The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

July 25, 2021  •  Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome

Text: Ephesians 3:16: “I 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...”

Any preacher given the task of preaching to this morning’s readings has an embarrassment of riches to contend with. We have a story about the complicated, larger-than-life King David, and his larger-than-life appetites. And as if that weren’t enough, we have not just one but two of the top-ten all-time Jesus stories this morning from John’s gospel, the two stories that were edited out of last week’s gospel reading: The feeding of a large, hungry crowd that had gathered around Jesus; and the calming of a storm that is threatening to capsize the little boat carrying the disciples across the Sea of Galilee.

There is no theme that links these two readings; each story in them has enough fireworks on its own. So rather than choose between them, I want to focus on something else, the quiet, short little reading from Paul’s letter to that church in Ephesus. It may have just slid right by you, as you were still contemplating David and Bathsheba and poor Uriah. So here is one part of it again:

“I 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....”

All of the wonderful stories from this morning aside, here are the words that speak most directly to our circumstances. Our inner being is in trouble. Across Europe, and in other parts of the world, yet another variant of the Covid virus is causing surges of infections and hospitalizations—despite the coming of vaccines. 

Let me say this plainly: We are tired of this. Yes, we are resilient, and yes, we are strong, but this has been a long, difficult, arduous time. 

It is not just that we have lived in ways that feel so constricted and small; it is not just that we have been worn down by the overshadowing danger that we, ourselves, might get sick, even very sick. 

Beyond all that, we have sustained so much loss in such a compressed amount of time. That, I think is the worst thing of all. We have lost people we love to this disease. We have lost contact with friends that we took for granted. We have lost ways of being and moving in the world that we thought would never change.

This past week I spoke with a friend back in Massachusetts who told me a little about how things are going back home. Where I live in New England, there has been day after day after day of rain. On the other side of the country, wildfires are consuming whole forests. “It feels like we are living in the end times,” she said. 

Of course we know, intellectually, that there are causes behind all this that science can help us understand. But our loss is emotional. Our loss is spiritual. We have more and more knowledge, but less and less certainty. That is perhaps the greatest and most painful of our losses. 

It is not just our physical health we are worried about; it is the health of our inner being, that deep place where God’s image lives in us, that is hurting.

Our patron saint here at Saint Paul’s understood profoundly how hard it was to be people of faith in a time of uncertainty. He knew that when we are in this situation, there are two things we long for: 

Knowledge, to understand what is happening, and maybe to see what may be coming; and 

Power, to protect ourselves and the people, the ideas, the things we love. 

People who are living in the midst of uncertainty and fear want knowledge and power. That tends to get in line ahead of our search for God.

What Paul teaches in what we heard read this morning is to link these together for us, in ways that can help us see the way ahead of us a little more clearly. But he also has something to teach us about being Christians in the midst of uncertainty, something we may find hard to grasp.

Paul knows this about us: We crave knowledge and power for many reasons, but most of all for protection—to reduce uncertainty, maybe, but most of all to reduce our vulnerability. Then, maybe, our inner being will be safe enough that we can bother to work on our spiritual lives.

Paul says that at least for us, for those of us who have been baptized and made part of the Body of Christ in the world, that is a little bit backwards—like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. 

Instead, he says, we should start by focusing on the inner being—on the health of our relationship with God. Even more dangerously, we have to start from our vulnerability. 

When we think of being strengthened, we think of going to the gym or doing yoga or working out, perhaps. So when Paul talks about his hope that we will be strengthened, immediately we wonder just what exercise, what exertion, we need to do. 

But really what Paul is teaching us is that we have to stop defending the vulnerability of our inner being if God is going to have any chance of strengthening us. Because faith is a gift, not a transaction. It is given to us; but for it to mean anything, we have to step out of the way, open the doors, and accept it, as fully and completely as we can.

From that acceptance, from giving God that permission to have access to our hearts, from that Paul says, comes power. 

And here is where our Christian path begins to diverge from what the world teaches us. Because that power, yes, is strength; but it is not force. It is not power over, it is power to; it is an enabling power.

The source of that power is the deepening presence of Christ’s love in us, of our greater awareness, day after day after day, that God is love and God acts in the world-—or, to say it in different words, God’s power is revealed in and changes the world—through love. 

So it isn’t just that God is love, something we say as though it were sweet and simple. When we say that God is love, and in the next breath we address ourselves to “Almighty God,” we are meant to make this connection: Real power, power aligned with God’s purpose, is love. God is love, and love is power.

The last link in the chain is to our craving for knowledge. The power we find in God’s love is intended exactly for the purpose of empowering us to find that knowledge. But we are meant to understand that for us, knowledge means something closer to understanding. 

The world teaches us that knowledge is power. But Paul is teaching us that, for Christians, Love is power, and power gives us knowledge—knowledge to comprehend how we are meant to be part of God’s loving purpose in the world, and strength to have the courage to act as though we were.

Beloved friends, these have been difficult days. There are more difficult days ahead. If we deal with our uncertainty by closing off access to our innermost being, that sacred place where God is meant to live in us, then our faith—our inner being—will only grow weaker. But if we open the doors and windows and give God’s gift of faith to fill us, we will have new strength, and new understanding, to be that love, to conquer our fears, and to be sources of God’s assurance in an unsteady and uncertain world. Amen.