Ephesians Elected Me | Lessons from the Last 15
It must have been destiny, or pre-destiny. I didn’t choose Ephesians, it chose me. Romans reached out and beckoned Augustine as those kids on the other side of the hedge sang “tolle lege—Take and read!” Romans had a similar effect on Luther and Lloyd-Jones. Chrysostom lived in John. Spurgeon was at home in the Psalms. For that matter, Jesus and the writer to the Hebrews lived in the Psalter too. It isn’t that the other books are in some way lacking, but sometimes it is as if some book becomes the front door that you go in and out of more frequently. My front door is Ephesians.
After a few years at Trinity, I discovered that I wasn’t the first Trinity pastor to have Ephesians as ‘my’ book. It was Pastor Christenson’s book as well. We shared a love for Ephesians, but he and I were vastly different in regard to self-discipline. He memorized Ephesians (and other books too) and stood and shared it during a Sunday sermon some decades before I came around. He recited it every day on his prayer walk until the day he died. Recited isn’t the right word. He prayed with it. Blessed with it. Its theology became his own. He learned its lessons on church and marriage and spiritual battle.
“It isn’t that the other books are in some way lacking, but sometimes it is as if some book becomes the front door that you go in and out of more frequently.”
I haven’t memorized it, but I have taught through this Epistle of reconciliation many times. In the Trinity congregation, family camps, a few years at the Canadian Lutheran Bible Institute, to a group of Charismatic Lutherans in Denmark and to the pastors and spouses of the Northern Diocese in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania. Its revelation of the mystery of the miraculous unity we have in Jesus Christ captivates people everywhere!
In mid-2020, I started hard-core complaining in God’s general direction. Feeling my own inadequacies in discipling a congregation, as tensions and trials exposed self-absorption and grasping for our own rights, I did what humans have been doing since Genesis—I blamed God! I put God on the dock as C.S. Lewis named it. At the trial of God, I dared the Almighty to justify himself as to how the Ephesian vision of unity had so woefully failed in my own experience. Ephesians talks all about the reconciliation of things in heaven and things on earth, this age and the age to come, Jews and Gentiles, and even men and women! We weaponized wearing or not wearing masks. Just before I pronounced the verdict on God, he bore witness, and silenced me, when I remembered his servant Paul who said, “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles…and to bring to light for everyone” (Ephesians 3.8-9). I guess I’m not the first one to feel inadequate as a Christian or as a leader. God continually does his best work out of Paul’s not-best-life-now. God’s power is made perfect in weakness. And, his grace is sufficient.
“God continually does his best work out of Paul’s not-best-life-now. God’s power is made perfect in weakness. And, his grace is sufficient.”
After dwelling on this theological reality, all in the indicative, Paul launches into prayer. He prays that what is reality in the heart of God would also be reality in the experience of the church. He bows his knees (Ephesians 3.14) and prays that God would grant his struggling people strength (3.16), that with all the saints they would comprehend the incomprehensible (3.18), and know a love that surpasses knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God (3.19).
All of a sudden I realized that even the Ephesian church wasn’t ‘there’ yet. Their differences and divisions were also real. Was it easy to incorporate Jewish background Christians with Temple-of-Artimis background Christians with mystery religion background Christians, all while trying to faithfully navigate Kingdom-of-God life in the Roman Empire?
Now as divisions threaten to undo land and home and church, my imagination brings me to the streets and stores and sanctuaries of Ephesus. When the reality of unity at the heart of God seems a million miles from the reality of division at Trinity Lutheran Church, I have a Pauline prayer to pray:
Bring near through the blood of Christ those who feel far off. You are our peace and have made us one. You have broken down the dividing wall of hostility that you might create in yourself one new person instead of two, making peace, reconciling us to each other and to God through the cross where you killed hostility. (2.13-16).
So Trinity’s theme verse is Trinitarian, as every congregation is Trinitarian, “In him [Jesus] you are being built together [work in process] into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2.22).
Lessons from the Last 15 is a series of articles from Pastor Nathan Hoff on the occasion of his 15th year in ministry at Trinity San Pedro.
“It seems like they need me,” I said pretentiously to a dear family I was visiting in the first congregation I served. Just shy of three years at that Call, I broke the news about our upcoming relocation to Southern California. It was the Fall of 2005, and I had recently received and accepted a new Call to Trinity Lutheran in San Pedro, California. How that family managed not to roll their eyes is more impressive as the years go by. I had a lot to learn.
October 31st marked the 15th anniversary of my installation as pastor at Trinity San Pedro. They didn’t “need” me in the way I thought they might need me. They did need the Gospel, and I needed it too—as desperately as anyone else. I still do and they still do. We are a good match.