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]
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!
[1] http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/You-Are-More-lyrics-Tenth-Avenue-North/954DE13AB471C6FC4825772600426897
No comments:
Post a Comment