Finding Starlight--September 20, 2023

Finding Starlight--September 20, 2023

"But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him'." [Lamentations 3:21-24]

Oscar Wilde said it this way: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

I think of him when I hear these words from the underrated book of Lamentations, a collection of poems in the Bible that are all written entirely from the gutter of exile.  This is one of those books we don't often dare to crack open in our Sunday worship or even Bible studies, largely because it is so relentlessly raw with grief, rage, and heartache at watching the invading Babylonian Empire destroy the city of Jerusalem and its Temple, leaving misery and tragedy behind in their wake. For many of us, the closest we have ever come to experiencing that kind of communal destruction might have been the attacks on September 11, 2001; but to be honest, even that day's destruction didn't compare in scope to what the people of Judah went through.  We were quickly told to buy more merchandise to keep the economy going after those attacks, and many lives went more or less back to normal before long.  But for those who lived through the seige and destruction of Jerusalem, it was like having everything sacred razed to the ground. And in the aftermath, all there was to be done was to grieve and weep angry tears.  Lamentations, as its name suggests, is an anthology of laments--songs and poems that just cry out with sorrow and anger over seeing everything the poet treasured reduced to rubble.  And it is almost--almost!--utterly hopeless, too.

There is, in fact, one passage of hope in the whole book, and you've just read most of it.  It is the one bright spot in a book full of gloom and shadow, like finding the one star in the sky on a dark night while you're standing with Oscar Wilde in the gutter.

And yet--that one star sure makes a difference, doesn't it?  The pinpoints of light that come from these verses in Lamentations make the whole book feel different.  The grief is real, to be sure.  The pain is undeniable and unresolved, that is true.  And the fact that these words of hope come, not at the end as a nice bow on the whole thing, but in the middle and in the thick of the tragedy, makes them honest.  The poet hasn't just said, "Well, I have to find a happy ending here, so I'll sweep all the sadness under the rug," but rather he has found genuine hope in the midst of the sorrow.  He is still in the gutter, but he has learned to look at the stars, too.  And that makes all the difference.

The poet here in Lamentations has found one bright spot in all the terrible dark--and it is love.  In particular, it is "the steadfast love of the LORD," which is unchanging and unending.  It is in knowing that God's love is relentless and constantly renewing that the poet dares to hope.  And that, as I think we are discovering this month, is exactly what happens when we are held by God's love: it's not that the love of God lets us pretend we don't have to deal with the terror and tragedy of life, but rather that the love of God lets us dare to hope while we acknowledge them and bear them.  It is God's faithful love that lets us see starlight from the gutter, without pretending that the starlight erases the pain around us (or within us).

For the writer of Lamentations, the faithful love of God gives hope because even though he hasn't seen God bring comfort yet, he is convinced that God will act for good.  Hope does that: it is able to say, "I don't see healing yet, but I trust that the Healer will move."  Hope starts from the assurance of God's love and insists that there is light to be found even when you're in the depths.  There's a Twitter account I follow whose writer will just periodically post the same recurring sentence: "You are not alone, and this will not last forever."  And I love that she just knows that sometimes that's what people need to hear, even complete strangers. Hope is like that: it keeps asserting that whatever rotten thing we are going through will not get the last word, and it assures us that we are not alone while we go through it.  I think that's what the writer of Lamentations has in mind with these few little verses in the midst of such heavy and horrendous circumstances.  He won't pretend that everything is all better, and he won't lie to himself or his people that they don't have to bear the devastation of losing their city, their temple, their king, and their old way of life.  But he does know that they are not alone, and that because they are accompanied by a God who faithfully loves them, they know that the sorrow will not last forever.  It's not a lot to go on--like the light from a few stars in the night sky, or a single tweet's worth of words amid all the endless shouting and weeping in the background--but it is enough.

I don't know what you're going through right now, and maybe right now you are enjoying a season of good things.  But I'd wager that you've been in one of those times before when it felt like everything was falling apart, or that maybe you're in one of those times now.  And while I can't pretend I have the power to wave some magic wand and wish all the loss or pain away, I can offer you these same words that the writer of Lamentations gives, like it is a bit of starlight for people trudging through the gutter: even when everything else is falling apart, God's love is new every day, and God will not abandon us, not even if we've turned our back on God ourselves.  God's love gives us hope enough to say even now, "You are not alone, and this will not last forever."

If you have ever been in a difficult season and found it somehow more hurtful when someone offered empty platitudes (maybe about how "God will never give you more than you can handle"), the words of Lamentations speak an honest hope we need to hear.  They come from a place of real suffering, and yet the speak of a love that keeps them looking up at the stars.  If the writer of Lamentations can find hope in God's faithfulness from the ditch he was in, then maybe there is reason for us to keep our eyes open to the light, too, even at our most gutter-bound moments.

May it be true for us when we need it, even today.

Lord God, let your love be steadfast for us today, so that we can keep looking up at your light.

On Being Somebodies--September 19, 2023

On Being Somebodies--September 19, 2023

"See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's chosen now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.  And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure." [1 John 3:1-3]

You know who needs to be reminded that they're somebodies?  The folks who have been treated like nobodies.  You know who finds comfort from being assured they are children of God?  The ones who have been told before that they don't belong and never can.  And do you know who is desperate to know they're beloved?  The people who have had it ingrained in them over and over again that they aren't worth anything.

And in case we relatively comfortable churchgoing practitioners of Respectable Religion have forgotten, the early Christians knew precisely what it was like to be all of the above. To read both the New Testament itself and the criticisms that the Greco-Roman world lobbed at the early church, one of the most scandalous things about those first generations was that the Christian community included so many people without status, class, or high reputation.  Paul would regularly point in his letters to how many of his readers were written off as un-schooled, un-impressive, and generally un-important.  They were the "weak," the "lowly," and the "foolish," in the eyes of the powerful and well-connected.  The Christian community included the enslaved, and not just those wealthy enough to study philosophy and religion in their spare time.  It included women and not just men, including in leadership, from the very beginning.  It included Gentiles, Samaritans, and eunuchs along with Judeans who could recite their Israelite pedigrees to perfection.  They were people that the world by and large wrote off as unworthy outcasts and negligible nobodies--and yet, those first Christians dared to believe that the world's appraisal was wrong.  The early church believed, and reminded one another, that they were not just "somebodies" rather than "nobodies" but no less than the very children of God.

And it was that claim that gave them hope--hope to keep going in life, one day at a time, but also hope to continue following the way of Jesus, even when it seemed pointless or dangerous.  It was the deep confidence that they were precious to God even when the world thought they were disposable, and that they were beloved even when their wider society saw them only as troublemakers and disturbers of the peace, that gave those early Christians the ability to endure.  And it was their hope, too, that indeed one day it would be clear that they were not the "nobodies" of the world after all, which allowed them to keep on striving to love the way Jesus loved, even if the world didn't recognize why that mattered.

That's how the writer of what we call First John addresses his readers.  They are children of God, even if the world doesn't agree.  They are precious and chosen, even if the rest of society sees them as low-class riff-raff.  They are living reflections of the character of Christ, even if on some days and in some situations they don't seem to look much like Jesus.  Because their status as children of God is a given (and not up for debate), John's readers start from a place of knowing they are accepted.  And because they know they are beloved, they can keep putting in the energy and effort it takes to respond to the world like Jesus--to love like Jesus does, to act like Jesus does, and to speak like Jesus does.  They keep on striving at that--to "purify themselves, just as he is pure"--to embody more fully what God has already said about them: they are children of God.

Of course, anybody who has ever loved and nurtured a child knows the same, too: when we remind children (ours, our grandchildren, students in a classroom, or young ones in our local congregation) that they are precious and beloved, they have a way of stepping into that identity.  When we remind children that they belong, that they are worthy, and that they are reflections of God's love in the world, they are enabled to embody all of that.  They will fail at it sometimes (as will we grown-ups), and they will have moments and even seasons of struggle.  But when we make the effort to remind them that they are chosen, that they are special, that they are beloved, and that they are somebodies, they will have less and less reason to become bullies who push other kids down in order to make themselves feel more important.  And they will have the resources to endure when somebody else comes along who tells them they're nobodies.  Well, if you and I have seen that with the children around us, then maybe we can recognize what First John is doing here, as he writes to a whole church that often needed to be reminded that they were God's children.

And maybe we can recognize our own need to hear it as well.  Maybe, amid all the voices in our culture that might tell us we are only important if we're in the top tax bracket, or that your opinion only counts if your preferred political party is in power, or that you're only a "somebody" if you fit someone else's mold of what a Respectable Religious Person is supposed to look like, we need to hear First John say to us as well, "You are chosen.  You are beloved.  You are a child of God."  Maybe that's part of why so much of what we do on Sunday mornings (at least this is certainly true of the Lutheran tradition in which I have grown up) is centered on reminding us who and whose we are.  We are re-membered--put back together again--and reshaped with the identity we have in God's love.  We keep being reminded that we are God's children so that we will, like those first century Christians to whom First John was written, hold onto the hope that keeps us striving to love like Jesus.  And when we are clear deep down what God says about us, we will be able to keep spending our energy and effort to love like Jesus, even if it seems like a waste to the rest of the world.  Hope does that to you--it gives you the power to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the direction you are pointed, even if everybody else thinks it's a waste.  

Today, then, remember who and whose you are--you, too, dear one, are a child of God.  And if that's true, well, then so are two other conclusions: for one, God's opinion of you holds no matter what anybody else says about you.  And just as important, we who know we the power of being called children of God will not demean anybody else as being "nobodies," because we ourselves are learning that God has a thing for taking the nobodies and outcasts and claiming them as beloved children.

Lord Jesus, remind us whose we are, so that we will reflect your love more clearly in this day.

Grounds for Hope--September 18, 2023

Grounds for Hope--September 18, 2023

"...and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." [Romans 5:4b-5]

It's hard to risk putting yourself out there in life... because it is so easy to end up disappointed.

That seems to me to be the catch of loving anybody in this life, and also the price of hoping for anything in this world, too.  Both hope and love require taking a risk, and none of us is very good at being vulnerable, especially not in a culture that teaches us to project strength and make ourselves look "tough" or "great" in order to survive.  

Live long enough on this planet, and you'll get hurt. That by itself make it easy to put up defense mechanisms around ourselves like city walls to keep the pain of disappointment at bay.  You close people off.  You don't let yourself get too excited about possibilities or opportunities, because you're so afraid deep down that they won't pan out.  You don't open yourself to relationships or friendships, because you've just gotten let down too many times before.  I keep thinking of the song, "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" from The Music Man, and how easy it is to stop putting ourselves out there for other people, because we just don't want to get our hearts broken... again.  

Now, to be sure, there's a certain logic to that approach with the world, a sort of practical pessimism, but it is very easy for that mindset to harden into bitterness, paranoia, and hostility toward everybody.  After all, you can't be let down by a close friend if you treat everybody as a stranger or an enemy, I suppose.  And yet... that seems a terrible way to live a lifetime.

That's why, I believe, the voices of the Scriptures keep pushing us to take the risk of hoping in this life, exactly because hope and love are intertwined.  In these words from his letter to the Christians in Rome, the apostle Paul describes the community of Jesus' followers as one that practices hope, precisely because of God's love.  "Hope does not disappoint us," he writes, "because God's love has been poured into our hearts..."  The Greek we translate as "disappoint" is even stronger, actually--it has more of the feel of saying, "Hope doesn't put us to shame," which is honestly a risky thing to say about hope, since we all have lived through times when our hopes were disappointed, our risk of putting ourselves out there blew up in our faces, and we got hurt by being hopeful.  Anybody who ever rooted for the home team and saw them lose knows that hoping can be painful, much less anyone who ever prayed for a recovery that never came, or longed for a reconciliation in an estranged relationship that never materialized, or waited for a particular outcome that just failed to happen.  And when those things happen, we often find ourselves ashamed for ever hoping in the first place.

And yet for Paul, our hope doesn't disappoint, because it is grounded in God's kind of love.  And God's kind of love is not only reliable for us to pin our hopes on, but also gives us the courage to risk hope in the rest of our lives, too.  We can dare to hope in this life, to risk putting ourselves out there rather than being guarded cynics who wallow in expecting the worst, because we start from a place of knowing we are held by the Love that will not let us go.  Sure, other things and people and wishes in life are unreliable.  Sure, your team will sometimes lose, the diagnosis will not come back clear, and the people you counted on will flake out on you from time to time.  But (and maybe it is only ever hope that allows us to speak that word "but") despite the ways other people, circumstances, and systems will let us down, God's love is unshakeable, unconditional, and unstoppable.  And because God's love includes the whole world (that's basic John 3:16-Christianity-101 level stuff there), there is always grounds for hoping that even our worst circumstances can be used for good by the God who loves.

That's different, of course, from saying, "Christian hope means that everything wish you make will come true," but it does mean that God is both able and willing to take the worst  catastrophes of our lives and to fashion good from the broken pieces.  And it's not just a hypothetical or some abstract thought experiment--we don't just believe that "theoretically God COULD take our ugliest situations and weave them into something beautiful," like the old philosophical debates about whether God is powerful enough to do X or almighty enough to do Y, or the old riddle about whether God is able to make a stone so heavy that even God couldn't lift it.  Paul doesn't say "Hope doesn't disappoint, because we have a theological argument that says God could, in theory, do good when we cannot see how," but rather, "Hope doesn't disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into us, and God's love irrevocable."  It's God's love that gives us reason to hope, not merely our theorizing and theologizing that gives us grounds for hope.

And that, dear ones, is where we begin today--with hope.  In particular, we face today with the hope that comes from God's love, a love that is both for us and in us.  As we explore in the coming days how Christ-like love leads us to "always hope" (or "hope all things," as the familiar translation puts it), remember where we begin.  In a world full of shakable and uncertain things, we start with God's love within us, and that gives us the courage to risk hoping even with our eyes wide open to all the disappointments and letdowns to be found around (and within) us.  We start with God's love--that is our ground for hope.

Lord God, help us to know and sense your love for us, and let it make us brave enough to risk putting ourselves out there in the world... which you also love.

What To Do With Our Hands--September 7, 2023

What To Do With Our Hands--September 7, 2023

"For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain." [1 Thessalonians 3:5]

I have a working theory about worry, and it goes like this: worry is the form that love takes when we don't know what to do next. In most cases, that means the reasons for our worry are not bad in and of themselves--they may be quite noble, in fact. You care about the people who are back roads during the thunderstorm during deer season, so you worry until they've made it home. You are concerned about family members working or traveling in other countries, because they are not there in the room with you for you to guarantee their safety. You don't want to see your friends approaching retirement lose their nest-egg, so you worry when the Dow Jones has a string of bad days. It is all very well-intentioned, and kind of sweet, I suppose. But let's be honest, too, this kind of worry is just a bit futile. Worry is perhaps the spiritual and mental equivalent of nervous pacing--you wish you could do something rather than nothing to help a situation, but either you are physically unable to do it or can't think of what to do. That's just the nature of the beast here.

If I seem to be a little soft here on worry and worriers, I will own the fact that I am wired to be a worrier myself. Perhaps I'm just trying to rationalize the irrational, but I really do think that worry can be a sign that you are alive--indeed, that you are aware of the troubles in the world and concerned about how they will affect the people care about. And with that confession out there, I have to tell you that it is of some comfort to me to know that Paul found himself worrying sometimes. And at least here in 1 Thessalonians 3:5, the worry seems to fit my working theory--Paul loves this congregation he had spent a great deal of time and energy in, and even from a distance he cared about how they were doing. But he realized that there was nothing he could do on his own to keep them from every danger. But at some point, he stopped stewing and sent his co-worker in the gospel, Timothy, to check in with good old First Church of Thessalonica. And Paul shares with us that he really was stewing over this. His theology told him that he could trust a good and strong Savior to preserve these Christians in the faith despite the insidious temptations of the devil. But we humans are more than strictly brains, and Paul's emotions and affections started whispering these doubts to him. And so concern became anxiety, and anxiety became worry, and before very long, Paul was pacing the floors wondering about his friends far away. The really bright insight that Paul offers us here is that at some point, he realized that just stewing about the worry wasn't doing anybody any good. And so, even if it turned out (as it did in the end) that he was all worked up and worried about nothing, Paul needed to send Timothy so that Paul could unclench his nervous spirit and get back to his own work. That's really the double-edged sword when we let worry get out of control--not only are you spending a lot of energy getting worked up about something that isn't helping the ones you're worrying about, you're also keeping yourself from using any of that energy for something productive. Up to the moment that Paul decided to send Timothy to reconnect with their friends in Thessalonica, he was earning ten out of ten for loving concern, but he was failing in terms of efficiency, of usefulness--his loving concern was just spinning its wheels and grinding its gears.

We Christians are going to have to learn to live with a certain amount of worry, and a certain amount of inefficiency in this life. We cannot help but care about others--our friends, our families, our fellow congregation members, and the needs of our community, country, and world. We are made for connection and love just being human, and on top of that, then as followers of Jesus we are called into a life of love of neighbor that means we will care about the needs of those around us. But at the same time, we are not given unlimited power or knowledge. So there will be times when we are concerned about people we cannot see, or times when we do not know what to do to help them. We are going to have to get used to a certain amount of worry in this life. And yet we are not called to wallow in it, or to celebrate worry for its own sake. Worry is a side effect, or a byproduct, that is going to be produced occasionally when people love but do not have the power to know or fix all things. But it is largely a waste of a byproduct. Like the sludgy mess than comes out of a mine, it's not good for much of anything of its own, except to tell you that the mine is operating. The coal is what will burn--the sludge is something that can't be avoided if you're going to mine the coal that you're after--it is a sign that our process is rather inefficient, but is at least doing something. (We can have the discussion about the value and perils of coal mining on another day--right now, the metaphor about worry will suffice, I hope.)

So at some point, we have to decide how much of our energy we want to pour into creating more worry, and at what point we want to redirect our energy into something more useful and valuable. If we take Paul seriously and learn from his experience, we can come to that point sooner rather than later. We can decide that anxious pacing in an empty room doesn't do much good for anybody, and we can figure out how best to channel the love we already have into efforts that will either help those we worry about or allow us to let go of the worry enough to get back to whatever it is we really are called to be about. In our day, we are blessed with much quicker ways of releasing that worry than Paul had at his disposal. While Paul was easily looking at weeks between sending Timothy and hearing back from him, we can make a phone or send an email and have near instant response that lets us either be a help or let go of our worry. The question, then, today, is whether we will follow Paul's example and allow our worry to be rechanneled so that love can do something good in the day we have been given.

O Lord God, you must laugh and hurt for us at the same time, knowing how much of ourselves we waste letting well-intentioned love be clenched up in worry. Give us relief, Lord, and use the love you have placed in us in constructive ways.

Strong Enough--September 6, 2023

Strong Enough--September 6, 2023

“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” [Colossians 3:12-14]

Nobody is saying it is easy. Just that it is worth it.

I’m not usually one to go looking for deep spiritual truths in Will Smith-driven summer blockbusters, but you can learn that lesson from the 1997 hit Men in Black. There’s a scene pretty early on in the movie where Will Smith finds out he has been invited to join an elite—but absolutely top-secret—agency that handles trouble from space-aliens who are living among us on Earth. Like everything in life, the offer has pluses and minuses: if he takes the job and puts on "the last suit you’ll ever wear” (the stylish but non-descript black suit and tie is the uniform of the Men in Black), he will get to see unbelievable sights, do incredible things, and know secrets that most of us poor unknowing schlubs couldn’t dream of. But on the other hand, it will mean leaving behind a whole life, and his old identity—his old job, old interests, old clothes, and old name. Even his fingerprints will have to be erased.

So before he makes the decision (and given that there have been a couple of sequels and now a reboot to the movie, you already know that he decides to do it), Will Smith’s character asks Tommy Lee Jones, a veteran member of the Men in Black, “Is it worth it?” And carefully but confidently, Jones gives his answer, “Oh, yeah, it’s worth it… if you’re strong enough.”

Well, there’s the rub. Putting off the old self (even, like in the movie, literally having your old identity erased from every record or memory) and putting on the new self in Christ is not easy stuff. And it’s not easy precisely because it requires love. And Christ-like love—love for neighbor, stranger, and enemy, as well as for those we are privileged to call sisters and brothers in Christ—is tough stuff.

Not because it requires heroics, mind you. Christ-like love is tough for almost the opposite reason—it requires ordinariness. Paul says we are to clothe ourselves “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” Those would just be empty words or concepts if they didn’t show up in the little actions, the small but powerful words, the extra bit of attention shown to someone when you were already busy, the willingness to go out of your way or inconvenienced without getting a parade thrown in your honor for doing it. Love—the kind we are clothed with in Jesus—is difficult to practice, because it’s not about cliché, choreographed (and often empty and faux-heroic) gestures like heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or sweeping string music in the background. It’s about the little moments, the details, where compassion is practiced. It’s about the little trespasses being forgiven without drama or a fuss. It’s about small moments of patience, where you are willing to be delayed or put to a bit of trouble or go out of your way, regardless of how you feel about doing it. It is about the small moments of courage when you speak up for someone else, even if you run the risk that others won't like it, or when you call out the casual mean-ness you've heard another would-be follower of Jesus use against someone else. These are moments that come and go, and it is their smallness that makes them challenging--there's usually no fanfare or drum-roll, only the calling to be decent and kind when no one else is looking.

Practicing Christ-like love is hard because it summons us out from the limelight and onto our knees at the water basin, or behind the scenes, or just plain out of notice. That is, of course, the very nature of love, which isn’t all that interested at pointing to itself, but is much more interested in turning toward the other. That will chafe against every instinct in our bodies and spirits, which want to make a mark and leave an impression and get the recognition for all the important “stuff” we do around here. So, yes, it will be hard for us to “clothe ourselves with love”… but it will be worth it.

This conversation—the one we are having right now—is what makes this whole business about “clothing yourself with love” more than just a lovely bit of poetry. We could just have left it at that. We could have just said, “Oh, isn’t it nice to talk about love, and let’s pretend we’re all just draped in love, wrapped up in love, swathed in love…” and never gotten around to actually saying or doing what love really looks like. We need to be clear then in this moment. If we are going to proceed any further in the Christian life—today, or ever—we have to understand it will mean learning the hard work of loving people, in all their (and our!) messy details, at inconvenient times, even when they won’t understand or see what you are doing.

It is hard to take off the old self and put on the new. But is it worth it?

Yeah… it’s worth it. The love of God is strong enough.

Lord God, clothe us with your love, and let it pull us into your mission in the world today.

Defiant Love--September 5, 2023

Defiant Love—Friday, November 22, 2013

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…” (Ephesians 2:4-5)

See? A “but.” More importantly, a “But God…”

But is one of those great words that says a lot in three letters. It is adversative. In other words, it means, “Regardless of whatever just came before, this next thing is true anyway, even in spite of what I just said.” The word and is practically just a plus sign—it can be as dull as your shopping list: I need eggs, and milk, and bread, and canned tomatoes, and on and on and on. But each of those things could go on a list with anything else and still not really relate to each other. The word “but” has a certain defiance to it, sort of an in-your-face quality.

Hold onto that feeling as you read these verse from Ephesians again: even though we were dead in sins, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us… made us alive.” We were dead, but God made us alive with Christ. We were turned away from God, mired in our own messes and sin, but God put our sins away and pulled us out when we couldn’t even ask for a life-preserver on our own. We didn’t have a thing to offer with which to buy, earn, deserve, or merit a new life, but God just up and gave us that new life by grace.

I don’t know that I ever really thought about it like this before, but all of this means that God's kind of love is really a kind of defiant thing, isn’t it? God's kind of love is given unconditionally, by grace.  It is God’s way of saying, “I don’t care what you say you’ve done—I’m going to love you anyway. I don’t care what was in your past, what is still going on in your present, and what you have yet to do wrong in your future—I’m doing good to you anyway, and will be faithful to you.” Defiant love doesn’t take a look at the evidence and decide to be kind to us because we have proven our worthiness.

Martin Luther said it this way in the last thesis of his Heidelberg Disputation from 1518: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” In other words, unlike stingy, finite human love, God doesn’t have an imaginary standard he carries around to compare us to, and then only love us if we meet the standard, but God finds us as we are and then makes us into new creations in spite of what we were. That’s what grace is like—God’s wonderfully stubborn unwillingness to give up on us despite the fact that we don’t bring anything to the table but our brokenness, and God’s passionate determination to make us lovely by loving us. Grace is God’s obstinate refusal to let our dead-ness be the end of the story. Grace is what it looks like when God takes a look at the shipwrecks we have made with our lives and God says, “But…” to it.

Maybe we need to add a verse to the old song, something like this (I expect you’ll know the tune to sing it to):

Defiant grace, how bold the sound

That took me as I was!

No points to earn it could be found:

Your love said, “Just because.”

For whatever else has come before, in Jesus Christ God has said, “But still…” over your life and mine. But still I claim you as my own. But still I am trading your stale-in-the-coffin deadness for my gift of stone-rolled-away-from-the-tomb life. But still my love will be unswerving and unfading, despite your fickle and flaky faithfulness sometimes."

Let’s sing the song, and live our lives, like that is true.

Lord God, thank you for your grace that defiantly refuses to let our deadness be the last word over us.

Plant Corn, Get Corn—September 1, 2023

 

Plant Corn, Get Corn—September 1, 2023

“So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from his is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” (1 John 4:16-21)

I am forever indebted to the Pennsylvanian saints who have taught me the expression, “Plant corn, get corn.” That little proverb has taught me a great deal about this passage from 1 John. And about the love of God everywhere else, too.

Surely, such an obvious truth would have been a no-brainer to even a child of the suburbs like me, but for whatever reason, it has only been in the recent years, where I picked up that expression, that it all clicked. You plant corn, you are going to get corn. No question. And the usual application of that pithy little aphorism is equally true, too. Most often, I hear it in reference to family resemblances: so-and-so acts just like her mother, or such-and-such a person ends up in the same patterns as his father. It’s no surprise to anybody when those things happen, because, hey, you plan corn, you are going to get corn.

And, oddly enough, that’s just how it is between us and God. We, who have been grabbed hold of by the love of God, we are going to love others, too, the same way, because God’s love has taken root in us. It really is almost an organic connection between God's action and ours. God's love produces exactly what you would expect in us—little echoes of that same love. It's not like a vending machine where you put in coins, and something very different—candy, or pop, or gum—comes out on the other side. It's not that God puts love into us and expects to get something else back as payment or something worth the cost of that love out of us. It’s more like planting seeds. God plants seeds of divine love into us, and—of course, it's only natural!—that same kind of divine love sprouts up in the soil of our hearts, putting out buds and fruit for others, and even sending out little missionary seeds like dandelion wisps to take root in others, or new stalks of corn with new kernels to become the next year’s crop, if you want to stick with the same plant in your mental picture. God’s love for us, which always comes first, then does something within us so that we bear that love to the world; and the world will see what God is like because they have seen it in us. Plant corn, get corn.

That’s why 1 John isn’t bogged down by fears of God’s judgment in all of this passage about loving others. We don’t have to be afraid anymore of whether we are doing “enough,” or whether we are going to be “zapped” for our lives not looking godly enough. That is the thinking of fear, and as John says here, genuine love casts out fear—the same language the biblical writers use for what Jesus would do to a demon: exorcize it. We don’t have to be afraid that our efforts won’t live up to our quota, or that God will one day wake up and realize that we aren’t carrying our share of the load and kick us out of the family. No, God’s love is going to do its thing in us. God has planted corn—we are going to be the corn that God planted. It may take a while, and we may waste a lot of time complicating things for God, too, because we are still in a lot of ways stinkers. But God is going to bring love out of us because God’s own life dwells within us. God, John says, “abides” in us, and we “abide” in God, too.

So, in the end, if we find ourselves having to ask the question, “Why should I do good, loving things to other people?” we are missing the point. It’s not a matter of being afraid we’ll go to hell for not doing a sufficient amount of good deeds. We don’t do good things in order to get on God’s good side or rack up heaven points, either. And yet on the other hand, they are not merely an optional “extra-credit” assignment for those select few who want to ‘wow’ God. It’s not about fear, and it’s not about bonus-points. It’s just what happens when God loves you first—love transforms. Love works its way into the nooks and crannies of your soul. Love eventually seeps out of you. God has planted it in you—what else do you expect will come out?

Lord God, let your love take hold and take root in us, and then let us be more and more moved naturally to do what your love leads us to do. Grow corn in us today, God. Grow corn.