Murder. Beheadings. Corrupt despots. Politicians partying with underage femme fatales. We get plenty of this in the news; must we encounter it in the pages of our Bible? Well – yes, there’s plenty of all that in the Bible, which, after all, chronicles the movement of God in human life – and often reminds us how desperately humankind needs that gift. A most unappealing story comes up in this Sunday's gospel: the account of how King Herod came to have John the Baptist beheaded. No doubt we can learn something from this sordid tale, but I have no wish to spend our whole week on it.
Happily Sunday’s readings also include one of my top ten hits – the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. This letter contains some of the most beautiful, lyrical passages in the New Testament; one year I actually memorized the first three chapters as a Lenten discipline. Paul is so effusive in his praise of God and so passionate in his prayer for this community he has heard about. Here's how it starts:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
Just pick out the verbs in that paragraph: blessed, chosen, destined, bestowed. In each case, God is the actor and we are the receivers – we are those blessed with every spiritual blessing that is going on right now in the heavenly places; we are those chosen before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love. That one sentence binds up our deepest past and our farthest future – and it’s all right now, already happening, on earth as it is in heaven.
Paul writes that God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Christ. This is great for us, but also, it appears, somehow adds to the praise of God’s grace freely given us in the Beloved, who is Christ. Imagine: when we receive God’s grace, it further praises the giver of that very gift. So when we refuse the gift of grace, when we try to justify ourselves, when we shun God’s forgiving mercy and insist on punishing ourselves, when we stubbornly cling to our self-sufficiency and illusions of control… God is less praised. Who'd have thought that not taking an offered gift could have such cosmic effect?
I was born into a wonderful human family in which I am birth-daughter, sister, aunt. I have also been adopted into the eternal and worldwide family of God, which has made me daughter, sister, mother to so many beautiful souls, chosen with me before the foundations of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love.
I can think of no better prayer today – for us to take in the immeasurable love in which we were made and in which we live. Thanks be to God!
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