Love That Child
Ephesians 2.5b-9
My Daughters' Sermons
Rev. Matthew M. Fry

As we continue to experience The Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Grant unto us now, Almighty God, the ability to go beyond our limits, so that we might experience you more fully, in this time and into our future. May this time of preaching and hearing the Word Proclaimed infect our lives, and so alter our ways of seeing the world, and of being in it, so that we might live in your grace and love, and spread your mercy and care to the whole world. In the name of Jesus the Son we pray, Amen.

This is the 4^th year I have done sermons that while inspired by scripture, are also partly inspired by my experience of being a father. The theory behind them has been that since we call God a parent, since we see our creator as a parental figure, then perhaps there are things we can learn about what God is like when we think about what it means to be a parent. Sometimes during my day to day life I am struck by something our daughters have done, or something that I need to do as a father, or some feeling they evoke in me, and I wonder if God is in some way similar. Jesus prayed to God as Abba, Father. I think there may be something to that, and that we can look at our human experience and think about parallels to God.

So, this year, instead of giving them both a separate Sunday, since this is my 4^th year, I’m going to combine them into one sermon.

Hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Listen for God’s word for you today. I’ll be reading from The Message translation today. Ephesians 2.5b-9.

“…immense in mercy and with an incredible love, (God) embraced us. God took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. God did all this on God’s own, with no help from us! Then God picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where God wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all God’s idea, and all God’s work. All we do is trust God enough to let God do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing!

The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

Since I preached my daughters' sermons to you last spring, it was, for a long time, a tough year. The blond one was two. Need I say more? For those of you who were here last summer, and fall, you know. You had front row seats. I am convinced that when I am well into my later years, if I am fortunate enough to live into my 90’s like my Gramma Dorris, that I will every once in a while wake up with the sound of Murphy’s screech in my ears. And man, was she ever pushing her two year old boundaries. If we said yes, she said no. If we said stop, she said go. If we said left, she went right. If we said come here, she would go away. And if we said to go away, she would instantly come over. The epitome of it was, for me, when we would talk to her about consequences. “If you don’t sit down at the table and eat your dinner, you will get a time out. Do you want a time out?” “Yes, time out.” What do you say to that?

She and Kayla have learned how to get at each other’s nerves in an effort to gain attention from us. They love the heck out of each other. But boy do they know how to push each other’s buttons. And ours.

It’s not that I’m taking them or this time for granted. But there are times when people say, “It all goes so fast,” and we say, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” I don’t want it to go any faster, but there are times…

Looking at it from the outside, it would be easy to ask the question, “What does Ephesians 2.5b-9 have to do with having children? Or of being a parent? Or how God is a parent to us?” Somewhere last year, in the midst of dealing with the frustrations that come with being a parent, I stumbled upon this reading in Ephesians. I’m not sure why, but for some reason it just stuck with me. Maybe the first thing that caught me was the promise in verse 7, which caught me in part because of the translation in The Message, which is the translation I was reading, “Now God has us where God wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.” And I found great comfort in that. While there is a sense for me that time is so fleeting, and the simultaneous feeling that when you have two young children, the time cannot go quick enough. But to God, time is irrelevant. God has us right where God wants us, and has all kinds of time to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. And so, as much as I want my girls to be better, to behave better, mostly, I just want to shower love and care upon them.

From that verse, and from my experience with my children, here is what I was left with; my kids irritate me and frustrate me, and bother me, and stress me out, and are making my widow’s peak here gain ground on the scalp. They are more than a handful. They frustrate me and they don’t listen. But, I love them with all my heart and with all that I am. I would do anything for them, want only the best for them, and have been known to be irrational on their behalf.

God certainly gets frustrated with us, I think. We’ve managed to pretty much bungle up so much of creation, we’ve managed to do terrible and awful things to each other as human beings, and we’ve managed to do a good deal of harm to creation and the created order. And I think God gets frustrated by all of that, and the many other things we manage to do and to mess up. But we are God’s children, and above all else, God loves us. God has given us life, and has also died for us, has defeated death in the process for us.

I think some of you have been worried about me lately. Especially during our Wednesday night doctrinal discussions. I keep pushing the envelope, asking questions that can’t be answered, and some of you seem to be worried that your pastor either has lost his faith, or maybe didn’t have any to begin with.

Without getting into that in depth, I’ll simply say this. As a child of God, I know that very often I irritate God, or frustrate God, or bother God or make God stressed out, or be more than a handful, which I am more than sure I do. But knowing that God still loves me no matter what, still will go to the ends of the earth for me, is still willing to live and die for me, knowing that is more than enough to get me through even the hugest crisis of faith that I could ever have. In fact, it makes the big crisis’ of faith seem pretty minuscule.

God has all the time in the world to shower me with grace and love, and plenty of grace and love with which to shower me. And that is more than enough. Amen.