Practicing Love

 

This week, we are focusing our intentions and attention on how to love God fully and let that love loose to those we encounter on our path of life ~ also known as our neighbors.  We are able to love, because we have first received love from God.  This was the truth at Christmas.  God’s love could no longer be confined or contained but came to us in the flesh and form of Jesus.  God’s love found a home in a manger (an animal’s feeding trough).  God’s love matured as Jesus grew in wisdom and in years (Luke 2:52).  Then, God’s love burst forth in the preaching, teaching, healing, and presence of Jesus as he wandered from community to community.  Note, this was not all pony rides and chocolate rivers for Jesus.  Everyone didn’t break out in songs and dance like in my favorite musicals.  Nope.  People got angry with Jesus.  Misunderstood Jesus.  Threated Jesus.  Eventually falsely accused him to get rid of him and his persist insistence that God is God, not Ceasar.  The gospel of Jesus confronts and challenges the gospels of domination and revenge and scapegoating ~ exposing these other “gospels” as false and that they will never lead us to full life.  And yet, the gospels of us verse them, might makes right, and if you are not with us, you must be my enemy still swirl and stir, especially in an election year.  Two thousand years of knowing the truth of loving God and neighbor, yet we still resist this way because we can’t take our eyes off the imaginary scoreboard of life ~ especially because we keep doom scrolling social media. 

 

Yet, to love God, we must marinate in God’s love.  As John Mark Comer says, you are constantly being formed by something.  Is it the news?  Is it the political landscape?  Is it your bank account or golf score or likes from friends on your recent post?  Is it God?  There have always been many gospels swirling and stirring in the air, both in Jesus’ day and in ours still today.  To focus our attention and intention on God will take effort and energy in following the way of Jesus.  Just as I can’t go out and run an entire marathon without weeks of practice, why do I think I can just flip a switch and start loving my enemies because I read a morning meditation?  Just as I can get physically injured if I run too fast or too far, so too I can get emotionally and spiritually injured by trying to love people ~ because people are messy (or like onions according to Shrek!).  We are complicated and contradictory mix of messiness and dustiness as we heard on Ash Wednesday.  True for me, you, and that person who doesn’t pick up their dog deposits from your front lawn…how rude!  If we don’t know ourselves fully, how can we claim to know another?  If we don’t love ourselves fully (which honestly, we tend to default to the factory setting of letting our inner critic have the last word rather than our inner ally), how in the world can we love another fully?  You can encounter God’s love in so many ways, there are so many paths of being formed and reformed by God’s love.  It starts with acknowledging where you feel most alive ~ where every fiber of your being tingles with enthusiasm (which literally means in theos or in God).  It might be sitting outside in the sun and feeling the wind.  It might be splashing in the Gulf waters remembering your baptism.  It might be music.  It might be good food with friends.  It might be silent prayer.  It might be reading.  It might be…fill in the blank here.  Now, go and find space in your life to be fully alive in ways that connect you to the Creator who longs to pour love into your life on this day.  Amen.