With a new year beginning, we can begin thinking about what 2022 will bring? We start the year with COVID still hanging over our heads, along with much political uncertainty and polarization. It’s easy to get discouraged, but we’re not without hope. We don’t know what this year will bring, but we take confidence in the promise that God has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” So blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
We opened worship singing about a “star shining in the east beyond them far, and to the earth it gave a great light.” [Glory to God, 147 v. 2]. We’ll close our worship singing about the “Star of wonder, Star of night, Star with royal beauty bright” that will “guide us to thy perfect light!” [Glory to God, 151].
These hymns promise that God will guide us through life, blessing us with spiritual gifts and calling us to ministries of blessing. As we follow the star, guided by God’s perfect light, we can discover the meaning and purpose of our lives. Is that not a pertinent question for this time of year?
As we conclude the Christmas season, we can look back to some of the stories of the season that speak to questions of identity. If we follow the stories of Scrooge and the Grinch, we watch as they are transformed as they learn the true meaning of Christmas. The same is true for Charlie Brown. Then there’s the story of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. George faces difficult decisions and begins to wonder whether the world might be better off without him. In the movie, an angel shows him what would happen if he jumped off the bridge on Christmas Eve. No, the world would not be better off without him. His life did matter. So do ours.
That is the message we find here in the opening paragraph of the Ephesian letter. We read here about chosenness, destiny, and adoption. We learn that we have been adopted into a very large family, the family of God. Because we have been adopted into the family, we become heirs of God, which leads to our redemption. This act of redemption, of salvation, is sealed in the Holy Spirit through our baptism.
So, what does that mean for our lives? What does this say about our destiny as children of God? Each of us probably frames the answer to that question differently. We may answer the question of destiny differently if we’re young rather than in our older years. But, no matter where we start, we all have a future as God’s children.
Ephesians speaks about spiritual blessings. When I read about blessings in Scripture, I think about the message of Genesis 12, where God makes a covenant with Abraham and tells him that God will bless the nations through him and through his descendants.
Here is where the Christmas story intersects with the story of God’s covenant with Abraham. As Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus reminds us, Jesus descends from Abraham and therefore he is an heir of that promise. (Mt. 1:1-16). Since God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, through adoption we are heirs of that promise made to Abraham. Therefore, we too are called to bless the nations. Not only is this is our purpose in life, but this has been our calling since before the creation of the world.
To put it a bit differently, you may remember an old Smucker’s jam commercial that speaks of family destiny. In that commercial, a little boy asks his older brother why he never gets asked what he wants to be when he grows up. The older and wiser brother points out that he’s a Smucker, and that means his future is already decided. Why would he do anything except work for Smuckers? Is that not true for us? As children of God, our destiny is to live into the family business, which is one of blessing. So whatever the future holds, it is wrapped up in this calling from God, which is sealed in baptism.
When the author of Ephesians speaks of destiny and chosenness, he has in mind three promises. First, Paul assures us that God is good. Secondly, God is faithful. Finally, as Rollin Rasmarrin puts it, God will “reorder the cosmos with righteousness and peace through the kingly rule of Christ.” 1
The good news is this: Because we are children of the living God, we can walk into the future confident that the God who has chosen us in Christ to be God’s children, is good, faithful, and is currently at work transforming the world in which we live. We get to participate in that work.
And as Paul writes in Romans,
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39).
This is what it means to be chosen by God to be God’s heirs. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, and this promise has been sealed in us through the mark of the Holy Spirit, which I take to have occurred in our baptisms.
And what shall we do with this legacy? Well, we can start with worship. In our worship, we can give thanks to God for choosing us in Christ so that we might live our lives full of hope and purpose. And in our worship, we declare ourselves ready to embrace God’s future with a song of praise—maybe even a stanza of the Hallelujah Chorus.
And as we break out in songs of praise, let us remember also that the God who has called us children of God, has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. And if we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing, which includes all those spiritual gifts that get named in Romans, in the first letter to the Corinthians, and here in Ephesians, then our destiny is this—we have been blessed so that we might be a blessing to the world of God’s creation.
And as we rejoice in the blessings of being an heir with Christ of God’s blessings, it is important that we receive these blessings with due humility, taking as our guide the attitude of Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, chose to empty himself of his glory and become a human being, humbling himself to the point of dying on a cross (Phil. 2:6-8).
Having a sense of purpose and meaning for our lives, rooted in our inheritance as children of God, sealed in baptism, may the year 2022, with all of its uncertainty due to COVID, be a fruitful season of ministry.
1. Rollin Rasmarrin, “Ephesians 1:3-14," in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett, (Louisville: WJK, 2009), 1:187.
Preached by:
Dr. Robert D. Cornwall
Pulpit Supply
First Presbyterian Church
Troy, MI
Christmas 2C
January 2, 2022
Image Attribution: Moyers, Mike. Awake My Soul, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57138 [retrieved January 1, 2022]. Original source: Mike Moyers, https://www.mikemoyersfineart.com/.
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