The Trinity Tornado
Ephesians 3:14-21
7/20/2003
Everyone complains about the weather ... but nobody ever DOES anything about it.
Until now. Frank Polifka, a lifelong Kansas farmer has figured out how to create, contain and control the raw and tremendous power of a Great Plains whirlwind — inside a large tin can he’s built behind his barn.
He’s put his contraption, a cyclone-making machine — a tornado in a can — to good use by creating radically new possibilities in waste management, food dehydration and a host of other twisted surprises.
It sounds kind of crazy, but this guy used his weather sense, ingenuity and hard work over many years to create an apparatus he anticipates will do “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (3:20 KJV), because it’s astonishingly useful. One big company executive commented, “It kind of looks like something your uncle might invent in the back yard. But it really sparks the imagination what you could do with it.”
Inside Mr. Polifka’s corrugated shed that serves as the test site for Vortex Dehydration Technology’s (VDT) strange and secretive new invention, this farmer simply cranks open a valve to unleash the force of a twister.
Just like a tornado, the roar of the machine is deafening, but the results spectacular.
In Scripture, the Holy Spirit is often described as a mighty wind. At Pentecost, there was “the rush of a violent wind,” as it was written in Acts 2:2. And in today’s Ephesians text (3:14-21), Paul brings together a Trinity force of unimaginable power. (READ TEXT)
Paul begins with the Father (v. 14) and moves to the Holy Spirit (v. 16), by whom we are strengthened, to the Son who lives in our hearts by faith, a three-fold combination that enables us to be rooted, grounded, and able to comprehend the enormity of the love of God — all of which is an immense power able to accomplish the unaccomplishable, to do the undoable, to achieve the unachievable! It’s a whirlwind of blessing, blowing into us a power beyond our imagining or even our ability to articulate.
Over the last couple of months, this is one thing that has disturbed me. See, I have discovered and USE this power I have through Christ, but I don’t see YOU using it. And that’s probably because you don’t realize what power you have in Jesus! When Paul talks about us being “strengthened in your inner being with power through (Christ’s) Spirit,” he is talking about our souls—our inner being—the part of us that is immortal. When you grab a hold of that power through the Holy Spirit, there’s nothing you can’t do as long as it is in align with God’s will.
One way we learn to first accept then use this power is through faith and by being “rooted and grounded in love.” (v. 17) And there is only one place for that to happen—the church, the congregation, this fellowship of believers.
God promises his love and power to his family, the church. If we want to receive his blessings, if we want to receive and use his power, it is important that we make regular contact with other believers a priority. If we isolate ourselves from God’s family by allowing other things to keep us from regular church attendance, we will cut ourselves off from God’s incredible power.
Look at a plant. What keeps it from falling over? Its roots! God wants us to be rooted as well, so that we won’t “fall over.” We are “being rooted and grounded in (the) love” of Jesus Christ, a love that holds us up and feeds our hearts and minds. What would happen if you cut this plant off right here, at the roots? It would fall over, die and dry up. The same thing happens to us when we cut ourselves off from the love of Jesus. In the same way that a plant is thankful for the stability and nutrition it gets, our roots in Christ’s love give us stability and nurture. I say again that I don’t think most of you are aware of that power.
That machine I told you about earlier — called “Windhexe” — breaks things down. That’s a little problem for my analogy, because it’s not like the Holy Spirit pulverizes us. The Holy Spirit builds us up, not breaks us down. My point is not the pulverizing action of Mr. Polifka’s machine, but the incredible, almost unbelievable, power of this apparatus!
When Polifka flips opens that valve on the Windhexe, superheated compressed air rushes into an 8-foot-tall steel cone, whirling and spiraling counterclockwise at incredibly tremendous speeds, producing a vortex of hot, powerful wind which can pulverize solid rock into dust and grind concrete into powder.
No wonder there’s a parade of visitors arriving from all over America to see his machine, to witness for themselves whether it really does what they’ve heard it can do. Poultry people in particular are keen to learn whether this Tornado-in-a-Can is able to convert their industrial byproducts of billions of pounds of awful chicken left-overs — feet, feathers, heads and guts — into dry powder and then, into green money.
Another company, this one in Australia, asked, could Windhexe dry out huge stores of underground coal, and makes it a viable alternative to oil? Would it dehydrate duck manure, some farmers in Ireland wondered. Could it separate gold from sand and gravel, asked another company, thinking this could be a new way to squeeze greater profits from the ground.
You bet, its champions say. The possibilities are as endless! To test their theory, the Vortex folks have tossed in rocks, dirty diapers, pallets of household garbage, buckets of jelly fish, barrels of eggshells, tomatoes, sweet potato rejects from the farm down the road, soda pop cans, glass bottles, manure, pine wood chips, 400 pounds of Oreo cookies, frozen pizza dough, even a dead bird — and all were reduced to fine powders, which, depending upon the material, could be reconstituted with water, spread on fields as fertilizers or used in a thousand other ways.
To say the power of a tornado is tremendous would be a serious understatement. We all know twisters can level huge brick buildings and lay waste to entire trailer parks in wide and long swaths in seconds. My grandmother used to talk about a tornado she lived through where she saw one piece of straw sticking right through a telephone pole. That is some serious power!
To take that kind of power, or a downsized portion of it, and harness it inside a vessel made of metal is almost miraculous. Imagine the power of a tornado created and contained inside a corrugated can. Now imagine that power of God instilled, installed and inspired within you, doing its work for you, to you.
That’s Paul’s point, and mine — that the tremendous power of God can be in us and can change our lives! And that same power of God is greater than our greatest problem, greater than our most perplexing situation, and greater than any of our fears or sins.
God is the Tornado. We’re the Can.
God is a Holy Whirlwind, anxious to live in us, love us, guide us, lift us up and spin us into a new people. God’s impressive tornado power is whirling inside us, able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope.
This is true on a personal level and on a faith-community level. Paul is speaking both to the church at Ephesus and to the people within the church—to US! Notice the prayer Paul offers in the last verses of this passage. It is also my prayer for you, in fact, I used these very verses as the benediction last week. Listen again:
I pray that all of you:
• Would experience God’s gifts “according to the riches of his glory” (v. 16)
• Would be “strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit” (v. 16)
• Would experience Christ as the one who “dwell[s] in your hearts through faith” (v. 17)
• Would be “rooted and grounded in love” (v. 17)
• Would have “the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of that same love (v. 18)
• Would “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (v. 19)
• Would “be filled with all the fullness of God” (v. 19)
And I pray this all this in the name of the One who is able to do far more than all we can ask or imagine (v. 20). This is the prayer we should memorize and pray every day of our lives. We should pray every day that on this day we would be the can, the container, the receptacle or channel for the awesome, transforming power of God!
But Paul is also speaking to the church. The last verse of this passage notes that it is God who is glorified “in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
God is the Tornado. The church is the Can.
The church is to be the vehicle through which the whirlwind of God sweeps across our neighborhoods, communities, nation and world. We’re the Can Church, the Can-do Church, energized by a God who works through the church far more than ALL we can ask or even imagine!
God seeks to catch us up in this whirlwind, into this splendid richness of life and power.
God has made us, constructed us, to be capable of containing a holy whirlwind, a portion of himself right inside our souls and our worship together. God’s love is total. It reaches every corner of our experience. It is long—it continues the length of our lives. It is wide—it needs to go beyond our own experience and we reach out to the whole world.
Take a moment of silence. I invite you in this sacred moment to think about where you need to see the power of God on display in your life. Consider that maybe you have never dared to ask God to work the unthinkable, the unimaginable, in your life. In this quiet time, I invite you to ask God to do that in your situation.
Then I invite you to pray this prayer:
Loving God, your abundance overflows around us. You could have given us only our health and that would have been enough. You could have given us only our loved ones, and that would have been enough. You could have given us only our daily bread, and that would have been enough. But you have given us so much more. To those who lack health, you have given salvation. To those who lack companionship, you have given your presence. To those who lack nourishment, you have given your broken body.
Teach us, Lord, the difference between the affluence of our culture and the abundance of your kingdom. Help us to rejoice in all that you give us, and to hold only lightly the goods of the world. For we pray in the name of the one who is your greatest gift. Amen.
Sources:
Huslin, Anita. “‘Tornado in a can’ pulverizes materials.” The Washington Post, December 10, 2002, Seattletimes.nwsource.com.
