| God is Love |
|
|
God is love. Imagine a tree. That tree symbolises God. Every part of that tree can be followed back to the trunk. Every division and of the branches fanning out are all traceable back to that one truck. The trunk is love and every bough and branch and twig ultimately comes from that trunk.
Pick a branch or a twig and make it stand for something God does. So, e.g., God gives gifts? Why?
Let’s trace it back . . . because God is love. Pick another: God hates sin. Why? Because God is love. Pick another attribute of God. God speaks through the Bible. Why? Because God is love.
Pick another. God gets angry. Why? Because God is love and so on and so on and so on.
Up to and including “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”
Everything God feels and thinks and says and does stems (if you’ll forgive the pun) from who he is. What we feel and think and say and do stems from who we are. So God gives gifts or gets angry or heals people or speaks through the scriptures or whatever because God is love. Follow it back. Trace the line along the branch back to the trunk.
God is love. A community of love – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, united as one in the perfect harmony of pure love. No ego, no fear, no anger, no insecurity or greed or laziness or pride or anything else that wrecks our relationships. Pure love and so the three are not three but one, that one God who is love, loves you.
I do a lot of funerals and many older people have been married for 50 or 60 years. Do you think things were easier then? No. People were poorer, and had harder lives, but they stuck it out and saw it through. Because love is tough and sticking it out needn’t mean grim determination, a lack of fun or happiness. It just means going through the bad times together. In fact, that might be the definition of love: “going through the bad times together.” After all any fool can go through the good times with you an d a lottery winner suddenly finds she has a lot of friends . . . But love, true real deep pure love means this:
Sitting by the hospital bed all night.
Cleaning up the puke.
Driving 200 miles to go to the funeral.
Dying on a cross.
These things are not glamourous, not amorous, not short, not sweet. Love means putting in the hours and putting in the effort. No shortcuts, no corners cut. Love is in it for the long-haul. Love’s work is often subtle, silent, stealthy, secret: without publicity or praise and love is inefficient, long hours of hard work and sometimes very little to show for it.
In fact, love is the opposite of our sinful selves and of the world we live in. We are selfish and lazy, we want quick and visible results, we want pleasure and fun, we want to be praised and rewarded and so love and God and the cross of Christ seem stupid or boring or painful or weird or pointless, by the selfish and short-term standards of a sinful world it is all of these things and more.
The well-know pastor and writer Rob Parsons has a saying that is aimed at you and me: ordinary church-going Christians. He’s speaking TO us, but he’s speaking about them, the others, the world outside, those who don’t come to church. Here’s what he says: “They don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.” (Rpt.)<
In our reading today St. Paul deals with that. Knowledge, he says, will fade and fail but love remains and even before it fades and fails it is flawed and fragmentary. The knowledge of God in our heads is imperfect but our hearts can contain and convey the perfect and permanent love of God, but let me say this:
Head-knowledge – what we think and believe – IS important.
God is very concerned that people think and know and believe right and true things, especially about him. What we think and believe and say about God matters to him and therefore it should matter to us, but first and foremost we are called to love. Please imagine for a moment that knowledge is cold and love is hot. Blue and red, if you like. Knowledge lives in the head, up here and love lives in the heart, down here. Now according to the laws of physics hot things rise up to the top (think of a hot air balloon or the steam from a kettle) and cold things sink down to the bottom. OK?
Now here is the issue: which is bigger or stronger, the cold knowledge in our heads or the warm love in our hearts? Which is going to affect the other? Which is going to win? Is the clear, cold knowledge in our head going to sink down and chill our hearts, and cool our love? OR is the fiery furnace of our love going to rise up and give warmth and energy and passion to what we know and say about God.
Whichever is stronger will affect the other. We can chill our love or fire-up our beliefs and this will come out in what we say and do. People will see and hear whether our love for God has set our thoughts and words about God on fire or whether our thoughts about God have damped and contained the heat of his love. We need both our heads and our hearts but we need the right relationship between them and I think that means we need love from God and for God to energise and ignite what we think and say about God. |
Amen |
|
|
|
