I got to take one single class from Dale Allison. He’s probably the world’s foremost scholar on the Gospel of Matthew, and if he heard me say that, he’d question the “probably.” But I had the opportunity, while he was still a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, to take “An Introduction to the Gospels” with him. So imagine a bunch of preschoolers surrounding Robert Frost or Mark Twain and asking him to teach them their ABC’s. It was probably a pretty maddening situation for Dr. Allison. Anyway, lacking the brilliance and incredible memory recall that he has, I can tell you that the number one main thing I took away from his class was the absolute mystery of all of this stuff we’re supposed to “know.” I always laugh at the title of my masters degree - the Master of Divinity - as if, now that I have this degree from a properly accredited university, I can now tell you how it is, how it all really and truly is. I have “mastered the divine.” But Dr. Allison had this one line that he would most emphatically and enthusiastically repeat over and over again. When he was asked a question from an anxious and well-meaning student who was squirreling away all the right answers so that they could produce them at a moment’s notice throughout their pastoral career, when asked a question from a student who was desperate for and demanding certainty, he would say, with a kind of squeak in his voice, “I don’t know! Nobody knows!”
I mean, just imagine it. You’re in a lecture hall watching probably the most brilliant Matthew scholar pace and scribble on the chalkboard in his sagging jeans and ill-fitting blazer, the man who has read it all and is still reading it all, say I don’t know. He may not know, but, like the Socrates quote that says “The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing,” you start to think that he really does…know.
It’s this different kind of knowing, though. It’s a kind of knowing that we can’t really comprehend. It’s, as the author of the Letter to the Ephesians says, it’s a “knowing that surpasses knowledge.” I mean, that’s a little trippy, a little mind bending, right? But if we read this passage slowly, we have to ask, how in the world can someone know something beyond knowledge? I mean, it starts to sound like nonsense, which, by the way, is why I think we either like to write off these complicated letters attributed to Paul, or why we latch on to one verse out of context and plant megachurches and use lasers and fog machines in response to them. But there is a third option, and that’s a kind of wrestling with the passage. It’s a kind of listening and being attentive to how these words are interacting with The Word, and with the words of our everyday lives. It’s a stretching kind of practice, where we try to make our minds less like granite upon which we carve all the things we supposedly “know,” and more like rubber bands that stretch and move and adapt according to what it’s trying to hold.
So let’s just grab a pail and a shovel and dive in to the sandbox. Let’s play a little bit. Our scripture today tells us that we can know past knowledge so we can be filled with all fullness. And our writer today kneels before God, a posture of passivity and submission, and prays that we might have the power to experience this. Kneeling for power. Knowing past knowledge that fills us with all fullness.
The letter to the Ephesians is sort of this great summary of all of Paul’s ideas. He may or may not have actually written the letter, but the emphasis of the letter is one of describing what God has done, which is breaking down all these walls that separate and divide, and what we should do in response to this new, radical, mind-bending, spiritual physics set before us. This prayer in the third chapter is the hinge upon which these two ideas rest. And so, we can start to think about, start to play with, this idea that because God knelt for power through Jesus Christ, so can we. That because God knows beyond knowing, so can we. And because Christ dwells in our hearts, we, too, can be filled with all fullness. But to play like this, to stretch our minds like this, we need to stretch that rubber band of our minds further than we have ever done before. We need to explore our sixth sense. We’re invited to see beyond three dimensions. We’re called to know beyond knowledge.
For some physicists, the fourth dimension is thought to be time. And the fifth dimension is this mathematical possibility of the “tesseract” or the “hypercube.” According to geometry folks, this hypercube is the fourth dimension, and I don’t really understand all the differences, but the point is that there’s this dimension that has been at least mathematically proven to exist, even if we don’t directly experience it. So get ready. Take a deep breath. Let’s play.
So we know the first dimension is a straight line connecting two points. Let’s call it the “breadth.” If you “square the line” you’d get a square. That’s the second dimension. This is what we can see when we draw or write or experience art. It’s flat. We’ll call that the “length.” Then the third dimension is how we all experience life - you’d “square the square” and come out with a cube - things have form and shape, roundness. It’s the difference between a sphere and a circle. Between the flat-earthers and all those explorers who didn’t fall off the face of the earth. So we’ll call that the “height.” But what if we squared that cube? What would happen then? Let’s call whatever that is the “depth." It’s super mindbendy. And people try to draw it, but nobody can quite do it justice because we simply can’t fully experience it. We are limited to our three dimensions. But just because we are limited to three dimensions doesn’t mean that a fourth or fifth or even sixth dimension isn’t there. But there’s this theory that if we could experience a tesseract, we could surpass the bounds of space and time. We could maybe even know beyond knowledge. And I think maybe this almost describes what happens when we “get it.” You know, that half a second that you have this experience and something just makes a kind of sense, or you feel the presence of the holy, or you feel like you’re connected to more than just yourself. It’s a flash in the pan where you thought maybe you heard someone calling your name, or you felt a strange comfort, or you had this sudden desire for something that you knew nothing in this world or through your meager five senses could fully fulfill. It’s a fourth dimension. It’s something new, entirely outside of your previous experience, that fills you with wonder and awe and maybe for a millisecond some level of understanding and then poof, it’s gone, like trying for the briefest of moments to comprehend a tesseract, a dimension past the three that we experience right now. It’s the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for us.
I used to think that this kind of thing just didn’t happen to me. I used to think you had to be really holy, you had to sit in lotus position and fast, or stand on a pole like those stylites who stood on pillars for thirty years, or walk over hot coals or wander the desert to experience that thing that’s outside of my traditional, reasonable knowing. Or, maybe I just had to believe harder. Maybe all those who claimed to have these multi-dimensional experiences just had more faith. Or maybe they worked harder, or were luckier, or were pulled out of gym class to join some special forces unit and told the secrets of the universe while I failed, yet again, to serve the volleyball over the net.
But now, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so hard. Maybe it’s not as impossible as I thought. Maybe I only have to travel as far as my own heart to get the tiniest glimpses of what this might look like. Maybe there’s a little bit of tesseract in me. In you. In the fireflies we caught last night, cupping them in our hands until they lit up the whole darkness we’d formed around them, and then letting them go, back out into the night. Maybe there’s Christ, dwelling in my heart, as I’m being rooted and grounded in love. I love that our epistolarian takes us beyond the limits of our understanding, past the limits of our knowledge, outside the bounds of reason and then, also, roots us, grounds us, in love. Like a kite tethered to the ground, we are invited to fly and soar and explore and play, but at the end of the day, no matter where our travels take us, even if it is outside the bounds of space and time, we always always have love to come back to.
I guess that’s why I’m not at all impressed by these billionaires flying themselves up into outer space. It’s been done before. It’s old news. Especially when these guys have the resources to go where no human has ever gone before and take us with them - to a world where everyone has enough food to eat, or a world where we slow down the destruction of our planet, or a world where people get all the medical care they need. I don’t know. I shouldn’t judge. But it seems to me that these guys are suffering from a lack of imagination here. They have hundreds of billions of dollars and still they are thinking in only three dimensions. They’re refusing to know beyond their knowledge in order to see what’s beyond their power, in order to be filled with the fullness, and finally be full, so they realize that they don’t need anything else. So they know that they, too, are rooted and grounded in love.
But of course, when I point one finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at me. And I think about all the ways that I have reduced God and reduced this life to reason and comprehension and test scores and only three dimensions. I’ve written my story in granite, instead of explored my life’s possibilities with the elasticity of a rubber band. I’ve denied the Christ that is in my heart, I’ve refused to make a home for him, I’ve wanted to cut myself off from God’s rooting and grounding love. I’ve had to know all the things because I was too afraid to admit that “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
I just “know” or think I know, that when I slow down, when I have a sense of awe, when I try to experience something in the fullness of what it is, I start to experience that thing in new dimensions. The two pine trees I pass by on my walk start to grow a little greener. The conversation with my son about Fortnite starts to make a little bit more sense. I start to wonder about the the homeless guy flying a cardboard sign on the side of the road, asking for money. I start to wonder about his story. I start to see him in more dimensions. I’m curious about the fear in the eyes of the white supremacist, and I can see new ways that maybe I can connect with the person on the other side of the political aisle. When we open ourselves to experiencing these new dimensions, this knowing beyond knowledge, we can start to get creative. We can see possibilities where before there were none. It’s the incarnation. Seeing the world beyond the limits of our very tiny, very limiting experience. We can stretch our minds to new encounters of hope and joy and connection and mutuality. We can understand the other, maybe just for half a second, but for that half-second it’s real and true and we are filled with the fullness of Christ’s love. That is what God is doing through Christ - expanding the limits of what it means to be God so as to fully unite with us. When we can be open to more dimensions, go beyond the boundaries we set up for ourselves, we can experience that “power that is already at work within us and is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”
Thanks be to God.
