Dear Church: Be Loved First Baptist Richmond, July 29, 2018 The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost Ephesians 3:14-21 I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Last Wednesday night we held our quarterly business meeting in the fellowship hall and followed it with a celebration of new members, which is one of my favorite things to do; I love to see the way God is adding to his family. Two of those new members were in the fifth generation of their family that had joined this church, sitting there at a table with their parents, at least one grandparent, an aunt, a couple of cousins. It wasn t hard to make them feel like members of First Baptist: they knew they belonged. But there was a new member sitting at another table who didn t grow up in this church. She didn t even grow up in this state. It took a little more effort to assure her that she really was welcome, and that she really did belong, but by the end of the evening I think she was convinced. What about you? Have you ever felt like an outsider? When my brothers and I were growing up in West Virginia we often felt that way. My dad was a Presbyterian minister with a special ministry to the poor. He was like a missionary, but that made us feel like missionary kids who were often oddly out of sorts with the culture around us. Please don t get me wrong: we loved West Virginia as much as if we were growing up on the mission field in New Zealand, but we were different. 1
We didn t fit in very well. And we got reminded of that every time we went to school. In one of my sermons a few years ago I told a story about one of my classmates from those days. It was a very positive story, about how I learned to love West Virginia, but because you can find everything on the Internet some of my other classmates found that sermon and began to share it around, asking if anybody remembered Jimmy Somerville. That conversation ended up on Facebook and I had the strange experience of reading the comments other people were making about me. Somebody said, Didn t his family live back there on the County Road between Racine and Bloomingrose? Yes, said someone else. And weren t they some other kind of religion? No! I thought. We were Presbyterian! Which may have seemed as foreign to some of those former classmates as being Buddhist or Hindu. I didn t fit in well in West Virginia most of the time. I certainly didn t fit in well at my school. My parents had practically homeschooled us to make up for the deficits in the public school system and the other students sometimes looked at us with that way, as if we thought we were too good for them. So, you can imagine my surprise when a girl came up to me one day in high school and asked if I would like to be in the Christmas pageant at her church. She was a junior and I was a sophomore. Not only that, I was a young sophomore: I had gone to high school a year early which means that I was at least a year behind the other students in my class in terms of development. I was five feet and two inches tall with a haircut my Dad had given me where the bangs were not entirely even across the front and big teeth that stuck out from where I had sucked my thumb as a boy. I ve seen the yearbook from my old high school. I know that not many of us had great haircuts or perfect teeth, but even so I think I was in the bottom third of my class. 2
And so I was surprised to find this girl talking to me, this junior girl, asking if I wanted to be in her church s Christmas pageant. It was especially hard for me to believe it because she was beautiful, and just about my height, and a majorette. I don t know if you had majorettes at your school but we had them at mine. We had a marching band that was led by a drum major and then there were these majorettes, whose job it was (apparently) to wear short shorts, and white boots, and to twirl batons. I don t think it was a rule, but generally those girls were among the prettiest girls in the school. This was one of those. Her name was Becky, and she was stunning. Honestly, if she had asked for one of my kidneys I think I would have given it to her. But all she asked was if I would like to be in her church s Christmas pageant, and as soon as I got over being speechless I said yes. That s how I ended up walking into the First Baptist Church of Racine, West Virginia, for youth group one Sunday night with beautiful Becky the majorette. And because I was with her (and because the boys could tell immediately that I was no threat, I was welcomed. Becky was pretty and popular and the president of her youth group. Everybody, she said, rapping on the back of a pew, this is Jimmy Somerville. I ve invited him to be in the Christmas pageant. Be nice to him. And they were. Some of them knew me, some of them didn t, but they were all nice to me and within minutes I was standing there in the choir loft with the rest of them rehearsing the song that was going to be the big closing number of our pageant. It wasn t what you would expect. It wasn t O Little Town of Bethlehem, or O Come, all Ye Faithful. No, this was 1973, so the closing number of the youth Christmas pageant was a Burt Bacharach song called What the World Needs Now. Do you remember that one? 3
What the world needs now Is love, sweet love, It s the only thing That there s just too little of. What the world needs now, Is love, sweet love, No not just for some, Oh but just for everyone. We worked on that song for weeks and by the time December rolled around we were ready. But on the day of the pageant I got distracted doing something else and forgot all about it. Fifteen minutes before show time there was a frantic knock on my door and I opened it to find one of the other kids from the youth group standing there with a frightened look on his face. Jimmy! he said. The pageant starts in fifteen minutes. Why aren t you there? My mother overheard that and said, Oh my goodness! She helped me pick out some clothes and at the last minute handed me a white button-down shirt with long sleeves saying, Here, put this on. It will make you look more churchified! I threw it on and ran down the hill with that other kid, jumped in his mother s car, and off we went to the First Baptist Church. I made it just in time. But the pageant went well (I even got to read a passage of Scripture from Book of Isaiah), and when it came time to sing the closing number we remembered everything we had rehearsed and it was pretty near perfect. But I will never forget that moment when I looked over at Becky and she looked over at me just as we were singing the words, love, sweet love. Our eyes met, and she smiled her majorette smile, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Ever since that night when I think about what it feels like to 4
belong to be an insider rather than an outsider I think about that moment and I feel the love. Sweet love. In today s Epistle lesson Paul seems to be trying to convince the Ephesians that even though many of them were once Gentiles, they are now members of God s family. It has been part of his theme since the beginning of the letter. In one way or another he has said to the Gentiles, You were once aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, but now because of what Jesus Christ has done for you on the cross the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down and there is no longer Jew or Gentile. You are all part of God s family. Welcome! I don t know how that felt to the Jewish Christians in that church, who had grown up believing they were God s chosen. Sometimes it s hard to accept those who come to us from the outside. But sometimes it s hard for outsiders to believe that they have truly been accepted. My father-in-law used to say this about being Christian: that it s hard for us to accept our own acceptance; hard for us to believe that God really does love us and want us for his own. And that s where the Gentiles seem to be in today s reading from Ephesians 3. Paul offers a prayer for them saying, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth gets its name, and I pray that you Gentiles might be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of God s love for you. It reminds me of a television show Christy and I sometimes watch called This Is Us. Maybe you ve heard of it; it won a couple of Emmys last year. It s a show about triplets who are now grown and trying to relate to their parents and each other. The first 5
episode shows how they came into the world, how their mother was expecting triplets but only two of them survived childbirth. And while she and her husband were grieving that loss he walked down to the newborn nursery and looked through the glass and there, in one of those bassinets, was a baby with no name. He asked about it and the nurse said, He was abandoned; left at the fire department. They brought him here because they didn t know what else to do with him. What s going to happen to him? the father asked. The nurse said, I don t know. At his house the father had three cribs ready to receive his triplets. One of them was going to be empty if he didn t do something, and so this is what he and his wife decided to do: adopt this boy. He was different from the other two. They were white; he was black. And yet the father and mother decided to bring him home, to fill all three cribs with newborn babies. It s a beautiful moment and a beautiful story, but as you might imagine that third child sometimes wonders if he is as special to his mother and father, as beloved, as his brother and sister. There is one episode where his mother is trying to assure him that his father loves him. I can t remember exactly what she said, but it was something like, Randall, you are no less precious to us than your brother and sister. Your father loves you. You are his son. That will always be true no matter what happens. You ve got to believe me when I tell you how precious you are to him. That could just as easily be Paul saying to those Gentiles at the church in Ephesus: You ve got to believe me when I tell you that your heavenly father loves you, and that you are no less precious to him than the Jewish Christians. Because of what Jesus has done you are members of this family and nothing can ever change that. But sometime it s hard to accept your own acceptance. At the end of last week s sermon I 6
wanted to say that we who are here in this room are former outsiders. With the exception of one or two none of us was born into the family of God. We are all Gentiles: aliens to the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. But through our faith in Jesus Christ and because of what he did for us on the cross we have been adopted into God s family. Now we are full members of that family, but we can t appreciate it if we can t remember what it was like to be on the outside. So, I m asking you: can you remember? Do you remember any time in your life when you were not on the inside looking out, but on the outside looking in? Can you remember how painful that was, how much you wished somebody would see you, and open the door, and invite you in? If you can t remember what it was like to be on the outside then you may never be able to appreciate what Paul is talking about here: the fact that in Christ Jesus you have become an insider. And now you are part of the family and an equal heir with Christ himself. Everything he stands to inherit you stand to inherit. Wow, you say. I can hardly believe it! I can hardly accept my own acceptance. But you must. Paul is praying for you: praying that you might come to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of God s love for you and find yourself so securely in his embrace that you would feel able to do anything. And that s how Paul concludes this prayer, by saying, Now to him who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than anything you could ask or imagine, and able to do it through you, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. It makes me think that if we could really believe that we are loved and accepted by God nothing could stop us. We would wake up in the morning and get out of bed knowing we were God s beloved children. Even if our bangs weren t exactly 7
straight, even if we had teeth that stuck out a little in front, we would walk out the front door and say Good morning, world! Because we would know that God loved us, we would know that we belonged to him, we would know that nobody could stop us, or hurt us, or bring us down. Because we would know who we are: God s beloved. So, dear church: be loved. Let yourself feel the full embrace of God the Father, and in the strength of that love go forth into the world able to accomplish abundantly far more than you have ever dared to ask or imagine. Amen. Jim Somerville 2018 8