The Hope to Which God Has Called You

Ephesians 1:11-23
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
(Celebrated as "All Saints Sunday")


At the conclusion of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, we pray, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Join me in saying that conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer with me, would you? “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

This morning’s New Testament lesson from the book of Ephesians looks for all the world like a commentary on the end of the Lord’s Prayer. If you are the kind of person for whom seeing is believing, you may want to look at it on page 949 in the Bible in the pew rack in front of you—or if there’s no pew in front of you, then you’ll find a Bible in the rack under your pew. Page 949. Ephesians 1:11-23.

Verses 20-22 of the first chapter of Ephesians pile up allusions to kingdom: verse 20 says, God “seated Christ at God’s right hand in the heavenly places”; verse 21 says, “far above all rule and authority” and “above every name that is named”; verse 22 says, God has put “all things under Christ’s feet” and made Christ “the head over all things.” There are six allusions to kingdom in three verses: “For thine is the kingdom.”

If you happen to be an especially observant reader, you might have noticed among the allusions to “kingdom” in verses 20 and 21, the word “power” occurs, not once but twice. Verse 20 says that God put God’s “power to work in Christ when God raised Christ from the dead.” And then in the middle of the “kingdom talk” in verses 20 and 21, we read that the rule and authority of Christ is “far about all rule and authority and power.” But the “power talk” isn’t just in verses 20 and 21. It had already started piling up in verse 19 that speaks of “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power . . . according to the working of God’s great power.” “Power” four times in three verses. “For thine is the kingdom and the power.”

Before we arrived at verse 19, sprinkled in among verses 12 through 18 are four references to “glory.” Verse twelve says, “For the praise of God’s glory.” Verse 14 says, “To the praise of God’s glory.” Verse 17 says, “the God of glory.” And verse 18 refers to a “glorious inheritance.” Glory, glory, glory, glorious, four times in seven verses. “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” “Forever?” Verse 21 says, “Not only in this age but also in the age to come.” Forever.

Once you have seen the piling up of kingdom and power and glory in these verses, it’s hard not to read the passage in front of us this morning as a commentary on the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer. And especially so, because the conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer and Ephesians 1:11-23 exhibit an identical perspective that you cannot miss once you have seen it. Think about it this way. In the center of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray there is a series of seven petitions or requests to God: may your name be held as holy; may your kingdom come; may your will be done; give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our trespasses; lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil. Jesus taught his disciples to pray for these seven things to come to be in our lives. But the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer does not speak of things that we are to ask of God that they may come to be. No. The conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer speaks of what already is: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” The Lord’s Prayer and Ephesians 1:11-23 share an identical perspective in speaking of the kingdom and the power and the glory: they already are.

The book of Ephesians says that because of what already is, we share in “an inheritance” in verse 11—and a “glorious inheritance” at that, according to verse 18—“not only in this age but also in the age to come,” and the guarantee of that inheritance is the Holy Spirit that has already been given to us. In the translation in the pew Bibles, verse 14 refers to the Holy Spirit as “the pledge of our inheritance,” but that’s a pretty puny translation. The word that the New Revised Standard Version translates as “pledge,” which sounds to us like something that is only promised, is actually a technical business term in the ancient world for money that is paid up front as the first installment. The word arrhabōn in Greek is not a promise or a pledge or even a deposit but the first part of the whole that guarantees that the remainder will be paid in full. We share in an inheritance, a glorious inheritance, that has already begun because the kingdom and power and the glory already are.

The inheritance of which Ephesians speaks is not a promissory note the value of which depends on the performance of our parents’ or grandparents’ investments in the stock market or bonds or real estate or precious metals or commodities or futures. Ephesians 1 says that the riches of a glorious inheritance among the saints is already stored up for us. In Christ, says verse 11, we have already obtained an inheritance the first installment and the guarantee of which we have received in the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and among us and in us. The Holy Spirit is the ground of Christian hope “not only in this age but also in the age to come”: the glorious and powerful and eternally sovereign rule of God is already present in our lives as “God with us” revealed in Jesus Christ and given to us in the Holy Spirit on earth as it is in heaven.

The references to “all the saints” in verse 15 and to the “glorious inheritance among the saints” in verse 18 and to “the heavenly places” in verse 20 make this passage an obvious choice as the epistle lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary for All Saints’ Day, which is November 1. Because in this congregation we observe the first Sunday after November 1st as “All Saints’ Sunday” and set it aside to remember and celebrate the lives of those among us who have completed their journey from God with God and to God, I saved Ephesians 1:11-23 over from Monday to today to remind us of what already is and to remind us of the inheritance that we share in what one day will be for us as it is for “the great cloud of witnesses” by which we are surrounded, as Hebrews 12:1 puts it.

In the New Testament, the word “saints” does not refer to heroic individuals who have been lionized by tradition and beatified and canonized by church authorities. Instead, the word “saint” refers to every believer among the faithful. The book we know as Ephesians that we are reading from this morning is addressed “to all the saints who are faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1). At the beginning of his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul addressed the congregation as “all God’s beloved . . . who are called to be saints” In between services this morning, Joe Roberts told me about a sermon he heard when was in high school in which the preacher said that the best indication of how broadly the term “saints” applies in the New Testament is that Paul calls the folks in Corinth saints and then levels 28 moral charges against them in his letters to them. As sure as we are all sinners, we are also all saints, according to the New Testament.

This morning we have called the names of saints among us who have completed their journeys from God with God and to God, and we thank God for their lives this morning. You and I are still on our journey. The grief that many of us have experienced in the past year and that many of us still experience now is an indication that we still walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But we never walk alone. That’s one reason why we come here to this place week in and week out, whether there are 1200 of us or 750 of us or 500 of us or 200 of us or 100 of us or only two or three of us gathered in Jesus’ name where Jesus has promised to be. We have made a commitment to God and to one another that none of us should ever walk alone. No matter how hard the journey gets, we will walk with each other where Jesus has promised to be.

The one of whom the psalmist confessed, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; “for thou art with me” is called Emmanuel, which means “God with us,” and is with us still in the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. So there is no shadow of death through which we must pass that is so dark that the light of the presence of God cannot shine in it. We do not ever walk alone. God walks with us, and God knows our grief.

Genesis 6:6 says that God was “grieved at heart” to see the violence and the bloodshed and the evil by which God’s good creation was overtaken. Psalm 78:40 says that the rebelliousness of God’s own people “grieved” the Lord, as does Isaiah 66:10. The gospel of John tells us that “Jesus wept” in grief at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35, KJV). And our Lord was “grieved, even to death” in the garden of Gethsemane as the hour of his own death approached (Matthew 26:37-38). Indeed, he “has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4, KJV).

God knows our grief. And that is why, as the old hymn says, “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” Because as real as our grief is and as real as our loss is and as real as our pain is, the kingdom and the power and the glory forever of the one with whom we walk is already and as real as our grief and our loss and our pain. “The hope to which God has called you,” according to Ephesians 1:18, is grounded beyond grief and beyond loss and beyond pain in what already is. So that you may know “the hope to which God has called you,” will you say again with me that conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer? “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” Amen.


Photo of All Saints Day in Salwator Cemetery, Cracow, Poland, by bildungsr0man, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com