Meg Peery McLaughlin
Grounded: Rooted and Grounded
October 13, 2024
Ephesians 3: 14-21
Prayer of Illumination
God of generations past and generations to come, great is your faithfulness. You do not fail to make yourself known to us time and time again. As we turn now to your Word, draw us together, and draw us to you. In Christ we pray, Amen.
Ephesians 3: 14-21
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. 16 I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit 17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 18 I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 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, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Sermon
This week I was emailing back and forth with UPC member, Polly Moreau.
(Font side, ¾ of the way back if you need location).
Polly’s cousin Melissa was killed by a tree the day after Hurricane Helene.
The storm had shaken the tree loose from its roots, and it fell while
Melissa was walking to check on a neighbor.
Polly was telling me about Melissa’s funeral in Kings Mountain,
and then she wrote:
these are very perilous times-
storms; war; misinformation amid a Presidential campaign; threats to our country.
Without our faith I don’t know how Dave and I would cope.
It would be hard to have hope.
I know Polly is grieving something fierce,
but I heard in her words a deep peace.
She does have hope.
I can actually see it twinkle in her eyes.
Frankly, it looks like mischief sometimes in Polly.
And if I’m honest,
when I see it, hope that is, sometimes I feel jealous.
Maybe you know what I mean.
Like you want to believe all will be well, but you can’t quite muster it.
Like you want to trust that our actions are making a difference, but that trust falls flat.
The work seems endless, the challenges too big. Hope can be a tricky thing.
Pastor Brian McLaren addresses this conundrum in his new book Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart.
It’s kind of an intense title—he defines doom as “the unpeaceful, uneasy,
feeling that we humans have made a mess of our civilization and our planet
and not enough of us seem to care enough or to change deeply or quickly enough
to save ourselves.”
In these perilous times, as Polly rightly calls them,
McLaren says our greatest mistake is that we tie hope to outcome.
We make hope dependent, conditional, on seeing the path forward,
and when we can’t see that path we sink into that sense doom and despair.
McLaren says that instead of hope, it is love that has become his greatest motivator .
Now he finally understands why the Apostle Paul says that faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.
For when our primary motive is love, a different logic comes into play.
We find courage, not in the likelihood of a good outcome,
but in our commitment to love, to what we love, to who we love.
Love may not provide a way through a predicament,
but love provides a way forward in it .
Even when all is crumbling, we just keep loving.
Another way to say it is that love can’t fix everything,
but love will outlast anything .
Perhaps – when Paul prays for church in Ephesus,
perhaps this is why he prays that we would be rooted and grounded in love.
It is as if Paul knew the church would be standing on shifting terrain,
needing deep roots to make it through.
Paul prays that we’d have the power to comprehend the immensity of the love in which we are planted: what is the breadth and length and height and depth of it.
Oh may that prayer be answered in us, today,
because if we can trust that love,
then we can share it, and live our lives motivated by it.
Another UPC Member Robert Owen was on a work trip last year, seated next to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church who just wrote a book called The Way of Love. I mean, of course, why wouldn’t you be seated next to Michael Curry on a plane?
Curry writes,
“While faith and hope are necessary for a full life, they are not a guide for life.
They don’t tell you what to do. That’s love’s job.
Love tells you how to direct the energy of courageous faith.
If hope and faith are the wind and sails, love is the rudder .”
No wonder this is the prayer for the church.
In every age, in each perilous time, be grounded in love.
Because love is the way forward, love is the guide,
even when our faith is flimsy, even when we can’t harvest hope.
Love recycles plastic bags (but only the proper kind of bags, mind you)
Love makes meals for the grieving.
Love sends relief money after hurricanes and war.
Love teaches children to share and adults to talk across deep divides.
But we can’t do any of that, not in any lasting way, if we are not rooted and grounded.
Polly said that the way she stays grounded in these times, is because she and Dave been members of University Presbyterian Church for over 5 decades. 56 years.
She wrote of her gratitude for this church–
for all the different ministers who have guided and inspired;
for the opportunities this place has afforded them to serve and care for the world.
Polly didn’t know it,
but in that email she was preaching a very fine stewardship sermon.
Because here is where that grounding happens.
Here is where the roots grow deep.
Here is where the seeds already planted get water.
The love of God is always present
but we need help digging down in it, so we can fully trust it.
Which is why Paul prays that we’d have strength and power and knowledge,
so that love could fill us from head to toe.
I know I’ve already quoted a lot of preachers in this sermon, but I want to leave you with a final story. Craig Barnes recently retired as Professor and President at Princeton Seminary, but of his early life he says,
My father was a preacher. On Mondays he’d give my older brother and me a bible verse written out on a little white card. We were expected to recite it from memory by dinner at the end of the week when our father would point to one of us and say something like “Romans 8:28.” If we didn’t start chirping away with “For all things work together for good for those who love God,” we’d have to leave the table.
By the time I was a teenager I had memorized a lot of the Bible, not out of love for the sacred text but because I didn’t want to be dismissed from Saturday evening dinner. I never paid attention to the words. But they were still in me.
When I was not quite 17, my parents’ marriage broke apart. My mother left our home on Long Island and went to live with her sister in Dallas. My father left the church he had started and just disappeared. My big brother dropped out of college, got a construction job, and helped me finish high school. I got an after-school job at a gas station. Together the two of us got by.
Oddly, my brother and I didn’t talk about how our world had crumbled. This wasn’t just because we weren’t good at sharing our feelings. Mostly it was because we were too worried about the next meal and a place to stay.
The following Christmas my brother and I decided we would go to Dallas to visit my mother. We didn’t have the money for a plane or bus ticket, so we did what young people sometimes do when they’re not thinking clearly. We decided to hitchhike from Long Island to Dallas.
By the end of the first day we were somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia on Interstate 81. It was snowing hard, the sun was long gone, and we stood on the entrance ramp with our thumbs sticking out. As the snow got heavier, there were fewer and fewer cars. After two hours, we finally saw a pair of headlights pull over in front of us. It was a Virginia state trooper. We were expecting a lecture about how dangerous, not to mention illegal, it was to hitchhike. Instead the officer told us that the highway had been closed for two hours and that after tending to an accident up the road he would come back for us and take us to a diner that was still open.
We stayed put on the side of the dark highway in the blizzard. After months of hustling our way through the immediate issues of making life work, my brother and I were finally forced to talk to each other. We took a stab at describing our situation, but it didn’t go very well after I mentioned that we were basically disposable to our family. We tried to pass the time by quizzing each other on sports statistics. Neither of us had ever been very good at that.
Then my brother pointed to me and said, “Romans 8:28.” We spent much of that night asking each other to recite the verses of the Bible we had memorized but never truly heard. At one point I found myself saying the precious lines of Isaiah 43: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you . . . Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
That night became a turning point in my life, because finally the words sunk in, and I began to trust the sustaining love of God.
Yes, Polly, these times are perilous.
And not all of us will manage to have hope all of the time.
But this place that you’ve loved for 56 years, it is still here,
and it is still proclaiming what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Listen church,
faith, hope, and love abide,
and the greatest of these is love.