Henrietta United
Rev. David
Inglis
Ephesians 4:1-16
“Bigger Than You Think”
Back
in the early days of Jewish history, the Hebrew people groaned under the heavy
bondage of slavery as they made bricks in the
hot Egyptian sun. And God heard their cries, because when God’s creatures
suffer, God suffers. And with signs and wonders, God broke the grip of
Pharaoh, and led the Hebrew people into the wilderness, and got them safely
across the
“Our God is a mighty powerful God,” they thought. “God must have chosen
us for something great.” It wasn’t long before they began to
believe that God had not only chosen to live in the Promised Land of Canaan,
but to kill every man, woman, child, and animal that breathed there, because those
people and all they owned weren’t chosen; they were an abomination and must
be wiped out. They even wrote that belief into the Bible.
For
some reason, the Canaanites were so spiritually blind they didn’t seem to share
the Hebrews’ God’s vision for their future. Their gods seemed to tell
them that they should resist these foreign invaders, because they were
infidels. And so began a long history of battles and wars for land and
power in the
The
Hebrews saw their God as powerful and mighty in battle and as a jealous God who
definitely took sides. Their God could whup their neighbors’ gods.
God was on their side, because they were God’s favored ones.
This
is the God of nationalism. This wasn’t just the God of the ancient
Jews. We can see this image of God in our pictures of the mighty eagle
holding the arrows in his talons. We try to conjure him up when we pray
for God to be on our side, protect our troops, and bless our country–if
we pray it in a way that diminishes the worth of God’s children that aren’t
“part of us.” But as Paul reminded us in our scripture reading today,
there is “one God and Father of all, who is above all
and through all and in all.” If you don’t see how vast God is, you are
likely to end up going around doing half-vast things that come back to kick you
in your half-vast self!
The
good news is that even though we do some half-vast things, We’re
really a lot vaster than we think we are.
If
you picture yourself, you probably picture your body–this bundle of needs,
impulses, pains, and pleasures. We all know that our bodies don’t last
forever, but you might be surprised to know how short-lived the shelf lives of
your body’s parts really are. Your skin cells replace themselves every
six weeks. The cells in your liver are replaced every two months. Every
five days you get a new stomach lining–which is a good thing, considering what
you ate on July 4th. In fact, every year, 98% of your body’s
atoms are completely replaced.1
You
are continually exchanging atoms with the world around you–through what you
breathe, eat, drink, shed, and eliminate. The atoms in your skin, muscle
and blood were recently parts of things like cornfields, cows, earthworms,
drain water, and smoke coming out of factory smokestacks. It’s a wonder
we feel as good as we do. So who is the you that
still feels like you, even though your body’s atoms were once scattered
all over the place and have been replaced many times over?
Are
you your feelings? Well, your emotions, your moods, your attitudes, your
feelings about yourself change over time–sometimes very quickly. But you
still know you’re the same you.
Are
you your thoughts, then? Well, we change our minds pretty often
too. And what we know and what we think about things changes all the
time. If fact, if we stop doing and just follow our thoughts, they will be a
tumbling jumble of ideas and images without any real coherence at all.
But somehow, under that, our identity stays the same.
What
is this identity, then? How would you describe yourself? By the work that you do, or your roles in your family, or your
gender? Well then, who is the you
who is these things, and that can change these things? Even if you
changed your gender, you would still know that it was you on the other side of
your sex change operation. We all might be confused about who you were
for awhile. But your dog wouldn’t be confused for a moment.
The
essential truth of who you are is vaster and deeper
than you or I can touch or feel or think. If you could let go of all the
trappings of physicality, feelings, thoughts, and ego identity, you would be
pure consciousness, pure awareness, deeply at peace, deeply attuned to and
compassionate toward everything around you. You would be timeless,
self-less, and one with God and everything.
Some
people have reached this place for a time. We call these mystics, enlightened
ones, or illumined ones. Some of you have glimpsed this pure state of
being. We inch toward it here together when we let go of our small selves
and unite as one body in the worship of God. At those times, we feel in our
souls the truth of what Paul said: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as
you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one
baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in
all.” That is one dimension of who we are–part of that divine Mystery
that connects our spirits with God and with everything.
And
the other dimension of who we are has to do with an incredible divine drama that’s
been unfolding in space and time for the past 14 billion years. These
atoms that make up our eyes and skin and bones and hearts have been in the
universe for billions of years, starting with the explosion of a large
star. And they’ve been combining and recombining and recombining until
they’ve come together as you, who can balance a bike and maybe even a
checkbook; who can play chess or an instrument or maybe even video games; who
can not only see and touch and hear the world around you, but can also
experience awe and wonder and reverence for it; who can not only use your mind
and hands to make things, but can also use your mind and hands to make things
better for those around you; who can love another person, a church, a worthy
cause, or an unseeable God so much that you might sacrifice your own personal
comfort and happiness for its sake.
Billions
of years ago, all we were was a great cloud of hydrogen gas. Look what
we’ve become! I don’t have anything against hydrogen, but I’d say we’ve
come a long way. What a marvelous drama we are a part of–atoms combining
to create molecules that combine to create organs that combine to create us
humans that combine to create families that combine to create communities that
combine to create states that combine to create a nation founded on the
principles of liberty and justice for all.
So
who are we? Part of something ancient and vast and mysterious, that is
continuing to unfold and reach higher states of complexity even during our own
lifetime.
Some
of you were alive when the highest level of complexity most people could relate
to was their nation. Nationalistic patriots were held in high esteem in
almost every country–even if their attitude was “My country, right or
wrong.” Two devastating world wars were fought when these nations’ self
interests conflicted with each other. And we came very close to a third
world war that could have destroyed much of life on our planet as we know
it.
But
the drama of creation has continued to unfold. Photos of the earth from
space have helped us see ourselves as inhabitants of one earth. News of
what’s happening around the world is shown in living rooms around the
world. A global economy has made every nation’s economy interdependent on
each other’s. Information, ideas and opinions are freely shared all over
the world on the World Wide Web. We are becoming one global
community. And the extinction of large numbers of species and the onset
of global climate change have made it clear as never before that our global
community is part of one bigger ecosystem that includes other species and
natural forces that are all interconnected. Our health depends on the health of
this ecosystem, and its health depends on our awareness of it, our respect for it, and our ability to be good
stewards of it.
We
are at a major turning point in our evolution. We have developed the
means of consuming the world’s resources at a voracious rate, and we are
throwing the “balance of nature” way out of balance. An oncologist
likened the human race at this level to a cancer that is consuming its host
body. A cancer cell starts off like a normal cell, but for some reason it
loses its genetic memory that tells it how to serve the larger body.
Instead, it goes out of control, taking over everything.2 It finally “wins,” and the body succumbs to it.
But at that moment, the cancer also loses, because the cancer dies when the
body dies. We are called a “consumer culture.” If that’s all we
are–consumers of our host body–our fate will be similar to a malignant
cancer’s.
But
we are also sons and daughters of the Creator of all of it and all of us.
Deep within us is a connectedness to the “one God and Father of all, who is
above all and through all and in all.” We have
the capacity to see beyond our own bodies and our own short-sighted self interest, and to serve that which is bigger than we
are.
That’s
what Paul was talking about when he said, Christ “gave gifts to his people...to
equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of
Christ....Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who
is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together
by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly,
promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
As
agents of God’s creative, redemptive love in the world, we are called to offer
our gifts to build up into maturity all the bodies of which we are a part–our
families, our church, our workplaces, our communities, our nation, our global
community, our ecosystem. They all belong to God; we are an integral part
of them all; our health is dependent on their health; and their health is
dependent on our awareness of them, our respect for them, and our willingness
to offer our gifts to benefit them.
Martin
Luther said, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A
Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Jesus
was the model of that-totally free, yet totally a servant of all. Whether
we’re talking about atoms or organs of a body or members of a church or the
nations of the world, when each part serves the whole by offering its
particular gifts, every part thrives because the whole is healthy. That’s
the marvelous, mysterious way God created us and the whole universe.
So
how big is God to you? How big are you? How big are we as a
church? How big are we as a nation? We were created to be
vast–integrally connected to the whole vast, mysterious, wondrous, unfolding
creation, as children of the “one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” And as servants of
this vast God, we are created to offer our gifts to this vast, wonderful
Creation, “promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
Does
your identity, your life, your faith, your patriotism feel half-vast? You
are bigger than you think! Let’s live as wholly-vast sons and daughters
of the God of us all, offering our gifts to every body we are a part of–because
that is what we were created to do.
1. Michael Dowd, Thank God for
Evolution, Council Oak Books, 2007, p. 271.