Skip to main content

I Love You Because God Loves Everybody

Barbara Brown Taylor remembers that explanation when she asked early in life why the Christians on campus kept saying they loved her. This is her reaction as recorded in An Altar in the World, "This may sound small, but I decided that was not enough for me. I did not want to be loved in general. I wanted to be loved in particular, as I was convinced God loved."

I think most people feel the same way. We want folks to love me, for me, not because some third party loves everybody. The problem is that all too often we behave as though we're doing something because God does it, or because God wants us to do it. That seems to me to miss the point of being Christian. We are called to be transformed into the likeness of God and that means that our behavior - our loving others - becomes more and more what we do because we love them. Eventually, our faith, our way of living is supposed to be ours in the fullest sense.

Taylor follows up immediately with this, "Plus, I am not sure it is possible to see the face of God in other people if you cannot see the faces they already have." If we cannot see people as they are, in the midst of their lives, struggles, fears, and desires, how do we propose to see God in them? Yes, everyone is made in the image of God and so God is there to be seen, but his appearance changes depending on the particular incarnation with which we are confronted at any moment. Unless we are sensitive enough to incarnation, we cannot say that we really see God in it.

God doesn't love you because He loves people; He loves you because well, He loves you. If we are God followers, then that is why we love others - because our tranformation does not allow any other course.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...
4 comments
Read more

Naaman's Dipping and Requests

The familiar story of Naaman dipping in the Jordan is a story with more than a few twists. Let's review the story first. Naaman we are told had been used by YHWH to punish Israel and our story describes him as a man of valor in high regard by his boss, the King of Syria the current thorn in the side of Israel. It turns out though that Naaman suffers from some sort of leprosy.  On one of Syria's raids into Israel, the Syrians captured an Jewish girl who had found her way into Naaman's household as a servant for his wife. Knowing of Naaman's illness, she suggests to her matron that there is a prophet in Israel who could help him. This message gets transmitted to Naaman who takes it to his boss. The boss - the king of Syria, tells Naaman to travel to Israel and gives him a letter to Israel's king directing that Naaman be healed. Upon Naaman's arrival in Israel he gives the letter to Israel's king who reacts in a panic. He does not even consider finding t...
4 comments
Read more