The Riches of Faith

I have always found Paul’s letters difficult to preach on. Most of them were written to address very specific situations, which often have little to do with our current settings. He uses long sentences with lots of subordinate clauses. To put it mildly, he takes a little unpacking. And long explanations strike me as a bit tedious, as much to speak as to hear. So rather than try and explain this passage, I thought I would tell a story, an imaginative recreation of how someone in Ephesus might have heard this letter. The file below shares that story.

The story makes reference to a mural depicting paradise. The attached picture is an early Christian art work on a similar theme from an ancient church on the East bank of the Jordan River. It is a well preserved mosaic floor contrasting a world of violence and aggressive competition (top two lines) with the ideal of God's kingdom, in which the creation will be at peace.