Live in God’s Love

Today is Mothers’ Day.  It is a fortuitous coincidence that our collect and scripture readings are about love.  In the collect we prayed, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises.”  It is about loving God in all things, living in God’s love that I invite us to think about this morning.

One of the things I enjoy doing when the weather permits is to sit on our sun-porch and read a good book.  I like to watch as birds fly around and perch on the bird feeder in our side yard.  It is a way to relax, to enjoy the scenery, to observe people walking by with their young children or dogs, or ride past on their bikes. 

There are many ways to relax and allow one’s surroundings to fulfill our lives.  It might be as simple as sitting on the beach or sailing on the Bay, lounging on a hammock in the back yard, or taking a walk through the neighborhood.  These are a few ways that I feel we all live or abide within our created world, the world in which God is love.

When Jesus said to his disciples, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love,” he was saying something very revealing about God’s love.  This word, “love” was increasingly important as the years progressed following Jesus’ death and resurrection.  In the earliest gospel Mark never used the word, love, but Matthew and Luke, both written a few years later, used it only once.  Later when John wrote his gospel sometime around the year 90 or 100, he referred to it seven times.  Then in the First Letter of John the word love is used 18 times:  “Abide in my love.”

One of the offertory sentences we use is from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians,  “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.”  The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has a slightly different translation but the meaning is the same, “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us.” 

Walking in love, living in love, abiding in love are ways of being in God’s love.  When I think of “love” I am aware of several meanings we give to this word.  Among them are three types of love that we know and live by.  The first is “eros,” a love that is emotional and intimate as between two people.  The second is “philia,” brotherly or sisterly love, a love of friendship or the love of one’s neighbor.  The third understanding of love is “agape.”  Agape is the love of God that transcends all loves and what it means to live a godly life, a life in the Spirit of God.  God is in us and we are in God, it is immanent and transcendent at the same time.

In an article about our scripture readings for today, the author Susan Palo Cherwein states, “Agape is a conscious, intentional, selfless love, a sign of the indwelling God.  It is ‘I in them and them in me.’  It wells up from the undepleted love of God, changing us, changing life, changing the world…. Every act of love increases Christ’s sway on the universe.  All of our smallest acts, lived out of love, have the potential of helping God’s reign come.”

When we pray the Lord’s prayer we say,  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  This is a prayer that acknowledges God’s indwelling spirit abiding in all creation; it abides in us and we live within God. 

There is a wonderful book titled The God We Never Knew, by the late Marcus Borg.  In it the author offers insightful ideas about how Christians today can come to know God in their lives and faithfully respond to God.  It is a book about living within the compassionate love of God and being in relationships of love that really matter.

Marcus Borg makes the claim that "God is all around us" and "we live within God."  "Whatever opens our hearts to the reality of the sacred is what we should be engaged in....The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge.  It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later.  It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now.  Spirituality is about this process:  the opening of the heart to the God who is already here."

"The fruit of this process is compassion..... God's will for us...is to become more compassionate beings.....If spirituality -- a life of relationship with the Spirit of God -- does not lead to compassion, then either it is life in relationship to a different spirit or there is a lot of static in the relationship.  The absence or presence of compassion is the central test for discerning whether something is 'of God.'  As the primary gift of the Spirit, compassion is the primary sign of spiritual growth." 

Compassion is another word about God’s love for all people.  God is love; God is Compassion.  The relationships we share that draw us into this compassionate love are what the Christian life is about.  Let us then live in love and abide in God in all we do. Amen.