Dropping the Millions

Dropping the Millions—Tuesday, July 5, 2018

“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.  Amen.” [Ephesians 3:20-21]

Our thinking is too small. 

We—yes, all of us—suffer from a dearth of imagination.

We’re all, in manner of speaking, in Dr. Evil’s shoes.

That’s right.  We’re going to take a brief detour into the 1997 Mike Myers adolescent-humor-tinged spy spoof, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.  The original Austin Powers movie is basically a send-up of the James Bond movies, poking fun at the outlandishness of their plots, characters, and bad pun-names.  So as a caricature of the Ernst Blofeld supervillain character from the Bond movies (all the way down to the white fluffy cat, bald head, and scar), Myers himself plays supervillain “Dr. Evil,” who returns to threaten the (1990s) present-day world after being frozen in space since the 1960s. 

So there comes a point in the movie where Dr. Evil, now awake in the 1990s, is making an ultimatum to the nations of the world (the way villains tend to do in movies like this), and he says that he will destroy a major city with his secret weapon unless the nations of the world pay him (raise pinky finger to your mouth here), “One… million… dollars!” 

Well, when he says that number, thinking that is a hefty sum of money to hold the world ransom for, his second-in-command advisor, “Number 2,” whispers to him that perhaps they should ask for more money than that, since inflation has made a million bucks buy a lot less than it used to.  For a super-villain who has missed out on the past thirty years, it boggles his mind to hear that even his dummy corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits, and that if you are going to hold the world ransom, you had better think in terms of billions and billions of dollars.  (And of course, even now, just twenty-odd years after Austin Powers came out, that joke’s math is stale all over again, since we now live in a time when federal budget deficits of one trillion dollars are becoming the norm.)

But you get the gist, right?  Here is a guy who was dreaming as big as he could, and the biggest number he could come up with was “one million dollars.” And now we would look at him and say that just our government’s shortfalls in income dwarf that sum to being laughable by comparison.  Poor Dr. Evil—he just can’t envision anything bigger at that moment.  Numbers like “billion” boggle his mind.

Or, to be slightly more intellectually respectable with our references, think of Edwin Abbott’s classic Flatland, which imagines what it would be like if a bunch of citizens of a two-dimensional world suddenly encountered our world of three dimensions.  They wouldn’t even have the language to describe what they were seeing—a world that was somehow fuller than anything they had ever experienced, but something they didn’t even know or imagine was possible.

This is the way Paul describes the difference between our imaginations and God’s ability.  It’s not even that God can do more than we can do.  It’s that God can do more than we even have the categories to even dream up!  Between us and God’s power, we are all citizens of Flatland, brought to jaw-dropping awe at a God whose greatness defies our words.  Compared to God’s power, we are all Dr. Evil, blushing to realize that the biggest things thought we could wish for are small potatoes.

Does that mean that you and I should start praying greedily for more of everything?  More money?  Bigger house?  Better job?  Higher total of Facebook friends and Twitter followers to make ourselves feel more popular?  Ah… no.

In fact, it’s a sign of our smallness of vision when all we can dream up to pray for is more of what we already have.  To really open ourselves up to a God who does “abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” means we may stop focusing on small potatoes stuff like just have more money, and start praying big like, “Your kingdom come.” 

To really open ourselves up to the power of God, we will have to stop focusing so narrowly on bigger bank accounts or more prestige at the workplace like we are little kids asking for more candy, and instead start asking God to widen our vision and to do things with us and among us that are a part of God’s eternal purposes.  We will ask that God use us to reach others with love.  We will ask that God work through our weaknesses as well as strengths.  We will ask that God provide food for every mouth—and we will ask that somehow we can be used as part of feeding them.  We will ask for God to meet us in our brokenness and not just for God to make us only outwardly strong.

We will pray, “Your will be done.”

We will, in short, not put bounds on what God should do that hamstring God within the confines of what we can imagine or what we think is best or what we have been told by ads and movies that we “should” want.  Forget the dollar signs.   Drop the million.  Think not just “bigger” but “deeper.”

Today, let’s dream so big that numbers stop entering into the picture.  It’s not about millions or billions or even trillions when you get to scope of the divine.  It’s about the infinite and the eternal.

Let that open up your vision today.

O God of all, your will be done, and your kingdom come.  Let us see it in all its vastness, beyond our tiny eyesight.