Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
14^th of July, 2024

Ephesians 1:3-14

I am sorry. I must confess that this week I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. In the ‘Ordination Charge’ that the Presbytery gives to Uniting Church ministers before we are ordained one instruction is: ‘Learning from the Confessional Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia, you will diligently teach Christ’s people, reminding them of the centrality of the person and work of Jesus Christ and the grace which justifies them through faith.’ The Basis of Union lists the ‘Confessional Documents of the Uniting Church’ as the Scots Confession of Faith (1560), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the Savoy Declaration (1658), and John Wesley’s Forty-Four Sermons (1793). I may do my job by diligently reminding you of ‘the centrality of the person and work of Jesus Christ,’ but I very seldom do so after reading any of the Confessional Documents. This week, given today’s passage from the Letter to the Ephesians, I decided that I should spend some time with them.

Throughout this service, I have referred to the Letter to the Ephesians as written by Paul, but commentators agree that it is unlikely that the letter was written by the Apostle himself. This is probably a letter from a follower of Paul seeking to sum up his teaching and apply it after his death. Because of the three-year lectionary cycle, we read this letter every time the National Assembly of the Uniting Church meets, which I have always found helpful because its central theme is church unity. The author of the letter reminds members of the church that Christ has united Jews and Gentiles, breaking down the dividing wall between them. Whenever decisions of the Assembly have threatened to split the Uniting Church, this letter has reminded members of the Uniting Church of our unity in Christ.

Today’s passage is not about this unity, but about the grace God has lavished on the Ephesians. It also tells the Ephesians that God has chosen them, which is why I read it together with the Westminster Confession and one of Wesley’s sermons. The author writes that the Ephesians were destined to become the adopted children of God and to obtain an inheritance in Christ before they were born. This sounds like what some of the ‘Confessional Documents of the Uniting Church’ refer to as ‘predestination’. Before we were born, before the very foundation of the world, God had already planned for us to be holy and blameless before him in love. That is wonderful for the Ephesians, who are being reassured in this letter that they have been chosen. But has everyone been chosen?

Not according to the Westminster Confession of 1647! It says:

By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death … Those of mankind that are predestined unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, has chosen, in Christ, unto everlasting glory … The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extends or withholds mercy, as He pleases, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.[1]

I do not know about you, but that does not sound like ‘glorious justice’ to me.

It did not sound like ‘glorious justice’ to John Wesley, either. He had a sermon, titled ‘Free Grace,’ in which he condemned predestination, arguing that what those who believed in it were saying was that:

The greater part of [humanity] God hath ordained to death … Them God hates; and, therefore, before they were born, decreed they should die eternally … Call it therefore by whatever name you please, election, preterition, predestination, or reprobation, it comes in the end to the same thing. The sense of all is plainly this: by virtue of an eternal, unchangeable, irresistible decree of God, one part of mankind are infallibly saved, and the rest infallibly damned; it being impossible that any of the former should be damned, or that any of the latter should be saved.[2]

On the contrary, says Wesley; humanity has the choice between everlasting life and everlasting death. ‘The soul that chooses life shall live, as the soul that chooses death shall die’.

Was Wesley right? Or were the authors of the Westminster Confession? When the author of the Letter to the Ephesians says that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love, is that the sort of predestination the authors of the Westminster Confession talk about? Or do we, as Wesley says, still have a choice between life and death?

It may not surprise you to learn that my answer is: both; neither; it does not matter. The authors of the Westminster Confession were right to emphasise that we are the recipients of God’s free grace. Today’s passage can be confusing because the author is piling up clause after clause, description after description, of God’s blessings, of God’s good pleasure, of God’s glorious grace, of God’s wisdom and insight, of the mystery of God’s will. But the message to the Ephesians, and to us, in all these phrases is that they are loved, adopted, chosen by God. If they ever worry that they might be failures, rejected, guilty, they are being told instead that they are blessed, chosen, beloved, because that is who God has always intended them to be. The same is true of us. There is nothing we need to do to earn God’s grace. For God’s eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of God’s will, God has chosen to give it to us.

But of course Wesley is right to reject the idea that anyone is ‘infallibly damned’. That God has chosen us does not mean that there are others God has not chosen. The author of this letter says that God ‘has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’. This takes me back to my dearly loved Julian of Norwich, and her concern that while the Church had taught her that there were some people who ‘shall be condemned everlastingly to hell,’[3] she saw no hell in her visions. Instead, as I have quoted to you so many times before, Jesus told Julian, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’.[4] When Julian asked how all things could be well if some people were condemned everlastingly to hell, she ‘received no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: “What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all things well.”’[5]

The Showings of Julian of Norwich are not among the Confessional Documents from which I, as a Uniting Church minister, am charged to learn, but the reassurance she received, that God would make all things well, chimes with the reassurance of the author of the Letter to the Ephesians that God’s ultimate purpose is to gather all things to him. Both Julian and the author of the Letter also agree that it is through the person and work of Jesus Christ that God’s will is being done. We have been blessed in Christ, chosen in Christ, adopted through Christ, obtained an inheritance in Christ, and set our hope on Christ. However God will gather others to Godself, we have become God’s own people through our relationship with Christ. ‘God destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.’ Regardless of all the arguments between Reformers, that is the truth to which we cling, and the reason that we know that ultimately ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’. Amen.

[1] Westminster Confession, Chapter 3, paragraphs III, V, VII.

[2] Sermon 128, ‘Free Grace’.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 86, chapter 32.

[4] Revelations, p. 79, chapter 27.

[5] Revelations, p. 86, chapter 32.