THE LORD WILL SEE YOU NOW

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Ephesians 3:1-13

January 6, 2008

Ephesians 3

¹This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—²for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you, ³and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, ⁴a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. ⁵In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: ⁶that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

⁷Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power. ⁸Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, ⁹and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; ¹⁰so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. ¹¹This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, ¹²in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him. ¹³I pray therefore that you may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory.

You walk into the CEO’s waiting room. The receptionist acts surprised but pleasant, “May I help you?” I want to see the CEO. “Is he expecting you?” No, but I need to see him. “Do you have an appointment with him?” No, I just need to see him. “Do you have a letter of introduction from someone he knows?” No. “Well, perhaps someone else could help you.”

It is frustrating, isn’t it? My senior year in college I had to go to the Chief of Police to get a parade permit for Transylvania University’s annual Rafinesque Day torchlight parade, where the students marched to the President’s home on North Broadway and he threw apples to them. Modern day students take notice: this was considered big time cool in 1966! At Police headquarters I was directed to the Chief’s office and told gruffly to take a seat. The Chief passed through the room several times and looked my way, but still I was left waiting for over an hour. I paced the office, drank water from the cooler, read all the notices on the wall, and finally, leaning against a filing cabinet, I hit the boiling over point. So I stealthily reached under my arm and began removing the small squares of paper which labeled the drawers of the filing cabinets and began switching them. A’s and B’s were switched with M’s and N’s. Unsolved Cases were now under the heading of Traffic Fines. Though this helped to vent my ire, when my name was finally called, it took another 20 minutes for them to find the parade permit forms because, in their words, “some lunatic had switched all the labels!” If it is frustrating for us to get a meeting with an earthly authority figure, how much more does it frustrate us to try to contact the Supreme Head of the Universe? How do you get God’s attention?

Whether you believe that the apostle Paul wrote the book of Ephesians or whether it was a devout disciple of his writing after Paul’s death, either way they faced a society that believed there was a great gap between humans and God. And in that gap lived other spirits, other rulers and authorities, who were bent on causing trouble for mortals. In a way you hoped back then to not get much notice from the gods; you wanted to fly under their radar, not attract any attention. For they were just waiting to spoil your plans, to do you harm, to mess with your life. Standing in our sophisticated world of 2008, you may think those old beliefs were preposterous, the result of ancient ignorance and that they don’t occur in our modern, intelligent world. But I hear comments to the contrary all the time. Someone will say to me, “I pray but my prayers get no higher than the ceiling. I don’t think anyone is listening.” Another will explain, “I believe God created the world, but God is like an absentee landlord. God put us here and split. We are on our own.” Or some say, “I believe in a supreme being, but I don’t think God is involved in our everyday lives.” Or, “We won’t really know God until after we die.” Or I hear commonly, “God lives in heaven.” Gaps--we still talk as if there is a gap between us and God. And are we not just as superstitious as those recently converted pagans who filled the pews of the Ephesian church? How many hotels or office buildings in Lexington have a 13^th floor? How many of us are afraid to talk about good fortune for fear of tempting fate? Do you knock on wood to avoid bad luck? Deaths always come in threes, we say. Isn’t that a superstition? If you widen the circle far enough deaths come every minute to some of our world’s population. The writer of Ephesians tries to reassure his readers, which now include us, that God had a plan to deal with gaps and ghouls, with spaces and spirits. It was a mystery, but now it is known. So, what was that plan?

I worked one summer digging ditches and connecting meters for the Water Company. We always hated to get a job order that required us to connect a house on that side of the street with the water main on this side of the street. That meant that we had to dig a hole beside the main and use a jack to push lengths of metal rods under the road until we hit a similar hole on the other side of the street. Of course if the rods hit rock they could miss the other hole by a few inches or feet and we would have to start all over. Or the rod could pop up in the middle of the street…or dive down and come out under the Great Wall of China. It was an arduous process, but once the connection was made, that home had an unlimited supply of fresh life-giving water. Through an arduous journey, starting in a stable and ending in a sepulcher, with angels on each end of the journey, Jesus made the connection between us and God. And a flow of life-giving water began. That was God’s plan for our world: to eliminate the gap, squeezing out all our superstitions and fears. So that now we have direct access to God and ought to be bold and confident in that fact.

Want to talk to God? Talk…and know that you will get an answer. Want to see God? Look…and God will appear in the form of a needed friend or a challenging teacher or a homeless man whose eyes hold a divine spark. Want to get past your fears? Realize that there is no greater power than God and God is on your side. God isn’t absent but present, ever present through the spirit of Christ. God is listening, involved, knowable, here. The cynic stopped a little boy on the sidewalk one Sunday morning as he walked toward the church. The cynic sneered, “Boy, I’ll give you a dollar if you can show me where God is.” The boy responded, “Sir, I’ll give you ten dollars if you can show me where God isn’t.” Bold and confidant in our access to God—that’s the Ephesian message to us, that’s the Epiphany message. But that’s not the whole message.

Our greatest fears come from the natural world, not the supernatural. We wonder if Bhutto’s death will cause the overthrow of Pakistan’s government, a country that has more than its share of fanatics plus nuclear weapons? Will the United States slip into recession and wind up with soup kitchen lines and families tossed out of their homes like in the 1930s? Will someone break into my home tonight so I will wish that I had one of those new pink Tazer guns to stun them? It’s a mad, mad world out there, full of heartless greed and murderous rage. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could change that somehow? And the Ephesian author writes, “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.” Want to fight the demons in the minds of humankind? Want to counter the destructive forces of our world and our society with goodness and power? Well, that’s what the church is supposed to do. We are not a little local worship club. We are not a meek fellowship of optimists. We are not curators of an archaic museum. We are confronters of evil. Our job is to spread the wisdom of God to this world, in its rich variety, God speaking in terms each culture will recognize, God served in a myriad number of ministries, God knowing how different we are but also how much the same we are. That’s the job of our church in 2008—to take this epiphany, this revelation of how to access God, and to share it with the new couple next door and with the prisoner in the cell, with the people who sit in earthly seats of power and with those who mistakenly think they have no power. God’s wisdom will reveal new paths for the nations of our world. Let’s step up to our task as a church of spreading that wisdom, for that is God’s plan for us.

Sometimes as I am heading home just at moonrise of a full moon, my cell phone rings. I know who it is even before I answer. It’s Julie, excited, exclaiming, “Have you seen that moon??” That’s what we, the church, need to be doing in 2008, excited, exclaiming, “Have you seen the Son??”

Much of the world feels like we might feel going into that office seeking to meet with the CEO—frustrated, disenfranchised, excluded, overlooked, disconnected. It makes you want to scream. It makes you want to do something crazy. But worst of all, it makes you want to give up. Don’t give up. Be bold and confident. God’s plan is at work; the connection has been made. The Lord will see you now.