John Linscheid's Sermon: Rooted and Grounded in Love
Published Friday, August 03, 2012
July 29, 2012
Germantown Mennonite Church
What images spring to mind when you hear the word “love”?
[Congregational responses included: warmth, family,parent and child, grandparents]
So what does it mean to be rooted and grounded in love as the Epistle to the Ephesians puts it?
Is it a feeling? A set of obligations?
Does love mean, a la Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree, the part about getting all used up by someone or the part about being happy about it?
It is all fuzzy feelings, or is it all doing something nice for someone.
In cultures such as the New Testament world, love and hate were less about internal feelings and more about social relationships. Was someone in your group or out of it? Were you socially connected or not?
Being rooted and grounded in love fundamentally has to do with being rooted and grounded in each other. The Ephesian prayer begins as an appeal to Abba God—Universal Parent. The source from which everyfamily takes its name. All families of peoples (cobbled together by blood or intent or circumstance) belong to one large family. We all belong to each other.
That is frightening. It is hard enough living with people we are related to, let alone those who randomly walk through church doors each Sunday or stumble across our path in the wider world.
Relationships are blessing and curse. Ecstasy. Agony. Empowering. Disheartening. And love means doing what is necessary to keep on living through all that with each other—and with the intent of making it work better with each other.
To do that, we must embrace even what involves conflict and is challenging in the relationship—without illusion or romantic denial. It means confronting and listening. Demanding as well as giving. Making life a three-way, five-way, hundred-way street.
Church, like most social institutions, is not very good at this. Institutions—collections of people—like control just as individuals like control.
A hundred-way street can’t be controlled. So let’s not beat ourselves up too much when we resort to short cuts that patch the connections in less-than-ideal ways.
But we must constantly envision better, and find ways to strengthen the connections, to open our hearts wider to each other. To risk deepening relationship.
This morning's Gospel story struck me.
In the story, the disciples head off in a boat without Jesus, struggling against storm conditions on the lake.When they see Jesus walking toward them on the water, coming in a way they don’t understand, they are frightened. And how is their fear overcome? Jesus says, “I am. Fear not.”
Not by their own will but by that great I am, by the one in whose image they are created and who takes their flesh. Who shares their nature and whose nature they share. It is a revelation that they are rooted and grounded in the same being.
When the fear of the unknown in another is overcome by knowledge of their common nature, the disciples want to take Jesus into their boat. And at that moment they have arrived.
Love involves recognizing others through our fears.
The moment we decide we want to be in the same boat with each other is the moment we arrive.
That doesn't mean a smooth path from there on. Indeed,for Jesus and the disciples, more difficult days lie ahead.On that last night, in the upper room, the disciples will still be trying to understand Jesus, what the relationship means, and where it is all going.
As we still are today.
The Ephesian prayer that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, so that you, being rooted and grounded in love,” etc. is all you plural. It refers to Christ dwelling in a group and the group being rooted and grounded in love. It is not about Christ dwelling in me, or my personal spiritual grounding. To “grasp fully the breadth, length, height, and depth” and to “know the love of Christ” is a collective enterprise; something we engage in with one another.
It is not about how I treat others or my personal moral standing in the group or in the Spirit. It is about how we treat each other, what we do with each other, how we live together.
We can only be filled with that divine reality, which we speak of as the knowledge of God, the love of Christ,the Holy Spirit—as we open ourselves together.
We must collectively want each other in the boat. We must listen together for the great I am that grounds and roots us all. And we must as one body invite the power that we know as God and Christ to come aboard with us. Then, in the words of Ephesians, we shall experience the love that surpasses understanding and be filled—all together—with the fullness of God.
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