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July 12, 2009—Proper 10

Lectionary Texts:

Sermon Text: Ephesians 1:3-14

God’s Long Range Plan

Author’s Note: The book of Ephesians claims Paul as its author, however, most scholars now agree that Paul did not write the book, it was written instead by a student of Paul’s thinking who attributed to Paul. Even knowing this current scholarship, this sermon refers to Paul as the author of Ephesians, primarily because issues of authorship were not at the forefront of understanding this passage and would have been an unnecessary distraction.

The future is bright. The best days are still ahead of us. That is what Paul is saying here in the first chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. He uses all sorts of images and robust language to declare the unfettered hope that is ours because God is bringing all things under Christ.

That’s what Scripture says to us this morning, but it can be hard to grasp this hope on a week like this week. It’s hard to believe that the best days are ahead of us, when it seems like so many things are falling apart.

Wildfires in Australia kill at least 173; some of which are suspected to be arson. The US Army is battling a new enemy--a high suicide rate among its soldiers. As the economy suffers, top executives still get large bonuses. A drug gang kidnapping turns into a gun battle in Mexico, leaving 21 dead. Court cases reveal that child soldiers in the Congo were trained to kill, rape, and pillage during the bloody conflict. Professional athletes confess to using drugs. Police in Florida search for a girl who vanished from her bed. I could go on and on and on.

Even if your eyes aren’t turned to the global or national news scene, it is still hard to find sign that the best days are ahead of us--especially for the Church. It seems as though I can’t go a week without hearing or reading some comment about the continued decline of the number of people sitting in church pews on Sunday mornings. I read how young people are coming to us until they are done with high school and then they are not coming back. I hear reports on how books on Buddhism are more popular in the US than books on Christianity right now. Look at the statistics from district assembly and you won’t see much to be excited about. Even if Paul’s message was only for the Church it would be hard to truly believe. Our best days are still ahead of us.

The trouble is not that Paul wrote in a time when it was better to be alive, that certainly isn’t the case. This same Paul who wrote this circular letter, passed around to the Ephesians and others, was the same one who found himself in and out of prison, in trouble from bandits, shipwrecked three times, and beaten in many of the cities he traveled to in order to preach the gospel. The problem certainly wasn’t that Paul had his head in the clouds, unaware of what could happen in the real world. Nor did he live in a better place where troubles were hard to come by.

Paul knew, as we do, that things on planet earth aren’t as they ought to be. But Paul also tells us that things also are not how they are going to be.

Paul tells us that God has a long range plan. This range might be a little longer than most of us would like, but it doesn’t change the purposes and intentions of God that underlie our movement into the future.

This long range plan started before the beginning Paul tells us. Even before the foundations for the world were laid, God decided to love us. God decided to adopt us as His own. So that we who are estranged from God might be brought into God’s family through the work--the life, death, and resurrection--of our older brother Jesus. This is what God wanted all along, for us to belong to Him, to be in relationship to Him, to want to be His.

But even love this big doesn’t capture all of God’s long range planning. God’s plan for the future is to bring all things under Christ. To bring all things under Christ. Did you hear that? To bring all things under Christ. When we listen to this passage of Scripture, we can’t just think small. We have to think big because when Paul talks about all of this, he speaks of the whole cosmos--the whole world. He includes everything in existence that he knew about at this time--heaven and earth and everything in them. He’s not just talking about human beings being brought under the headship of Christ, but all things--the whole created order--animals, plants, the earth itself. Everything we know and everything that lies behind it. The whole cosmos, all of it, will be brought under Christ.

When I think of all things being brought under Christ, two different images come to mind. The first is of a magnet and the power it has over metal. I think of all things being brought under Christ being something like this magnet using magnetic force to draw all things to himself, to touch Him, to be connected to Him, to be one with Him. Have you ever played with magnets and watched its power to draw metal to itself?

The other image that comes to mind is the board game Risk. I think of the board itself, which is pretty much a map of this whole world broken down in geographical segments. When the game starts, cards for each of these geographical areas are distributed along with armies signified by infantries, cavalries, and canons of different colors. For those who have never played, the goal of the game is to take over the entire world. To roll the dice and beat the people sitting next to you until the armies of their color don’t exist anymore, and your color is spread in all places across the board. When I think of God bringing all things under Christ, I think of Jesus playing Risk with little red armies, quickly taking over the world, until the armies of His opponents don’t exist anymore. I start to think that God bringing all things under Christ looks like Christ taking over the world.

But there are some problems with this image in my head.

There are some problems with this because this doesn’t seem to be the way we experience God’s moving in the world. He’s not exactly building armies and moving geographically, and obliterating those who won’t submit to his ways.

God bringing this whole world under Christ is something more than Christ getting a really big army and all sorts of people who will wear His uniform. It has to be more than that, because Jesus doesn’t seem to be interested in doing battle the way the armies of this world do.

There was a time when Jesus’ disciples felt so threatened that they drew their swords for protection and Jesus’ response to them was to put their swords away. Jesus doesn’t seem to be about obliterating His enemies, but rather, the promise we have from God, God’s plan from the very beginning, was to love those who stood against Him and to draw them also under the headship of Christ. The magnetic power God uses isn’t force or demand, it is the power of His patient love.

Paul even gives us a hint as to the details of God’s plan early on in this passage. God bringing all things under Christ doesn’t just mean that we’ll wear His name or fly His flag over our heads, or take on the name “Christian” to show that we’re part of His family. I think what God has in mind is not that we’ll just physically find ourselves under Christ, but that we’ll be like Him, holy and blameless as He is. We’ll take on the family resemblance in our adoption, looking more and more like our big brother Jesus, the representation of God himself, each and every day.

A transformation takes place as God brings the whole cosmos under Christ. The birds and trees and hurting earth are included just as we human beings are. In this process of coming under Christ, we find ourselves loving like Christ did. We start showing the same compassion. We begin utter words of forgiveness. We find ourselves paying more attention to those who used to blend in with the walls. We find ourselves giving our lives away as gifts to other people and find out the more we give away the more our life is worth living. The more we’re under Christ, the more we become like Him. As we ourselves are brought under Christ, we find wholeness, purpose, a sense of mission. We start living life as a reflection of Jesus’ life. We find this is really living. We’ll eat with people we never thought we’d eat with. We’ll start helping people however we can with our words and with our resources.

To be brought under Christ is more than saying you’re on Christ’s team. It means you start to be transformed so you look a whole lot like Him. Transformed until the footprints we leave behind are left in the same way and in the same kinds of places Jesus left His.

According to Paul in this letter to the Ephesians, the news just keeps getting better. You see, this becoming like Christ isn’t something we have to do ourselves. Becoming holy and blameless isn’t the homework we’re left to do on our own. What transforms us into looking more like our older brother Jesus, isn’t our hard work, instead it is His love--His love for us that has existed since before the beginning of time. God’s love transforms us. The more we’re bathed in it, the more it surrounds us, the more God’s love for us makes us look more like Jesus. It isn’t left to us to get ourselves cleaned up and made holy, it’s something God does by His love and because of His love.

When Paul talks about the blessings God has given us in the heavenly realms, this would have to be one of them. What a great gift this is! God loves us so much that He wants our broken lives with Him. God loves us so much that He doesn’t require us to be cleaned up first, but He surrounds us with His love, includes us in a new family, and transforms us so that we get to be like Jesus. This is certainly one of those blessings. He lists more. Because of Christ’s blood poured out for us, we’re free people. We’re free from the penalties and punishments resulting from our misdeeds. We’re forgiven and free, not just slightly, either, but abundantly! In Christ we are made whole so we can be who we were intended to be. Not only that, when we heard this good news and were adopted into God’s family, we also got the Holy Spirit who is at work within us, drawing us more and more under the lordship and into the likeness of Christ. The Holy Spirit is both a seal and a down payment. It’s the first installment from God to show that His plans and purposes for us are sure and certain until they happen. If our experience of the Holy Spirit now is just a first installment, just wait until God lavishes all His gifts upon us!

This is good news, isn’t it? This is why the future is bright and the best days are still ahead of us. God has not yet brought all things under Christ, but He will and He is. The process started back since the beginning and it’s still continuing today. You and I are signs of it. God has and is bringing us under Christ. We have been adopted and we are being transformed and made into the image of Christ! More and more everyday we are being made whole and God is trying to help us be who we were meant to be as we give Him permission to do so.

But the news gets better than that. This process of all things coming under Christ is not something that we just stand back and watch. His intention wasn’t just that we would watch Him carry out His plan, but He has invited us to help Him with it. He has invited us and equipped us to join in the joyous activity of telling others His plan of love and transformation that has existed from the before the beginning. It’s a plan that involves the whole cosmos being redeemed and made whole. God wants to use our hands and feet to do so. God is working in this world, among those who know and those who don’t know. God is working and those of us being transformed into the likeness of Christ have the responsibility of pointing out where He is working, how He is drawing all people under Christ. God is at work everywhere--in the good and in the bad, in the obvious and not so obvious, inviting us to wholeness, redeeming the brokenness, transforming us into people of love and compassion like Jesus was.

Can you hear this good news? It’s good news because of what it does for us, but also in what it invites us to. We participate in this work, but we also ought to rejoice and sing and bless the Lord for the many ways He has been a blessing to us. We ought to praise Him and celebrate and give thanks. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to remind ourselves of whose world this is. We’re going to sing about the wonderful gift of grace He’s given us. We’re going to sing about the joy of participating with Him in this plan He’s had from before the very beginning. God is bringing all things under Christ and we have every reason to rejoice. The future is not bleak, but bright. The future that lies ahead belongs to God. We are heading toward our home in Christ. Thanks be to God!