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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
As we with repentance and faith are preparing to celebrate Jesus’s having come in His birth at Bethlehem, His coming now in Word and Sacrament, and His future coming a final time with glory to judge the living and the dead, we have been considering “Advent Fullness” in this year’s Midweek Advent Evening Prayer special sermon series. After the Reading tonight, we now have heard three Readings from Divinely-inspired Epistles of St. Paul. Each of those three Readings more or less is included on one or two dates in our usual three-year series of Readings for Sunday mornings, though, when your pastor tends to preach on the Gospel Reading most Sundays, the Epistle Readings admittedly receive less attention. Still, even before the last two midweek services, you may have been somewhat familiar with St. Paul’s referring both to when the fullness of time had come (Galatians 4:1-7) and to the fullness of God’s dwelling in Christ (Colossians 1:15-23). Less familiar may be, as we heard tonight, St. Paul’s referring to the fullness of God’s filling you, even though that idea is found elsewhere, including two other places in Ephesians (Ephesians 1:23 and 4:13), both of which passages are also included in our usual series of Readings for Sundays. With the help of the Holy Spirit, after this sermon, then, you should be more familiar with the “Fullness of God in You”.
In tonight’s Reading, St. Paul is describing his prayer to the Heavenly Father for the saints who are in Ephesus who are faithful in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 1:1), his prayer that God the Father might grant both that God the Holy Spirit might strengthen them in their inner being and that Christ, God the Son, might dwell in their hearts through faith, and his prayer that they might be strengthened both to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge—all of those things with the ultimate purpose or goal of their being filled with all the fullness of God (confer Delling, TDNT 6:302; Winger, ad loc Ephesians 3:19, p.399). What is described sounds sort of like human beings’ being made divine—what often is accurately or inaccurately called by the Greek names “apothéosis” or “theosis” or “theo-poiesis”, or by the English names “divinization” or “deification” or “christification”. To be sure, we should be cautious of those who speak wrongly about such a process (for example, see Halvorson), but we cannot deny clear passages of Holy Scripture such as that in tonight’s Reading or, for example, when the Divinely‑inspired St. Peter writes of believers’ becoming “partakers of the divine nature”—partakers of the Divine nature, he goes on to say, “having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Peter 1:4).
That “sinful desire” goes back to the Garden of Eden, of course, when the serpent tempted the woman in part by telling her that, by eating of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, she would be “like God”, specifically in knowing good and evil. And, she and her husband who was with her, and all of us their children, have “known” good and evil since they ate—not just knowing what are good and evil but knowing what good and evil are like to experience, especially evil, with its resulting sickness and death, not to mention eternal damnation. (Genesis 3:1-6.) Their sin has so corrupted us that we try to determine our own standards of good and evil and that we try to live our lives according to our own wills. By nature, we not only lack but also are incapable of producing the right fear, love, and trust of God that we should have. Even we who are Christians may feel incomplete and empty because we do not avail ourselves of Him Who would fill us with all the fullness of God.
Yet, God, out of His great love, mercy, and grace, continually calls and so enables us to turn from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us. God forgives our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, whatever our actual sin might be. To paraphrase the antiphon of tonight’s Psalm (Psalm 126:1-6; antiphon v.5), we, who sow in tears of repentance, reap forgiveness with shouts of joy! God the Father forgives us, for the sake of God the Son’s perfect life that we fail to live and His death on the cross in our place. And, as He rose from the dead, so also we, if we die before His final coming, will rise from the dead. As the Divinely-inspired St. John describes, the Son of God, Who in the beginning was with the Father and shared His Divine nature, in time became flesh, full of grace and truth, and from His fullness we all receive (John 1:1, 14, 16). And, as the Divinely-inspired St. Paul says, writing to the Colossians, in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” and we “have been filled in Him” (Colossians 2:9-10).
We are filled in Christ as we are forgiven for His sake through God’s Means of Grace, His Word and His Sacraments. As St. Paul makes clear in tonight’s Reading, God the Father works through His Son and Holy Spirit with the result that we are filled with all the fullness of God. That “filling” may start with the reading and preaching of God’s Word to groups such as this, or that “filling” may start with the individual application of the Gospel with water in Holy Baptism, with touch in Holy Absolution, or with bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood in the Holy Supper. But, regardless of how that “filling” starts, with repentance and faith, we are brought into the Church, which St. Paul elsewhere describes as the body of Christ, the fullness of Him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23). By one Spirit we are baptized into one body (1 Corinthians 12:13), and in that ecclesial (or “churchly”) body of Christ we partake of the sacramental Body of Christ, and so in communion—“partaking” or “sharing”—with Christ and His Church we find the mighty working of Christ (Delling, TDNT 6:304)—as one commentator puts it, “Christ and His bride become one flesh, as His flesh enters and enlivens our flesh, transforming us from what we were into what He is” (Winger, ad loc Ephesians 1:15-23, p.275).
Interestingly enough, apparently all of Holy Scripture’s speaking about “you” being filled with all the fullness of God is not “you” singular but “you” plural—or, as we might say in Texas, “y’all” or “all y’all” (the same is seemingly true of the singular “body” of all of us plural’s being a temple of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 6:19-20]). We might like to think that each of us all simultaneously could be filled with Christ individually, but that is not what Holy Scripture describes. We are filled with Him only in communion with Him, and that communion with Him entails communion with one another. God and His life are not accessible to us directly or through whatever experience we might imagine, but God and His life are accessible to us only in our crucified and risen Savior, as He gives Himself to us in His Word and Sacraments (Marquart, CTQ 64:3 [July 2000], p.l95), and in all these ways we are filled in every way that He fills, not by our coming to Him but by His coming to us. Christ in us, in turn, loves and serves our neighbor in our vocations, and, as we continue to be served by His Word and Sacrament ministry, we grow up in Him, ultimately finding the most complete and fulfilled lives in glorified bodies before His eternal presence (Ephesians 4:13‑14; Delling, TDNT 6:302; Winger, ad loc Ephesians 4:13, p.468).
Under our theme of “Advent Fullness”, this year we have considered the “Fullness of Time”, the “Fullness of God in Christ”, and now also the “Fullness of God in you”. Truly the time is always right for the fullness of God in Christ to fill us. May we live each day with both sorrow over our sin and trust in God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, so that we are prepared for His comings this Advent and always.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +