EPHESUS: LESSONS FROM THE PAST AND STRATEGIC PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE (Acts. 19: 23-41, (4th in the Series -- The Steps of St. Paul) 8/11/13 The Rev. Dr. Robert Gustafson Two hundred miles straight east from Athens across the Aegean Sea lies the renowned ancient metropolis of Ephesus, Turkey. Not surprising that St. Paul intentionally developed his long-range strategic plan to include Ephesus. We can clearly see the careful, deliberative, detailed planning that went into selecting his destinations and his style of ministry. Consider these features that influenced Paul’s planning process on this leg of his journey: Ephesus was the market of Asia Minor. Trade followed the river valleys in Paul’s day, as it has for most of history. Ephesus stood at the mouth of the Cayster River and therefore was the entrance to the richest interior in Asia Minor. She was known as the “The Treasure House of Asia.” Commenting on the wonders of ancient Ephesus, one world traveler remarked: “It doesn’t seem possible that such noble elegance existed so long before our technical skills provided mechanical know how.” (L. Hanson, personal friend.) Furthermore, Ephesus was an Assize Town, meaning that at certain specific times the Roman governor came there, and all great cases of justice were tried. Ephesus knew the pomp, the color, and the pageantry of Roman power and Roman justice. Ephesus was also the seat of the Pan-Ionian Games. The whole country came to these games. To be chair of the games, responsible for their organization and their running, was a coveted honor, roughly like the Head of modern day International Olympics. On the downside, ironically, Ephesus was the home of criminals. The local pagan Temple possessed the right of asylum. We know this concept in the Old Testament as the right of “sanctuary.” If any criminal could reach the area round the temple he or she was safe. As a result, Ephesus had become the home of cutthroats and swindlers, law-breakers, and all sorts of criminals in the ancient world. In addition, Ephesus was a center of pagan superstition, famous for charms and spells. “Ephesian Scripts” were magical scrolls containing spells; pure gibberish, a rigmarole of words and names considered to be unusually potent, arranged sometimes in patterns which were part of the essence of the spell. They brought high prices to the lucky seller. The Scripts were guaranteed—or so many believed—to bring safety on a journey, to bring children to the childless, to bring success in love or in business. From all over people came to Ephesus to buy these magic parchments, which were worn as amulets and charms. We can easily see how Paul faced immediate and stiff competition from the purveyors of these scrolls.

Nothing new in that. The gospel always faces competition of one kind or another. A ton of money and notoriety is made from people’s superstitions, their pastimes, their wild-eyed wants, their addictions, and even their legitimate, deeper aspirations. Sellers in the media in our time, and at popular tourist spots, hustle all kinds of schemes, promises, and wares with the underlying goal to lighten our wallets and thin our purses. “There’s a sucker born every minute” is P.T. Barnum’s famous saying. We can’t eliminate the competition, legitimate or bogus, anymore than we can reimpose the now defunct blue laws that privileged Sunday for Christians and made it easier to fill Sunday school classes and worship services. Like Paul, we’ve simply got to devise new strategies to stay in the game. The greatest glory—the epitome of ancient Ephesus’ claim to fame and fortune— was the Temple of the Greek goddess Artemis, known as Diana to the Romans. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, 425 feet long by 220 feet wide by 60 feet high. 127 pillars, each of them the gift of a king, and all glittering marble, 36 of them beautifully gilded and inlaid. The great altar had been carved by the greatest of all Greek sculptors. And the image of Artemis, fashioned in such manner as to signify fertility, was so old that no one knew where it had come from or even of what material it was made. Legend claimed that it had fallen from heaven. The greatest glory of Ephesus was that Artemis was the guardian of the most famous temple in the world. On top of that, there was a chap named Demetrius, who was well known in the trade of manufacturing small silver Artemis shrines. The business of producing and selling these silver souvenirs had been brisk. The faithful bought them to dedicate to Artemis in her temple. When Paul came to town and started disseminating the good news of Jesus the Messiah, tempers flared. Demetrius accused Paul of seducing the Ephesians into believing that what was made by human hands could not be a god. Unthinkable! On the surface, Demetrius claimed that the veneration and recognition of the great Goddess of the Ephesians was being undermined. What really upset him and others, very understandably, was the threat to their livelihood. What was good for Artemis was obviously good for the economic climate of Ephesus. Demetrius and his cronies staged a mass protest, which virtually turned into a riot. Paul was headstrong enough to want to get involved, but apparently was restrained by the common sense of friends. The town clerk calmed the masses and they eventually went home.

Now just stop and think for a moment: Into this center of pomp and power, wealth and wonder, superstition and swindling, came this converted Pharisee proclaiming Jesus the risen Christ, the only God. Paul clearly set his sights on Ephesus because of its strategic location. Modern day realtors endlessly beat that drum. Value correlates with location, they say. Ephesus, as we’ve noted, had immense monetary as well as strategic value--in Paul’s day. A center and crossroads of the Roman Empire. Not a better city in which to get a foothold for the Gospel. Clearly, he knew what he was doing; clearly he had thought it through, prayed about it, perhaps run it by associates for a second opinion, and maybe even cased the area. He was, after all, a highly educated man of faith. Don’t faith’s arduous efforts today equally require the very best minds, as well as the biggest hearts? But times change, and the value of location changes with it. Any modern church, once built in the center of a bustling, vibrant area of urban activity, knows how time and change can erode that once prominent spot in the city. It should not surprise us! Maybe sadden us momentarily, but only if we are so emotionally in love with the past that we forget that we’re called and empowered to live the life of faith now—not then. Many communities of faith—sadly, have declined to a wisp of what they once were, or to outright extinction. Such was the case in my very first parish in New England, which saw over 100 years of faithful ministry to Reformed immigrants from Germany who worked in the woolen mills before they closed or moved. By an act of Presbytery, the parish was finally closed after steadfastly refusing to broaden its reach, enlarge its welcome mat, open its doors to non-Germanic newcomers. One of the saddest, most heartbreaking days in our ministry. And just two weeks ago, down the road in Newport News, we shuttered another of our Presbyterian Churches that in the 50’s and 60’s was a vibrant, active, sanctuaryfull family of faith. What happened? Ironically, the car produced the suburbs, the suburbs produced new churches, new churches drew new and in some cases old families, and frequently those new churches left behind the famed tall-steeple urban citadels, or, the little residential family churches that were once bursting at the seams and bustling with activities and ages of all kinds. Consider this further example from the cradle of our Protestant heritage—the country that produced Martin Luther who started the Reformation, and later Bach,

Beethoven, and Brahms. The same country that simultaneously produced greats like Dietrich Bonheoffer, tyrants like Adolph Hitler, and geniuses like Albert Einstein. Faced with declining membership, dwindling income and more demands for services, Germany’s Protestants saw an overwhelming challenge ahead of them, as do all state sponsored and financed churches in Europe. In search of inspiration, some 300 church members traveled to Wittenberg, the town where Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517 ushering in the Protestant Reformation. With church attendance dropping all across Europe and demographic trends indicating fewer folks to provide the financial base, church leaders were trying to understand the challenges and plan for a possibly very different future. “We’re here trying as a group to set goals for the future,” the leaders said. Attendees brainstormed structure, financing, and how to make the church that Luther built viable for the 21st century. It’s no different than what our Session here at Gloucester, or any church in tune with the times, continually tries to figure out. In his closing remarks, Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin told the group that the future won’t come without change. “We’re under way,” he told the group. “Like good Protestants, we’re fighting all the way, but we’ve started. We can no longer go back.” Absolutely! There is no going back! We learn from the past; we do not worship the past. We respect the past, but we revere God. Changes in time and culture sweep us all forward, as they did Paul. After all, his sights ultimately were set on Spain, via a stopover in Rome. Recall the grandeur of Ephesus described earlier. The source of its grandeur in Paul’s day, namely its marvelous geographical location, eventually became its downfall. What sparked its initial rise to glory, ultimately, and perhaps ironically, led to its demise. The Roman historian Pliny related that “… the Aegean sea itself used to wash up to the very temple of Diana.” But all that changed. The mouth of the Kaystros River gradually filled with silt, despite constant dredging, and as a result the harbor decayed. With the silt came marshy land, and with that malaria, which forced inhabitants to flee to higher ground nearby. Today, after centuries of alluvium filling up the harbor and river mouth, this once proud, magnificent, and magnetic city lies in a swampy plain four to five miles inland from the sea. Linda and I stood on the spot, looked down toward the harbor where once St. Paul stood, and we contemplated how much has changed. Might it have been different? We’ll never know; history does not permit a second voyage over the same terrain, and few people, if any, can peer accurately into the future. That’s why the spiritual practice of discernment—spiritual planning-- is so demanding, and so crucial. It’s as if we have one chance to get it right, one chance to chart the correct course.

Ephesus lost its strategic importance over the centuries, and except for a short revival in the fourteenth century, today it lies in ruins, visited only by curious tourists who, in between taking pictures of artifacts and curiosities, wonder what it might have been like in Paul’s day. Tradition records that the temple was set afire on the night of Alexander the Great’s birth in 356 B.C., allegedly by a madman who wanted his name in history. What was left was finally used to build St. Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul. And today, there remains but a few fragments of broken marble. The cries of the mobs, “Great is Diana” have fallen silent; the merchants and hucksters of magic and good luck have left for more promising spots; and the water lazily meanders in the marshes, its coming and going all but meaningless to the tide of history. The period of Paul’s Ephesians ministry drew to an end. It had been a most fruitful and encouraging work. The faith had a secure foothold on the shores of the Aegean, and the young churches could safely be left to continue their work of fellowship and witness under the direction of the Spirit. Paul’s activity could be transferred elsewhere, and so he looked around for new worlds to conquer for Christ. He set his sights on Spain, the most westerly outpost of Roman civilization in Europe. Now sitting across the Aegean Sea in a Roman prison, he or perhaps one of his followers, penned what has been called “The Queen of the Epistles”--the letter to the Ephesians. “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone. “In light of all this, here’s what I want you to do. While I’m locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want one strolling off down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences. When we trust in him, we’re free to say whatever needs to be said; bold to go where we need to go. So don’t let my present trouble on your behalf get you down. Be proud! God can do anything, you know, far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams. He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently with us. So reach out and experience the

breadth of Christ’s love. Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.” Extraordinary! That’s the plan, if we can just figure it out and get it working. Amen!