Isaiah 63: 7-9; I John 4: 7-12
Well, we made it through Christmas 2013 — and seemingly in one piece! Many of you have spent your holidays with family and friends and for a lot of us that meant traveling up and down the highways of our country. It is always good to gather back again in God’s house on God’s day (but then all houses should be God’s houses and all days God’s days, shouldn’t they?) to worship, to praise and to celebrate our Lord and our faith.
Throughout Advent we have tethered ourselves to the prophet Isaiah — the one to whom early Christians looked more than any other to interpret the who, the what and the why of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. Under the theme of the Peaceable Kingdom we have engaged in a short study of what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. Through Isaiah we have looked at what it means for us to walk in the way of the Kingdom proleptically — in advance of its final fulfillment. We have discussed whether sitting around anticipating a return of the Messiah is the best use of our time and energies. We have renewed and refreshed ourselves in those “streams in the desert” provided for by our Lord. Then, on Christmas Eve, we celebrated the reality that “a child is born…a son is given” i.e., in the Incarnation we have God’s own presence in our universe as the reality of that Kingdom.
Now, as we have come to the end of the Isaiah texts we find ourselves looking at life through the lenses of the other side of devastation and destruction. Our text comes from what is known in scholarly circles as “Third” Isaiah (chapters 40-66.) Seemingly much later than the Isaiah of earlier chapters, this Isaiah focuses not on the coming devastation — for it has already come. The temple and city have been destroyed and lie in ruins. Now the question is how to live while rebuilding? Where is God in the aftermath? Can Israel any longer consider themselves people of the covenant as they begin the process of removing the rubble and restoring the ruins?
Isaiah calls upon Israel to engage in holy memory — to remember that though judgment has come God’s final word is not wrath but love. In God’s love will be their salvation and restoration…the covenant is not ended and their relationship not fully severed. Though for their sin they have felt the vengeance of God, now they will know once more the hesed, the loving, forgiving and eternal presence of God. Their hope for the future lies not in their goodness, but in God’s faithfulness.
As I read this passage this week I was preparing to preach a normal sermon on God’s love for us. I made some mental notes about God’s love, how we experience it and how we ought to respond to it. Then, in the middle of my meditation a new thought hit me, one which I have not dealt with in a very long time. We talk so much about God’s loving us…but what about our loving God? Jesus said that the greatest commandment to follow, the essence of true faith was to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.” Do we love God? We argue about God. We certainly worship and fear/respect God. But, the question remains: Do we really love God?
As I thought about this it hit me that perhaps love of God is a missing link in our current/post-modern expressions of faith. Most of us talk and argue about believing in God. We are caught up in our day about whether God exists and whether we can even understand God to be loving given the reality of human suffering and evil. What we never seem to talk about, at least in the circles of which I am a part, is our love for God. What does it mean to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul…?” How do we love the One whom we believe called all of this universe into being and even invaded this existence on our behalf? Love is about feelings and even passions — emotions we rarely associate with faith any more.
So, I started thinking, reflecting and even did a little search on my computer of past files. Low and behold, a seventeen year old article from the esteemed Martin Marty addressed this very subject. Dr. Marty, of the University of Chicago fame, quoted Dr. Edward Collins Vacek, a Jesuit priest:
“Every age has its central religious concept. At one time the question of faith energized. Today Christians often answer the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ with little investment. The question Do you trust God?’ is more involving, but it still leaves in abeyance the way we live our lives. A question that will challenge all of us today is this: ‘Do you love God?’ That question evokes the endlessness of our hearts quest as well as the incomprehensibility of God, and it gives us an absorbing center of our lives.”
This quote woke me from my post-Christmas somnambulant state like the proverbial ton of bricks. Have we so focused on the reality of God’s love for us that we have neglected what was a central focus for Jesus — loving God? I thought over how the church spiritual fathers and mothers spent hours focusing on their love for God and Christ. Their writings at times seemed to be virtual love letters as they poured forth from the depths of their souls their love for and devotion to Christ Jesus. The mood, the warp and woof of these pages is so passionate as to move one to pause and reflect upon one’s own feeble faith in the process. Are we passionately in love with Christ? Or, is Christ more of a convenience than the focus, an option rather than a priority of our lives? What does it mean for us, in the early stages of the 21st century, to love God? What does that look like to us who so often lead with our minds rather than our hearts. How do we go about loving God?
Loving God means our focus is to be upon knowing God rather than knowing about God. The idea is quite simple: we Christians spend far more time learning about God than we do developing a personal relationship with God, i.e., a relationship wherein not only are we known but we also know. In spiritual growth there is an openness required if we are to know God. We must look deep within and reveal to God the very depths of our souls if we are to know God — for any type of in-depth personal relationship requires complete and total transparency. As Dr. Bill Hale taught us years ago: YCKAMAAPTYAWTRAY. (You cannot know any more about another person than you are willing to reveal about yourself.) If we would know God then we must be willing to go deep within ourselves and share our fears, our failures, our drives, our desires, our hopes and aspirations with God.
Loving God means our focus is upon loving others — living by a distinctively Christian ethic of love and grace. In I John we find the challenge to be different from ours. We do not claim to love God — only to believe in God. In I John Christians were claiming to love God deeply and fully, yet they were treating one another with animosity and divison. Jesus took the Jewish “Shema” of loving your neighbor as yourself — which meant to them your Jewish neighbor — and extended it across racial and ethnic lines to include any and all persons. I John simply expands upon that interpretation: “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
For historic Christianity love of God is ultimately expressed not only in devotion to God, but in devotion to one’s brothers and sisters in need. If one loves God then that love will be seen in how one treats those who are, as Jesus puts it, “the least of these.”
It seems to me that there are at least three levels of loving God:
Loving God for our sake — we love God in return for God’s love and to be saved, i.e., to go to heaven when we die.
Loving God for God’s sake — we love God because of who God is and what God has done in Christ Jesus.
Loving Others for God’s sake — we love the other because of how we have experienced the love of God.
People say to me things like, “I want to see my church grow and reach people. How do we accomplish that goal?” My reply is simple: Begin first by asking one question: What does spiritual growth look like to God? Follow that with another: How we can work with the Spirit of God in accomplishing that ideal? To answer in the language of the day, spiritual growth means growing to love God increasingly more each and every day until our lives are totally and completely encapsulated in Christ.
One of my heroes in the faith, Henri Nouwen, stepped out of a Harvard professorship and moved to Daybreak, a community in Toronto, Canada, for people with mental and physical disabilities. He decided that loving God, for him, was now about service rather than success. He once said to a group of Baptist ministers: “Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community. A lot of people are always concerned about: ‘How can I help people? Or help the youth to come to Christ? Or preach well?’ But these are all basically nonissues. If you are burning with the love of Jesus, don’t worry: everyone will know. They will say, ‘I want to get close to this person who is so full of God.’”
On another occasion a well known Christian writer and youth leader, Mike Yaconelli, came for a lengthy stay with Dr. Nouwen and confessed later: “I knew what it meant to believe in Jesus; I did not know what it meant to be with Jesus. ... I found it easy to do the work of God, but I had no idea how to let God work in me.”
There is an old expression in Christianity which is known as “Journey Inward…Journey Outward.” Basically what it means is that the deeper our journey inward, to the very presence of Christ, the greater will be our extension outward — to our brothers and sisters in need. So, I issue to all of us a challenge for 2014: Will you join me in making this the year in which we grow in our love for God? Will you join me in making personal knowledge and spiritual growth the keys to our life of faith and church? Maybe, just maybe, what we need is to know God in the depths of our souls? I close with the words of a famous song from the Musical Godspell:
Day by day, day by day
Oh dear Lord, three things I pray
To see thee more clearly
To love thee more dearly
To follow thee more nearly
Day by day
Amen.
