God is Love.
This past week, like many, I have been glued to my devices. My heart heavy and broken with sadness, and all kinds of emotions, witnessing the real pain our country and world is in when a video from Lexham Press came onto my news feed. It was a video where the publishing house interviews authors they are working with, and this particular interview was with Ben Witherington III, a New Testament scholar and professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore Kentucky.
The subject of his interview was “God is Love.” But it is not just that God gives love, but it is used as a noun, that God is Love in itself. God's default is always one of love. “For God so loved the Cosmos!” Witherington says Love is how God relates to God’s creation. It is what we were made for. To love one another as the Triune God loves us. To love others is to love God, to love God is to love others.
This clip was in the midst of so much turmoil and, for me, spoke the truth into what we are facing. The deplorable and senseless murder of George Floyd and the feelings, emotions, and actions after are not isolated situations, but rather a cancer–a wound, and a boiling point, that has been festering for over four hundred years and beyond; hatred and racism boiling over. This is what happens when we only treat the symptoms and not the causes of racism and hatred and we only put a band-aid on it and say, “it has been fixed.” I do not claim to be an expert on racism, but you do not have to look very hard to see there is a real problem.
This is also during a time with the COVID-19 pandemic, an economy in shambles, a system that does not appropriately work, in a gospel egalitarian sense. We are a people, humanity, exhausted, angry, frustrated, lamenting, and tired of it all.
I stated in my sermon last week at my appointed church in the series, There is a Balm: City of Fire, that this is not a political thing for me, although there is a need for it to be, for me, it is a human issue and spiritual one. All humans are beloved children of God, wonderfully and uniquely created, loved, and of sacred worth. We are all sacred and divine beings, in that we house divine breath.
God is to be life-giving, church, the body of Christ, is to life-giving, and anything that is not doing this, is not church or God.
I find 1st John 4 relevant this day.
God is love. Anything that is not loving, does not share love, is not from God, and is not God. There are many who use faith, religion, and symbols as props as a way to pander and promote or justify their actions or decisions as “ordained by God”, or are defensible because they are on the “right side of God.” This is not just something we deal with in postmodernity, but there were those in the Antebellum South that used Scripture in disgraceful means to justify their actions of enslaving others while proclaiming the “good news,” or treatment of indigenous communities in the United States and throughout the World, or the Crusades, or the Holocaust, and countless others treated unjustly and oppressed by those who use religion, faith, symbols and texts as a way to justify their backward and misguided hermeneutics through wrong exegetical and eisegetical means.
Simply put, if it is not love, it is not God.
There has been so much good, care, social justice, love that people from all faith backgrounds and cultures have shared with society, particularly during this year of 2020, and I believe this is God at work among us. God is way bigger then we will ever be able to understand, comprehend, or conceive.
I believe as people of faith, and those who believe in God, a.k.a Love, we have a mandate to share it, and speak the truth into it, with it. Truth is not easy to swallow, it is not easy to hear, it is not easy to share, but there is a need for it because it is love, a tough kind of love.
I pray for peace, for healing and the soul of our nation, for our leaders both religious and political, I stand with those who need a voice that for far too long have been silenced or pandered to. To those of us born with privileges, we need to use it by listening, hearing, learning, growing, opening up our hearts, turning up the E.Q., and making sure we are on the right side of Love.
As a follower of the Way, my living savior is Jesus the Christ, a person of color, who was born into an enslaved culture, was an illegal immigrant, lived under an oppressive governmental system that would put him to death under the most excruciating forms of capital punishment created, and lives, so everyone, all may live free. I hope that my actions and my life are led in such a way that exemplifies the teachings of Christ. I am not perfect, but given love, mercy, and grace, to share such love, mercy, and grace.
We need to do better. We not only have a responsibility but a mandate as people of faith to do so. We have work to do, to continue to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. There is a season for everything; it is the season to build–build a new.
Do No Harm. Do All Good. Stay in love with God. Because–God is love.
Shalom,
Tim