Knowing God’s love - Ephesians 3.14-21

Alison Morgan, Holy Trinity, June 2000

 

 

Introduction

 

At opposite ends of the medieval city of Florence stand two churches. To the west lies S M Novella, begun in 1246, built by the Dominicans. To the east stands S Croce, begun in 1294, built by the Franciscans. The two churches are quite different. S M Novella is tall and dark, with soaring black and white gothic arches and an atmosphere of order. S Croce is warm and brown, with a flat wooden roof and golden altarpieces. S M Novella feels as though you should be quiet. S Croce feels as though there should be pigeons flying in the rafters. In S M Novella you are very serious. In S Croce you are relaxed.

 

What explains the differences?

 

By the time these 2 buildings were put up the Church had got itself into quite a state. It was politicised, secularised and profoundly corrupt. It evangelised with armies, did spiritual warfare by burning the afflicted at the stake, and made its appointments by selling its most desirable positions. But towards the beginning of the 13th century two men were given a vision of the restoration of the gospel. One was Dominic, born in Spain. The other was Francis, born in Assisi. Dominic’s vision was to seek and proclaim God through the pursuit of knowledge and truth. He founded a preaching order, the Dominicans. Francis’s vision was to seek and proclaim God through the pursuit of a life of poverty and love. His order was the Franciscans. The orders grew, offering ways of following Christ which seemed in harmony with the way of Christ himself. And so by the year 1300 S M Novella and S Croce were going up in Florence, one of the most prosperous and powerful cities in the world. As yet there was no university, and the two churches stood as the centres of learning in the city. They were after the same thing, but offered different syllabuses. You want to find God? Go to the Dominicans and seek him in knowledge. Or go to the Franciscans and seek him in love.

 

 

Seeking God: knowledge or love?

 

Now I want to ask you. If you had been alive in 1300, would you have gone to S M Novella or would you have gone to S Croce? Would you have chosen to seek God through knowledge or through love? Through study or through meditation? In the quiet of the library or in a life of service to others?

 

For me the answer is simple. Life has trained me as a Dominican. I think for most of us it does. Learning for us means knowledge. It doesn’t mean relationships. Learning means facts, it doesn’t mean feelings. Learning means acquiring information. So learning about God often means studying. Books. Bible study. Sermons. Tapes.  So although we know in our heads that God is love, that tends to be an intellectual experience and not an emotional one.

 

But S Croce stands for something else. And I want to share with you where I have come to. I have trained as a Dominican. I have thirsted after truth, and I have found it. But now I want to find out what it’s like to be a Franciscan. I want to balance west with east, and my head with my heart. I want to explore the love of God. And that’s what we’re going to try and do this morning.

 

Let’s pray.

 

 

Paul and the Ephesians

 

The passage we had read to us comes from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It was probably written from prison in Rome, and probably sent not just to Ephesus but to other churches in the region too. It contains the essentials of the Christian faith. It has lots of teaching, and lots of exhortation to godly living. And it has two prayers.

 

The first prayer comes in chapter one, where Paul prays they will know what their calling is, and what is the nature of the power of Christ in them. This, if you like, is the Dominican prayer. He wants them to know what their position in Christ is. Where they stand. How they are now part of God’s purposes. He wants them to be given a spirit of wisdom. This is a truth prayer, a head prayer.

 

The second prayer comes in chapter three. Here Paul prays that they will know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and that Christ will dwell in their hearts. This is the Franciscan prayer. This is a heart prayer. He wants not understanding but experience for them, and the experience is to be an emotional one. This is a love prayer.

 

Let me share with you again. Paul has prayed those prayers for me too. I am a head person. I have studied in 3 universities and taught in 4. One of my greatest teachers was a Dominican. And when I became a Christian it was with my head that I set about finding God. And slowly I did. I learnt the things of Ephesians 1. I learnt what he had called me to. I learnt about my status in Christ. And then I learnt the immeasurable greatness of the power which is mine as I live by that calling.

 

But now I am exploring the second prayer. Now I am learning what it is to know God’s love. Perhaps you’ve all known it for years. But I think perhaps you haven’t, or perhaps we can go further in together. What is it like to know God? Well, the image I like is another 14th century image. To know God is to look into the waters of the sea. In the shallows you can see the bottom. But as you walk out into deeper water, and eventually begin to swim, it recedes from you. So it is with God. It is a rare thing to enter fully into the overwhelming knowledge of God’s love. Most of us can do little more than splash about in the shallows. But that is where we must start. One day we shall unlock the secrets of the open sea. For the moment we are still learning.

 

 

We all want to be loved

 

So let me ask you a question. Where does true happiness lie? What do you think people really want? What do you really want? Mostly we define our desires in material and tangible terms. Money. Status. Success. Children. Leisure. Health and long life. It has been said that what we think about most, that’s where our heart is. I suspect that not one of us here could cross our heart and say what we really think about most is God.

 

And yet these other things don’t satisfy. We know they don’t, because we never get to the point where we feel satisfied. Nobody on their deathbed wishes they’d spent more time at the office. Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Money has a way of taking over. Children don’t always turn out the way you wanted.

 

So that’s not what we really want. What we really want is to be loved. The reason the love bug was so devastating in its effects on the world’s computers was that all over the world grown men and women came into the office, saw they’d got an email with the subject ‘I love you’ and hastened to open it. What were they hoping for? I bet it wasn’t a message from their mother! Love. We all want it. We are all born with an inbuilt longing for it. We can never have enough of it. And yet we displace that desire onto other things. We seek recognition because we’ve learnt to think that is how to feel good about ourselves. We have babies because we want the fulfilment of human intimacy. These things are good, but they are only pointers to the real thing, foreshadowings of the love that surpasses knowledge, the love that is unchanging, the love that cannot be taken away.

 

So what is it like, this love which Paul wants them to know? Listen to this. It comes from another 14th century writer, a hermit called Richard Rolle. This was the experience which changed his life.

 

I cannot tell you how surprised I was the first time I felt my heart begin to warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! But once I realised that it came entirely from within, that this fire of love had no cause, material or sinful, but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater. And this longing was all the more urgent because of the delightful effect and the interior sweetness which this spiritual flame fed into my soul. Before the infusion of this comfort I had never thought that we exiles could possibly have known such warmth, so sweet was the devotion it kindled. It set my soul aglow as if a real fire was burning there.

 

He explains it like this:

 

Since the human soul is capable of receiving God alone, nothing less than God can fill it; which explains why lovers of earthly things are never satisfied. The peace known by lovers of Christ comes from their heart being fixed, in longing and in thought, in the love of God; it is a peace that sings and loves and burns and contemplates...

 

And he adds:

 

Once a man has known some such experience, he is never thereafter wholly without it, for there always remains a sort of glow, some song or sweetness, even if these are not all present together in equal strength.

 

 

Entering a new world

 

How then do we get in touch with this love, the love which will provide us with an inner strength we have never known, the love which will grow us roots of nourishment and place us on a foundation that cannot be shaken, the love which will fill us with the fulness of God?

 

Let me read you a story.

 

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!” but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried “Faster! Don’t try to talk!”

Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.

“Nearly there?” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!” And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears...

“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped,and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little, now.”

Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”

“Of course it is,” said the Queen. ‘What would you have it?”

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

 

When Alice stepped through the Looking Glass, she entered a different world. It is a crazy world, a world where assumptions are shattered and reality is a different shape. It make us wonder about our own world. What are we doing? Alice runs, and stays in the same place. She plays croquet, and finds the mallets are upside down flamingoes and the balls are hedgehogs, and the flamingoes keep standing upright and the hedgehogs unrolling. Is that what our world is like? Are we running on the spot to stay in the same place, and are our most serious tools really flamingoes and hedgehogs in disguise? Is there some more real reality under it all?

 

Well, perhaps there is. We live in a rational, factual world, a world in which our needs are defined in tangible terms. But Paul wants us to enter a new, emotional world, a world not of knowledge, but of love, a world in which things happen to us that are far greater than we could ask or imagine, a world in which we may be filled with the fulness of God. He wants us to step through the Looking Glass and into a world where the rules are different, and the foundation we stand on is not fact but love. Once we have been Dominic, he wants us to be Francis.

 

 

How do we get in touch with this love?

 

So how do we do it. Obviously not by just wanting it, although it is necessary to realise that we do want it, and stop thinking we want other things which really are only secondary. Paul prays for the Ephesians. He prays with great fervour. It was normal to pray standing up; Paul here falls to his knees before God, imploring him to give this experience to these people. This experience comes to no one except by the grace of God. It comes from without, it descends unexpected, it completely changes your understanding of who you are. It isn’t right to seek for experience; but it is right to seek for God, to cry out to him, to wait for him.

 

But having said that I think there are some things we can do to prepare ourselves for this experience.

 

1. Be still

 

The first is, to learn to be still. The world rushes, it honks, it wastes no time, it leaves no space for the soul. It plugs itself into personal stereos to shut out the silence. That isn’t how the contemplatives of the Middle Ages found God. They found him in the quiet. They found him by being still. They found him by not rushing. ‘In England’, the bishop of N Zambia said to me, ‘you have the watches. In Africa, we have the time.’ And they do. In 20 years I have not spent so much time waiting as I did in 2 weeks in Zambia. And God has never drawn me so closely into his love as he did in Zambia. So we need to take time to be still. Prayer walks. Retreats. Setting aside a day for prayer. Just going into the garden and looking at a flower. Be still, and know that I am God. This is the advice given in the 17th century to a novice by Francis of Sales: ‘when you begin to walk more slowly, talk more slowly and eat more slowly, then perhaps we can begin to do something about your spiritual life’. Take it seriously.

 

2. Be obedient

 

The second is, to be obedient. Ephesians is full of exhortations to godly living. We are to put away our old self and do the good works which God has prepared in advance for us to do. God rewards those who obey him, and he draws near to those who draw near to him. God’s love is found by those who strive to live within his will.

 

3. Don’t try to be different

 

Third thing. This is the thunderbolt that struck me a year ago. Ask yourself, what is it you want to be loved for? What sort of love are you after? The answer surely is that you want to be loved for your good qualities. For your unique abilities. For your strengths.

 

But is this the love you need? It is the love we want, but is it the love we really need? I think that it isn’t. Why do I need you to love me? I need you to love me because I do not love myself. Why do I not love myself? Because I know that in addition to strengths I have weaknesses and faults, and I am not satisfied with myself. I want to be loved so I can forget about these weaknesses and faults.

 

But suppose those don’t matter? Suppose the love that is on offer is truly unconditional. Suppose I am loved not just for my strengths and in spite of my weaknesses, but because I am me, made in the image of God, living in a fallen world, and yet totally acceptable to the Father who created and called me? The first hint that this is the kind of love I am being offered comes as a terrible shock. It is indeed far more than I could have asked for or imagined. It makes me see myself in a totally new way.

 

It also makes me appreciate you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, much more. You know me. You know my strengths. You also know my weaknesses. But where I am weak, you are strong. Where you are weak, I am strong. Together we make up the body of Christ, together we have only strengths, and no weaknesses. Together we can do everything. So my weaknesses are an opportunity for me to know how deeply I really am loved, but they are also an opportunity for your strengths. And so it is that we build one another up in Christ.

 

Listen to this, from another French spiritual director:

 

Be gentle, patient, humble and courteous to all, but especially be gentle and patient with yourself. I think that many of your troubles arise from an exaggerated anxiety, a secret impatience with your own faults; and this restlessness, when once it has got possession of your mind, is the cause of numberless trifling faults, which worry you... I would have you honest in checking and correcting yourself, but at the same time patient under the consciousness of your frailty.                                                   

 

So this is what I have learnt. That to know God’s love is to know I am accepted. To know I am accepted is to know that I, strengths, weaknesses and all, am perfect in his sight. I am not loved because of what I can do. I am loved because I am me. That’s the kind of love Paul wants for the Ephesians.

 

4. Be involved in relationships

 

A fourth suggestion. We need to be involved in relationships. Richard Rolle got in touch with the burning fire of God’s love through a life of solitude and contemplation. But even he insisted on the need for friends in whose fellowship of love he could search out his inmost being, and through whom he might be freed from unhappiness. ‘What I cannot claim for myself, because I have not found what I hope for so eagerly, I might be able to enjoy in the sweet comfort of my friend... Holy friendship is not to be despised; it has the remedy for every ill. It is of God that we should be sustained amid the tribulations of our exile by the advice and assistance of friends, until we come to God himself.’ And God himself is, after all, relationship, relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

So we must be willing to be and to have friends. We must be willing to share ourselves with others, to offer and receive acceptance. We must be willing to love one another, and to be loved in return. I think I can say that I have received nothing from God that has not come through the willingness of others to love me. God gives birth to great things in our soul, but he needs midwives. So we must be willing to be those midwives to others. And just as important, we must be willing in our own pain to allow others to be midwives for us. You can die in childbirth without a midwife. Don’t ever underestimate the role.

 

5. Pray

 

Finally, let’s keep praying. Let’s allow God into every dimension of our lives. Paul prays that they will know the breadth of the love of Christ. His love encompasses everything you are and do. Our lives are flung wide. We have many roles, many relationships, many responsibilities and many joys. In all of them God is there, if we let him be. Paul prays that they will know the length of God’s love, from the moment of birth to the moment of death and beyond. He prays that they will know the height and the depth of his love. Allow God to be there in your moments of happiness, and allow him to be there in the depths of your despair. Remember the words of the psalmist:

 

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and settle at the farthest limits of the sea; even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you. For it was you who formed my inward parts, you who knit me together in my mother’s womb.

 

So whether you are up or down, God is there and he loves you. Whether you are young or old, God is there and he loves you. Whether you go north or south, west or east, God is there and he loves you.

 

Conclusion

 

So the long and the short of it is just that. God loves you. You may not feel that he does. You may not love yourself. But the truth is that he does. Paul does not pray that God will love them. He prays that they will know the love of God that is already there for them. It is there for you too, and it always has been.

So why do we not experience the depth of his love? This is Henri Nouwen, a modern mystic this time.

 

As I look within as well as around myself, I am overwhelmed by the dark voices telling me, ‘you are nothing special; you are just another person among millions; your life is just one more mouth to feed, your needs just one more problem to solve.. As long as we allow our parents, siblings, teachers, friends and lovers to determine whether we are chosen or not, we are caught in the net of a suffocating world that accepts or rejects us according to its own agenda of effectivity and control.. Our preciousness, uniqueness and individuality are not given to us by those who meet us in clock-time... but by the One who has chosen us with an everlasting love, a love that existed from all eternity and will last through all eternity.

 

In a moment we’re going to listen to a song. It’s a song about what it’s like to know the love of God. It’s a song about coming into his presence and being changed by it. It’s a song about seeing yourself in a new way. But before we listen to it let me share one more thing.

 

I think it’s like this. I used to think of myself as a sea anemone. You know the sort; those little red things like plums which cling to the side of rocks between the tidelines. When the water ebbs away, the anemone closes up into a tight red ball of protectedness. When the tide comes in again, it gradually opens up, putting out its tentacles one after another until, reassured of the safety of the water, it becomes a beautiful underwater flower. But then a child comes, and pokes it with a stick, and it jams shut to protect itself. That’s how we live. That’s what it’s like in the world. The tide comes and it goes, and people come with sticks and poke you. But it isn’t like that with God. With God, the water is always there, and it’s always safe to open up. In fact, opening up is the only way to find nourishment, because it’s with its tentacles that the anemone finds its food.

 

So listen to the song. Imagine you are sitting in S Croce, and that you have been learning to seek God not with your mind but with your heart. Imagine you are Alice, in a new world with different rules, rules not of knowledge but of love. Imagine you are the anemone, and dare to open up from your ball of protectedness. Let yourself come into the presence of the living God, and receive his love. Amen.