Sermon Eph 3-16-19 for 30 jul 00
Let us pray that the Holy Spirit flood are hearts with grace so that we may know of the unlimited breadth, length, depth and height of God’s love for us, as we reflect on the words of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Introduction
Many Christians wear crosses around their necks or pinned to their lapels as a symbol of our faith in Jesus Christ our redeemer. It is a reminder of the unlimited dimensions of God’s love for each one of us.
Some of us take longer to learn this than others. I know that I tried to deny that Christ loved me. In hindsight, I was afraid that this love would challenge me to be more generous to others. Acts of selflessness always tend to cramp our individual plans.
Have you ever seen others or perhaps experienced yourselves, the thrill and terror of bungy jumping?
The jumper stands hundreds of feet above the ground
and steps into the abyss, plunging headlong earthward’s
pulled by gravity to an unavoidable destiny.
The ground rushes up, impact is certain, then
the bungy chord, that elastic band tethered to the jumper, snaps the body back from the certainty of death.
After years of a misguided belief in nothing but myself, the Grace of the Holy Spirit snapped me back from my own fall. I began to realize that I was tethered to God through the love of Christ. The Spirit reminded me that Jesus loves me: always did, always is, and always will. And so, about four years ago, I to began to wear a cross again.
Now, my mother, a faithful 81 year old, has never doubted the wisdom in the truth that Jesus loves her. So she was over- joyed with my transformation in Christ. However, for a little extra peace of mind, she gave me this card called “A Cross in my Pocket,” to carry in my wallet. She knows that life occasionally is like speeding head first down a dangerously narrow and twisting mountain road, Sometimes you miss a curve and fall off. When this happens to me, I am grateful to God for my mother’s wisdom in giving me this card. I frequently pray on the message in this little card. It uplifts me because it reminds me that I am securely and forever tethered to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Trouble in the Text: Christians in Asia Minor need reassurance that Jesus loves them
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was circulated to many individual congregations between Jerusalem and Rome, who needed the reassurance that Christ was firmly tethered to them in love.
Imagine Antonius, a poor slave, sitting alone in a deteriorating second-story slum apartment in the city of Ephesius, thinking about the meaning of God’s love for him, after he heard this letter.
Rain pelted the wall outside, seeping through the cracks in the roof and dripping on his supper of stale bread and sour wine. He was alone with his thoughts, bitterly remembering the ridiculing he had received in the market place last week because he was Christian.
When Antonius became a Christian, he lost his job as a tent-makers apprentice. Now he spent his day doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He struggled to maintain faith on the truth of Christ, but the constant verbal jabs about those Christians and their crazy beliefs of a resurrected Godman called Jesus made him feel lonely.
He desperately wanted to be accepted. He was even hearing rumours of arrests and the torture of some Christians by the Roman authorities. Many of his close friends were abandoning the faith. How could they believe that God loved them, let alone live Christ’s challenge of the cross-to love others, under these circumstances?
Trouble in our World: We need reassurance that Jesus Loves us.
All of us have felt how isolating and impersonal life can be in the big city. All of us know how this dehumanizes us. It can make one spiteful and resentful. It causes us to withdraw or hold back our own compassion from others. Pick up any newspaper in this city, the Globe, the National, the Star, the Sun. The stories of youth violence, murder, greed, broken relationships, and the systemic injustice of homlessness, challenge our faith that God loves us. Its hard to believe that the tether of God’s grace will prevent us from breaking our necks, as we plunge head-long into the unavoidable challenges and temptations of daily living the minute we wake up.
Now look beyond our own city and country and multiply our resentments by a factor of 1,000,000. In 1994 close to 1,000,000 Rwandan Tutsis were murdered by Hutu government forces in a state organized tribal genocide. 1,000,000 human beings, that’s every second person in the city of Toronto. Where is the depth, height, breadth and length of God’s love here?
The Book of Genesis tells us that God made us in God’s image. We humans tend to want to reverse this Divine truth. We constantly struggle against the temptation to create God in our image. You see, when we make God like us, it becomes easy for us to become self-centered. Our compassion for others dries up and gets blown away like dust in the wind of human plans.
There is an ancient Hebrew story told that when God was about to create humanity, God took counsel from the angels that stood about the heavenly throne.
‘Do not create humankind’, said the angel of Justice, ‘for if thou does, he will create all kinds of inhumanity against his fellow men, he will be cruel and unjust’.
‘Do not create humankind’, said the angel of wisdom, for she will be false and deceitful to her sisters’,
‘Do not create humankind’, said the angel of holiness, ‘for they shall disobey you and reject your love’. They shall hurt you.
Then stepped forward the angel of mercy and said,
‘Create them, O God, for when they sin and turn from the path of justice, wisdom, and holiness, I will forever love them and lead them back to thee’.
Grace in the text: Jesus Christ the source of love
This is the Divine will for us, that God wants to share Godself with us. The truth of human nature is that our lives are shaped by those who love us and by those who refuse to love us. The truth of the Gospel is that God’s love for us is completely unconditional.
It is a blessed gift of God’s mercy, that sooner or later, for each one of us, the Holy Spirit tugs on the tether of grace that binds us to Jesus. The Spirit reminds us that we are forever held fast in the orbit of God’s love. We shall not spin off into space or ever hit the ground.
The Gospel tells us that nothing shall separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ. Have you looked at the cross lately? Can you see the depth, height, width and breadth of Christ’s love for us in the dimensions of the cross.
Trace with your hearts, the width of its sweep from Jesus’s palm, across his chest to his other palm: Remember the open love of Christ who welcomes into his arms every person in every age more certainly than any human being has ever loved another.
Look at the cross’s vertical length, from the head of Christ to his feet. Remember the length of Christ’s love for us: Jesus suffering on that cross, a Divine selfless act. This is the infinite length of God’s love stretching forever as it suffers for the oppressed, poor and dispossessed in all ages.
Christ on the cross is the unlimited length of Divine justice.
Look at it from any angle, the cross stands in our faces. It unmasks the naked brutality of humanity’s senseless violence by a God who refused to respond with the same violence.
The Romans scouraged Jesus with whips, but with each stroke of the lash, Jesus revealed their own inhumanity, there own inability to understand the nature of love. They hammered him to the cross, not realizing with each blow, that they were shaming themselves and the imperfection of their own system of justice.
See the broken body of Christ on the cross. Our vulnerable God, suffering our pain unto death for the freedom of love.
But there is more mercy in God’s love.
Take a look at the cross again. See it empty now and rejoice in its emptiness. The unknowable breadth and depth of God’s love for us in Christ’s resurrection. In resurrection, Jesus Christ was not intent on stitching up our old wounds. Jesus Christ was showing us that we would never suffer from any wounds again. Death has no power over us. Love transforms suffering. Love conquers death. Jesus Christ transcends the limitations of our own human justice and morality systems. His love is purer then these.
And His Holy Spirit, the Divine comforter constantly tugs on the tether of our conscience reminding us that Jesus loves us. What a gift!
Grace in our World: Jesus loves you
The mystery of our faith- Christ has died, is risen and will come again would never have been revealed to us if Jesus never lived. Jesus Christ- for us, with us, in us. There is no person outside the love of Christ. There is no place out of reach of Christ’s love. There is no experience, which the love of Christ will refuse in order to gain one person.
Max Lucado a popular Christian writer asks ‘What if one day, Jesus were to become you? What if for 24 hours Jesus wakes up in your bed and wears your shoes in all your life’s experience- its joys and sorrows. Well, he already has.
God loves you. In his death, Jesus shows us that we are forgiven. In his glorious resurrection, he creates new life, new hope and new joy, where none existed.
In Rwanda today, the deep wounds of genocide are slowly being cauterized by the burning grace of the Holy Spirit. Anastase, a Tutsi pastor and Joseph, a Hutu teacher, visit a cemetery where the crosses of 6,000 victims including Anastase’s aunt bear witness to the reality and utter futility of our inhumanity. These two former enemies have forgiven each other and now lead reconciliation seminars for all the peoples of Rwanda. Like tiny green shoots of trees that poke through the charred remains of a forest floor destroyed by fire, which reach up to the growing power of sunlight, the irrepressible light of the Holy Spirit is transforming mistrust and rage into love:
A mother adopts the repentant soldier who killed her son; a widow offers hospitality to people she once despised; a builder helps those who looted and destroyed his business. Jesus Christ bears the sins and pain of Rwanda. In his Divine compassion, two ordinary men, two former enemies are transformed by a better way, a greater truth. They struggle courageously to live the compassion of Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
There are times when you hear the truth in your head but do not feel it. And then there are times when you feel the truth in the center of your being. Our human world will never understand fully the truth of unlimited love in Jesus Christ. But Paul prays fervently for the Spirit’s grace that we may know even a tiny sense of God’s unlimited love for us. A grace and love so immense that even an atom’s worth will be enough to transform our lives.
Over the altars of our churches there hangs the cross. Under the cross there is the unwritten caption: ‘No one has greater love than this.
My friends, God is love. If giving and sharing with another is the character and essence of love, then God is love. God seeks nothing except to share God’s love with us. In Jesus death and resurrection, God shows that there is no human being who is unloved. Jesus loves you. Thanks be to God. Amen.