Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: July 28, 2024
Power of Love
Jessica Thompson
2 Samuel 11:1-15 | Psalm 14 | Ephesians 3:14-21 | John 6:1-21
It’s been said that the Apostle Paul writes two types of letters:
We are heirs through unfathomable grace to unimaginable glory.
… and…
I am, as a personal favor, begging you incorrigible little twerps to act normal for just five minutes.
This week our Epistle sits squarely in option one. Beautiful. Inspirational. Moving.
And I can imagine the letter Paul would write to King David about today’s choices falls squarely into option two.
Ouch… but Reverend Nat asked me to continue their teachings on Ephesians…
So we come today to this Ephesians text in the face of the whole truth of the human condition: King David hit an all time low, two weeks ago King Herod called for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Paul is writing this from a cell, imprisoned… and we have the same power hungry, King-like leaders bidding for control in our midst today. How can Paul wax poetically on “the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God” in the face of all this… wrongness?
On the first day of my pastoral care course last term, our instructor the Reverend Hillary Kimsey told us what her pastoral care instructor told her on the first day of class:
There are three truths in this world.
Only two of them can be held at one time:
God is all loving.
God is all powerful.
Bad things happen.
God can be all loving AND all powerful until something bad happens, then one has to go. Bad things happen and God is all loving, but not all powerful OR bad things happen and God is all powerful, but not all loving. Our mind just can’t make sense of how an all loving, all powerful God will let bad things happen.
I know for me, this was the crux of my own crisis of faith. After a bad break-up, my life was falling apart. All I ever wanted was to be faithful to God. So if God loves me and God is all powerful, why does God let bad things happen? In the end I let go of God being all powerful, at least in my human understanding of power—which was a “prosperity gospel” micromanaging human choices and consequences, and denial of free will. Instead I desperately cling to God’s unconditional, unrelenting love.
We’ve all been there. This world is harsh, as you, I, and Paul are well aware. Still, Paul is moved to fall to his knees on the floor of his cell in prayer for the church— God’s beloved family— in the midst of this harsh world. In this prayer, coming after a call for unity and equality of all peoples, nations, genders, and ethnicities as God’s own, Paul doesn’t discard God’s power. God is powerful— it’s just God’s power works differently than how we humans tend to understand power. It is the power of love, not control.
Paul’s prayer is threefold, a trinitarian prayer for the church— not just the church in Ephesus but the unified church, past, present, and future— a prayer for God’s power beginning and ending with Love.
First Paul prays that God’s power of love might move in our hearts. “According to the riches of God’s glory, that we all may be strengthened in our inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are being rooted and grounded in love.”
Next, Paul prays that God’s power of love might move in our minds “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.”
Unless we have love and are loved, we cannot understand God’s love. But of course, we have love and are loved because God first loved us. William Hendriksen says that this circle of love is “the most blessed chain reaction in the universe.” God first loved us, so we have love and are loved… and the amount of love God has to give is beyond our greatest imagination. As soon as we think we can grasp the abundance of God’s love, there is more—we cannot contain, measure, or comprehend. And yet the act of seeking is what fills us with more and more Love.
Lastly, and most import as you will discover in the next few weeks as we journey through the rest of Ephesians, Paul prays that God’s power might move in our bodies. “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”
The power of love in our hearts and minds is nothing if we do not share it. It is our actions of love, the extension of Christ in this world, that is the power of God active and alive today. As Bishop Curry writes in his book Love is the Way: “God may be the source of love, but people are often the vessels.”
What a loving and powerful God, to choose not to work power upon us, micromanaging and jerking us around, but instead, God’s power is worked through us. Us flawed and feeble humans are who God choose to embody, fill with love so that overflowing with love, we are empowered to share God’s love with others.
It was a strange thing— during my crisis of faith, as soon as I gave up the idea of an all powerful, micromanaging God and instead let God be who God is, not what I want God to be, something shifted. I thought there would be no God and I’d be done with religion. Instead, at my deepest time of need and despair, a welling of deep abiding love and power came through me. I knew within the very core of my soul that I was called to be a source of God’s love in this world. It is through me—through all of us— that God’s restorative power of love is worked in this world. It is, as God’s heirs, our vocation to be God’s hands and feet—the representation of God’s Love, God’s action in this world today.
As the late Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world, for love is the only way.”
God’s power is not displayed through control like earthly kings and rulers—it’s an outpouring of Love. So when this world is harsh, when fear and despair begin to pull us in, it’s time to fall on our knees and ask God to strengthen us with the power of Love in our heart, mind, and body so WE can be a force of God’s Goodness and Love in this world.
“to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.”