Thursday, October 13, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The sum of all love
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.
Oh, Paul. You are on a high! Catch the wings of the doves, slide over to the falcons, and finally slip onto the backside of an angel. Heading to heaven, you are. You love these Ephesians! You offer them the sweetest words and the sweetest promises. They love you, too!
In love our Father destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.
My goodness! Paul repeats himself, of course, as do all good poets. Can you say it out loud? For the praise of the glory of his grace. For the praise of the glory of his grace. For the praise of the glory of his grace.
Our Father set forth in Christ a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.
 His words transport not just his little old self, but us. We listen, we sway, we start to rise. See how Eugene Peterson hears him:
We’re a free people! And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything and provided for everything we could possible need. He delighted in that, and set it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up. In him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.
Awhile ago I indulged in a novel by Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears. But Paul’s vision has No Fear in it. It is summed up in love, which is never weighted down with fear, nor hesitation, nor terror, nor uncertainty, nor despair. The loads of burly gravel we carry on our backs from place to place is not part of God’s plan. Paul was right, and Tom Clancy is wrong. We don’t need no stinkin’ Jack Ryan.
But even that cinematic allusion stinks with murder for money. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has nothing to do with the pearl of great price. I flirt with the edges of death and madness when I settle into a movie like this. Why do I do it? I can’t stop coming back to Paul. Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done wondrous deeds. The Lord has made his salvation known.
The Lord makes it known to me, to little old me. I fail to KNOW only when I turn away. When I flirt and play with the edges of hell, which are fascinating (just watch What Dreams May Come), but also, at the least, distracting and at the most wholly destructive. This choice, when we have been made free … why? I wrack my brain for answers, but my brain resists. It thinks it’s having fun. I’m having fun. I’m joining my friends in a far out party.
But my friends know too.
All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation by our God. Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands! With song, with harp, with trumpets and the sound of the horn, sing. Sing. Sing!
The Pharisees, they knew too. Why didn’t they just sing? Jesus called out the Pharisees and took their minds back in time, to the evil of their ancestors, who also knew. Out of fear those ancestors killed the prophets, and now, still the same. But blind, the Pharisees admire and adore their ancestors.
Therefore the wisdom of God said, “I will send them prophets and apostles, some of them they will kill and persecute, in order that THIS generation might be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. Woe to you! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter, and you stop those who try.
Better by far to sing and praise and worship the King.
(Ephesians 1, Psalm 98, John 14, Luke 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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