All Saints C (4 November 2007)

Ephesians 1:11-23

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

GOD’S DOWN PAYMENT

Our First Lesson from Ephesians is part of an almost breathless chapter about God’s plan for all of history and the scope of the resurrection and rule of Christ. We’re not sure who wrote this letter – it was either St. Paul or a disciple of his. In either case represents the high point of Paul’s mature thinking about Christ and the church. Most of our text is one long complicated sentence in the original, as if the writer was so excited that he just couldn’t stop.

God “raised [Christ] from the dead,” he says, “and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.” It’s not surprising that this is one of the readings for Ascension Day. In a later chapter of Ephesians the writer makes it clear that when he speaks of the ascension he’s not thinking of Jesus just sitting on a throne a few miles up above sky. Christ, he says, “ascended far above all heavens, so that he might fill all things.” The entire universe is pervaded by what Teilhard de Chardin called “the intoxicating presence of Christ.”

Today is not the festival of the Ascension, however, but All Saints Sunday. And this text is about all saints – all “who have set [their] hopes on Christ” and who “in Christ ... have obtained an inheritance.” And he wants you – the people of St. Paul’s, Akron, 2007, as well as the people of ancient Ephesus - to know “what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” That inheritance is that we are to grow to maturity in the Son of God and to share in the life of God. The church, the “communion of saints, is Christ’s “body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

And we can get caught up in that language and those ideas, as we can get caught up with other religious things – an inspiring text or a good sermons, sharing in the Eucharist, listening to great choir music, some feeling of God’s presence in the natural world - and have an idea of what is meant by “the intoxicating presence of Christ” and our call to share in it.

But then, inevitably, we come back to earth. There’s a test in school tomorrow, we remember difficult people we have to deal with at work, there’s a doctor’s appointment we’re worried about, and we’re concerned about our children, our parents, and the state of the world. We never stay on the mountain top for very long. And when we come back to the everyday, how much difference do a few inspiring moments, some comforting Bible verses and “religious experiences” make?

We live on earth, not in heaven – and on an unfinished earth at that, with human society nowhere near what God intends. And it’s the same with our lives. Most of us feel that we are, most of the time, only the roughest approximation to “spiritual people.” Am I right? And yet something has been done for us to assure us that those intimations of heaven, and of a world which really is what God intends, are real. “When you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in Christ, [you] were marked with the seal of his promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance, toward redemption as God’s own people.”

The word “pledge” there is an interesting and important one. The Greek word, arrabōn, which is borrowed from the Hebrew, was a technical term of business and finance in the ancient world. It refers to a non-refundable deposit on a purchase – not the full price but enough to show that the buyer is serious. It’s a little bit like the non-refundable deposits that students may make when they apply to a college for admission. Or if you’re agreeing to buy a house you give the seller a certain amount of “earnest money,” as it may be called, as a start. If you back out of the deal you don’t get that money back. That means that the payment of this pledge is an indication that you really are committed to the purchase.

And Paul, or his disciple, says that the gift of the Holy Spirit that Christians have received is a little bit like that. We are not spiritually exalted all the time, confident, or healthy, wealth and wise the way the religious snake oil peddlers on television promise. We are, Paul says in another letter, “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ... struck down but not destroyed.” But those times of inspiration that we are given, those religious experiences and moments of assurance, are reminders that God has given us a down payment of the Holy Spirit. God tells us then, “I really meant it when I called you and promised you that glorious inheritance in Christ with all the saints. You’re not there yet but you’ll get there because I’ll get you there as surely as I raised Jesus from the grave.”

That is all especially significant in connection with our service of Baptism today. All Saints is one of the times during the year when we’re encouraged to celebrate Baptism because that is the sacrament by which people are incorporated into the Body of Christ and become members of the communion of saints in earth and heaven. But I want you to notice one particular part of the service. That is the chrismation, when the sign of the cross is made on the forehead of the newly baptized person, who is addressed by name and told, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” That echoes the language from our reading in Ephesians – “the seal of [God’s] promised Holy Spirit.” And it means that whatever your ups and downs may be as you go through life, no matter how many spiritual dry spells there may be, you are God’s own.

Baptism is something we grow into – we don’t get it all at the moment when the water is poured. But we do have God’s pledge that we will receive in full “the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.”