Ephesians 2:13-18

2:13-18

          Paul accomplishes this turn in the same way he did in the first section (2:4) with another of his big “buts”: “But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” The God whose rich love and great mercy raised humanity out of death to new life with him through Christ’s death and resurrection (2:4) also healed the breach our sin wrought between Jews and Gentiles through the sacrifice of that same Christ.  Humanity’s rebellion separated us from God vertically and from each other horizontally - a double-dashing of God’s dream to have a world living in harmony with itself with and him!

          These vertical and horizontal abysses cleave humanity from God and Jew from Gentile etching a cross-shaped divide into the torn fabric of creation.  These seemingly fatal fissures, however, were met by God’s unfathomably wise love healing the fissures by embracing them taking their pain, suffering, and guilt onto himself as Jesus Christ offered himself for this world on the cross of these fissures.

 

God

                                           Jew                             Gentile

Humanity

          Paul says more here than that Jesus has made peace for us through his cross.  He goes further, saying that Jesus himself is our peace (v.14).  Peace is not a philosophical ideal or a politico-military ideology (like the Pax Romana, the “peace” imposed on the empire by the military to in the interests of the Roman elite).  It is not even the great Old Testament vision of shalom (the interdependent harmony of generosity, friendship, and well-being for the whole creation) as something available to us apart from Jesus Christ.

 

          No, Paul says Jesus “himself”[1] is our peace.  Notice the shift of pronouns here.  The “you” referring to the Gentiles in v.13 has become the “our” encompassing both the Jews and Gentiles.  In his body torturously stretched out on that hideous cross, in the love that impelled him to allow his life-blood to be poured out for us, there, there is our peace. 

          Paul surely has the Old Testament teaching on peace in mind here.  In particular, the book of Isaiah highlights this theme (9:6; 52:7; 57:19).  But other passages like Micah 5:5a and Zechariah 9:9-10 also bear important witness to this theme.[2]   On the cross Jesus fulfills this important strand of Old Testament expectation according to Paul.

          Paul witnesses to peace as a dominant reality in God’s subversive counter-revolution against his rebellious creation throughout his letters. He calls God “a God of peace” (Rom. 15:33; 16:20; 1 Cor. 14:33; 2 Cor. 13:11; 1 Thess. 5:23), Christ “the Lord of peace who gives peace” (2 Thess. 3:16), and the gospel a gospel of peace (Eph. 6:15). The mind set on the Spirit is life and peace (Rom. 8:6). Peace is an eschatological reward (Rom. 2:10) and is equivalent to salvation and characterizes the new relationship we have to God (Rom. 5:1). Paul writes that he kingdom consists of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17).  It is also the goal for human relations (Rom. 14:19; Eph. 4:3; 2 Tim. 2:22), and a reality that facilitates conflict resolution (1 Cor. 7:15; 14:33). Peace is also a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:17). Peace guards our hearts (Phil. 4:7) and rules in them (Col. 3:15).[3]

          Thus when Paul claims that Jesus is the “place” where we encounter God’s peace, he has this rich tapestry of biblical and theological insight in mind.  When at the end of this section Paul names Jesus as the “cornerstone” of the new temple, the “place” where God is present to his people (vv.21-22) he has a breathtaking vision of the resources available to us for living in accord with God’s dream and as his “subversive counter-revolutionary” people. 

          In him, then, in living relation to the crucified and risen Jesus, the deepest and primal divisions between humanity are overcome.  And there was much to division and hatred to overcome.

“The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentiles. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell. God, they said, loves only Israel of all the nations he had made … It was not even lawful to render help to a Gentile mother in her hour of sorest need, for that would simply bring another Gentile into the world. Until Christ came, the Gentiles were an object of contempt to the Jews. The barrier between them was absolute. If a Jewish boy married a Gentile girl, or if a Jewish girl married a Gentile boy, the funeral of that Jewish boy or girl was carried out. Such contact with a Gentile was the equivalent of death.”[4]

Division and hostility indeed - and the feeling was certainly mutual!

          How did Jesus’ death on a cross make peace between Jews and Gentiles and do away with the “hostility” that had poisoned their relations for millennia?   Paul points first to the temple balustrade that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the Jewish precincts in the Temple in Jerusalem, a very physical symbol of the impassable division between Jews and Gentiles (“the dividing wall,” v.14).  An inscription discovered on this balustrade in 1871 reads: “No man of another race is to enter within the fence and enclosure around the Temple. Whoever is caught will have only himself to thank for the death which follows.”[5] 

          Paul points to the Jewish Law as well:  the “law with its commandments and ordinances” (v.15). He does not mean the Ten Commandments or even the whole 613 Laws of the Old Testament as such.  He means rather the use of the Law as a means to exclude Gentiles from the gifts and promises of God.  To say it another way, Paul speaks here of the “abolition” of the use of the Law which functions to affirm only 2/3 of God’s threefold promise to Abraham and Sarah (Gen.12:1-3).  When Jews use their Law to affirm their special relation to God and to embrace the blessings that come to them from that relation but deny or ignore that they are to be a vehicle for spreading God’s blessings to all other peoples, they use it in the way that Paul here declares “abolished”.  And the Jews did use their Law to exclude, ostracize, and stigmatize Gentile outsiders.

          The death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, however, the very goal of the Law itself (Rom.10:4), has exposed and done away with this illegitimate use of the Law.  Abolition is for the purpose of something new.  In fact, it’s the prelude to new creation!  Paul frames it just this way:  “(in order) that (Jesus) might create in himself one new humanity” (v.15).  As he is our peace, so Jesus is the “site” of this new humanity.  Language of creation is the only proper language here.  This “new humanity” is no natural phenomenon.  Jesus was raised by God into his new humanity; we are raised with him into our new humanity.  For Paul, “something quite new had broken into human experience, and this is nothing less than the ‘first fruits’ of the community between God and the people that will be ushered in at the last day.”[6]  Indeed, a pagan in the 1^st century inadvertently acknowledged this by calling the church a “third race” alongside Jews and Gentiles.[7]  This term is used for the church in the 2^nd century by Christian writers such as Aristides in his Apology and the author of the earlier Kerygma Petrou.[8]

          By breaking down the barriers which induced Jews and Gentiles to demean, diminish, and ultimately dehumanize each other, Jesus makes peace between them.  In him each finds their genuine humanity as Jews and Gentiles.  In him they share a point of reference beyond themselves that grounds their differences from each other as part of God’s good creative intent and an aspect of the gifts God gives his people as a multicultural subversive counter-revolutionary people.  In him Jews and Gentiles discover new life, life given as a free gift, to be shared and celebrated, to show the world how human beings are meant to live together under God.

          This one new humanity, Jews and Gentiles living together under God, becomes Christ’s body, with him as the head and humanity as his body.  Paul hinted at this earlier (1:23) but brings it to full flower later in Ephesians.  At this point we ought to note that Christ is now seen as a corporate person.  He died on the cross (v.16) that we might be in him, intrinsically connected to one another.  In this we experience a restoration to the form of life (communal) God intended for us in creation.  Individualism is done and gone for those in Christ.  To continue to live as disconnected individuals is to continue to live a sub-human existence, even if we do it in the name of Christ!

          To be created as a new humanity “in one body” (v.16) brings another issue of enormous significance into view.  “Into one body” means we become a living, breathing, physical, visible entity.  Our spiritual connection to one another and to Christ is mediated through our interactions, patterns of behavior, and practices as his body.  We all live today in a “Missouri” world – a “show me” reality.  Few will believe our witness, preaching, or teaching just because we say so!  If we do not walk the talk is substantial ways, others will walk (away) from our talk.

          There was no way for the early church to claim that in Christ Jesus Jews and Gentiles have been made siblings in faith unless they lived, ate, prayed, worked, and cared for each other together.  Visible, observable, demonstrable evidence of life lived that matched the words proclaimed was, and is, a non-negotiable for viable and faithful witness.  Especially for a movement bent on subverting the way things are in the name of the way God says they should be and are becoming in Christ!   

          Paul seems to have Isa.52:7 and 57:19 in mind in v.17.  But let’s first stop and ponder that Jesus “came”.  What does this mean?  Why does Paul not simply say “He preached peace . . .”?  I suggest Paul is alluding to Jesus being sent from God.  He “came” in obedience to the Father and in service of his mission.  Thus all that unfolds from Jesus’ work belongs to the fulfillment of that mission – the gathering of all things together under Christ.  His preaching and enacting God’s peace thus lies at the very heart of what God is up to in our world.  Our experience and practice of this gift of divine peace places us right in the middle of the “action”!

          Paul’s reference to the Isaiah passages supports this interpretation.  He thereby identifies Jesus as that “messenger who announces peace” (Isa.52:7) and with the “Lord” who proclaims peace “to the far and to the near” (Isa.57:19).  The “far” and the “near” are of course the Gentiles and the Jews respectively.  Here we get explicit confirmation that the Jews need to be included in God’s peace every bit as much as the Gentiles.   "Through him,” Paul claims, both Jews and Gentiles are ushered in the very presence of God the Father.  The Holy Spirit, the one Spirit, knits us together in the peace Christ won for us.  In this new unity, this new humanity in Christ, we share his intimate access to the Father.  Here the well-known Trinitarian principle of “to the Father in the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit” sums up Paul’s discussion in the whole of this section.

          This whole section is bracketed by “in Christ Jesus” in v.13 and “through him (Christ)” in v.18.  We have seen that he is also the substance of the section.  The Father and the Spirit are introduced in v.18 by the “through him”.  This reminds us again of the key Christian truth that the only God we know, the true and living God, we know in and as Jesus Christ.  He is the “face” and “name” of God[9] for us, and we believe, for the whole world.

          One further matter needs attention.  Paul uses a lot of sacrificial and temple imagery to describe Christ’s work on the cross.  This makes sense in light his calling God’s people “a holy temple” in the next section.  Paul pictures Christ as both the one who both offers the sacrifice that heals and unifies and at the same time is himself the offering, the sacrifice, that effects these changes.  Sacrifices are, of course, offered at the Temple.  It is Christ’s “blood” (v.13) from “his flesh” (v.14) offered on the cross (v.16) that is the sacrifice.  On the other hand, as we noted earlier (footnote 2 above), Christ is the subject of all the verbs here.  He does all the acting.  He offers the sacrifice of himself!  Further, the notion of “access” in v.18 suggests drawing near to God in his palace, the Temple.  

          This picture Christ the priest who offers himself as the sacrifice that heals and unifies in the Temple of his people has important implications for the “sitting,” the experience of God’s lavish grace we need to be faithful and effective participants in God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement.  We will explore this in the last section of this chapter.

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[1] The pronoun is in the emphatic position in the Greek.  In addition Paul highlights the centrality of Jesus as “himself” our peace by making him the subject of all the verbs in vv.14-18. 

[2] See Snodgrass, Ephesians, 128-129.

[3] Snodgrass, Ephesians, 129-130.

[4] William Barclay, cited in John R.W. Stott, God's New Society: The Message of Ephesians (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979), 91 (also at http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/christ-is-our-peace-a-reflection-on-ephesians-211%E2%80%9322).

[5] Cited in http://philliphigley.com/2010/11/08/reconciliation-and-restoration-ephesians-214-18/.

[6] Robert J. Banks, Paul’s Idea of Community (Peabody, MA:  Hendricksons Publishers, rev.ed. 1994), 108.

[7] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_third_race.

[8] http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2008/02/third-race-kerygma-petrou.html.

[9] From the lyrics of Joan Osborne’s 1995 hit song about God, “One of Us”.

Ch.6: “Sit” – The Memory of God’s Gracious Plan (2): Ephesians 2:11-22 2:11-22:

                                                                                                                                God’s Victory Over Division through Christ
 

          We’ve seen how this second chapter of Ephesians, as part of a Divine Warfare pattern based on the Old Testament, provides us with the evidence of God’s prowess and his track record in defeating his enemies and that it offers two specimens of such victory to encourage us to channel our white-hot faith into commitment to God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement.  The first victory Paul details is God defeat of sin and death in Christ (2:1-10).  The second, too which we turn now, is God’s defeat of humanity’s alienation and division among itself through Christ (2:11-18).  Eph.2:19-22 comprises the final element of the Divine Warfare pattern we identified earlier.

We noted that these two sections of Ephesians 2 have a matching structure – old state, God’s decisive victory, new state.  In 2:11-22 that structure looks like this:

2:11-12         Description of the Old State:  Gentiles alienated from Israel, God’s people

2:13-18         Celebration of God’s Victory:  Christ Makes the Two into One New Person

2:19-22         Recounting the New State:  Both Together are the Temple of God

           

Both of these divine victories that Paul recounts result from the death of Jesus on the cross and God’s raising him victorious on the third day.  As they both follow a similar pattern I suggest Paul wants us to read them stereoscopically, as two accounts of the same thing seen from different points of view.  They do not follow sequentially; both are results of the same death and resurrection of Jesus.  Nor does one have a priority over the other; each are aspects of the same problem that God must deal with.  After all, if his “eternal purpose” is to gather all things together in Christ (1:10), humanity must be brought back to God and to each other for that to happen.  Neither without the other fulfills the purpose God intends to achieve.  This suggests that we cannot and should not separate what God has put together:  the vertical and horizontal dimensions of life, evangelism and social justice, the sacred and the secular.  All of these are unreal distinctions that only do mischief to our efforts to be God’s “subversive counter-revolutionary” people.  I suspect it’s to forestall such distinctions that Paul joins them at the hip the way he does here.

2:11-12:  Gentiles are alienated from Israel, God’s People

 

          “Remember” kicks off this second section of this chapter.  In fact, it’s a double “remember” (vv.11-12).  Memory, as we saw earlier, is a re-presentation and participation in what is remembered.  Here Paul exhorts the Gentiles to remember their journey from “being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (v.12) to being “no longer strangers and aliens” but “citizens” and “members of the household of God” (v.19).

          Paul also includes his Jewish readers in this journey down memory lane.  He emphasizes the desperate state of the Gentiles but his rhetoric suggests that not all is well for the Jews either.  They apparently scorned the Gentiles calling them the “uncircumcision,” those males who lacked the physical identifier of “belonging” to God’s people.  This epithet is hurled at them, Paul tells us, by those identify themselves as the “circumcision,” those who do bear the mark of belonging to Israel. However, when Paul adds “a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands,” the implication that they are not quite where they need to be with God lurks nearby.

          In fact, Paul cleverly implicates both in a problematic relation to God prior to Christ by using the phrase “in the flesh” to describe both:  Gentiles “in the flesh” (translated “by birth” in the NRSV) and Jews “called ‘the circumcision’ . . . made in the flesh”.  Paul means more here than merely physicality.  He mostly uses “flesh” in contrast to life lived in the Spirit, as that part of us that resists God and refuses to go God’s way.  Here he allows this sense to bleed over into the physical sense and give it a less innocent nuance that it might at first glance seem to have. Both parties are “in the flesh,” different ethnic flesh to be sure, but both stand together in resisting God’s will and way for them.[1]

          Remember, Paul writes, that before Christ you Gentiles “were . . . without Christ”.  And he expands that in what some have called the saddest verse in the whole Bible:  “being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”  Before Christ, in other words, the Gentiles were not active characters in the story of God with the world which centrally concerned Israel.  Those “covenants of promise” signify the unfolding of God’s story with the world through Israel (covenants with Abraham, with Moses, with David, and a New Covenant to come) in which the Gentiles were not participants.  But even though they were not participants, they were always the object of the promise carried by these covenants (Gen.12:3).  Though the story was not “about them” in one sense, it was most surely “about them” in another!

          Without hope and without God in the world is Paul’s way of summarizing the Gentiles’ plight.  Though they are without God, God is not without them.  They are always in his mind and heart.  And their being drawn near in Christ has always been his plan from all eternity.  And to that climax to all God’s promises and purposes we turn with Paul in the next section of this part of Eph.2.

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[1] Snodgrass comments:  “Paul wants his readers to remember that they were Gentiles, confined to that which is weak and merely human, being bad-mouthed by Jews, who labeled them “the uncircumcision” and themselves “the circumcision.” But, as we will see, the Jews were no better off; they too needed the gospel” (126)

We Practice “Sitting” as God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary People (2) Ephesians 2:1-10

          We are learning to “sit” in Christ with God and allow our hearts, minds, and even our bodies to absorb the profound and astonishing realities of God’s new creation into which we have been graciously adopted by the triune God.  I suggest the following learnings for your prayer and reflection. 

1.    There is no “God with a Scowl”.

As we have seen, from eternity past (Eph.1:3) to eternity future (Eph.2:7) Paul insists that God intends only good for us.  The destructive image of God that I call “God with a Scowl” is nowhere found in Ephesians or the rest of the Bible for that matter.  This far too prevalent distortion, that God (the Father at least) sits in heaven scrutinizing our every move for failure, thunderbolts clenched in his quivering fists as he awaits the opportunity to unleash them at us, pounding us with guilt at every turn, is responsible for more spiritual, emotional, and psychological debilitation  than anything else I can think of!

Obviously, it is impossible to be open, honest, and intimate with such a deity.  Hiding is the only defense we can try in his presence, futile though it is.  We try to hide from his presence like Adam and Eve in the garden after they sinned.  We try to hide the seriousness of our sin from ourselves and God.  We try to evade the guilt we feel by denying or rationalizing it, or we wallow in it and allow it to eat us up.  Fear, deceit, and anger corrupt our relationship to this “God with a Scowl”.  We serve him, if we do, out of fear or duty but scarcely out of love for him or for the world he seeks to save.  The dysfunctions that grow from kind of relationship to God are many and profound.

Often, Jesus the Son gets pitted against the God with a Scowl as our only hope and defense from him.  It is he who satisfies and pacifies the Father’s angry, vengeful wrath and protects us against it.  Thus God is divided against himself!  This creates unsolvable difficulties for us on both a theological and a spiritual level.  It won’t do to pit the Father against the Son!

If anything is clear from the first chapter and a half of Ephesians it is that the triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are united in heart and strategy.  God loves his creatures and has done everything that can be done (after all, he is God!) to reclaim and restore them to his family and his good purposes for them.  The Father’s love sends the Son on his redemptive mission.  The Son’s love for us reveals the Father’s heart.  And the gift of the Spirit to God’s people comes from the join love of the Father and the Son.

All God’s works come from his love.  Even when God warns and disciplines us, he does so as a parent disappointed and hurt by a child’s actions but never as a moral tyrant who suspends his love and acceptance of the child on their behavior.  God looks on us as the members of his family he wanted from all eternity and through Christ has adopted as his own forever.  There is no “God with a Scowl” in the Bible.  That he exists in the thought and practice of many Christians and wreaks such havoc is both tragic and blasphemous.  If we hope to join God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people, we must exorcize the “God with a Scowl”.  And there is no better mantra of exorcism for him than these opening paragraphs of Ephesians.

       

2.    We must always “look to the water.”

The baptismal imagery in vv.5-6 reminds us who are really are and what’s been done for us.  Remembering what Christ has done for us and our acceptance into the experience of those benefits through baptism is an essential resource for being and persevering in the struggle God calls us to.

The great reformer Martin Luther knew and practiced this truth.  When he was under attack by the enemy (as he often was), Luther would place his hand on his head and cry out, “Martin, you have been baptized!”  Whenever the enemy attacks us over our sins and failures, especially if the enemy is the “God with a Scowl,” we must not “head for the hills” in defeat but “look to the water” for reassurance of our forgiveness and reaffirmation of our identity as God’s children.

The group Tenth Avenue North has a song, “You are More,” that captures all this perfectly.  It’s about a young woman who feels she has sinned her way out of God’s love.  But in the refrain the group sings this good news to her:

But don't you know who you are,
What's been done for you?
Yeah don't you know who you are?

You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade.[1]

“You’ve been remade”!  Yes, that’s our new reality; the reality from which we need to live.  That’s the good news we experience in baptism and the truth about us that’s reaffirmed every time we remember our baptism.  Like I said, let’s learn to “look to the water” and avail ourselves of this most excellent resource God has given us.

3.    We must look from the BHAGoal to the BHAGod.

As mind-boggling as the glimpse of God’s eternal purpose which get in Ephesians is, the God who underwrites it is more mind-boggling yet.  If the gathering of all things in the cosmos together in Christ is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal that stretches our minds and imaginations, how much Bigger, Hairy-er, and More Audacious must the God who dreamed this all up be!  And if the keynote of all this God’s works is grace – how great a grace must that be!  “Amazing” is the word that has come to be associated with grace through John Newton’s great hymn, yet amazing really doesn’t quite capture it.  That’s why I call it a BHAGoal and a BHAGod!

I use words like mind-boggling and Big, Hairy, and Audacious to remind us that the God with whom we have to do is truly the God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and ways are not our ways (Isa.55:8).  That God’s thoughts and plans far outpace our grasp of them ought to create in us a humility regarding what we think we know about all that.  By humility I mean the grace to hold fast without wavering to the Truth who holds us fast (1 Tim.1:12) and at the same time remain steadfastly a pilgrim on the way to a larger grasp of the truth.  Our relationship to the Truth means that we always know more than we can say about that relationship while simultaneously knowing less truth than we believe we can articulate at any given moment.  Thus our need for humility.

This humility equips us to be witnesses.  We know whom we know, even though we cannot prove it and explain it to anyone else’s satisfaction.  We can only point to this One and invite others to take our word for it, try it, and find out for themselves.  Witnesses are required only to tell what they know, so we don’t need to be intimidated or apologetic about all we don’t know about God’s thoughts and will.  We don’t, then, need to angry or defensive in witnessing to others.  This kind of humility calls on us neither to sacrifice the certainty of our relationship to the Truth nor pretend that what we know of the truth is ironclad and in need of no revision or correction.  We can be open to insight and truth from surprising places and unlikely people.  Civil conversation will be our norm and hope; relationship with others our primary goal.  Yes, witness seems to be most appropriate way for us to live and serve in our BHAGod’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement!

4.    The Shape of the Unholy Trinity.

The demonic triad of the world, the flesh, and the devil we met in 2:2-3 takes specific shape in different cultures and societies.  Part of our task as subversive counter-revolutionaries is to discern the shape of this unholy trinity in order to better subvert it in the interests of the priorities, passions, and practices of God’s kingdom.

What I see when I look around our culture is an unholy trinity of “Mars, Mammon, and Me”.

Me

                        Mars                         Mammon

         

This trio is related and mutually reinforcing, creating a mindset within which we “live and move and have our being”.  It is the cultural “air” we breathe.  We can no more avoid it, than a fish can avoid living in water (if it wants to live).  It shapes us and nurtures in us a set of priorities, passions, and practices that enable us to fit in and succeed.  We receive this mindset with our mother’s milk.  The institutions, media, celebrations, histories, morals, and ethos of the culture join hands in inculcating and enforcing the parameters of the ways of life acceptable in it.

          We can, however, learn to recognize the central motifs and convictions of this cultural mindset and how they shape us to live.  As Christians we have been baptized into a new mindset of a new culture – the kingdom of God.  In light of this new culture’s leading motifs and central convictions we learn the ways of life appropriate to it and, at the same time, the ways the culture we grew up in have misshapen us and misdirected the priorities, passions, and practices God intends for us.  At this point we can begin to confront and subvert the values and visions of the dominant culture in the interests of God’s kingdom.

          Thus, I have come to identify the shape the unholy trinity takes in this country in terms of its aggressive and radical commitment to individualism (“Me”), its addiction to materialism (“Mammon”), and its penchant to resort to force/violence to settle its problems (“Mars”).  One could line this out differently or add additional items to the list but I’m willing to bet there are few analyses of what drives us as Americans that do not include “Mars, Mammon, and Me” in some way shape or form.  Thus I believe this trio brings us close to the corrupted heart of being American that needs to be confronted and subverted in the name of God’s kingdom.

          Further comment on this unholy trinity will be found in the discussion of the texts of Ephesians.  I ask you to keep this paradigm of what drives us in mind as we move on though.  It will help bring some order and shape to our reflections.  I will return to this paradigm again in my closing comments.

          Learnings around these four items, the no “God with a Scowl,” the “look to the water” of baptism, the Big Hairy Audacious God we have, and the unholy trinity of “Mars, Mammon, and Me” are wonderful starting points for reflection and prayer as we “sit” with God in Christ to discover and internalize all that we have and are in the wondrous grace of the triune God.  You will doubtless discover other images and truths in this section of Ephesians to reflect on as well.  Go with where the Spirit takes you and enjoy the ride!

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[1] http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/You-Are-More-lyrics-Tenth-Avenue-North/954DE13AB471C6FC4825772600426897