Rev Gav
Are God and Love the same thing?
This week I was thinking about how the words ‘God’ and ‘love’ are often interchangeable and how this can be helpful for us on our spiritual journey. I’m not, for one second, suggesting that God is not sentient or omnipotent, but just that we often do use the word ‘love’ when describing God, for example, when we sing, “Love came down” or “Here is love, vast as the ocean.”
Conversely, when I take a wedding, my talk is often based around 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4-8 where Paul talks about love, and I find it helpful to replace the word ‘love’ with ‘God’ so that it reads, “God is patient; God is kind; God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God does not insist on their own way; God is not irritable; God keeps no record of wrongs; God does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never fails.”
We read in 1 John 4 verse 8 that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
Today is Trinity Sunday when we think about the Holy Trinity, and how we are invited into this wonderful relationship of love. As Christians, God has poured into our hearts the gift of love, or to put it another way, filled us with the Holy Spirit. In John 13 verse 34-35 Jesus said, “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” He later, “breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” We are called to be so filled with God’s love such that God’s love overflows from us to others. How do we know if someone is a Christian — a follower of Jesus? By their love.
We are created beings, living in a conscious, physical, emotional, and intellectual world. I wonder then, if when we talk of things of the Spirit, if we find them difficult to grasp, whether it would be helpful to simply think about love? We know what self-sacrificial, self-giving agape love looks and feels like. It is tangible and measurable. We can give it and we can experience it.
Therefore, when we ask God to fill us with the Holy Spirit, what we are asking is to be filled with God’s divine, sentient love; a love that is outward-looking, self-giving, and compassionate, or as Paul put it, a love that is patient, kind, generous, humble, tolerant, forgiving, truthful, enduring, believing, hopeful, and everlasting.
When we gather for worship on a Sunday, the leader’s job is to set up a meeting between you and God. We try to give you space, through words, music, and sacrament, for one purpose — that you may experience God’s love. I know we often make our gatherings about our worship of God, but it is a two-way thing. We come in an attitude of repentance, worship, and openness that we might receive a blessing from God, and God’s blessing is simply to be filled with and know God’s love. When I pray that you may be blessed, that is what I am asking, that you may know and be filled with God’s divine love.
It is being filled with God’s divine love — the Holy Spirit — that helps us endure the hardships, trials, and difficulties we face, but also, God’s love cannot be contained. It is impossible to be filled with God’s love without it pouring out of us to others and to the world around us. God’s love enables us to see the world as God sees it, to, in the words of Isaiah, “proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” or as the Psalmist writes, “to heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.” (Psalm 147.3)
Our calling is to join in with the ongoing mission of God’s love in the world, to be the hands and feet and heart of Jesus, or as Helen put it this week, “To bring order to our own small patch of chaos: wherever, whatever, and however that may be.”
When Jesus was about to leave this earth, to return by his Spirit, he summed up all his teaching with the words, “love one another”, and I suppose, as Helen and I finish this ministry with St. Mark’s, if there was one message I could give you it would be the same thing: “Love one another. Don’t stop being filled with God’s love. Don’t stop that love from inspiring you to endure the hardships you face, and allow it to pour out of you to a broken and hurting world that desperately needs God’s love.”
Amen.
and then