Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 27th, 2020

Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 27th, 2020

In  St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, we read the words of a man desperate to reach out to his spiritual children.  We read in the pages of this epistle St. Paul's earnest plea to the Christians at Ephesus to know of his desire that they do not take the love of Christ for granted.   For you see, St. Paul was writing these words from prison.  He found himself not only to be a man literally bound in chains but also bound by his desire to reach out to his spiritual children.  As such, he poured out his heart and his soul into the words he wrote to the Ephesians to implore them to take seriously not only the love that Our Dear Saviour has for each of us  . . . . for you and for me . . . but also to truly appreciate what Christ has done out of love for us.   He writes:  ". . . that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. "  (Ephesians 3:17-19)  He is urging the members of the young church to do their best to understand, or as St. Paul says, to comprehend exactly what Our Blessed Saviour's love means for each one of us.  How do any of us comprehend truly the love of Christ?  How can we truly appreciate what this means for any of us?  But St. Paul answers that question as best as he can.  He says in verse nineteen that we should be filled with "all the fulness of God."  In other words, St. Paul is urging the Ephesians, just as he is urging us some two-thousand years later, to fill ourselves up with God .  . . . to fill ourselves to the brim with the things of God.  So often we fill ourselves up with the things of the world instead of the things of God.  We fill our time by binge watching TV shows or movies.  We fill our life with material possessions or the quest for those material possessions.  We fill our time searching the internet or social media.  We fill our soul even dwelling on our hatred or our anger at someone who has wronged us.  We can all come up with our own examples but the point that St. Paul is making is that we are called to be filled with fulness of God.  This is because, quite frankly, it is in God that we are complete.  For we hear elsewhere:  "And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power." (Colossians 2:10)   We only find ourselves to be complete when we have a relationship with Our Blessed Saviour.  Let us never forget that fact and let us follow St. Paul's recommendation that we "might be filled with all the fulness of God. "