Psalm 89:1-4 (The Message)
Your love, O God, is my song, and I’ll sing it!
I’m forever telling everyone how faithful you are.
I’ll never quit telling the story of your love--
how you built the cosmos and guaranteed everything in it.
Your love has always been our lives’ foundation,
your fidelity has been the roof over our world.
“I’ll never quit telling the story of your love...” The theme for this last Sunday in Advent is LOVE. In the past three weeks we’ve explored Hope and Peace and Joy — each of them so important in our understanding (such as it is) as well as our relationship with God. But the One who holds all of these — and all of us — is Love. Without love we do not have hope or peace or joy.
I shouldn’t have to explain that we’re not talking about romantic love here — although that is a part of the overall package. We’re talking of the love that gives of itself, that recognizes that all we are is a gift from the One who loves us more than we can imagine. Love that sees the Divine in every person we meet.
The Old Testament prophets don’t speak too much about love — they are more about obedience and faithfulness. There are stories of loving actions but the word itself as we use it doesn’t play a large role in the Hebrew scriptures. It isn’t until the One they were waiting for does finally arrive that we hear the word spoken so often. It is Jesus who speaks to us of love.
When challenged on what is the greatest of the commandments, Jesus answered, quite properly, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” but then he followed that immediately with, “A second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” These two are inextricably linked — we must love God with everything we have, but in order to do that we must love our neighbor, but to love our neighbor we must first love ourselves. In the words of playwright/actor/poet Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Love is love is love is love is love.”
Love is a unity. It cannot be diced up into little separate boxes. I’ll love this, but I’ll hate that. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not just what we feel, it’s what we believe. Love either is — or it isn’t. As the psalmist says: Your love, O God, is my song, and I’ll sing it!
So sing your song of love into the world and welcome the Child of Love into your hearts and souls and into this oh-so-needy world. Come, Lord Jesus! Welcome Love!
Amen.
I shouldn’t have to explain that we’re not talking about romantic love here — although that is a part of the overall package. We’re talking of the love that gives of itself, that recognizes that all we are is a gift from the One who loves us more than we can imagine. Love that sees the Divine in every person we meet.
The Old Testament prophets don’t speak too much about love — they are more about obedience and faithfulness. There are stories of loving actions but the word itself as we use it doesn’t play a large role in the Hebrew scriptures. It isn’t until the One they were waiting for does finally arrive that we hear the word spoken so often. It is Jesus who speaks to us of love.
When challenged on what is the greatest of the commandments, Jesus answered, quite properly, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” but then he followed that immediately with, “A second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” These two are inextricably linked — we must love God with everything we have, but in order to do that we must love our neighbor, but to love our neighbor we must first love ourselves. In the words of playwright/actor/poet Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Love is love is love is love is love.”
Love is a unity. It cannot be diced up into little separate boxes. I’ll love this, but I’ll hate that. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not just what we feel, it’s what we believe. Love either is — or it isn’t. As the psalmist says: Your love, O God, is my song, and I’ll sing it!
So sing your song of love into the world and welcome the Child of Love into your hearts and souls and into this oh-so-needy world. Come, Lord Jesus! Welcome Love!
Amen.
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