Ephesians 3:1-12
January 11, 2025
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, Oakland, CA
Waiting another year for Christmas is 365 days away but in the church calendar, we are fortunate to have Epiphany! Besides the repetitiveness of the jingle, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Epiphany is the 12th day after the birth of Christ when we recall the Magi or the Wise Men who traveled from the east to see the Baby Jesus. Technically, Epiphany Day was on January 6th this past Tuesday.
Since I didn’t want Christmas to end so quickly, our family started to celebrate Epiphany especially after we decided to alternate annually to celebrate these winter holidays in California with our daughter and her family and North Carolina with our son and his family. For your information, this year it was Thanksgiving in California and Christmas in North Carolina.
We celebrate Epiphany by baking a Three Kings Cake and baked inside traditionally is a ceramic Baby Jesus. I put in an almond because of nut allergies. The hidden Baby Jesus or almond is symbolic that Jesus went into hiding because of Herod. The Magi or Wise Men who came from the East and therefore, not Jewish or even from the Middle East symbolize that in the birth of Christ, the Good News of a Savior is for all people in the world.
We do a white elephant gift exchange to symbolize the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. We eat the entire one-layer Three Kings Cake in order to find the almond. Whoever gets it, is crowned king or queen for the year! But with 3 grandkids in this household, we have 3 crowns for them! For some mysterious reason, none of the adults seem to ever get the almond! It’s one of those Christmas miracles!
Jesus was still coming into the world 12 days after Christmas!
Paul, the Prisoner
The Epiphany of the Lord is made possible because of God’s self-disclosure. God discloses or reveals God’s self to us is an expression of love and mercy. Epiphany is an awakening to the life of Jesus Christ and transform individual lives as well as transform the entire world.
While Paul was a prisoner of Caesar given the large-scale Roman persecution of the day, Paul describes himself as a prisoner of Jesus Christ. While Paul was chained in prison by the Romans, Paul proclaimed that he was linked in an unbreakable chain to Jesus Christ. The passionate identification with Christ even under persecution is what Paul is saying to us as disciples of Christ at Lakeshore and for future generations to come.
Paul reminds believers that this Epiphany when God discloses God’s self in Jesus Christ is God’s grace, not to be taken lightly or for granted, not to be sold or traded, is freely given and comes from God’s abundant love.
Therefore, we who are heirs to Christ, receivers of God’s abundant love are called to share this love with others, just as God’s love in the Birth of Jesus and the arrival of the Magi are evidence of God’s love for all human life.
Hearing a Call
To the Ephesians, Paul points to his own autobiography to support the mystery of God’s grace at work. Paul recognizes that his life reflects someone actually least worthy of the calling that he represents. He testifies, “Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of God’s power.” (3:7)
How many of you made New Year resolutions 11 days ago and have already broken them? God’s abundant love for you means that your failure to keep your resolutions is okay. It’s God’s grace. We all have stories that reveal how God has been gracious to us time and time again. When God is gracious to the Apostle Paul who is the “least of the saints,” God is gracious to you too.
One time when I was attending a BYF state convention in Massachusetts, we were at a new Catholic girls’ high school auditorium. When the Baptist ministers were celebrating Communion, they made the point that before this school was opened for Catholic students to use it, the school administrators permitted the Baptist youth to use it first! I was so touched by this ecumenical gesture that I experienced the Holy Spirit upon me.
I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the fact that Protestants and Catholics were historically at odds in my growing up years were now civil to each other. Maybe as a youth, I became aware of the oneness in Christ while we seem to meet in different sanctuaries and practice different liturgies. Maybe it was God calling me to capture a vision like that of Peter when Christ told him that nothing is profane but everything and everyone is welcomed and blessed by God’s extravagant love and grace.
When I finished seminary in 1975, I thought that a little church in the suburbs of Boston would be where I cut my first teeth in ministry, but God called me to San Francisco. Before I got too settled, God called again and we relocated across the country to be in Valley Forge where I further understood the Bible by being a curriculum editor. While two decades of mowing grass led me to believe that Chester County would be my sunset years, God called again. Leaving our snow shovels and lawn mower to the new homeowner, we made the Bay Area our place from which to see the world by. And as I mentioned before, God disrupted my retired life to come to Lakeshore. And if I ever think that God’s is finished with me, I would be speaking prematurely!
Like Paul, I feel that I am unworthy to be called by God to serve. But like Paul, I am serving humbly and faithfully. How is God calling you to serve?
What is your story of God’s abundant love and grace freely given to you? And consequently, you are no longer chained to temporary and earthy idols but like Paul linked with unbreakable chains with Christ himself.
LABC Church
In our text today, Paul in verse 9-10 says, “I am to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
It is through the church that “the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.” (v. 10) It is not any single church; not just Lakeshore; not a single denomination, not a single branch of Christianity—that reveals the wisdom of God in all of its variety. It is the whole church throughout time and place, with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone, that makes it known.
It is the whole church, knit together as one body, the body of Christ. It is the whole of the church, in Word and Ordinances, Scripture and tradition, in historic texts and voices from the pew, that makes known the wisdom of God, the mystery of Christ, the One for all, known to all.
No one part of the body has this commission alone; no one branch, denomination, in any century, has figured it out. Therefore, we need everyone’s wisdom to keep us all from going astray.
When Lakeshore was disfellowshipped, you needed other churches to remain balanced and to participate in the whole. You became a part of ABC of Metro-New York and now with Evergreen Baptist Association.
Maybe what I experienced at this Catholic high school that day was God’s way of telling me that we need all branches of Christianity to have the wisdom of God to become witnesses of God’s abundant love and grace in the world.
Our call is not just limited to Gentiles and LABC Christians like us in our time and space, but to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” These are the beings and forces that are beyond our neighborhood and those who are in-between and everywhere. Just as God is boundless, so is our call to God’s people.
The halls of government, the malls of shopping, the squares of towns and cities, the auditoriums of schools, the boardrooms of Fortune 500s, and the kitchens in our homes—all of these are places and contexts for the wisdom of God to be revealed in Jesus Christ to be made manifest.
Annual Meeting
In two weeks will be our church’s Annual Meeting. Like Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, you too will be making everyone see what has happened in the past year in your reports. The good news of the boundless riches of Christ will be revealed in the programs and projects that took place in 2025. No longer hidden in mystery, Lakeshore having received the wisdom of God with its rich variety of its church members and friends are now ready and prepared to confront today’s rulers and authorities.
Unlike corporations who scheduled annual meetings to report profits and losses, although we will do some of that to be fully transparent with our resources, the church’s annual meeting is to rededicate ourselves for the work that is still ahead.
We are not meagerly equipped. We don’t need to dream about what it was like in the past because yesterday was yesterday and today is indeed today. What is Lakeshore today in God’s wisdom? Where is God calling Lakeshore to go like the Magi traveled to see the Christ Child? What epiphanies are being revealed to you and us that are calling us in new directions?
Bold and Confident
In 2 weeks from now, we have scheduled the Great Purge on Jan. 24th! I have asked you to begin cleaning out, sorting out, and hopefully throwing out. The staff has assigned certain rooms in our 5-building campus to certain leaders to be primarily responsible to purge. We’ll need to begin staging the things next weekend so that we would be ready to move things onto the sidewalk on Jan. 24th. There are things that are quite heavy and large so we’ll need some of the more able bodies to do some heavy lifting.
And I suspect that there will be comments like, “Not that, we may need it later!” or “That was used 10 years ago and we might need it again!” or “That belongs to that person, but the person is no longer here!”
There will be many reasons to resist purging like how Paul said that he was in prison, most likely “chained to the wall.” Are we chained to these old things that might symbolize how we are holding on to the past that we are yet to be able to see our future?
My message to you is strong stuff. The gospel message is not just limited to a personal relationship with the Lord. My message has something for us to do as a church. The church is the primary part of God’s plan. If God is going to do anything in the world, God would most likely do it through the church. Imagine God doing a new thing at Lakeshore, having purged from old things and ready to hear God in our church.
Umbrellas and Fans
There was a poor widow who had two sons. Every day, she fretted and worried about her sons’ businesses. One son sold umbrellas. So, the mother would wake up in the morning to see if it would rain since then her son will sell some umbrellas. The other son sold fans. So, every day the mother would wake up to see if it may be sunny so this son will sell some fans.
No matter what the weather was, this poor widow had something to fret about. If the sun was shining, she felt terrible because nobody would buy her son’s umbrellas. If the sun was not shining and it was cloudy, she also felt terrible, because nobody would buy her son’s fans. With such an attitude she was bound to lose.
One day, she ran into a friend who said, “Why do you fret when there’s no way you can lose. If the sun is shining, people will buy fans; if it rains, they’ll buy umbrellas. You cannot lose.” With that simple observation, the woman was happy for the rest of her life.
Lakeshore cannot lose with its rich diversity, loving inclusiveness, daring witness, and deep faithfulness. God is empowering us with “boldness and confidence” to become God’s dwelling place and God’s instrument in the world. We can sell both umbrellas and fans.
With boldness and confidence, Lakeshore is assured of the call, assured of the light, assured of the life that is ours in Christ, we accept the commission to make known the light and that life in Christ, that forgiveness, healing, and compassion to all those who come our way and for us to go out to the corners of the earth.
Let us pray.
O God, make your Epiphany presence upon us to be real and empowering. Invite us to hear your calling to proclaim Good News. Help us to celebrate and remember our past so that we may turn toward the future in boldness, and confidently believe that you are with us today and tomorrow as you have been in the past 160 years of Lakeshore’s faithful ministry. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.
Benediction
To the least of God’s saint, grace is given.
Our faith in Christ gives us access to God.
Go forth in boldness and confidence.
God’s work of justice is our work. Go in peace.