At the midpoint of his correspondence with the Ephesian church, Paul breaks into a exclamation of praise to God:
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, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21, NRSV)Paul’s positive affirmation stands in stark contrast to many viewpoints expressed in the current events and business pages of print and electronic media. Reporters, politicians, and business leaders seem to base everything on a foundation of scarcity and negativity and of looking out for self before community. And much of it is fueled by fear. The world around us tells us to live fearfully. Paul, across the generations, across the centuries, calls us to fearless living.
If we were to sit and listen to scripture straight through from Genesis’ “In the beginning” to Revelation’s final “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints” — about 90 hours later — the thing that would strike us about the full sweep of scripture is that God desires God’s people to give up living fearfully and to live fearlessly in the rich abundance generously provided by our God.
Paul wants us to know without any doubt whatsoever, that the sky’s the limit with God. Any dream that we can dream, God can dream it bigger, grander, and more abundant. The Westminster Catechism tells us that God is “infinite...in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”(1) Infinity is always moving. Is there something bigger than infinity? Infinity plus one; ad infinitum. God is always bigger than we imagine. God is always bigger than the containers we try to put God in. God is always more generous than we are willing to imagine for ourselves, more generous than we or others think we deserve, and more generous to others than we think they deserve.
What is even more amazing is that God chooses to work through us to accomplish more than we can imagine. If that isn’t a living example of fearless living, I don’t know what is. God has taken a huge chance for God’s precious creation by deciding to work with us, through us, alongside us in the glorious work of tending all that God spoke into existence. God has entrusted us with it all—every last atom and subatomic particle. It’s like giving a 16 year old the keys to a new Corvette. It’s not going to survive unscathed. There are going to be dents and dings, crashes and mishaps. We human beings have taken the universe for quite a ride and it is battered and scraped up something fierce. But God hasn’t asked for the keys back yet.
Mark Kirchoff writes that
“God was fearless in giving charge of creation over to humanity. Humans could destroy creation outright. They could maintain creation differently from how God intended. Because of free will, humanity has spoiled creation through original sin. The good news is that we don’t have to continue to give in to the dark side.”(2)But more than that, God has given us an innate desire to leave our mark on the world, to exert an influence on the communities we participate in.
We are in a constant struggle between thinking only of ourselves and of thinking generously towards other members of our community. In the midst of that struggle, we let fear rush in.
When I published the readings for this week several weeks ago, I had intended to use a reading from Exodus 34. In the reading, Moses was on Mt. Sinai getting a reprint of the first set of tablets of the Law. (He had thrown down the first set in a pique of anger at the behavior of the Israelites and the tablets had shattered.) Moses had been on the mountain for a long time and the people were afraid that he had died or left them. So they persuaded Aaron and the other leaders to create an image of their God. Some theological wit has noted that what they wanted was a massive bull, maybe something like the one in New York’s Wall Street financial district. Except that when they donated their gold, there only enough for a calf. Even in their disobedience they lived fearfully and couldn’t even fearlessly live following an idol made with their own hands.
While the people were cowering with their calf, Moses was fearlessly facing God and bargaining for the people and the future generations of God’s people which they represented. Moses, as human as he was, as fallible and moody and difficult as he was, nevertheless had a sense of the enormity of God’s generosity as well as a vision of what all God desired to accomplish through them. The goodness of creation was within them. It had to be brought out.
We see the same kind of struggle between scarcity and generosity, between living fearfully and living fearlessly in many of the events that the gospel writers recorded about Jesus and in the parables he told. The story of the wedding party is really a retelling of the truth expressed in the Genesis creation story we heard earlier and the subsequent story of the first beings choosing their own path of life different from what God had desired them to follow.
The king desired to give a party for the wedding of his son. This was not going to be a party where everyone got one tea sandwich, three mints, and half a cup of punch. The king put everything into the planning and execution of the party plans, just as God had put everything into creation resulting in an acclamation that it was “supremely good.” That’s how the wedding party details were carried out. It was very good. But all the invited guests weren’t interested in the generous party which the king had prepared. They had their own agendas, their own schedules, their own sense of fear that they had to live their way because the world revolved around them. They declined to participate in the king’s joyful generosity and generous joy.
Paul was telling the believers in Philippi something similar:
Be glad in the Lord always! Again I say, be glad!...Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4, 6-8)The peace of God that exceeds all understanding draws our imagination farther and farther toward that infinity of God’s generous love for us. That peace, that “all” that we can’t even imagine is freedom to try, freedom to learn from things that don’t work as expected, freedom to learn from serendipitous accomplishments, freedom to let God use us to do things far beyond our own abilities. In our results-oriented society, we avoid risk. We bury or otherwise abuse the talent, nest-egg, resource entrusted to us, when God invites us to invest ourselves as well as God’s resources for the sake of kingdom. That takes courage. That is fearless living.
The Ephesian letter describes the church as “God’s new humanity, a colony in which the Lord of history has established a foretaste of the renewed unity and dignity of the human race,”(3) that God-imprint from day six of creation.
Jesus concluded the wedding party parables with the note that “Many people are invited, but few people are chosen.” In God’s generous love for us in Christ, we have been chosen. We are the few who are called to live fearlessly.
In The Message Eugene Peterson paraphrased Paul’s Ephesian praise this way:
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.Oh, yes, indeed!
Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!
(1) Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 4.
(2) Mark Kirchoff, “Fearless Generosity,” Giving, volume 16 (2014), p.4.
(3) Overview of the Book of Ephesians, Third Millennium Ministries, http://thirdmill.org/answers/answer.asp/file/41361.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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