Be with us, O Lord, for if you are with us, nothing else matters; and if you are not with us, nothing else matters. Amen.
Have you ever considered your faith in terms of dimensions? This morning in Ephesians we heard that St. Paul prays that we might know the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love. How far into your soul do you perceive this love? How far are you willing to go in faith? How widely is this love manifest in your life? How deeply do you feel God’s love for you? This beautiful passage from Ephesians invites us to consider the dimensions of God’s love for us.
You might have noticed that this passage is a prayer to God, not a direct address to the Ephesians or us. Thus far in Ephesians, you’ll recall that we’ve seen how there is conflict between Christians that were previously Jewish and those who had pagan roots. In essence, this powerful prayer asks that we might comprehend the incalculable fullness of God’s love for us which unites us in glorifying God from generation to generation. I highly commend taking this prayer with you this week and reading it daily, reflecting on it, asking that you might know the breadth, length, height, and depths of God’s love for you.
The prayer opens by noting that all people take their name from the Father. As we know from Genesis, humanity was created in the image and likeness of God. In our Baptisms, we were declared as God’s beloved. I know that we all have different names, like Robert, or Bonnie, or James, or Alice – but those really are more like nicknames. Our truest name is “Beloved,” and this prayer reminds us that because God is the source of our name, our most real identity is that we are children who are deeply loved by God.
Paul then prays that Christ might dwell in our heats, that being be rooted and grounded in love, we will be filled with the fullness of God. I absolutely love this portion of the prayer, as the imagery is so very rich. By the power of the Spirit, Christ is made to dwell in our hearts. It’s not that Christ comes for a visit, but that Christ abides there, taking up residence in our souls. Even if sometimes we think we are more of a shack than palace for Christ to come and reside in, Christ still comes to dwell within us. And in doing so, our hearts become a temple because Christ comes with royal splendor, saving grace, and magnificent love.
I know that it can sound hokey to talk about feeling Jesus in your heart, but it’s actually at the core of our faith. How aware are you of Jesus dwelling in your heart? The prayer suggests that this inhabiting of Jesus in our hearts is known by being rooted and grounded in love. There are two ways that we can experience this love.
The first is prayer, which is the bedrock of our relationship with God. Of course, God’s love for you is not dependent on how often or earnestly you pray. But how deeply you encounter this love and how aware you are of Christ’s presence in your heart does depend on your prayer life. I’ll advise you that if you walk away from this sermon saying “I want to know the love of Christ more fully, so I’m going to start a prayer routine tomorrow,” you may not feel any differently after you set aside time for prayer. You may, and that’s wonderful if you do. But the metaphor here is that we are rooted in love. If you’ve ever done any gardening, or just understand the basics of how plants grow, you know that roots don’t show up instantly. Getting roots takes time and cultivation.
Now don’t start flipping through the Prayer Book right now, but on pages 137 through 140 there is a section of prayers for individuals and families. Each of these short liturgies is only one page in length and can be used throughout the day. They are a wonderful place to start developing a rooted prayer life. Another fantastic way to be rooted in God’s love for you through prayer is the Daily Office, which is the rhythm of daily Scripture readings and prayers that has been a hallmark of our Anglican tradition since the first Prayer Book in 1549. At St. Luke’s, we are blessed with a group of dedicated members who lead Morning Prayer at 8am and Evening Prayer at 5:30pm in the Chapel during the week. And if your work and life situations don’t allow for you to attend, you might download the Forward Day by Day app on your smartphone. It does cost a little bit, but there are also paper copies of this resource available in the narthex. It provides a short reflection and verse of Scripture each day.
The thing about love is that it is relational. No one falls in love because they’ve thought about each other, but rather because they have come to know each other. Love comes through relationships. The reason why you love your children, or your spouse, or your parents, or your friends isn’t because they seem like good people in your mind. No, it’s because you have a relationship with them and through that relationship, you have come to love them. The love of God is the same – we will come closer to knowing the fullness of God’s love through relationship, and prayer is the means of having this relationship. Sure, the love of God can break open even the hardest heart of the staunchest atheist, but prayer helps us to recognize those twinges of grace when we feel them instead of dismissing them as mere indigestion or sentimentality.
The other way to become aware of the love of Christ is in community. As the prayer notes, we come to comprehend this love with all the saints. The community of the church is the foundation upon which this love is founded. The only way that the incomprehensible love of God can be comprehended is in the community of faith. The love of God is so grand, and deep, and wide that we need each other to have any chance of internalizing it. You will experience the love of God in one way, and me in another. By coming together, this love is magnified and we start to see just how expansive and all-surpassing God’s love is. It’s sort of like the stained glass windows that adorn so many churches, including ours. Each piece of glass has its own beauty, but when they are put together – the beauty grows into something that is bigger than the sum of all the individual pieces of glass. Like prayer, the more often we unite our voices in praising God, hearing the story of our salvation in Scripture, and receiving the Eucharist, the more grounded we will be in Christ’s love.
The reason why prayer and community are the pathways to knowing of God’s love for us is because, as the prayer states, “the love of Christ surpasses knowledge.” As we all know from the way that we love and have been loved, the heart often has reasons for loving that the mind cannot fathom. Love is a truth that the mind can defend but never discover. Our intellect will only take us so far when it comes to the love of God. Love is not a mental exercise, it is an experience of relationship. And so we pray and we unite to catch glimpses of the glorious dimensions of God’s love.
And once we are sanctified by this love, we’ll soon realize that there is no limit to this love. You can go to the furthest reaches of space and will still not have outrun God’s love. Since Creation was an act of love and the culmination of all things is the love of God, there is no time when God’s love is not bursting at the seams. There is no experience in which God’s love cannot be known. This is what the Cross proclaims to us and why it is our central symbol as Christians – we can do our absolute worst to God, and yet love is not conquered. Though the darkness of depression, cancer, dementia, war, division, poverty, or betrayal may overwhelm us to the point that we cannot see the light of love, that does not mean that the love of Christ is not burning deeply within us. And because God’s love is essential to our nature, we do not need to fear that God will ever stop loving us. God is always with us and always for us. At times, sin does obscure this love because of our doubts or fears, but God’s love for us is truer than our existence itself.
As this prayer is concluding, St. Paul writes “Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever.” I know that’s not exactly what you have in your bulletin, but that’s the translation that the Prayer Book uses. At the conclusion of both Morning and Evening Prayer, a verse of Scripture is said and I’ve been using this particular one every morning and evening for the last three months.
It was three months ago that we moved out of the feasibility phase of our capital campaign into the pledging phase. Our consultant called me to let me know that while the results of the feasibility study were positive, we would need to adjust our campaign goal downward from what we had hoped. We did that, and we’re making great strides in hitting that goal. But to say that I was dejected by the report that said we could probably raise half a million instead of something more like $900,000 is an understatement. I questioned my leadership and wondered what I had done wrong. My sin was focusing on what I could accomplish instead of remembering that God’s power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. I had limited the dimensions of God’s grace.
When it comes to God, I know that I get into trouble when I have a desired outcome. What the power of God’s love can do through us is more than we could ever ask or imagine. But when I so narrowly define what success looks like, it’s so easy to miss the grace of God when it shows up because it doesn’t come in the way we expected. God’s love is bigger and more beautiful than we can ever expect.
The expansiveness of God’s love means that we won’t always be able to comprehend what is going on in our lives. Though, through prayer and community, we come to trust that we are always loved by God. And in that trust, God’s love will accomplish abundantly far more than we ever thought would be possible. By using this phrase so often recently in my own prayer life, I can tell that you I have come to more fully trust, in the words of St. Teresa of Avila, that all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. I know that what God is doing through us at St. Luke’s is beyond our wildest dreams.
Because if the love of God is with us, nothing else matters. Nothing can defeat the love of God. And if the love of God is not with us, well, then nothing else matters because nothing else can save us. And so we rejoice that, by the Spirit working in us, we come to be rooted and grounded in trusting that the love of Christ is, indeed, with us.
This is why St. Paul begins this prayer on his knees. Surrendering ourselves to the awe and majesty of God’s love is the only suitable response. The dimensions of this love are so grand that it drives us to our knees. And so I invite you this week to also bow your knees to God with this lovely prayer from Ephesians. Sit with these words of promise and hope. Pray with these words to be rooted in the abundant dimensions of the love of Christ. Glorify God by giving thanks that through this love, God will, through us, do infinitely more than we could ever have ever asked for or imagined.
