The following is the homily this blogger delivered in Christ Episcopal's Zoom worship service on January 30, 2022.
GOD IS LOVE
Those three words in some form or another is a truth expressed in every known spiritual or theistic religion.
As followers of Jesus, they have profound implications not only in understanding who God is, but who we are and why we are. If God is love, then we are made in the image of love and made to love God by loving that which God loves, in the way that God loves, and the way that God loves, the very nature of God, is the subject of our reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians; in particular, the portion of today’s reading that defines love.
Allow me to paraphrase and reread that portion substituting God for the word love:
“God is patient; God is kind; God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God does not insist on God’s own way; God is not irritable or resentful; God does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. God bears all things, has faith in all things, hopes in all things, endures all things. God never gives up.”
What Paul is describing is the unconditional love of God, the love that Jesus portrayed as the father in his parable of the Prodigal Son, the love exemplified in every step of his redemptive ministry, the love he pronounced when forgiving those who crucified him, and the Love that raised him to new life.
This is the love we were made from and the ministry of love we are called to.
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So how are we doing?
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It is good that God is patient. In the nearly twenty-one hundred years since Paul wrote this letter, we Christians, as a whole, continue to struggle with demonstrating God’s redeeming, unconditional love for all.
Jesus' approach to redemption was to forgive people, to heal people, as unconditionally as he loved them.
It’s unfortunate that we have been indoctrinated through these years to fall on the sword of our imperfections by pleading original sin as an excuse for failing to forgive and to love unconditionally, as Jesus did. Sin is not original to us, just as it was not original to Jesus. Sin came to us, as it always comes to us, a temptation wrapped as an opportunity to do things our way. This is why Jesus taught us to ask God to lead us away from temptation and the evil it causes.
What is original to us is the grace of being made in the image of God’s love, the grace which Jesus revealed to us and about us in himself.
That God does not insist on God’s own way is because God’s assessment of creation is that it is good and worthy of love, including the least of us and the worst of us. God has faith and hope in our original goodness even when we don’t. This is why Jesus taught us to ask that God’s will is done in our lives because it is the will of God for us to love.
The first letter of John sums this up nicely when it says:
“We are of God. So let us love one another because everyone who loves, knows they are born of God and knows God. For God is Love.”
May the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus enlighten and strengthen us to love. Amen.
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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