11 August 2024
A friend of mine told me a couple of weeks ago that they were planning a trip to the Germany to hike in the Bavarian Alps. Now when I picture the German Alps, I picture several things. But near the top of that list is the music I associate with that part of the world, namely yodeling. And I can’t think of German yodeling without remembering one of the funniest comedy sketches I’ve ever seen.
It was the work of a German comedian named Loriot, and it poked fun at the German tendency to involve bureaucracy in just about every area of life, as well as the German need to put an official stamp on everything imaginable. And this sketch involved yodeling. It featured a very humorless instructor teaching an adult education class that would supposedly result in a yodeling license.
The sketch opened with a classroom full of middle-aged students seated at desks, with the instructor dictating the words to a yodel to them slowly and in a monotone. “Holleri du dödl di, diri diri dudl dö.” The obvious joke here is that, of all the types of music I can imagine, yodeling is among the most joyous and free. I might not be fond of it, but I have to admit that it can’t be learned by sitting in a classroom and copying nonsense syllables. But of course, that’s what might happen if you start thinking the government should license yodeling.
The yodel license was heavy on my mind a day or two later when I discovered a new Olympic sport comingr of Paris. It’s called breaking—what we call breakdancing. Since this is a peculiarly American artform, you’d think we would dominate in this sport… but apparently we didn’t take this competition too seriously, because we didn’t exactly send our best breakdancers to Paris. The medalists—at least on the women’s side—came from Japan, Lithuania, and China.
But nobody on social media cared about the medalists. It was the last place breakdancer that broke the internet. She came from Australia. And boy, was she excoriated by everybody who watched the competition. I think of breakdancing as spontaneous and fluid and athletic. But when I watched her performance, it was nothing if not clunky and awkward.
Everybody was asking how she ended up as an Olympic athlete in this new sport, despite being at least ten years older than any of the other competitors. And the answer is that she is a university professor with a Ph.D. in… breakdancing. Just as a yodel license doesn’t necessarily result in a good yodeler, a breakdancing degree doesn’t create a good breakdancer.
Now that we’ve got yodeling and breakdancing out of the way, let’s turn to the scriptures. Paul opened this morning’s reading with a call to honesty. Just as lying to your doctor about your health or denying what’s going on in your own body is a dumb idea, so it is with the church. We’re all members of the same body, so lying to one another or turning a blind eye to something that’s wrong is harmful to the health of the church.
It's into this context that Paul introduces two ideas. The first one deals with anger. Anger is an emotion that was created by God. It has its uses. Anger can help defend the innocent from attack. Anger can help motivate needed change. But Paul doesn’t want the Ephesians to nurse anger. He says, “Be angry and deal with it. Don’t sleep on it and let it grow.” Anger that’s dealt with can create growth. But anger that’s left to fester can destroy.
Edgar Allen Poe once wrote, “That years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.” How often it’s true that in our anger, which is usually based on one event, one word, one situation—usually the most recent one, at that—we can forget all the reasons we have to love, to appreciate, to be grateful. And if we don’t confront our anger—whether we are to blame or the other person is to blame—the love we have can disappear. So don’t sin by letting anger control you, Paul says, and don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry.
And then Paul openly and honestly confronts something that was apparently a problem in the Ephesian church. He calls out dishonesty and tells those who are making a living off hurting others that they need to get a job. I don’t know what he’s talking about here. He might be talking about burglars or shoplifters or pickpockets. Or he might be talking about swindlers or dishonest business-men or -women. But whoever they are or whatever they’re doing, Paul gives a reason for his honest assessment: Other people need you and what you can offer. They don’t need what’s left over from your stealing. They need you at your best, so offer to them the fruits of your honest labor.
And then Paul talks about another mark of discipleship: Kindness. He talks about not using hurtful words, words that curse, words that make others uncomfortable. Living in certain ways brings sorrow to the Spirit of God that dwells within us. And Paul doesn’t explain this by giving a list of Thou Shall Nots. Instead he tells us about the way of life that makes God’s Spirit happy. He tells the Ephesians to treat other with kindness, to have compassion for each other, and finally, to forgive one another. And that Greek word he uses for forgiveness includes grace in its meaning—that is, forgiveness that isn’t earned, that may not be deserved, that may not even be asked for. Forgive each other not according to the human definition of forgiveness that expects something in return, but freely, just as God has forgiven you through Christ.
Paul talks a lot about these things, and not just here in Ephesians Most of his letters seem to contain sections on how followers of Christ should live. And I’m not talking about judgmental attacks on people. I’m talking about simple commonsense kindness. Christians should be known for our kindness, after all. The One we say we follow was, as far as we’re concerned, the kindest man in history. He was kind to just about everybody—family, neighbors, little children, sick people, outcasts, and foreigners. The only times he wasn’t kind were when he came up against hypocrites and those who would turn the house of God into a den of thieves. But even then, he didn’t stay mad; he didn’t let the sun go down on his anger.
But I think there are a lot of people who do not perceive Christians as particularly kind. More and more, people see us as judgmental and arrogant and sometimes even dishonest. The Bible that we believe in is more about love than anything else. But the Bible people hear about seems to have cut out the love and left the vengeance.
But over and over again, Paul says in his letters to remember this rule or that doctrine, but live the love of God and practice the kindness of Christ. Because, you know what? a Christian that just memorizes a bunch of verses so that they can use the Bible as a weapon against those they disagree with is a questionable Christian. Christianity with a Bible but no kindness is like a middle-aged businessman with a license to yodel or a professor with a breakdancing degree. It’s talking the talk without walking the walk.
Each of us is created in God’s image. And for believers, the image that we reflect shows people the God we believe in. Do we reflect mean-spiritedness or kindness, judgment or forgiveness? There are stories about all those things in the Bible, so we have a choice. And in Ephesians 4, as he does elsewhere, Paul tells us to choose kindness and forgiveness.
This doesn’t always come naturally to us. In fact, the image of God in which we were created has been marred in all of us; we have forgotten what God looks like. But Christ showed that God’s image isn’t a thing to look, but a way to act. And to be a disciple is not knowing some rules, or thinking that a perfect belief system is the be-all-and-end-all of Christianity. No, to follow Christ means to grow into what we were always supposed to be. And the more we act like the Jesus we read about in the gospels, the more we reflect God’s image into the world.
The classroom won’t make you a yodeler, nor will a degree make you a breakdancer. We become by doing, and we grow by acting on the thing we want to become. And so practice the kindness of God and you will grow into the image that you were intended to reflect all along. In the words of Paul therefore, (Ephesians 5:1-2), be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
—©2024 Sam Greening
