Ephesians 1: 15-23 Ephesians 3: 14-21

When you pray to God, what underlying assumptions about God do you bring to the interaction? Do you believe God to be: loving? trustworthy? concerned with your life? These assumptions, and honestly our biases, fundamentally shape how we pray, the nature of our prayer life, and a good portion of our spiritual journey as a whole. Susan Scott preached on the prayer that started in Ephesians 1, was interrupted, and finished in Ephesians 3. What can we learn from this prayer? God is knowable, worth knowing, and stands ready to impart the wisdom and most importantly, the hope that we need. This hope is not for riches or aggrandizement, but rather that God will do what they have promised to do and to aid us in our calling. This hope allows us to wait patiently for the things that God has promised that we do not yet have. Ultimately, this hope is that God will reconcile all things in heaven and earth through Jesus. Hope give us the ability to endure the feelings of helplessness and despair when the world around us seems dark and unredeemable: when all of our efforts to bring light and salt appear futile. Remember that God wastes none of the work that they call you to do and that is all a part of a plan of redemption that started even before Christ appeared.

Ephesians 1:15-23 & 3:14-21

Susan asked us what kind of assumptions we have about God. Our picture of God shapes how we pray just like our assumptions about other people shape those conversations. We're all afflicted with unconscious bias, which we know, but often don't recognize.

The lectionary readings in Ephesians brings us to a great prayer. The prayer, which begins in chapter 1, is interrupted by the author's enthusiastic theological reflections and picked up again in chapter 3. This is a prayer that is useful for any of us. And it's useful for us as a congregation at a time of transition as we're looking to see who God is going to bring us.

Even when you may not feel it, or feel like your prayers are being answered, know that God is utterly caught up in the details of our situation and cares for us more than we care for ourselves. You are precious to God, you are loved, and God is glad to hear from you.

A great help in surviving trying times is the knowledge, or even just the hope, that God is present to us and loves us. Knowing you are loved goes a long way in our ability to persevere.

Matthew 4: 8-10

Mauricio Chenlo preached on Satan’s temptation of Christ, offering him all of the kingdoms of the world. Similarly, often we depend on the kingdoms of the world to deliver the kingdom of God. Mauricio related his experiences growing up in Argentina where he experienced Christian faith expressed in the nation’s politics swing wildly from right to left as the government went from a dictatorship to a Marxist government. He even heard the preaching on liberation theology about the kingdom of God from the dictator Ortega of Nicaragua in the 90s. Politics is the process by which people make collective decisions about how to live together by distributing power, responsibilities and resources. So, who gets to define these priorities? In this country it seems that we are told to change our politics every four years. Likewise, the Church historically has been tempted to align with political ideologies. Jesus, however, brings a different kind of politics. Jesus rejected alignment with any of the political ideologies of his time. The role of the Church is to be a witness and an extension of the kingdom of God in this world, because we still must be in the world even if we are not of the world. We cannot just focus on feeding people’s bodies (not on bread alone); we must also nourish people spiritually. We must not manipulate God’s word, love, or message to gain power or popularity.