Sermon - Rooted and Grounded in Love (Proper 12B)

 9^th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B)                                                  July 25, 2021

Text: Ephesians 3:14-21                                                Panzer Chapel Liturgical Service

When I read through the verses from Ephesians 3 today, I keyed in on one particular phrase… Paul’s prayer is that we be rooted and grounded in love. And it immediately made me think about gardening.

My dad grew up on a farm in Western North Carolina. 90% of the land was covered in timber, but there was plenty on land by the New River where my grandparents tended a very large garden, probably a little over an acre. I worked in that garden until I was in high school, and then transferred those skills to working the smaller garden we had a home. My parents took this hobby very seriously – tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, corn, okra, squash, peppers… if we weren’t pulling weeds or harvesting a crop, then we were trying to figure out what to do with all the veggies we grew. It never paid to leave your car unlocked if you came to visit us in the summer – you were taking something home whether you wanted it or not.

I didn’t think that I learned much from that experience because I really didn’t like gardening very much. I didn’t like being hot. I didn’t like being in the sun. I didn’t like how scratchy the leaves of many of the plants felt against my skin. And I didn’t like eating green beans at almost every meal in August and September.

I’m happy it only took a few years to have the joy of gardening return. It started with flowers, but about 10 years ago, we started growing vegetables, too. Every year we observed our successes and our failures. We read up on what to use to get rid of destructive pests and what kinds of additives and fertilizers would give us a good crop while maintaining a healthy environment for bees and other helpful insects.

We learned that crushing up eggshells in the hole before we planted our tomatoes and zucchini would help prevent the ends from rotting before they were harvested. We have a great harvest of radishes this year because we figured out that mixing peat with dirt gives us just the right soil texture for an optimal harvest. We learned which flowers need the most sun, and which ones like the shade. Our terraced perineal garden blooms from March to October because we have studied, experimented, and paid attention as our way of making our garden grow.

Much of Paul’s writing to the churches under his care is about teaching and instructing… his call is to welcome people into the circle as God has welcomed them. Today’s verses from Ephesians are as much pastoral prayer as they are a lesson in theology. His prayer is that we be grounded in Christ… and not just in the ways we understand faith, but also in the ways we live it… not just in what works for us as individuals, but also to discover what works for us as a community.

Here in Ephesians and also in Philippians 2, Paul uses the action of kneeling in prayer for two purposes. First, to subjugate ourselves to the Triune God. It’s a big thing to realize and then live as if the world does not revolve around us. Once we become followers of Christ, we are connected to him through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our very character is empowered by this relationship – very much in the way we talked last week about the vertical nature of our relationship with God. Our strength comes from this relationship – not from our wants or abilities.

Second, when we allow Christ to infuse our lives in and with faith, we enter into new relationships. Prayer is one of the ways we communicate with God – prayer that is both speaking and listening – prayer that calls us to quiet and to action. Service is how our relationships with others get lived out. We are called to love one another, not because we are the same, but because we worship one God, together. Sometimes we call this family… sometimes we call it church. Last week, we use the word, ekklesia, citizens of a community built on love. Within these relationships, love can grow and flourish, bear fruit and beauty.

So how does this relate to gardening? Before we talked about how we must understand the ways that soils, nutrients, and growing conditions affect the ways our gardens grow and provide crops or flowers as we work. Think of it this way, in the same way, that plants need good soil, we need good community, a place to plant deep roots and be nourished as we move toward fruitful harvest. When we participate in spiritual disciplines like prayer, worship, and as we study about faith, we are nurtured in the same way that plants need different kinds of nutrients and treatments to help them grow stronger, yielding good fruit.

For instance, this year, we will have plenty of zucchini, but our tomatoes have fallen ill with a blight that has affected many in our area… too much rain, too little sun, and temperatures better suited to a fungus than the setting of fruit on our vines. We have realized that just because our tomatoes have flourished in the same garden for the last five years, we cannot rest on our laurels or give up on our garden altogether. We will take this years’ experience under advisement when we think about what to plant next year and we may make changes we haven’t ever considered before.

Up to this point in the letter, Paul has been focused on the concept of God’s immeasurable grace. What does that grace look like? Well, I think he’s telling us that it’s bigger than we can even imagine… love to the fourth dimension. He says it this way: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

God’s love and power surpass our ability to know how big that love is. And that is an invitation to love and dream and work bigger than we can imagine for ourselves. Or in Paul’s words, “Now to him who by the power at work within us can accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine…”

Our faith journeys are as different as each of us is. Our histories, our experiences, and our dreams for the future are unique to our own lives. What a blessing when these lines intersect and even travel together for a time. Our walks may look different as we grow and travel and experience faith in new ways. The spiritual disciples that work for me may not be as meaningful to you, or vice versa. The ways of praying or studying or being a part of the Christian community may change for us as we grow in faith. And all of that is OK, as long as we keep ourselves centered on the One who gives us the faith and gifts to serve him.

I know a family that adopted a child from overseas. The process was difficult, tedious, and there were delays and roadblocks at almost every turn. The mom was allowed a 1-week visit with the child to start bonding with him and to attend to the required paperwork. She then had to return to the US and wait for several months before she could return to bring him home to his new family. Those months were agonizing.

There were many people shocked at how much time, money, and energy they were willing to expend to bring a new member into their family which included three teenaged boys. When it was suggested that maybe it wasn’t meant to be, my friend replied, “This is my child and I will do whatever it takes to bring him home. If something were to happen to him or this adoption was not to go through, it would be the same as if one of the children I birthed from my own body had died. God called him to be our child and us to be his family, and God will see this through.” That, my friends, is love without bounds… love for an unknown child, and trust in a God who can make impossible things happen.

God loves us even more than that, evidenced in ways that we might not recognize at the time. Sometimes we must look back and see the powerful hand of God at work in our lives. This working out can have an ethereal, other-worldly nature, but often as not, it happens people-to-people. This love is both eternal and earthly, not one or the other.

And in the midst of it all, we are called to this life together. We have our personal relationships with Christ, but we are also called to live with one another.

God wants us to be like Monika and her family, who welcomed a new son and brother and loved him before they even got to touch his hand. God wants us to be so filled with love and joy and happiness that we give those feelings more power over us than the concerns and worries and needs that might make us afraid or hesitant in the ways we live out our faith. God’s love keeps us going when we want to give up. God’s love pushes us farther and deeper when we want to play it safe. God calls us to a new way of life, of being, of loving out our lives because that’s what love is all about.

Paul calls that the fullness of God… blessing and possibility mixed with suffering and disappointment, but God is always there. God does not call us to an easy life. It may not be as fruitful in the ways we hoped – like tomato plants that drop their leaves before the fruit can even get big enough to harvest. But we are called to live deeper lives, knowing that even in our struggles, love is the better choice.

Some days, we don’t know how it’s all going to work out. But we don’t have to always know. In these times – at all times, we are asked to trust in the One who sees more and who can work miracles in ways we never imagined or asked.

Shawn and I love sunflowers, and for the last few years, we have planted several varieties of seeds in little pots and nurtured them until we could plant them at the back of our garden, along the fence. But this year the seedlings kept dying. So, Shawn took the seeds we had left, mixed them up, used a hoe to make a small trench, poured the seeds in, and covered them up, hoping for the best. It took a few weeks, but we eventually had a whole line of seeds germinate, and now, along our back fence, we have over two dozen sunflowers almost ready to bloom. They are different heights and shapes, and we have no idea what varieties we have. Normally at this time of the season, we would be staking the plants up to help them make it to the end of the season before their stalks break. But this year, the plants are so close together that they are holding each other up… no assistance from us is needed.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus once again hosted a meal… a very big meal… a miraculous meal. At first glance, it feels like only Jesus and the boy with the loaves and fishes thought this was even possible. But as the disciples followed Jesus’ instructions to have the people sit down, and as they passed around the blessed bread and fish, everyone believed. The miracle wasn’t just that Jesus made that little bit of food go so far. It was also in the faith of those who sat and waited for the food to come to them. No one went away hungry, and there was an unbelievable amount left over at the end – many times more than what they started with.

We live life better together. Loving, learning, hoping… we do it, we know it, we experience it all better together as long as we are rooted and grounded together in love. This very thing - being rooted and grounded in love is the very essence of what God is calling us to be and to do. Love is at the center of it all…love for God, love for one another, and love for all of God’s people.

Thanks be to God.

(c) Deb Luther Teagan, July 2021

 

Sermon resourced from UMC Discipleship – Derek Weberhttps://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship-planning/geared-up-for-life/ninth-sunday-after-pentecost-year-b-lectionary-planning-notes/ninth-sunday-after-pentecost-year-b-preaching-notes