How Could Anyone? - July 30, 2006

Ephesians 3: 14-21

This little Biblical letter, which in my Bible at home is only four pages long, is kind of controversial. Not because of its content, but because people can’t really agree on who wrote it and when. People a whole lot smarter than me, who know a lot more than I do about this kind of thing, just can’t decide if this was written by Paul, or by someone who knew Paul very well, and wanted to emulate him—not imitate him or try to pass himself off as Paul—but to continue in the tradition of Paul.

“Why in the world would I care?” you ask. Well, the authorship and timeline of this little letter have a great deal to do with how it is interpreted. I read the commentaries, looked at the comparison studies of Ephesians with Galatians and Colossians, and I guess I have to come down on the more contemporary view that Paul did not write this letter, and that it was probably written after his death, and after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.

A major reason that I made this decision can be found in our text for today. The author seems to want the readers (hearers) of his words to know this: you are rooted and grounded in God’s love—a love we can scarcely comprehend, a love that goes against everything we can see all around us. And to me that sounds as if this was written to a devastated people. To me it sounds as of it was written to comfort and reassure a people who had lost the grip on the one thing that was holding them together. To me it sounds like it was written to a people who really needed to be held in the palm of God’s hand.

In this little letter, there is no room for Paul’s usual arguments, no room for his lessons on what makes one (i.e., Paul himself) a true apostle. There is only room for love.

Brothers and sisters, there are a whole lot of people in this world who have never believed that they were loved. Or who have been taught some lies about what love is.

Many of you might remember that before I went to seminary, I worked for Planned Parenthood in a clinic. Now, as someone who had a fairly shielded childhood, and a particularly unspectacular adolescence growing up in rural Indiana, my work at the clinic was a real eye-opener in many ways. But what I didn’t expect, was maybe unprepared for, was that I would encounter so many people just desperate to be loved, and so willing to accept a false imitation where real love belonged.

Many, many times when conducting the pre-examination intake interview with young teenage girls, (some even younger than my own daughter is right now) I would ask them about the kind of relationship they were about to embark on. My chief goal in this line of questioning was to find out if they were being coerced or forced into a physical relationship with anyone. And more often than not, I was saddened to find out that although nobody was being forced into anything, there was a great deal of internal pressure on some of these young girls to feel loved. Maybe they had gotten the messages at home that they were somehow less than loveable, less than worthy, less than beautiful. Maybe they had never been told that it was acceptable to have goals in life beyond getting and keeping a boyfriend. Or maybe they had been given these positive messages by loving parents and a church family that cared about them, but the screaming voices of the culture were just too loud for them to hear the voices of the ones who knew them best.

And so, when someone came along offering something that the culture told these girls was love—well, they eagerly accepted a pale imitation for self-esteem and a sense of self-worth, and a poor substitute for love.

Sometimes the girls came to me after they had already begun accepting the message that they really needed to have a boyfriend to fit in, (and that having a boyfriend meant being willing to do specific things). Then it was too late for me to help them reconsider how they wanted to maintain their bodies and protect themselves, because they had already become pregnant. Hundreds of times I sat in a little room, no bigger than a closet, looking across a tiny desk into a young face after I had just showed her the positive pregnancy test. My first question after giving the news was always this, “How do you feel about what I just told you?”

Many times, I would see young chins start to quiver, and young eyes start to tear up, and in weak trembling voices, a young girl would say, “Well, at least a baby will love me unconditionally, right? Won’t it? A baby will love me no matter what.” The problem of teenage pregnancy, or more accurately of young people growing up too fast, is not about good kids versus bad kids. It is, at the heart of the matter, about making choices based on some assumptions about who the young person is and what their life is worth. And many times (not always but many times) the young girls and boys caught up in the crisis of an unintended pregnancy at too young an age are also caught up in believing that the world just doesn’t expect very much either of them or from them.

The author of this letter wants very badly for the church to know that not only does God expect great things both of them and from them, but for them. The very root and ground of their being is God’s love for them. Like a young teenage girl whose very life has crumbled around her, the church must have lost all hope, and must have begun looking around for some sign that there was a purpose, a meaning, a reason for existence. And sometimes when a young person, or a Church, or a culture is looking for some reassurance, or purpose, or meaning some poor substitute for love is accepted in its place. Or perhaps the person, Church or culture accepts the lie that love is just not in the cards for them. Perhaps they begin to believe the lie that being loved, cherished, appreciated for who they are, just as they are, is out of reach. Many of those young girls I worked with all those years ago never really believed that they had a future worth preserving; Many of those in the church—the Presbyterian church, founded on the reformed principle that first and foremost we are loved by God—have come to believe that there is no future to preserve. This culture has bought into the lie that poor substitutes—the right car, a bigger house, a smaller waistline, a smoother complexion, the right ‘signature scent’ will make a person more lovable, or will make you happy enough not to care if you are really loved and accepted or not.

All of this fear, all of this acceptance of poor substitutes and pale imitations, stems from the basic premise, the bottom line assumption that we are just not good enough—that in and of ourselves we are just not worthy of being loved and accepted by God or by anyone else. And you know what? That assumption is correct. In and of ourselves we are not.

So…if we cannot change the situation, then we must base this on a different assumption. And what the author of this letter, writing in Paul’s style, saying to the church what Paul would have, had he still been alive is this: In Christ, through Christ, because of Christ, we are rooted and grounded in God’s love.

There is a song that a friend of mine told me about, by a songwriter I had never heard of named Libby Broderick . The title of the song is “How Could Anyone?” It goes like this:

How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than beautiful?
How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole?
How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle?
How deeply you’re connected
To my soul?

Now, the beauty of the song as it is recorded on the CD is that it begins with one voice singing that one verse, then another voice is added, then some strings, then drums, and soon there is a whole chorus of voices and instruments singing that verse, over and over, and at the end, the one voice goes on, fading out, the song never ending.

If what we say is true is what we truly believe—if what we read in Scripture is written on our hearts, how could anyone convince us of anything else? When I listen to this song, I don’t really hear Libby Roderick. I hear the voice of God, reminding us that in Christ we are transformed from a people of the sacrificial altar—a people who must find a way to be good enough in God’s eyes—to a people of the font of God’s grace and the table of God’s fellowship. In Christ we are a new creation, rooted and grounded in God’s love. We can no longer, believe that we are unlovable, but instead know that we live in the light of God’s abundant, overwhelming, irresistible love—the love that surpasses all understanding.

How could anyone tell us anything else? How could we believe anything else?

Thanks be to God.