We live in a farming community, so we see evidence of being rooted and grounded every day. A well-rooted plant is more stable, better able to withstand tough periods. The psalms start with this image, and it may well lie in the background of the thoughts here. I love the idea that our lives are rooted and grounded in the love of God. Rooted in that love, our lives can blossom and flourish, and spread that selfsame love. Our spiritual vocabulary, rooted in Scripture, matures over the years.

 

Sin happens when we get uprooted from being rooted and grounded in love. Moved by lust, David forgets out his love and loyalty. David gets uprooted from limits.He is drawing upon a different source in his life. Then the weeds attack. He gets entangled in so many thorny briers that he becomes immured in them. He cannot disentangle himself from the thicket he has created with his power and cunning.Sin comes from a sense that we are missing out in the fullness of life, but in the end, it becomes a vapid sameness.It's similar to the sense of Tolstoy that all difficult families are the same, but that variety lives in a happy family, in a unique way. Another sense would be that it poisons our lives at the roots. I was told of someone using Mean Green on a plant, and it poisoned the plants. Instead of bringing nourishment, the root system brought poison to wither and die. Some herbicides work at the root level to destroy growth. Sin is the enemy of love at the root system of our lives and replaces it with eventually death-dealing poisons. We delude ourselves into thinking that it leads to a fuller life, but it leaves only emptiness in its wake.

 

God is with us in the heights of life. When we notice that, we celebrate and praise. In the vast breadth of our experiences, God is there.God is with us in the depths of life. The confirmation group's catechism says it well: that their is no "grief Jesus does not know, no burden that Jesus has not borne." We could take the sense of depth to be one that goes to the very core of our inner being, the bedrock of the self. No experience is too small to escape divine notice; nothing too great to exceed the scope of divine love. That is the sense of Ephesians fullness, perhaps even a cosmic sense that God's love radiates like light throughout our lives, or to use an image from Psalm 23, a love whose cup runneth over. Sometimes Christians overemphasize a decisive moment, such as a born-again experience, and by so doing downplay the sense that God follows us through the whole long course of our lives.I would encourage you to look for the hand of God as you chart some of the major events in your life. The writer speaks of God in exalted terms, that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge, that God is able to do more than we can possibly imagine, abundantly, exceedingly, immeasurably. Why worry if our prayers don't measure up? We are tapping into the riches of a constantly renewing resource in the love of God. At the root of our lives is God. On this Sabbath Day, hear this prayer from the New Union Prayer Book. "In the silence of our praying place we close the door upon our hectic joys and fears, the accomplishments and anguish of the week we leave behind. What we did must be woven into what we are. We walk the path of our humanity, no longer ride unseeing through a world we do not touch and only vaguely sense. On this day, our warmth and light come from deep within ourselves." Paul Tillich called God the ground of our being. He knew well that we are at our best when we tap into the Source of all that exists to live in the fullness of God's generous love.