God is love Reflection

A Reflection for V Easter                                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.   

May 3, 2015                                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 8:26-40               Psalm 22:24-30                       1 John 4:7-21              John 15:1-8

In today’s epistle lesson, the writer of the first letter of John wrote that God is love. At the Bible Study this week as we looked at the lessons for today, I asked each person to tell me about love. We got all sorts of responses, and mainly the respondents kept giving me examples and talking about how they wished that they could love like God loves. In the end they decided that the definition of love was a bit like Justice Potter Stewart’s statement in the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court opinion where he wrote that he could not define hard core pornography but “I know it when I see it.” 

Who is God and what is love? Aristotle posited that God was the “unmoved mover” which was developed by Thomas Aquinas as the standard definition of God in Christian faith. James Boice, a very popular 20^th Century conservative Evangelical preacher, proclaimed the exalted image of God as:  (1) creator of the universe standing over time and reigning over creation, (2) omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, (3) accountable to no one, acting with complete freedom from all external influences.

Yet, in tension with this view of God is the view put forward by the writer of John’s epistles, “God is love”. C. S Lewis wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

 

To define love is as fruitless a task as trying to define the indefinable of God; human words are just not capable of making a dent. The author of the Epistle uses the Greek word “Ginosko” which means “know”, but not in the way we “know” facts, but in the way we come to an understanding through experience and even in the way the word is used to mean intimate relationships. This kind of knowing is not book-knowledge but wisdom by living life fully aware in relationship. Last week I quoted from Teilhard de Chardin who defined matter as “spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”; in the same way, for me, God and love are not static nouns but verbs speeding by which slow down and caress us - and we almost always know it in hindsight when we are able to catch the fading action and say something like “Oh yes, now I know that is God, that is love.”  

Prose does not work, but maybe we can use poetry, like from the 2^nd verse of the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

St. Clare, who loved St. Francis of Assisi, said:

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others.

If the writer of 1^st John is correct, and God is love, and then how we “know”, understand, love is how we can attempt to understand God. This week we have had a couple exercises in the national news on how we attempt to understand love. There was a riot in Baltimore caused yet again by the official use of violence that was perceived by many residents as being part of the legacy of racism in this country. In that riot a mother saw her only son preparing to participate in the violent response to the violence. She charged into him and dragged him out of the line of danger. She used violence to keep her son from being violent and from what she thought was dangerous activity that might subject him up to a violent response. I don’t agree that violence is a way to teach non-violence, but she loved her son so much that she decided to risk his approval of her and, at least in this way, lived into the prayer of St. Francis to “not so much seek to be loved as to love.” Love is sometimes saying no. I would have preferred if she had hugged him, but I understand her fear. It is usually fear that drives us to violence, and as the writer of 1^st John suggests, that “perfect love drives out fear”. If only we believed that, for one of the ways we try to justify violence is to focus in on the “wrath of God” as a metaphor to excuse our own actions. Jesus commanded the sword to be put away when he was being arrested.

Another example of our attempt to understand love is the argument before the U.S. Supreme Court this week on the issue of same-gender marriage. My own view is that it is a question of how we really define marriage. For instance, in Dare County and in North Carolina when I fill out a marriage license, I send it to the Register of Deeds, and that makes sense if you understand that for most of the history of marriage until probably the middle of the 19^th and early 20^th  century, marriage was a transfer of property from the father of the bride to the husband of the bride. English Common Law ruled that “the man and woman become one” and that one is the husband.  When the justices asked about “traditional” marriage, they should be looking at ALL the traditi         on.  In the Prayer Book with which I was raised, the Marriage ceremony had the mandatory question, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” In the 1979 revision it is an option to ask, “Who presents this woman to be married to this man?”  In our heritage, if marriage is a contract, a legal contract by the state, certified by the state, then it does seem to be discrimination by a state to deny access to a contract. Contracts are not based on love but awareness that there is an exchange of goods and services between the party of the first part and the party of the second part. In that way it fits the usual definition of love in popular culture, which is that love is a cathexis, an emotional and mental investment, in a person, thing, or idea for the perceived benefit of the person doing the investment. One of the other Supremes, Diana Ross, sang about that kind of love all the time: “Baby love, my Baby love, I need you, oh how I need you.” It will be interesting to see how the other nine “Supremes” rule if marriage is about getting needs met. The state usually holds that contracts are null and void if there is an inequitable exchange of goods and services, or return on the investment, or the property was misrepresented, and the state calls that a divorce.

However, one of the arguments used is that marriage is a “sacred institution.” I am always thankful for the Bill of Rights which keeps the government out of the role of defining what is sacred; I am more than a little leery of the government telling me what God looks like. I see marriage as sacred, so that when we are able to see what love looks like between two people, we get a glimpse of what God looks like. Jesus and Paul saw even in the inequality of marriage in their time that God’s love could be made manifest as the couple followed Christ and respected, honored, forgave, and sacrificed themselves to each other.  I see God as graceful, who gives a covenant of love rather than a contract of obligations, and therefore see the couple in a marriage as being “ministers” of the sacrament – their ministry is to love each other and show us what God looks like in daily life. I cannot do magic and make a marriage sacred - I can only pray that the couple will empty themselves out of their own agendas so that they will be able to forgive, find hope, and love. If sacred marriage is the willingness to be humble ministers who understand the need for a power greater than themselves to help them keep their vows of mutual commitment to love, I have a hard time seeing what gender has to do with it. When Pat and I got married, no one in the government of Virginia quizzed us about whether our decision not to have children would make our marriage less sacred.

 All agree the Supreme Court will be making an historical statement, but time will tell if this case will be another Brown vs. the Board of Education” or another “Dred Scott” decision. However, the most important decision is the one we make each day in making a decision to love as God loves today.