Sermon: Rooted In Love

Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)

8th Sunday After Pentecost
July 26, 2009

"Rooted in Love"

Ephesians 3:14-21
Mark 4:1-10, 13-20

Prayer:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our minds and hearts gathered here this day be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.  

16. I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory, you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Holy Spirit,
17. and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love..

Isn’t this a great prayer?  As I said last week, whether or not this Letter to the Ephesians was written by the actual hand of the Apostle Paul, it is impressive the depth and passion of the author’s love for these new churches in what is now Western Turkey.  Nearly all their members were new Christians.  So the author of Ephesians wasn’t writing to address a specific church problem – as Paul’s letters so often do.  The author wasn’t writing to scold, or even to teach.  The author is just praying for people he loves, praying that these new converts would root themselves firmly in the life-giving love of Christ.

As Mark points out in the “Parable of the Sower”– with these great images of demon birds and bad soil – faith has always been hard to hold on to, especially when times are tough.  As Jesus says, “the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for things” can take hold of us and, like thorns, “choke the word” (the Good News of God’s love) so that “it yields nothing.”  With the hard times our world is going through today, we would do well to pray this prayer constantly – that Christ may dwell in [our] hearts through faith,” and that we may be “rooted and grounded in love.” 

Times were hard and getting harder for Christians by the time the Letter to the Ephesians was written, late in the first century after Christ.  If it was actually written by Paul, it would have been written from jail – during his final imprisonment in Rome.  By then, the churches were already knowing serious challenges and terrible persecution.  Times were tough.  So the author of Ephesians offers this prayer so that church members would not lose heart or let go of their relationships with Christ.  I’m sure he suspected that persecutions of Christians were only to increase in the near future, so he was hoping that these newly planted congregations had taken root deeply enough to weather the even tougher hard times that were coming.  And so he prays for them:

“I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory, you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Holy Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.”

What a wonderful blessing this is!  Think of the things he could have said, things like “Be sure to always do this,” or “Make sure you never do that.”  He could have nagged and lectured, but instead, what he offers is this loving prayer.  It’s a prayer we could be praying for each other too, isn’t it?  We pray like this for our young people – for our Confirmands and Mission Trip, right?  For our baptism babies and Church School kids?  So what it would be like to pray it, not just for the next generation of new Christians, but for all of our brothers and sisters in Christ?  “May you be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Holy Spirit, and may Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” What if all of our actions were powered by the Holy Spirit, motivated by the love of Christ?

Now I’m a pastor, and I’m from the South – you know, where we do the “friendly wave” – but I’ve been learning this interesting new sign language you guys up North here use for drivers’ ed, especially in heavy traffic.  New York drivers seem very good at this – you know, hand signals you give to one another when things don’t go exactly right?  And I’m thinking, what if the next time I’m cut off by a bad driver, instead of instructing them using one of these hand gestures, what if I prayed this prayer for myself?  “Lord, strengthen me in my inner being with power through the Holy Spirit, and dwell in my heart through faith; root me and ground me in love.”  Pray with my eyes open, though, I guess – since I’m driving!

I’ve often said this, but Christianity is much easier to preach than to practice.  It helps, I think, that we have opportunities all the time to practice our faith – not just in worship – but in church work and out there in the world, in our daily lives  It’s under the stress and strain of things like trying to get through a committee meeting or put on a potluck dinner or fix a leaky sink – it’s in the heat of those challenges, that we most need to pray this prayer, to be sure we are firmly rooted in the love of Christ.

I don’t know what you adult leaders of this last week’s mission trip experienced, but I know that when I was going to week-long church camps or on trips like that, I was always struck by how these “full immersion” programs provide everyone a chance to put down deeper roots in our faith than we can grow in just one short hour on Sunday.  When we have a sustained week living in Christian community, we get what amounts to a good, long soaking in the nourishment of the Holy Spirit – in the life-giving love of Jesus.  When I was doing youth leader or counselor trainings, I always put extra emphasis on this one thing:  nurturing a climate of Christian love and grace.  Discipline and safety, of course, are important.  Having fun and breaking down barriers and making new friends are important.  Worshiping God and getting our work done are important.  But to know the love of Christ through grace-filled day-to-day interactions with one another is the most important Christian education, not memorizing the facts of some Bible lesson. 

So you’d think this would be Good News for those of us in churches, whether back then in Ephesus or here today in Brookfield – if there really is only this one big thing to remember, this one last commandment of Jesus that we “love one another.” Only it’s a very hard thing to do – in churches or anywhere else – to truly nurture a climate of Christian love and grace.  Most days, our world is a hard and arid and unforgiving place.  The soil of our daily lives can get awfully dry and rocky – especially in these tough economic times.  Demon birds of doubt swoop down to take away our joy; thorns of distractions and worries grow up in the path and threaten to choke all the life out of us.  What is a good Christian to do, to keep on being a good Christian?

Let me tell you a little story.  Sometimes it’s a drag, but my family is loving how much rain we’re getting here in Connecticut – how green everything is.  You can watch your garden grow right before your eyes!  My gardening skills were never very good, and so back in California I was talking to a church member one time who was a great gardener – and I asked for just one hint, one tip, that might make my garden grow a little bit better.  And her answer really surprised me, especially as her husband had made a living selling chemical pesticides and fertilizers.  It was just one word, “Water.”  And I was like, “Well, I water.”  And she said, “But Northern California is really a desert in the summer – in spite of the fog – so most people don’t water nearly enough.”  She said, “Most people think they water a lot, but they really don’t do it nearly enough.  Healthy gardens do need a good, regular watering, a good, steady soaking every other day or so.”

Now I suspect most of us think we give and receive a lot of love, all the time.  Many of us, I know, believe we shower our loved ones ceaselessly with words of encouragement, but if we actually had a kind of “love accountant” following behind us us to keep track, I bet we’d find that the ratio of criticism to praise is often pretty far out of whack.  Reality is often quite different from what we think we are doing.  I know I think positive thoughts about other people much more often than I remember to speak those words out loud.  We think we say “I love you” a lot, just as we think we pray a lot.  But I’m a working pastor, and I know how easy it is to let almost a whole day go by without really sitting down in prayer and letting God’s love soak into my heart.  There is actually a kind of prayer called “soaking prayer,” where all we do is sit in the presence of God and remember how much we are loved – sing “Jesus Loves Me” to ourselves, maybe.  Just like my friend the gardener said, pruning and weeding have their place, but a garden that doesn’t get enough water will shrivel up and die. 

It’s one of the most important things I learned in my first years of youth ministry – it’s actually very hard to over-water most people with positive attention.  In the first youth group I served, they had a long-time tradition of giving each another specific affirmations – which is when you look for something good to notice and name about someone in your Christian community.  That is, not “hey, you’re a nice guy” or “what a pretty dress” – although that’s better than nothing.  The challenge is to actually catch someone doing something nice, or showing a Christian spirit, and noticing that out loud.  Things like, “Wow, you really went out of your way to help your friend when he needed you ,” or “your kindness and gentle voice really helped to diffuse that very difficult situation.”  After the first service, I heard from Jen that this was the worship theme of their Mission Trip – that every day they were challenged in their devotionals to remember to fill each other’s “buckets” with love and positive words.

This prayer from Ephesians reminds us that it is the generous and regular outpouring of love, like the nearly daily soakings of afternoon thunderstorms our East Coast gardens get through the summer, that helps our faith grow strong roots that can resist all kinds of hardship.  I noticed, even last night – when my daughter Lela was discouraged by another middle-of-the-night puppy accident – that positive comments weren’t the first words to come to mind to say when she was upset by the mess.  But after it was over, and she was exhausted and discouraged, I remembered to give her a big hug and say, “You know, you’re doing so well with the puppy – I don’t think I could have been so caring and responsible for an animal at age 13.”  And she kind of perked up, like a wilted plant, and came back to life.  So let us pour on the water of love for each other! 

Let us shower one another with real affection.  Let us not be afraid of being too “mushy,” because the world needs us to create in our church an oasis of God’s love – a place where we know we can come to be refreshed by the Holy Spirit.  Just one little sprinkling on our baptism day is not enough to stand up to the real challenges of life out there in what St. Paul liked to call “the world of flesh.” We need a good daily watering in prayer and Christian love for our faith to really take root.   Thanks be to God that we have this good church where we can learn and grow, as we are thoroughly washed in God’s grace and thoroughly soaked with Christ’s love.  Amen.

Mark 4:1-10, 13-20

²[Jesus] began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: ³“Listen! A sower went out to sow. ⁴And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. ⁶And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. ⁸Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” ⁹And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” ¹⁰When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. ^…

¹³And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables? ¹⁴The sower sows the word. ¹⁵These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. ¹⁶And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. ¹⁷But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. ¹⁸And others are those sown among the thorns: these are the ones who hear the word, ¹⁹but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. ²⁰And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.”

Ephesians 3:14-21

¹⁴For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. ¹⁶I 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, ¹⁷and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. ¹⁸I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. ²⁰Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, ²¹to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.