Ephesians begins with a torrent washing us in a waterfall of poetry.[1] The passage we just heard is just one breathtakingly long sentence in the original Greek, difficult to replicate in English, but we catch the flow, the surge of phrases pouring from the page, line after line, wave after wave of exuberant praise, a river of hymnic exultation that bids us bless the God who blesses all with every heavenly blessing. The style is as grand as the joyous claims the hymn presents, singing of the mystery made known to us: God gathering up all things, things in heaven and things on earth, in Christ. The whole world and all who live in it bathed in God’s grace, a grace poured out with heedless abundance. Ephesians begins with a river of song responding to the unfathomable river of God, inviting us to sing along, encouraging us to begin our year, our days, our prayers not with chalky prose, but with praise.
It doesn’t come easy, though. I read that two of the most widely quoted and shared poems in the closing years of this decade were William Butlers Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Yeats’s poem was written just after World War I, declaring “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and speaking of a time when “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Auden’s poem, written in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, speaks of how “Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth” and describes a world lying “in stupor,” as democracy is threatened and “the enlightenment driven away.”[2] Praise doesn’t come easy in these times of twittered rage and mournful lament, but the praise of God whose wondrous incarnation we celebrate on Christmas may well be the one thing powerful enough to pull us beyond our ideological captivities to a vision of one life shared by all. Ephesians wants to remind us, in poetry and prose, that in Christ we participate in a new humanity, wherein everyone and everything in heaven and on earth is reconciled to God and one another. In Christ, even our proudest divisions come to an end. Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo at the end of the 4th century, said in a sermon on the feast of Epiphany,
Now, then, my dearly beloved [children] and heirs of grace, look to your vocation and, since Christ has been revealed to both Jews and Gentiles as the cornerstone, cling together with most constant affection. For he was manifested in the very cradle of his infancy to those who were near and to those who were afar - to the Jews whose shepherds were nearby; to the Gentiles whose Magi were at a great distance. The former came to him on the very day of his birth; the latter are believed to have come on this day. He was not revealed, therefore, to the shepherds because they were learned, nor to the Magi because they were righteous, for ignorance abounds in the rusticity of shepherds and impiety amid the sacrileges of the Magi. He, the cornerstone, joined both groups to himself since he came to choose the foolish things of the world in order to put to shame the wise and “to call sinners, not the righteous,” so that the mighty would not be lifted up nor the lowly be in despair.[3]
Luke tells us of the shepherds and Matthew of the wise men, but when we put together the Nativity set, we put the whole world in and around the stable—Jews and Gentiles, poor working folk and scholarly star gazers, locals and outsiders, and even ox and ass, sheep and camels, because the vision of peace is not just for humanity, but for all creation. And all because the one in the cradle “came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” as we read in Ephesians; and now it doesn’t matter anymore how we try to determine and define “far off” because the one who went from the cradle to the cross brought us all near in the wide embrace of his unsentimental love. “So then [we all] are no longer strangers and aliens, but … citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”[4]
Members of the household of God. One life, shared by all. The purpose is no longer hidden, but revealed in Christ’s embrace of the world. Dr. King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail,
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.[5]
Those words are as true today as they were in 1963, and they are even more urgent today when we’re finally beginning to realize that the biggest challenges we face aren’t national, but global. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, and that garment has serious rips and tears in its fabric.
Left to our own devices, we can’t escape our tendency to rend asunder what God has tied together. Catherine of Siena said, speaking in the voice of God,
“I could easily have created [human beings] possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.”[6]
Left to our own devices, we keep trying to grasp for ourselves all that we should need both for body and soul, and what we create in the process are the rips and tears of alienation, distrust, suspicion, and hostility.
Left to our own devices, we make a world where unless you are like me, I have no need of you; unless you are for me, I have no need of you; and unless you are useful to me, I have no need of you.[7] But “I have no need of you” never was an option for human life, and it became a reality only because of the power of sin.
Ephesians begins with a torrent of praise, because we are not left to our own devices: Christ has conquered sin so we might live in the beloved community of his making, reconciled to God and one another, in the blessed conviviality of creation, to the praise of God’s glory. We live in a new day, because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. We belong, because Christ has made us his own, and because we belong to Christ, we are part of God’s great enterprise of reconciliation and the healing of God’s broken world. Catherine of Siena said, in God’s voice, about God’s human creatures, “I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.” God’s great enterprise of creation and redemption translates into lots and lots of small steps and everyday actions.
Brian Doyle, a gifted storyteller and writer, died in the spring of 2017 at the age of 60 of complications from a brain tumor. “We’re only here for a minute,” he told a friend. “We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”[8] The creation and redemption of the world is God’s great story, but for you and me, Doyle suggests, it’s the dailiness of catching and sharing shards of light and laughter and grace. Doyle spoke of God as the “coherent mercy” that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of “the music in and through and under all things,” and his final book of essays is “made up almost entirely of praise songs, often for the people [he] loved — wife, children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends — but just as often for … shrews and hummingbirds and hawks and … great blue herons and pretty much every other creature he happened to encounter.”[9] The writer of Ephesians heard Christ as the music in and through and under all things, and erupted in praise—because God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will: to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, the whole universe made complete in love.
I believe praise is born of wonder and gratefulness. David Steindl-Rast says, “What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. [But] we forget that.” We do forget that, but singing the praise of God from whom all blessings flow, we may yet come to “practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness.”[10] And we will each add our praise to the songs of angels, shepherds, and wise men, while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy.
[1] Eph 1:3-14
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming and https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939; see Michiko Kakutani https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/27/opinion/sunday/2010s-america-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
[3] Augustine, quoted in Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 153.
[4] See Ephesians 2:17-19
[5] Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
[6] Quoted by Stephen Boyd, Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 139.
[7] In addition to Catherine, see 1 Cor 12:21.
[8] From a new collection of Doyle’s essays, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, quoted in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/impeachment-trump-pelosi.html
[9] Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/books/review/one-long-river-of-song-brian-doyle.html
[10] Brother David Steindl-Rast https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/19/november-19-2010-brother-david-steindl-rast-on-gratitude/7515/