“he has made known to us the mystery of his will… to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10)
In the first creation account in Genesis 1, we’re given an image of God ordering the world in a systematic and rational way. In the midst of this story is the separation of sky and sea, a way of signaling that God is ordering 3-dimensional life. He’ll go on to give dominion of the sky to the birds and dominion of the sea to the fish and dominion of everything to humanity, His chief creation. Again, it is all orderly and structured and sound.
The accident of this sort of creation is that we are tempted to believe that everything has its particular place and that staying in that place is necessary for goodness and holiness. This sort of assumption has – by extrapolation – led to racism, classism, and sexism. It is not hard to see how a God who puts everything just right could be used as justification for making sure “those people” live on “that side” of the tracks. To be clear, this is not to imply that God created racial, classist, and sexist discrimination, but rather that our misappropriation of God’s orderliness for our own prejudice means that these social ills are all-but inevitable. Furthermore, any resistance to this sort of social ordering is seen not just as anti-social behavior, but unholy/heretical behavior.
Then comes the Apostle Paul in these opening verses of Ephesians. In it, he bombastically claims that we have received insight into the mystery of God’s will. Maybe not the entire mystery of God’s will, but enough that we know what God is planning. And what is that, precisely? The biggest merger of all mergers ever, that’s what! God desires to collapse the space and structures between heaven and earth, bringing all of them together in Jesus Christ (who is, Himself, the fullness of heaven and earth – or, a sort of foreshadowing of God’s big work ahead). Paul presents us not as neatly placed where we ought to be, but spiritual scattered. This is, at any rate, the implication of language like God “gather[ing] up all things in him.” How are we to be gathered, after all, if we are not previously scattered?
Not much else is said about how this will happen or when or what it will all look like once it is complete (there are, we find, still plenty of mysteries left to us), but we can be certain that this is going to happen because it has already, in part, happened in the person of Jesus Christ. And, if we are His, then we live as He lived and we are what He is.
I think this is Good News for the cluttered desks and even more cluttered minds in our life. We tend to dislike clutter because, on some deep/spiritual level, we believe that disorder is just one step away from discord and our dismissal. But what if “clutter” is just a form of gathering, of uniting disparate things, prior to some larger, holier merger? How would we view the clutter of our lives differently?
I’m not trying to say that you should leave the dinner table a mess of old mail, newspapers, and random bric-a-brac (especially if doing so infuriates a spouse or loved one), but rather that not every form of order – as we understand it – is going to be holy or sanctified and that not every form of disorder is outside the work and will of God. Rather, we have a God who is preparing to partner heaven and earth, angels and humans, the spiritual and the bodily all into one, all into Him. In a disordered and chaotic world, there may be no better hope. Amen.
