Ephesians 1:3-14 – Growing up in Christ #2
Last week, Josh introduced us to our series working through Ephesians with the video from Bible Project, which illustrated how we can divide Ephesians into two parts: the first half about the good news of Jesus and the second about working out that good news in our lives.
Josh also mentioned Eugene Peterson’s book on Ephesians called Practice Resurrection. It is like a commentary, but also not. He subtitles it a conversation on growing up in Christ.
It’s a great book, we do commend it to you. It’s very readable and accessible. It’s $32 on Blackwells with free shipping.
Peterson contends, and many others agree with him, that Ephesians is at its core about growing up to the full stature of Christ. Growing up healthy in God, robust in love.
Or put another way: being baked into a really good cake.
Josh used the metaphor of baking a cake, that a recipe has two halves:
the ingredients list, all the good things that need to be present for a glorious and decadent cake;
And the Method or instructions, which guides us in putting the ingredients together in such a way that, in the end, we arrive at our glorious and decadent cake.
To extend Josh’s analogy a little. In this week’s reading, we discover two things. That there is “glory” due to the baker in this cake-making business. You know that reaction that comes almost involuntarily with the first bite of that cakey goodness, mmmm
Who made this? You did, well done, it’s extraordinary. What recipe did you use? What’s in it? Wow! This is really good. You’re an exceptional baker.
We discover there is glory and praise due to the baker.
And we discover that we are not the ones making the cake. Jesus is one who has done and is doing the baking.
We discover Jesus is the one baking the ‘cake’
Knowing our story
This image of growing up in Christ is one, the author, whom we’re calling Paul, uses himself in chapter 4.
It follows from the metaphor Jesus used when talking to Nicodemeaus, that of being born anew, from above. Being born physically is something we’ve all experienced, unless you’re a robot.
The idea of being ‘born again’ has taken on a certain meaning in many streams of Christianity. But at its core, Jesus used it as a way of speaking about people becoming ‘alive’, becoming ‘alive to God’
In the grand scheme of our lives, our being born is a moment. A painful moment, a joyous moment, a frightening moment, a mindblowing moment, but then there are our whole lives spent growing up.
In the same way, our birth anew, our becoming alive to God, is a moment. Maybe also a painful, joyous, frightening, or mindblowing moment, but then there are our whole lives spent growing up, growing up in Jesus, into our faith.
An important part of growing is learning to see our story as something wider and bigger than ourselves and orienting ourselves in it.
Perhaps we can see this more clearly in our young people who, through adolescence, generally want to assert their independence, establish an identity for themselves. There’s a certain distance they often like to put between themselves and their parents or caregivers. Maybe you saw this in your children, or grandchildren, or even recall your own experience.
But then there often comes a time of realisation, an awareness of what your parents did for you over the years. Or maybe, painfully, what they didn’t do for you, or were unable to do for you.
There’s no way to predict when this will happen or what the catalyst will be. It may even include becoming aware of one’s whakapapa or family history.
But this awareness of who you are, who our parents are or were or were not, and what that all means for us as people, is a part of growing up that changes how we relate to them, to ourselves, and others. You begin to realise who you are and what you are part of, maybe make peace with thing,s and begin to come home to yourself
These 11 verses of the letter are essentially Paul orienting us with our story, with who we truly are, how big our world and our existence truly is.
He needs to do this, for our brokenness has the effect of shrinking our imaginations, leading us to think we may be lost in the cosmos. Trapped in the meaningless humdrum of our everyday.
Paul’s blessing, essentially what these verses are, stretches us. Painting for us a picture of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.
Knowing our story is an important part of growing up in Christ.
God’s decadent actions
Paul is not just giving a lecture on human existence. If we can picture Paul as an artist painting a picture. He’s moving quickly, laying on the paint thickly, generously, big, fast, but not ill-considered, strokes.
In Greek, this is one big, long sentence. In talking with Joy about this passage earlier this week, she said you can imagine the poor scribe struggling to keep up with Paul as he paces, thinking, and dictating aloud.
This passage is packed full of verbs, action words to describe God’s work, and they come tumbling out like water from a monsoon bucket.
I don’t know about you, it’s so expansive I found it hard to get my head around the whole thing. Rather, I found myself caught up like a leaf, surrendered to its current and enjoying the ride down the cascading river of words.
That’s why today we heard the passage twice, from two different versions. Hopefully that’s been helpful.
Blessing
But this is the part of the story where we discover that God is the one doing the baking of the cake, that it is all because of who God is and what God is doing.
Just in case we miss this, Paul starts with Blessed be God, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing.
God gives us Godself.
I wonder if you’ve ever been to a significant celebration for someone special, but you hadn’t got them a gift, when you mention this to them, maybe they have said that what was more important than a present was the gift of your presence.
Life is busy. Sometimes because it’s full, or sometimes because things now take us longer to do. Mostly, we just get on with it. God is there for the big things.
But as we grow up in Christ, in living the company of this sacred three-in-one God. We learn the blessing of this ever-present God. That, as one New Zealand writer says, Jesus is already praying; when we pray, we are just joining the conversation.
The Blessing of the Divine presence.
Chose
There is an object for the affections of God’s blessing. God chose us in Christ.
We were chosen before the foundation of the world, in the wild and waste of a non-existent universe. We were chosen.
We talked about this with the kids this morning. All of us likely have stories of not being chosen for something. Maybe being overlooked for something quite important to us. For me, it not not being chosen when I tried out for my primary school choir. It’s only in recent years, by God’s grace, that I’ve dared to sing in front of others.
But I think our stories of not being chosen can reinforce this idea that we can and should only be chosen for something when we are the best, the brightest. When we have the right skills or the most compatible personality.
Then, when we hear that God chose us, to our ears it can sound dull. Maybe God felt sorry for us. Or that God’s just saying that.
We opened our service this morning, calling God the God of all humanity. A title God spoke to the prophet Jeremiah. God’s choosing is one that desires to embrace all humanity.
But here I’m deliberating sticking with Paul’s words, speaking to God’s church as I speak to you today. God chose you. Because when we abstract these ideas, we risk losing the punch of the deeply personal. God is relationship. That God chose you. God deliberately, before there was the ‘stuff’ for you to exist, chose you.
Destined
God chose us and destined us. Destined us for adoption as God’s children.
Isn’t destined the same as chosen? Maybe in a way. But the subtle difference is that destined carries with it a destination. A destination of belonging in the family.
Many translations of the bible have that wonderful prefix here: pre. Predestined. Another term that carries a lot of baggage and confusion, especially in the reformed tradition.
Here we come, unhelpfully, to abstraction again. Many have thought that if God destines or predestines, then perhaps we can figure out if there will be some who will never become alive to God and some who certainly will.
But this, boiling down of the words to leave some sort of cosmic deterministic drafting gate, misses the mystery and enormousness of a God that has, in a real way, destined us for belonging.
Can we really figure it out? Can we really do the maths with God to solve the universe’s problems? We must approach this destiny thing humbly.
Perhaps we can take a clue from the tone of the passage as a whole, which is one of adoration, not calculation. Adoration, not calculation.
God cannot be depersonalised, reduced to a cosmic blueprint.
Bestowed and Lavished
Chosen and destined as children of God, God freely bestows and lavishes Grace on us.
We don’t use the word bestow very much anymore. Simply means to put something in a specific place. We may use still to talk about gifts. For example, the good people of Timaru Presbyterian bestowed on me this beautiful pounanmu as a gift of appreciation.
God places Grace in us, on us, in Jesus the Beloved.
But it’s not just a solemn presentation of Grace to us. The way Paul uses the word bestow, the way it’s used in combination with the word Grace, intensifies the action. The result is that we could read that God drenches us in Grace.
This squares wonderfully with lavish. A word Paul uses lavishly in his writings. It’s his favourite word for talking about God’s grace. Lavish – Generous, Extravagant! The scale is enormous.
Peterson reminds us that when it comes to matters of God’s grace, hyperboles are understatements. Hyperboles are understatements.
Made Known – Gathers up
As children lavished with Grace, with wisdom and insight, we’ve had made known to us the mystery of God’s will to gather up all things in Jesus, things in heaven and on earth. This is the making all things new part of the story.
Mysteries are, by nature, mysterious, aren’t they? Once we know the outcome, maybe, who dunnit, or how it works, it loses its charm.
The same can’t be said for the mystery God has revealed to us. We may have knowledge of the plan to gather all things in the cosmos together. Everything scattered, everything disordered and broken, people, places, planets, gather them up into a healthy, coherent existence under Jesus. With Jesus in control.
The mystery remains in part because we are drawn into this plan. We are still growing up in Christ, growing more like Jesus, learning to practice this resurrection life. Putting knowledge into practice is how we work out wisdom and insight. It’s how we grow up.
Blessed, Chosen, Destined, Bestowed, Lavished, Made Known, Gathered up.
Coming home to God’s Glory
And yet, as one theologian I read this week pointed out, this exalted and extravagant language also reveals itself as poverty-stricken and inadequate to describe the magnitude of God’s work on the grandest scale and broadest canvas.
For all of this, Paul says. All of it is to the praise of God’s glory! To the praise of God’s glorious grace, to the praise of God’s Glory.
This life, this cosmos, is God’s project. It’s God’s Cake if you will. It’s not
All of this, blessing, choosing, destining, bestowing, lavishing, making-known, and gathering so we can come home to what we were made for, the grandest celebration in the closeness of the presence of the God of it all.
The cake recipe isn’t one for us to follow, to get all the ingredients, and make sure they all go together. To be sure we’re part of this whole project. But we’re not running it.
God is, and God’s is the glory.
Our step of faith is to receive this grace. Acknowledge where we come from, know our true story in Christ. Be carried along by the current of unimaginable, indescribable, uncontainable grace that God has baked into the cosmos.
And to practice this resurrection life. Growing up healthy in God, robust in love.
Amen.