It’s automatic. How we wish it wasn’t! But spiritual growth – growing up spiritually -  is not automatic. Sometimes I think we wish it were. Sometimes we act as if it were. There are some people, who’ve spent their whole lives in the church, who think that somehow that makes them spiritually mature. They know the Prayer Book by heart. They can set up a credence table like nobody. But you ask them what the gospel is and they don’t have a clue. They’re there in church every Sunday, but the rest of the week God is hardly in their thoughts. And maybe they know the 23rd Psalm, a couple of other verses of Scripture here and there, but by-in-large, the Word of God is something for the Lector to read in the service; they rarely think to take it up and read it for themselves. You see, they’ve grown to physical maturity, but they remain spiritual infants. You’ll agree with me that a seventy-year-old infant is a grotesque thing! A forty-year-old infant is a grotesque thing! But we remain spiritual infants unless, with purpose and deliberate action, we attend to the things God has given for our spiritual growth. It doesn’t come automatically.

 

What then are those things God has given us to equip us, to build us up, to bring us to that level of spiritual maturity where it could be said of us that we are together one mature man? It is written, “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets…”

 

First God gave us the apostles and prophets. Well, what did the prophets and apostles do? They gave us the Old and the New Testaments. They gave us God’s Word. And what do we have in the Word of God?  To Timothy Paul writes, “All Scripture is God-breathed, and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” In the Scriptures, Peter says, God “has given us everything we need for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us.” The Word of God gives us the knowledge of God, through which we have everything we need for life and godliness.

 

So I ask you: how is it that we think we can grow in the Lord without knowing His Word?  How is it that we think we can grow in godliness if we don’ have that which equips us for every good work dwelling in our hearts and in our minds? We don’t think we can grow and advance in our jobs unless we learn and become proficient in the specialized field of knowledge necessary for us to do our jobs. How much study did you put in for your last promotion? Are you thinking you can have “promotion” in the Lord with less? How much reading have you done to learn how to raise your children to become responsible, well-educated, well-mannered adults? Are you thinking you or they can grow to spiritual adulthood with comparably less reading in God’s Word?

 

No, the Word of God equips us for every good work; it gives us everything we need for life and godliness, but it doesn’t get into our hearts and minds through some sort of osmosis. “Take up and read, take up and read,” Augustine heard the voice say.  God gave some to be apostles and prophets to equip us for spiritual maturity, but we must take up and read.

 

God also gave some to be evangelists – like St. Mark. We call him St. Mark, the Evangelist, and today we celebrate his day. What did St. Mark give us? He gave us the Gospel – the first Gospel, the sayings and acts of our Savior Jesus Christ.

 

St. Mark is himself an interesting study in spiritual maturation. The first time we’re introduced to St. Mark is in his own Gospel. He’s most likely that “certain young man” who followed Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane for some reason wearing nothing but a piece of linen cloth. And when the guards try to grab him they get nothing but linen, and Mark goes running off naked into the darkness. (There are some really funny scenes in the Bible.)   

 

But it seems that in his young Christian life, St. Mark was always running away from something. St. Paul brought him along as his assistant on his first missionary journey, but when they got to the town of Perga, Mark suddenly took off running again back to Jerusalem. Maybe he thought, “This preaching and persecution stuff isn’t for me; I think I’ll go home and write a book.” But it says in the Book of Acts that a great contention arose between Paul and Barnabas as a result of Mark’s actions. Paul didn’t trust him, and Barnabas, ever the encourager, wanted to give him another chance. But the contention was so great that Paul and Barnabas ended up splitting company and going their separate ways. See, that’s what spiritual immaturity does. It doesn’t build up the body; it ends up tearing it apart.

 

But we learn from the Bible that Mark did grow up, and he was reconciled with Paul, and was even with Paul in his first imprisonment in Rome where he probably wrote his Gospel. Later Mark became the faithful servant of the Apostle Peter in Rome. And tradition tells us that he became the first bishop of the Church in Alexandria where he was martyred during the Roman persecution under the Emperor Trajan.

 

St. Mark, and all the other Evangelists, and everyone who has preached the Gospel to us, were God’s gifts to the Church for our spiritual growth and maturity. But even they had to grow from spiritual infancy to spiritual adulthood, and all the stages in between. You see, growing to spiritual maturity means moving from being equipped to becoming an equipper yourself. It means moving from only receiving ministry to doing ministry. That’s what St. Paul is getting at in our passage: that God gave the apostles and prophets and evangelist to equip us to do the work of ministry, that we may all be built up together one mature man in the Lord.

 

But there’s one other gift Paul mentions here in Ephesians that God has given us for our spiritual maturation. “Pastor-teachers” are also God’s gift to the Church to train us up in the way to spiritual maturity so we ourselves become ministers and edifiers of the Body, and the way they do that it is primarily through preaching and teaching and providing spiritual guidance.

 

Now, if it was God’s design to give some to be pastor-teachers to equip us to grow up spiritually in the Lord, doesn’t that imply that we need to attend to their instruction and guidance? Notice, Paul doesn’t say God gave us a library full of books so we can all become our own independent learners. Is reading books on theology and spirituality not profitable? Of course it is. But God did not just give us the apostles and prophets and evangelist and all their books; he also gave us some to instruct us in those books and to give us guidance from those books. Independence is not the way of God.

 

It is essential for our spiritual growth that we attend to the preaching and teaching and spiritual direction of our pastor-teachers, especially those of you who have the responsibility of teaching others (which, I might add, includes Pastors themselves). Again to Timothy Paul says, “The things you’ve heard from me… commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” You see the teaching ministry in the church is something that gets handed down from one teacher to the other, from the one who has the teaching office to those who will teach others, and so on and so on. The principle is: we have to be teachable before we can become teachers.

 

Beloved, St. Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” We understand this as it relates to physical growth. We understand the need, as we grow older, to put away childish behavior and childish ways of thinking. We all know adults who’ve never grown up - they’re just big kids - and we all know how annoying they can be. Of course once in a while, it’s fun to let down your hair and be a kid again. We need to do that from time to time. But by and large we know that when we grow up we need to be grown up. But we need to understand this with regard to our spiritual lives as well.

 

Henceforth, let us no longer be children. We need to put away things like our childish lack of discipline—reading the Word of God consistently, praying consistently, being in church consistently. We need to put away the childish avoidance of spiritual responsibility, in the church, in the home. I mean what are you always after your kids about? Being responsible for themselves. Being serious about the responsibilities they have. Taking on more responsibilities. It’s part of growing up. The same goes for you in the matter of your spiritual development. We need to put away any childish, or should I say, teenager-like unwillingness to be instructed. We need to be teachable, that we may teach others also.

 

These are the things that pertain to our spiritual maturation. So let us faithfully attend to the gifts God has given us: to the apostles and prophet— the New and the Old Testaments; to the Evangelists—those who give us the Gospel; to our pastor-teachers—those who preach and teach the Word of God, so that we may be equipped to do the work of the ministry, to build each other up so that we all grow together in the unity of faith into that one perfect man, into fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ. +