Holy Extravagance

Along with scores of others, mostly tourists, my friends and I sat in folding chairs in the chancel of the historic and awe-inspiring Westminster Abbey, for Pentecost Sunday morning worship, in 2022. Having received communion and returned to my seat, I marveled at the sheer beauty of the magnificent cathedral, of walking into history itself. It has been the site of coronations, royal weddings and funerals for more than 1000 years. Iconic figures are buried there: kings and queens, generals and politicians, writers and musicians, scientists and activists. The wonder of getting to worship God on this day, the day the church celebrates the glorious One who poured out the divine Spirit of power into and upon God’s people – well, let’s just say it was a transcendent experience for me.

As we exited the cathedral, we noticed crowds of people, barricades in place, and a sizable police presence. We wandered across a small green and inquired of some people standing by. As it turned out, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant was about to pass by. We fell in line behind the barricades and soon watched the entire parade celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne, including the Gold State Carriage, with her hologram.

The sights were amazing: column after column of troops, many on horseback, from the far-flung former British Empire; sabers glistening, plumes fluttering in the wind. The Queen’s reign was highlighted, decade by decade, with parades of brightly colored and costumed dancers, famous people, and vintage vehicles, representing the various historic events and pop trends of her long reign. The sounds were wonderful: Big Ben chiming the time, mixed with cathedral bells pealing from across the City of London; languages from around the world spoken all around me – truly a Pentecost experience; the clip-clop of thousands of horses’ hooves; snippets of seven decades of music, plus military bands playing; the excited chatter, cheers and applause rising and falling from the thousands of spectators. The smells mingled: the mustiness of ancient stone buildings, the horse smells – enough said; people jammed together; mouth-watering aromas wafting out from nearby pubs: fish and chips, bangers and mash, along with the unmistakable nose of stouts and ales. All senses were fully engaged and all, in my case, totally coincidental.

Between Pentecost worship at Westminster Abbey, followed immediately by experiencing the Queen’s Jubilee Pageant, it’s as if I fell into a full immersion of British history and culture at its best. It was lavish, all-encompassing, and unforgettable; and the joy of the crowds was palpable. This is but a tiny taste of what the writer of Ephesians is trying to convey about God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ.

We continue in a series of sermons on the first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, considering the divine actions taken on our behalf. We are focusing on the verbs employed by the writer to describe what God has done for us. This chapter is a liturgy of blessing, a eulogy to God for who God is and what God does in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the world, so for you and me.
We began by learning that blessing is more than a good wish given another. According to the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, “a blessing is an act – by speech or gesture – whereby one party transmits power for life to another party…[all this] within the world of intense interpersonal relationships.” God’s people are blessed to be a blessing to the whole world to enrich life for all.

Last week we considered the notion of being chosen, destined, elect. We learned that in that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was elected before the foundation of the world to be humanity’s Savior and to redeem all creation. He did this by dying the death we deserve, as a result of our rebellion against God, and by rising to new life. He thus vanquishes every power and consequence of evil, including death itself. In Christ, the Son of God made human, we, too, are chosen by God, in love. We are chosen to now live holy and blameless lives, destined to be God’s adopted children, and enjoying all the blessings of God’s family. Yet, with blessings come responsibilities to live according to the family values of justice, grace, love, as embodied by the beloved Son, and to share that grace with all people.

Today, we come to the terms “bestowed” and “lavished.” From verses four through six: “God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of God’s will, to the praise of God’s glorious grace that God freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” An extremely rare verb, the word translated here as ‘bestowed’ is used only one other place in scripture. In Luke’s Gospel, the angel greets Mary as “the favored one,” to announce her role in God’s salvation plan. She will be the God-bearer who will give birth to the long-awaited Messiah. ‘Favored’ is the same word translated in Ephesians as ‘bestowed.’

The author uses this term to express God’s action of showering us with grace, or even ‘gracing us with grace.’ According to pastor Eugene Peterson, it is “a verb form of the noun ‘grace,’ yet it intensifies its meaning.” ‘Grace’ is a word that describes God’s most essential and comprehensive character and action for the world. It is the loving, extravagant, over-the-top way God is God toward and for and with us. As such, the author, in effect, invites the reader to step into the entire realm of divine grace – a place we are now called “to live and breathe and have our being” as Luke, in the Book of Acts, describes our new graced life in Christ (Acts 17:28).
As with my immersion in British culture that Pentecost Sunday, we are called to experience the full realm of God’s grace, “to be filled with the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). We cannot encapsulate or fully define God’s mysterious gracing of us any more than we can truly comprehend God. We can only allude to it while living into its multivalent, life-giving, extravagant forms in Christ through the Spirit. To bestow grace on us, God drenches us with the Creator’s delight, taking sheer divine pleasure in us. Peterson says there is no English word to capture the Greek meaning of this word for “‘grace,’ preserving its centuries of stored-up meaning and then activating it with a kind of take-your-breath-away energy.” ‘Bestowed’ does not do justice to the reality captured in the Greek. Yet, the superlative abundance and extravagant love entailed in our gracing by God is based on who God is and what God has accomplished in Christ for us and for all creation. Get used to it! This is how God operates in the world for all who will receive the divine gracing of grace in Christ.

The next term fills out the meaning of ‘bestowed’: ‘lavished’. In Jesus Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of God’s grace that God lavished on us” (Ephesians 1:7-8). Unlike ‘bestowed,’ the term, in all its forms, translated here as ‘lavished,’ is pervasive; used 78 times in the New Testament, over half in the Apostle Paul’s writings. The notion again is an attempt to express the out-of-this-world, beyond imagining kind of exuberance and jaw-dropping extravagance that comes with the outpouring, the drenching of God’s grace in the beloved Son, Jesus Christ, upon us! It is a tiny bit like celebrating the awesomeness and transcendence of Pentecost Sunday at Westminster Abbey, coupled with the spectacle and delight of a monarch’s once-in-the-history-of-the-world Platinum Jubilee Pageant, but on a cosmic, divine, and never-ending scale! In the lavish use of this verb ‘lavished,’ Peterson poses the question, “does [the author of Ephesians] overdo it? In matters of God’s grace,” he concludes, “hyperboles are understatements.” There is no measuring, no counting, no capturing the fullness and perfection of God’s blessing in grace with which we are blessed, and which we are compelled to share with others for their blessing. It is for this we have been graced in Christ.

Such holy extravagance cost Jesus Christ his own life. Through that gift, we are offered a new life, in his resurrection, rooted and grounded in love. It is an offer to start anew, leaving behind human enslavement to powers of evil and death; an offer for us to have “the power to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18-21).

Will you receive the life in which you may enjoy the extraordinary pleasure of God? Will you live graced by grace and lavished by love in Jesus Christ, to God’s eternal delight – and yours? For this you and I were chosen in Christ to be “filled with all the fullness of God” to the praise of God’s glorious grace (Eph. 3:19). Imagine that!