God So Loved the World. And You.

2 Lent - Cycle A

God so loved the world.

God so loved the world.

And I learned about love from my grandma.

“When you was a little girl…” That’s how the story began, told by a woman who was born in 1911 in Drumright, Oklahoma—she told it to another woman who was no longer a little girl. And yet still is. And she hung on every word.

“When you was a little girl, you was the sweetest thing. And you loved that baby Jesus. Your mama would bring you over at Christmas time and you went straight for the figures. You loved to play with the baby Jesus. Then when you went home, as soon as your mama walked in the door, the phone would be ringin’. ‘Baby Jesus is missin’ again!’ and there he’d be, in your tight little fist.

“We was always takin’ that baby Jesus away from you, and you’d kick up such a fuss. Then you started hidin’ him in your shirt. Your mama would find him when she got you ready for bed.”

You loved that baby Jesus.

So here is a proposal for you. The Christian life is an invitation to fall in love with Jesus. Because, here’s the thing, Jesus is in love with you. Is his love requited?

A newspaper reporter interviewed me a number of years ago. I was at a church in a town about the size of Prineville, about the style, the attitudes of Prineville. And I was a novelty, a woman priest with a wife. The newspaper decided to do an article, couple of articles, interviews with several clergy about what they thought about me and my being a minister in town.

Thank God it’s been years since anybody thought they needed to do an article like that. I didn’t want to do it then, except I knew I wouldn’t like what anybody else said, even those who thought they were on my side.

This reporter’s questions were about, “Where do you draw the line?” He actually put it that way, even though I tried to head him off at the pass. Before he got to the question, I knew it was coming. So I was prepared. I said, “It’s not about lines.”

That’s why I don’t like what people say who think they are on my side just because they draw a line that includes me in.

It makes me sad to hear people use the Bible to answer the question, “Where do you draw the line,” even if their line includes me in. Because the Bible is the story of God being in love with us, before we were ever born. The God who created the whole shebang and pronounced it good has ever after been reaching across the lines that we draw.

God created you because God was in love with you before you ever were created, when you were just a twinkle in God’s eye. And once we were created, then the rest of the Bible is about that love affair. Sometimes God’s love is requited and sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it is misunderstood as an obligation or anger that must be satisfied.

There are always misunderstandings in a love affair. But if you keep at it, you can clear up those misunderstandings.

“Isn’t there a balance between God’s love and God’s justice?” the reporter asked. No, God wants everybody to have justice. That is part of how God expresses love. God wants everybody to have love. That is how God expresses justice. God is not divided, one side weighed against the other. God is not of two minds about us. God is in love with us.

Your picture is on God’s refrigerator door.

Yours, too.

And yours.

Your picture is on God’s refrigerator door.

Yours, too...

It’s a big refrigerator.

Now indeed that love affair has implications for behavior. If love is requited, if it is returned, then we try to please the one who loves us. Which means—God was clear about what God wants—it means that we treat well the other people that God loves.

But more than that, we ourselves are transformed by loving. Grandma made me who I am by loving me. And I am more of who I am when I follow the Way of Love. Today’s Gospel calls us deeper, to rest, to incubate, and to grow in that love, until we are born again. We become new.

Actually, if you are in love with the one who loves you, you don’t become a different person. That’s not what being born again means. Instead, you are invited to become who you already are, all that possibility that is inside, waiting for birth.

You know it. You know that your best self is yet to be more fully expressed. There is more to you than what you already are. And you don’t get there by drawing lines, by chopping off parts of yourself or parts of those you are called to love the way Jesus loves.

That’s a way you can tell if love is genuine, and love is requited. If it is, then you get bigger than you were. Your soul expands to discover new possibilities within yourself. You can do and feel and be and dream what you didn’t know you could do and feel and be and dream.

Abraham was seventy-five years old when he discovered that he could move to a whole ‘nother country. Seventy-five years old. He was a hundred when the child he was dreaming about was born, and Sarah was ninety. You all are just getting started in what you can do!

You are made in the image of God. And the point of this love affair is to draw out of you that image.

  

The other thing I told that reporter about is the baptismal covenant. When we baptize a person in the Episcopal Church, we ask that person to make some promises. It’s like the promises you make when you get married. Not just, “Will you love her?” That’s a bunch of empty words, a Valentine’s Day card. But how are you going to live this love? “Will you comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others?” Will you incarnate this love, put flesh on it, make it real and apparent in your life, for all to witness? Because the feeling of love is straw. And it will not hold you against the cold winds of this world, unless you build around it with solid stones of how you live your life.

So one of the promises we make, when we bind ourselves to Jesus in baptism is this, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”

See, that’s not about lines. That’s not about who is worthy, or deserving. That is an invitation to do something, to get up out of bed every morning and go out into the world, like Abraham to the land that God would show him, searching for and expecting to find your beloved, the Christ.

How is that for a Lenten discipline? Before you go out of the house, to the grocery store, to the meeting, or even inside your house, when you turn on the news, or open Facebook, before you speak a word to whoever lives with you, turn, set your intention to see the Christ, and to love that person in front of you, because you are in love with the Christ.

We can learn something from our Hindu brothers and sisters who greet each other with folded hands, a bow and a word that means, The divine in me recognizes the divine in you. The Christ in me recognizes the Christ in you.

When you expect to find him, you do, in the most unexpected places. Like it’s unexpected in the gospels, the people that Jesus loves, today a politician, next week a wanton woman, week after a sinner. But the practice, the way of love, expands the mind and the heart and the soul, the better to love Jesus with, and everybody in whom he is found. Just like he loves us.

So listen to the gospel readings this season to learn from him where you might find him, the unexpected encounters where he finds somebody to love.

I am in love with Jesus, always have been. I used to hold him in my tight little fist. But he didn’t stay there. And it gives me such joy in my life that I hope for you that you can find him—everywhere. The more places you can find him, the more you will discover him in yourself.

And God will bless you, and you will be a blessing.

Amen.

photo of the Earth seen from Apollo 17 in the public domain

figure of Baby Jesus by Circello used under the Creative Commons license

photo of Namaste, a greetings gesture by a local lady in Nepal used under the Creative Commons license