Perfectly Love (Excerpt from Feb 27)

Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.... (Deut 6)

We believe that our good God, by his marvelous wisdom and goodness, seeing that we had made ourselves completely miserable (even to the point of plunging ourselves into a downward spiral of physical and spiritual death), set out to find us, even though we, trembling all over, were fleeing from God (Belgic Confession, Article 17, my translation).

I love the phrase, "trembling all over... fleeing from God." It makes me think of Adam and Eve hiding from God after sin alienated their hearts from God. Too often, I think, people have been taught or have somehow “learned” from cultural images of “the Deity” that God came looking for Adam and Eve in order to take them back behind the woodshed. But there's nothing in the Gen 3 story that implies an angry or harsh tone of voice when God says, "Where are you?" We—yes, you and I—are the ones who picture God as being red-hot with a desire to exact revenge, when, in fact, everything in the story would indicate otherwise. God's words – even God's judgment – his "because-you-have-done-this" words – those words are spoken with grace and tenderness.

God is not yelling but weeping.

Even after sin God comes looking for Adam and Eve; deeply grieved; even experiencing loss, perhaps? Yes, God is heartbroken. Picture in your mind, perhaps, the woodcarver Geppetto and his love for Pinocchio. Or the great Lion Aslan in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” giving his life freely to save the life of undeserving Edmund. There is no dark, inscrutable, or foreboding God. No, the face of God is the face of Jesus Christ on the cross saying, "Father, forgive them." God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 103:8).

So how do we love God "perfectly"? We love God perfectly when we open our hearts to Love… to God’s steadfast, loyal love for you… to God’s undying love for the whole cosmos… to Jesus’ love for you… "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man gives up his life for his friends."

God does not merely want our assent or agreement, not merely our belief in doctrines about God, about Jesus. No, God wants us to be in love with him. Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love.”

Christ doesn’t want us to believe with our heads only -- intellectual assent without a passionate, fiery, white-hot LOVE of God is more distasteful to God than no assent at all: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” Revelation 3:15-16).

To love God is to be passionate about the things God is passionate about. To love God is to acknowledge and accept God’s love-to-the-uttermost tenderhearted, compassionate, patient and kind and overflowing love. To love God is to simply respond in kind to what you have been taught since you were old enough to walk and talk: Jesus loves me, this I know!

When we open our hearts to God’s love we find ourselves, by a miracle of the Holy Spirit, becoming more and more perfectly in love with God.

February 13 sermon excerpts

“Lord Jesus, before you I patiently wait, come now and within me a new heart create. To those who have sought you, you never said ‘no’, now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow” (James Nicholson).

Whiter than snow. Yeah, right. Have you noticed? This time of year, the snow isn’t very white, is it? Warm weather, snow melting… It was almost 40 yesterday and 40-45 is the forecast for today. The snow banks have never looked so ugly, so grimy and dingy... and yet vulnerable, precarious... their days are numbered. You almost have to feel sorry for those once stately banks and piles of snow....

Those dirty banks of snow along the street are NOT what the psalmist and Isaiah are talking about (Ps 51; Isa. 1:10-20), of course, but the grungy old snow can remind us of what we mean when we pray, "Lord, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow."

How did the snow get to be so ugly?

It looked beautiful after the last snow fall, didn’t it? But yet, accumulating through the winter, the evidence of salt and sand spread on the streets and then shoved to the sides after the next snowfall, the evidence of other sources of grime. And the melting reveals what was there all the time. And so it is with us.

How good is it that God doesn’t just spread a new layer of snow over us?! God, by grace, washes us so that we’re just as clean as a foot of freshly fallen snow in the middle of your backyard or in the depths of the woods.

This brilliant newness is what our hearts deeply long for.

Our deepest desire is
for Christ-in-us,
for Christ’s washing,
for Christ’s snow-white purity.
What we seek, only God can give.
What we ask for, we are unable to find for ourselves.
What we desire is faith, but faith is pure gift.
What we pray for is for the grace
to be faithful receivers of God’s gifts --
which means being faithful givers of love and mercy --
and faithful servants of the Prince of Shalom.

Part 4 in a six-part series based on the Collect for Purity.
Inspired by six prayers by Walter Brueggemann in Prayers for a Privileged People.

Super Bowl Sunday

A prayer by Walter Brueggemann, from Prayers for a Privileged People

The world of fast money,
and loud talk,
and much hype is upon us.
We praise huge men whose names will linger only briefly.

We will eat and drink,
and gamble and laugh,
and cheer and hiss,
and marvel and then yawn.

We show up, most of us, for such a circus,
and such an indulgence.
Loud clashing bodies,
violence within rules,
and money and merchandise and music.

And you--today like every day--
you govern and watch and summon;
you glad when there is joy in the earth,
But you notice our liturgies of disregard and
our litanies of selves made too big,
our fascination with machismo power,
and lust for bodies and for big bucks.

And around you gather today, as every day,
elsewhere uninvited, but noticed acutely by you,
those disabled and gone feeble,
those alone and failed,
those uninvited and shamed.
And you whose gift is more than "super,"
overflowing, abundant, adequate, all sufficient.
The day of preoccupation with creature comforts writ large.
We pause to be mindful of our creatureliness,
our commonality with all that is small and vulnerable exposed,
your creatures called to obedience and praise.

Give us some distance from the noise,
some reserve about the loud success of the day,
that we may remember that our life consists
not in things we consume
but in neighbors we embrace.

Be our good neighbor that we may practice
your neighborly generosity all through our needy neighborhood.

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 183pp.