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Ephesians 1:15-23

Many of you may have memories of years past when on Ascension Sunday children would come from their Sunday School class, of which there were myriads, with a white Styrofoam cup turned upside down with cotton balls glued all over it.  There would be a paper cut-out of Jesus dangling from a string out the bottom of it.  When you pulled up on the string, Jesus would disappear into the cup as if to ascend into heaven amidst clouds of glory.  So cool.  The whole scenario just begs that be a spaceship involved.

Ascension Sunday.  Ascension is such a big word.  I wonder what it would be like to be a child and ponder this thing of Jesus ascending into heaven.  I think they would have a lot less trouble dealing with it than adults do.  We adults, we want scientific proof and stuff like that and tend to dismiss as preposterous a bodily resurrected from the dead human being ascending bodily to somewhere else.  But hey, try this on for size.  We like to imagine ourselves as living in a four-dimensional reality.  We can measure length, height, depth, and time, but that’s not it.  Since the discovery of the subatomic world, it’s pretty much an established fact that there are at least 11 dimensions to our universe or our four dimensions don’t add up.  There are seven more dimensions of reality that we can’t conceive of, but they are there.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.  Here's another one about things we can't see.  The electrons in the atoms we each are made of are at this very moment jumping in and out of existence.  “Where do they come from and do they go, nobody knows but Cotton-eyed Joe”.  If our electrons are popping in and out of our reality and presumably into another, how are we able even to physically exist.

When I consider reality at the sub-atomic level, well, Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead and bodily ascended to someplace called heaven does not seem all that impossible.  Rather, it is as possible and probable as the mathematical singularity we call the Black Hole which we now have pictures of to prove their existence.  Over a hundred years ago, black holes were only theoretical possibilities swirling around in Albert Einstein's nearly god-like brain and now we have pictures of them...and...it's theoretically possible that there are wee-teenie black holes just about everywhere blipping in and out of existence...like the one that just happened in my brain!

But anyway, I think children have simpler thoughts and questions about Jesus' Ascension that we would feel more comfortable pondering.  I can think of at least three obvious questions that deserve some time: Where did he go?  Does he still have a body?  And, what’s he doing there wherever it was he went?  I put on our child-like minds for a bit and ponder these.

To answer the first question Ephesians tells us that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).”  He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being God the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes.   To a child’s mind, that’s an informative enough answer and they would be ready to move on to question number two.  But some older children may want to ask where is and what is heaven or the heavenly places as Paul calls them.  

Well, briefly, I don't like to think of heaven as being up and far away.  Rather, I think of it as overlapping our reality and as being at the center of everything and hidden behind everything.  If you could somehow open a hole in reality right in front of you and stick your head in and look around, you would be looking into heaven.  And like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation, you would see God’s throne and on the throne would be a super fantabulous display of lights of every colour because we can’t see what God the Father looks like.  “Tis only the splendour of light hideth Thee”.  Seated to the right of God would be the best friend and brother you will ever have, Jesus.  You would see angels and choirs of angels and lots and lots of people from all times and all places and some of them you would know and they would all be singing, worshipping and praying, and you would have a feeling of being so loved and so special wash over you  - that’s the Holy Spirit - and you would want to just step right on through except it’s not your time.  When its your time, then you’ll go.

Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly place, then what’s his body like?  Is he a ghost? is another way of putting it.  The answer is that he still has a fully human body, resurrected all be it, and he has some scars.  Now try this on for size; Jesus’s ascension back into heaven is every bit as important as Christmas.  

At Christmas, we celebrate that God the Son became a human being just like us in every way.   We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God.  God the Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became a human person with a real body just like ours.  He thinks and feels just like we do.  With the Ascension, the reverse happens.  Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary took humanity, human flesh, back through into heaven.  As a result, God the Father from sends the Holy Spirit to come and live in us to glue us to Jesus.  It’s like life-glue.  There’s Elmer’s glue and Gorilla glue.  So also, there’s life-glue, the Holy Spirit, who glues us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' new, resurrected life, and slowly we become more like him until when our time comes, because of that life-glue we go straight on to be with Jesus and we get resurrected.  But also and until then, while we are on this side of things we are God’s beloved children just like Jesus is because we are life-glued to Jesus with the Holy Spirit.  And as I said, this life-glue makes us to become more living, more loving like Jesus and helps us to do here on earth what Jesus is doing there in heaven.

And that takes us to our third question: if we participate in Jesus’s life because we are life-glued to him and doing what he is doing, then what is he doing?  For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the Book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who while in continual worship of the Father prays like all get out for each of us.  He says, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18) protect them, provide for them, let them know you love them just as much as you love me.”  He constantly prays for us and our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to listen (Heb. 4:14-5:10).  This also is why it’s important for us to think of heaven as being behind everything rather than way far away, up there somewhere.  If God is right here behind everything, he is with us and hears our prayers real good.

In and with Jesus we pray all the time for the needs of the world as Jesus does.  As Jesus is always praying for us so also we should to strive to pray without ceasing.  I like to try to pray The Lord's Prayer as often as I can think to.  We pray in and with Jesus because we are life-glued to him, but sometimes we don't know what to pray and sometimes we are hurting so bad we can't pray.  Guess what?  When we don’t know what to pray, Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit is still praying in us always for what we need.  It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of God even God is praying for us.  Sit on that one for a while.

The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit.  We’ve talked about this already.  This life-glue is the power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side and that the same power is at work in us by the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit not only life-glues us to Jesus so that we share in the love that Jesus and the God the Father have for each other but the Holy Spirit also life-glues us to each other so that we can love each other and other people and even those we might call enemies like God loves us, like family.

As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit.  Jesus is always praying for us so we should be always praying.  Another thing Jesus is doing is worshipping.  In Jesus, life-glued to him and to each other we find our true worship, which is rooted in God the Son’s love of God the Father coupled with thankfulness and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into God’s very being through the Holy Spirit.  We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians.  We attend worship to worship the Father through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.  In and with Jesus, we worship, we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and pours his love on us.  

So, we worship and we pray.  One other thing, as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son sends us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission.  He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to fellowship with God in such a way as to make us to participate in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the life-glue of the Holy Spirit living in us.  This means we are to let ourselves be moulded by that love into a fellowship that proclaims and invites all people.  Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit into us we are life-glued to God in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace.  That’s what Jesus is doing and so that’s what we do and so there you have it. Amen.

 

The Credibility Problem

Ephesians 1:15-23

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This is Christ the King Sunday.  The day we step up and boldly profess that Jesus rules this Universe.  I like the title the Eastern Orthodox tradition gives to Jesus with respect to this role – Pantokrator (krator means ruler, panto means all).  There’s a movie in that, I’m sure.  If Schwarzenegger can be The Terminator who comes back from the future to prevent a very dark world filled with war between humans and the intelligent machines they created; so, Jesus can be The Pantokrator - the Incarnation of God the Son; the One who was, is, and will be; the One who died and was raised and lives; he who is at all times presently working in the power of the Holy Spirit to bring about the glorious future of God’s perfecting of his Creation so that sin, death, and evil are no more; the One who will finally come to raise the dead and make it all so.  That would make a great movie, I think, but we would need longer than an hour on Sunday morning to show it.  It has the potential of be as long as history itself.

It’s Christ the King Sunday.  Jesus reigns.  Amen?  Well, I guess we should say how he reigns because the obviousness of that fact isn’t that (how shall we say it?) obvious.  People do ask, “Well, if Jesus reigns, why is the world so messed up?  Why doesn’t he just go ahead and fix it?”  That’s a tough one and we can only commiserate with the asker, because we people of faith suffer in this world too and it sure would be nice if God would just go ahead put it to rights.  We just can’t answer that “why not yet?” question.  God has to answer that himself.  

  Looking again at the question of how Jesus reigns, a part of the answer to that question, which we can speak to, would be that for now, Jesus manifests his reign in this world most obviously through his people, his body, his brothers and sisters on earth bound to him by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, we who know ourselves to be the beloved children of God just as Jesus is the Beloved Son of God the Father.  I’ll be careful not to get too theological here.  Let’s just say it this way: We sing “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  Yes, indeed he does.  Yet, if we want to be truly Biblical, it is more correct to sing “God the Father has adopted me and loves me just as much as he does his Only Begotten Son Jesus and I know this because the Holy Spirit has made a home in me.”  We should rather be singing that, but I’ve yet to find a catchy melody and the lyrics need tweaking.  Knowing yourself to be God’s beloved child is a good portion of the means of how Jesus reigns in this world, because, believe me, knowing that changes everything.  

Anyway, back to the topic – Jesus makes his reign visible through his Body, the Church.  Well, that’s a bit of a bitter pill for most people to swallow.  When we start talking about the Church exhibiting the Reign of Jesus, we run into some credibility issues.  In particular, throughout most of its two millennia the Church has tried to reign on Earth instead of Christ Jesus.  Popes have sat in the place of emperors.  Christian kingdoms have warred against Christian kingdoms.  Christian nations have gone to war against other Christian nations.  Christians have warred against people of other faiths.  In Modern times, in Democracies Christians have tried to govern by enforcing Christian moral values, by getting people elected who will further pseudo-Christian moral values and social agendas even to the extent of jumping into bed with Donald Trump and saying he is the one ordained by God to restore America to greatness in exchange for the hopes of the appointment of a couple of Conservative Supreme Court justices.  

The Church truly has a credibility issue when saying Jesus manifests his reign through the Church.  The institution of the Church throughout the ages has had a problem with power lust and greed to the extent of often becoming an oppressive force in the world.  Where the Church has reigned, it has not looked nor acted like Jesus.  We have instead grossly abused power.  Well, let’s talk about power.

Looking at our Ephesians passage, power, the power that belongs to Jesus, is a key topic.  It is such a key topic that Paul uses about every synonym for power that exists in the Greek language.  In translation, we see the words power, rule, authority, dominion, might, greatness, strength all within the span of a couple of verses.  The topic of power is important here, but the power that Paul refers to is not an earthly form of power.  It’s a power that belongs exclusively to God and it is above all earthly powers.  God the Father has placed all earthly powers under Jesus foot so it says.  It is so sadly ironic that the Church has historically chosen to exercise and abuse those lesser earthly powers in order to make itself great when all along we have had God’s power at our disposal and could have done great things.

Well, what kind of power are we talking about then?  Paul says it is the power that God used to raise Jesus from the dead – Resurrection power.  There is no power on earth to which we can compare this power.  We know no energy or force that can raise the dead.  But, God’s power can be known.  Paul indicates that the more we come to know Jesus and his way of life, the more we will know this resurrection power for it will be working in us to change us to be like Jesus as he is alive from the dead.  Through knowing Jesus by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit we get a taste of Jesus’ resurrection life right now.  

But, there’s a catch.  Jesus taught that we must die to ourselves to know this life, this power.  This dying to self runs contrary to the self-seeking we are accustomed too and do by nature.  God has called us to live the Jesus Way, the Way of the Cross, the way of dying to all that the world calls success by means of living according to the teachings of Jesus.  The blessing we get in life is to know Christ Jesus and the power of his resurrection, not success and material comfort.  The way of the Christian is not simply to believe in God and be a good person and God will bless what you do with success and comfort.  It is to follow Jesus at great personal cost and reap the blessing of knowing him and coming to know ourselves as beloved by God.

Paul notes this way of life among the Ephesians.  Paul tells the Ephesians that he has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and of their love toward all the saints.  Wouldn’t it be nice that the only thing people hear about us is about our faithful following of and trust in Jesus Christ shown in our overwhelming love for others?  You know, what people hear about you is your legacy, the reputation you leave behind.  One way to think about our legacy is think about what people would write as an epithet on our tombstone. Wouldn’t it be nice if the epithet on our tombstone read: “Worked hard all his life, but never got rich because Jesus taught him to share it with others.”  We’ve heard the phrase, “Never met a stranger” about those people who can just talk to anybody.  Well, how about, “She never met a stranger she didn’t help”?  Would our tombstones reflect faithfulness to Christ in any kind of way or would it just be dates that say nothing?

Paul then goes to say that hearing of their faithfulness and love, he prays for them.  Paul prays that God would give the Ephesians (and us) a Spirit of wisdom and revelation as we come to know him.  Wisdom isn’t the ability to whip out catchy phrases about life that find their way onto coffee mugs.  Wisdom concerns the way we live our lives.  In Paul’s teaching, wisdom is living according to the Way of the Cross; and, when we live according to the Way of the Cross revelation happens meaning what God is up to in the world becomes evident.  Paul indicates that this wisdom and revelation will become ours the more we get to know Jesus, which means building that relationship with him.  

Paul also prays for the enlightening of the eyes of our hearts.  That is a rich phrase.  It means to see life, the world, others through sight that is forged in devotion to Christ.  It means always looking about for the opportunity of living according to our devotion to Christ Jesus.  We know of people whose motivation in life is “What’s in it for me?”  Our motivation should rather be asking “How can I serve the Lord who reigns in love in this situation?”  To do that it is necessary we fell devotion to Jesus.  That’s what faith is.  Faith isn’t just believing stuff.  Faith is felt devotion, loyal friendship with Jesus, which we express in the way we live our lives. 

Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know the hope – know the hope – to which we have been called.  Hope!  Who do you know that doesn’t need hope?  The way of life in Christ makes evident the hope of salvation.  By it we help God powerfully bring healing to his diseased creation.  People living the Way of the Cross, putting self aside to act in unconditional love, is the path to the healing of nations.

Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know and share in the abundant overflowing wealth of the inheritance that belongs to Jesus…the wealth he means isn’t money or material wealth.  It is the wealth of knowing ourselves to be God’s beloved children; the wealth of knowing we will live the resurrection life in a creation that God has healed and made new because we taste of it now because the presence of the Holy Spirit moves in us.  We feel the presence of God with us. 

Finally, Paul prays this prayer for us so that we may come to know the immeasurable greatness of God’s exercising his universe creating/life-changing/resurrection power on our behalf.  I don’t know if you have had moments where the only way to explain them is to say God stepped in and fixed what was unfixable, healed what was unhealable, loved me when I thought myself unlovable, stopped me when I was out of control.  I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

That universe creating, life changing, new creation making, resurrection power is how Jesus reigns until he comes again.  It is not of this world.  It comes from God’s very self and we find it by living according to faith, hope, and love.  That’s how Jesus reigns now.  Oh, for a world where Christians quit trying to control nations by earthly powers of coercion and rather devoted ourselves to Jesus, seeking to know him above all else.  The credibility problem would be solved.  Amen.  

Participators Not Simply Imitators

Text: Ephesians 1:15-23

I often advise people in the wake of death that the primary focus of their life for the next little while will be learning how to live with the presence of someone who is now absent. It really is like that. Everywhere you look are reminders. You feel like they are there. They show up in dreams, glimpses out of the corner of your eye, and sometimes it’s more real than that like standing at the foot of the bed smiling a smile of assurance. I read once that 80% of people who have lost somebody say they have had an experience of encountering the deceased, an experience that was oddly communicative and reassuring. You feel like they are around. Yet, they are gone. Present, yet absent. At first it is really difficult, gut-wrenching actually, to come to grips with but, after awhile and it may take years, this present absence that used to make you cry your eyes out can actually be comforting.

Well, I said all that because I think it is a good analogy for what many would say is the task of the church. We are called to learn how to live with the very real presence of this man Jesus even though it is obvious he is not physically here. Let me say it again because this is important. We must learn to live with the real and personal presence of Jesus though he is not here. This is a difficult thing to do. It would be so easy if we could just say, “Jesus is dead. Gone. He was a good man, indeed God. But, he ain’t here no more.” If it were the case that he was dead and gone and no longer present, then being the church is simply living according to a memory. Jesus came and showed us what God required of us and all we have to do is imitate him. Be the community that lives like Jesus. We do what they think God wants us to do. We’re good people, actually some of the best people you’ll ever meet, but just going through the motions of what we think God wants us to do. Doing our duty for God, faithful because God wants us to be faithful. It really becomes evident on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper is shared. The meal is simply a re-enactment of the last supper where we remember what Jesus did for us and maybe be thankful, maybe feel guilty, maybe recommit to do better. If this is the case, then Jesus might as well be dead.

Permit me a bit more time to rant further on this imitative way of being Christian. If all Jesus did was come and show us how to live and die a sacrificial death to appease an angry God and pay our death penalty for our sin and then in turn our response is to live in imitation of him, then all we really are doing is continuing to keep ourselves in the God-seat pretending to be gods ourselves. We do things that we have determined to be something that Jesus would and hope he blesses it. Seeking simply to imitate Jesus is in the end just a backdoor attempt of our trying to be God ourselves. The last time I checked that's one of the consequences of sin, just one more way of living out alienation from the Trinity when in fact what Jesus did was make it so we can participate in the life of the Trinity. There is an eternity's worth of difference between participating in the life of the Trinity and simply trying to imitate its image, noble though that effort be.

I mention these things not to step on anybody’s toes. For really, I have probably just described 60% of the churches in North America and 85% of the churches of Western Europe. Our common problem, we just haven’t figured out how to live with the presence of the one who is absent, so we just do what we think he expects of us as if he was dead and gone. Paul writes here in Ephesians that we are Christ's body and that Jesus is our head. Our problem is that we, the church, decapitate ourselves. We run around with sudden bursts of energy like a chicken that’s just had its head cut off until the body falls over giving up the ghost with a few good twitches.

Well, I’ve good news. This problem is fixable, but you have to answer three questions and answer them correctly. The first question: Where’s Jesus? The answer Paul gives us is that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).” This blatantly entails that Jesus is not dead and gone but rather that he is alive. He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes. It is helpful to think of heaven as relationship, a relational dimension where the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit permeates and is unveiled and where our relationship to, with, and in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is unhindered. To die and go to heaven (or Paradise as Jesus called it at Luke 23:43) to await resurrection (life after life after death as N. T. Wright says) is to go to this relational dimension. The Kingdom of Heaven come to earth is an opening up of this relational dimension into our broken one. Indeed, Einstein has shone us that all of reality as we know it is a relational dimension. Would it be too much of a stretch to throw heaven, the relational dimension of relationship in as part of a Theory of Everything as well as what makes for life and consciousness?

Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly places (the relational dimension of relationship), then what’s his body like? Is he ghost? is another way of putting it. The answer is that he is still fully physically human yet resurrected, resurrected yet scarred. Today, which is Ascension Sunday we celebrate Christ’s ascension into heaven. Today is every bit as important as Christmas when we celebrate the Son, the Word of God becoming human. We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God the Son. The Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became human taking to himself physical reality and our broken nature. With the Ascension, the reverse happens. Jesus the Christ, Son of God and son of Mary takes humanity in the form of resurrected human flesh back into heaven and back into the inner life of the Trinity.

The end result is that we now participate in the life of Trinity by means of Jesus, our union with him in his humanity. We are participators in Christ’s life in the Triune life of God not simply imitators of him.   The Father and the Son make this real in us by sending the Holy Spirit to live in us now as a “pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people (Eph. 1:14).”

Now I know this sounds crazy, just as crazy as God the Son becoming human. We are not accustomed to think that Jesus with a resurrected yet scared human body is seated in the heavenly places with the Father. We like to think he was somehow changed into a spiritual Jesus because everybody knows that the human body doesn’t go into the heavens. But, believing that Jesus has somehow changed from human flesh to ascend into heaven is one of the key theological misbeliefs that is killing the church in North America. Jesus having a human body is crucial to our faith for just as Jesus is God the Son in a real human body in heaven giving humanity place in the life of God so are we real human bodies here on earth indwelt by the Holy Spirit participating in the life of Christ our head doing here as he does in heaven.

That leads us to our third question: if we participate in Christ’s life, doing what he is doing, then what is he doing? For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who in continual worship of the Father intercedes on our behalf. He by his death has made us holy and he takes us before the Father and says, speaking summuratively, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18).” He constantly pleads the case of our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to grant (Heb. 4:14-5:10).

The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit. He sends the Holy Spirit to make us participants in the life of God and to make real in us the saving work he accomplished in being faithful and obedient unto death. His faith, not our own, is the only faith we can count on. His obedience, not our own, is the only obedience we can hope in. Doesn’t that take the pressure off? The power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side is the same power at work in us by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit opens the eyes of our hearts so that we can know the hope to which he has called us, the hope of eternal life in communion with God (Jn. 17:3). The Holy Spirit makes known to us now Jesus' own glorious inheritance, which is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Being made by the Spirit into his Body we share in the communion of love that the Father and the Son share.

As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit. In the Ascended Christ we find our true worship, which is rooted in the Son’s love of the Father coupled with gratitude and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into the Trinity’s very being through the Holy Spirit. We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians. We attend worship to adore the Father through Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus' worship we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and the Father pours his love out on us.

In Christ we pray interceding for the needs of the world as Jesus ceaselessly does. As Jesus is ever praying for us so are we to strive to pray without ceasing. To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray to the Father empowered by the Spirit because we are in Christ. We pray in him and when we don’t know what to pray Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit still is praying in us always. It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of the Trinity even the Trinity is praying for us. Ponder on that. Ever wonder if anyone is praying for you? Well, the Trinity in his very self is praying for you.

So, we worship and we pray. One more thing; as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son send us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission. He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to eternal life now in the loving communion of the Trinity, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This means that in the relational network of our lives the Trinity is molding us by the loving communion of his very self into a fellowship that images that loving communion and thereby proclaims and invites all people to it. No one is excluded. Everyone is included. Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and has sent the Holy Spirit into us we are unioned into the life of the Trinity in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace.