John 15:9-10, 12, 16-17
9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love....
12 This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.....
16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Today is Valentine’s Day. That’s why I chose to begin today, not with a story, but with some words from Jesus on the subject of Love.
Valentine’s Day not on the lectionary calendar, of course, but it is a day that is almost impossible to ignore because of all the marketing that is attached to it. This year, because it lands right next to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, it has me thinking of Love and Lent and how they intersect.
The story we will be reliving through Lent is not about the Hearts and Flowers kind of love, not the romantic love of a Hallmark movie, but a love that is much deeper, more earth shattering, more life changing—the love of God.
So much that passes for Christian thinking in the media these days appears to have completely lost the message when it comes to love. What we seem to get instead is a perversion of what Christian love should be— a “love” that preaches hell and damnation, a love that closes doors, shuts people out, demands allegiance to a particular dogma—and one that too often overtly preaches hatred against God’s “other” children. And I do say “other” in quotes here because it is always the “other” who is the recipient of this vengeful, exclusionary, perverted form of Christianity.
Unfortunately, it is this distorted version of Jesus’ love that shouts the loudest and thus gets more attention right now in our history, making it all the more necessary that the rest of us seek for the actual love of Jesus so that we, in turn, can share that love with the world around us.
Love should not ever be a cage that locks us into a single option. God’s love is, like everything else that comes from God, open-handed. We can take it or we can leave it. The choice is ours. In his book, Love Wins, author Rob Bell puts it this way: “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can [if we so choose] have all the hell we want.” The choice is always ours. We can choose the world’s hatred or we can choose to accept and share God’s love.
We’ll be staying with the lectionary readings this Lent, but I plan to spend our time while there looking for love—God’s kind—in each of those readings. In some it will be obvious, in others, I suspect it may be harder to find. I want to find what Jesus’ journey to the cross has to teach us about living and acting with love—the easy kind and, especially, the hard kind--love that stretches us, love that may hurt us--and yet we hold it and offer it anyway.
Blogger/Speaker John Pavlovitz wrote in his blog “Things that Need to be Said,” back in Sept. 2015 in a piece titled, I Want to Do Love Right: “My agenda now is fairly simple: I want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up**.”
Sounds like love to me. This is the love I believe we’ll find as we travel through this Lent with Jesus.
So today, on this Valentine’s Day – on this day the secular world tells us is all about love, may we all commit to continue seeking out and admitting to our wrongs so that we can correct them, and because we choose to live in the Spirit of God’s all-encompassing love – today, tomorrow, and always.
The love of God be with you.
Valentine’s Day not on the lectionary calendar, of course, but it is a day that is almost impossible to ignore because of all the marketing that is attached to it. This year, because it lands right next to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, it has me thinking of Love and Lent and how they intersect.
The story we will be reliving through Lent is not about the Hearts and Flowers kind of love, not the romantic love of a Hallmark movie, but a love that is much deeper, more earth shattering, more life changing—the love of God.
So much that passes for Christian thinking in the media these days appears to have completely lost the message when it comes to love. What we seem to get instead is a perversion of what Christian love should be— a “love” that preaches hell and damnation, a love that closes doors, shuts people out, demands allegiance to a particular dogma—and one that too often overtly preaches hatred against God’s “other” children. And I do say “other” in quotes here because it is always the “other” who is the recipient of this vengeful, exclusionary, perverted form of Christianity.
Unfortunately, it is this distorted version of Jesus’ love that shouts the loudest and thus gets more attention right now in our history, making it all the more necessary that the rest of us seek for the actual love of Jesus so that we, in turn, can share that love with the world around us.
Love should not ever be a cage that locks us into a single option. God’s love is, like everything else that comes from God, open-handed. We can take it or we can leave it. The choice is ours. In his book, Love Wins, author Rob Bell puts it this way: “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can [if we so choose] have all the hell we want.” The choice is always ours. We can choose the world’s hatred or we can choose to accept and share God’s love.
We’ll be staying with the lectionary readings this Lent, but I plan to spend our time while there looking for love—God’s kind—in each of those readings. In some it will be obvious, in others, I suspect it may be harder to find. I want to find what Jesus’ journey to the cross has to teach us about living and acting with love—the easy kind and, especially, the hard kind--love that stretches us, love that may hurt us--and yet we hold it and offer it anyway.
Blogger/Speaker John Pavlovitz wrote in his blog “Things that Need to be Said,” back in Sept. 2015 in a piece titled, I Want to Do Love Right: “My agenda now is fairly simple: I want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up**.”
Sounds like love to me. This is the love I believe we’ll find as we travel through this Lent with Jesus.
So today, on this Valentine’s Day – on this day the secular world tells us is all about love, may we all commit to continue seeking out and admitting to our wrongs so that we can correct them, and because we choose to live in the Spirit of God’s all-encompassing love – today, tomorrow, and always.
The love of God be with you.
* Rob Bell, Love Wins,: A Book about Heaven. Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Harper Collins, © 2011
** John Pavlovitz, Things that Need to Be Said: I Want to Do Love Right, Sept. 18, 2015
** John Pavlovitz, Things that Need to Be Said: I Want to Do Love Right, Sept. 18, 2015
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