A Spirit of Wisdom (Ephesians 1:15-23; Ascension Sunday; June 1, 2014)

A Spirit of Wisdom

Ephesians 1:15-23
Ascension Sunday
June 1, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Next Friday afternoon the Iowa Annual Conference will begin its work as the clergy session meets to decide on all the questions that have to do with licensed and ordained ministry.  The most important of these questions will be about who shall be ordained as elders and deacons. 

Then the next day the whole of the Conference will gather to worship, to decide on programs and budgets, and to speak as a Conference to the issues of our day.  We’ll hear reports—many, many reports.  We’ll collect a bunch of special offerings.  We’ll vote and make motions to amend this proposal and table that.  At least once we’ll turn ourselves inside out trying to understand how Robert’s Rules applies to our situation.

A week from today we will ordain elders and deacons to lead the United Methodist Church in Iowa.  It is always a high and holy moment.  But there is a troubling question that in all probability will be neither asked nor answered: Lead the church into what future?

Thirty years ago the answer to that question was easy, or at least assumed.  You lead the church by helping to do what the church has done for as long as we can remember.  And you could measure your success by simple numerical yardsticks: Did your membership increase in the last year?  Did you have adult professions of faith?  Did you pay your apportionments?  If the answers to these questions were “Yes,” then you had fulfilled your promise to lead.

But the landscape has changed in the last decades.  The territory no longer corresponds to anything we can see on the maps we inherited from the past.  We are no longer sure of where we are going, let alone how to get there. 

The last decades have been hard on the United Methodist Church.  We’ve lost membership almost everywhere in the country.  The church is wracked in a debate that appears to be about the role of gays and lesbians in our church, but masks deeper struggles over the nature of Christian discipleship and the authority of Scripture.   When it comes to important social issues, we no longer carry the weight that we used to.  The Des Moines Register no longer sends a reporter to listen to what the Conference has to say. 

Here in Decorah, where thirty years ago it would have been unheard of for a sports club to schedule a game on Sunday, parents are schlepping their kids to neighboring states for meets that last all weekend.  Thirty years ago nobody would have dared to propose that the school athletic program crowd into “church night.”  Thirty years ago no one could have imagined, after the community’s pastors had unanimously requested that the Wednesday afternoon schedule remain as it was, that the School Board would then have approved the change.  This is not a complaint, only a mark of just how much our context for ministry has changed.

Some in our Conference are looking for ways to bring back the fabulous fifties and the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sixties.  Others are looking to succeed in the emerging world by adapting to its core values.  Those in the middle are just trying to muddle through, trying to meet the demands that arise, trying to keep people happy.  Some of us are trying to figure out, not how the church can succeed by the number-obsessed standards of our culture, but how we can be faithful as Christians and as a church.

The next thirty years are going to be a challenge for the United Methodist Church, for our congregation, for each of us.  Across the globe we are facing a series of crises that will challenge every institution and all of us.  It is not only that the mainline Protestantism has lost its privileged position as the unofficial but nonetheless very real established church in the United States.  Historically, the middle class has historically provided the foundation of the United Methodist Church, but the middle class itself is in trouble.  Massive indebtedness—especially in the form of student loans—and the generations-long stagnation of wages and salaries, have left the middle class unable to maintain its economic success.  Half of all Americans will at some time in their lives qualify for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. 

The extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very wealthy that characterizes our time has nearly destroyed our sense that we will face national and global challenges together, sharing the burdens and the gains. 

Our economy is up against a wall as compounded growth collides with the limits of a finite earth.  We can no longer count on being able to vent the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane that our civilization produces into the global system without suffering the consequences in climate-related disasters, disrupted food production, and a competitive struggle for the resources that all of us need.

How do we respond faithfully to this unprecedented challenge?  How will we prepare ourselves and the next generation to be the kind of Christians who can tell the truth about our world when the stakes are high?  How do we prepare ourselves to be able to make the kind of choices that we will need to make?  What sorts of organizations and institutions will serve us well as we figure these things out?  These are the questions that we need to focus on.  Instead our denomination is fighting about sex. 

Can we face our fears and focus on what is really going on in our world?  I’m not optimistic.  But I am hopeful. 

Which brings us to the letter to the Ephesians.  While we can’t be sure that it was written specifically to the church at Ephesus, nor even that it was written by Paul, we can say with assurance that it was written to a church or churches in what was then called Asia Minor, modern western Turkey, by someone who was quite familiar with Paul’s thought.  Anyone in Asia Minor who was trying to be a Christian was in a hard place.  Besides the local cultures and city life, there was the Roman Empire.  You know the old joke that runs, “Where does a five hundred pound gorilla sit?” to which the answer is, “Anywhere it wants to.”   Well, the Roman Empire was a cultural, religious, and political five-hundred pound gorilla.  Trying to be a Christian in Asia Minor was as hard as trying to be a Ukrainian living next to Russia, or worse, trying to be a Canadian living next to the United States.

And unlike us the ancients recognized that the world was not simply a material reality, but also a spiritual one.  Every city, kingdom and empire, every gathered assembly, every mob, every extended family, every religious society, even the world itself had its spiritual counterpart.  When they tried to resist becoming Roman they were not only resisting Roman government, religion and culture; they were resisting the invisible powers that stood behind each of those things.  And they were just a pitifully few Christians, meeting before dawn on the first day of the week, doing their best to follow Jesus whom the Empire insisted had been executed for treason but whom they nonetheless believed was alive and living among them.  How could they possibly manage?

Well, writes our author, you’re not doing so badly.  You are trusting in Christ and you love each other.  That’s no small thing.  And, he says, I will pray that you receive a spirit of wisdom, that is a spirit that will let you see what is really going on in the world, behind the pomp and glitter of empire.  Yes, there are rulers and authorities—and he means the spiritual powers and authorities first of all, and then their earthly expressions—yes, there are powers and dominions; yes, there are names of power that people invoke.  That’s all true.  But God.  You see, those words are the words that give Christians their power and freedom to follow Christ: But God.  But God with the power that gives life to the dead, starting with Jesus, has put Christ above the rulers and authorities, above the powers and dominions, above all the names of power.  And, as strange as it may seem, God has done this for the Church, that is Christ’s body, and that, in turn is God’s full presence in the world. 

And that’s why, even those I’m not optimistic, I am hopeful.  In the final analysis the Church is not an institution, even one as fine as the United Methodist Church.  Our congregation is not the organization that we call Decorah First United Methodist Church.  And we are up to the challenges that face us, not because we are ready as an institution or an organization, nor because we are good and competent and bright people.  We are up to the challenges that face us, because the power of God is at work in Christ, and we are Christ’s body and it is God’s full presence in the world.

There are great powers in our day.  They are the “isms” that reign over our world—neo-liberal capitalism, militarism, consumerism, racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, and individualism, to name just a few.  They are daunting.  Before their power our hearts quail and our knees shake and we can hardly find our voices.  The Annual Conference gathers and adopts its strategic plans.  Local congregations develop mission statements.  But strategic plans and mission statements won’t topple the “isms,” nor give our hearts courage, nor steady our knees, nor give us our voices. 

We are no match for the “isms” of our day.  But they are no match for the God whose power gave new life to Jesus and gives new life to us.  And it is God’s purpose to bring new life to the world through us, the resurrected body of Christ. 

How do Jesus-followers follow an absent Jesus?  We do it by leaning into God’s purpose for us just as Jesus leaned into God’s purpose for him.  As our writer put it:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation…that…you may know…the immeasurable greatness of God’s power for us who believe, according to the working of God’s great power at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and seated him at God’s right hand in the heavenly places,  far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.  And God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of God who fills all in all.

Amen.

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