God's dream, God's vision, of love

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

God loves you. God loves you, without question, without reservation. God loves you. You already know that because we preach that all the time here at St. Mary’s. We tell you that God loves you a lot. It’s usually how we end sermons, but today we are starting there.

God loves you. It is a consistent message in scripture. This reality of God’s love is for you, for me, for us, for all of humanity, for all of creation. God’s love is proclaimed time and again throughout Scripture, from the beginning in the Torah, through the Prophets and the Psalms, the Gospel, the Epistles. It is repeated time and again, sometimes explicitly, sometimes it is more implicit, but it is there over and over again.

You might think of some of those explicit moments, like in the Torah when it says God’s covenant with God’s people is a covenant of loving kindness. Or you might think about the Prophets when Isaiah and Jeremiah and several of the minor Prophets say that God’s love is everlasting. It is eternal. The Psalms are full of references of God’s abounding love for humanity and all of creation. In the Gospels there are so many good examples, but what better one than John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. My favorite comes from Paul in Romans Chapter 8, where he asks the question, what can separate us from the love of God? And the answer is, nothing. Can anything separate us from the love of God? No. For I am convinced that neither life nor death nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor heighth or depth or anything else in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. I am an Episcopalian. I don’t memorize scripture, but I know this one.

There are other wonderful implicit stories of God’s love. All the stories of Jesus healing people are about love. Or his parables, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is really the parable of the forgiving father who forgives before he is even asked. Think of the great stories about Ruth and Esther and Jonah. Think of the story of Moses and Miriam and the liberation of God’s people from their enslavement in Egypt. Think about the stories of Jacob and Isaac and Abraham. Think about the story of Joseph. Think about the creation story. It doesn’t say anything specific about love, but it is all about love. As God makes the world, each and every day he looks it over and says, it is good, it is good, it is very good. My favorite retelling of the Creation Story is the one that Desmond Tutu offers in a children’s Bible he put together. It says God’s love bubbled up and bubbled over into creation. God’s love cannot be contained, and that love is so enormous that it bubbled up and bubbled over into all that we see, all that we know, all that we experience, the love of God embodied in creation through God’s loving act.

God loves you. And that is the message that the author of 1st John knows as he puts it in an epistle to send to a community that is having some struggles. But John doesn’t just say that God loves you. He takes it one step further. He says not only does God love you, but God is love. Love is not just a verb, it is not just a feeling that God has for things, it is not just the actions that God takes that show love. God is love. God, in God’s very being, doesn’t just love. God is love. God’s identity is love, so God can do no other. The reason that God loves you without question or reservation is not because you did something that makes you loveable. God loves you because God’s love is at the core of God’s identity. God can do nothing but love. That love will not go away. There’s nothing you did to earn it, so there is nothing you can do to lose it.

God loves you, but the author of John takes is one step further. God is love, and that means you need to love as well. If you claim to know anything about God, that means you know that we have a God who is love. And it you claim to want to live your life in accordance with God, who is love, then you will love as well. Any form of religiosity that is filled with hate is not the way of God. Because the way of God is the way of love because God is love. Therefore you need to love as well. I think this goes back to the creation story, because it said that when God made you, God made humanity, we were made in the image of God. And if we have a God who is love, that means that you have been imprinted with the image of love. Deep down inside of you, your identity is one of love as well. To be true to who you are, to be true to what you were made to be, means that you have to love, because you were made in God’s image.

It's a lovely idea, isn’t it? And yet when we look around the world, it is not always loving. There are a lot of places where love is not clear or obvious, where God’s love does not seem to be shining. There is the thing we call sin, greed, selfishness that get in the way of that love. It doesn’t mean that love is not there, it means that it is hard to see. Sometimes it is hard to love people who are not so loveable. It can be really challenging.

In the Gospel today Jesus gives us a way forward when he offers us this beautiful and profound image of the vineyard. God the Father is the vine keeper, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. The branches are meant to produce fruit. Not grapes, but the fruit of love. I think today’s Gospel reading is cut a little bit short, because right after this Jesus goes into a great dissertation about the need to love. When he is talking about this fruit, he is talking about the fruit of love, that we are meant to produce love. What Jesus says is that just like in a real vine, you need to do a little bit of pruning. To prune away those rougher edges, like that selfishness or that greediness so that we can put the energy into love.

That’s why pruning works, because a plant has all kinds of energy coming into it and putting it everywhere, wasting it on things that are not producing fruit. So when you prune the bits that are wasting energy, then the fruit gets more of the energy and can grow bigger and better and more nutritious and help nourish people better. Jesus is saying that there are bits in all of our lives that can use a little bit of pruning so the fruit of love can be bigger, the crop can be more, that we can nourish our world with that love a little bit better.

So, my friends, I encourage you to take some time this week to reflect on love. God’s love, on how God is love, how you were made in His image, imprinted with love on your very soul, that in your identity is love as well. And then ask yourself the very hard question, what little bits need to be pruned so that I can produce a little more love in this world. If we do that, 1st John says, if all of us who follow Jesus tend to that garden and work on making this world a little more loving, we can show God to people. Because every time we show love we show God. Every time we put a little more love in this world, we help nourish this world on love. Maybe we can tip the balance so people can look at this world and say it is a world full of love, it is a world full of the love of God everywhere. Maybe it will help this world become more aligned with God’s dream, God’s vision, of love.

AMEN