Sermon Notes — August 2, 2026
“What Was I Made For”
August 2, 2026
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Ephesians 2:1-10 (CEB)
I was never a Barbie girl. I don’t even think I owned a Barbie. My best friend, though, had Barbies and a Barbie dream house, and we occasionally played with those although it wasn’t really my thing. Barbie wasn’t exactly relatable for an awkward redheaded girl with a Dorothy Hamill haircut that looked more like a bowl than a wedge.
But the nostalgia for Barbie is real, as I discovered while I was watching the Barbie movie last week: the ubiquitous shade of Barbie pink that does not work with red hair, the feet molded to high heels even when she takes her shoes off. For Barbie every day is the perfect day, every night is girls’ night, and every relationship fulfills her. Until she starts to have feelings, and those feelings lead to existential dread, and her existential dread leads her to ask, “What Was I Made For?”
And that is relatable.
Will you pray with me and for me?
I have shared with you before that from ages 0 to 18 I attended a fundamentalist Christian church. While I am in a very different place now both spiritually and religiously, one of the things that that church gave me was a deep regard for scripture, which I carry with me to this day. My peers and I were encouraged to memorize scripture, and each year, as summer approached, I memorized and recited a list of verses in order to earn a “scholarship” for church camp. The first one I remember memorizing, of course, was John 3:16, and then several verses from the Book of Romans, and two from today’s text: Ephesians 2:8-9
For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9, KJV).
And yes, I always memorized them in the King James Version. And yes, I will continue to recite them in the King James Version until I breathe my last.
It wasn’t until many years later, though, that I paid any attention to Ephesians 2:10. Here’s why:
Fifteen or so years ago one of my clergy colleagues asked me to preach at her church’s revival in Bath Springs, TN. This was the first time anyone had ever asked me to preach at a revival – really, I’m the last person I would think of when I think of a “revival preacher.” But I gladly accepted the invitation and began my search for inspiration. What should I preach about? I decided that I would find the first sermon that John Wesley preached after his experience at Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738. This story might sound familiar – after Wesley returned to London from a disastrous trip to Savannah, Georgia, John Wesley was feeling pretty dejected about his life of discipleship. More than anything he wanted God to assure him that he was moving in the right direction in his life. He wanted to feel in his heart, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had been given the gift of salvation. And so he went to a meeting of Christians on a street called Aldersgate Street in London. When he arrived someone was reading the introduction to the Book of Romans written by Martin Luther. And at that moment Wesley finally experienced assurance of his own salvation. And so I wondered, what did he preach on after that experience? Turns out that he preached a sermon called Salvation by Faith and he based his sermon on Ephesians 2:8. And so I revisited Ephesians 2:8, even though I had long since memorized it, and I read Wesley’s sermon, and I still wasn’t inspired. So I kept reading.
And when I got to Ephesians 2:10, something shifted in me.
I spent a lot of time in my Christian fundamentalist church when I was growing up. It gave me a strong community and it gave me a sense of purpose and calling. It gave me a deep respect for scripture and it gave me a profound experience of God’s love that became the foundation for my call to local church ministry.
It also gave me extreme anxiety.
We spent a lot of time in my church talking about sin and its effects. From an early age I learned that I had sinned and that I had fallen short of God’s glory. I learned that I deserved eternity in hell but that God had sent Jesus to give me eternal life in heaven. I learned that I was so corrupted by sin that the perfect almighty God couldn’t even love me, and so Jesus died in my place, and it was only through Jesus’ sacrifice that God could love me. I needed Jesus to save me from my sin. I needed Jesus to save me from God’s wrath. I needed Jesus to save me from an eternity in hell.
And as a pathological overachiever, you’d better believe I asked Jesus to save me regularly. Sometimes I asked Jesus to save me from sin and hell three or four times a week just in case a bad thought had slipped through the cracks when I wasn’t paying attention.
I knew everything I needed to be saved from.
But verse 10 is the rest of the story. Verse 10 told me what I had been saved for. It told me what we – the body of Christ – what we are saved for. We are saved for the good things that God has given us to do – good things that God has given us to be our whole way of life.
Please don’t hear me minimizing the seriousness of sin, evil, and estrangement from God, or minimizing Jesus’s perfect sacrifice of his own life to show us the extent of God’s love for us despite our sin. We live in a broken world. Our decisions and choices contribute to that brokenness. Paul gets it right on the nose in Romans 7 when he says
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7: 15; 18-19, NRSVUE)
I feel that every day.
But in today’s text Paul is comparing then – our very real condition as a result of sin – and now – the new life that God has given us.
Then, Paul says, you were like dead people because of your sin. You lived like everyone else in the world instead of using your lives to show God’s love to the world. You were a mess.
But now you get to spend your whole life immersed in the good things that God has prepared for you to do.
What’s the difference between then and now? Did we save ourselves, remake ourselves, free ourselves?
Absolutely not.
We are who we are now because God is rich in mercy. And God did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. God brought us back to life, and God placed us in the heavens next to Jesus, and God will keep on being merciful and gracious to all generations. Not because of who we are but because of who God is. Not because of what we have done but because of what God has done.
Our text today says that we are God’s accomplishment, but that Greek word, poiema (POY-u-muh), can also be translated as masterpiece or work of art.
We are God’s masterpiece. We is plural, so we remember that Paul is talking about Christians collectively. Paul is talking about the church We – the church – we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good things that God prepared long ago to be our way of life. God saves us so that the world will know that our God is the God who saves. Our God is the God who redeems, who transforms, who reconciles.
We are made to point to God by doing the things that reflect God’s character to the world. Just as a painting inspires an observer to want to know more about the painter; our lives should inspire the world to want to know more about our creator.
Over the years I have worked to reconcile the things I learned about God and about myself from my Christian fundamentalist church. To reconcile those things with the ways that I have experienced God’s patience and kindness in my own life. And to reconcile those things with the stories of Jesus that show the wideness of his mercy and love.
And here’s what shifted in me when I read Ephesians 2:10.
God does not see me through a lens of all the things that are wrong with me. Those things are real, though. But so is God’s grace. So is God’s forgiveness. So is God’s patience. It is only because of God’s sanctifying grace that we are becoming more and more like Jesus. It’s only because of God’s transforming grace that the church is becoming more and more like God’s Kingdom as we gently welcome others in and as we boldly speak out against all that does not reflect God’s justice. There’s nothing that you or I or we can do to work our way or to win our way into pleasing God. But God does not see me – God does not see you – God does not see us – through the lens of all the things that are wrong.
No, what God sees is a masterpiece, a work of art. We are what he has made us, the body of Christ equipped by God’s love and gifts and compassion to live a life full of good things that God knew about before the foundation of the earth.
This is what we were made for.
At the end of the movie, Barbie is faced with a choice. She meets Ruth Handler, Barbie’s real-life creator, and she tells Ruth that she wants to leave the perfection of Barbie Land and live in the real world. Ruth invites Barbie to hold her hands, and as she does, Barbie sees through Ruth’s eyes what that life would be like. It is a life full of big feelings – joy, nostalgia, grief, and love. It is a world full of choices and mistakes and deep human connection.
It’s a world that we know very well.
Barbie decides that this is what she was made for.
We also have a choice. We can live in the shelter of our own comfort with a life centered on ourselves. Or we can risk the life that we were made for. A life that gives us the opportunity to be vulnerable, to take risks for the sake of God’s kingdom, and to center and serve those who are systematically pushed to the margins, silenced, and forgotten. We can live the lives that create for ourselves, or we can live as God’s masterpiece.
Thanks be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.