Sermons

Rooted and Grounded in Love

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  July 27, 2003                                      Ephesians 3:14-21 

For homiletical purposes only, please accept the following premise: that the world is divided into two camps. Think about it…there are cat-people and non-cat people. There are Pepsi people and Coke people. There are people who like Cher and people who don’t. There are people who think that baseball’s designated hitter rule is acceptable and those who think it an absolute and shameful abomination, sullying the integrity of the national pastime. You get the point.

But there’s one more that I have been thinking about over these summer months. There are people who can grow a plant, and those who can’t. I would count myself in the second category, the anti-green thumb, horticulturally challenged category. I could kill a silk flower, I think, and it’s not for lack of effort or intent.

The void of such a skill-set has done nothing to wither my appreciation for plants, flowers, trees, and lush green grass. Not in the least. It simply means that while many of us gathered here this morning can make those things happen with hard work and experience and T.L.C., I can’t.

The appreciation factor, at least, gives us some access to a biblical world that is filled with such a view. In today’s parlance, the Bible is a “green” book. It was written in a time when the people were much more directly connected to the land, growing their own food, sensing the connection between what they planted in the ground and what ended up on their table.

The people with whom Jesus lived and moved were an agricultural people: they resonated with his stories about mustard seeds and vines and branches and workers’ relationships with landowners.

And so when the Apostle Paul writes to the struggling little church in Ephesus offering to them a prayer for wisdom, he accesses these very images. I pray that God will give you strength for the journey, Paul writes, in a prayer we might offer to each other and for each other every single day. I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, he says, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. And my hunch is that those Ephesian readers would have nodded a bit at the reference, resonated with it, appreciated it, even as we might.

Faith is not a commodity. It is a gift. Our understanding of things does not spring fully formed, ever, at any moment. It is nurtured and developed. It meanders from this place to that one. It is like a seed, Paul is saying. It is planted, and a mystifying, complex, ultimately inexplicable process takes over. Nurture is provided in the form of soil and light and water. Paul calls that love.

And eventually, over time, growth happens. Blooming and blossoming happens. Faith, like a flower, then takes on extraordinary beauty, a loveliness that defies description, with benefits in the here and now that lead us to eternal loveliness.

“Roses are red, violets are blue," we learned as children. "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree,” Alfred Joyce Kilmer wrote.

Wendell Berry is a farmer and poet with a theological bent. Every Sunday afternoon, he takes a walk in the woods and returns home to write a poem. “Sabbath Poems,” they are called. Now we are all not farmers and we are all not poets – except in a way that I am suggesting this morning that we are. The task of reflection and action for reflection is left to each of us and all of us together.

Berry writes: “To sit and look at light-filled leaves/May let us see, or seem to see,/Far backward, as through clearer eyes/To what unsighted hope believes:/The blessed conviviality/That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise.”

To what unsighted hope believes. What a superb consideration of faith – unsighted hope, hope like a seed planted deeply in the ground, blossoming at the right moment after many uncertain moments underground to provide sustenance, to provide shade.

And the nourishment, the concoction needed to make growth happen – the soil and sun and water all rolled into one – is love. Love.

We should not be surprised by this, but we should be awed by it. We are deep in the wedding season, and after a while even a preacher listens to her or his own wedding sermons, and so I have been speaking about love enough for that extraordinary word to rattle around in me, beyond the sentiments of any particular matrimonial moment. Love that is as tough and tenacious as it is tender. Love that carries through in difficult moments as well as the more glamorous one. Love that perseveres. Love that really does hope and endure and believe all things. All things.

And it is such love, Paul would insist, that allows faith to grow. Love is a gift as well, we would have to say. Our task is to tend to it even as we tend to the seed it waters.

Theologian Walter Wangerin writes that “I own a John Deere 5000 series farm tractor. It pulls at the power of forty horses, more than enough to handle the work I do on twenty-four acres: light plowing and disking. I drag timber from the woods to cut and split for firewood. I mow the broader fields, stretch fence, chip tree limbs, grade the ground and haul – all with my little Deere. After having lived for more than a decade in the confinement of the inner city, to me this machine represents breadth and the breathing of my spirit. It is perfectly suited to the cultivation of our modest crops, berry bushes, hickory and walnut trees, strawberry hills, scattered stands of apple trees, a sizable vegetable garden.” (“One Man on a Tractor Far Away,” in Best Christian Writing, 2002, page 252)

Wangerin is saying two important things. He is saying that somehow, even we urban and suburban dwellers would do well to get re-connected with the earth, as a matter of connection with creation and its creator. He’s right, of course. The church I attended in college held farmers in its membership. From time to time they would invite me out to the farm to decompress. What a gift. Good for the body and the soul.

And Wangerin is saying something more. He is saying that such a conversation connects with the life of faith, that the actions of plowing and cultivating reflect the task of faith. “But I tell you from my own experience,” Wangerin writes. “Even in the inner city, there are vacant lots waiting with eager longing for the clearing and the tilling of the children of God.” (Page 262)

That would insist that the product of these seeds of faith being nurtured within us will hold both internal and external benefit. That would insist that the faith growing in us will make a difference in the way we live, in the choices we make, the attitudes we hold, the approaches we take. That means that as we face hardship of every stripe, the faith nurtured in us by love will make a difference. It also means that it will make a difference in the world, in the communities in which we live.

Faith in action, we sometimes call it, and though its leaves and berries might look a little different, it, too, is grown from those very same seeds, fed by that very same water and sun of faith. There are lots in this city that we might be tilling: a city plagued by handgun violence, a city battered by economic uncertainty, even in the face of this week’s news.

Faith nurtured by love speaks to these realties as well. Sometimes the seed is planted so deeply, or watered so sparingly, that the hard work of cultivation seems hardly worth it. And yet it is.

“Look at the mustard seed,” Jesus said. And we think of a bright yellow condiment bottle! Look at the mustard seed. It is so small, and it does such great things. And never on its own, but only and always because it receives what it needs to grow and flourish and do what it is created to do.

That is our promise. That is our unsighted hope. That is our prayer – Paul’s prayer. That we will have strength for the journey, to be filled with the glory of God.

This seems to be a day for poetry, so here is one more. Galway Kinnell writes that” The bud/ stands for all things,/even for those things that don’t flower,/for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary/to re-teach a thing its loveliness,/to put a hand on its brow/of the flower/and retell it in word and touch/it is lovely/until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…” (“Saint Francis and the Sow”)

Even the seeds of faith that are planted within us are preceded by a more fundamental seed, and even in those moments when we consider ourselves unworthy or unnoticed or unappreciated, miraculous things are happening within us. We are yet to be lovely, and loved, that we may yet love.

That is the promise to which we must cling this day, that we are rooted and grounded in love, that we may blossom and flower in faith, for our sake, yours and mine, for Christ’s sake, for the sake for the world. Amen.