Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 30, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I need to say at the beginning that something in this morning’s passage from Ephesians brought me up short. It says that the author wants us to "know the love of Christ that passes knowledge...." Ephesians 3:19 My first reaction to those words was: That’s gibberish! It’s an oxymoron! A person can’t possibly "know" something that "passes knowledge." That’s saying I want you to know that which is unknowable. Well, I thought. I certainly have no time for some passage that uses language so badly as to come up with that kind of nonsense. I was about to move on and find a different text to preach on.

But then, part of the fascination with words that I have, and that sometimes drives some of you understandably nuts, seems to be a curiosity about statements like this one that on their surface make no sense but that also seem somehow to have something significant to say. The sentence that has this apparent nonsense about knowing the unknowable is about the love of Christ and being filled with the fullness of God. That’s pretty important stuff. It is in fact about as important as stuff gets. So I thought maybe I shouldn’t write the passage off just because it contains an apparent contradiction. After all, I’ve said many times around here that all profound religious truth is paradoxical. I thought: Maybe this business about knowing the unknowable deserves further consideration. So let’s take a closer look and see what we can find that may be of value for us.

It seems to me that if we are to find any meaning in this oxymoron of knowing the unknowable, we have to get below the surface of the words, because it is on the surface that they seem to create a contradiction. It seems to me that their very contradiction is directing us to get below the surface, to look for hidden meaning. The author of Ephesians, I think, used this apparent oxymoron about knowing the unknowable to get us to think about our knowledge of the love of Christ in a new way. That seems clear from the fact that if we don’t think about knowledge a new way, we’re left with nothing but that pesky contradiction of being asked to know the unknowable. That contradiction raises the question of what knowledge is and how we claim to know anything. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you an epistemology lecture. Still, I think to get at the spiritual meaning that this text has to offer, we need to look at least briefly at what this passage is suggesting about that question of how we know things.

The author’s focus is clearly on the love of Christ. That’s what he wants us to have, but he says that that love passes all knowledge. That means, I think, that we cannot get access to that love through our usual way of knowing things. What is our usual way of knowing things? Well, very briefly, it is taking in information about our surroundings through our ordinary sense perceptions, then processing that information through our faculty of reason, of logic. That is basically the methodology of science, and for most of us in our culture, that’s how we establish knowledge, how we establish truth. We say: "I’ll believe it when I see it." Or: "Show me!", especially if we’re from Missouri. We reject claims of knowledge that don’t make sense to us by saying "that’s illogical" or "that’s unreasonable." There is, after all, a good deal of Mr. Spock in all of us.

In saying that the love of Christ passes knowledge, the author of Ephesians is telling us that that usual way of processing information, of gaining knowledge, won’t work when it comes to knowing the love of Christ. That way of learning gives us knowledge about the world. It will not give us knowledge about the love of Christ. We must acquire knowledge of the love of Christ in some other way. Somewhat maddeningly, our author doesn’t tell us what he thinks that other kind of knowing is. We can, however figure it out. If ordinary worldly knowledge begins with the perceptions of the usual senses, then knowledge of the love of Christ must begin some other way. It begins not with sight but with intuition. We can’t see it, but we can feel it, not with the tips of our fingers but with the cockles of our hearts. We can’t reason our way to it, because it isn’t logical. It is in fact profoundly illogical that Christ should love the like of us humans, so reason won’t get us there. We don’t hear it or smell it or taste it. We sense it in the very depth of our beings, where that spiritual love of Christ touches our spirits. We can feel that touch. I have felt it often, and I know you have too. It isn’t the touch of something external that we can feel touching our skin, pressing on our flesh. It is something internal, something touching us not physically but spiritually, pressing on our souls. It is a deeper, more profound, and much truer way of knowing than mere sense perception and reason.

But how do we get this deep inner knowledge of the love of Christ? We can’t Google it or buy it from Amazon.com. We can’t get it by reading about it in a book. Getting this knowledge takes other techniques. To get this knowledge of the love of Christ we open not our eyes but our hearts. We open our hearts and invite the Holy Spirit in. We open our hearts and ask Jesus to come in and love us. We turn to Christ in prayer and in silent meditation with a receptive attitude. Maybe another way to say that is: We just let it happen. We know the love of Jesus when we stop resisting and simply let him come in and love us. We don’t come to know the love of Christ by cramming for a test or by reading a book, not even The Book. That’s the way of worldly knowledge. The way of knowing the love of Christ is the way of spiritual knowledge. It is the way of trusting that love that we seek to know, of living into it in lives of prayer and of service.

But why should we bother? Our author this morning tells us, but he uses another funny twisting of words to do it. Having told us that he wants us to know the love of Christ that passes all knowledge, he now tells us that if we do, we may "be filled with all the fullness of God." Great. Now we have to figure out what it means to be filled with someone else’s fullness, God’s fullness. And what in heaven’s name does "the fullness of God" mean, anyway? Well, to try to figure that one out I went looking in some of the study resources I have. I found in one of them a suggestion that "the fullness of God" might mean the power and presence of God in the world. So it seems to me that to be filled with the fullness of God means to be filled with the presence and power of God. That, our reading tells us, is what happens when we open our hearts to the spiritual reality of the love of Christ. We are filled with the presence and power of God.

OK, fine. Only now we’ve got something else we have to figure out. What on earth does it mean to be filled with the presence and power of God. That one, however, is easy. You see, we know what it looks like when a human being is filled with the presence and power of God. It looks like Jesus Christ. He is our model of what being filled with the presence and power of God looks like. That really is what we mean when we say he is the Son of God Incarnate. He was completely filled with God.

And what did being completely filled with God look like in Christ Jesus? It looked like infinite compassion. That, after all, is what Jesus was all about, God’s infinite compassion for all people, indeed for all creation. His compassion was both personal and political. On the personal level he healed the sick, forgave the sinners, and guided the lost. On the political level he cried out for justice for the poor and the marginalized, and he preached God’s way of peace, of nonviolence. In all of those things he was living out God’s compassion. He could live out God’s compassion fully because he was completely filled with the fullness of God, with the presence and power of God.

You may be asking: Does he really think I can be like Jesus? The answer is yes, I do. I think you can at least be a lot more like Jesus than you are, and I know that I can be a lot more like Jesus than I am. We may never attain to Jesus’ level of living the compassion of God. We do believe, after all, that he is the one unique person in the history of the world. Still, he is our model. He models for us a life of opening our hearts to the fullness of God, of opening our hearts to the presence and power of God in ourselves and in our world. We claim to be his disciples, which means that we must seek to emulate him, to be more like him. Our call is to be filled with all the fullness of God. That means that our call is always more and more to live out God’s compassion in our lives, in our world.

So, come to know more and more the love of Christ that passes common human knowledge but that we can know through the wisdom of our hearts. Come to know that love and be filled with the fullness of God. Be filled with God’s presence and power in your life. And when you do, go out into the world living a life of compassion for all you meet, and for all whom you do not meet but who are still beloved children of God. Go out into the world living a life of compassion for the world, working for justice and for peace. That was the author of Ephesians’ prayer for the Christians of his time. It is my prayer for you and for me. If we open our hearts to the love of Christ that passes all knowledge, and with the help of God’s unfailing grace, we can do it. Amen.