Dear Emmanuel Presbyterian church family, I’ve been with you nearly three months now as your transitional pastor. It’s been a time of learning for me, learning names, for instance. I’m still working on that! More importantly, of course, has been getting to know the people attached to those names. I’ve so appreciated how warm and welcoming you have been. This has also been a time of learning about you as a congregation, about your passions, like mission, and about your customary ways of doing things. Those are a bit different in every church, and I want to thank those who’ve helped me navigate my course here.
So far, my sermons here have been shaped by time and by context; first by a focus on transition, and then largely by the liturgical calendar. In June I will begin a sermon series based on the Letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians invites us to step back from our usual ways of viewing things -- the world, the church, our own lives – and to see them all, to see everything, in light of God’s big picture, God’s cosmic plan from the beginning of time. It calls us, in other words, to see ourselves within the context of God’s huge, unfolding story.
Eugene Peterson, in the book featured by our current book group (Eat This Book), calls readers to see Scripture as a narrative. The Bible, he writes, “turns out to be a large comprehensive story, a meta-story.” And a story “invites our participation.” When we read Scripture appropriately, he argues, we allow its stories to “form” us, to shape us. “When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” We don’t always reflect on God’s big story, but instead tend to focus on our own much smaller ones. Ephesians is about that larger story, God’s story, in which we’re called to find ourselves.
This epistle has traditionally been seen as addressed to the Christian community at Corinth, but that designation is missing in some important early manuscripts. It seems likely, instead, that it was intended as a circular letter, that is, one meant to be taken around to various churches. It’s suggested that the name of the addresses was left out so that it could be filled in with the name of whatever congregation it reached. And so, we may consider it addressed “to the church that is at Bothell, Washington,” that is, even to us.
Pastor Janet
June 1, 2024