A Scarcity of Love

A Scarcity of Love--July 12, 2017

“So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Ephesians 2:17-18)

The fear is a killer—the fear that there won’t be enough love to go around.  That’s the fear that you lose sleep over.  That’s the fear that keeps me up at night.  It cuts to the quick.

Little children have it sometimes, about their siblings and their parents.  How can my parents love me and my brother, me and my sisters, completely and fully for all of us?  Isn’t there a limit to how much love they can spend on the others if they are still going to love me wholly?  How can mom and dad say to each of us, “I love you with all my heart?”  Can you remember, even if for only a moment, that fearful thought going through your mind—that there just wasn’t enough love to go around, and that you might be the one to get the short end of the stick?  Everything else in this life runs out at some point, we figure--doesn't that mean there must also be a scarcity of love?

To be honest, that’s not just a worry of the young. That fear is a vicious one with claws that can hang onto us and dig into us well after childhood.  Adult siblings still fight and fear over who will get more of their parents’ affection, as measured in inheritances and estates—perhaps not because of the cash value of things, but because we let dollar signs stand in as a gauge of love. 

Or we look at the busyness in the lives of other people in our families, people under our own roofs even, and we can’t help but fear that we will be lost in the cracks between their many commitments.  We ask, “Will there be time, and love, enough for me, too?” while the lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” play in the background of our heads.

Or it’s the worry of foreseeing your friends becoming more distant to pursue other things.  Whether it was watching them all go off in different directions after high school, or seeing the way their social lives change as new people come into their families—spouses, kids, etc., or seeing them be uprooted to move across country for a new job, or just watching them grow apart from you as they pursue other things.  There’s that same fear—that something else will come along and take the love that was yours, and consequently, that there won’t be enough love to go around.

Come on, let’s tell the truth here: these are real fears for us, and we are not children anymore.

And to be really and truly, even brutally honest, they are not foolish fears. 

With other people, other limited, finite, only-so-much-time-in-the-day people like you and me, there are limits to how much attention or love can go around.  Love is not just a feeling; it is expressed in time spent, energy expended, pain shared, and attention given undividedly. As Zadie Smith puts it, “Time is how you spend your love.”  And there is only so much of yourself you can give.  There is a limited number of people you can make (and mean) lasting commitments to before you run out of minutes or attention span.  So, yeah, the fears we feared as children are maybe not so childish—they are realities that go along with knowing your friends from grade school will not always be your friends. And even though you insist to your retiring coworker that you’ll still stay in touch, you and he both know that unless you make the time and expend the effort, that is a lie. There is a reason that we fear there won’t be enough love from others to go around, and that I will be left the odd one out: all too often, that is just the truth.

But…

But—things are different between us and God.  Different, honestly, from every other relationship in your life.  Because God truly isn’t limited in love, and God’s love really will go around for all, whole and complete and perfect.  Today’s verses from Ephesians are meant to wipe away the fear that makes us hostile toward each other.  When we are overcome with the fear that there won’t be enough of God’s love to go around, we start to see each other as competition: if God loves you, then I am threatened.  If God loves me, then I can hold that over against you, I think.  In the early church that fear was expressed as the Jewish versus Gentile conflict—each group was afraid that if God really accepted the other, that their own access to God was cut off.  “If God loves the law-keeping, tradition-observing Jewish Christians,” thought the Gentile Christians, “then it means God can’t love us, who don’t do all of that keeping kosher and the like.”  And on the other hand, the Jewish believers worried, “If God is accepting these new Gentile believers, then what are we—chopped liver?  Doesn’t it matter how hard we have tried to show God we love him?  Doesn’t that count for something?  Is God kicking us out?”  It’s the same old fear—the fear that the love will run out.

Maybe it’s an understandable fear, since every human relationship in our lives does come with limits, and we can only divvy up our time, our attention, our care, and our thoughts, so many ways for so many people.  But the difference, Paul says, is that God is unlimited.  How did Paul say it at the beginning of this chapter?  God wants us to know “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”  In other words, God’s love is so big and so full and so infinitely wide that it doesn’t detract in the least from me to know that God loves you. 

I know, I know—that really is different from the other loves in our human experience.  Everybody else can only spread themselves out so far.  With everybody else, the choice to give some of your time and attention to someone comes at the cost of not being able to spend that same time and attention on someone else.  You pick how you spend them, but you can only spend them once. 

But it isn’t that way with God.  It just ain’t so.  There is no scarcity of love.

Once we get that difference—that God’s love for you is not a loss to me—we can rejoice at the sheer immensity of God’s love.  We can be glad that God has brought “those who were near” and “those who were far away” all together into one.  We can, with tears of joy, be glad that each of us can come close to the Father and know we are deeply beloved.  Nobody gets shortchanged.

That is news the world deeply needs, because every other love it has met is limited.  God’s love, at last, is the one thing that we never have to fear running out of.  That’s the thing about God’s love—you can’t run out of it, you can’t run beyond it, and you can’t outrun it, either. There’s more than enough.

Lord God, let us believe the truth about your inexhaustible love for us.  We are almost afraid to believe it, because we have learned to live with limited love and to expect that there’s only so much to go around.  In your divine abundance, fill us up so that we are not threatened by the way you fill the people around us with your love, too.