Christmas 2 (B)
January 3, 2021
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
to be holy and blameless before him in love.
He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ,
according to the good pleasure of his will,
to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,
according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us.
With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will,
according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time,
to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance,
having been destined according to the purpose of him
who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will,
so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.
In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him,
were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit;
this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people,
I will understand completely if your heart did not flutter
with the reading of the text. It comes from the first chapter of Ephesians and
it is a little over our heads. Scholars who are paid to handle such matters
tell us there are 201 words between verses 3 and 14. In the original Greek
language, it was a single run-on sentence, the longest sentence in the Bible.
Thank God the English translators added commas and periods!
There is a lot of high-faluting language. The writer speaks of huge concepts that aim pretty high. We have a spiritual inheritance, he says. Our destiny is to live out God’s eternal purpose. As we set our hope on Christ, we live for the praise of his glory. Nobody but a preacher talks this way. When you turn off today’s worship service, when you converse with loved ones over lunch or on the phone, I cannot imagine anybody saying, “I am claiming the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption, to the praise of God’s glory.”
This is the letter to the Ephesians. There are a lot of big words in Ephesians, words like salvation, redemption, predestination, and revelation. Nobody normal uses words like these. Such words shut down conversation. Should we speak them, people look at us curiously and clam up. They figure we know what we are talking about, and they need a dictionary just to look them up.
I am aware that nobody talks like that, outside of a church. The truth of the matter is few people talk like that inside of a church. In a normal year, we would have sign-up sheets and lists of ushering duties. We would wonder why the office radiator had to be repaired three times in December. One committee is adding up all the contributions received from our members to see how far we may have been in the hole in 2020. Others are trying to keep in touch with all our scattered members.
And then we hear the opening line from Ephesians, “God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.”
To some folks, there is a disconnection between the high and holy words of our scripture and the kind of lives we actually live. That reminds me of the man who went to visit a Russian Orthodox Church. It was so much more than he could take in: the gold icons, the haunting chants, the heavy incense, the heavenly liturgy. “It was so incredibly beautiful,” he exclaimed, “but I have no clue what it has to do with my life.”
It’s possible to get the same feeling when we hear the lyrics of the Ephesian letter. The words swirl up high like chants and incense while somebody downstairs forgets it was her turn to bring muffins for coffee hour. Do you know about that disconnection? Some call it the divorce between Sunday morning and Monday morning – to put it as a question: what does our worship on Sunday have to do with the labor of Monday?
Yet the first chapter of Ephesians would declare the question is backwards. It should be: what does our labor on Monday have to do with our worship on Sunday? What is it that we discover here that makes a difference in everything we do all week? What are the mysteries in here that we live out when we step outside?
Reflecting on the massive sentence that is our text, Eugene Peterson says the writer of Ephesians describes the church that we never actually see. We see the building with the leaky radiator, visited by its share of comics and cranks. Ephesians sees a people in whom God is saving the whole world. Here in chapter one, for instance, the church is full of people called “saints,” the “holy ones.” (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection, p. 14)
We squint and scratch our heads. We have seen the fidgety child playing games on Grandma’s cell phone, the liturgist who just stifled a yawn, the woman who sneaked in late. But Ephesians sees a gathering of saints, saints whose names have been given by Christ. They are the holy ones because holy power is at work in them ever since God raised Jesus from the dead. The saints recognize a greater authority over their lives than the threat of illness or the quicksand of despair.
Thanks to the grace of God, something really big is going on. Ephesians uses all those enormous words to name it: “redemption,” “salvation,” “glory,” “wisdom,” and “power.” This is God’s mission to the world – if only we can see it.
In my upstairs study at the house, there’s a framed print of a favorite Norman Rockwell painting. Rockwell paints St. Thomas’ Church in New York City. It’s a gloomy day on Fifth Avenue and people are shuffling by. The priest has just given his sermon title to the sexton who puts the words on the bulletin board: “Lift Up Thine Eyes.” A flock of doves fly upward while the pedestrians shuffle by with their eyes downcast.
“Lift Up Thine Eyes.” That is the message from Ephesians to the church. See that God has come down here to salvage the world, and then do something to take part in that work. Look through the moment to see what is truly going on. Through the preaching and mission of the church lives are claimed and commissioned by God. The community is fed by grace. See these moments in all their glory.
Even in the prison cell where Paul writes this letter, he sees nothing but the blessing of God. In every single line, the spiritual inheritance is named:
- In Jesus, we have redemption and forgiveness
- In Christ, the riches of grace are lavished upon us.
- In Jesus, we come to understand the hidden wisdom of God's will.
- In Christ, all the scraps of our lives are gathered up and stitched together.
- In Jesus, we inherit the promises and purposes of God.
- In Christ, we know God's good pleasure.
And even though, from age to age, the church may be shaken and tested, the God we know in Jesus Christ still conveys these blessings. As somebody has written,
[The blessing of Christ] is hanging over Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, that triumphant letter in which he crowns Christ as the ruler of all creation and the church as Christ’s body – not two entities, but one – God’s chosen instrument for the reconciliation of the world. The church shall be a colony of heaven on earth, Paul says, the divine gene pool from which the world shall be recreated in God’s image. From the heart of Christ’s body shall flow all the transforming love of God, bestowing hope, Paul says, riches, immeasurable greatness. As God is to Christ, so shall the church be to the world – the means of filling the whole cosmos with the glory of God.[1]
At the beginning of a New Year, with the carols of angels still ringing in our ears, I can almost believe it – can’t you? To know that all our believing and hoping and giving and serving is not in vain – but it is part of God’s great purposes – indeed a visible sign of God’s good pleasure. The blessings named above our heads are lived out on the ground. We only need the eyes to see the grace beneath out feet.
A handful of years ago, we visited some friends in New Hampshire. On the way home, we stopped by to see the grave of novelist Willa Cather in the church yard of Jaffrey Center. We discovered we weren’t far from Mount Monadnock, a large slope nestled between some lakes. They tell us the locals never climb Monadnock, just as the denizens of Manhattan never visit the Statue of Liberty. But I said, “Let’s find it,” off we went.
We turned at the sign, went down the road, and must have drove right past it. How do you drive by a famous mountain? Well, we did – three or four times, until a wise voice said, “Are we done with this? Can we go home, please?” So we turned toward the border of Massachusetts and gave up the search.
Sometime later, I came across a poem by Robert Siegel who had an experience just like ours. Here’s what he writes:
We see the sign, “Monadnock State Park”as it flashes by, after a mile or twodecide to go back, “We can’t pass by Monadnockwithout seeing it,” I say, turning around.We head down the side road – “Monadnock Realty,”“Monadnock Pottery,” “Monadnock Designs,”but no Monadnock. Then the signs fall away –nothing but trees and the darkening afternoon.We don’t speak, pass a clearing, and you say,“I think I saw it, or part of it – a bald rock?”Miles and miles more. Finally, I pull overand we consult a map. “Monadnock’s right there.”“Or just back a bit there.” “But we should see it –We’re practically on top of it.” And driving backwe look – trees, a flash of clearing, purple rock -but we are, it seems, too close to see it:It is here. We are on it. It is under us.[2]
It is under us. All of is under us. Remember all those
high-in-the sky blessings of Ephesians? In case you forgot, let me run the
list: redemption, forgiveness, riches of grace, hidden wisdom, heavenly
inheritance, promise and purpose, and God’s good pleasure. All of those seem
over our heads. But the truth is they are under our feet, sure, and solid, and
steady.
God has come. God has come to us. So go and claim your inheritance, for you are on solid ground.
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