God Is...

A common question that I hear every Sunday is, “How are you doing?” Well, all week long, everywhere I have looked I’ve been seeing the same thing over and over, and it’s got me feeling fantastic inside. I’m doing great this morning everywhere I’ve looked I’ve been seeing Love:

Couples in love. Families in love. Husbands and wives in love. Now, I know you might be thinking, “Well, Spring is in the air…” But it’s more than that. What I’m seeing is more than that. It’s not cupid, it’s not young lovers lost in the raptures of passion. What I’m talking about is more than all of that. The love I’m seeing is all the more spectacular for being so much more common.

My wife, Melanie spending hours preparing art projects for the elementary kids she teaches; Our church secretary, Liz, going out of her way to try and get a children’s playscape for our church and some tables and chairs from an old elementary school building; a couple walking down the street deep in conversation, the man with his hand resting peacefully on the curve of the woman’s back as they walked… All of these are love—everyday examples of people reaching beyond themselves to others just because it is Good to be together.

You remember that reporter, Jill Carroll, who was released this week after 82 days of captivity in Iraq? Well, at the first press conference after her release every reporter in the room wanted to know about some strong anti-American statements she had made during those 82 days, but do you know that not a one asked her? Out of love, I tell you. Respect, decency and yes, love. I heard about it on the radio.

And I saw an uncle taking his two nieces out for really large Dairy Queen blizzards. And one of the girls, on holding her massive frozen treat looked up and said in a child’s singsong voice, “Thank you uncle Steve.” And then her sister did the same, looking up. “Yeah. Thank you, uncle Steve.” Then they went to the bed of his empty truck and sat there enjoying each other’s company.

Love, I tell you. It’s everywhere. Smiles in the grocery store; People waving each other in at the highway merge; A woman running along the side of the road with two couldn’t-be-happier dogs. People helping people. People talking. People walking together, even in quiet. I saw it over and over again: People loving people.

Even at the deathbed of a father. Especially at the deathbed of a father: Love. Love all around him. And just so, Love all around here. I’ve seen it a hundred times already this morning.

We might think we know love, because it touches us so often. Love is so very common, so very, very common that by now we should all have seen all sides of it. And yet love—this common thing—has mystical dimensions deeper than most of us have ever plumbed.

The author of 1 John writes, “Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone who loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.”

God, that mystery of existence that is at once so personal and so transcendent…

God is love—The theologians tell us that this statement is literally true. God’s nature, the very essence of God is love. Not that “love is God”, and not that God has love, though that’s true. But God is love. Outward and perfect love—it is the nature of God. In thinking on this, even the mystery of the Trinity begins to make sense, in that, How could God’s being be love if God were alone and solitary in himself? The answer is that God is not alone in himself. God is a Trinity of persons, engaged in his very essence in a dance of internally, eternally, perfect love.

Love is common. Love is the blueprint of God’s eternal

nature. And Love is also the source of creation.

Again the theologians tell us that though God was perfect in God’s self as an active union of three, God’s love could not be held even within God’s own self, but stretched out from himself to embrace and give himself to that which was other, and so led to the creation of the universe and all that is herein.

You can look and see the fingerprint of love on everything that is created. What thing exists entirely on its own without touching or influencing, being in active, dynamic contact with anything else? No such thing exists. It is a law of creation. Every created thing has gravity that ties it to every other thing, no matter how far away. Every molecule and atom is even itself made of a union of even smaller particles giving themselves to each other to create a greater and more perfect whole.

Love is life. Love is the blueprint of God. Love is the reason for and the blueprint of creation.

Is it any wonder that God, from the beginning sought to put knowledge of himself into the very heart of every human soul? That all would know him and recognize him as their very lifeblood, indeed as each of our very own Father?

And is it any wonder that God’s greatest revelation, the perfect revelation of God’s own person would find his climax in an act of perfect love that would, in its perfection, eventually draw all creation to himself?

The most amazing thing about love is… Well, which is more amazing? It’s transcendence? It’s identity as the essence of God? It’s power as the spark and framework of creation? It’s perfection in God’s act of love on the cross? What is the most amazing of all these things?

And is it more amazing or less, that that which “is”, and “courses through”, and “causes”, and “saves”, is also yours and mine, free, to give and share and glory in, by our own will, every moment of our lives, with children and family and strangers and friends? The boundless has life within us. And the infinite has become our charge.

Amen.