July 16 & 19, 2006

Ephesians 1:3-14

EVERYTHING ADDS UP

In the entire state of Ohio, in the year 1895, there were only two automobiles - but they collided. That's the way it seems to be far too often; plans we had don't turn out so well. Hopes fade. We don't end up where we thought our best efforts would get us.

Now, sometimes that makes for a delightful surprise, we're better off than we thought we'd be, and we're happy. Sometimes it makes for tragedy and disappointment. Sometimes it's in-between, an uneasy tension 'twixt good and bad.

Where's the steady summer rain, for instance? In this normally green and happy land of 10,000 lakes, water is one worry we don't have! But this summer, supposedly the growing season, many fields are having a hard time growing much of anything that requires water. (We will pray today for many more such rainy days as this one!) And events controlled by human beings seem just as out-of-balance. Our military and diplomatic troubles in the Middle East, for instance, prove the truth of that irresistible principle of life, Murphy's Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, world-wide or small scale.

On the other hand, as I say... sometimes it turns out better than we hoped. A friend of mine wrote in his church newsletter about a conversation with his 7-year-old grandson Jason. Jason was reporting on his first game of T-ball. He told Paul it was his very first time at bat.

"Grandpa, I hit a grand slam homerun!"

"That's great, Jason. You scored four runs! Not everyone can do that."

"No, five runs, Grandpa - I scored five!"

"Wait! How could that be?"

"Grandpa, there were two guys on third base."

Wouldn't it be great if that's the way it always were for us? How much more often don't we pop up, a dismal easy out! Even if you aren't as pessimistic as Murphy's law, you realize the fickle, frantic way life can change in just a fleeting moment, change from agony to ecstasy, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The word of this biblical letter comes to us as welcome news. This is a writer with a cosmic point of view. He starts with our whole existence, all of creation, everything in heaven and on earth - a truly wide-scale perspective. And then he brings it close to you and me and the rooms that we call home, narrowed closely enough to tell us that what we see and sense, that what is going on around us, beside us and inside us - all this warfare, noise, worry, and confusion is NOT the final answer of the universe.

God's arithmetic works a different way. I learned this week that at the time of St. Paul, addition went in the opposite direction. We add things top to bottom, draw a line, and write the sum down here. But in those days they literally "added things UP" - and the answer was at the top (the head) of the column. Count the people of the world, add in the rest of creation - the animals, the green growing things, the sea and all that is in it, the heavens - add up everything and here's the answer: Christ. "God's plan, when the time is right, is to bring all things together with Christ at the... head."

So the answer is, we do not just happen to exist. The human beings we love the most, our lives, our work and our accomplishments, the world and life itself - WE - are not accidents of cosmic dust in the silent wilderness of space. We are God's own handiwork. Our lives have their roots in God's purposes. The beginning and end of our destiny are in God's love. Somehow in all this apparent randomness and routine, God's ultimate purpose is being worked out: To pull everything back together the way it's meant to be, with Christ as head. That's not obvious in the world right now, but it's God's plan.

A crew of unemployed miners was sent out one morning as part of a federal work program up on the Iron Range. For several hours with shovels and backhoes they worked digging 4 x 4 holes five feet deep. Then the foreman would signal, they'd stop, he'd come over, look down into the hole - and order it filled up again. The men dug half a dozen such holes, and each time the foreman would order it filled in.

Finally the men had enough and quit - leaned on their shovels, shut down the backhoe - and one of them spoke up. "No more," he said. "You don't make fun of us digging holes and filling 'em in, even if it is make-work. This makes no sense, it's embarrassing, and we won't do it."

The boss explained - as he shoulda from the start - but he said that the city was trying to improve the tourist trade and build onto the visitors' center, but a water line had a valve stuck shut. Old maps were lost and no one could remember the original plan. All they could do was make an eyeball guess, dig some holes until they found what they were looking for. With an explanation like that the men went back to work. Now they had a reason for their effort - some purpose, a goal.

Our Christian faith and the word of Scripture tell us there is divine meaning somewhere in the craziness of the world, that in the midst of this confusion (or in spite of this confusion), God can accomplish what he wants to be eventually fulfilled. God is bringing everything back together with Christ as head, AND we are part of it.

Now, in the large-scale scheme of things, we can feel small, insignificant, and useless. Yet God starts with YOU. "God was choosing us before this world was made," it says, "planning for us to be adopted as God's children." That happens one by one; 's the way each one of us comes into the world. I'm the father of a birth child and an adoptive child and I know that even if we talking quintuplets, every person is born individually, one by one. That's how we're born/adopted by God, personally and one by one; each one of us belongs to God and he knows us individually. We fit into every plan God has.

The centerpiece of God's plan, of course, is Christ. The raw material of God's plan is the same stuff we work with one day at a time: The world as it is. Jesus died because - from one way to look at it - it was politically convenient for the government to use him and get rid of him. Or, from another point of view, Jesus died without any sensible reason for his death, a good man caught in the wheels of religious jealousies and power politics. In another way - more personal - Jesus died before his hopes and plans, his goals, and his relationships could be completed. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong for him, big picture or small scale. When he died, noontime clouded over and the sky turned black, it was that bad.

But when he rose, the world is forever after different. Before that everything really was BC - before Christ - and everything since his resurrection is now AD, literally "in the year of our Lord," which means, present tense; it's going on right now. History has a purpose, this day does, too, and so do we. Everything adds up; the result is Jesus Christ, we are part of it, and the end of it is life.

More than a century ago - well before navigational equipment and radio signals - a fisherman and his sons were out on Lake Superior somewhere north of Grand Marais when their house was hit by lightning and burned to the ground. The wife and mother was beside herself when her men finally returned. Except for the old boat, everything they owned had been destroyed. But the old man and his sons shrugged off the loss.

"A few hours ago," he said, "we could see that storm building over the Sawtooth Mountains. We knew it would be bad but we had no idea. We were too far out to have a chance. It wasn't long before we were completely turned around, it was pitch black, and we were absolutely lost. Then we saw a yellow glare. At first we thought we'd been blown as far south as Split Rock but that didn't make sense for the time the storm had lasted - and this light was steady. We didn't understand it, but we figured we may as well head that way. As it turned out the fire that destroyed this house was the light that saved our lives."

Our true security is not this world and the value that we add to it. Our hope is not the plans we have to make things total up for ourselves, nor the knowledge we gain over a lifetime of hard work. The answer to our existence is not what we put into it, and not how all that multiplies. God's math adds up to something else: WE are the reason for God's love and the head of everything is Christ.

Nathan Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota