Gospel Love

 Blessed be God who animates our lives and is the God in whose image we are made and is of Love always and eternally. AMEN

In these difficult times in which we live I am reminded on a daily basis, even now a moment by moment basis, of two things: the world is filled with violence and injustice AND there are glimmerings of Love, God’s Love, God who is Love, which appear and fuel a fervent hope for peace, restoration and reparation and wholeness.

I am also reminded that these are times not dissimilar to Jesus’ time and thus His divine teachings are ever relevant and essential. We come to church each Sunday and pray on a daily basis for God to take away our fears and restore our souls, to extend mercy upon mercy, grace upon grace. 

Who are we to be to become that we might receive and offer such love ourselves? 

The gospel answer is always…always LOVE. We are to become Love.

We might need more than ever to develop deeper understanding of the how to and the power of divine love and to that end I offer this poem by pastor and poet Steve Garnaas-Holmes which is for me and I hope you a distillation of gospel love and may be woven today with our lessons and hymns as we refine our own commanded love:

 Love

Love is not a feeling; it's kindness.
It's wonder at another's being,
and our shared being in God,
a celebration of our oneness.
To love someone is to honor them as a soul,
regardless of their actions,
and to commit to their well-being.

Love has no room for judgment,
for being in control or being right,
even being “better” than an awful person.
It is only kindness.
Love sets aside our feelings, even our fear,
and our self-interest.
Love is willing to be weak, to be wrong,
to be hurt, to be misunderstood,
for the sake of the other.

Love is not a product of our effort,
but a gift flowing through us:
we are the riverbank and God is the river.
Our feeble love—and we ourselves—
are made whole and perfect
by God's love flowing through us.

        We receive and give.
        We breathe in and breathe out.
        Love flows through us into all the world.

—————-

We breathe in and breathe out./Love flows through us into all the world.

Lord make us instruments of thy Love

I could develop many of the poem’s lines, relate them to the Gospel, find stories to demonstrate them etc…And today I just want these words, these images, to be lain alongside Jesus’ and to let the Holy Spirit breathe in and through us that we might come closer to such Love which is grace and gift.

For in his sermon on the plain while using different phrases and metaphors, I believe Jesus’ message, the core of all of it, is to love God and one another and self no matter what. Moreover and perhaps most critically for today Jesus offers his listeners the paradoxical how to’s of loving into wholeness, ourselves, each other and the world. If we follow Jesus in so doing we move toward and into the kingdom or kindom as Father Greg Boyle likes to call it. The kindom is within and without which is to say the power, the transforming power of love, is within us and all around us. Making it manifest, changes the world and affects even in tiny ways that which we fear.

Just as in the poem, Jesus’s string of how to’s is overwhelming not to mention difficult. We have all heard love your enemy so many times that if it is not actually written on our hearts, and it is not for so many of us, then we have put it on a shelf as too much to deal with.

But what I am suggesting today is to breathe gently those words He uses like forgiveness and mercy and justice and try to let them at least blur condemnation and injury. To not let the paradox or magnitude overwhelm but to let the opposites lie gently next to each other.

Much like the Gospel hymn today which musically prays the words of St Francis, the poem, the Gospel, the lesson is that Jesus’ message is one of radical, fierce transforming love and we might do well to find a place within this love to realize God’s will for us and all creation. To get past the apparent irony and difficulty and to simply breathe in the grace given and trust that when breathed out, it will make a difference. 

Jesuit priest Greg Boyle has written a book on this very topic. Its title: Cherished Belonging :The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times is so relevant and its content reads like a sermon on the plain just in different time and space. 

Father Greg or G as the homies call him, established Homeboy Industries which works to rehabilitate thousands of former gang members in LA.

To speak of Cherishing in the world of violent gang wars and urban violence catches one up short. More importantly though he weaves a story or stories which demonstrate his thesis that there are not evil people, only broken unhealthy ones and that cherishing is a dear form of love, fills the brokenness, heals, and creates community where belonging and the responsibilities it invokes perpetuate this cherishing, creating kindom on earth.

G recites story after story of acts of tenderness and forgiveness in the most unlikely of spaces, some are hysterical and some are deeply transformative. All catch one up short with the cherishing present.

He tells of a mother sitting in a jail with her arrested gang member son. She asks him if the guard is looking and when he says no she reaches into her bra and pulls out his favorite burrito and hands it to him. He then holds in his cuffed hands under the table sneaking bites whenever no one is looking. 

The kindom has come near.

While I have used many words to demonstrate love: kindness, forgiveness, tenderness, mercy, cherishing, I believe that no matter what word or form, love is love and it is who we are called to be for self and each other. Not just when convenient but even more so when difficult. Jesus’s instructions underline this non convenient love and call us to become those very instruments of which St Francis speaks; our purpose just as any other instrument has a purpose is to be love in the world. be kindness, be mercy, be peace, be forgiveness, be the cherishing…

In the end we need to let go of our transactional mentality and even approach to the Gospel, to suspend our literal insertion of propositions into this crazy world and to remember there is nothing, no thing, transactional about God or grace, God loves without exception and often without return, grace is gift. In the end the love to which jesus calls us is not a thing or accomplishment but our very identity as belovedness;

So I close with more lines from steve garnaas-holmes:

Greed starves under generosity.
Fear withers under mercy.
Resentment can't stand long against forgiveness.

In a regime of cruelty and selfishness
joy and generosity are revolutionary acts.
Defy the Emperor of Fear.

           Trust the grace
           Extend the mercy.
           Share the gifts.

Joy and generosity are revolutionary acts…

Let’s be revolutionaries…

God bless you who defy in the name of the God of Love. God bless you who are becoming the overwhelming and eternal love of God.