“With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he has set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Ephesians 1:8b-10)
Why do I go to church?
Why do I go to my job?
Why do I spend any energy at all striving to live a certain way, to do or not do certain things, or to do them in certain ways?
Why did God send Jesus, and why does God care at all about us human beings knowing about this Jesus?
If my answer to any of those questions is anything less than “Because God is gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth,” then my answer is too small. My vision is too small. My picture of God and God’s goals is too small. God is determined, not only to gather up all things, but to bring us all fully to life.
I think this is our problem. Mine, yours, all of ours at some point. We are shortsighted as to what things are all about—we have spiritual myopia, astigmatism of the soul.
It looks harmless enough. Our answers to the big questions of life, like the ones above, are usually quaint enough. “I go to church because I like the way it makes me feel,” or “I go to church because of the value of the tradition, and because it’s time my whole family can spend together.” Or with our work, “I go to work because I want to make more money—duh!,” or even, “I go to work because the company needs me.” Or with our actions, “I strive to live a moral life because I want to make sure I get rewards in heaven when I die.”
Here’s the thing: none of those reasons are big enough for God’s vision.
Sorry, but Paul doesn’t think that a warm fuzzy religious feeling is reason enough to be in church. If that’s all you’ve got, stay home and sleep in on Sunday—a fleece blanket is warm and fuzzy, too.
Sorry, but Paul doesn’t think that it’s worth spending decades of your life at work if your job is just a means of getting bigger piles of money—if you reach the end of your life with nothing but a pile of money, you are truly the impoverished one.
And while we’re saying sorry, Paul doesn’t even think that lining up your own personal, individual rewards in heaven is really the point of living the Christian life. That, too, is just too small a vision.
Paul says, rather, that the only real reason worth our worship, our work, and our willpower is to share in God’s plan “to gather up all things.” God is on a mission to restore everything in creation back into right relationship—both with God and with everything else. As Daniel Erlander puts it in his book Manna and Mercy, the Christian faith is the “story of God’s unfolding promise to mend the entire universe.” That’s a big vision. That’s a big project.
And that is what we are invited to share in as followers of Jesus. That becomes our reason for church, for work, for neighborly care for one another. We do it because it lets us be a part of God’s plan, in the fullness of time, to re-gather every last thing into God’s hands. That’s how big our vision has to be, or else we are settling for something so much smaller, for us and for God.
In light of such a big mission, (and really, it can’t get any bigger than “gathering up all things into the love of Christ”), your employment changes its purpose. I’m not there just to get a paycheck, whether I love my job or can barely stand it—I’m there as salt and light for the world, reflecting even in small ways the love of Christ to the people around me. It won’t necessarily even look “religious” all the time, but sometimes it will just mean that I do my job so well and with such grace (and without trying to stab my coworkers in the back or step on people to climb up to a promotion) that others just wonder about me, and what makes me different like that.
In light of such a big mission, your church involvement changes, too. Instead of just going through the motions—or not going at all—we find ourselves brought to worship with other disciples/recovering sinners (and we are all both at the same time) to offer up our lives and our love to God, and to be re-oriented and re-aligned for reaching everybody around us in love.
In light of such a big mission, I frankly stop caring about what kind of rewards I will get in heaven or even what kind of notice I am getting in this life, and instead it becomes more and more about letting other people see God’s love—its depth, its length, and its breadth—in all that I do.
Now we are beginning to get close to how big our vision needs to be to catch up to God’s. It’s about pulling everything and everyone into the love of God, a love that we ourselves are getting swept up in more and more, too.
Be warned, though: once you’ve gotten a glimpse of that big a vision, once you’ve had new lenses put over your spiritual shortsightedness, you will never be really satisfied with settling for less again. Work will never be just about a paycheck anymore. Church will never be about just a warm feeling you get from time to time, and we'll stop seeing ourselves as consumers buying a religious product. We are conspirators in God's grand project of bringing all things more fully to life! And your way of life will be more than rules to earn heavenly gold stars (or other people’s approval now). The only vision that will satisfy your eyes from then on will be, “How can I be a part of God’s dream to gather up all things, all things, all things, into the embrace of God's love?”
Lord God, let us be a part of your big vision, in big and small ways today.
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