Ninth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

The Whole Fullness

I went to Peebles yesterday. I've started going to these exercise classes at the Y to maintain my heart health, and the shorts I have been wearing were a little too constricting, so I needed (I guess you could say I "needed") special shorts for exercising. And of course, right there in the middle of the store, there was a whole section of exercise clothing. I mean, think about that for a minute. What does that tell you?

Our culture tries to reduce us to consumers. As consumers, we embrace a lifestyle, and with each lifestyle comes its package of consumables. A lifestyle in our culture, which I don't think is only American, but increasingly global, or at least Western, consists of what we do, how we do it, where we do it, what and who we do it with, and so on. All of these things have become consumer items which are marketed and delivered to us, who consume them. I think eventually, someone will figure out how to market the air we breathe. They may already have done that.

There is an endless multiplicity of lifestyles. There's the waterfront retirement lifestyle, for example. The boater lifestyle. The tree-hugger lifestyle, complete with the Prius and the "save the whales" sticker. There's the fitness lifestyle, and you can even have your entire diet mailed to you every week. Each lifestyle has it's clothing, its range of automobiles, its package of toys. And increasingly, in our culture, even its spirituality.

A Christian economist wrote that a consumer society is not about having things, but about shopping for things. It's not about materialism, but about the quest for fullness. If we were all happy once we had the things we wanted, our economy would shut down. In order for the economy to keep growing, we all have to keep spending. Our economy is based on never really being happy, always needing something, or someone or someplace, more.

At the end of the consumer rainbow, I suppose, is the miracle of fullness, that magnificent moment when everything is just the way we want it, when we are surrounded by people we like, in a place we find comfortable, with all the toys we need to feel happy, and wearing the perfect clothing. No more shopping required.

Fullness. This seems to be what we are seeking. I guess some people might call it "fulfillment." Our culture has taught us that it's impossible, that we just have to accept that not everything will ever be all right. We're just going to have to shop, well, until we drop.

And in our religion, many say that's the point at which you get your fullness, your fulfillment, and they picture heaven as that pot of gold at the end of the consumer rainbow, everything finally just the way we want it. Others find other spiritualities that in one way or another make us feel better, feel fuller.

Believe it or not, things weren't that different in Paul's day. Particularly in the religious department. Other gurus were going around in the newborn churches saying, you won't be full until you add my special ingredient. Paul is saying that we don't need any added ingredients beyond the fullness of God.

Did you hear all those organic, physical words? Root, body, ligament, sinews, growth, substance. Paul doesn't deny there is a spiritual and unseen dimension to our existence, but finally in our faith, fullness is not in some other dimension or at the end of our lives. Fullness is available here and now in our physical and real lives. Not only fullness, but abundance, an overflowing cup.

The whole fullness of God is pleased to dwell in Christ, and this fullness can be our fullness as well. Christ is really here, then, now and always. He was here then in Jesus, he is here now in communion of saints, and he will always be here. Here on earth. Here in the body.

We know Paul isn't denying our physical bodies because he talks about our resurrection as already completed in Christ. He doesn't say you will be raised. He says you have been raised. Instead of the old covenant self-mutilation, we have a new covenant Holy Spirit resurrection. If we have been raised with Christ, we need no carrots or sticks anymore. We serve God because we are his children and we love him.

As for the other world, the hidden world of heaven, the realm of the elemental spirits, we are concerned with them only insofar as they affect our lives in this world, as Paul asserts that all of these powers are ultimately under the authority of Christ, in whom God is pleased to dwell bodily, that is, in our world, in this creation. We spoke about this last week in our whimsical flight to heaven.

God is in our world in the vessel of the human body, wherever human beings open themselves to Christ. Even old Hosea was invited to physically experience God's anguish at Israel's unfaithfulness by being married to a prostitute. Some might say this foreshadows our physical experience of the crucifixion in the work of forgiving our enemies, of which Paul spoke at the beginning of this letter, and of which Jesus speaks so often, and indeed includes in his teaching on prayer. And we learn in today's lesson from Luke that he is actually teaching us to pray for God's Holy Spirit, which is the power that raised him from the dead, and raises us as well.

I wonder if all our shopping, all our sweat to build up the means to buy our lifestyles, I wonder if it all isn't a search for this fullness, the whole fullness. We are still seeking by our self-punishment and self-reward a fullness we can never accomplish. We are still seeking something that we can never find in this world, not because it is in some other world, as some of us might hope, but because it doesn't exist at all.

And I wonder too if our Christian path is not toward a fullness that is very much in this world, the fullness of the Holy Spirit, whom our loving and forgiving Father offers us for the asking, pleased as he is to dwell in all his fullness in our messy bodies and in our even messier church.

Amen.