Ephesians 3:14-21 (The Message)
My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!
This past week I saw a quote someone posted on-line and I liked it so much I re-posted it on our church facebook page. It reads like this:
"It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group, one usually has to be convinced the group is ‘right’; to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everyone else."
The line comes from a Franciscan priest, named Richard Rohr, who is one of our greatest living teachers on spirituality and a longtime favorite of mine.
And then I read the readings for this week and found that the epistle for this Sunday is this letter from St. Paul to the church at Ephesus. There is in fact a good deal of doubt that Paul actually wrote this letter and even more doubt that it was written specifically to the church at Ephesus but since this is not going to be a sermon on Biblical Historical Criticism I’m not going to go into all that and I will continue speaking of Paul and Ephesus rather than trying to work around it here and boring us all to death with speculation as to who may have written it. Whoever wrote it writes as Paul, writing from his final prison in Rome – which he knows he will never leave alive – and we know the letter traveled not just to Ephesus but made the rounds of the various first century European/Near Eastern missionary churches.
If you spend much time reading the current thinking on the state of the church in the world today – as I do – you will find a lot of talk about people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” By this, I assume they mean they like the idea of God – some Higher Power out there – but want nothing particular to do with all the “-ologies”, e.g. theology, ecclesiology, and their ilk.
The “-ology” part of those words comes from the Greek logos which means word and so theology becomes words about (or what we know about) God (Theos), and ecclesiology is the study of ekklesia (church). Ecclesiology then is the study of how we do church and why we do it that way, and theology is the attempt to organize what we think we know about God into a coherent system. If one is not careful, these two can very easily drift out of range of any heart/spirit connection and end up completely in the realm of word games and abstract philosophy. I have to admit that while many people find Systematic Theology fascinating, just the words alone can put me to sleep inside of a minute. Personally, I have no interest in constructing boxes for my faith.
So while the ‘-ologies’ are important it is easy to see, based on how these discussions are often perceived by the world at large, why many people reject them in favor of what they experience as a more “spiritual” connection to the divine.
I do believe they are both important – spirituality and the systematic ‘ologies’ – and that, like the old song, “You can’t have one without the other.” I read an essay the other day, by a young woman named Myriam Renaud, writing as The Naked Theologian, (for some reason I have never quite picked up) which likens theology and spirituality to a honeycomb and the honey contained therein. Without spirituality, theology is just a lump of beeswax, she says, and without theology, spirituality is just a pile of sweet goo. They need each other to have both substance and form.
I think that much of what we see in the larger church today is the triumph of form over substance – a strict adherence to “the rules” and the “way we’ve always done it,” which so often stifles any effort the Spirit is making to speak a current in the church and in the world. There is something about fundamentalism which has always seemed to me to betoken a very shaky faith in God’s ability to act. All of the “you have to do this and say this and this is a sin and you can’t do that and follow these rules exactly...” has always seemed to me to be more of as effort to corral God into something manageable than to keep humankind on a straight and narrow.
I simply can’t find any possibility for God’s love anywhere in all that frantic rule following. When keeping the wax walls of our honeycomb perfect and burnished becomes more important than the honey that fills it ... when our church structure is buttressed about with strong rules, but folks are being hurt and shunned, then where is God allowed to speak and move? And is anybody anywhere listening?
To return to the quote with which I began today: It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group, one usually has to be convinced the group is ‘right’... Living without trusting that God actually means what God says about loving us means that one’s whole salvation depends on adhering to “the rules” and it becomes ever more urgently important then that the rules of your group are the “right” rules. There is no room here for human error. For a fundamentalist, there could be no greater horror than to be brought to believe, as the Rohr quote continues, that to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everyone else.
God placed us in this world and set us free to become what we would become. God set God’s own Holy Spirit into each one of us to be our guide and advocate and nudge us along to way to growth and change. It has never been God who hedged us around with rules – that has always been humanity itself – a humanity terrified of freedom and never quite able, apparently, to fully trust in God’s love.
This why Paul (or whoever) reminds us that
And then I read the readings for this week and found that the epistle for this Sunday is this letter from St. Paul to the church at Ephesus. There is in fact a good deal of doubt that Paul actually wrote this letter and even more doubt that it was written specifically to the church at Ephesus but since this is not going to be a sermon on Biblical Historical Criticism I’m not going to go into all that and I will continue speaking of Paul and Ephesus rather than trying to work around it here and boring us all to death with speculation as to who may have written it. Whoever wrote it writes as Paul, writing from his final prison in Rome – which he knows he will never leave alive – and we know the letter traveled not just to Ephesus but made the rounds of the various first century European/Near Eastern missionary churches.
If you spend much time reading the current thinking on the state of the church in the world today – as I do – you will find a lot of talk about people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” By this, I assume they mean they like the idea of God – some Higher Power out there – but want nothing particular to do with all the “-ologies”, e.g. theology, ecclesiology, and their ilk.
The “-ology” part of those words comes from the Greek logos which means word and so theology becomes words about (or what we know about) God (Theos), and ecclesiology is the study of ekklesia (church). Ecclesiology then is the study of how we do church and why we do it that way, and theology is the attempt to organize what we think we know about God into a coherent system. If one is not careful, these two can very easily drift out of range of any heart/spirit connection and end up completely in the realm of word games and abstract philosophy. I have to admit that while many people find Systematic Theology fascinating, just the words alone can put me to sleep inside of a minute. Personally, I have no interest in constructing boxes for my faith.
So while the ‘-ologies’ are important it is easy to see, based on how these discussions are often perceived by the world at large, why many people reject them in favor of what they experience as a more “spiritual” connection to the divine.
I do believe they are both important – spirituality and the systematic ‘ologies’ – and that, like the old song, “You can’t have one without the other.” I read an essay the other day, by a young woman named Myriam Renaud, writing as The Naked Theologian, (for some reason I have never quite picked up) which likens theology and spirituality to a honeycomb and the honey contained therein. Without spirituality, theology is just a lump of beeswax, she says, and without theology, spirituality is just a pile of sweet goo. They need each other to have both substance and form.
I think that much of what we see in the larger church today is the triumph of form over substance – a strict adherence to “the rules” and the “way we’ve always done it,” which so often stifles any effort the Spirit is making to speak a current in the church and in the world. There is something about fundamentalism which has always seemed to me to betoken a very shaky faith in God’s ability to act. All of the “you have to do this and say this and this is a sin and you can’t do that and follow these rules exactly...” has always seemed to me to be more of as effort to corral God into something manageable than to keep humankind on a straight and narrow.
I simply can’t find any possibility for God’s love anywhere in all that frantic rule following. When keeping the wax walls of our honeycomb perfect and burnished becomes more important than the honey that fills it ... when our church structure is buttressed about with strong rules, but folks are being hurt and shunned, then where is God allowed to speak and move? And is anybody anywhere listening?
To return to the quote with which I began today: It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group, one usually has to be convinced the group is ‘right’... Living without trusting that God actually means what God says about loving us means that one’s whole salvation depends on adhering to “the rules” and it becomes ever more urgently important then that the rules of your group are the “right” rules. There is no room here for human error. For a fundamentalist, there could be no greater horror than to be brought to believe, as the Rohr quote continues, that to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everyone else.
God placed us in this world and set us free to become what we would become. God set God’s own Holy Spirit into each one of us to be our guide and advocate and nudge us along to way to growth and change. It has never been God who hedged us around with rules – that has always been humanity itself – a humanity terrified of freedom and never quite able, apparently, to fully trust in God’s love.
This why Paul (or whoever) reminds us that
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
As with many things do to with our faith, it is always easier to see faults and weaknesses in others rather than in ourselves. If we take the time and thought to look into ourselves, are we anymore free off the rules and boxes than the fundamentalists? Or do we just have rules that look different? Do we ourselves truly trust God completely? Do we take the time to listen for the Spirit speaking to us? Do we take the time to listen? Do we actually live our spiritual lives as free and joy-filled as our scriptural writer today suggests?
...take in...the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.....It is possible.....God can do anything, you know.
RSS Feed