St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, July 26, 2009

Love Letter From Ephesus – Rev. David Mundy

Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:16-21

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It was one of those headlines that is hard to resist: Happy Ending for Love Letter Pair. The article on the BBC news website showed a smiling couple on their wedding day, but this wasn’t your regular story.

A British man and a Spanish woman met in their mid-twenties when she was an exchange student. They fell in love and became engaged, but circumstances were such that she returned to Spain and the relationship was broken off. He never forgot her, and she never married. Several years later he wrote a love letter to her in the hope that their relationship might be revived. The letter arrived at her mother’s home but it slipped down the back of her fireplace mantle piece. The daughter never saw it and he assumed that she had chosen not to respond.

During a renovation of the mother’s home, the letter was discovered and finally given to his long-lost love. She contacted him, they reunited, and seventeen years after they first met they were married.

What do you think is more impressive here, that somehow they got back together, or that a guy wrote a letter? It is remarkable that two lives could be so deeply affected by one letter.

Actually, letter writing has become increasingly rare in this day of what is called social networking. People who use computers turn to websites such as Facebook and MySpace to seek out friends, including those with whom we may have lost touch through the years. A remarkable twelve million Canadians, more than one in three, are on Facebook. Our daughters who are in their twenties live with us at the moment and they regularly tell us about reconnecting with schoolmates from public school or churches we have been part of in the past. They also stay in regular contact with friends through text messaging, while others have enthusiastically taken up Twittering to share virtually every activity through the day. Tweets, as Twitter messages are called are made up of 140 characters or less.

So putting a letter or card in the mailbox is so old-fashioned as to be quaint, and its critics refer to it as snail mail. It’s interesting though that our daughters still enjoy getting mail that comes through the slot in the front door. In fact, they will point it out to us when we get personal correspondence and cannot fathom how we can let the letter just sit there unread, even if it is just for a couple of hours.

Why all this talk about correspondence this morning? For the next few weeks we will be reading from one of the letters of our New Testament. While we often speak of them as books of the bible or epistles, a number of them are letters sent by one person to a group of others who share the same Christian faith.

At least seven of the letters in our Christian scriptures were written by the apostle Paul as he attempted to stay in touch with and encourage and instruct the fledgling congregations he established on his missionary journeys through what is modern-day Turkey and Macedonia and Greece, all the way to Italy. What is really remarkable is that twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament books are in the form of letters. As I have mentioned to you before, these letters were not intended to be scripture, but the early Christian church came to believe that they were divinely inspired and became part of the canon of writings which we call the New Testament.

The letter we will hear from during these next four weeks was probably not written by Paul, even though it begins with the words “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus.” While it may seem deceitful to us today, it was quite common in the ancient world for a disciple of a significant leader to write in the name of the mentor. In fact, the letter was likely written after Paul’s death.

Ephesians, as the name suggests, was addressed to the Christian congregation in the city of Ephesus, one of the most sophisticated and vital cities of the first century. As an example of the city’s glory, the Ephesus of Paul’s time had a theatre which seated 24,000 which was excavated in the twentieth century. Paul spent two years preaching and teaching in Ephesus and got into trouble because what he said about the God revealed in Jesus Christ undermined the cult of the Greek god, Artemis. The silversmiths in the city had a booming business making images of Artemis and they didn’t want Paul to change people’s allegiance! Many years later, long after he is gone, this congregation receives a letter

We can try to imagine these early Christians gathering in someone’s home and unfurling a letter which has been transported by ship or horseback or on foot – or all of the above – to share a message of hope about Christ the saviour and friend.

Well it’s fine to hear the background of our biblical letters but what do they actually say? The section of Ephesians we heard today is a prayer for this “family” of faith.

I pray that according to the riches of [God’s] 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 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 you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

One of the reasons that scholars feel that this is not a letter of Paul is that this author tends toward run-on sentences! Just so you know, both of these sentences are nearly two hundred characters in length, so they wouldn’t qualify for Twitter. Still, in the very best sense this is a wonderful love letter. I would like to think it reflects the prayer we all have that our faith will be more than superficial, and the very source of life and inspiration for how we live from day to day.

While we were on vacation Ruth and I travelled to Land’s End, the very tip of the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec where we enjoyed the beauty of both land and ocean. We spent time on the shore with all the interesting treasures of the beach. But we were aware that there was also a very rich and complex life below the surface of the waves. We saw fishermen pulling up the mackerel which were running into the coves and bays. We were thrilled to see whales which flourish in these cold and seemingly inhospitable waters. We went out in our kayaks and were surrounded by curious seals. And we realized that this was only a small part of the complexity and diversity of ocean life.

This prayer of Ephesians encourages us to believe that the love of Christ we experience is not shallow, that we aren’t just looking on from the shore. We can go below the surface into something which is a world almost beyond imagining. Through the years I have had many conversations with folk who remember a time in their spiritual lives when they had great enthusiasm to learn and grow, and felt close to Christ. They are often rather wistful, and wonder where that experience went and how to recapture it. These verses assure us that this can be a present reality and invite us into a relational faith which is three dimensional and mature and live-giving.

So what should we do with the image of the love letter of faith in this time of instant communication made up of just a few characters?

First of all this may nudge us in our own correspondence with others. Is there a letter of support, including the offer of prayer which we can offer others? Last summer when I was on restorative leave and Ruth was faced with the blow of her place of work being destroyed by fire many of you wrote words of support through cards and letters. They arrived all through my time away and I saved every one. If we are a family of faith, or a social network, or whatever term we want to us, then we uphold one another during our challenging times. There is someone in the life of each of us who needs to receive a personal message of encouragement and hope.

This might also be the incentive we need to read some of the biblical letters. A number of them are short enough to read in one sitting, and that might actually be the best way to get a sense of the message of the author. Ephesians would be a good place to start, since we will be reading from it for a few weeks.

Finally, we can ask whether God is still speaking through the faithful in our day to bring about justice and peace and a better world. It’s been suggested that perhaps we need another testament for our time, which incorporates some of the profound writings and letters inspired by God during the roughly twenty centuries since the flurry of writing which gave us the New Testament.

One of the letters which has been offered for inclusion was written by the revered civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he was arrested and thrown into jail. In closing I’ll share with you a portion which is both warning and encouragement to be the church.