Ephesians 3:1-13 "Epiphany's Surprise" Scott Hoezee

How do you react when something astonishes you? That's probably too broad of a question. After all, there are many different kinds of surprises in life. In a sense, you could lump together into the category of "surprises" events as diverse as a surprise birthday party that your friends cooked up behind your back as well as the surprise that would come if you discovered one day that your spouse had been having an adulterous affair behind your back. Both the party and the revelation of the affair would come as a shock, but to state the incredibly obvious, your response to each surprise would be rather different!

But the kind of surprise I have in mind is when you discover that your whole life, you've been wrong about something. Maybe some of you have experienced this in terms of your attitudes toward people of other races. A few of our members attended a series of seminars on racism last fall, and a couple admitted that at times the meetings were a little rugged for the white folks in attendance. More than we realize, we white people carry around certain assumptions about people of other races--assumptions that are false but that help to keep alive the little racist who lives deep inside most of us. When such things get pointed out to you for the first time, it can come as quite a disconcerting shock and surprise.

We have collectively experienced something similar in recent months in terms of how the rest of the world perceives America. Last year a survey was conducted in which 52% of American leaders stated their belief that America is very favorably regarded by other nations in that America really does a lot of good. When this same survey was taken of leaders from other nations, however, only 12% believed America is favorably regarded.

Again, hearing that may come as a surprise to many of us. So how do we react? Often, there are two opposite extremes: you can allow this new information to change you or you can choose to stay the way you are by rejecting the revelation as wrong. I suspect we all know which of those two options comes the most naturally! I once read an old Scottish prayer that contained the petition, "O Lord, grantest Thou that I mayest always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn!"

Today is Epiphany Sunday. Unlike the recent holidays of Christmas and New Year's, however, my guess is that very few of you rolled out of bed this morning and thought, "Well, it's Epiphany! I've been looking forward to his holy day!" It is almost certainly the case that the same kids who twelve days ago bounded out of bed with shouts of "Merry Christmas!" did not this morning wake you up early with the joy of Epiphany streaming from their faces, urging you to get up so that the celebrations could begin!

No, that's not how it goes with Epiphany. I asked Doug to keep the Christmas tree up until this Sunday for reasons that will become clear in a few moments, but my guess is that most of you have already packed away the lights and decorations, and the tree is at the curb waiting to be turned into woodchips. The holidays are over, and none too soon!

Yet in the Christian tradition, the Christmas season does not even begin until Christmas Day and it does not end until January 6, which is Epiphany. The "twelve days of Christmas" start on December 26 and end today. Christmas must conclude with Epiphany because without a true understanding of Epiphany, Christmas is empty of meaning. The word "epiphany" is from the Greek epiphaino, which means "to show, reveal, appear." An epiphany is a revelation of some new information. Typically the information that comes in an epiphany is unexpected and surprising.

In the tradition of the Christian Church, Epiphany focuses on one of two gospel events: either the arrival of the Magi or the baptism of Jesus. Both of those events contained a rather startling epiphany about who Jesus was and why he had come to this world in the first place. But our passage for this morning focuses on neither of those events, and yet what Paul says in Ephesians 3 nicely captures the essence of Epiphany in terms of getting at the surprise message Jesus brings to the world. In fact, as these verses make clear, Paul never recovered from the shock he experienced in God's epiphany through Jesus.

What is the content of this epiphany? Well, Paul goes on and on in these verses about some big mystery. There was a divine mystery that God had kept hidden for ages. The only reason Paul ever found out about this was because of what he calls "the administration of grace" in verse 2 and "the administration of the mystery" in verse 9. The actual phrases in Greek could be translated "the economy of grace" and "the economy of the mystery" because Paul uses the word oikonomia, from which we derive our words "economy" and "economics." An "economy" refers to how something gets managed and distributed. In financial terms, if the economy is good, it means there is a decent amount of money flowing through the system, getting distributed far and wide to consumers and producers alike.

The Greek word Paul uses carries pretty much the same meaning: "economy" refers to how something gets managed, arranged, and parceled out. So when it comes to grace and also to the mystery of salvation, what is God's management style like? How would Paul describe divine economics? In a word: lavish! God is generous with his grace, almost outlandish in the ways by which he so freely distributes his salvation in Christ.

The mystery that bowled Paul over in shock when he first heard about it is this: getting saved has nothing to do with how we behave or what we accomplish on our own. To be saved, all anyone needs is a dose of God's grace in Christ Jesus. Salvation is not a reward for proper living. Salvation is not "for Jews only" or for anyone else who has a certain religious or ethnic pedigree to show for himself. Salvation is a gift through and through.

This gracious gift may well come to the most likely of people but it also comes to the least likely candidates. The kingdom of God, as it turns out, contains the types of folks you'd expect to see there: ministers, upstanding church members, nice little old ladies who were always so sweet to everyone they ever met. But the kingdom belongs to also strugglers and stragglers, prodigals and sinners, women just as much as men, Samaritans and Greeks just as much as pious Jews who could quote the whole Torah from memory.

The kingdom even managed to include Paul, who had spent a decent portion of his life getting physically sick at the mere mention of the name "Jesus" and who therefore had done his level best for a long time to wipe that ugly name from the face of the earth. When in verse 8 Paul refers to himself as "the least" of all the saints, that's not some fake attempt to be humble. Paul could never outrun the memories of how he had once acted--those memories chased him in his sleep and hounded his waking hours, too. And yet, grace came.

The mystery that was revealed, or "epiphanied," to Paul is that in the face of God's grace, sin doesn't matter and so won't prove to be an obstacle in the long run. And the real kicker for Paul was that this divine grace did not wait for a Gentile to be turned into a Jew. There were no strings attached to grace, no pre-requisites, provisos, or hidden clauses that spelled out a catch or two. If grace came to a person, then it didn't matter if the individual in question had been a prostitute or a princess, a deeply religious person his whole life or a flippant hedonist whose partying lifestyle had contained no hint of spirituality. None of that mattered because Jesus really had done it all for us and if this same Jesus decides to deliver the mind-blowing riches of his love to someone, then there is no one in heaven or on earth who may say, "Wait a second! Shouldn't so-and-so have to do something first, Jesus!?"

No one could say any such thing, even though the kinds of people who were getting saved left and right in the early days of the church surely tempted Paul, Peter, and the others to make just such objections. In fact, they did make these objections. The first big controversy in church history (which resulted in the first-ever meeting of a church synod replete with its own study committee) centered on the question of whether a person needed to become an observant Jew before he or she could then become also a Christian.

Paul said they didn't need to become Jews first, Peter and a few others thought otherwise, and so they finally had to call a special meeting in Jerusalem to figure out what in the world God was doing and what their response to that divine activity needed to be. In the end, Paul's side on this issue won the day because of Paul's testimony that Gentiles were being anointed with the Holy Spirit sheerly by God's grace. So if God wasn't waiting for people to become Jews first, why should anyone else!?

But it was all quite surprising to Paul that this was the case. Yet it is something of a shame that this was true, and Paul himself would no doubt agree. Because God's desire to save the whole world had been pretty evident all along. This evening we will kick off a sermon series about Abraham. As we will see in the course of that series, already in Genesis God made it clear that although he would start with just one nation, the goal would be to bless and to save all the nations of the earth. And there are numerous passages and stories throughout the Bible that convey God's love for all people and for the entire creation.

Still, Peter and Paul and so many others missed it. They conveniently ignored, or re-interpreted, Scripture passages that pointed to a salvation whose reach was beyond the borders of just Israel. So by the time God's grace cracked through Paul's thick skull with the message that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, it did indeed come as a life-changing shock. But at least Paul had the courage to admit this. At least Paul allowed God's epiphany to change him instead of rejecting this revelation.

A seminary professor once listed what he believed are the characteristics of a good theologian. The list contained pretty much what most of you would probably guess: a good biblical scholar should know Greek and Hebrew, should be well-versed in various types of biblical literature, should have a solid grounding in systematic and historical theology. But there was one requirement you likely would not guess: a good biblical interpreter, this professor claimed, also needs "a willingness to be surprised."

Are we willing to be surprised? Are we willing to let God's Word challenge the way we've always thought, thus requiring us to re-orient certain things in our hearts? For instance, if we were to discover God quite clearly at work in the life of a type of person we usually deem to be beyond the orthodox pale, would we be willing at least to check out whether we just maybe had been wrong about this or that all along?

Maybe one way to answer that question is to ask ourselves yet another question: can we remember the last time we read a part of the Bible or heard a sermon based on the Bible that did not simply confirm everything we've thought all along but actually shook us up? Can we recall the last time that we felt genuinely convicted by something we had maybe never before known, or that we had known about but had actively resisted for years? Does this ever happen to us? Or do we skip the parts of the Bible that may affect us that way? When a sermon gives us quite new things to think about, do we then prayerfully ponder such matters or simply shake our heads on the way home after church even as we say, "Well, the preacher got it wrong today, didn't he?!"

Of course, if it's wrong never to be surprised into a new perspective, we must admit that it's equally wrong to be so wishy-washy that we change our minds about important subjects every other day. As we have said here many times, in the midst of a society that loves to adopt new ideas by trashing traditional ones, a major portion of our strength is precisely that we are anchored to the faith of our fathers and mothers, that we are lashed to foundational truths like the ones found in the Apostles' Creed. No one should go home today thinking that what this sermon means is that everything is up for grabs (because in that case it really would be true that the preacher had gotten it wrong today!).

Still, even from the security provided by the foundations of our faith, we must admit that God's creation is vast, supple, and bursting with variety. God's salvation is likewise beyond our ability fully to comprehend its depth and scope. In Ephesians 3, Paul pegs a part of the mystery of God's plan when he says that it includes Gentiles freely and fully in ways that people like Paul had frankly never before suspected would be the case. But Paul does not claim that this is the whole of the mystery. That's why in verse 8 he refers to the "unsearchable" riches of God's mystery. The word Paul used there refers to something that is bottomless, never-ending, high and wide and deep in ways we can only dimly begin to suspect. Certainly in this life we will never come anywhere near plumbing the full depths of God, his grace, or his ways of salvation.

But for now, one of the results of being engulfed by this divine profundity is that our church communities should be transparent witnesses to the fact that God saves people in quite startling ways--ways that go beyond the neat and tidy and predictable patterns with which we are more familiar. We need to be astonished that even we are in the church even as we hope and pray that we as a church can now and again offer a glimpse into the startling fact that the economy of God's grace really does distribute new life to all kinds of folks.

We need to hope that we can reveal something of that mystery because in verse 10 Paul says something that is itself one whopper of a surprise: Paul says that God's plan for the church is that we will become a showcase of God's far-ranging wisdom. That's not the startling part, however. The big surprise comes when Paul tells us who is watching for signs of this divine wisdom: it's the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms! We are supposed to catch the attention of angels and archangels, perhaps of even the devil and his hosts. No one has ever been certain precisely what Paul had in mind here, but the idea that the church is supposed to influence any spiritual beings is enough to take your breath away.

If you look at it through the right theological lens, there is much about the Christmas story that properly boggles the mind. But too often Christmas becomes rather predictable. Our focus does not tend to open up but narrows down to that one little manger scene. Maybe that's why in the church's tradition, Christmas begins on December 25 instead of ending there. We begin at the stable but that only launches us on a journey that brings us to today, to Epiphany, when we don't focus narrowly but broadly on the mystery of it all.

So it is fitting on this January 6 to conclude not the way we concluded on Christmas by singing "O come, let us adore him," where we were the ones gazing down on a manger. Instead we conclude today by ourselves being gazed down upon, and by no less than the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms at that! What do those beings see in us? They are supposed to see the surprise of God's mystery and grace. They are supposed to see the multi-faceted wisdom of God. They are supposed to see regular celebrations of a grace we can't grasp but that we do make available to any and all we meet.

To be a people of Epiphany means that we are willing to be surprised as we follow where God leads. Christmas really is finished for another year. But the adventure of God's mystery and grace has only just begun. "Surely you've heard about this mystery," Paul wrote long ago. Indeed, we have. What remains in this new year, as always, is what Paul memorably went on to write in verse 18 of this chapter, and that is our ongoing willingness to keep on exploring how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, a love that surpasses knowledge. There will be surprises along the way. Thanks be to God! Amen.