Sunday, July 26 Des Moines
Ephesians 3:14-21

Leveraging Our Imagination

        The truth is, this is not the conversation we usually have.  For the most part, we are more comfortable talking about imperatives – you know, what we ought to be doing in the world – than we are talking about why and how.  We are a people with an eye for mission – for doing good things that make a difference in people's lives.  We help immigrants learn how to speak English.  We shelter homeless people, and lobby at the capitol.  We take seriously the call to care for the “least of these” in our community, and respond generously when disasters strike anywhere in the world. 

          It appeals to our sense of stewardship to house other congregations in our building – augmented by the fact that two of them gather into their fold people on the fringes of society.  We are proud to be the address of the Interfaith Alliance, home to one branch of the Boys and Girls Club, one of the founding congregations of AMOS:  A Mid-Iowa Organizing Strategy, and to have created an award-winning farmer's market recognized for innovation and a positive atmosphere.  Some might recall that not that long ago our church maintained an apartment used as transitional living for families trying to climb out of the poverty cycle, and mission trips abroad and work projects locally have come to be routine. 

          We are accustomed to doing good things.  It's a part of our congregational DNA.  Just don't ask us “why.”  Oh, we could tell you that we feel “called” to do such things; we could tell you that they represent the kind of things we “ought” to be doing and have been “taught” to do in some generalized way.  We might even be able to refer the questioner to a Bible verse or two by way of rationale –

But pressed much beyond those we would likely stammer, eventually falling back on the simple conviction that those are just the kinds of things God would have us do. 

          We certainly know people who talk about Jesus as readily and comfortably as most people talk about the weather or the corn crop.  We have friends and co-workers who fall out of bed in the morning talking about salvation and being “born again” and being “moved by the Spirit”; but for better or worse we tend to be more circumspect, more comfortable in the “James camp”, the New Testament book where it is written, “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” 

          But let's not confuse conversation with informed conviction.  Whether or not we talk about our faith more than that, it is important that we comprehend more than that.  We aren't, after all, just spiritual tourists in the Christian faith -- knocking around, checking out a few of the special attractions and highlights before heading off for ice cream.  No, we claim to be citizens of this Kingdom of God, a relationship which necessarily alters the way we choose, the way we see, the way we behave, the way we think life is supposed to be.  No more than we can be responsible Americans without the cultural fluency of knowing basic traffic laws and constitutional rights and guarantees, can we be responsible Christians without an active relationship with and fluent comprehension of the God we have come to know through Jesus of Nazareth whom we have confessed to be the Christ –

·         who this God is, and how we are related;

·         what this God finds pleasing, and what evokes divine tears;

·         some sense of how God is active in our midst, regardless of what we are doing,

·         and some sense of God's over-arching purpose. 

·         We need to have some sense of discernment about what God is now and always working to accomplish with us and through us.

·         We need some working vocabulary of God's will and way,

·         and some framing awe for both God's immensity and intimacy;

·         both God's over-arching vision and God's earthy practicality.

          Paul seemed to feel this kind of pastoral urgency for his congregation, as well – Paul, or whoever wrote this letter to the Christians in Ephesus.  Exactly who this author might have been is up for debate, and despite the traditional designation, the Apostle Paul seems to be among the less-likely candidates according to modern scholarship.  But that's a conversation for another time and place.  Whoever wrote the letter was a pastor to these people, and here, in the paragraph of the letter in front of us today he shares with his flock the contents of his pastoral prayer on their behalf.

          He prays, among other things, that God bless them with strength in their inner being, and that Christ dwell in their hearts.  Notice that at this point none of this is “head” talk.  The pastor is praying for their spiritual warmth, not their intellectual clarity.  This is “gut” talk, visceral consciousness deep in the bowels where truth is warm and moist and gaseous.  Propositional order certainly has its place, but if it isn't swelled and animated by the passion of the heart, then faith becomes wooden, splintery, and ultimately dry and decaying. 

          This pastor is praying that his people know Jesus not like we might know Abraham Lincoln or Oprah Winfrey, but like we know our husband or our wife or our parents or our kids.  And he prays that they might somehow grasp how much God loves them – how deep and wide and high is that divine affection and devotion. It is, he knows, that love that holds us, lifts us, shapes us, and pulls us forward.  

          And then his intercessions turn curious.  He prays for their imagination:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend... what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 20Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine...

More than we can imagine?   Just consider it.  Why would he pray for our imagination?  Perhaps it's because he knows how small we tend to think; how near-sighted our dreams tend to be – how miserably short is our long-range vision. 

It is so easy to allow the world to shrink down to our size – to wonder only which restaurant whets our appetite today for lunch, while forgetting to ask who else in the world may not even have food; to feel aggravation at the rush-hour congestion, without pausing to wonder about the effects of all these belching exhaust pipes on the atmosphere we are all dependent upon breathing;  to fume about the rising cost of our prescriptions and the possibility that our medical flexibility might get curtailed, without a thought that maybe the way we fortunate ones get my health care could be the very system that is preventing millions from having access to any at all; to assume that if all is well with me and mine – food in my pantry, clothes in my closet, gas in my car, friends on my Facebook  page or speed dial, and entertaining options for my free time – then life must be good for everyone else as well.

          But that world view, this pastor knows, is too tragically small.  The panorama in God's field of vision is infinitely more vast and colorful and flavorful than that – an ocean of purposeful possibilities, and all we have is a teaspoon.  But there is nothing to say we can't keep dipping – drinking in more and more of God's desire.  The only thing that will starve us spiritually and eternally to death is contentment with the little drips and drops of what we already recognize and know and understand. 

          Here is a pastor's prayer for leveraging our imagination with the very heart and mind and measureless grace of God.  ...to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.