You know what it means to call God your shepherd (sheep herder, if you are from Vermont), but do you ever think of God as a poet and your work as God’s poetry.

Or have you thought of God as a shoemaker and your own daily routines as shoes that God has prepared for you to walk in? Well, I want to share with you how these ways of thinking turn up in today’s second reading, the letter to the Christians in Ephesus. (Here I get a chance to show how the stuff I studied to teach Bible for 40 years—like Hebrew and Greek--can actually help us dive deeper into God’s communication to us.)  Let my try to unpack just one single verse—Ephesians 2:10. But let’s at least provide some context by including the two verses that lead to that verse:

Eph 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.  9 It is not from works, so no one may boast.

The English word “grace” here translates the Greek word charis, which is ‘gift,’ but with the emphasis on the action, the process of giving. Since the simple word ‘gift’ doesn’t catch the verbal sense of charis, we applied the word ‘grace’ to translate it. Being rescued by God is more than getting a thing, but being on the receiving end of something God is doing, God’s ‘giving.’  The next clause, This is not from you, clarifies that “saved through faith” does NOT mean that your faith caused the rescue; here your faith is an act of receiving, not any part of the giving of salvation. So when the verse continues, adding “it is the gift of God,” the writer uses another word for gift, this time a Greek word rare in the New Testament - to doron, which was the common word in the Greek world for a material gift, a present, used here because the author wants a different word to emphasize God as the giver of this special giving, which is now underscoring what is also called love (agapē) elsewhere in the NT.

If you did not get the point of verse 8, verse 9 drives it home: It is not from works, so no one may boast. Are some of the Ephesians actually boasting that they that they are saving themselves? Apparently, yes--as we shall see.

Now comes the motherlode of verse 10—first, in the New American Bible version that we hear in church this Sunday:

For we are his [i.e. God’s] handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them [literally, “walk in them”].

“Handiwork” translates poiēma, the Greek noun from the verb poiéō (“I make” or “do”), and the ending -ma which turns the verb into a noun meaning “something made,” which in turn gives us the English word poem. Since the original author is using ‘poem’ metaphorically, not literally, “handiwork” is a good English translation of poiēma, but the lovely resonance with poem shouldn’t be lost on the English-speaking reader.

If God is the maker, his work is surely creation (which renders the precise Greek word here). And that creation, which makes you Ephesians masterworks, “poems,” not random growths, “in Christ Jesus” [baptism, implied in this context]. And it is “for the purpose of good works [epi ergois agathois], in contrast to the BAD works produced by the “self-saving boasters” already mentioned. And what is the nature of the good works? The acts of daily Christian life. But the literal translation of the last word—en autois peripatēsomen (“that we should walk in them”—the very rendering of the King James Version). To “walk in” is a Hebrew idiom meaning to live according to a certain spirit (good or evil), as our author also uses the word in Eph 2:2; 4:17, and 5:8. So when the author tells the Ephesians to walk in the good works that the Master worker has prepared for them by re-creation in Christ Jesus, the picture that emerges is that the actions of Christian living are like pairs of shoes divinely cobbled precisely for you to walk God’s path in companionship with the risen Lord Jesus. Of course it takes the whole letter to make this clear.

Loving God, we want to do our best to grow up in loving you and fellow creatures. But please spare us from thinking that our perfectly reasonable self-improvement projects are what you invite to in the call of this holy season of Lent. Help us to recognize that only you can truly save us. Help walk in the shoes you have fitted so carefully to our uneven feet. Help us desire to be the “poetry” that you can use to help the rest of the human family recognize you in what we do as we walk you path in the way of your Son, Jesus our Lord and savior. You are the source of all gifts and the enabler of all giving.