love in a bottle?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
FIFTEENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (July 16) 1989

 

READINGS

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

 [Returning to this sermon after 35+ years I wonder if I ever finished writing it. Perhaps I ad libbed a different ending. My diary tells me I was busy with visitors the day I wrote it – as it happens visitors with whom I still have Facebook contact – the sermon writing squeezed between two sets. Ah well. Let it stand].

We hear it read each Sunday. The Golden Rule, the command to love God,  self, and neighbour. It rolls easily off the tongue, causing us scarcely a hiccup in out thoughts, and we respond, “Lord, have mercy on us.”

Yet the reply Jesus gave to the lawyer is pregnant with significance. The command is simply to give all our human self to the service of God. The whole person is to be dedicated to the worship and the service of God. We are not intended to divide up the aspects of our humanness. The combination of heart, soul, strength and mind is no more than an emphasis on the totality of our life, the holistic way in which our lives are called to be dedicated to God.

In the beginning God created. The hows and the whens are utterly unimportant. What is important is that this alternate source of energy withdrew from a tiny space in the universe and granted room for you and I to grow there. God creates because in the perfection of divine love there was and is a desire to share love.
Love in a bottle or love in a vacuum is an unsatisfactory, restricted love. In response however to the privilege of being breathed into existence, God seeks the return of love; that we should love God with all our being.

Love from a puppet is no love at all. God breathed us into existence impregnated with free will, we may choose to love God, we may choose to ignore God, we may choose to hate God. The love of a puppet for its master is no love. God did not create puppets.

The story, the myth, of the Fall reminds us of our failure to love God. The children of the parent reject the loving care of the parent and refuse to obey. We as individuals and we as a human race fail to obey, and so we form a world where hatred is based on misunderstandings of our neighbour, because of their colour, because of their sex, because of their sexuality, because of their creed. We fail to love God with heart, soul, strength, mind. We fail to love even our neighbour. We fail to love.

At the heart of Jewish religion is the knowledge that the command to love God in our totality, and likewise to love our fellow beings created in the image of God, is everything. The Ten Commandments, all the Law, all the Prophets, all are no more then an explanation of the command to love God. If you love God then you will not covet, or steal, or perjure, or profane those things that are sacred.

The earnest lawyer saw and knew all that.

But we do not love God with our all, and we are entrapped in a world which does not love God with its all. You and I will again and again fail in our attempts to love God. We will leave undone those things we should have done and we'll do the things that we should not do.

The reward for that failure should be the experience of eternal and unremitting separation from the perfection of God’s love.

That it is not is the miracle of Easter, the miracle of divine love.