Precious and Rough
Ephesians 5:8-14
What’s the difference between gem stones and gravel? We probably think they’re pretty easy to distinguish from each other. Gem stones are rare, beautiful and valuable. Gravel is plentiful, cheap and not necessarily pretty.
Several years ago I traveled to a small island off the coast of Venezuela called La Isla de Margarita. This was my first time to visit South America or the Caribbean and it is a beautiful place – great beaches, lots of sun, lush forested mountains. In the town closest to our hotel there was always a woman selling empanadas on the side of the road. Empanadas are like turnovers with your choice of fish or cheese or meat inside. The woman rolls out the dough, puts the filling in and folds it over to seal. They are fried up fresh in these small propane fryers and they were so good. Two or three of them made a meal and they cost the equivalent of about 30 cents at the time.
The other new experience for me on that trip was that it was the first time I saw pearls being harvested. These were not the perfectly round globes I always associated with this gem stone. These pearls were sometimes rough and oddly shaped and multi-colored but the locals had created a whole industry around making spectacular jewelry out of these precious and rough gems. But I have to tell you, watching these harvesters at work, it was not at all clear to me what was gravel and what was a gem. It didn’t seem to confuse them at all. They would sift through off of these rocks inside the shellfish and pull out a small oddly shaped rock that didn’t appear to be any different from the rest of the gravel. But clean off the dirt, buff up the surface and there it was.
When we think of gem stones, we usually image what we see in a jewelry store – polished, cut, mounted for best lighting. For a gem stone to reach its most precious value cutting is usually involved – not for some gems like pearls, but for diamonds, rubies, emeralds and so forth, cutting enhances the beauty of the stone.
In our reading from Ephesians we are encouraged to live as children of light, to reject the ways of darkness and to allow Christ to shine through our lives. It is a long way from a muddy creek bed to a jeweler’s display case. Yet, all those qualities that causes us to oh and ah are present within that gem even while it appeared to be nothing but gravel. It is a long way from the muddiness of life to being a shining child of light. The process of getting there is called a faith journey. And the good news is that the qualities we long to have produced from our lives – love, hope, joy, courage – are already present within us as a gift from Holy Spirit. It just takes some cutting or polishing for those qualities to be able to shine through.
For Christians, some examples of impurities that need removing are noted in the verses before our reading. Ephesians tells us that this cutting involves getting rid of qualities such as greed, idolatry, vulgar talk and anger. These are the kinds of things that take the sparkle off the stone.
Unlike a gem stone, we have the ability to cut, mold and shape our lives to either reflect the beauty with which God’s grace has gifted us or to camouflage that beauty and be as useful as a paperweight. The most beautiful stones absorb light, internalize it and then reflect it back with brilliance. The light is a gift to the stone but the stone contributes to the light that is returned. We are those living stones.
That, says Ephesians, is what it means to live as “children of light”. Like a beautiful gem we absorb the light we have received and then radiate that light out from within ourselves.
If you think about it, this is another way of talking about what it means to be blessed and then using that blessedness to bless others that we have been living out a lot over the last year.
Gem stones or gravel. Unlike rocks, God has the ability to make any person as a living stone into a gem of a person. It is up to you and me whether we are willing to enter that process called faith – to allow the cutting or buffing that would make your life shine. You get to decide if you are a gem stone or gravel.
Sources:
www.homileticsonline.com Diamonds in the Rough, March 2008.
http://proposiciones.blogia.com/upload/20061012044126-isla-margarita.jpg
