Love One Another

1 John 4:7-21

God is love.

It is a statement so easily made, yet so profoundly other that it boggles the mind. God is love is true, but we cannot turn that phrase around--then it ceases to be true. If God is love, then what of the created order God fashioned? Richard Attenborough’s wonderful film series, “Planet Earth,” shows a violent world of random acts of destruction and predatory cycles, all encased in a beauty and glory hard to fathom--but love hardly seems to rule the course of nature. Does that not negate any affirmation that God is love? What of human suffering? How can God stand by? What is God thinking? The affirmation comes so readily, but then so does the negation. 

But God IS love.

How do we know?

We exist.

We came to be because God, although complete in every possible way, chose to make someone with whom to interact. God created the world and all that is in it in a majestic sweep of creative imagination, and then formed us within it, blessed with that same powerful creative imagination. God left us free--and, hence, fallible--to make of creation what we would. God gave us counsel, revealing love to be the proper frame on which to build our own order. God also gave us a gift in making us incomplete. In order to fulfill what we are to be, we have to search each other out, make connections, and find that which makes us whole. We find that love brings that completion, that love heals the hurts, and that love offers hope in the face of nearly constant uncertainty.As we enter this grand effort, we find God. God enters all loves, bringing them to powerful fruition. Our existence becomes a means to grace as it also becomes an experience of miracle.

Holding a child confirms every one of these thoughts. The child will come to be as she finds and lives within love. The inverse will wreak heavy consequences. She is made to be loved and she is wired to love. Nurture brings that to light. 

Here is why John so stressed love as the foundation of the community of Christ. Christ revealed the purest and most true form of love--self-emptying and self-sacrificial love that transforms and transcends all of existence. He did so, revealing that God sees all of us as that precious child whom we hold. He did so, revealing how that love brings us to places and states we never imagined being. He shows us how to realize the promise made in Psalm 8 that declares us to be “a little lower than the angels.” 

As we grow into embodying this love, we see the created order in new light. It also is an act of love, fearfully and wonderfully made. It has a terrible beauty.

But there is that inescapable presence and reality of suffering. 

Suffering exists in part because God made creation--and us--free. God left it to follow its own course, not a mandated track, reducing creation to a living machine that rides the rails of determinism. No, God wanted it to be fully alive, and to be fully alive, there must be freedom--the freedom to be the result of our real and actual choices and decisions. Nature itself follows the course of evolution and development. The world makes itself through weather, vulcanism, organic growth, and all the other forces of creation. Creation is messy. Life feeds on life. Life needs life to sustain it. Hence, predation exists. Even the purest vegan eats life. That is what it means to be alive. God provides for this, but God also provides for an ethic of consumption from us. A tiger eats because it is hungry. We do, too, but we can manage what we eat and how it comes to the table in a way of love. 

Suffering exists because as created beings, we are incomplete. Bodies break. Minds fail. This stuff from which we are made is fallible and it is finite--it will wear out. Love allows for us to meet this incompleteness with compassion and care. We learn the arts of mending. We also learn the arts of palliative care, when saying goodbye is the truest expression of love. 

Suffering also exists because we are willful. Another consequence of freedom is the freedom to make a mess of things. To choose to live along a fault line means one will experience that messiness firsthand. Hence, a nuclear power plant built in Japan in an earthquake zone may well find itself broken by that force of nature. We can freely enter the church of self, wherein all that matters is our power, our gratification, our wants, our whims, and all other forms of self-centeredness. We have seen megalomaniacs rise to power with dreams of world conquest with horrendous consequences for all whom they march over. We have seen it on a smaller scale when a temper tantrum--child or adult--blows to smithereens domestic peace. We have seen ourselves indulge ourselves in ways that hurt us and everybody around us. We have seen our power to turn of our reason and act solely on impulse with disastrous results--”Hey, y’all, watch this!” God does not intervene because that would be a negation of our freedom. God also does not intervene, giving us the chance to discover the power of grace.

The Parable of the Lost Sons tells this clearly and poetically. Each son of a gracious father makes horrendous mistakes. The younger son runs away from home with his father’s wealth and loses himself, coming home only after becoming as emptied as a person can. The elder son turns inward in offended self-righteousness and wills himself out of hearth and home. Their father lets them go and experience the fullness of their choices, all the while loving them as only he can. They must find that love for themselves. They must learn from their mistakes. They must make their own amends. No one can do it for them. That is grace because it makes it real for them as they embody it in their experience. 

So, even suffering caused by our own willfulness can become an avenue into love that overwhelms all suffering. Love gives us the way to transcend it, finding the power of God to redeem any situation or circumstance, a power some theologians name “omnicompetence.” 

That power of redemption is no less than the power of life itself. 

Which brings us back where we began--God is love. As love, God breathes life into being. As love, God sustains that life always. As love, God redeems that life from the messiness of living--always. As love, God ensures life will always be.

God is love, a statement so easily made, yet so profoundly powerful it boggles the imagination.