Love God and Love One Another
Dear Friends in Christ,
It’s not about me! In this age of flux and uncertainty, we
need to speak truth to power. And usually that power is not an individual but
rather systems or institutions that have become a gated community which set
themselves apart by keeping most of the world outside established and rigid
boundaries. The people belonging to these institutions (inside the gates)
are told that they are the “in” group while everyone else is the “out” or wrong
group. You don’t have to go very far to see this play out in our
families, in our communities, and in our world.
Jesus’ main message in the gospels is one of a bigger, more
inclusive point of view. God’s point of view! It is a message of oneness
and inclusion. We are all the same, yet different! What does that
mean? Think of your own family, or job, or the groups you belong
to. The sameness comes from sharing the same core values, and the
differences come in the way we each have specific ways in which we process and
interact in the world. Each person has unique talents, tendencies and
DNA, but in order to belong to the group, individuals must all share the
group’s core values. For us here at Grace Church our core values can be
summed up in the first sentence of our mission statement: Grace is God’s gift
of unconditional love made known to us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus told us that the entirety of God’s word, God’s laws, and
the prophets’ teachings can be summed up in one statement: “Love God and Love
one another.” So this is the Christian core value and all things should
point to this understanding. Now our differences are vast, and the
Apostle Paul describes these differences in the metaphor of our body parts. All
have different functions but share the same body. He was directing the
churches of his day to keep to Jesus’ core values and everything else would
fall into place. We then become the Body of Christ revealing God’s values
in a broken world and reconciling us to God’s unconditional love.
The Body of Christ is a metaphor for the rich diverseness of all
creation, including us humans. Taken together, we are all collectively a
reflection of our creator. We are all interdependent, and we all share
different unique gifts and talents which cause us to work together towards a
common goal. When that common goal is an earthly institution, system, or
ruler we will always come up short. But when that common goal is loving
God and loving one another, we will always succeed; we then align with our
creator and creation.
But life isn’t easy, and folks want all the answers. Life is a
beautiful, sad, awesome, painful, joyful mystery! Emma Higgs writes:
“Following Jesus was never supposed to be about having a static set of
beliefs. To have faith in Jesus is to embrace a new way of being in the
world; a way of upside-down priorities, countercultural inclusion, radical
forgiveness and ultimate sacrifice. And the best word we have to that is
love.” The reason everything seems upside down is that we made everything
about us at the expense of those outside our way of thinking, including nature
itself. Life (and God) is a wondrous mystery, and when we gain the wisdom
to realize this world is not about us, then we will find that all the answers
we seek will, in fact, begin with unconditional love.
In today’s upside down world, we must be as one crying out in
the wilderness. Love God and Love one another! Our world has
become, in many ways, a spiritual desert, and our voices compete with all the
noise and voices crying out to so many other gods corporations, governments,
money, drugs, technology etc, etc. And no, these things are not evil, but
our worshipping them at the expense of everything and everyone else is.
These are exciting times, my friends. Change is never
easy; but we have an opportunity at this time and place to help reconcile the
world. So when the voices of the world get too loud, the best way to show
the world a better way is simply by living a life focused on God and one
another…with love.
Your faithful servant,
carmen
