When I was serving Olympic View Church in Seattle as their youth pastor, my area minister,1 Carol Mason, made a point of meeting with each of the pastors under her care about once a month or so. She and I would meet at Panera Bread at Northgate Mall and have lunch together, and it was a wonderful opportunity each month or so for the pastor to be pastored – to share joys, concerns, challenges, and successes.
At the conclusion of one of these lunches, Carol shared that she always prays for me, but she wanted to know if there were anything specific for which she could pray. I said that my biggest challenge at that moment in time – still is, still is – was that while there were things in my life that were not as I would desire but could not be ameliorated for now, there were always other things that were a blessing and a joy. I asked Carol to pray that I could stay in the joy.
Have you ever noticed this? That as you go through life, you often have a choice – you can focus on the things that are going badly – perhaps your finances are a little challenging at present, or you’ve been experiencing some poor health, or someone in your family is facing difficulties or just plain being difficult. But at the same time, you are living in a beautiful place in a glorious season, you have a wonderful church family and community to support and encourage you, a nice place to live, and at least one person who dearly loves you no matter how well or badly everything else is going.
The question is, which set of experiences do you focus on?
During the catastrophic flooding in Texas a few years ago, one of our church members in Okanagon shared a story about seeing two women on the news from Texas. One was complaining that she couldn’t get from point A to point B as quickly as she was used to, and there were things she wanted at the store that weren’t available because shipments hadn’t been able to come in. The other woman was literally standing waist-deep in water, thanking and praising the Lord that she was alive.
It’s a question of focus.
In our passage for today, from the letter we know as Ephesians, we see the writer working to shift the focus of the Christian community at Ephesus. The letter was probably a circular letter, with copies going not just to Ephesus but to several other Christian communities in Asia Minor, and it may have been written, not by Paul, but by a trusted associate or younger colleague. Leaving all that aside, to give you a little background, Ephesus was a city on the coast of Ionia, which is now located in Turkey, but in biblical times was part of ancient Greece. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis, was located in ancient Ephesus. At various points in its history, Ephesus was officially under the control of the city-state of Athens, and then that of Sparta, but these political shifts didn’t much affect daily life for the people of Ephesus.
Ephesus became part of the Roman Empire about 130 years before the birth of Christ. Mark Antony stayed in Ephesus more than once during his career, including in 33 BC with Cleopatra. Scholars are not in agreement about the population of Ephesus during the time of Paul – it was probably bigger than Carbondale but smaller than Decatur. Paul himself lived in Ephesus for almost three years, from 52-54. He wrote his first letter to the Corinthians from Ephesus, and the letter now known as Ephesians was written about ten or so years later.
The gospel of John may have been written at Ephesus in about the year 90, and Ephesus is one of the seven churches addressed in the book of Revelation. There is a legend that Jesus’s mother Mary spent the last years of her life at Ephesus since it is known that John lived there and Jesus had commended his mother to John’s care from the cross; in fact, there is a shrine near the site of ancient Ephesus called The House of the Virgin. The Christian community at Ephesus was important enough to be the recipients of a letter from Bishop Ignatius of Antioch in the early 2nd century. While the city was destroyed by the Goths in 263, the Church of Mary near the harbor was the site of two ecumenical councils in the 5th century.
The main issue which Paul encountered amongst members of the Ephesian church during his sojourn there, and which is addressed in the letter, is unity in Christ in the midst of diversity. As with many of the churches Paul planted or wrote to, the Christian community at Ephesus was comprised of a mix of both Jewish Christians and Gentiles. There were also tensions with the community of Jews at Ephesus who had not chosen to follow the way of Christ. The major theme of the letter to the Ephesians is unity, and how it could be pursued in ordinary daily life together as a congregation.
Our passage for today gives a list of contrasting behaviors – things the Ephesian Christians should avoid doing, and what they should do instead. It’s a list of dos and don’ts. The writer tells the Ephesians, put away falsehood and speak the truth to one another. It’s okay if you’re angry with someone, but don’t let your anger lead you to sin against your neighbor, and make sure you’ve resolved your disagreement before you go to bed that night. Don’t steal; do honest work. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but say things that will build each other up and give each other grace. Put away bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, and slander, and instead be kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving.
So let’s imagine that there is a church similar to the one in ancient Ephesus here in our local community. In order to have a similar set of challenges, this church would be a mix of people – maybe about half the families who attend regularly and serve on the commissions are white, and the other half are of another racial or ethnic background, perhaps African-American or Latinx.2 The two groups get along pretty well for the most part, but some of the white folks get a little suspicious when they hear the Latinx families speaking Spanish amongst themselves during coffee hour, afraid that they might be gossiping about them, and some of the Latinx members are afraid to reveal their documentation status to their white brothers and sisters in Christ, for fear of being deported.
What I love about what this letter has to say to the church at Ephesus, working through their differences as Jewish and Gentile Christians, is that neither group is singled out. Everything said can be equally applied to both. If you’re tempted to badmouth those in the other demographic, don’t do that. Instead, be kind to each other, build each other up, offer each other grace. It seems to me that the behaviors the letter recommends would help the two disparate groups be able to slowly warm up, open up, and trust one another, to become to one another true brothers and sisters in Christ in which he distinctions are not rendered invisible, but are infinitely less important than what all have in common – that is, faith in Christ and fellowship in the Holy Spirit – and that which makes each individual member beloved, precious, and important to the work.
Being able to truly see, welcome, and live in community with one another in this way really does take time and effort – it doesn’t come automatically just because we all confess the lordship of Jesus Christ. There are genuine reasons for mistrust on both sides of any demographic divide, and we have to make a conscious effort to overcome and work through these. The teens in my youth group in Seattle, most of whom were of a different race than me, had to learn through time and testing that I could be trusted, that I wasn’t just another white adult who would throw them under the bus when things got challenging. And I had to learn to listen and speak effectively to them – in that order, by listening first and then speaking, and by acknowledging my mistakes and making the effort to try again.
What it takes is a shift of focus. A shift like I experienced very suddenly one evening in Berkeley. I was leaving an event at the Jesuit school and walking the two blocks to my apartment. Stopping to cross the street, I saw a group of black men on the other side, getting ready to cross in my direction. And I was afraid.
There were no cars coming, so I started walking across the street, and when I got a few steps in, I realized that these scary black men were people I knew, some of the African Jesuits with whom I had taken classes. They were my friends: Fulgence, from Madagascar, Niku from Nigeria, Emmanuel from Burkina Faso. I felt relieved, and both stupid and slightly enlightened at the same time. As soon as I got close enough to make out their faces, my focus shifted entirely, from “scary black men” to “my friends.” People I knew. Fulgence and Niku and Emmanuel and a few other friends of theirs. That moment of crossing the street was an encapsulation of the kind of work all Christians need to do continually so that instead of scary black people or nasty white people or lazy Mexicans or whatever other stereotypes we’ve unconsciously bought into, we see individuals, brothers and sisters. Friends.
And we will make mistakes. I still blush thinking of some of the unthinkingly racist things I remember saying to the youth in Seattle early on, and I am still floored by the depth of their willingness to forgive me and let me keep trying. The willingness to forgive one another and stay in relationship is absolutely essential to achieving true unity in Christ with a diversity of folks.
I learned something really important about forgiveness at the 2018 Brethren National Youth Conference, but it took another couple of weeks for it to really sink in. The message at the last evening worship service was shared by Jarrod McKenna, a pastor and theologian from Perth, Australia. Jarrod is known in his home country for starting a ministry to welcome new immigrants to Australia, including a three-family home in which new immigrants can live and receive assistance from area volunteers, which was purchased entirely with crowdsourced funds because the banks would not give Jarrod and his community a loan for the project.
During the worship service, Jarrod invited us to turn to another person and confess that which was keeping us from truly welcoming, loving, and ministering and being ministered to by others – any others. I gathered on the bleacher steps with a girl from my congregation and the three youth from the Ellisforde church, and the first one to speak was Noelia. “Do we really have to confess to one another?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll start.”
I told them that for years I had been bitter and angry toward a few of my former bosses at secular jobs because I felt they had been unfair to me. One of those people I had been angry with for almost fifteen years, although I was sure she’d completely forgotten me. The confessions continued, with each person sharing, courageously willing to be very vulnerable with the rest of us. By the time we finished, there were tears in everyone’s eyes.
The rest of the story happened a few weeks later. I woke up early one morning – not on purpose, because I rarely do that; I’m not really a morning person – and somehow, by grace and grace alone, I understood that each of the people I had worked for that had treated me badly had a story, too. That what I experienced of them came out of, probably, in each case, a place of lack of understanding, distrust, and fear, just as when I have treated people badly, those have often been the reasons. And I had compassion for them. I forgave them – something I had been unable to do on my own for fifteen years.
I felt like I understood forgiveness itself in a new and powerful way. It was an incredible shift of focus, from how I had been hurt to the possibilities of how others doing the hurting were themselves coming from a place of hurt, or ignorance, or fear. And knowing that, I could see them as whole people, people worthy of love, respect, compassion, forgiveness, and second chances. I probably won’t run right out and invite them to my next party, but that weight of bitterness and anger – it was gone. Thank the Lord.
I want to tell you one more story about shifting focus – how it’s something that can help us be kinder and gentler not only with other people but even with ourselves. The story takes place about 13 years ago when I was finishing up my time as a Newhall Teaching Fellow in Berkeley. One of my students had been diagnosed with Stage Four melanoma during class – she literally had the call from Kaiser come in during our class session and left the room to take it. At the close of the semester, I reached out to her and invited her to lunch, and she accepted. The day of our lunch date, I discovered I’d misplaced my wallet, so I told her that the Holy Child of Atocha had it and was doing good with it, and I’d get it back when he was done. In the meantime, I had ten dollars in my pocket, and I offered to treat her to whatever we could afford together on that at the Mexican restaurant on Euclid.
Just to give you the background, the Holy Child of Atocha was an appearance of the Christ child in the 13th century to Christian prisoners under Muslim rule in Atocha, Spain. The prisoners were not fed; their families had to bring them food, and the warden devised a new rule that only children under the age of 12 could bring the food, so prisoners who did not have young children began to starve. Christ himself then began appearing to the prisoners with food and saved their lives.
I’ll let Kirstin tell the rest of this story. She kept a blog called “Barefoot and Laughing,” from the time she was diagnosed in 2008 until shortly before her death in 2011. She was just 40 when she died, and had been studying for the Episcopal priesthood and doing street ministry in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This blog post is entitled “Grace upon grace upon grace”3:
“I mentioned yesterday that I’d had lunch with a friend. She taught my Monday morning class, of which I’d missed the last month. (I’d left in the middle of it when I’d had three calls from Kaiser in the space of an hour; and either had appointments or was recuperating, the rest of the term. Once I missed because I dearly needed chapel.)
“It was a GTU class, taught at PSR. I’d cleaved to my core community, and to the faculty who knew me well. I’d let everything go, that I could. She knew where I was, and I knew it was okay that I was tending to myself. But I hadn’t kept up that relationship.
“A couple of days ago, she tagged me on Facebook. She wrote on my wall, asking how I was. It was a brief, and loving, note. I answered with a paragraph about where I had been, was, and would be. I felt… safe. Her note came out of nowhere, and it freed me of the shades of guilt I’d felt for not staying in touch.
“It was a kind, gracious, channel-opening exchange. I was grateful; I was also busy, and I didn’t think much more about it. Then yesterday, she asked me to lunch. I was packed (took me days) and not in a huge rush to leave, so I accepted. I’d always liked her, though I’d missed so much school that I hadn’t known her well. I said yes to connecting before I left for the Valley and she goes overseas.
“She greeted me with a big hug, and, “The Lord be with you!” We spoke the Eucharistic dialogue. The conversation that followed was a sacramental whirlwind. Her wallet was lost, so she fed us both on the $10 in her pocket. And told me the story of the Holy Child of Atocha, who had given bread to starving people in prison. Hence: this child had made off with her wallet, to do good where it was most needed.
“I would have panicked about my missing wallet, and cursed my own idiocy in losing it. I don’t see grace in that sort of thing. She showed me: it’s perspective. Grace is in the eyes through which you choose to see.
“I showed her my ear, and my scar. She touched them; lightly, gently. All she said was, “Beautiful.” It was a spiritual healing, as much as a reminder to live. To take these scars as gifts, and to walk into the world with the empathy and courage I know they’ve given me. To be the healer, and human, that I’m called (and gifted) to be.
“It really was a conversation with the communion of saints; and not only because she invoked them. They were imagined, and they were with us. It was astonishingly easy to meet her in that place.
“So there we were, talking about lost wallets and miracle children, mothers and godmothers and grace and the Great Time; creating, apparently, a Celtic “thin place” in a Mexican restaurant on Euclid. We talked about everything, with the exception of class. That never came up, even once.
“This morning, I got an e-mail from her saying that I’d passed my oral exam, and she was releasing me from the conditions of my incomplete. Not only that, but she gave me an A for the semester.
“It wasn’t an exam; it was a lunch date. One that I’m glad I said yes to—and maybe that’s one of the lessons, to say yes to random gifts (and to keep working on not being afraid of people). But I never expected this; it didn’t cross my mind. And now I have two less papers to write. Alleluia.
“The work I had done was good; the grade she gave me was in line with that. So there is an element of academic work here, along with the soul work I’ve been giving myself wholeheartedly to for six weeks—which is really where I’ve needed to be. I take it also as a sign of the universe telling me, “You’ve done well.”
“She showed me something I’m still sitting with: celebration as a grateful response. Seeing with blessed eyes, the profusion of gifts that is this life. Walking in gentleness, generosity, and joy. Loving without expectation—and without limit of space and time.”
The story of the Holy Child of Atocha had been a way for me to forgive myself for stupidly losing track of my wallet – I found it the next day in a jacket pocket; the last time I’d gone out had been chilly, and the day I met Kirstin for lunch was warm. And the grace of shifting my focus to forgive myself for losing my wallet was multiplied for that entire lunch date, creating a space to offer Kirstin all the grace she needed at a time when she was frightened and suffering, transitioning to a completely new understanding of her life and her future.
Letting the Holy Spirit shift our focus is powerful, friends. My prayer for each one of you is that you will have the courage to let grace, forgiveness, and shifting of focus permeate your lives individually and our common lives as Christians together. Amen? Amen.
- In some districts, area ministers assist District Executives with the “pastoring the pastor” roles, often covering a designated portion or area of the district.
- A gender-inclusive term for people of Latin American heritage.
- Adapted from “Barefoot and Laughing,” by Kirstin Paisley, website memorialized/archived 2011 (http://barefootandlaughing.blogspot.com/). Reprinted in part with permission from Andee Zetterbaum, executor of the author’s estate.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.