Text: I pray … that you may be strengthened with power through his Spirit (Eph 3.16). I want to say a few things this morning about the way God works in us and through us to accomplish his purposes in the world.
Bankers have had a rotten Press recently. If some individuals have been dishonest or greedy, they deserve to be roundly criticised. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that fundamentally the banking system has been highly beneficial in facilitating the growth of the economy, and with it of employment and of wealth, making a great many people much more comfortable than they used to be. We may now be approaching the limits of sustainable growth. If so, that will be a new challenge, but it’s hard to argue against the overwhelmingly positive consequences of the economic growth we have seen over the past couple of hundred years. If we had all kept our money in a sock under the mattress, we should all be the poorer for it. Good banking lies at the heart of an economic system that has much to teach us about the benefits of working together as good neighbours to make the most of the complex world in which we live, and to do so to the glory of God.
That was the good news. However, as the recession bites, we have to face the bad news too. As jobs are lost and belts have to be tightened, it is timely to be reminded that the compassion that we know to be characteristic of God our Father, has always been stirred, as it was in Elisha’s day, by the misery associated with famine. Recession is the cyclical equivalent of famine in a developed modern economy, and I’m sure he feels the same compassion for those who are struggling to make ends meet to-day. Our gospel reading about the feeding of the five thousand teaches us that he even cares about the shorter term pangs of hunger to which we are all subject from time to time. But I believe it is significant that neither Elisha nor Jesus acts alone. In a famine the harvest offering of 20 loaves of barley which were brought to Elisha must have represented a considerable sacrifice on the part of the man from Baal-shalishah. Similarly, the boy who gave the disciples his lunch-box of five loaves and two small fishes was probably hungry enough to have eaten it all himself. In both cases it was a little act of sacrificial generosity, by two ordinary people, which prompted a great miracle.
As is so often the case, we have to turn to St Paul to understand what these little stories have to tell us about the way God works in the world, and what we might be able to do to help. Our involvement in a complex capitalist society has already suggested the importance of the multiplier effect when we share our financial resources rather than hoarding them for ourselves. But alongside our membership of a secular world, which is already so wonderful, we are also citizens of God’s kingdom where the currency is denominated not in pounds or dollars or euros, but in love. And it’s when we begin to spend in that currency that the world is truly changed. We love because He first loved us, and so the little impulse that prompts us, tentatively, to offer up the little lunch-box that is all we have to give, can be picked up, absorbed into the love of God, and amplified to feed thousands of people.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians reaches a climax in the verses that were read for our second reading. He understands that if we are rooted in God’s love like a carefully nurtured cutting, or grounded in God’s love like a building resting securely on its foundations, then we shall be strengthened in our hearts by Christ who is the source of such love and the very ground of our being. And if Christ dwells in our hearts, then we shall gradually come to know from the inside what his love is like, until one day – if not in this world, then perhaps when his purposes are truly fulfilled in us – one day, we shall be filled, as he puts it, with all the fullness of God.
That’s a promise we can hardly dare to believe. But as we gather around the Lord’s table to share in the bread and the wine, which are to us his Body and his Blood, the very essence of his being, we open our hearts to his indwelling Spirit. Week by week as we renew our communion with Him, we are drawn ever more surely into the circle of his love, until the power that is at work within us – his power – is able to accomplish in and through us more than we can either ask or imagine. And those are Paul’s words of course, not mine.
What that more will be, is harder to discern, since it is more than we can either ask or imagine. In the smallest circles around each one of us, both at home and at work, the love of God has the power not only to touch with gold the love that we have for one another, but also to transform those relationships which have turned sour or confrontational. In our neighbourhood and community God’s love has the power to make us more aware of the needs of those who are less fortunate than we are, more ready to find new and imaginative ways to contribute to the life of our community – for example through the way we care for our building and make it available to others, as well as through our outreach and giving programmes. In the wider world, it cannot be right for those of us who live in rich countries like ours to squander resources, whilst some of the world’s poorest communities suffer the worst consequences of more violent storms and rising sea levels. It may seem that our contribution as individuals or as a church cannot make any real difference. But that’s not necessarily how it works in God’s kingdom. The boy in our gospel story might very well have felt that his lunch-box couldn’t make any difference. But he offered it anyway, and when that small act of love and generosity was caught up in the abundance of God’s love, it made all the difference in the world.
The Climate Change Summit at Copenhagen in December may or may not have the wisdom to take the steps which are needed to control climate change – probably not if the leaders assembled there are motivated mainly by assessments of what they each need to do to get through the next election. I wasn’t here last week, but I have read Fr Jim’s sermon on the web-site, so I know that we have already been urged to join Christian Aid’s campaign for a real change of heart. But you may still be wondering whether what we say or do will have the slightest effect, given the scale of the problem we face. It may, if enough of us lobby our governments, sign the Christian Aid pledge, and do what we can to reduce our carbon footprint. I hope it will. But the message of to-day’s gospel reaches beyond all that. We do not have to rely solely on the mechanisms of our secular society to deliver results. If we do what we can, simply because we are prompted to take action by the love for others which God has sown in our hearts, He is able to take and multiply what we give and what we do, as he took and multiplied the five barley loaves and the two small fishes, which in his hands were enough to feed five thousand people.
I was in the Nicolaikirche in Leipzig a few days ago, where the prayers of a small group of seemingly powerless students were enough – with the help of God – to topple a mighty and oppressive regime. It can happen, even to-day. St Paul put it this way: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen