Back in seminary, if you had told me I would turn to the epistles of the New Testament for preaching material as often as I do, I would have probably laughed and said something clever like "yeah, right." I knew I was going to do a Romans series as soon as I had the chance, and I did exactly that. (It starts with this sermon and goes forward for a few months, by the time all is said and done.) I figured 1 Corinthians 13 would happen eventually, and there were a few other spots here and there that would happen.
It wasn't something I figured would happen all that often, though. I certainly didn't expect to preach from the epistles more often than from the Old Testament, for example, with all the good stories from Genesis to work from. I still tend to stick to the gospels as first choice, for the most part, but darned if the epistles don't turn up and grab my attention more often than I'd ever have planned.
And I certainly didn't expect to preach much at all from what are sometimes called the "deutero-Pauline" epistles. These are the letters which have Paul's name attached to them (sometimes quite loudly) but do not really appear to have been written or dictated or anything by Paul himself. Sometimes it's the subject matter, something that clearly wasn't an issue in Paul's time (imagine reading what purports to be a letter by Abraham Lincoln that somehow discuss the Spanish-American War). Sometimes it's the writing style; imagine you were reading something by C.S. Lewis and suddenly coming upon a passage by Ernest Hemingway that someone had snuck into your reading material unawares. And sometimes the book just flat says things that Paul wouldn't have said.
Frankly, I just didn't want to deal with the fuss. I didn't want to deal with explaining biblical ghostwriting, or how sticking a bigger name on what you've written didn't carry the stigma of violation that it would today. (I am mindful of how many pieces of music of the late 18th century got passed off as having been composed by Haydn simply to sell more copies.) I certainly didn't want to deal with the not-very-Paul-like things those epistles say.
Perhaps chief of all of these was the epistle given the name "Ephesians." Even that title is a little hinky; most of the earliest manuscripts don't have that inscription "at Ephesus" in the greeting, suggesting at minimum that this was probably a circular letter with no particular congregation as its target. The extremely general nature of the letter's content also lends to this doubt; the way Paul is described in his farewell to the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20 stands in blazing contrast to the utterly impersonal nature of this letter.
And no, I really didn't want even to come near the household codes of Ephesians 5-6. Greco-Roman boilerplate social mores, dressed up with some attempted churchy talk, that has become the basis for centuries of oppressive mumbo-jumbo about "biblical womanhood" and the whole business of "complementarianism" that shackles evangelicalism to some decidedly unchristlike standards of behavior and doctrine? Miss me with that, hard.
And yet, this morning, I just preached my third sermon from Ephesians based on this year's cycle in the Revised Common Lectionary. I'll preach from the book for the four further weeks as the lectionary offers. And then, when the lectionary's offered cycle is completed, I'll go back and slip in one more sermon based on the book, dealing with exactly those Greco-Roman household codes and what we Christ-followers nowadays should actually take from their presence in the New Testament.
If I were in an evangelical church I'd get fired for sure. Even in my mainline church I might be in danger. But, unless God slaps me around a bit and says "child, what is with you?", that's how August is going to go.
If I had never come off this, I'd have missed out on that giddy opening of the letter, one of the best run-on sentences in scripture (it really is all one sentence in Greek), a big exuberant blessing that doesn't know when to stop. I'd have missed on today's reading, a benediction on the letter's readers that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of Christ's love and leaves us gobsmacked. I'd have missed on chapter four's gifts for building up the body of Christ, chapter five's mini-echo of Colossians 3:16, and the chance to break down chapter six's "armor of God" passage. All of that would have been a shame.
So Ephesians it is, ugliness and all. I suppose there's a point in all this. Maybe "never say never"? Or maybe it's something related to that increasingly famous prayer of Thomas Merton, the one that starts "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going...". Or maybe I'm just getting to the end of my tether.
Whatever may be the case, the quote that actually sticks in my brain at this point actually comes from Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring:
The road goes evern on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it meets some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
And so the fool's errand goes.
