Sermon Notes — July 13, 2025
July 13, 2025
Ephesians 3:14-21
Deep Roots and Firm Foundations
Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Good Morning!
I hope you’ll humor me this morning and close your eyes for a moment. Now, with your eyes closed, I want you to bring to mind a picture of your dream for Bethlehem United Methodist Church. Maybe it’s a dream of quantity – maybe the picture you have in your mind is a picture of a worship service filled to bursting with children, or a youth group made of a hundred teenagers. Or maybe your dream is a different kind of dream – maybe your dream is a God-sized dream of spiritual growth within the church, or some kind of transformation within the congregation that ends up transforming our community. Whatever that dream is, hold that picture in your mind for a moment…
(pause)
And now I invite you to pray with me and for me.
I chose this particular text this morning because it is a prayer – a pastoral prayer, if you will – that reflects my own heart as I and my family start this season with you. This text was the theme of our Tennessee-Western Kentucky Annual Conference last month, and it is full of words and images that we could mine for days and weeks without ever fully exhausting their riches. It also seemed like the perfect way to warm up for the sermon series that starts next week called “Limitless.”
First, I want to tell you a little bit about me and how me standing here today is proof that God can do abundantly far more than we could ever ask or imagine, as Paul says at the end of this prayer.
I was born in Nashville and lived here – I say here knowing that Franklin is not Nashville, but it’s closer to Nashville than I’ve been in 33 years, so I think of it as here – I lived here until I was 17, but I didn’t grow up Methodist. I, like many of you, found my home in Methodism a little later in life. My earliest and most formative religious experiences were in a series of Christian fundamentalist churches – so fundamentalist – so conservative – as I’ve told several staff members this week, that we thought Southern Baptists were progressive…
But despite its flaws, the church that raised me taught me to love the Bible and to love God and to love people. My youth pastor took discipleship seriously and wanted nothing more in his life than for God to use him to shape us. And I am grateful that despite the message that I heard in that church about women – that women are not allowed to preach and teach – despite that message my aunt, my mother’s sister, was an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. And so I held those two things in tension for my tween and teen years – on one hand a church that loved me but implied that there were some things that God would never call me to do as a woman, and on the other a beloved aunt who was doing one of those things that God would never call women to do.
The tension didn’t bother me too much. I lived in it and secretly kind of enjoyed the look of confusion when I mentioned in my youth group – say if I had missed church one Sunday – that I had been in Kentucky and had gone to my aunt’s church to hear her preach.
So imagine – just imagine – as I move through college studying Music Business – I had originally planned to study Music Education and become a high school band director but didn’t want to miss a semester or even a whole year on campus to student teach – I’m moving through college getting that Music Business degree when I start to sense a call to ministry.
It all began when I was chosen to be a Peer Counselor in my sorority during my senior year – AOII if you’re wondering. The college that I attended – DePauw University – had a strong counseling center staffed by two amazing women who gathered all of the peer counselors together every other Friday and gave us space to talk about the things that were going on in our living units, whether sorority house or fraternity house or dormitory. I began to recognize – and looking back I can see the prompting of the Holy Spirit in all of this – I began to recognize gifts for listening, for mediation, for holding space for people to be vulnerable, for unconditional acceptance and a desire to understand the other. And as my senior year went on I realized that this call to ministry needed to be bolstered by more education. And so I began to look at seminary.
Now, having served as the Chair of the Board of Ordained Ministry for our conference for the last four years I can tell you that the way I went about this was the exact opposite of the way that most of our clergy go about this. I had no church home, no spiritual home, no pastor or SPRC to help me discern. I just knew that the next step was seminary. Let me revise that statement. I had a church home and I had a spiritual home, but I knew that all of that was going to go away once I shared with my church in Nashville that I was following a call into ordained ministry.
So where to start? I was a spiritual orphan. Who was going to take me in? In my search for a seminary I turned to the only denomination I knew anything about – the United Methodists. I threw myself in with them and prayed that they would be my people. In January of my senior year of college I was baptized and joined Henderson First United Methodist Church in Henderson, KY, my aunt’s home church, and the following fall I went off to Boston University School of Theology and hoped for the best.
And what I received was abundantly far more than I could ever ask or imagine. Not just my seminary experience, which was utterly transformational, and not just the ways that God has allowed me to serve the church, which have been beautiful and hard and messy and holy, but the very idea that God could have plucked me out of a church where I heard repeatedly that God couldn’t possibly call a woman to be an ordained church leader and then led me on a path right into ordained church leadership.
That is why the last two verses of today’s scripture resonate so deeply with me. Because I have seen in my own personal life, and in the life of the church over and over again, the power of God to do abundantly far more than I – than we – could ever ask or imagine.
I know that Bethlehem United Methodist Church has stories like mine – both individual and personal stories and congregational stories – stories in which the power of God has done abundantly far more than you could ever ask or imagine. And I’m looking forward to hearing those stories, because it is in you telling those stories and me hearing those stories that we remember what God has done in the past, and that remembering gives us faith and trust and hope that the power of God is going to continue that work in us in the future.
I said earlier that we could mine this text for days and weeks and never plumb its depths, so I want to pull one piece of this prayer for us to spend time with this morning. In verse 17 Paul prays that
Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love
In Greek, and let me be clear that I did not take Greek or Hebrew in seminary, so I in no way want to ever be mistaken for a Greek scholar. I use blueletterbible.com just like every other non-language-taking pastor in the world.
So in Greek there are two words that might be translated “dwell” or “live” as we read in the Common English translation. The first is paroiko and the second is katoikeo. Paroiko is the word you would use if you were talking about someone coming to stay with you for a little while, like hosting a houseguest. What do you do when a houseguest comes to stay with you? Well, you set an extra place at the table, you alter your routine a little bit to accommodate them, maybe you give up your favorite seat on the couch for a few days because your guest sat down there and didn’t realize it was your favorite seat on the couch. In other words, you make some room, but it’s temporary. You’re going to return to your routine eventually.
But Paul uses katoikeo, and that’s the word you use if someone is moving in, if they’re taking up permanent residence with you. That’s when you take out all of the stuff you’ve been storing in the extra bedroom and make it into an actual place for someone to move in. It’s when you downsize some of your things to make room for their things. You make permanent changes. You make room for them to dwell.
And that’s what Paul is praying for the church at Ephesus, that they would continually rearrange their life together as a church so that God can live with them permanently. He prays that they would make room for God to live there.
In his letter to the church at Colossae, Paul quotes what was probably a familiar hymn about Christ, and in this prayer he calls Christ the
Image of the invisible God, the one who is first over all creation (Colossians 1: 15)
And several verses later reminds the church at Colossae that
All the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in him (Colossians 1:19)
It’s the same word. Imagine that. That the same way that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ – all of God was present in Christ – is the way that all of Christ dwells within us – within the church.
What a powerful prayer Paul prays for his brothers and sisters in the church at Ephesus, and what a glorious gift that that prayer is even for us still today. That we would continually rearrange our lives as a church to make room for the fullness of Christ to dwell with us, to take up residence, to live with us.
Why? Why does Paul pray this? Why does he pray that the church would make room for Christ to take up permanent residence with them? Well, it’s definitely not so that we would keep Christ all to ourselves and be a chummy, happy little family, just us and Jesus. Christ wants to dwell with us because that is how we become rooted and grounded in love, and as Anglican theologian John Stott says
In the new and reconciled humanity Christ is creating, love is the preeminent virtue (John Stott).
We cannot love each other and we cannot love our neighbor as we ought without the power of Christ living in us – living in each of us as individuals and living in us as a congregation, as the body of Christ. And we cannot become more like Christ unless we have made room for Christ to dwell with us, unless we are continually rearranging our spiritual home to ensure the fullness of Christ has space among us.
And that’s the whole point of discipleship – that we become more like Jesus, so that what we say and what we do are reflections of Jesus who came to reveal the fullness of God to us.
So let’s go back to that God-sized dream for Bethlehem United Methodist Church. Bring that picture to mind again. And then I want you to consider this…that as big as that dream is, as audacious as it seems, God’s desire is to do even more than that – even better than that – even more kingdom-building than that. When we continually make room for Christ to dwell in us, to live in our congregational heart, we will be making room for God’s power to do abundantly far more than we could ever ask or imagine. Thanks be to God.
OK, you can open your eyes.
We are about to learn a lot about each other, and I am here for it. I want to hear your stories, I want to share your burdens, I want to know what God has done in your life, how Jesus found you, what your deepest prayers are for yourself and for your church and for your family. What you’ll learn about me is that I have not shown up with some sweeping vision for this congregation. I am here to listen to you and to listen to God, and to help us listen to God together, in small groups, in personal conversations, in large groups – and in doing so we pray we will discern together what it is that God is calling us to do and who it is that God is calling us to be. And I believe that to do that well takes time and intention and trust that when we allow God to dwell in us – when we invite God to every meeting and to every table believing that God is going to reveal some of himself to us – God will do abundantly far more than we could ever ask or imagine.
I don’t know what God dreams for this congregation, but I do trust that God has dreams for us, and that our work is to listen and trust and to follow where God leads us.
I am so grateful to be here with you, to finally be in this space with you as we worship God. I am so grateful for all the ways you have made this transition so smooth and the warm welcome that you have given us and that you continue to give us. Itineracy is hard, but there is so much grace in it, and you have shown us that grace over and over and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Let’s pray together.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hear this invitation to discipleship:
If you have never before chosen to follow Christ, you are welcome at this rail.
If the Holy Spirit is calling you to recommit to the path of discipleship, you are welcome at this rail.
If you are ready to join your journey of discipleship with Bethlehem United Methodist Church, you are welcome at this rail.
And if today is simply a day to pray and open your heart, you are welcome at this rail.
There is always room for you here.