August 13, 2006 Des Moines

TEXT: Ephesians 3:14-21

KNOWING BEYOND KNOWLEDGE

I get sidetracked easily. I'll be talking about one thing and a word or a sight will send my mind - and occasionally my mouth - off chasing some conversational rabbit, and I wake up a mile down the trail, wondering where I was heading in the first place. With luck I can pick back up where I left off, having lost only minutes and not my listener, and continue until the next distraction.

It is no doubt because of this tendency in myself that Paul usually makes sense to me. Scholars say that he dictated his letters to a secretary, rather than writing them himself, all the while, I can imagine, pacing back and forth across his room, and, as anybody who has read much of Paul has noticed, wandering on and off the track in the process. As in today's reading.

Earlier in the letter, as we read a few weeks ago, Paul has talked about barriers: ones torn down as well as those still standing, and how the cause of the former and the hope for the latter is Jesus Christ alone. Separated people brought together - coming together - in Christ. In the next verse Paul was about to draw some implications, with the words "For this reason I pray...", but something else caught his eye. A word here and a thought there, and Paul was consumed in a discussion of one of his favorite topics: his own apostolic role. Then, either exhausting that tangent of thought, or realizing how far afield he had run, this morning's passage finds him picking back up where he had left off; with the words: "For this reason I kneel in prayer..."

For what reason? You have to assume that he is referring to what he was talking about before he got off the subject: the peace of Christ that draws diversity together. Paul had called his gentile readers to remember who they had been, compared with who they now were: fellow members of the household of God, thanks to the inclusiveness of Christ. It is for that reason Paul prays.

I think it is important to stop there and become aware of what is about to follow. Paul is not getting ready to exhort his readers to greater heights of discipleship. He is getting ready to pray for them. More accurately, he is getting ready to share with them the usual contents of his own prayers on their behalf. What follows then, is prayer, not urging; intercession, not inspiration. And there's a difference.

Paul prays that they might be filled. Not filled, first of all, with warm feelings and pietistic longings - though those will perhaps come. Paul prays for particular fillings: inner strength through God's spirit; faith; a deep rooting and a firm foundation that will enable them to grasp - apprehend - the immensity of Christ's love, and then a peculiar petition: to know that love of Christ, though it is beyond knowledge. The object of all this pouring in, according to Paul, is that the readers might be filled up with the fullness of God.

Strength, faith, and a special knowledge of Christ's love. Filled with the fullness of God. What of all that? Those are not gifts for self-satisfaction - fullness for its own sake. They are gifts of preparation. Especially that last one.

Gnosticism was a big movement in the time period of the early church. It was the movement that revolved around knowledge - special knowledge - secret knowledge. Any kind of knowledge. The goal of the Gnostic was to gain more and more knowledge. Because they KNEW more, they felt they WERE more. But it was a movement at which Paul continually leveled his hammer blows, saying for instance to the Corinthians in the context of love, "Is there knowledge? It will vanish away, for our knowledge is partial, and the partial vanishes away when wholeness

comes."

Today's reading does something similar. The focus is not love in general, or love in the abstract. The subject is the love of Christ. And the metaphor Paul uses is pouring. Paul prays that the Ephesians be filled, not with knowledge, but with love, and the strength to use it; to know Christ's love, that is beyond knowledge. Christ's love, you see, is not something to be intellectually ascertained. It is beyond "knowledge." It is beyond "learning about." It is something that has to be "known".

We have understood, since the surreptitious giggles of our childhood, about "knowing in the Biblical sense." As we understood when "Adam knew Eve, it is not simply a mental exercise. It is an involvement of the whole person. It is "knowing" at every level possible. Inside and outside. It is becoming a part of. And so, Paul prays that the Ephesians not simply learn about Christ's love, for it is far more than can be learned about. His desire is that they "know" Christ's love. That inside and outside, in every part of their being, they may experience and become a part of, Christ's love: its height, breadth, length and width.

I think of standing on the beach looking out over the waves - the vastness, the seeming infinity; the overwhelming, powerful expanse. Or laying on your back on a clear night, staring up at the stars. Infinite wonder. Stars looking almost like you could reach up and touch them, being light years away. Mind stretching. Awesome.

I think about the dome atop St. Peter's basilica in Rome. It looks overwhelmingly huge, but its real size isn't understood without some comparisons. Like the fact that the letters around the circumference of the dome that granted, look a bit oversized, are twenty feet tall. Like the fact that the rather normal looking windows high in the air are two-stories tall. And you begin to realize how small you are, and how expansive it is.

Like the love of Christ. Paul prays that the church, through the indwelling of Christ himself, may come to know, understand, grasp the height, depth, length and breadth of his love; a love that could bring together enemies into one family; a love that could reach all the way across the æons of sin and bring grace - and life. A love that can reach across apathy and despair, and bring hope.

And so, Paul shares with the Ephesians that which he prays for them: that they be filled up with God; filled up with Christ's love - know that which is beyond knowledge. And though it has been a long time getting here, that must be my sermon. A prayer. That for which I pray for this church. For I, too, pray for filling - for strength and faith, and to know Christ's love which is beyond knowledge.

We work hard at faith development in this congregation - spending money on curriculum, devoting hours to recruiting teachers who will devote hours in preparation. We partner mentoring elders with candidates for baptism and we gather on school-year Wednesday nights in LOGOS for Bible Study among other things. Home ministry groups get together to study the scriptures, fellowships of both women and men meet regularly to do the same. We can never abandon the classroom, but we must occasionally emerge from it. Just as this service of worship is really the prelude to your own service of worship that takes place outside of these walls, so the classroom must lead us into the world, rather than pre-occupy us apart from it. I pray, then, that we will not be content to learn about Christ's love and its implications, but will begin to "know" it in the Biblical sense. I pray that in ways we have yet to conceive, we will put our hands into projects, and not simply our money and our minds.

Through the first six months of this year we have already received as many new members to our church as we did in all of the previous year. Frankly, I don’t see any reason why we can’t more than double last year’s welcome by the end of December. But as those new members would be the first to tell us, we aren’t talking about numbers here. We are talking about disciples who have chosen to ally themselves and their gifts with the ministry of this congregation. They have taken a significant step. One of my prayers for the rest of us is that we will take a similarly bold one by making room for them – not simply in the pew but in our witness and in the fabric of our relationships. Something ought to be changing, organically, in our fellowship through the addition of their lives, and I pray that we not only become aware of that change, but celebrate it and encourage it as well.

One of the confessions that surfaced in our congregational planning session this past winter, as we reflected on the “Marks of a Spiritually Mature Church,” was that few of us know, very well, our faith story, and that fewer of us, still, feel any comfort in talking about it. It is my prayer that in the weeks and years ahead, we all might come, not simply to understand who we are in the eyes of God, but to "know in the Biblical sense" our own gifts for sharing the good news of Christ, and our opportunities.

And what of the leading edges of discipleship that we have not yet discovered or discerned? What are the threads of community that we have only begun to finger? Lead us to them, O God, that we might make them our own. A church I once worked in used the guiding phrase: "find needs and meet them; discover hurts and heal them." Too often the church, which is called not only to proclaim the Kingdom of God but to model it as well, modifies such intentions to "finding needs and studying them; discovering hurts and discussing them." Let that not be our indictment. Let us know beyond knowledge. Let us be filled with God's strength, hope, and love to the point that this kind of barrier between awareness and action - insight and involvement - might be destroyed as well.

I pray that we’ll not just talk a good line. I pray that we will walk one. I pray that we will have the strength, the faith, and the love to get our hands dirty; that we might be filled with the fullness of God - and learn just how good it feels!