Been following women’s golf lately? You don’t know what you’re missing if you think golf is all Tiger all the time. Some great stories on the ladies’ side. Like Annika Sorenstam playing with the boys at Colonial and showing she’s got game. You can be a curmudgeon about an all-men’s tour if you want, just as you can defend the right to have all men’s golf clubs, but there’s something in the human spirit that can’t help cheering when these walls are breached. Robert Frost’s words in “Mending Wall” come to mind: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall; that wants it down.

But did you catch the U. S. Women’s Open last week? Annika missed the playoff by one stroke by bogeying the last hole. And on the final hole of the playoff the next day, Hilary Lunke won the title with a 15-foot birdie.  Hilary who? Hilary came out of nowhere to get into the tournament. She had to qualify at sectionals and then regionals just to make it in, because this is no invitational tournament, it is an open — which means anyone with a low enough handicap and high enough gumption is welcome if they can shoot the scores. She did. She beat all the big names and even the seven teenagers in the field, like 13-year-old Wunderkind Michelle Wie, who is six feet tall, drives the ball 300 yards, and just won the U.S. Public Links tournament. Lunke hits it short, has never won on tour, and is the Open champion. Three cheers.

We’re starting seven weeks of sermons today out of Ephesians. Ephesians is unlike most of Paul’s letters. The earliest manuscripts don’t contain the word “to the Ephesians”; it is just addressed to faithful Christians. That, coupled with the fact that the subject matter doesn’t get specific about issues in one particular church, makes us think it might have been a letter summarizing Paul’s thoughts that also appear elsewhere in his writing. It might have been a cover letter to his other letters that could have been bound together with it and then circulated among various churches. So what we have here are some of the most important things for the church then and now to remember.  And we begin with his crucial point about the nature of the church — that it is a community of people, Jews and Gentiles both, which is called into being by God for a special purpose.  The church is a chosen community, in other words. But its chosenness is more like the open format of golf than the elitism of special invitationals.

We begin with the privilege of it all that includes all of us and is open to all of us. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing …, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. … He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will. Right at the first Paul lays out the secret of God’s plan in history that is now revealed in Christ. It is a plan to gather up all people and things in Christ. This is the good news, the gospel of God that we live by but somehow distort time and time again.

The privilege of our chosenness is that God has established a ground for our salvation in God’s own good pleasure and not in our good bloodline or good achievement. God’s choice of us is wide, not narrow; it is a choice for all of us, not for some of us. The idea that God chose us from before the foundation of the world means that we were all of us made in love and for love, regardless of the circumstances of our birth. We didn’t even have a chance to earn it or mess it up, since God decided on our blessing from the beginning. Paul says that we are all chosen and blessed in the beloved one himself — Jesus Christ. This Christ was not a Jesus-come-lately; he was the Son of God through whom all things came into being and through whom all things are being redeemed. So let me say this loud and clear for all of you who are always trying to figure out how you might be excluded from God’s love: God has chosen you along with everyone else ever made.  You are loved and accepted in Christ.  Period. And that will never change.

Of course, since the beginning of time some people have also been trying to figure how other people can be excluded. They divide up the world and make differences between people they claim are really rooted in God. 

Race is one way this has been done.  The idea that biological differences among peoples bear any resemblance to God’s chosenness is perfect nonsense and more than mischief: It is a wickedness that only the Devil himself could inspire. Bryan Sykes is an Oxford geneticist and author who puts the science bluntly: There’s no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all.  [Quoted in “Is Race Real?” by Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times (July 11, 2003).]  When you trace the genetic markings of any living human being, you might wish, as I do, to find a Scottish gene or an Italian gene, but no such luck. If you go back far enough, you find we all go back to a very few common ancestors in Africa. Although there are some genetic traits that show up in various groups, like sickle cell in Africans or Tay-Sachs in Jews, even these, like skin color and facial features, are the product of environmental adaptation over millions of years. The time is past for us to put away pernicious notions of superiority or inferiority based on race. Race is a social invention, a human contrivance, nothing more. And it is spiritually sinful. God has elected everyone — red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.  Christ died for everyone — every color every race, all are covered by God’s grace. So no more of this secret wisdom that light- colored people are closer to the image of God. It is death-dealing foolishness, not life-giving wisdom.

While we’re at it, a word about ethnicity. Ethnic groups are real, but they are the product of migrations and disease survival of peoples over time that have developed into traditions and cultures with distinct language, art, religion, and the way you cook your pot roast. In that case, viva la difference. N’est-ce pas? (N’est-ce pas is sort of a don’t you know, don’t you know?!)  Here again, differences among ethnic groups cannot be traced back to God’s preference for one people over another, as if God has chosen one group for salvation over another.

This includes the matter of Jews and Gentiles. Jews came first to the truth of their election, but like us, they have struggled with the question of chosenness. If everyone is chosen, then what’s so special about that? When Gentiles became dominant in the church, we sought ways to limit salvation by saying that when Paul speaks of God choosing us before the foundation of the world, he means US: God chose only the church, the ones who would eventually be saved.  God did not choose everyone, only those that would accept Jesus and thereby be “in Christ.” This was Augustine’s view, and the reformer, John Calvin, took a dastardly turn, saying that God not only chose some of us to be saved but also some of us to be damned. That way we can explain why some people accept Christ and some reject him, while not allowing for it be based upon human choice, which would make salvation depend upon us and not God. It’s all God’s fault! I think Paul would bristle at that. Everything about his passage celebrates the inclusion of all humanity, indeed all creation, in Christ. No one and no thing are excluded. That doesn’t say that some people can’t go to hell if they insist upon it, but we cannot root that loss in the God whose good pleasure is to save us all.

So we need to stop dividing the world up into those who are part of Christ and apart from Christ as if we know who they are, when all are elected in Christ. We who know and celebrate our chosenness in Christ are not in the business of sorting out the good and evil, the saved and the lost; we are in the business of proclaiming the good news in word and deed and calling every person to accept their acceptance in Christ. The poet Edwin Markham penned a little quip he entitled “Outwitted,” that sums up well both God’s work and ours: He drew a circle that shut me out—/ Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout./But Love and I had the wit to win:/We drew a circle that took him in!

When we try to turn privilege into an exclusive club, we are grave peril of working against the love of God.  Which gets to the matter of Jews and Gentiles. Paul says that although God chose Jews initially to bear the light of God to the nations of the word, although God has been unfolding the truth over time through a select people, the point is not to say that God has loved one people more than any other or drawn a circle to keep people out. On the contrary, God has been trying to explore every effort in the world to do just that. The Jews were first to receive this good news, and in the coming of Jesus the Jew as the Christ it becomes clearer what God was always up to. Now Gentiles too are invited into the chosen community, not because God wanted to save a few of us along with the Jews, not to privilege a few more who would get to heaven by accepting Jesus, since they weren’t born into it like the Jews. No, there is a deeper purpose to this chosenness, and it has less to do with salvation than mission, less to do with privilege than purpose.

God adopts us in Christ, Paul says, in order that we might live to the praise of God’s glory. Not that we may call attention to ourselves, but that we might call the attention of the world to God. We exist as a chosen to community — the church — to tell the world that still does not yet know it belongs to God that it belongs to God. We are there to announce the grace of God and the blessings of God in Christ and to invite them to join us in serving and praising this God.

In ancient Rome an emperor would set up statues of himself all over his empire, small images of his eminence. It was not just a matter of his self-praise; it was a practical matter of reminding his subjects that although they do not see him in person in all the far-flung parts of the empire, yet still when they look upon his likeness they are reminded that he is their king. Likewise, the church is a visible reminder of God in the world. Though the world does not see God, when it sees the church, it is reminded that everyone and everything belongs to the reign of God. [Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology:Vol. 1 (Oliver & Boyd, 1962), p. 146.]

Robert Fulghum reminds us of a haunting image in his book Maybe (Maybe Not). [Villard/ Random, 1993.] In 1992 The New York Times Magazine carried a photograph of a middle-aged man with long hair and bushy mustache, dressed in formal wear, sitting in a café in the middle of a bombed-out area in war-torn Sarajevo. For twenty-two days this man sat there, playing his cello the way he had once done for the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra. With Serbian bombs going off all round him, he played over and over Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. This sad piece was constructed from a fragment of a manuscript found in the ruins of the death camp at Dresden, where many Jews lost their lives in the gas chambers, during another time of genocide billed as ethnic cleansing.  This man knew he could not stop the killing by himself, but he could do something. His tribute was a claiming of beauty in the midst of ugliness, goodness in the face of evil, and truth against the lies of narrow chosenness.  It was also a sign of God in the world, a reminder of the God who reigns and will gather all things together in Christ, no matter the rubble we make of things or our lives.

This is our purpose as a chosen community: to be reminders of God in the world by being little images everywhere that bear the likeness of Christ our king.