“Riches For A Lifetime”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Text: Ephesians 3:8-19
This past week I watched one of the most amazing television programs I have seen in years. (And probably because I was lying prostrate on the couch with the flu, the program was more inspiring than it would normally be). It is a series called House, about a brilliant doctor who suffers from chronic pain. Because of this, and despite his great intellectual brilliance and his ability to get to the heart of so many terrible diseases, he nevertheless has a bitter and twisted approach to life.
In this episode, he encounters a nine-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Dr. House is amazed by her, for even though he knows she is suffering greatly, she is courageous and strong in the face of her suffering. He cannot understand why this girl would have what seems to be almost a superhuman ability to rise above her situation. So, he begins a search to find a neurological or physiological reason to explain her courage. He finds an aneurysm in her brain and believes this to be the source of her courage - it is touching a particular lobe within the brain that controls the emotions.
Just before an operation designed to bring this girl to a point of death and then to resuscitate her, he meets with her and tells her that even if he performs this operation, she's probably still going to die from the cancer, and does she want to go ahead with it?
She says, “Yes, I do.”
He's astounded again by her courage, by her resolve to see this through. He tries again to find out why she is so courageous, and we're given one little insight, one little clue: She says, “Because I do not want to see my mother cry.”
House keeps pushing her, trying to find out even more. Then the girl explains, “The reason why I don't want to see her cry is because I love her.”
They perform the operation, they find the aneurysm, and it wasn't at the point of the brain that would give her courage. At the conclusion of the show the girl, still hairless from her chemotherapy, approaches the skeptical Dr. House and embraces him warmly and walks out into the night. House learns a lesson: Compassion can give you courage, love can transcend suffering, care for others can take you out of concern for yourself. The mighty House is humbled.
This morning in our text from the Book of Ephesians we have the apostle Paul in a very similar situation. He has been imprisoned on two different occasions: once for two years in Cesarea and now for another two years in Rome. The people of his congregations in Ephesus and elsewhere look upon him with sympathy, as someone who is not succeeding. They wonder how he's able to keep going, and so he writes them a letter of love and compassion. He says, “Don't worry about me, because what I am doing and have done, I am doing for you.”
Although the government had imprisoned him, though Rome had put him down, Paul had a source of strength that could give him freedom even when he was incarcerated. And he wanted the people in Ephesus to know there was no need to worry about him. He was suffering for them. And in one of the most humble and self-deprecating of all passages in the New Testament, Paul says, “But I'm not superhuman. I am one of the least, but what I want you to have as a result of my incarceration is the unsearchable riches of Christ.”
In other words, he wants the Ephesians to have what he has. But what exactly does he mean by unsearchable riches? As we are baptizing these beautiful babies this morning and their families are looking to the future for their children and thinking about what they can offer them so they live good and healthy and rich lives, what is Paul talking about?
By “unsearchable” he means that on our own we cannot fathom, we cannot give an account, we have no words, no expressions, nothing that can really capture the full majesty, the full wonder of Christ's love. In art, for example, no matter how much the greatest painters try to depict Jesus, how they try to fathom him and understand him, even they fall short. I'm a great lover of Rembrandt, and I have been looking at some of his depictions of Jesus recently. They are fabulous, such as the Jesus that you find in his paintings of the Supper at Emmaus or appearing before his disciples. But no matter how you look at it, when you shave off the beard Rembrandt's Jesus looks like a Dutchman.
Now, I've nothing at all against Dutchmen, but methinks that the Jewish Jesus of first-century Palestine didn't really look that Dutch. Even great art depictions attempting to capture Jesus are only facsimiles of the original. He is unfathomable, unsearchable. Even when you look at the great Christ figures in literature, such as King Arthur in Tennyson's Idylls of the King or Thackeray's Colonel Newcome, or even Disney's Mufasa in The Lion King, all are nothing more and nothing less than Christ-like figures. But even the most articulate writers cannot capture the true nature, power and glory of Christ. Paul is right. It is unfathomable. We cannot search it out in order that we might know it.
I liken our attempts to try and fathom Christ to be as one theologian said, “Like someone who gazes in a jeweller's window at a diamond, but never has an appreciation of the mine from which the diamond came.”
What we see is on the surface. What we fathom and what we understand are simply what is before our eyes. There has to be something more. What riches are Paul talking about? Is he talking about what we sometimes hear on television, when the “prosperity gospel” preachers say that if you support their ministry with so much money, you will get back 10 times what you've invested? This is no different than being a stockbroker promising big returns on junk bonds. This is like saying if you invest over here, you're going to get rich and wealthy over there, as though the highest success is not what you put into your faith or the love that you show for others, but what you are able to get out of it. Is that what he's talking about, by the riches of Christ? A get-wealthy-quick scheme? No!
Is he saying, rather, that you will have glories and riches in heaven, and your road to heaven will be paved with gold and you will live in paradise forever, if you have this great Christ in your life? In other words, you have nothing now, but later on you will be able to claim your investment - when you're dead? Is that what he's talking about? I don't think so.
The riches that Paul is talking about are deeper than that. This is not materialism that he's addressing, this is not accumulation that he is talking about, this is something more powerful, so powerful that it sustained him in prison. When he had nothing, it gave him courage, when he was at his lowest it elevated him. So what are these riches, and how are they revealed? The answer is through the eyes of faith.
Paul realized that on our own we cannot fathom or understand or come to a full knowledge of God. Only by looking at how God has revealed Himself in Christ's coming to us do we really appreciate what God is like. Paul described this in one of the most beautiful, poignant and powerful of all passages in the New Testament. This is what he said to the Ephesians:
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
For Paul, the riches are nothing short than having God in your life by faith. Having the power and the strength and the love of Christ's Spirit in your heart and in your soul. The riches are not just something out there that you accumulate, they are a gift from God through living in Christ that gives you strength and power and courage in every single facet of your life.
Now, I know the church sometimes tries to promote this through marketing and slick advertising and slick messages. We say, “Here, go and take this, but if you don't actually believe it, it's not going to be yours.” It's like the dog food company that came out with a new anti-allergenic, low-carb diet for dogs (and isn't it sad that you see even dogs have to be on low-carb diets these days?) Anyway, this dog food company came up with this new dog food, but it wasn't selling. So the general manager brought all the other managers together and said, “Now, we've got to figure out why this product isn't selling.” He asked the advertising people, “How is the advertising going?”
They said, “We have just won an international award for advertising excellence. It's on every television station in the country and we're getting rave reviews.”
“Very well,” the general manager said. He then asked the product people, “How is the development of the product going?”
“Oh, wonderfully! We have packaged it well. It's being very, very well received. It is the first thing that you see when you go into the dog food aisle. There it is, everyone knows it's well packaged, well presented. It's superb.”
“It must be the sales force,” the general manager said, so he asked how the sales people were doing.
“Oh, the sales people are visiting more stores in one year than they have done in the previous 10. We have the best qualified, best educated, most successful sales force in dog food manufacturing in the world.”
The general manager said, “Well, I don't understand it. Why is this food not selling?”
One hand went up at the back, and one brave soul said, “Because the stupid dogs can't stand eating the stuff. That's why.”
In other words, no matter how good your packaging is, no matter how well presented, the riches of Christ have to be consumed. Like faith, they have to be taken in.
This week there was an interesting article in the Toronto Star on Rembrandt. A painting that had been ascribed to another painter was found to have come from the brush of Rembrandt himself. It was an amazing find.
It reminds me of a story about William Randolph Hearst, the great newspaper baron. He liked to collect art, and one day he saw a picture of a painting that he really wanted, so he sent all his curators and all his associates out to find this painting and get it for him. After 12 months of searching throughout the whole world, they finally found it, and informed Mr. Hearst that it was in a crate in the basement of a building that he owned - he had already bought it years before.
My friends, that is what faith is like. It is there and Christ is there and his strength and his love is there, it just needs to be opened, it just needs to be received. You can't just go searching for it - you just have to receive it.
I am continually amazed by men and women who tell me honestly and sincerely that without their faith they don't know how they could deal with the challenges of life. Just last week, one person whose husband was suffering from severe problems took me to one side and said, “Andrew, I do not know what I would do or how I would handle this if I did not have my faith.” For it is that faith that gives courage. It is that faith that gives compassion.
I think of these dear souls in Galveston, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, the poor and wretched who have lost nearly everything, and I simply do not know how the earth's riches will help them through this. My prayer is that they may find the unsearchable riches of Christ to give them courage and strength to see themselves through this crisis.
I think of that young girl in House and I realize that her courage and her strength came from love. Her power to rise above her situation and face down even certain death was born out of compassion. And I believe that that is true for any person who has the faith of Christ. I believe Paul had it when he was imprisoned and it is what made him win over the Ephesians. This is something that I believe with every fibre of my being. The riches, the faith of Christ, are the riches that will last a lifetime and beyond. Do you have them? Amen
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.