Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen
“Although I am the very least of all the
saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the
boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the
mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the
church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the
rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the
eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we
have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.”
These two verses
in Paul’s lesson to the Ephesians really spoke to me this week.
They are loaded.
Paul has a way of
writing extremely complex sentences.
In that first
sentence alone, Paul speaks about
1.
Being the least of all the saints;
2.
Grace;
3.
Gentiles;
4.
The boundless riches of Christ;
5.
The plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God;
6.
God creating all things;
Especially it was
this phrase that struck me:
so that through the church the wisdom of
God in its rich variety might now be made known.
And then, in the
second sentence he stresses again, that “This
was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ
Jesus our Lord.”
Epiphany is about
God revealing himself, and specifically Jesus, to the nations.
Traditionally, on
Epiphany we remember the Wisemen, those sages from the east who traveled to
Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus.
“Since the
seventh century in the Western Church, the Magi have been identified as Caspar,
Melchior and Balthasar. A work called the Excerpta et Collectanea attributed to
St. Bede (d. 735) wrote, "The magi were the ones who gave gifts to the
Lord. The first is said to have been Melchior, an old man with white hair and a
long beard... who offered gold to the Lord as to a king. The second, Caspar by
name, young and beardless and ruddy complexioned... honored Him as God by his
gift of incense, an oblation worthy of divinity. The third, black-skinned and
heavily bearded, named Balthasar ... by his gift of myrrh testified to the Son
of Man who was to die.”
(https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/the-magi.html)
The tradition of
the Church also maintains that following the resurrection of Jesus, Thomas went
on a missionary journey to India. While
on this journey he is said to have met up with the Wisemen in Persia, and
baptized them.
Eventually their
bodies, their relics, were brought back to Europe and are said to be interred
in the Cathedral in Cologne Germany.
What the Wise men
represent is that it was God’s plan to reveal Jesus, not just to the Jewish
people, but to all nations, all peoples, all races.
Back to the
Apostle Paul, and the phrase “so that
through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made
known.
A rich variety.
The boundless
riches of Christ.
And a God who
created all things.
Let me start with
the last, and work back to the first.
What can we know
about God?
To begin to understand
the nature of God, we look first to the creation which is the work of God’s
hands.
And if we look to
the world around us, the geography, the plants, the animals, not to mention the
vastness of the universe, what we cannot help but be struck by is the rich
variety and diversity that is part of creation.
“Science has
identified some 2 million species of plants, animals and microbes on Earth, but
scientists estimated there are millions more left to discover, and new species
are constantly discovered and described. The most commonly discovered new
species are typically insects, a type of animal with a high degree of
biodiversity. Newly discovered mammal species are rare, but they do occur,
typically in remote places that haven't been well studied previously.”
(https://www.livescience.com/topics/newfound-species)
Think about
that. The creation is so diverse and
rich with variety that even to this day, we have not identified every species
of plant and animal that we share this planet with.
And even within
the human family, billions of people have lived and died, and not one is
identical to the other. Even identical
twins are not in fact identical.
That rich
diversity in Creation tells us a lot about God.
Secondly, we hear
about the boundless riches of Christ.
Boundless means
unlimited. No borders or boundaries can
limit the riches of Christ.
That’s one of the
most important points of the visit of the Wisemen to the baby Jesus. From Jesus birth onward, God sought to make
clear that he loved the world, not just Jewish people.
Boundless also
means that no one, not even one person, is beyond the grace of God.
This has been one
of the hardest things for us to realize.
God can love all people, but we struggle. If we are honest, there are some people so
different from ourselves that we are incapable of loving them as we should.
God isn’t.
God created them.
God can love
them.
And Jesus so
loved them that he gave his life for them, just as he died for us.
Finally, let’s
return to the phrase “so that through
the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.
It’s not just
that there is a rich variety in this world.
And it’s not just
that God in Christ Jesus loves all people.
The wisdom of God
in its rich variety might now be made known through the Church.
In Jesus’ high
priestly prayer, in John 17 he prays “Holy
Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be
one, as we are one.”
That we might be
one, as God is one.
When we speak
about Christian unity we often do so with the sense that we should be the same,
and that our differences are the result of our failures, our sins.
That the Church
is divided is the result of our sinfulness and our differences.
History tells the
story of the many divisions that have taken place in the church.
The disciples
were different.
The Church
divided between the Orthodox in the East and the Roman Catholics in the west.
Following the
Reformation, many different church bodies arose, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican,
Baptist, and Pentecostal, to name a few.
In addition to
being divided on theological grounds, nationality and race has divided us.
We don’t agree
about how the church should operate.
We don’t agree
about how the church should worship.
There are three
things that we have all tended to believe:
First, that we
are right.
Second, that they
are wrong.
And finally, that
these differences are the result of our failure to maintain the unity of the
Church.
But in contrast
to that we have these words of Paul, who by the way, had his own disagreements
with Peter. . .
“so that through the church the wisdom of
God in its rich variety might now be made known.”
And not only that
but this was the plan of the mystery
hidden for ages in God
And this was in accordance with the eternal
purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Imagine that.
Imagine that the
diversity that is present within the Christian community, and perhaps even within
the larger faith community, is not the result of our sinfulness, but rather is
the result of the rich variety of the wisdom of God and his grace that knows no
bounds.
The church was
created by God, for our sake, and as part of God’s creation it is as diverse as
the people that are part of it.
The reason why we
have Catholics, and Lutherans, and Baptists, and Pentecostals, and Methodists,
and non-denominationalists and whatever other church body you might care to
mention, is that apart from this rich variety the wisdom of God and God’s
boundless mercy and grace simply cannot be known.
To put it more
simply: Jesus prayed that we might be
one, not that we would be the same.
On a very personal level, what this means is that you need not be anything other than the self God created you to be.
On a very personal level, what this means is that you need not be anything other than the self God created you to be.
And so the Church
is rich in its diversity.
In this rich
diversity we reflect not only the variety of people whose faith has brought
them to the Church, but also the very nature of the Creator.
As Christians,
the one thing that we have in common is our faith in Christ Jesus.
Apart from that
we are richly diverse. And that is a
beautiful thing.
We lift our
voices in praise of God, yet we each
sing a different melody.
This is all
according to the wisdom of God and his eternal purpose and plan of salvation.
Amen
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