Sermon for the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Paul's prayer is that we may know the love of Christ even though it is beyond all knowledge. All knowledge from the most dogmatic traditional to the most extreme skeptical will fail. To know the love of Christ is to know ourselves as we are known and loved by our Creator.

It’s not every day that one of our readings from Holy Scripture isn’t a story, or a poem of praise like the Psalms, or an exposition of Christian doctrine. What we have from Paul this morning is a straight-up prayer. That’s pretty simple, except that this is Paul speaking. And “Paul” and “simple” don’t generally go together. Boiled down to its essence, Paul prays that the Ephesians will know the love of Christ, which is beyond knowledge. “Paul” and “paradox” do go together quite nicely, which you either love or hate. How can we know something, which, basically, is unknown?

To answer that question requires us first to refine the question. What exactly is “knowledge?” If you think about that question for just a short time, then it becomes obvious that there are different ways of “knowing” something, and different types of “knowledge.” There is the knowledge that is handed down from generation to generation, called tradition. The latest generation may have forgotten exactly why the first generation came up with the truth they have inherited. But the latest generation trusts that what was learned in the past is a sure guide for the future. That is, until a new situation arises which our ancestors never anticipated.

Then there is scientific knowledge. If you can observe it, then you know it’s true. Except that scientists have shown that the very act of observation can affect the object you’re observing. Then there is ideology, in which we deduce certain political principles from our experience, and then impose that ideology on the world around us. The belief that this is “The Way the World Works” sometimes colors their memory, so that most Republicans think that the budget deficits increased under Bill Clinton, while Democrats believe that the economy shrank under Ronald Reagan.

So, all those kinds of knowledge can’t be what Paul is talking about. What he is not talking about is “objective” knowledge: the knowledge of objects outside of ourselves. That’s mostly the kind of knowledge that we seek. But that kind of knowledge is simply another form of power-grabbing. The more we know about the world around us, the more control we can exercise over it, or more likely, the easier we can convince ourselves that we control it.

None of this is what Paul prays that his readers might “know?” He prays that they might know the “love of Christ.” Love is knowledge. In fact, Love is really the most difficult knowledge to attain. Objects can be observed. Words can be studied. Things outside of ourselves can be seen, touched, counted. But we can only know the love of Christ in the one place we can’t see, touch, count – our inner selves.

When you’re young, who you are is an open book full of blank pages, just waiting for you to write in. When we’re young, we can try on different selves, hoping one will somehow “fit,” will feel right. When we’re older, we have filled that book with our writings. But others have written in our book. Things have happened to us that we didn’t plan, or ask for. Those are pages that we prefer not to read: pain inflicted on us, pain we have inflicted on others. And yet here we are this Sunday, hearing a prayer that we might “know” the “love of Christ.” To know the love of God in Christ Jesus is to know ourselves through the eyes of the One who made us, who knows every single page of our book, and still loves every single one of us.

To know anything of God raises the question of Revelation – the God beyond all knowledge revealing himself in such a way that we can claim to know the unknowable. The Bible gives us stories of how God has revealed himself in objective ways – burning bushes, divided waters, the Word made flesh. It’s safe to say that most, if not all of us, will never observe such revelation.
But Paul assures us that we can receive God’s revelation in our hearts, if we can screw up our courage, and open that book to those pages that we would rather not read, because Jesus is there, in all his love for you and me. There is no revelation more powerful than to “know” ourselves as the one who made us knows us, and loves us.

To know that they were fully known and fully loved was Paul's prayer for the Ephesians, and I can think of no better prayer for us today.