More Than We Can Ask Or Imagine

Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

July 30, 2006

I was having a bad week, filled with minor annoyances at our houses here and in Bethlehem, filled with rising heat and humidity, filled with bad and worse news from Lebanon and Israel and Palestine and endless piffle coming out of the mouths of politicians running for election or already holding office in this country and in others. And I remembered that when my mother was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, she said, “I just want to shrink down, very small, and go hide away in a cave somewhere and make all the world go away.” One thing after another in our personal lives, in the daily news here and abroad, what does it all have to do with us, what can we do about it, and where, by the way, is God in the midst of it?

Then I read the passage from Ephesians this week. I was blown right out of my cave. Paul’s words hit me over the head with the bigness of everything and the connectedness of everything in Paul’s vision, and I was even more powerfully struck by the fact that the text indicates Paul wrote this from prison. Talk about an involuntary cave, a place where the big picture totally disappears! I think of the men in Guantanamo Bay, disconnected from family, language, culture, any contact with the wider world, any sense that there is a tomorrow that might look different from every day for the past four years. Like many of them, Paul was a political prisoner as well, persecuted by a power bent on destroying his spirit of connection to God, to the world, to the community of faith.

Yet in the midst of that environment, listen again to how Paul feels the bigness of God and the world and his place in them. “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant you strength in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to the one who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to that one be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.”

Word after word, phrase after phrase, pull us out of smallness, out of ourselves, out of the dripping water that can torture so many of our days. Paul says,

• It’s not just about us, but about every family in heaven and on earth. We are not just named by our particular family names, but joined with all people as God’s children: those prisoners in Guantanamo, our neighbors in Fair Haven, Lebanese and Israeli children cowering from bombs, our wise elders who can tell us so much, each other here today. We are family. We need each other and are needed by each other.
• It’s not about the stuff we own or don’t own; it’s about the riches of God that God yearns to shower upon us. Riches that may not look like pirate’s treasure or stock options, but riches that can change our lives.
• It’s not about just our own individual strength and power, but about the Spirit’s power. This Spirit that can move in us and lift us up over the dailiness or the disasters of our lives and push us forward. It can also work powerfully in nations and people, as the Bible’s stories remind us. It is not worldly power, but it can transform worldly powers if we invoke it!
• It’s not about our capacity to love, limited as it is, but about the unlimited, forgiving, inclusive love of Jesus Christ that can enable us to love, to forgive, to include those we thought beyond our capacity to love: those who have hurt us, family or friends from whom we are estranged, those whom history tells us to hate, even selected politicians.
• It’s not about our font of knowledge, whether we think that font overflowing or merely a puddle, but about Christ’s love and God’s fullness. As Paul says elsewhere, knowledge will pass away and we see now as though in a shadowed glass, but God really does know more than we do and sees more clearly than we can.
• It’s not about how we can fill our time, our houses and cars, our bellies, but about connecting with the fullness of God. What a curious phrase that is, the fullness of God, the image of the 23^rd Psalm talking about being anointed by God with an overflowing cup. Making an empty place in our lives to receive that anointing is the daily invitation to us.
• It’s not about what we can imagine, but what God can. I love the way John’s gospel tells this story of the feeding of the 5000, because it points to the imagination piece. Philip said it was impossible; there wasn’t enough money to buy that much food available to them. Andrew began to imagine more when he mentioned the child with food he was willing to share, but was sure it still would not be sufficient. Jesus showed what was possible when imagination was set free in the name of love and expanded from what people perceived they did not have to what God has made available to all. How I pray that imagination might come into play in any part of the Middle East today.
• Finally, it’s not just about now, today, or even our lifetimes, but we are part of something that has been and will be, and we have a connection and responsibility to that past and future to which we need to attend.

“Ask for the bigness,” Paul says to us, “the fullness, the riches, the strength, the power, the love, the imagination, ask!” Don’t be satisfied with anything less than that overflowing cup of God.

Another man who knew a great deal about what it was like to be in prison for his beliefs, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, invited his people to do the same thing. In his 1994 Inaugural Speech, he said this: “You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking…. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Jesus said he came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Let us go forth this week and live into that abundance, that oneness with God and each other, and as we do, let’s bring some others along for the ride. Amen.