Sunday, October 26, 2014

God loves us into loveliness – Matt 22:34-40, 1 Thes 1:5c-10, Exod 22:20-26

30th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stanislaus.

My father was a wandering Aramean.  Well, he wasn’t; my father was from Cumbria and the only wandering I remember him doing was purposeful moderate hiking.  But, if we were celebrating Passover, it wouldn’t matter if your father was from LaPorte or La Paz; we would each make that claim, that “my father was a wandering Aramean,” and we’d make it because Deuteronomy tells us to.  As the Jewish people recall each year the saving wonders God worked for His people in freeing them from slavery in Egypt, they don’t let that event stay soberly and tamely in the past, they claim for themselves, “my father was a wandering Aramean.”  In much the same way, today in this Church we’re invited to hear the Word of God say to us, personally “you were aliens in Egypt.  Remember.”  That’s not a word that we can let sit in the past, not a word we can hear directed solely to that one generation millennia ago, wandering in the desert, freed from slavery, approaching the promised land, receiving the Law as they went; that’s a word for us.  That’s the Word of the Lord for us.  That’s a word that takes on life in this assembly.  That’s a word in which we encounter Christ.  We were aliens in Egypt.  We were slaves.  Remember.


And remember not just that.  Remember what God does to the chains of slavery.  Remember the Exodus.  Remember what God does to bonds of sin and of death.  Remember the cross.  Remember the great cost to self at which God acts to liberate his people.  Remember the love.  Remember God’s hearing of the cries of the afflicted, and be comforted and cry out in childlike trust.  Remember God’s wrath for those who refuse to hear and act with compassion, and remember the finger of that wrath which could, quite justly, be pointed at each of us, and be challenged, but still cry out in childlike trust, because we have been freed from fear, cast out by perfect love.  Remember Jesus, and remember what St. Paul tells us, that he delivers us from the coming wrath.  That he loves us and, refusing to hold onto love as his own private virtue, loves us into loveliness.  Remember.


And when we remember all that, the result can be miraculous: a healthy love of self: an awareness of all that binds us, all that doesn’t leave us as free to love as we dream of being, as God created us to be.  We’ll be aware of the times when we turn away from the hard path of Christ-like love, we’ll be aware of our inability to overcome an impulse, to conquer a fear, to wisely discern just quite what is a loving response in each situation.  And we’ll be aware that God is even more aware of all of those things than we are.  And we’ll be aware that none of that makes God love us any the less, that God’s righteous anger at our brokenness fires up his love to act in healing, to lead us to the baptismal waters, free us as concretely as those slaves who walked through the Red Sea, cleanse us and claim us as his own sons and daughters, to incorporate us into the death and the resurrection of his beloved son.  We’ll start to learn how to love a self so radically beloved of God, how to love a sinner being redeemed.  And we’ll look around, and we’ll see we’re not alone at the foot of this cross, that we are surrounded by sisters and brothers, strangers no longer, no longer aliens in Egypt, but fellow citizens of heaven, redeemed with us, claimed by God along with us, not wanderers, but pilgrims, returning to our native land.  And maybe then, we can heed our Lord’s words, and love these neighbors as ourselves, with that brilliant fiery love we encountered in God for us.

And then we might see that love’s victory extends to us, that love may start to conquer in us what we could never conquer in ourselves, and God’s love starts to lovelify us and all parts of our being might start to fall in step, to harmonize with each other, and, with heart, and soul and mind, we love God.  And we’ll keep falling short of that, and that’s not a condemnation of us, but an awed awareness of the grandeur of God’s love, and we’ll keep finding God reaching out to us with love that revivifies what sin turns lifeless.  We’ll see God concerning himself intimately with the seemingly mundane and seeing how each sphere we reject as irrelevant to our life of love can be transfigured, can be part of the Creator’s plan of love.

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