Psalm 24:1-2 The earth is Abba God’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein. For it is God who founded it upon the seas and made it firm upon the rivers of the deep.

Introduction

Throughout our study of 2 Corinthians, we juggled the twin questions: “What now?” and “Will they?” What do we do now that we are in the world but not of the world, breakable creatures carrying God’s Spirit and message, charged with carrying on the mission of God in the world: the advancement of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation made incarnate in Christ and the wellbeing and benefit of the neighbor to the glory of God. Without Christ to guide the disciples, the disciples are left to figure it out by the leading of the Spirit.

We saw that Paul, in 2 Corinthians, gave us ample direction to discover that the “What now?” and “Will they?” is never answered once for all, but brought to the disciples of Christ anew every season, and that in each season the disciples of Christ must depend fully on God, cling to God’s word made known in Christ, and to follow—eyes wide open—the leading of God’s Spirit residing in their hearts and guiding their minds toward God’s wisdom and discernment in the world, impassioned with God’s passion to bring love, life, and liberation to the whole world—participation in the mission of God by faith working itself out in freedom and responsibility.

Paul seemed to leave us, though, with the reality that the Christian journey and Christian life is as hard as easy, as sorrowful as joyous, as thorn-filled as rose-filled. It is certain that as Christians who follow God, God’s Word, and God’s Spirit, we will have great existential anguish as much as we will have great existential excitement; both states are part of the Christian life in the world that is not of the world. Paul left us in the world dependent on God as we walk.

If Paul left us on earth in 2 Corinthians 12; Ephesians launches us into that third heaven Paul referenced. It is through remembrance, hope, and prayer that we, those dependent on God, continue to move through the world bringing God’s love to our neighbor and our neighbor to a loving God.

Ephesians 1:3-14

Bless God, the parent of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who blesses us in Christ in every kind of spiritual blessing in the heavenly sphere, just as God selected us in Christ before the conception of the cosmos to live holy and righteous before God in love, foreordaining us to adoption through Jesus Christ toward God according to the favorable favor of the will of God … (Eph. 1:3-6)[1]

Verses three to fourteen form one long sentence packed full of adoration, gratitude, praise, prayer, and doctrine. One of the most striking things, though, is the way this passage starts with humans blessing God. While some may feel compelled to shun this idea—preferring that it is God who blesses us so to keep God active and not passive[2]—the idea that we can bless God isn’t that foreign to our theology and prayer life. Take for example “The Lord’s Prayer” and the petition, let your name be made sacred. Isn’t God’s name already sacred? Yet the petition implies a capacity on our part to act in such a way that God’s name is praised and made holy. Thus, the idea that we bless God isn’t farfetched but makes sense: we have been made by God to be in the world and to bring God the glory God deserves through our love of God which is love of our neighbor. In other words, we are the “free otherness” from God who can return the blessing and bless God who blesses us.[3] The relationship with God by faith in Christ and the power of the Spirit is one where both the Lover and the Beloved are mutually dependent and mutually responsible.[4] God loves us, and we love God; God keeps us warm, and we keep God warm; God protects us, and we protect God.[5]

The author then moves to speak of our being blessed in every kind of spiritual blessing in the heavenly sphere, and of our selection in Christ from the laying-down of the cosmos. All of it oriented toward holy and blameless living before God that is characterized by love. This living is at once in the temporal realm and in the spiritual realm.[6] Human being and human love, according to Ephesians, is born of God’s love to go farther into the world to bring light where there is darkness, life where there is death, liberation where there is captivity, and love where there is indifference.[7] The believer is caught up into the cosmic battle between the creation that is of the reign of God and the destruction that is of the kingdom of humanity; it is the believer who is “enlisted” to be the epicenter of spiritual and temporal activity, at once the one who is adopted through Christ toward God, according to the good pleasure of the will of God and the breakable vessel, summoned out of the mud and dust.

It is these adopted of God and summoned from the dust and mud who are also endowed with God’s grace, the ones who have been loved, the recipients of liberation and forgiveness of false-steps, and,thus, recipientsof divine wisdom working out in human prudence.[8] It is these who are enlisted to act in the world to the glory of God by God’s will and leading (by the Holy Spirit), those who are charged to carry forward God’s Word (incarnated in Christ), and to participate in the continuation of God’s mission in the world to gather up all things in Christ, the things upon the heavens and the things upon the earth, those who were given a share foreordained according to the purpose of the one who is operative in all things according to the will of God. It is these identity markers of the beloved of God in Christ who are given a reason to hope because what we see in the world isn’t all there is. As the forces of the kingdom of humanity threaten death and destruction in the temporal realm, those who believe know that there is another realm—the spiritual realm—surging alongside, eager to make itself known through those who walk with the Spirit in Christ before God, who have heard the word of truth, the good news of salvation, and those who have eyes to see that there is more here than meets the eye because they have been sealed to the Holy Spirit of promise who is the security of our inheritance of liberation to praise of the glory of God.[9]

Conclusion

The author of the letter of Ephesians wants the community to remember. Remembering is key because it is in remembering together where we hold the presence of one absent among us as if they are still present. Though Christ is gone from us, Christ is present among us and among us with those who suffer as we remember him through proclamation and through remembering that the gift of the Holy Spirit to us (individually and corporately) is “security” that what has been started by God in Christ is not yet finished and that God will show up because God has promised to do so and God’s promises do not fall flat. God is not done with God’s world because God’s people still remember, and by remembering they (re)turn their gaze to God in the present thus to the future. Herein is the good hope of something different that will bring the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation farther into the world, and, ultimately, to is consummation in Christ’s return.[10]

And we do all of it through our dependence on God realized through our prayers—corporate[11] and individual. We do not go it alone. This letter to the Ephesians is an invitation to pray, to pray with our whole selves.[12] Prayer is the groundwork of the union with God that leads to the outpouring of divine love, liberation, and life for the neighbor in the world. Prayer solicits a self-awareness needed by God and the self-needing God and needing God to speak. It is in prayer where the believer is not only reoriented to God and thus to themself, but also where they are brought close to their neighbor. Prayer also participates in new language for the believer in the world where the believer represents the neighbor to God in words articulating the septic, antiquatedness of the kingdom of humanity. But prayer does not resign the believer to non-activity as if it is the final act in the face of trouble; it is the starting point. Prayer is how the believer unites with God and God’s passion for life, love, and liberation.[13] It is the bold request for God to enter in, to act; in prayer God is spoken to and from, in prayer God is remembered, so, too, the neighbor.[14]

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[1] Translation mine.

[2] Allen Verhey and Joseph S. Harvard, Ephesians, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2011), 43. Blessing God “…seems to make God the recipient of blessing rather than the source of all blessing It seems to render God passive.”

[3] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 43. “But this mysterious ‘passivity’ of God is precisely the nuance we should not neglect. By a powerful and creative word God created the universe and all that is in it, by God’s constant care God sustains it, and by God’s grace God redeems it. God is agent, active. But God creates, sustains and redeems the creation into a fertile and free otherness from God. God gives God’s creatures their own distinctive powers and upholds those powers, concurring in their own works not rendering the creation passive but active in God’s own project.”

[4] Cf Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative.

[5] Dorothee Sölle, “Laudation from Dorothee Sölle for Carola Moosbach, June 2, 2000, “When it is related to the children: God loves you, God protects you, God warms you, I completely agree with it. But just as important is it to say to them: God is in need of you, you can warm God. Sometimes, it is also cold here to God.

[6] Barth, Ephesians, 102. “‘Spiritual blessing,’…does not mean a timeless, otherworldly, abstract blessing. Rather it describes changes effected upon and among people of flesh and blood. It means a history, that is, decisions, actions, testimonies, suffering which have been set in motion and are as yet unfinished.”

[7] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 45. Heavenlies “It is the mysterious and unseen realm above and behind this world. It is not another world, a different world, unconnected with this one. It is the realm at once of God, who creates and sustains this world, and of the ‘spiritual forces of evil’ (6:12), who are at work in this world to destroy it. It is the realm of a cosmic conflict. On the one side are God and his Christ; on the other are the principalities and powers who would usurp God’s rule. That cosmic conflict is that battle for sovereignty in this world, not some other one. It is the very cosmic conflict in which Christians find themselves enlisted (6:12).”

[8] Barth, Markus, Ephesians: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on Chapters 1-3, The Anchor Bible Series (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), 85. “The wise man knows how and when to speak; he gives good counsel; he lives up to his gifts; his actions make sense and are successful. For this reason the conjunction ‘and’ between ‘wisdom’ and ‘prudence’ is to be understood as expository. Paul speaks of that wisdom which is operating in prudence.”

[9] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 45. “The decisive battle has been fought and won in this conflict, fought and won in this world, when God raise Jesus form the dead. The powers of death and doom had done their damnedest, but God raised Jesus up and set him at his right hand ‘in the heavenly places’ (1:20).”

[10] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 47. “Remembrance has brought us to this point. It is because this community remembers Christ that it also hopes. It hopes for the good future of God, which is the good future for God’s creation, for ‘all things.’ This good future is our ‘inheritance’ in Christ (1:11), and the Spirit is the ‘pledge,’ the earnest, of that inheritance (1:14), the firstfruits of God’s good pleasure.”

[11] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 49. “Ephesians sets its talk of God and its instructions concerning the common life in the context of prayer.”

[12] Verhey and Harvard, Ephesians, 49. “Ephesians invites us to pray. Much of the first three chapters is prayer.”

[13] See Sölle, Choosing Life, pp. 92-93

[14] This paragraph is taken from, Lauren R.E. Larkin, “Leaving Heaven Behind: Paradoxical Identity as the Anchor of Dorothee Sölle’s Theology of Political Resistance,” PhD Dissertation (University of Aberdeen, 2024), 202.