“Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised: his greatness is unsearchable.” Psalm 145.  One of the first prayers I ever learned was prayed before meals.  “God is great/God is good.”  “Yeah yeah we know that,” one might say.  We understand this, don’t we?  Do we?  We do we keep it front of ourselves so much?  “Great Are You Lord” is a song that we sing here.  You give life/You are love/You bring light in the darkness/You give hope/You restore every heart that is broken/Great are you, Lord.  Record scratch and all of a sudden “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians” is booming out through the speakers.  We’re in a struggle, and it’s not for nothing that Paul wrote about putting on the armour of God to the people of Ephesus.

We are in a struggle around a question that everyone is called to answer.  “Who or what is great?”  To put it another way, “Whose power is at work in the world?” For the follower of Jesus, a good trinitarian answer would be “God the Father, Son and Spirit.”  This past week I saw someone in a crowd wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed “Jesus is King.”  “What does that mean to you?” I wanted to ask, though I didn’t.  There could be many different answers to the question “What power is at work in the world that is greater than all others?”  Whether we consider it or not, we answer that question with our lives.  Today I want us to consider what it means to say “Jesus Christ is Lord of all.”  What does it mean to name Jesus as our ruler, and what does that mean in terms of what or who is not ruling?

Competing claims to rulership are very much in play here in Ephesus.  Ephesus in Paul’s day is another big-deal city.  The fourth largest city in the Roman Empire.  The capital of the Roman province of Asia.  Located in the western part of modern-day Turkey.  It was a port city that was part of a major east-west trade route. While the importance of its port facilities had waned somewhat, its importance as a tourist destination had not.  Just outside the city stood one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Temple of Artemis.  Artemis, or Diana as she was known to the Romans, was a big-deal goddess – goddess of the hunt, goddess of fertility. The temple was not only a place where people came to sacrifice and worship, it also served as a bank. There was a bi-monthly festival which included a parade through town to celebrate Artemis.  Worship of Artemis was inextricably connected to civic life/social life/economic life. You can visit the ruins of Ephesus today, which have been excavated since the 19th century.  One of the amazing things about this is that you really get a sense of the grandeur of the place as you go through the city.

This place was a big deal.

I can’t help but think of our own city as we read accounts of Paul staying in places like Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus. The similarities are numerous. Economic, cultural, educational centres of power and the powerful.

Which brings us back to the question - whose power is at work in the world?  To put it another way, “What is the thing that we are going to worship?”  Everyone worships something.  What is the thing in which we will find meaning?  Economic prosperity?  Financial security?  Good government? The algorithm? Ourselves?  Our education or looks or smarts or charm? 

What is going to change us?  We’ve been talking about points of contact we share no matter our faith foundation.  Do we not all share a sense that there is a need in our world for transformation on both a personal and societal level?  Do we not have the sense that we are in need of transforming?  If we stopped long enough to reflect and think about it, do we not long to be better? When we consider the things that we do to each other as individuals, as nations, as tribes; when we consider what we do to God’s creation, do we not get the sense that we should be doing better?

I believe this to be inarguable, really. Where the competing voices come is in when we ask, “To whom or what do we look for change?”  Is it within ourselves?  Is it as simple as telling ourselves “Do better”?  Is it simply a matter of finding unity in civic or national pride?  Is it really the economy stupid?  What is the overarching or undergirding or foundational thing? The thing about being in a city, the evidence of what is worshipped can be pretty obvious.  A temple to Artemis.  Financial towers. A coliseum that contained a quarter of the city’s population.  Cathedrals to sport. Glittering cathedrals to materialism and the belief that “I spend therefore I am.”

Whose power is at work in the world?

Into this question step Priscilla and Aquila. The husband and wife team from Rome that we first encountered in Corinth, working with Paul and having Paul as their guest.  They’re in Ephesus now.  Apollos comes to town and he’s zealous – he speaks with burning enthusiasm (great!) – and he has been instructed in the Way of the Lord and he’s a native of Alexandria which was another big deal town and library town and he is eloquent and learned (to the point where Paul would have to remind the people of Corinth that it’s not about a competition between the two of them) and he taught accurately. The thing is, he only knew the baptism of John.  John the Baptist.  The Christ-following life is about being transformed. The Christ following life is not one in which we’ve arrived, it’s one in which we’re on a journey together.  Part of being on this journey is that we’re coming to know more of God.  Not just head knowledge but knowledge that is transforming our hearts.  Knowledge of God’s grace and mercy and justice and love. We need one another in this.  We’ve been seeing this throughout the book of Acts. Priscilla and her husband Aquila take Apollos aside because it wouldn’t do to correct him publicly. They explain the Way of God to him more accurately, and here we have a case of a woman teaching a preacher, and I’ll just put that out there.  These followers of the Way are following together.  They haven’t forgotten (and we won’t forget) those words about how they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. When Apollos wished to cross over to Achaia, the believers in Ephesus encouraged him, and they wrote to the disciples in Achaia to welcome him, and so he was helped.  When he arrived, he helped those who through grace had become believers.

And lives are transformed.

The same sort of scenario plays out when Paul arrives in the great city. He finds some disciples  and asks them how it was going with the Holy Spirit. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” he asks them. “We didn’t even know there WAS a Holy Spirit,” they tell him. Paul explains to them about John’s baptism being one for repentance or turning to God and John’s telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after – in other words, Jesus.

They receive the Holy Spirit.  We’re asking the question “Whose power is at work in the world?”  The power of God – who is great – at work in followers of Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit.  God with us leading us into deeper understandings of what God is like.  The unsearchable greatness of God at work in us through the Holy Spirit of God.  The power to bind us to God and Christ and to one another, the power to comfort, the power to console, the power to transform.

And don’t we all long for transformation?

The power of God, which is the power that continues the work that Jesus began, that continues in Jesus’ church, which is empowered by the Holy Spirit of God.  It’s a power that results in people being made whole.  It’s a power that results in people being healed.  It’s a power that results in people being set free from bonds from which they were unable to free themselves. The power is not in the person.  It’s not about Paul.  It’s not about me or you.  The power is not in the magical handkerchief or apron. The power is the Holy Spirit of God.  It’s a power that brings personal transformation. This is not a power that is to be harnessed for one’s own ends or simply a name to invoke in order to advance one’s personal agenda.

So we have the episode of the Seven Sons of Sceva. This is described as a comedic episode, and I suppose in some places and at some times it might seem funny for a group of brothers to be attacked by a man with an evil spirit who beats them up to the point where they flee wounded and naked and the whole “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” thing. For us today, though, I want to focus on the result.  The name of the Lord Jesus was praised.  Praise is a natural outworking of the Spirit of God in us – not a result of our own emotional state or how into a particular song we can get or not. The will and ability to praise comes from God, so let us pray to God to fill us with the Spirit in order that we might praise.  Practices are being changed. The way people are living is changing.  “Also many of those who became believers confessed and disclosed their practices.  A number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly; when the value of these books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins.  So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.”  Is there anything on which you used to place a lot of importance that you now see as having little or maybe even no importance as you’re following Jesus?  What are the things upon which we are depending which need to be thrown into the fire? 

In the Holy Spirit we’re made new.  This is not only affecting individuals.  It’s affecting all of society.  This is the Holy Spirit’s work.  No little disturbance broke out concerning the Way.  By “no little” Luke means big.  A big disturbance breaks out, because this Jesus’ Way thing is affecting the city to the point where it’s affecting business!  Paul is saying that gods made by human hands are not gods at all!  To believe such a thing means that all of life is affected, including what we do with our time and money.  To say “Jesus is Lord” or to sing “Great are you Lord” as we do is to say that fill-in-the-blank is not Lord, and this can lead to feelings of discomfort, to say the least. A few years ago, Greta Thunberg spoke to the UN.  She said, “People are dying; entire ecosystems are collapsing… We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” No matter what you think of Greta Thunberg or her message, it is undeniable that her message draws strong reactions.  We Christians might take note and question how we’re doing with getting the good news of Jesus and how we’re doing with comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable (which might include ourselves).  NT Wright puts it like this – “Imagine someone setting up shop in the heart of the financial district of one of our great cities – London, Frankfurt, New York, Tokyo – and using the basis of a powerful ministry of healing to declare, over and over again, that the money markets and the stock markets were simply a way of worshipping the god of Mammon, that this was destroying the lives and the livelihoods of millions in other parts of the world, and that the whole system was rotten and anyone who saw the light ought to reject it outright.  You might get more than just a sharp word now and then…”

“Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”  Great are you, Lord. The situation is dicey. Paul wants to go out into the crowd – what an opportunity! – but is advised not to by his friends and even some officials. Eventually the town clerk restores some order and tells the crowd that these people are neither temple robbers nor blasphemers and that if Demetrius and the silversmiths' union have a problem they can take it up in court. The crowd disperses, and the mission goes on.

As our own mission goes on here at Blythwood.  As we are led to continue through the power of the Holy Spirit, the work that Christ began – the demonstration and proclamation of the good news of Christ.  May our hearts continue to be shaped and formed by the same Holy Spirit that empowered Paul and those we’re reading about.  May we be ever more coming to know what it means for every aspect of life to claim Jesus as Lord.  May these things be true for us all.

Amen