That’s how much God loves us

I was struck by our reading from Ephesians this week, especially by the language about comprehending God’s love. I thought about how hard it is to get my mind around this, and I wondered why it’s important for us to understand it. As I thought about these questions, I remembered a speech I gave in 7th grade, where I, for some reason, tried to talk about God’s love. When I was in school, beginning in about 4th grade, we had to give a speech to our class every year. It had to be 3 to 5 minutes long, and we had to deliver it from memory. Other than PE, this may have been my least favorite thing to do in school. It happened at the same time every year, and I remember this time of year as a very anxious one for me. I didn’t like speaking in front of the class, and I found it really difficult to decide on a topic.

So, I don’t remember what made me that year give my speech on a Christian writer and speaker named Ann Keimel Anderson, who was popular within my church denomination, primarily for talking about sharing God’s love, and who I really admired. This was not a religious school that I attended, so even though I really liked this writer, I can’t imagine that many of my classmates had ever heard of her or were all that interested in my topic. But, we were allowed to pick anything we wanted and this is what I chose. As a side note, we were at a convocation meeting yesterday and we were asked to “share something personal about ourselves” and I talked about a book I just finished reading, so maybe this is just something I do. Anyway, in my speech, I remember that I included one of my favorite stories that she told in one of her books, about a little boy who was working in the garden with his grandfather and went into the house to get a glass of water for his grandpa. The glass was covered in dirt from the garden, the water was warm from the tap, and still the grandfather drank that whole glass of water. That’s how much God loves us, she wrote.

That’s one way of describing God’s love, and at 12 years old, this story was very meaningful to me. Here we are many years later, and I’m not sure I can comprehend God’s love any better now than I could then. I find myself continuing to try, though, and I don’t think that I’m alone. Describing God’s love, comprehending God’s love, is something humans have been trying to do for thousands of years. We forget that sometimes. More than 500 years before Ann Keimel Anderson wrote her books about God’s love, in 1373 Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love. Her texts describe the visions, or showings, she had over the course of one day while she was very ill. Fifteen years after these visions, she wrote about trying to understand the meaning of them, saying the answer she received was, “Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love.” She wrote, “This is how I was taught that our Lord’s meaning was love. And I saw quite certainly in this and in everything that God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall. And all his works were done in this love; and in this love he has made everything for our profit; and in this love our life is everlasting.”

From Julian to Ann, two very different women writing in very different times, the point is the same. God’s love is the point. And God’s love is limitless and immeasurable; God’s love is always present, has always been present, will always be present, and it exists for everyone. Even though discussions of God’s love have taken place for centuries, and even though we could say that the central organizing principle of scriptures is love, I often hear love cast as some kind of modern convention, like it’s incidental to God’s message, like it’s weak, or girly, or woke. I suppose we do this with a lot of things, we think the things we encounter have not been encountered before, the thoughts we have, the arguments we have, have never occurred before.

But long before Julian of Norwich’s time, the author of the letter to the Ephesians also believed that it was crucial to understand God’s love. He says that in their faith the people are being “rooted and grounded in love,” and he prays for them to be able to comprehend “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of love. This letter is addressed to a Gentile audience who have left their former pagan ways behind and are learning how to live as followers of Jesus, but it is primarily concerned with questions of how to live in order to break down the wall that separates Gentiles and Jews. The answer given to the challenge of that separation was, you guessed it, love. Right after the passage we heard today, the letter goes on to say, “I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

This is why it is crucial for us to comprehend God’s love, because it is loving one another that is our calling, and it is only with God’s love at work within us that we can complete the work that God calls us to. When it comes to loving one another, Mother McGhee has been asking us to do some pretty difficult things in her sermons recently, and rightly so. Last week she talked to us about forgiving others, the week before that she asked us to resist the danger that fear brings us. I don’t know about you, but I listened to those sermons and I worried because I doubted my ability to do those things. But this week I was reminded, just like Julian of Norwich, the answer is in God’s love. God’s bold, abundant and boundary-breaking love. God’s love. Not mine. If it was up to me on my own to summon the love that I need to do these hard things, to love my neighbor that I don’t even like, they would not get done. I can be a pretty nice person, but I don’t have that kind of love. That kind of love is a gift from God, and it comes to us through faith, which is also a gift from God. In other words, we need to get out of our own way. God gives us what we need. Whether it is love, or understanding, or humility or patience, or bread and fish to feed 5,000 people gathered in a field, with leftovers. God gives us what we need. God “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” Even our wildest imagination doesn’t get close to what we can accomplish with God’s love. I can think of no better prayer than to pray, like the epistle writer, that we will strive to comprehend what this means, that we will be rooted and grounded in love, and that we will get on with this work, because there is a whole lot of work to do out there, and God is waiting for us to join her. Amen.