The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

August 8, 2021  •  Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome

Text: Ephesians 4:29: “Let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors,
for we are all members of one another.”

One of the basic human skills we all learn somehow or other is to ask for advice. We learn from a very early age that asking for advice is an essential part of solving problems. The first person who told you there were no stupid questions was probably one of your parents—at least I hope it was; that advice was meant to instill in us a habit of learning from other people.  

Asking for advice is a fundamentally social form of wisdom-sharing. It is impossible for any of us to imagine where we would each be today if no one had ever offered us any advice, warned us away from a potential mistake, showed us how to solve a problem or exercise a basic skill. We are social learners, and we save ourselves a great deal of grief when we ask for advice.

Exactly because we are social learners, though, we ask for advice for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes we genuinely need to know something. Sometimes we’re more motivated by curiosity—we want to know what someone else knows, we want to learn some little bit of knowledge they seem to have.

Sometimes we ask for advice because we want to be seen as the sort of people who ask for advice—because we want people to think something of us. That may seem odd, but in fact it’s pretty common; when you ask someone for advice, you are showing them a sign of respect, and that’s a very important way we function in society.

Now, whether or not you accept the advice is a different question. There are some types of advice we never intend to follow. Our grandmother’s advice to be careful and go slow. Our parents’ advice about, well, just about anything. 

Of course, the problem with that is—later in life, when we look back on a lot of that, it really was pretty good advice. It was advice spoken from experience, the wisdom of learning from painful mistakes. It was advice spoken in love for us, hoping to keep us from hurt.

We have no way of knowing what prompted Saint Paul to write down the advice we heard him share with us this morning. We know that in other cases—especially the church in Corinth—he received questions from churches he had planted, and he answered those questions in his letters. In First Corinthians, that becomes explicit: remember, “Now concerning the things of which you wrote...”

We think that Paul’s experience of the church in Ephesus wasn’t as deep as his experience of other churches he founded. We aren’t really even all that sure this letter was written specifically to the church in Ephesus; it might be the copy sent to Ephesus of a letter that was sent as a circular to a  number of churches in the ancient world.

We’re more sure of where Paul was when he wrote the letter. He was here, right in Rome, in prison. And we know that when it came to the churches he had planted around the Eastern Mediterranean, Paul was first, last, and always a pastor. He cared deeply for the people of God.

Just yesterday, the Epistle reading appointed for Morning Prayer was a story from the Acts of the Apostles about Paul traveling through a place called Troas, not far from Ephesus. He stays there for a week, and on the last night he is there he gathers with the leaders of the church to talk about how to keep the church together. 

The story isn’t about what he says; it’s about how long he talks. He talks all through the night, from dinner until dawn. He cares so much about these people and the church they are starting that he wants to help them in any way he can. But the story doesn’t neglect to mention that one of the people listening to him in that third-floor upper room falls asleep—and falls out of the window where he’d been sitting.

So this morning we have Paul’s advice. We’re not sure what the question was, or who asked it, or what advice they were looking for. But we know what the answer is.

And the question for us is—is it the sort of advice we’re willing to learn from?

The worst kind of advice is the advice you get but don’t really want to follow. The worst kind of advice to get is the advice you know you should follow-—and you know just as well that following it will mean not just learning something, but changing your life.

It’s like getting advice from your doctor. Your doctor gives you advice to lose weight, or quit smoking, or exercise more. You know you should. But taking that advice means, well, making a sacrifice—making a change. Even when we say we want to, we often don’t. 

Paul is a doctor—a doctor of Christian souls. He is giving us advice that we know is good for us. The question is whether we are going to turn it into the worst kind of advice.

His advice is simply this: 

To be a Christian means to be in community. There are no Christians alone. There are no “spiritual but not religious” Christians, at least not of what you mean by “religious” is “being part of a church.” Being part of a church is not optional for Christians.

And here’s another part of his advice. When Paul talks about neighbors to the Ephesians—and to us—he’s talking about the great big world of non-Christian people. When he says we should speak the truth to all our neighbors, because we are members of one another, he is telling us that this is the truth we need to tell ourselves, and them: We are all connected in this life, we are all bound up in each other’s lives; our destinies are intertwined, whether we like it or not.

We know that’s true if only because we read and watch the news. We know that our planet is in trouble, and there is no place any of us can escape that problem and leave it to others. We know that nationalism is tearing apart everything from friendships and neighborhoods to the institutions we built to preserve peace; and there is no way any one of us can somehow escape the consequences of that, or the responsibility to do work against it.

So here is the last part of Paul’s advice. For us to treat each other well, for us to love each other as sisters and brothers in the church, that’s not optional. That’s not something we do for appearances. It’s essential to who we are. It’s core to our faith.

That’s true for two reasons. First, the world around us is a lot like the world that surrounded those first churches of Paul’s. It’s pretty unsympathetic to the message we have to share. 

The world around us doesn’t really believe that each human being deserves equal respect and equal dignity. The world around us doesn’t really believe that love has more power to change the world than force. The world around us doesn’t really believe that self-denial and serving God is the way to realize the full possibility of human potential.

So for those of us who do believe those things and try to live by them, sticking together is not really optional. It’s essential. And we’ll never be able to stick together if we don’t treat each other well.

There’s a second reason this is urgent for us. It’s that if the world sees us treating each other poorly, it will have little reason to be interested in what we say we believe. 

The single most important part of our evangelism is not going out in the streets and handing out pamphlets advertising the times of our services. It’s not our beautiful liturgy, and it’s sure not the sermons. 

No, the single most important thing we do to share the gospel of Christ with the world is the example we give of how we treat each other. When we get that right, people get curious. When we get it wrong, people give up on us.

So is this going to be the worst advice in the world for us?

Or is it advice we’re willing to take? 

Can we make Paul’s words to that long-ago church in Ephesus our own mission statement?

 Are we prepared to really ask ourselves whether all we have we have come by honestly? 

Are we willing to watch what we say, and be more disciplined about not talking poorly about others when they’re not around? 

Are we ready to do all we can always to encourage each other, whether it’s what we do in the church or in the rest of our lives?

Here’s what Paul says this morning that is not advice, but a fact: You were marked with a seal. You were claimed for God through the death and resurrection of Christ in baptism. 

The day is coming when that seal will be looked for on each of us by the God who put it there, who loves us and is counting on us—and then it will be seen what we did with our brother Paul’s advice. Amen.