Stretching Exercises

Ephesians 1:15-23

May 4, 2008, Ascension Sunday

One of the things one quickly learns when beginning to exercise is the need to do warm-up and stretching exercises before the strenuous part of the workout. Even in walking you must stretch your calf and ankle muscles or you will feel them hurt later. If you don’t warm-up and stretch, in some cases you run the risk of severely injuring yourself.

Today Paul takes us through some spiritual stretching exercises in our passage from Ephesians. The purpose of the recitation on the placement of Christ is to help us fully understand the implications of having a faith in Christ’s resurrection and ascension. While neglecting this theological stretching might not hurt us physically – it can hurt us in spiritually. Paul’s stretching exercises help facilitate growth in faith and discipleship.

Last week I talked about how we imagine God and why that is an important question. In many ways today is about how we imagine Christ. There are different ways that people think of Christ. 1.) Jesus was a man who did good things and then died. 2.) Jesus was the Son of God who showed us how to live and then left us. 3.) Jesus is the Son of God who left us and is one of many in the heavenly angelic hierarchy. 4.) Jesus is the Son of God who returned to the fullness of God where he rules over the universe. Paul is pretty clear that he thinks of Jesus in the last sense and it fits with his understanding of God that we heard from Acts last week. Remember how he describes God to the Athenians, “For in him (in God) we live and move and have our being.” God is all around us not far off. God is as close to us as the air we breathe. So Jesus is the Son of God who has returned to the fullness of God. In saying this Paul enlarges Jesus; he pulls the kinks out of a faith that would restrict Jesus to an earthly role only. Paul writes:

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, ²¹far 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.

While he speaks of Jesus in human terms, there is the sense that Jesus is so much more than human. The resurrection and the ascension of Christ which we celebrate today break every spatial and temporal barrier that we could ever conceive of to contain Christ. The one that we knew as the historical Jesus is now the cosmic Christ of the universe. The one we knew as a historical figure who lived for 33 years starting in 4 BC is now the one who lives in the past, the present and the future. Even the author of the Gospel of John understood when he began his gospel by talking about Jesus as “being” in the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

Jesus has always been so much more than the historical figure who lived thirty-three years. And whatever you believe about the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension, Paul reminds us that the Spirit of Christ is an integral part of the fullness of God, and the whole of the Church. Because of this it is imperative that we handle the historical Jesus gently, otherwise we run the risk the reducing Jesus to a few historical sound-bytes.

Next week we will be celebrating Mother’s Day and I’m reminded of my own mother. She was the one who opened me up to the possibilities of life. She was the one who I would sit and talk to when I came home from school. She was the one who would gather the family around the table and invite us to talk about our days as we drank cokes and ate pretzels. She was the one who encouraged me in so many ways to be all that I could be, and not to allow myself to be limited by my hearing problems, or my perceptions of myself. Like Paul she was taking me through my stretching exercises to help me stretch beyond how I currently saw myself and my life.

The celebration of the Ascension of Jesus is our opportunity to stretch and soar. We are encouraged to break the bonds that hold our human constructs of Jesus and let Jesus be the Christ; to let Jesus lead us into the fullness of God.

Paul reminds us that the one we call the anointed one is not wandering some far Elysian field, but is at the very center of the universe, shaping and moving the universe down to the tiniest matter of life. Jesus, the Christ, is the creative, loving Spirit at the very heart of God’s creation.

The one who set this table for us today is the one who died and rose again and ascended into heaven, and reigns in power for us. May God help us to stretch our minds that we might be blessed with an unfettered vision of Jesus, the loving Christ.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters