A Life Worthy of Your Calling

The crucial, introductory “therefore” in verse 1 serves as a pivotal appeal for the church in Ephesus to manifest who God has called them to be.  This therefore serves as a continuation from hymnic praise to exhortation. Before God demanded from us, we were adopted as children, given citizenship in the Kingdom of heaven, and received the first fruits of reconciliation. When new life, obedience, discipline, and suffering are described it is only as a consequence of God’s reconciling grace. The works which we shall describe are of the Holy Spirit and rooted in our relationship with Christ. Our “therefore” here serves as an important reminder that we cannot abstract our loving from the One who first loved us.

This movement requires that our theologies and interpretations of Scripture are not abstracted from our witness and our action. To declare that there is a life worthy of the gospel is to claim that there are lives which are not. As a community, we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, but this work is often difficult to discern. We imagine the world when Christ shall come, but we hold this in tension with our histories and what is present. We look forward to the eschatological unity promised in Jesus and hold this in tension with the Spirit’s work in our communities. A life worthy of the gospel says “yes” to some and “no” to others. There are choices to be made in how we live out our faith, these choices reveal whether we are indeed “rooted and grounded in love” or are not.  

In the past, Christianity has been marked by domination and supremacy. Missionaries converted folks religiously only after they had accepted European culture, its economy, and governing systems. The oneness of faith which this passage testifies was thought to mean assimilation- that we would be the same. And yet, this theology in practice has been shown to have disastrous consequences. Recent discoveries in Canada have brought the issues of assimilation, unity, and domination to the forefront of my own conscience. A few weeks ago, unmarked graves were discovered at a Christian-run residential school that housed indigenous children- children who were taken from their families to be made more “Canadian.” This comes on the back of the discovery of more than 600 unmarked graves and another 215 indigenous bodies found near Cranbrook, British Columbia. It’s believed that the remains are those of people from the bands of the Ktunaxa (k-too-nah-ha) nation, which includes the Lower Kootenay Band (Koot-ah-nee), and other neighboring First Nation communities. These schools which claimed to be in Christ were brutal. Children were punished for speaking their native language. Disease, starvation, and abuse ran rampant. From the 19th century until the 1970’s more than 150,000 indigenous children were forced to attend these state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society.

My heart is broken for the Indigenous tribes who continue to feel the trauma and suffering of these assimilation camps. It pains me that in the name of Jesus, apostles, preachers, and evangelists destroyed the lives of children and families who were different than them. That a people who spoke a different language, looked and dressed differently, and had different customs were seen as a threat to the peace and well-being of their society. As the body of Christ, we should grieve that people like myself stood up in a pulpit for years and said that this behavior was okay, that it was normal, and that it was preferred. Our understanding of Jesus should lead us to live different lives than this.

And this is not only a problem in Canada. We here in the United States have done our best to erase difference amongst us. American Christians believed that they had a manifest destiny to expand throughout the US and Americas. That whatever we did, however we acted were both justified and inevitable in our reaching our destiny. In our own Ravalli County, we have the same episode taking place with the Salishtribe. At St. Mary’s Mission in Stevensville, the Jesuits tried to stamp out Salish traditions that contradicted Catholic teachings. The generational knowledge of Salish medicine men was lost due to Jesuit interference.[1] In 1855, Isaac Stevens, the Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Washington Territory and the namesake of our neighbor to the north, Stevensville, invited Many Horses, head chief of the Bitterroot Salish; No Horses, head chief of the Kalispel; and Michelle, head chief of the Kootenais to a council in present-day Missoula, Montana. The tribal leaders were told that Stevens wanted to talk about a peace treaty. However, the chiefs and headmen were surprised and angered to discover Stevens's primary purpose was to discuss cession of their lands.[2]

The issue was again raised in 1872, when future president of the United States James Garfield attempted the same removal at the behest of then current president Ulysses S. Grant. In 1889 retired General Henry B. Carrington successfully forced the Salish to leave their homeland. The Salish left in order to retain their people and culture. In other words, they left so that they could survive. During their removal in 1891, troops were present in what historians have nicknamed Montana’s Trail of Tears. [3] The expansion of the United States from coast to coast continued at the hands of a church preaching the Lordship of God and the supremacy of their own mission. In our quest to be the city on the hill, we drowned out the voices and experiences of those who had lived in the valley hundreds of years before we ever arrived.

In the past, the filling of the cosmos with domination and exploitation was the prevalent theology, but today in light of this repulsive history we must say “no” to this type of unity. Our goal as the church was to have people come into our building, look like us, talk like us, and then they would be Christians. Assimilation was a virtue and a hope longed for. We have been inundated with the temptation of “speaking” or “doing” “the truth in love.” Using the name of God, love was manifested through domination, exploitation, and our so-called manifest destiny. Innocent indigenous peoples were abused for speaking their own language, for living in their lands, and for the celebration of their own culture. We see from their example that love is not a disposition of the heart which can be perfected in isolation. We see that the so-called “holiest” and “most loving” people did the most unspeakable things. Speaking and doing the truth in love cannot be transported by the vehicle of violence and hatred.

Today we must be different. Our task is to fill the earth with love and proclaim the gospel of peace.[4] Love cannot be abstracted from the One who loves us but is always tangible and realized in relationship with God and one another. Love requires us to not only acknowledge that which has happened, but to be on the side of those who have been harmed. It is always specific, always costly, always a miraculous event. When we speak of Christian unity, one body, one Spirit, and one baptism, we can no longer do so undergirded by the supremacy of one people group, one language, or one nation. The range of diversity in the gifts, talents, and experiences each of us have are but a drop in the bucket of God’s vastness. The goodness of God is manifest in the One who’s grace never runs dry and whose love extends far beyond we can imagine it. This is living in the total reality of God’s own self being “above all and through all and in all.” (v. 6). The reality of God’s presence in our days leads us to take up the Spirit of humility, gentleness, and patience that today’s passage describes.

So what does that mean for us? How are we to lead a life worthy of our calling? The centerpiece of our Christian life always brings us back to God. Rather than a spirit of domination and supremacy, we are to take up a spirit humility, gentleness, and patience. Humility that we do not have THE theology, that we do not necessarily have all the answers or know all there is to know about God. Trust that God has gone before us and is present with us in our midst. Patience that God will make our ways straight and reveal the road ahead. As a church this has the potential to be revolutionary and bold. It gives us the courage to remain in the digital sphere with live-stream services. It gives us the boldness to make visitations with the sick, shut-ins, and our neighbors a weekly rhythm. It underscores the importance of knowing our history so that we might reconcile wrongs and right our future.  The divine origin of our call empowers such a vocation that we would be the church here in Corvallis. That all of us here, the saints, would be emboldened in our joint task to be ambassadors of the gospel of peace. My hope is that our worship and experience of God would be a catalyst to the work we do in our communities in spreading the gospel through our love.

[1] Baumler, Ellen (Spring 2016). "A Cross in the Wilderness: St. Mary's Mission Celebrates 175 Years". Montana The Magazine of Western History. 66 (1): 18–38.

[2] Baumler, "A Cross in the Wilderness, " 18–38.

[3] Flathead Chief Charlo said in 1889, “I will go. I and my children. My young men are becoming bad. They have no place to hunt. My women are hungry. For their sake I will go.” For more on the traumatic upheaval of Indigenous tribes in Montana see “The Removal of the Flathead Indians,” Native American Netroots, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/472. Accessed 7/29/21.

[4] For more on the discourse of filling the earth with love rather than domination see: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Ephesians, ed. Linda M. Maloney and Barbara E. Reid, vol. 50, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017), 59–60.