“The Dimensions of God’s Love”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On October 11, 1998

NOTE:

 I read this from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.  I tell you this today, because this text is a very dense mass.  As a result, the translators, in trying to interpret it, have varied significantly, but I think with great sincerity, from each other, as they try to give expression to the complexity of what has been written here in the Greek. 

  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, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.  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.

 Now to him who is able, by the power at work within us, to accomplish abundantly, far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.  Amen. 

      Ephesians 3: 14-21

I’ve been in Haiti this week.  Emily has been in France, and Kathy is back from Montreat.  I joined the medical mission team in Mobin Crochu at the Covenant Hospital there.  It’s way, way, way out in the rural countryside of Haiti.  You know, when you get that many miles away from civilization and away from any electrical power, away from any factories or industries, the stars are very beautiful at night.  And in the evenings, the people who were a part of the medical mission team would climb up to the top of the roof of the hospital late at night and look at the stars and that beautiful full moon, which I know you saw also here in Tampa.  One night Charlie Stevens (from this congregation) and I were on the roof with Sylvia Campbell, looking at the stars under that beautiful moon, and Sylvia suddenly hollered out, “Did you see that?  What was that?!  That wasn’t just a shooting star, that was huge!  It looked like a firework!!”  And of course, Charlie and I hadn’t seen it.  We were looking at a donkey tied to the ground.  Sylvia had to keep reaching for metaphors to describe it.  “It was different!  It was big – it was flare-like!” 

Sylvia’s reaching for metaphors reminded me of another astronomical event about four years ago.  I wonder if you remember it.  It was the comet that collided with the planet Jupiter - the Shumaker-Levy comet.  Do you remember when it happened, astronomers and scientists in the paper and on CNN kept reaching for metaphors, for superlatives, to try and describe the size of the impact of this comet with the planet Jupiter.   “Huge!  Big!  Incredible!”  they kept saying.  Describing the impact of the first piece of the comet, Time Magazine said, “As if ten million hydrogen bombs went off in one place!  A mushroom cloud of hot gas, a thousand miles, will plume up into the atmosphere.”  One astronomer, trying to find a metaphor to describe it, said, “It’s as if you picked up Rhode Island and hurled it into the middle of the state of Iowa!”  After a while, I stopped listening really to the information about the comet, and just began to be entertained by the astronomers and the zeal and the passion they found in describing this event.  I remember how the news kept flashing to an observatory near Baltimore (maybe it was at John Hopkins University).  One professor there, whose hair made him look like the professor from “Back to the Future.”  Remember that guy?  And they would cut to his image, and he would be there saying, “Big!  Huge!  Incredible!”  And then you’d see them in the observatory room, and they were all pouring champagne and toasting each other with glasses.  I began to think, “You know, you guys better put the champagne down and go back to looking at the telescopes!”  They were stretching for superlatives to describe it.

Driving in my car yesterday with my children, I heard, on their radio station, the commentator say, “Okay, get ready.  I have an announcement to make.  This is so huge, it is surely a sign of the coming of the apocalypse.  Alan Hartman, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is dating Sporty Spice!  Incredible!”  They reach for metaphors to describe it. 

This made me remember my daughter, Mary, when she was two years old.  At the beginning of that summer, we had started to take her swimming.  We began by taking her to a small plastic wading pool in the back yard, and she learned the word “pool,” and the basic sentence, “Go pool.  Go pool now!”  Then shortly into the summer, Emalee began taking her to the community pool in our neighborhood.  Mary got over there and she saw it and said, “Big pool.  Big Pool.  Go big pool now!”  At the end of that summer, we took her to the beach with us.  We went to New Smyrna Beach and stayed there with my family.  I took her hand and walked out of that condominium and across the deck and down onto the sand, and she saw the Atlantic Ocean for the very first time.  She looked at me and she said, “Big, big pool!”  She had to reach to the extent of her imagination to find superlatives to describe it.

This text from Ephesians reaches for superlatives also.  Did you hear them?  I’ve been listening to it for the last week.  I’ve been trying to comprehend it in preparation for this sermon.  The language of Paul just rolls around like the language of the astronomers.  Listen again.   ”For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.”  Paul is going to string a lot of metaphors here together.  He’s talking about praying, and he says, “I pray that according to the riches of His glory, He may grant that you (speaking, I think, of you) may be strengthened in your inner being.  I’m praying,” Paul said, “that God, through the riches of His power, may strengthen you (the members of this congregation) in your inner being with power through His holy spirit, so that Jesus Christ might dwell in your hearts through faith.”  That’s what he’s praying, that this will happen to you.  “I pray that according to the riches of His glory, that you will be rooted and grounded together in love.”  It seems to me that his prayer is so that there is room for community together.  I think Paul is thinking here that the basis, the moral basis for community, is somehow being rooted and grounded together in a common love.  “I pray that,” he says (and this is like a second prayer now, or a second clause in his prayer he’s making), “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints (not just that you will have the power, but that you and all of the saints throughout the history of the church will have the power to comprehend, both those now living and those who have been resurrected), what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth (of what?  He doesn’t say of what.  He says, ‘I want you to have the power to comprehend what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth of …’ and he never quite says of what.  He moves on …),  “and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (what a curious phrase, to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowing, which is beyond our ability to know it), so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.   Now to him who is able, by the power at work within us, to accomplish abundantly (again, the superlatives) far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.  Amen. 

Pool.  Big pool.  Big, big pool.

I can’t quite comprehend it.  I can’t quite comprehend what he’s trying to say here, and it isn’t because I haven’t studied it.  I’ve been living with this text for a while.  I had it typed out and I carried it around in my pocket for over a week, reciting it to myself over and over again, trying to understand, trying to comprehend what he is speaking of here.  I’m trying to get my mind around the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of it.  That may be all that we can do.  It may be all that I can do as preacher this morning.  Perhaps all I can do is try and lay out for you, as we read this, the simple literal meaning of this text, of what the apostle is saying.  You may have to take the interpretation and the intersection in your own lives home with you.  Homiletic homework for you. 

Verses fourteen and fifteen.  He starts by praying, and he’s not just praying as we pray most of the time or as they prayed most of the time in the Bible.  He’s not standing now, like the traditional Jewish male would stand in prayer, with palms upturned.  No, he’s bowed his knees.  He’s fallen to his knees.  He’s been overwhelmed with this prayer.  He prays, knees bowed, to God from whom every family takes its name.  Altogether in one family,” he says, because ultimately God is our creator.  “I pray,” he says, “that you may be strengthened in your inner being, (that somehow you are stronger), and that the strengthening will come through the power of God’s spirit (which, he suggests, is already at work in you even as I am preaching to you now).  “This power,” Paul says, “is at work in your hearts, in your hopes and your dreams, in your loves, in your regrets.  This power is at work in your heart through Jesus Christ even at this very minute.”  And the power through faith, which is at work in you in Jesus Christ, is seeking to root and ground you in love.  Rooted and grounded to give you a foundation from which in turn we can grow and learn and live as Christians together in the community.  A foundation secure enough to allow us to grow and to serve the Lord.  “I pray,” he says again, “I am praying (this is the part of the prayer that really interests me) that you might have the power (is it intellectual power or spiritual power?) to comprehend (and not just you, but all of the saints, as if somehow we can only comprehend it altogether - this is a new idea for me, as if somehow Paul is saying that discerning God is only possible as the community works in fellowship, in unity, on it) the breadth and the length and the height and the depth (of what?).  The superlatives just sort of spin out there and never land.  Karl Barth, in his commentary on this passage, says, “Well, it’s the love of God.”  That’s what he’s talking about.  The height, the breadth, and the length and the depth of the love of God.  Barth’s son, Marcus Barth, who also became a Bible scholar, says, “No.  No, Dad’s wrong.  It’s the fullness of God.  Paul is speaking here about the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of the fullness of God.  That’s what Paul is praying that we’ll understand.  From the beginning of creation even to now, in our hearts.” 

Cynthia Jarvis, an interpreter in Texas, says about both of them:  “No, they’re both wrong.  It’s the fullness of God’s being, which is the love of God, the height and the breadth and the length and the depth of it.  The whole thing.  It’s the whole universe of God’s being.”  Paul says, “I am hoping that all of us somehow might have the capacity to know this, to know the love of Christ, which is the love that really surpasses knowledge.”  In the same way, because we certainly can’t know it fully, can we? 

Perhaps in the same way that a two-year-old can know the Atlantic Ocean.  Pool.  Big pool.  Big, big pool.  Perhaps we can understand it that way.   She knows nothing of what’s inside the ocean.  She knows nothing of the life that it teams with.  She knows nothing of the people and the lives on the other shore.  All she knows is big, big, big.  And at that point in her development, that’s enough.  And it seems to me that Paul is saying there is an appropriate developmental progression in what Christians are able to know about God in this life.  And what we can at least know about the love of God is this:  Big, big, big.  “I am praying,” says Paul, “that we might know the love of God that really surpasses knowledge.”  “Incredible” is the precise word, I believe.  And then Paul says, “God is able…. God is able…” and you have to fill in the blanks, because Paul doesn’t say what it is that God is able to do.

Well, what is it that you need God to do?  Paul says that God is not only able to do that, but God is able to do that which really needs doing without your ability to realize it or to imagine it.  God is able to touch the griefs and the joys and the hopes and the regrets and the dreams and the sorrows that are going on in your life, and to pull them, somehow, into Christian maturity.  And ultimately, that is called resurrection.  The hopes and the regrets and the sorrows and the dreams of every Christian who is praying to God.  God is able to do more than we can ask.  Not even that, but God is able, says Paul, to do more even than we can imagine asking.  Pool.  Big pool.  Big, big pool.

This week I was in Haiti with the medical mission team.   There, the hospital is the only facility in this village of  about 3000 people, that has any electricity.  There is no electricity in this village.  There is no running water.  There are not any cars.  The people all live in essentially thatched huts.  They are an agrarian based society - they are all farmers.  Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this isn’t the poorest village in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.  This tropical hospital sits there in the middle of it.  It’s really more of a jungle clinic than a hospital.  There were always about seventy-five people in front of the hospital, hoping to get in to be treated, because there is no medical care there other than that facility. 

During the week, a mother came to the hospital with her eighteen-month-old baby.  All of their cooking is done on small fires outside their homes.  She had a large pot of boiling water on the fire, and the baby had come up behind her and grabbed it and pulled it over onto himself.  He was, of course, horribly burned across the side of his face and his chest, and his legs, and on one arm.  You can imagine the trauma of that, both to the mother and to the baby.  Sylvia and the team of nurses and the doctor who were there with her began to try to treat him.  They sedated him, which I was so grateful for immediately, to try at least to get him beyond hysteria, and they began to do in that limited facility what it was possible to do to try to help this baby.  The practice in that kind of a tropical setting in those primitive hospitals is that the family, or some member of the family, must stay with the child or the adult to be able to feed him, to bring food in, and to watch them over the night.  So his mother and also his little sister were there in the storage room that Charlie Stevens had turned into a room for this terribly burned baby.  I asked Sylvia what was going to happen, and in despondency and with great emotion, she told me, “I think this baby is going to die.  We can do what we’ve done so far, but I don’t believe his body is going to be able to overcome the trauma that it has received.  At least not in this setting.”  She said, “If we had him at the burn unit at Tampa General, we could save his life.  But I think that’s what’s going to happen here.”  One of the nights there, right before I went to bed, I went and stood with that mother as she sat by his bed.  In Haiti they speak Creole, a kind of rural French.  As I stood there in the room with her, alone, she looked over and said to me something in French.  I don’t remember much French from my three years of high school French, but I recognized what she said to me that night.  “In the name of Jesus Christ,” she said, “help me.”

Well, they began to think about what they could do for this baby.  In the operating room, as they tried to decide what to do next, and was there anything in our desperation that we could do.  Sylvia said, “What if we could figure out a way to airlift him to Tampa General?”  Of course, that’s not possible there.  But in your desperation, you do things that you don’t know are impossible.  So, they got on the short-wave radio and called back here to Tampa and said, “We have this baby who is going to die.  Is there any way that we could get him airlifted back to the United States?”  Of course, you have to get permission to take him out of the country, and you have to find a hospital that will accept him, and it was not really possible.  Well, they got to the Medical Benevolence Foundation, and some of the people here, and Paul Reed got on the phone, and ….  Pool.  Big pool. Big, big pool.  We heard, about twelve hours later, coming over the short-wave, that Paul Reed had called the United Nations contingent at the Port au Prince airport, and they were going to fly in a medical chopper the next morning into that village.  Tampa General had agreed to accept him.  Somehow, he had talked the air ambulance service into flying to Port au Prince to pick him up.  So we went to that mother and her family and said, “We can save this baby’s life, we think, but we have to take him to the United States.  And you can’t go with him.” 

What do you think that was like for her?  They had to think about it for about four hours.  After about four hours, they came back in to us, and she had a small white Haitian garment.  It looked to me like a baptismal gown.  She brought it to us, and it was her way of saying, “Take him.”

Early the next morning, we put him on a stretcher, and with Sylvia and Charlie Stevens at the head of the stretcher and me at the back, and Diana, one of the nurses who was there with Sylvia, holding the I.V., we waited until this huge Coast Guard-like chopper suddenly came thundering across the mountains and landed there in that village.  The Haitian people who were there in the marketplace had eyes that made me think that for them it must’ve been like the spaceship out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was landing there in the village.  We carried that baby up to the back of that chopper.  When it opened up, out of it came two Argentine military escorts and a Canadian doctor and medic, and what I think was an American pilot, all from a big Russian helicopter.  There, with about three hundred Haitian people standing around the chopper, they put that baby in it and Jeanne, the nurse anesthesiologist from Tampa General Hospital, climbed in with the baby.  They let the mother kiss the baby good-bye, and then, up, up, and away it went.  Away to a land that the mother had never seen, and probably will never see, she let her baby go. 

Afterwards, we gathered in a big circle there, and the hospital administrator prayed with all the people in the village.  He had the mother and her husband and her brothers and her sisters stand in the circle with them.  He prayed, “Oh God, this morning we have seen all that is possible for man to do.  But we know that You have done it.” 

Today, this morning, that baby is here in Tampa General in the burn unit.  Beyond our imagination.  Beyond our ability to ask, “How big?  How broad?  How wide?  How deep?”  That’s our task as pastors, isn’t it?  To have the task of trying to pastor a group of people, and having to try and interpret to them the depth and the width and the height and the length of God, when most of them have a significant head start on us in understanding it.  How can we speak to Opal Morton about the glorious riches of Jesus Christ, when she has been watching it in her own life for about fifty years ahead of us.  How can we interpret to you what you are already familiar with yourself?  So you know what it means to feel the power of God.  Bob knows what it means to feel the power of God which has brought Bob and Sally together.  Jeff and Darrin  must know something of what it means to experience the comfort of God which is able and deep enough to reach down and comfort them, even in the loss of their mother.   So you know something of the experience and the movement of the spirit in this congregation that reached in and found Ramiro Ross and called him out of this congregation and to the ministry with farmworkers here in Wimamua.  So Emily and the Senior Highs know something of the power and the length and the depth and the height of God’s movement that called them to Mexico this summer to put a roof on a church there, and then to have communion in it afterwards. 

What metaphor can the New Testament use to describe this?  Well, the lectionary says that when you preach on the length and the depth and the breadth and the width of God’s being in love, couple it with the sixth chapter from the gospel of John.  They were on a hillside, and Jesus was teaching them.  There were over five thousand people there, and they were hungry.  They did not know how they were going to be fed.  So they asked him, “Master, what can we do?”  They couldn’t imagine it.  There was lunch enough for one boy’s meal there.  And Jesus fed them.  The text says that there was enough so that they were satisfied.  And there were twelve baskets left over.  Beyond their ability to imagine.  Beyond their ability to ask.

All of this thinking about comets and power and hearts and minds and faith, and mission trips and the length and the depth and the breadth and the width of the being of God has brought my memory, at the end of this week, back to the psalms.  Especially those psalms that speak of God’s being, and I remembered them as I looked up at the stars.  “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth!  Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted by the mouths of babes and infants.  Thou has established a bulwark because of thy foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.  When I look at the heavens, the work of thy fingers, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou doest care for him.  Yet Thou has made him little less than God, and doest crown him with glory and honor.  Thou hast given him dominion over the works of Thy hands.  The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims His handiwork.  Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.  For the sake of my relatives and friends,” says the psalmist, “I will say ‘Peace be within you.  For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.  Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in its holy place?  Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be lifted up, ye ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in.  Who is the King of Glory?  The Lord of Hosts, Jesus Christ.  And all of the riches of the breadth and the length and the height and the depth of God are his.  He is the King of Glory!”