God is Love

I've been meaning to post something about Holy Cross School and its students for a while... but that is not this post. 

This post wrote itself to a certain extent, coming out of the thoughts and prayers I have been struggling with in the past few months around the importance placed on works within the Christian faith. These are the (very early) beginnings of some sort of synthesis on my part.

As Christians in the 21st Century we have a significant identity issue that stems from, as I see it, the most basic principle of our faith: God is love. The love of God has been rightly emphasized by Christians of all stripes but I think we have now reached a point where the message has lost some of its meaning. Because of the repetition and enthusiasm with which it spread the idea of God’s love has diminished in potency and become, sadly, trite and cliche. To most non-believers these words sound like a load of hooey or do not even register. Divine love and all it implies has become an idea best left to bumper stickers and cheery T-shirts. 

Along with this ubiquity the foundational concept of God’s love has a bit of an image problem that is equally hard to correct. Whatever one’s feeling on the matter it is hard to deny that the message of the love of God, as we experience it through Jesus Christ, has been put into the world very successfully and enthusiastically by Evangelical Protestant churches. Where I find issue is not with the message or even the format--billboards and coffee mugs need be no less holy than a pulpit--the basic problem is that God’s love inevitably is given qualifiers. Now this is not overt, no one is wearing pins that say “Jesus ♥ you unless...”, but the behavior of most--if not all--churches quickly makes those limits clear. God loves you unless you are an immigrant or Muslim or gay or homeless or Black or loud or illiterate--the list goes on. Some of these objections may be publicly exclaimed by churches such as Westboro Baptist but most are more subtle and thus more difficult to correct. 

Now before you object and state confidently “well, my church is different, we would welcome anyone” consider what it may be like for a marginalized or even slightly different kind of person to enter your sanctuary on a Sunday and join in the worship. Would a homeless person feel truly welcome? Would a family with a intermittently squalling child? Would a person with limited abilities in your language? Would someone unfamiliar with your worship tradition? Would someone with a skin color unlike the common tone of your community? Certainly some of these issues can not (and probably should not) be corrected; one of the great glories of worship in America is the breadth of choice available to us. If you don’t like praise music well you’ve got plenty of other churches that will take you! If you don’t like incense well there are lots of un-smoked places to gather! But we cannot make light of the fact that every church will feel forbidding or unwelcoming to someone. I know from a number of conversations with African-American acquaintances and friends that what makes a place “diverse” is very different for Black people and White people.

It should be obvious that these limits are human imposed, that God’s love is far beyond these various categories that repress and inhibit our ability to unite, but as long as we are human the message of God’s love will inevitably be constrained by our nature. So what to do. It’s untenable to dilute or diminish the centrality of God’s love to the faith but it’s apparent to my mind that we’ve hit a limit of sorts where that message is concerned. I think our best response is to tweak slightly, to acknowledge the limits of our humanity in spreading the message of divine love and press onward using the same words in a new, but not at all unfamiliar, way. 

The idea of divine love is comforting and rightfully appealing but it is sometimes used as a palliative instead of as a call to action. As a culture we proudly embrace the rights of the individual and so that is the framework through which we view Christ’s love and forgiveness--whatever I am and whatever I have done, God still loves me. This is important and is undoubtedly redemptive for millions of Christians but to stop there is to miss the other equally important foundation of our faith: love of neighbor. If God loves me wholly and unconditionally, for no other reason than that I am beautifully alive and made in God's image, then it stands to reason that God loves everyone else just as much. I am no more or no less loved than anyone else who lives, has lived or will live. If I am to accept this, to truly acknowledge another’s belovedness alongside my own, I cannot be still; I cannot accept the world as it is nor the structures that have made it this way. I cannot be satisfied with inequity and injustice and I cannot pretend that someone else will come along to solve the messier bits of our world. 

So we arrive back at my starting point--God is love--and continue to where I believe Church needs to be loudly and triumphantly heading. The true embrace of another’s beloved nature must impel us as Christians to action and, I believe, will help us resolve the issues of identity that have arisen from a limited definition of the love of God. God loves you and this is what that means. God loves you and this is what I’m going to do because of it.