The Emerywood Pulpit
“Loving God — The Focus of our Lives”
Matthew 22: 34-40
January 12, 2014

What does it take for us to come to the place where we love God?  A couple of weeks ago I asked this question of us in a slightly different form, noting that while we often believe in God, fear God and try to obey God, how many of us “love God?”  I confessed that “loving God” was not something which had crossed my mind in recent weeks.  Interestingly enough, several of you commented or emailed me about this sermon with the indication that it had struck a nerve with you as well.
So, I started to ponder — and when ministers ponder strange things can happen.  Why don’t we feel that we “love God?”  Have we in the church put people under such a strain, religiously and spiritually, that loving God is virtually impossible?  Have we made God so complicated or distant that we can no longer feel God’s love?  Or, is our modern existence so frenetic and fragile that we are all emotionally hanging by a thread, seeking to just hold onto a modicum of sanity in a world of chaos?  Is it possible that in the middle of what seems to be economic and moral instability we feel somehow cheated of the life of simplicity and prosperity our parents knew and are therefore resentful of God?  Have these experiences made “loving God” a rare if not impossible reality in our world?
Yet, the truth remains that both Judaism and Christianity are based in the same command: loving God.  Life, it would seem to me, is no more perilous or challenging for us than for previous generations.  So, over the next year we will be exploring this truth in many different facets — for I have come to believe that if we cannot love God then we are so distanced from God that our life of faith will be weak and ineffective.  It is in loving God that we discover not only God, but also ourselves.  “Loving God…Loving Neighbor” — this will be our theme of 2014.
We begin, however, not with our loving God, but with God loving us.  All of our love, faith and belief is at its core a response to the action of God:  we love in response to God’s loving us.  From the Biblical perspective all love comes from God — and it is only in knowing the love of God that we can understand and demonstrate that love to others.  If it were not for the love of God we have experienced in Jesus Christ, would we really know love?  How did Jesus, the Word become flesh, love and so command us to love?
Augustine has given us a couple of directives to go on:  Jesus, he intoned, loved each person he met as if there were none other in all the world to love.  Jesus never loved in general without loving in particular — the people whom he lived with and encountered in his life.  Jesus looked to each person, to their uniqueness and their particularity. In so doing he loved “them” — in the flesh — as they were and not as they ought to be.  Jesus never let sin or failure get in the way of him loving a person.
Let’s face it: we find that to be incredibly difficult, do we not?  After all, it is easy to love a figment of one’s imagination; the more difficult task is to love a real human being, warts and all.  My premarital counseling focuses not on any one Biblical understanding of marriage for there are several different models therein.  No, I focus more on helping these couples to know the person that they say they love and are marrying.  Far too often couples discover that who they thought they were marrying is not who they are marrying.  In fact there is an old Chinese proverb which says:  “It matters not who you marry for it will be a different person that you thought when you awake the next morning.”
I find this true in all human relationships.  We hire a new person or take a new job — and too often we idolize another person — just imagining that they are virtually faultless in their life. “I’ve got the perfect boss,” someone says.  Or, “I have finally found the perfect salesperson.”  However, for each of us if we look behind the curtain we discover a flawed human being who can be as difficult to love as any other.  This is the core sin of the soft-pornography industry, not to mention the entire modeling industry.  They promote an image of women which is unreal and therefore unattainable.  Studies have shown that men who engage in viewing pornography have a terrible time both with maintaining relationships and with a healthy understanding of intimacy.  Or, consider the way many teenage girls (and older) feel about themselves after looking at the ads in the magazines targeted to them.  The person they idolize in their minds is just that — a figment and not a part of life.  Real people have bodies which sag and droop; real people have hair that falls out and breath that stinks and armpits that…well, you get the picture!  Real people are really hard to love…if you are looking for perfection. 
It matters not who you are, where you came from or where you are going.  Know this morning that Jesus loves you just as you are—warts and all.  Jesus did not lump people into categories or expect them to change in order to be loved: he loved them so that they could be whom God created them to be.
The second clue of Augustine is that Jesus loved all as he loved each.  Jesus never rejected a person based on their race, ethnicity, home, status in life, vocation or relationship with God.  To those rejected by the religious establishment Jesus offered love and grace.  To racial outcasts he offered acceptance and hope.  Jesus may have responded with anger to people, but he never responded with hatred.  Yes, there were times when Jesus challenged the perspectives and actions of others.  Yet, we must remember that indifference, not opposition, is the polar opposite of love.  Jesus loved enough to confront those who pushed others beyond the pale of God’s love.  Jesus confronted us — rabbis and sinners, priests and publicans — all in a desire to touch them with the inclusive and accepting love of God.
Of all the traits of Jesus which amaze me, his inclusive love is primary.  If there were every any evidence for divinity, this would be exhibit “A.”  No one, not even Gandhi or the Buddha or Mother Teresa was able to love as Jesus loved — wholly and without limits.  Think of his love for Judas as he looked at him and in that time before the betrayal expressed not condemnation, but sadness.  Think of Jesus, abandoned by his closest colleagues and hanging on the cross, saying: “Abba, forgive them…they know not what they do.” 
One of my favorite movies is The Bucket List.  At the end the narrator (Morgan Freeman) says this of his companion:  Edward Perryman Cole died in May. It was a Sunday in the afternoon and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. He was 81 years old. Even now, I can't claim to understand the measure of a life, but I can tell you this: I know that when he died, his eyes were closed and his heart was open…”
Is that not the goal of each and all of us…to so grow in our lives that when we depart our hearts are fully open to the other?  I hope and pray that when I die someone will say the same about me: “his heart was open.”
Hear me clearly:  God loves each and all as if there were no other — with a love which gives and gives and gives.   It is this love into which he challenges us to grow — and it is how we share that love with one another that we shall look next Sunday.  For today let us rejoice and live out of the love that is ours in Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God!
Amen.