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When Bob Zuppke was football coach at the University of Illinois, the team thrived under his enthusiasm. Players said that he would almost hypnotize them with his driving energy.

One game it seemed that he would have to. Illinois trailed by three touchdowns at halftime, and Coach Zuppke needed to work his magic. He started out slow and low, nudging and encouraging his players' tired spirits. Then he picked up steam and pumped them up until the adrenaline was popping in their veins. By the time he was finished they were ready to go out and fight World War III. Zuppke pointed to the door at the far end of the locker room and yelled, "Okay, men! Let's charge through that door and on to VICTORY!!!"

They jumped and ran, charging like bulls. They slammed through that door, and piled on top of each other in the university swimming pool!

Enthusiasm is a prized quality in most societies. Daniel Goleman, in his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1995), describes enthusiasm as part of the "master aptitude" that gives those who have it an edge over those who don't in nearly every area of human endeavor. Louis Pasteur, generations ago, thought that the word "enthusiasm" was one of the most beautiful words in the world. It certainly describes his own approach to life. Before becoming a chemist he had already established himself as an artist. Then, when he suffered a paralyzing stroke at the age of 46, he embarked on research that would bring some of his most famous discoveries. His personal motto was this: "Happy is the man who bears [God] within."

This is the meaning of enthusiasm: to bear God within, and to be driven by his purpose and energy.

If ever there was a theology of enthusiasm in the Bible, it has to be Ephesians 1. These are not paragraphs to read slowly or sedately. These words are the charged-up pep talk of Coach Paul, firing his team into action. In fact, Greek scholars have always thrown up their hands in despair when attempting to make clear sense of these verses. Paul didn't use punctuation when writing, and all of the letters, words, and sentences are run right up against each other in the original language. Whoever received the letter had to sort it all out.

This chapter needs a lot of sorting. Even when Greek scholars try to pull it all apart, they end up with only about four or five sentences. And what sentences they are! One translator says that this passage is like a racehorse, always rushing for a prize. Another says that it is like an eagle soaring, playing with the currents and winding around itself in a maze of ecstasy.

My favorite, though, is William Hendricksen's picture of a small child in winter, packing a small snowball at the top of a hill. As he rolls it around on the ground it begins to tip toward the slope. It starts to move on its own, picking up speed as it runs down the incline. As it picks up more and more snow it becomes a boulder, racing along with increasing energy until it crashes into a tree and showers the whole area with its wealth of snow.

Those are good descriptions of the way Paul writes here. He gets very excited about the message that he is bringing and just runs on and on about it. His enthusiasm carries him along. His excitement overwhelms him. His energy bubbles up like a geyser, and he can't control it.

And because of that he speaks in superlatives. Declarative sentences are simple statements of fact. Comparatives place two things next to one another and evaluate one over against the other. But superlatives stretch one thing high above the rest.

Enthusiasm always speaks in the language of superlatives. Paul's enthusiasm carries through in several kinds of superlatives.

The Priorities Of God

For one thing, Paul gets very excited about the priorities of God.

G. K. Chesterton once said that "the central idea of the ... Old Testament may be called the idea of the loneliness of God." What he meant is that God is always looking for a family, for a people to share himself with. Throughout the Old Testament God tries time and again to be part of human society on earth.

It is a lonely journey, however. People couldn't see God, so they quickly forgot about him. Sometimes they would take the gifts God gave them and use these to worship other forces or powers. The travels of God in the Old Testament are the journeys of a lonely person.

The prophet Isaiah, in fact, gives a tearjerker picture of God. He sits at the window of a retirement home, says Isaiah in chapter 1, staring out at the rain. With a quivering voice he mutters, "I reared children, and brought them up" (1:2), but now they have forgotten me!

Other prophets tell a similar tale. But then Christmas happens, and God comes into our world wearing our own clothes. We see him. We know him. We touch him. We understand him. And we realize that this is what God has been about all along. He wanted to walk and talk with us! He wanted to enter our lives so that we can enter his! That is essentially the way John writes the story in the first chapter of his gospel.

Victor Hugo said a similar thing in his great novel Les Miserables. The main character, Jean Valjean, takes little Cosette into his life. She was the daughter of a prostitute, now orphaned and unwanted. But Valjean loves her and looks after her. Even when Marius takes her away from him Valjean does all in his power to make her life beautiful. It is the mission of his life.

When Victor Hugo was asked about the meaning of his story, he said that it was a very "religious book," and that it portrayed in human terms the great drama of our relationship with God.

So it is with Paul here. That is his enthusiasm. God sees us as the priority of his life. God goes out of his way, into our way, to love us, to care about us, to be with us.

I'll never forget the look in the eye of a man who learned that for the first time. He was weak with cancer, hospitalized in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. He used to belong to a Jewish synagogue, but over the years he had become what he termed a "practical atheist." Now he was dying all alone, without family or faith to stand next to him.

Someone in our church learned about him and asked if Pastor Stroo and I would visit him. We drove 45 minutes to get to the hospital, making a special trip since no one from our congregation was at that hospital or lived in that area.

We found the man's room. He was gaunt and gray, with tubes running everywhere. We introduced ourselves and told him why we had come, that a friend had asked us to look him up.

He said, "Ah, I hope you didn't make a special trip just for me."

I would have said, "No, there were other things we had to come here for."

But Bill Stroo was a wise pastor. He said, "Yes! We did make a special trip for you! There isn't anyone else here that we wanted to see. We came just to see you!"

The man shook his head and tears erupted from his eyes. He grabbed our hands, and his whole body shuddered in disbelief. Would someone actually do that for him? Could someone really care that much?

We told him about the God who made a special trip to see us, coming to our world in Jesus. We told him about God who loves us, not because we love him first, but because love for us is the priority of his life.

Before that man died he became a Christian. The nurses in the hospital stopped us later to tell us of the remarkable change that had come over him in his final weeks. He was loved by God! And in that love he learned to love others in a whole new way! Isn't that a remarkable enthusiasm to have?

According to music legends Eugene Ormandy is supposed to have dislocated his shoulder once while conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. That is actually quite hard to believe, since Ormandy was usually very controlled in his orchestral leadership. There was a refined and spare way about him as he stood on the podium with his baton, giving little movements with his hands and tiny gestures with his arms.

Since I first heard that story I have wondered what they were playing when Ormandy dislocated his shoulder. Probably not Bach or Mozart, with their steady pace and predictable tempos. It might have been Brahms or Stravinsky. In one of Brahms' symphonies there is a place where he wrote in the margin, "As loud as possible!" Then, just a few bars later, he wrote, "Louder still!" Something like that may cause Eugene Ormandy to dislocate his shoulder and a few other bones!

Leonard Bernstein, on the other hand, actually fell off the podium a few times when he got into the enthusiasm of conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Paul, in Ephesians 1, is a lot like Bernstein. He is conducting the choir of God's people, and the music on the stands is the symphony of God's love, orchestrated before the worlds ever came into being, scored from all eternity. The music of the heavens. The joyful noise of creation. The melody of compassion and the ecstasy of love.

That is a performance worth getting excited about! That's the enthusiasm of Paul in Ephesians 1: the priorities of God that we find in the love of Jesus.

The Privilege Of Prayer

Here is a second enthusiasm of Paul. It's what he says about the privilege of prayer. Prayer, for Paul, is an amazing thing. This short letter fairly breathes with prayer. Paul doesn't so much talk about prayer in this letter, at least not until the very end. Instead, he just prays, here in chapter 1 and then again in chapter 3.

I'm reminded of the song we sometimes sing: "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, the Christian's native air...."

That describes well the atmosphere of prayer in this letter.

Thomas Hardy once looked out over his little Dorset village and wondered what it would be like if all the wishes and wants and prayers of the hearts of his neighbors would suddenly become visible. Can you imagine it? Our world would probably look like a newspaper comic strip, with little balloons of dialogue standing over each head. What would it be like this morning if all of our prayers should suddenly paint the air in this place: all of the groanings of our spirits, all of the secret confessions, and all of the loud and exuberant celebrations?

"God, make her see me today! Let her fall in love with me!" Can you see that standing over someone's head?

"Please, God, let me find a job!"

"Save our marriage!"

"Don't let this happen to me!"

"Make my body well!"

"Take care of my child!"

These are the things we pray.

But that is only the start of prayer. Prayer is more than just our selfish shopping lists, washed along on our conceited materialism. Prayer is also the kind of thing that Paul shouts here. He begins with God. His praying is an extension of his delight in God. His praying is the outgrowth of his enthusiasm about God.

You see, prayer isn't just a magic formula whereby we get anything we want in life. Prayer, for Paul, is being caught up instead into the very character of God and then seeing what he sees and wanting what he wants. It is receiving his abundance, to be sure, but receiving it out of his fullness and not just out of our wanting. That is the reason that we learn early in our spiritual pilgrimages to pray "in Christ's name" or "for Jesus' sake."

When we pray in that way, our prayers begin to change. Who can pray for selfish things when we see the depth of God's character? It would be like marrying someone for money! At first it brings its own comfort. But the person who marries for money gets so much less than he could have in a spouse.

Similarly, it is not the wealth of God that makes our prayers come alive, but the depth of his love. Dag Hammarskjold, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, penned his daily thoughts in a journal that was published, after his death, as Markings. He caught the spirit of Paul's enthusiasm about the privilege of prayer when he wrote: "For all that has been -- Thanks! To all that shall be -- Yes!"

The Power Of Christ

There is at least one more enthusiasm of Paul in Ephesians 1: the power of Christ.

Perhaps this seems like something too abstract to get excited about. I would think so myself if all I heard was the phrase "the Power of Christ." It doesn't say much by itself.

But Paul turns it into something very real. He says that the power of Christ is the power that God used to raise Jesus from death on Easter Sunday morning. That is something that gets to all of us at one time or another in our lives.

An ancient Chinese proverb puts it like this: "When the winter is severe the pine trees in this ancient land stay green throughout the year. Is it because the earth is warm and friendly? No! It is because the pine tree has within itself a life-restoring power."

That is something we all long for: "a life-restoring power." A few years ago Muriel and John James published a book called Passion for Life (Dutton, 1991) that grew out of their lifetime of research. Their goal, in their own words, was to distill the essential qualities of the human spirit to their most basic character. The number one quality humans have, said the Jameses, is the "urge to live." Once we are alive we will do anything to stay alive. It is the single greatest driving force within is.

Yet we know that we cannot ultimately keep ourselves alive. None of us can! To be sure, it is often our great dream, like the legend of Faust that keeps replaying itself throughout history. Many of us sell our souls to the devil for just a taste of immortality.

Still, we all die. Then the questions come: What is the meaning of my life? Why did life ever come into these frail bones? Is it all worth the bother?

Then Paul enters our space with his great enthusiasm. Within the reality of his religion is the knowledge that Jesus Christ died, and that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead, and we with him. This was the preaching of the early church. This is the heart of the Christian confession. Not that we will be reincarnated forever and forever in new and ever-changing personalities, but that this one, unique, special personality we know is really us won't be snuffed out and lost forever.

We say it so carelessly in the Apostles' Creed -- "I believe in the resurrection of the dead" -- as if it is merely a punctuation mark, or an afterthought, or one of the ingredients in the cereal box. But it is not so! This was the central message of the preaching of Paul. It was the heart and soul of the early church! Their lives were often nothing: table scraps for the lions in the arenas of Rome; target practice for Nero's troops; outcasts from honorable society.

But God made them something! God promised them life! God took their weak, frail, diseased bodies, and said that he would preserve their psyches, and heal their wounds, and restore their failing strength. God, who raised Jesus from the dead, would do the same for them!

William Blake handed that enthusiasm of Paul over to a friend of his who stood in a cold cemetery. He said to her, through his poem:

I give you the end of a golden string;

Only wind it into a ball.
'Twill bring you in through heaven's gate

Built in Jerusalem's wall.


That is a promise to hang your faith on, and a superlative to keep you going!

Do you have that enthusiasm within you? There are congregations that are dying out of a sense of duty, theologized into tedium and boredom. There are Christians who have lost a sense of energy and enthusiasm in life.

God give us the ability to find again the enthusiasms of Paul!

Remember Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist? He was in his bathtub one day and suddenly jumped out of the water. He ran stark naked down the streets of his town shouting at the top of his voice, "Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!"

He wasn't selling vacuum cleaners! He was just shouting out the Greek word that Paul shouted when he first met Jesus: "Eureka!"

It simply means, "I've got it now! It makes sense to me for the first time! This is the point of everything I've ever really wanted to know!"

Have you ever said that?

If you have, you have found the right superlatives!