Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 14, 2025

The Fullness of God

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor

Psalm 46
Ephesians 3:16–21

The Apostle Paul offers us an incredible gift in the words of his prayer for us here. For one thing, he tells us that God is at work within us. Paul tells us that God can strengthen us in our inward being — that strength can come from within, through our communion with the Holy Spirit. And the idea that Christ may dwell in our hearts also suggests an incredible intimacy with God through Christ. 

Fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote that “I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”

These are different ways of talking about the idea that we humans are all created in the image of God, as described in the book of Genesis. Because we believe that the image of God is in each person, we make the bold claim that each and every life is holy, to be reverenced. We sometimes use the language that each person is a child of God, or, again boldly, that each person is a beloved child of God. 

As Christians, we believe that God was fully present in Christ, and so this image of God in us is related to the idea of Christ dwelling in our hearts. Paul prays that we will experience that, that we will be filled with all the fullness of God. 

This is a mystical invitation. It’s an invitation into a different kind of knowing about how we are thoroughly connected to God and God’s creation and all God’s people. We are related. We are part of the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love. It is big. And yet it is intimate. 

Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue has said, “What I love is that at the heart of Christianity you have this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen, the ultimate home of individuation, the ultimate source of it, and the homecoming; … that’s what I’d call spirituality, … the art of homecoming” (John O’Donohue, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty,” On Being with Krista Tippett).

I love this idea that spirituality is the art of homecoming to our source, homecoming to the God who created us as separate individuals and yet who holds us together in holy belonging. O’Donohue goes on to quote African church father and theologian, St. Augustine, who wrote in Latin, “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.” Another translation could be, “You [God] are more inward to me than my most inward part.” That bears meditating on. 

Paul reminds us of God’s love and then also reminds the church of our calling to live worthy lives. After ending his prayer with amen, Paul explains why he is praying for us: “I therefore … beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1–3).

Here’s where it gets more challenging. It has been a difficult week. We are called to bear with one another in love when we have experienced another public assassination, our forty-seventh school shooting of this year on that same day, and the anniversary of the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 twenty-four years ago. Love feels hard to live into when there is so much fear, grief, and dismay at where we find ourselves. 

We grieve the assassination this week of Charlie Kirk, just as we grieve the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the House of Minnesota, and her husband, in June of this year because of their political beliefs. And we grieve the slew of political violence we have seen across the political spectrum in recent years. In a democracy we disagree and we debate. That’s healthy. It seems so basic to our democratic values that we shouldn’t have to say it, but we do: people should not be killed because of their beliefs. Never. It is not acceptable. It is not right.

In these difficult times, I have been thinking a lot about our calling as Christians, our role and responsibility in the world, as well as the resources of our faith that might help us carry on and not succumb to fear, rage, despair, or the dehumanizing impulses that are tearing at our society and our government. How might we contribute to the common good and cultivate a commitment to community, inclusion, and justice? How can we be builders of culture and creators of healing and wholeness? 

Looking for resources, I turn to today’s scriptures and liturgy as well as to theologians, poets, and philosophers who help give us frameworks of understanding and guidance to live into. 

Howard Thurman, of course, is one of the greats. A pastor, theologian, and scholar, he lived from 1900 to 1981, a period that included two world wars, Jim Crow racial segregation, periods of brutal lynching of Black Americans, the civil rights movement, and the beginning glimmers of racial healing. He was the first black dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University and cofounder and pastor of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, California, the first interracially co-pastored church in America. His books of sermons, essays, and spiritual meditations are life-giving and inspiring. 

Howard Thurman was a mystic, deeply grounded in spiritual practices of prayer and meditation. He had experiences of knowing the love of Christ and the presence of God within him from the time he was a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow South. He turned to God to help him deal with his fears of being attacked. He wrote, “I found that the more I turned to prayer, to what I discovered in later years to be meditation, the more time I spent alone in the woods or on the beach, the freer became my own spirit” (Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, p. 16).

Later, Thurman pursued training for ministry at Rochester Theological Seminary, which would only accept one Black student per year. In his book Meditations of the Heart, he wrote about turbulent times and how our faith can help us.

He wrote, “The mass attack of disillusion and despair, distilled out of the collapse of hope, has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral. There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility. This is the great deception.”

Thurman went on to speak of evil, saying, “There is no need to fear evil. There is every need to understand what it does, how it operates in the world, what it draws upon to sustain itself. We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil. Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body, the reduction to rubble of cities; the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man and to give to his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.”

Thurman prescribes antidotes to such a disintegration of our souls. He invites us into holy silence and prayer to protect hope and strength and remembrance of God’s presence and God’s love. “To drink in the beauty that is within reach, to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind — this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception” (Howard Thurman, “Life Goes On,” Meditations of the Heart, pp. 110–111).

In contradiction to the deception, there is this truth: God is with us, and God is within us, and God is moving through human experience with us. We are not alone. The Apostle Paul’s message to the Ephesians was also a prayer that the people not lose heart (Ephesians 3:13). When Paul prays that the church experience the fullness of God and Christ’s love, he encourages us to remember the capacity of God in us to accomplish more than we can ask or imagine. 

John O’Donohoe tells us that the Greek word for beauty is related to the word for “calling.” He says that beauty is not neutral, but that it actually calls you “to be yourself and [calls you] to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded in you.” Beauty heals us, he says. He describes it as an “emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth.” 

“Beauty isn’t all about just a nice loveliness,” O’Donohue says. “Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.” He sees beauty in the faces of loved ones and in lovely kindnesses in bleak times. He thinks of those he calls unknown but real heroes who offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing in the midst of awful situations. “Beauty is not a luxury,” he says. “It ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us.”

That is the Fullness of God, the infinity that is within us. 

In June I had the opportunity to take three weeks living in a little hermitage at The Christine Center in northern Wisconsin. It’s a Christian retreat and renewal center founded by a nun from the Order of Saint Francis forty years ago. The retreat center has a focus on the transformative qualities of nature, silence, and the practice of meditation. Their mission is “offering contemplative support to persons of all spiritual paths in a natural woodland sanctuary.” 

My introverted friends thought that three weeks alone in a hermitage in the woods sounded lovely, and my extroverted friends thought this sounded crazy. One said he would not last two days in that situation. For me it was wonderful. I took long daily walks in the woods, read, meditated, made art, cooked simple, nourishing food. After three weeks I felt I was finally feeling a quieting in my soul and a deepening in my awareness of God’s presence. But it was time to go. I had to bring that experience and that remembrance with me into the rest of my life. 

I practiced gratitude on my way out. Walking through my tiny hermitage I thanked it in my mind. Then I walked out into the woods and thanked the trees and the landscape for their great beauty and stability and peace. As I said thank you, as I looked at the beauty all around me, I felt a powerful whooshing up of emotion and the most amazing gratitude filled me. It brought me to tears. The rich luscious green trees towered over me and held me in what felt like a spiritual embrace. I had more love for them than I had words. This was a moment of emerging fullness in me, and it felt like a homecoming, to use O’Donohue’s words, a homecoming to true belonging to the land, belonging to God and to God’s world. God was there, and God was in me.

O’Donohue wrote that beauty “returns us, often in fleeting but sustaining moments to our highest selves.” Trying to put words to it, I would say that a part of my soul blossomed. 

Meister Eckhart said that “there’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.” I think that’s another way to describe the place in us that carries the image of God. Sometimes I imagine that soul place filled with a brilliant light, the light of the resurrected Christ that dwells within us. That light is a love that transfigures and transforms us. It heals the wounds we carry and brings us to an unwounded place. That light shines out of our faces when we allow ourselves to be rooted and grounded in love, as Paul describes in his letter to the Ephesians. 

It is hard to hold on to that light, that love, that beauty, that power, when we feel threatened and afraid. It is hard. But it is a resource for us. It is something that we can practice. It is a gift that God has given us. 

Returning to our spiritual practices again and again is somewhat like strengthening a muscle, so that we are strong enough to return to our inner resources when we need them the most. When we are filled with the fullness of God, it’s not just so we can feel personally satisfied. We are filled with that fullness so that we can answer our calling and serve the world with love, courage, perseverance, and a true commitment to reconciliation, justice, and authentic community. 

Let us seek and may we find the unwounded place in our souls, so that we may bear with one another in love and maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. For as Paul says, “There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, on faith, one baptism, one God and Creator of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4–6).

We are part of each other. We belong to each other. And God is with us. May it be so. Amen. 

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church