Mostly Dead and All Dead

Mostly Dead and All Dead—April 23, 2019

“You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.” [Ephesians 2:1-2]

Dead is a strong word. 

It is, like a handful of other words in this life—words like promise, never, always, hopeless, or love—not to be misused, spoken lightly, or ignored.  Do not use the word dead unless you mean, all the way, completely, no fakin’, no mistakin’, dead.

“Sick,” you can throw around willy-nilly—it will work for a case of the sniffles or terminal cancer.  “Weak,” you can apply to a wide variety of people or things.  Even “sinking” and “fading” and “drowning” leave a little ambiguity—the swimmer might just get a second wind and pull himself to shore or grab hold of the life-preserver floating beside him.

But dead allows no such wiggle room.  In the words of The Princess Bride’s Miracle Max, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.”  Dead means the door is closed, no foot in the way.  Dead means the deceased cannot do anything anymore for him or herself—not watering the petunias, not folding the laundry, not breathing on your own, and not even reaching for a rope that’s thrown to you.

Now, this might seem to be belaboring a point, but I want us to be clear about the way that Ephesians describes our condition before God got a hold of us.  Paul doesn’t say that we were sick in our sins, but could conceivably get better on our own with enough bed-rest and spiritual orange-juice.  Paul doesn’t say we were merely weak and just needed some spiritual muscle-building in order to become strong enough to pull ourselves up to God like a chin-up bar.  Paul doesn’t say we were just stuck in the road and needing a kick-start.  And you know what—Paul doesn’t even say that we are like a drowning man in the water who reaches out to grab a life-preserver to be rescued. 

Paul says we were dead.

In other words, on our own, we couldn’t grab the life-preserver.  On our own, we couldn’t accept the offer of a free gift of help.  On our own, we couldn’t reach out and ask Jesus for help.  Dead people can’t ask or accept or reach.

This is an uncomfortable truth for us, because we don’t like hearing the idea that we didn’t have something to do with our salvation.  We like to think that we had to bring something to the table to make it happen.  We tell ourselves (and often, religious people tell others, thinking this is the “good news”) that you have to do something to kick-start God’s involvement in our lives—e.g., we pray the right prayer first, we invite Jesus into our hearts first, we clean our lives up first, or we achieve a certain level of moral behavior first.  And so we imagine that in the story of salvation, we are swimmers sinking in the sea, who at least were smart enough to shout for help to Jesus at the wheel of his rescue ship and grab a hold of the life-preserver he throws us. We would like to think that God awards us this thing called salvation on the basis of our having done, or at least decided, something for our part that leads God to save us.

But that’s not what dead people do.  Dead people can’t grab a life-preserver.  They can’t even ask for it. 

Paul pushes the point this far, insisting that we are not merely sick in sin or drowning in sin, but that we were dead in our sins.  And Paul does that to make it clear just how amazing grace really is.  We didn’t do a thing to get this gift called salvation.  We certainly didn’t swim to shore ourselves, and we didn’t even get a hold of a life-preserver.  We were dead in the water, and God scooped us up and resuscitated us.  God didn’t wait around for us to get it figured out first.  God didn’t wait for us to be able to diagram it or explain it. God didn’t wait for us to ask for the help first, either.  God did for us the only thing God can do with a dead person—God raised us.

It is scary to hear all of this, because it reminds us that we are not in control of this thing called grace. We can’t command it.  We can’t limit it.  We can’t say it has expired.  We can’t set up fake hurdles for other people to jump first in order to be eligible for it.  And we can’t imagine that we have earned it by our own good deeds, pious devotion, winning smiles, or charming personalities.  To hear today’s verses from Ephesians rightly means that we come face to face with the fact that we bring nothing to the table that we could use to earn or buy or win God’s saving, but only our deadness.

Robert Farrar Capon puts it this way, with his usual provocative clarity:  “Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to reform the reformable, not to improve the improvable... As long as you're struggling like the Pharisee to be alive in your own eyes -- and to the precise degree that your struggles are for what is holy, just and good -- you will resent the apparent indifference to your pains that God shows in making the effortlessness of death the touchstone of your justification. Only when you're finally able, with the publican, to admit that you're dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.” 

So, if somebody religious ever asks you, the way certain religious somebodies do, “If you were to die tonight and to stand before the judgment seat of God, and he asked you, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’, what would you say?” the answer cannot be, “Because I grabbed the life-preserver God threw me after I asked.”  And it cannot be, “Because I was bright enough to invite Jesus into my heart,” either.

Paul says we were dead.  And as the saying goes, dead men tell no tales… because dead men don’t do anything.  All they can do is be raised.  All Lazarus can do is receive resurrection. All you and I bring to the table with God is our spiritual deadness.  And what God brings to the table—despite our love for control and the illusion of earning—what God brings to the table for each of us, is everything.

What we need is more than a spiritual vitamin, a recitation of rules, or a handful of helpful life-principles from Jesus-as-life-coach.  What we need is nothing short of resurrection.

And that is precisely what we have been given--we who once were dead, have been brought to life again by God, just as the dead body of Jesus was raised and lives forever now.

Let that sink in today, and see if you don’t break into praise and thanks.

Lord God, raise up what is dead in us, and enable us to let go of control so that we can recognize you have saved us without our earning it.