Growing up I had a lot of problems in my relationship with my Mom.  It seems like over the years we fought more than we ever got along,  and for so long I was haunted by lost time.  Looking back it seems like all I ever wanted was her love, and it was daily fight and struggle trying to figure out how to go about that, and I never did get it right.  I became a Christian at 38 and I understood forgiveness, but having gone through so many painful struggles I still wanted someone, or something to “make everything better”. I thought if my relationship with my Mom, or friends or a spouse was working it was for me…it took me years to realize the kind of love that Jesus Christ requires of me is just the opposite but I was still so needy, so fractured and broken and like Humpty Dumpty thinking someone needed to put me back together again. Thank goodness a few years ago my Mom and I finally got that relationship I had been dreaming of.

It’s funny, all I had to do was stop expecting anything and just love her.

We talked every day and I was so happy that when I called her or went to see her she actually wanted to see me, she loved me and I loved her. Sadly several years later she got sick and ended up with dementia and our precious time together was cut short. It seemed like I was cheated in a way, we had only a few years but God is merciful and He allowed me to realize that those two brief years were precious. I was not owed any more and those few times are a gift.  I have had to learn to see my Mother as the same woman, but with a completely different personality and it’s been so difficult. That woman who was so strong she survived cancer 5 times now has no idea how to use a straw. It’s humbling and I depend on God’s grace to not break down into tears constantly, when I am weak….he’s like the Incredible Hulk. I could never do this without Him.

She is is very ill now,  89 and  her death hovers around me like a misty cloud. Some days I can only see the rain and winds but other days it’s like a veil, it shields me from the reality of pain and the fear of losing her. I am able to tune out the turbulent feelings and see her just as she is, a gift to me and I am so thankful. The simple act of feeding her or stroking her hair is a blessing. I enjoy her snoring, her rare smiles or kisses.  I was driving home today and I realized after 9 years of salvation I think I finally understand what liberation and freedom we have in Christ, even in ways we seldom think about. I am free from years of pain and trauma, I can love my Mother just to love her. I don’t need anyone to fix me, or even comfort me. Christ has done all that and continues to. Through Him I can just love people, no strings. And like Him, that’s more than enough for me.

Free wallpapers #2013-01   “I have loved you…”  1440×900            Downloads, all sizes

When we think of what it is to love someone, and to let someone love us, we can take our pattern from God’s initial love for us. God made us to love us. God sent Jesus for us. So many reasons to let God’s love flow through us.

What has this all got to do with the romantic love that is celebrated on Valentine’s Day? I’m challenging us all to let our love go deeper – not just the chemistry clanging, bells ringing kind of love, but the deep, sacrificial love, that would lay down our life for another person.

‘As a minister, of course, I’ve spent countless hours with people who are struggling and wrestling with the biggest question – the WHY question in the face of relentless tragedies and injustices. And like all ministers or any spiritual guides of any sort, I scramble to try to say something to respond and I always come away feeling inadequate and that’s not going to be any different today. But we can’t shrink from the task of responding to that question. Because the very best way to honor the memories of the ones we’ve lost and love is to live confident, productive lives. And the only way to do that is to actually be able to face that question. We have to have the strength to face a world filled with constant devastation and loss. So where do we get that strength? How do we deal with that question? I would like to propose that, though we won’t get all of what we need, we may get some of what we need 3 ways: by recognizing the problem for what it is, and then by grasping both an empowering hint from the past and an empowering hope from the future.

First, we have to recognize that the problem of tragedy, injustice and suffering is a problem for everyone no matter what their beliefs are. Now, if you believe in God and for the first time experience or see horrendous evil, you rightly believe that that is a problem for your belief in God, and you’re right – and you say, “How could a good and powerful God allow something like this to happen?”

But it’s a mistake (though a very understandable mistake) to think that if you abandon your belief in God it somehow is going to make the problem easier to handle. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail says that if there was no higher divine Law, there would be no way to tell if a particular human law was unjust or not. So think. If there is no God or higher divine Law and the material universe is all there is, then violence is perfectly natural—the strong eating the weak! And yet somehow, we still feel this isn’t the way things ought to be. Why not? Now I’m not going to get philosophical at a time like this. I’m just trying to make the point that the problem of injustice and suffering is a problem for belief in God but it is also a problem for disbelief in God—for any set of beliefs. So abandoning belief in God does not really help in the face of it. OK, then what will?

Second, I believe we need to grasp an empowering hint from the past. Now at this point, I’d like to freely acknowledge that every faith – and we are an interfaith gathering today – every faith has great resources for dealing with suffering and injustice in the world. But as a Christian minister I know my own faith’s resources the best, so let me simply share with you what I’ve got. When people ask the big question, “Why would God allow this or that to happen?” There are almost always two answers. The one answer is: Don’t question God! He has reasons beyond your finite little mind. And therefore, just accept everything. Don’t question. The other answer is: I don’t know what God’s up to – I have no idea at all about why these things are happening. There’s no way to make any sense of it at all. Now I’d like to respectfully suggest the first of these answers is too hard and the second is too weak. The second is too weak because, though of course we don’t have the full answer, we do have an idea, an incredibly powerful idea.

One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God identifies with the suffering. There are all these great texts that say things like this: If you oppress the poor, you oppress to me. I am a husband to the widow. I am father to the fatherless. I think the texts are saying God binds up his heart so closely with suffering people that he interprets any move against them as a move against him. This is powerful stuff! But Christianity says he goes even beyond that. Christians believe that in Jesus, God’s son, divinity became vulnerable to and involved in – suffering and death! He didn’t come as a general or emperor. He came as a carpenter. He was born in a manger, no room in the inn.

But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack. And so you see what this means? John Stott puts it this way. John Stott wrote: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

And lastly, we have to grasp an empowering hope for the future. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and even more explicitly in the Christian Scriptures we have the promise of resurrection. In Daniel 12:2-3 we read: Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake….[They]… will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and…like the stars for ever and ever. And in John 11 we hear Jesus say: I am the resurrection and the life! Now this is what the claim is: That God is not preparing for us merely some ethereal, abstract spiritual existence that is just a kind of compensation for the life we lost. Resurrection means the restoration to us of the life we lost. New heavens and new earth means this body, this world! Our bodies, our homes, our loved ones—restored, returned, perfected and beautified! Given back to us!

In the year after 9-11 I was diagnosed with cancer, and I was treated successfully. But during that whole time I read about the future resurrection and that was my real medicine. In the last book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee wakes up, thinking everything is lost and discovering instead that all his friends were around him, he cries out: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

The answer is YES. And the answer of the Bible is YES. If the resurrection is true, then the answer is yes. Everything sad is going TO COME UNTRUE.

Oh, I know many of you are saying, “I wish I could believe that.” And guess what? This idea is so potent that you can go forward with that. To even want the resurrection, to love the idea of the resurrection, long for the promise of the resurrection even though you are unsure of it, is strengthening. I John 3:2-3. Beloved, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope purify themselves as he is pure.” Even to have a hope in this is purifying.

Listen to how Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”

That is strong and that last sentence is particularly strong…but if the resurrection is true, it’s absolutely right. Amen.

*Transcript of Service of Remembrance and Peace for 9-11 victim’s families.
Ground Zero/St Paul’s Chapel Tim Keller
Sep 10, 2006

Would you? Is it worth it? Honestly…tell the truth.

Discuss. I would love to hear what you think.

-Stephen Colbert, I Am America

Random Bible Study at someone’s lovely modern living room. 9 adults in their mid 20s- late 30s are sitting.

Associate Pastor: You do learn things when you go through suffering. But I just don’t agree that suffering is  glorious.

Me: But if you learn things than doesn’t that make suffering good?

Associate Pastor: I just don’t see how suffering is glorious.

Me: (looking down, thinking and than looking up) When Jesus was dying on the Cross wasn’t he at his most glorious?

Associate Pastor: But that’s Jesus not us.

           (Others nods and murmur in agreement)

Me: But that’s not right…to think God is up there and we’re down here. That defeats the whole purpose of Jesus coming to Earth and becoming man. He came so he can experience everything we go through so we can go to Him with anything we go through because He understands. That’s what makes God great and different from any other god because He became us…so you’re wrong.

          (Bible Study silent awkward pause that feels like an eternity)

The End

*Random Bible Study I had

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol.9: The Kindly Ones

VS.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

-CS Lewis, The Four Loves

— Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill

TODAY’S THOUGHT
So often we put the emphasis on us “following” God when we would be better off “responding” to God. We worry so much about how to love God when we all we really need to do is truly understand His love for us. If we really knew what today’s verse really meant how could loving God ever be an issue? How could we ever be worried about following Him? But do we really believe that God desires to bless us and keep us? Do we see God as a loving God that turns His face toward us with such a focus that it is as His face is shining right on us? It is this daunting attention from our loving God that causes us to love Him. It is this knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that His intention is to bless us and keep us, to be gracious with us and give us peace that causes us to follow Him without reservation. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, said it best, “We love Him because He first loved us.” Today know that God has blessed you and kept you. Understand that He has turned His face toward you and has shined it upon you. Finally receive the peace that comes from knowing His unconditional love.
 
TODAY’S PRAYER
Father, thank You for Your awareness of me. Thank You for shining Your face on me. Thank Your for turning Your face toward me and giving me peace. Today Lord, help me live in this reality.
AMEN

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