17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ephesians 3:14-21
July 26, 2009

　Awesome

I missed Lord’s Day worship last Sunday. I was returning from a week in Orlando, but it’s not what you think. It’s true I was in a resort hotel, and it’s true the hotel was on Disney property, but you must believe me, I was not there for Mickey Mouse. I was there to teach theology, polity, and church history to members of the Administrative Personnel Association of the PC(USA). I taught for at least five hours every day and spent much of the rest of the day getting ready for the next day’s course.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

There I was, riding elevators redolent of sunscreen lotion, surrounded by people in various stages of undress, doing my best to concentrate on the Great Ends of the Church, the Diet of Worms, and the Second Helvetic Confession.

Alas, you can’t get any more Presbyterian than that.

Late one evening I rode the elevator with a family from Scotland. Despite the fact that they had spent the whole day at Disneyworld, were lobster red and exhausted, they were rushing up to their room to change into their swimsuits for a night swim.

"What do you think of Florida?" I asked the eight-year-old boy in the family.

"Awesome!" he said. "Awesome!"

Meaning no disrespect for Uncle Walt, I can’t help but lament that so noble a word as "awesome" has come to be used in this way. "Awesome" used to convey wonder, reverence, an awareness of finitude in the presence of the infinite. "Awesome" was a word we used to reserve for experiences that left us otherwise speechless -- for standing at the foot of a giant redwood, or peeking over the rim of the Grand Canyon, or attending the birth of a child.

How was your trip to the mall? Awesome! It’s a shame, really.

I’d have said that those verses Peggy just read from Ephesians, Chapter 3, are amongst the most awesome in the whole of Scripture, but, as we just observed, that wouldn’t tell you much, would it? "Awesome" doesn’t mean "awesome" anymore.

Perhaps it would help if I told you that the writer of the letter has spent the first three chapters trying to convince Gentile Christians in little house churches scattered throughout Asia Minor that they belong to God. Through Jesus Christ, the writer tells them, they have been saved by grace through faith, and what’s more, this isn’t their doing. It is God’s doing. They belong to God through the gift of God, the gracious gift of faith in Jesus Christ.

You are Gentiles by birth, the writer says. You were aliens from the commonwealth, but now you have been brought into full citizenship. Once you were strangers and aliens. Now you are saints and members of the household of God.

God has taken two groups of alienated human beings – Jews and Gentiles -- and formed something new. In the cross of Christ, the writer says, God has put to death that old hostility that used to prevail, and in its place God has birthed a new humanity. Call this new humanity "the household of God." Call it "a holy temple in the Lord." Call it "a dwelling place for God," or call it simply "the church."

That’s what you are, the writer says to these fledgling followers of Christ. "You’re the church." Awesome!

At this point, the writer has run out of words, and like any good pastor, he simply falls on his knees and starts praying for his flock. "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on earth takes its name," he writes, and "I pray that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Holy Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts though faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love."

" . . . that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." Today we might hear this as a prayer that Christ will take over people’s emotions, their "hearts," but that’s not what "heart" meant in New Testament times. People back then considered the "heart" the seat of intelligence and thought. Emotions came from the area below the heart, from what we could call "the guts." The writer is praying that Christ will make his dwelling not only in his hearers’ emotions, but also in their intellect – that their whole being from inside out, will welcome the love Christ brings.

God’s love in Christ, the writer has come to realize, is more than intellectual comprehension, more than mere knowledge. It’s a kind of knowing, to be sure, but it’s a special kind of knowing. It’s the kind of knowing that comes from being known.

In the course of my arduous labors in Orlando, I tried to instill in my students an appreciation for the confessions and catechisms of the Reformed tradition. The Westminster Confession went over like a lead balloon. Likewise the Longer and Shorter Catechisms. But they liked opening words of the Heidelberg Catechism:

                    Q. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?

Theologians call this kind of knowing "revelation." H. Richard Niebuhr said, "Revelation means that moment in our history through which we know ourselves to be known from beginning to end, in which we are apprehended by the knower; it means the self-disclosing of that eternal knower." (The Meaning of Revelation, p. 154).

It’s when we know ourselves to be known through God’s love in Jesus Christ that we begin to grasp two things – how glorious is the grace that claims us and how limited our grasp of the surpassing greatness of God.

To be a Christian is not only to kneel at the foot of the cross. It is to kneel "before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes it name." It is to sense that God’s love cannot be contained or controlled, that it reaches beyond the boundaries. It is to marvel at what the writer of Ephesians calls "the breadth and length and height and depth" and to know, in the most rudimentary but still wonderful way "the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge."

How can anyone know something that surpasses knowledge? I can’t tell you in so many words, but then again, neither could the writer of Ephesians. The best he could do was to tell those saints that he was asking God for the impossible on their behalf. He was asking that they might know "the love of God which surpasses knowledge," and sure enough, they did.

In our own struggling, stumbling, and occasionally glorious way, that’s what you and I are called to display in our life together – the love of God which surpasses knowledge. It appears from this letter that those first Christians had it, but didn’t know they had it. They were just being the church – gathering round the Word, eating at the Lord’s table, sharing bread with the hungry, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned, inviting others to join their unlikely fellowship.

They weren’t seeking some special knowledge of God. That was for the various mystery cults that were so common to that culture. The Christians addressed in this letter weren’t trying to set up some trendy secret society. They weren’t trying to attract the movers and shakers and build the most impressive building in town. They weren’t trying to call attention to themselves. They were just trying to love one another as God so clearly loved them.

The writer believed they could do a lot better at that than they were, and he gave them plenty of suggestions in the rest of his letter. But before he gives instructions, he prays that they will realize what a precious gift God has already given them.

Not long ago I was talking to the daughter of a church member at a reception following her father’s funeral. She has her own family now, and lives far away. I hadn’t expected so many people to come to the service, and I confess that I had given too small a number to the Congregational Care Council who prepared the reception. The family walked into the Westminster Room and I heard a least one member of the family gasp. A banquet was laid out before them – more than enough – "pressed down, shaken together, running over" as Jesus says. (Luke 6:38).

"All of this," the daughter said. "For us? Why?"

"Because we love you," I told her.

Awesome!

 

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

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