Sermon Tone Analysis

We are Marching in the Light

*Call to Worship* \\ L: Arise, shine; for your light has come.

\\ P: The glory of the Lord has been revealed by \\ a star in the East.

\\ L: Lift up your eyes and look around.

\\ P: The wisdom of God is made known to all in \\ Emmanuel.

\\ L: We gather together to proclaim the praise \\ of the Lord!

*Prayer* \\ Everlasting God, the radiance of faithful souls, you brought the nations to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Fill the world with your glory, and show yourself to all the nations; through him who is the true light and the bright and morning star, even Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Amen.

\\ -Latin Sacramentary, 5th-7th Century,

*Children's Sermon*

Purchase a number of Christian bookmarks containing a picture of Jesus, enough for each child to have one.

Begin by asking the children what an "inheritance" is.

Explain that it is a gift of money or jewelry or furniture or some other valuable item that is passed from parent to child.

Hold up the bookmark and ask if "Jesus" is something valuable to pass from parent to child.

Yes! Let them know that for a while, the inheritance of Jesus was shared only with God's chosen people, the Jews.

Illustrate this by handing a bookmark to only one child.

Ask if this is fair, for Jesus to be shared with only one child of God.

No! Explain that the apostle Paul made a discovery: that non-Jews, called the Gentiles, "have become fellow heirs ... and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (Ephesians 3:6).

Let them know that God's family has now become huge, and it means that everyone has a chance to inherit Jesus.

Show the children that they can all be heirs of Jesus by giving them each a bookmark.

Hymn # 47   There’s the Wonder of Sunset

/Ephesians 3:1-12/  

The Monarch Mystery

*Christians, like monarch butterflies, are drawn to a home we have never seen before.

We fly in faith, carried only by God's grace, mystery, revelation and power.*

The ability to find home evokes legends doves, pigeons and Rover or Fido who, when owners have moved from one coast to the other, have made a 3,000-mile trek to find their owners in a location to which they've never been before.

\\ At least the doves and dogs each make it back home.

But not the monarch butterfly.

These insects somehow know how to migrate thousands of miles every autumn, from the Eastern United States and Canada to a handful of sites in Mexico.

There, they rest over the winter for the return trip home.

But here's the amazing part: No individual butterfly ever goes to Mexico and back, yet thousands converge on the same few sites year after year.

These insects know where to go.

But none of them has ever been there before.

Let's explain.

\\ Sue Halpern is an author with a passion for monarchs, one that drives her new book Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly.

Throwing herself fully into the subject, she hits the road and studies butterflies in Mexico with a "cowboy entomologist," tags and raises monarchs with her 8-year-old daughter at their home in the Adirondacks, and takes a glider ride to better understand the thermal forces that propel the butterflies for much of their journey.

\\ "Monarchs are not guided by memory," she explains, "since no single butterfly ever makes the round trip.

Three or four generations separate those that spend one winter in Mexico from those that go there the next."

A monarch butterfly born in August in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, for instance, will fly all the way to Mexico, spend the winter there, and leave in March.

Then it will fly north, laying eggs on milkweed along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Florida before dying.

\\ The butterflies born of those eggs will continue northward, breeding and laying more eggs along the way.

So will their offspring.

By August another monarch, four generations or so removed from the monarch that left New York for Mexico the previous summer, will emerge from its chrysalis and do the same thing.

It will head south, aiming for a place it's never been, an acre or two of forest on the steep slopes of a particular mountain range.

\\ If you hike into those mountains, you can see monarch butterflies so heavy on the branches of the pine trees that the branches bend toward the ground.

You see more butterflies than you ever dreamed possible, 20 or 30 million at a time.

Every available place to roost is taken.

There are butterflies on your shoulders and shoes, butterflies in your hair.

The clamor of butterfly wings is "as constant and irregular as surf cresting over rocks," says Halpern.

It feels like a holy and blessed place.

\\ On this first Sunday of the year, we no doubt wish we had the unerring instincts of a monarch butterfly as it makes the journey home, to a place it's never seen before.

We pursue the kingdom of God over the course of many changing seasons.

We ride the wind of the Spirit like butterflies riding thermal forces over thousands of miles.

We have a mysterious instinct for God, one that moves us toward The True Monarch, generation after generation.

\\ In a sense, we make our way through life on a wing and a prayer.

\\ The apostle Paul discovered just how dangerous this journey can be.

Although he grew up as an observant Jew, he realized after his conversion to Christianity that God was calling him to take the gospel to the unclean and unrighteous non-Jews of the world, the Gentiles.

This call was irresistibly strong, drawing Paul to the Gentiles in the same way that monarch butterflies feel drawn to Mexico.

\\ "Although I am the very least of all the saints," he admits to the Ephesians, "this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things" (3:8-9).

Paul felt compelled by God to take the gospel in a whole new direction, and to engage a group of people who were long shunned by the chosen people of God.

\\ \\ It wasn't easy, but he had to do it - just like a monarch has to go "south of the border."

Early in today's lesson, Paul speaks of how "the mystery" was made known to him by revelation (v. 3) - the mystery of why God wants to bring all people together in Christ.

Although this news sounded scandalous to the faithful Jewish Christians all around him, Paul had to insist that "the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (v. 6).

This mystery was not made known in former generations, but it has now been revealed by the Spirit of God, and entrusted to Paul by the gifts of God's grace and God's power.

\\ Paul was really flying on four wings and a prayer.

The only things keeping him aloft were four simple but powerful wings - the wing of God's grace, the wing of Christ's mystery, the wing of the Spirit's revelation and the wing of God's power.

\\ Grace, mystery, revelation and power.

\\ Grace, God's unmerited favor given without condition, without basis or any human endeavor that could be rewarded by God.

Notice Paul continually emphasizes that this grace was given "to me" (3:2,7,8).

His witness is that when God called him to his own unique ministry, God gave him the grace (charis) to fulfil the "commission" that God has put before him.

Good news for us on the threshold of a new year as we revisit the "commission" that God has laid upon us.

What God calls us to do, he gives us the charis to complete.

\\ Mystery, the unfathomable enigma of that grace and God's plan for the church.

The scope of God's redemptive love is unlimited.

It reaches not just a select few, not just those who seem deserving, not just the rich and powerful of the world, but everyone, in faith, are also a part of this body called the church, "fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (3:6).

\\ Revelation, whereby God enables us to "see" the truth of this mystery and on that basis proclaim it, to "make everyone see" (3:9).

\\ Power, whereby the proclamation of the revelation, of the mystery of the grace of God, his "boundless riches" (3:8) can achieve its greatest effect.

\\ Maybe this is enough to keep us, as well as Paul, flying high in the spiritual stratosphere Paul calls the "eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord (3:11).

\\ Like monarch butterflies and the apostle Paul, we are guided by the Spirit to a new destination every day, week, month, year and decade of our lives.

Like the monarch who completes only half of the journey, we too have no complete knowledge now, how our own comportment as Christians encourages and enables those who follow us, nor are we always aware of those to whom we are in debt, those who have enabled us to make the journey.

\\ That is the nature of the church: connectedness, community, and interrelatedness.

We've all been warmed by fires we didn't build, enjoyed the share of trees we didn't plant.

\\ Now we're called "not [to] lose heart" (3:13) but to build fires of our own, plant trees of our own - in short to be faithful pilgrims of the church on our ultimate journey home, where we, like the golden monarchs clinging to the trees of Mexico, will gather around the throne of God in eternal worship and praise.

\\ And yet, how often we fall from the sky because we try to chart our own course.

We pursue a private form of spirituality by snatching up religious books, a category in publishing that has been one of the fastest-growing in the past 10 years.

Our American obsession with self-help has begun to focus on spiritual matters, and we are now devouring subjects ranging from Buddhism to Christian fiction.

\\ What's wrong with this picture?

Simple: The "private" dimension of "private spirituality."

Seven in 10 Americans now say they can be religious without going to services in a community of faith, and this is a radical departure from Paul's vision of the church, where the experience of God is always in community.

There is no room for individualism when he says, "The Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Christ through the gospel" (v. 6).

For Paul, an experience of God requires a community of faith.

\\ The solution for us is to be more like monarch butterflies, who always migrate in community and depend on each other to achieve the goal of a complete round trip.

Although a single monarch may make it from New York to Mexico, on the way back it lays its eggs and dies.

Those eggs hatch and then new butterflies continue the journey north, laying more eggs along the way.

No one completes the journey solo, and it is only as a community that they discover the fullness of God's plan for them.

\\ Paul knew this truth firsthand.

In fact, he was writing to the Ephesians from prison, and wasn't going to be taking flight himself anytime soon.

And yet he spoke to them in boldness and confidence, "so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known" (v.

10).

He was speaking about God's grace, mystery, revelation and power for the benefit of the community of faith, not for himself.