Looking for Love in the Wrong Places
Ephesians 2: 1 – 10; John 3: 14 – 21
We spend enormous amounts of time and energy during
our lives seeking love. We want our parents to love us as
children, we want our friends to love us as we grow, we want a very
special man or woman to love us as a partner and lover and spouse, and
we want our children to love us when we have them. We want our
co-workers to at least like us enough to make work pleasant, and we
certainly hope that whenever we make friends, they will turn out to be
the kind of friends who will stand by us in good times and bad, and
love us even when we’re not on our best behavior.
If you pick up the newspaper, at least once a week,
you’ll find a couple of pages filled with personals ads—there are lots
of people looking for someone special in their life. If you
listen to the local country music station, KUZZ, you’ll find they
regularly run advertising for something called the “Country
Connection,” which is a service that matches singles looking for
someone special. Just this week, I heard the DJ comment that
someone in East Bakersfield had met their husband through the Country
Connection, and how happy they were.
Saturday’s Californian offered a whole article on
dating sites: everything from datemypet.com for pet lovers, to
tallfriends.com for those vertically endowed. There’s a site for
truckers: truckerpassions.com, conservatives: conservativematch.com,
fans of hip hop music: hiphopmatchmaker.com, wine lovers:
grapedates.com, people with disabilities: friendslikeme.com, and Ivy
Leaguers: rightstuffdating.com. The implicit promise is, sign up and
find love.
Some high school sophomores were once given an
assignment to write an essay outlining their definition of love.
Among the responses were these:
Life is one thing after another. Love is two things after each other.
Love is the feeling in your stomach of butterflies wearing roller skates.
But everyone’s favorite was this one:
Love is that feeling you feel when you feel you are going to have a feeling
you have never felt before.
Love is so much more, though, isn’t it? It is
so much more than that fizzy feeling in your stomach, so much more than
“a connection,” so much more than just a human emotion. It’s easy
to look for love in the wrong places. Most of all—in our deepest
yearning, we want to know that God loves us, loves us enough to forgive
our sins and failings. This is where the writer of the letter to
the Ephesians leads us to the right place to look for love: All
of us once lived among [the disobedient] in the passions of our flesh,
following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature
children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in
mercy, out of the great love with which God loved us even when we were
dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by
grace you have been saved…”
Beautiful words sharing a beautiful promise.
Yet I would issue a caution: Even these words can be heard
improperly. As important as it is to understand that “God so
loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who
believes in him may not perish but may have eternal
life;” that God’s greatest motivation is merciful,
unmerited, unconditional love for the cosmos—we must grasp that this is
but the first half of the equation. God’s love has been given–now
we must respond by living lives that express that same merciful,
unmerited, unconditional love.
I found myself thinking of the phrase “What
does the Lord require of you?” which is actually a line from the
prophet Micah, as I reflected upon the many resources I had addressing
our scripture passages for today---and the ways in which Christian
faith and action had been in the news this week. In many ways,
each was asking this question: What DOES God’s love require of us?
Being recipients of God’s love requires that we
respond by thinking “outside the box” of our own self-interest.
Too often, we fall into the habit of seeing everything in terms of how
it will affect us. Robert Bellah did some research in the 1980’s
about why people go to church, and found that the number one reason was
to feel good about themselves. He found church members often
spoke of their need for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement,
self-gratification, and self-love—not God’s love at all.
We do often complain about the annoyances, the
difficulties, the strains of our daily grind. We think of
ourselves as put upon, picked upon, put down; we become defensive and
frightened and overwhelmed. This happens to churches, Christian
organizations and nations, as well as individuals. People
functioning from this mindset rarely make good or wise decisions—or
politics. I frankly was dismayed to hear Friday evening on ABC
Evening News of a “non-binding resolution” being considered in
Missouri, that could be construed as asserting that only a “Christian
God” is to be acknowledged in our nation. That’s self-interest
and defensiveness talking, not an expression of God’s unconditional
love for the cosmos.
How differently I felt when I read about Cardinal
Roger Mahony’s call to civil disobedience during his Ash Wednesday
sermon. At issue is House Resolution 4437, which expands the
definition of “alien smuggling” in a way that could theoretically
include working in a soup kitchen, driving a friend to a bus stop or
caring for a neighbor’s baby—if that person happens to be an illegal
immigrant. Cardinal Mahoney has correctly asserted that “As
[Christ’s] disciples, we are called to attend to the last, littlest,
lowest and least in society and in the church,” no questions asked,
without first checking immigration documents. Serving others
through the Homeless Shelter, Child Haven, the Alzheimer’s Center,
Habitat for Humanity, Get on the Bus, our New Orleans work team,
counseling services, emergency shelter, job training—all of these
efforts arise as our answer to that question I posed earlier: What does
God’s love require of us?
Karl Barth, writing in the first half of the
twentieth century, commented: The Christian Church must be guided
by God and by God alone. It must not forget for an instant that
all political systems, right and left alike, are the work of men.
It must hold itself free to carry out its own mission and to work out a
possibly quite new form of obedience or resistance. It must not
sell this birthright for any conservative or revolutionary mess of
pottage.
God is love. Grace is God’s love
expressed. There is nothing we can do to earn such a gift, for
grace is always a gift of God alone. Grace is not a reward for
the good works we do, or for living a faithful life—God’s love is
given, not deserved. Jesus invites us to “abide in God’s
love”—that means to rest in love, to live in love, to serve out of
love. This is our faith, this is our present, this is our future,
this is our joy.
As we move into sharing in communion, I invite you
to respond to a litany based upon 1 Corinthians 13 with this
phrase: “Lord, forgive us.”
If we have spoken with the eloquence of poets and of angels but have no love,
Lord, forgive us.
If we have become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbals,
harsh words or hard condemnations,
Lord, forgive us.
If we’re so sure of ourselves that we have faith that can move mountains,
that only our perspective is right, but have no love,
Lord, forgive us.
If we have disposed of all we possess, or if we eagerly gather possessions to us,
but have no love,
Lord, forgive us.
If there are limits to our love’s endurance, our acceptance of others,
our willingness to give and to serve,
Lord, forgive us.
If, when all else has fallen, our love does not still stand,
Lord, forgive us.
As you receive the bread and cup today, I pray that
you may experience the overwhelming love of God—feel it bathing you,
brooding over you, opening up in you deep responses, that it may send
you transformed out into the world with a new and vital love for God
and all creation. May God’s spirit become your spirit, God’s love
become your love, God’s presence your life. Amen.
5 Real Road (corner of Stockdale & Real)
Bakersfield, CA 93309
Phone: 661-327-1609
FAX: 661-327-4443
Sunday Services & Church School: 10 AM
(Services last about an hour, dress is casual)
Nursery care available
E-mail: firstcong(at)postoffice.igalaxy.net
Webpage editor: dinah.campbell(at)gmail.com)
Free Counter | |
