The Greatest Love Letter of All Time – Homily for Word of God Sunday

One Catholic Life

About five or six years ago there was a poll
to discover the world’s greatest love letter.
After all the votes were tallied,
the overwhelming favorite
among all the love letters ever written,
was a letter from country music singer Johnny Cash
to his wife June Carter Cash for her 65th birthday.
The letter was published in a book by their son about ten years ago,
and it’s just a beautiful letter, brief, simple, and heartfelt,
and it goes like this:

Happy Birthday Princess,

We get old and get used to each other.
We think alike.
We read each others [sic] minds.
We know what the other wants without asking.

Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit.
Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.

But once in awhile, like today,
I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am
to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met.
You still fascinate and inspire me.
You influence me for the better.
You’re the object of my desire,
the #1 Earthly reason for my existence.
I love you very much.

Happy Birthday Princess. – John

Now there are many things to love about that letter.
First of all, I love it because it was written by Johnny Cash,
and I happen to be a fan.

But aside from that, there’s a real honesty to the letter,
a simplicity that gets right to the point,
a heartfelt sincerity.
Johnny Cash doesn’t try to gloss anything over,
he’s not trying to hide anything.
They sometimes get on each other’s nerves,
and take each other for granted.
But he ends with a beautiful tribute to how important she is to him,
“the #1 Earthly reason for his existence.”
You can tell that this is a letter
from someone who’s been in a relationship for a long time,
with its ups and downs, its tragedies and glories.

It’s just beautiful, and it’s no wonder that it was voted
the greatest love letter of all time.

Now I bring this up today
because this weekend is Word of God Sunday.
Every year on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
we celebrate the Word of God, God’s love letter to us.
The Word of God is God’s love letter to us.

Love seeks expression.
Love, true love, almost demands to be communicated,
to be expressed to the beloved.
And so God, in his infinite love for us,
gives us his Word as a love letter to us.

And what is the Word of God?
If we look at the very beginning of the Gospel of John,
we can see exactly what the Word of God is:
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
The Word of God is not a what, but a Who,
the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the Word of God.
Jesus is God’s love letter to us.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

Out of love, the Father gives the Son as gift to the world.
Jesus, the Word of God, is God’s love letter to us.
And it is up to us to read that letter,
to receive Jesus into our lives, into our hearts.

Like all married couples,
Brenda and I have exchanged love letters over the years.
And I don’t think it would ever have occurred to us not to read
any of the love letters that we had written to each other.
To receive a Valentine from Brenda and say,
“Oh, thanks, honey, I’ll read this later,” and set it aside?
Or, “Let’s put this anniversary card on the stack
with the bills and junk mail,
and all the rest of the stuff that we need to go through this week.”

No, when we get love letters from our beloved,
we set everything aside to read them,
whether they’re from a fiancé, a spouse, a parent or grandparent.
And we often go back and reread those letters,
noticing something we missed the first time,
or just reveling in the love we feel coming through those simple lines.

And that’s why it’s so important for us to read Scripture regularly.
We have a love letter from God that we can experience every single day,
and which leads us to encounter Jesus Christ, the true Word of God.
How can we put that aside?
How can we ignore that love letter?
Well, we get distracted, we get our priorities mixed up.

And so that’s one reason the parish is promoting
the Bible in a Year Podcast.
It’s one way of staying committed to reading that love letter,
cherishing the Word of God daily.
It’s a convenient way of becoming acquainted with the whole of Scripture,
so you get the bird’s-eye view, so to speak, of Salvation History.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for the first three weeks,
I have just one word for you:
brokenness.
That seems to be Fr. Mike’s word of the year so far.
If you haven’t been listening, and you’d like to, it’s not too late to start.
Just jump in on day 22 or 23.
Or start at the beginning and listen whenever you can.
As Fr. Luke has been saying,
you can listen in your car, while you exercise,
you can even watch it on TV through the YouTube app
like Brenda and I are doing with our family each evening,
so we can read the transcript in big letters.

It can be really helpful to listen to the Word of God in its entirety,
like the Bible in a Year Podcast is doing,
but it’s also important to read God’s love letter to us
is in a slow, deliberate, savoring way.
To use a metaphor that I think some here will appreciate,
it’s like opening up a bottle of fine wine and letting it breathe,
then pouring it carefully into the glass,
swirling it around while you appreciate its color,
sniffing its complex aroma,
and finally sipping it slowly, absorbing the flavors.

Reading our love letter from God
ought to be a little like that.
Sitting down comfortably and quietly,
turning deliberately to a sentence or paragraph of Scripture,
maybe the Gospel reading for daily Mass,
and reading it ever so slowly,
looking for a word or phrase that stands out to you.

When you encounter a word or phrase like that, you stop reading
and roll that word or phrase around in your mind,
chewing on it, pondering it,
wondering what this particular word or phrase means to you,
and how God may be using it to communicate with you.

Eventually, you may feel inspired
to speak your own verbal, prayerful response to God’s word.
At that point you pray honestly, simply, and sincerely,
just like Johnny Cash’s love letter.
You pray not in order to make a good impression on God,
but simply to be intimate with the One who loves you.
Eventually, the words may just drop away
and the wordless silence will embrace you
as you simply sit in God’s presence.

For instance, if you were reading today’s gospel,
you might be taken by the phrase,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
And you might stop and ponder, and think to yourself,
“This is about Jesus, but it’s also true of me.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, too.
Through my baptism and my confirmation,
I have received the Holy Spirit.
But I forget that sometimes.
I forget what a great gift it is to have received the Holy Spirit.”
And so I might ponder that awhile and be filled with gratitude,
and then I might return to the gospel and be drawn to the line,
“He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.”
So then I might think, “Yes, I have received the Holy Spirit for a reason,
to bring glad tidings to the poor.”
And at this point I may say to God, “I’m afraid of what that means,”
or I might say, “God, show me how to do this.
I’m not sure how to bring your glad tidings to the poor.
Who are the poor you want me to reach,
and how do I speak your glad tidings?
I’m not very good at this kind of thing.
But I believe that your Spirit is with me.”
Or maybe I don’t believe that,
maybe I’m having a hard time believing that, and so I tell God that, too.
You see, our dialogue with God needs to be honest,
just like that love letter from Johnny Cash to his wife June.

When mature lovers speak to each other,
they tell the truth.
And so our reading and pondering of a word or phrase of Scripture
may lead us to talk to God honestly and openly.
And after we speak, we sit in silence,
the way long-married couples often do,
saying nothing, just reveling in each others’ presence.

Just like Johnny Cash writes,

We get old and get used to each other.
We think alike. We read each others’ minds.
We know what the other wants without asking.

This is what happens to us the more regularly we pray with Scripture,
spending time with the beloved who loves us infinitely,
just 15 or 20 minutes a day.
We get used to God, we begin to think like God,
we begin to know what God wants.
We enter into communion with God.

Reading the Bible this way is not about figuring it all out,
but rather it’s about encountering Jesus, the Word of God,
through the medium of the written word,
and entering into communion.

On this Word of God Sunday,
I encourage you to make a commitment
to listening to the Bible in a Year Podcast,
or to spending 15 to 20 minutes each day
prayerfully reading the love letter that was written directly to you,
responding to that letter in prayer,
and sitting in silence with the One who loves you infinitely,
so that you can say to God in all honesty,
You’re the object of my desire,
the #1 Earthly reason for my existence.
I love you very much.