Loving With the Heart of God/Askwa -I John 4: 7-12 - July 17, 2011- Cicero United Methodist Church- Everett J. Bassett/Sharon Schmit

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Of the many evolutions that take place in the Bible, one of the deepest is the evolving understanding of the true nature of love. In a nutshell, it is the evolving journey from an exclusive love that says, "God only loves people who are like me," to an inclusive love that says, "God's love is vast enough to embrace all people in their endless diversity."

            We might as well admit it - there is a strong vein of exclusiveness that runs through much of the Bible. The Hebrew people in the Old Testament saw themselves as a chosen people, separated and favored by God. In its most extreme form, they avoided foreigners, and saw them as inferior or unclean. This spirit continued into New Testament times, where the Jews. including the Jewish Christians, saw themselves as separate and superior to all of those Gentiles outside the chosen circle. A couple weeks back, we read from Acts, chapter 10, where God gives the apostle Peter a vision of a wider love to embrace all the races of the earth - and Peter actually argues with God about it, resisting this call to break down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile.

            This inability to notice God's love for diversity seems odd, given the amazing diversity God has placed in this world. Perhaps you read that scientists recently discovered a group of caves in Sequoia National Park in California, and found 27 previously unknown species of animals. Some of them were specific to one particular room in one particular cave. There was a pill bug that is translucent so its inner organs show; there is a tiny fluorescent orange spider; a daddy-long-legs with jaws bigger than its body, and many more. I can tell many of you are thinking, "Now my life is complete, I was losing sleep wondering if we were ever going to find more pill bugs." But the point is, we have still not discovered all of the amazing variety God has placed in this world - whether we're talking snowflakes, pill bugs, or varieties of people. And we never will. So why have people - including people in the Bible - always jumped to the conclusion that God can only favor people like themselves - their own particular race; their own particular religion; their own particular nation; their own particular group of any kind?

            This morning's scripture lesson from I John 4 shows the other extreme of the evolving understanding about God's love. This is the beautiful realization that love is so radically intertwined with who God is that the only way to say it strong enough is to say finally that, "God is love." In fact, the ability to appreciate God's love becomes the litmus test for whether you know God at all. In the opening verses of this chapter, John introduces a major concern - how can you test the spirits to tell whether they are from God. His first answer is that the test is whether or not the spirit recognizes that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. But even that is not clear enough. So in the verses we read, it is as if John is saying, "Look, let's make it as simple as possible. It's about love. That's what Jesus was about. That's what His death on the cross represents. That's what He was trying to teach us about God."

            Maybe you could say this at any time at any pace, but it seems to me that we desperately need to recapture the truth of that here and now. People are claiming all kinds of tests for true faith. Usually it comes dawn to something like, "If you believe this doctrine, you know God. If you don't believe it, you don't know God." Or, if you vote this way... or, if you say these words... or, if you support my cause...  if  you dress this way... if you gain acceptance to this group. And ironically, often as not, these words are couched in very unloving terms. We aren't very nice to each other sometimes, and sometimes our exclusiveness is outright, and sometimes it's subtle. It shows up in our humor, or our silence against injustice, or even in our unconscious assumptions and stereotypes about those who are different from us. But here is a simple test: am I loving right now? Because if I don't have love, then it doesn't matter if I have everything else right -I am not close to God. I don't know God; it's that simple.

            Last week, in our Sunday night discussions of movies, we watched a scene from the movie Bruce Almighty, a scene where Bruce finally starts to understand the lesson God is trying to teach him. God asks him what prayer he would make for the woman he loves. And after struggling through his own self-centered feelings, Bruce finally says that he prays that someone will see her, the love of his life, the way God looks at her right now. And God responds, "Now, that's a prayer." And isn't that what we would strive to do? To see each other the way God sees us? Celebrating our differences instead of fearing them? Encouraging our uniqueness instead of shooting it down?

            A rabbi named Jennifer Krause wrote about her neighborhood in New York City, and her daily contact with varieties of people, including many Muslims and Christians. Some of the more conservative Jews in her circle work very hard to stay separate from outsiders. Their sense of things is that God purposely set them apart - that's the way they should live. But Krause disagrees, and she talks about the central moment when the Jews were formed in the Bible - the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. She points out something I had never thought about before. In Exodus 12: 37, we're told that 600,000 Hebrews walked out of Egypt with Moses. But then verse 38 adds this: "A mixed multitude also went up with them ... " Somehow that verse gets overlooked. Krause points out that as the Jewish people looked back on that formative event in their history, they saw it exclusively as the liberation of their Hebrew ancestors. But it was always a mixed multitude - a variety of peoples, just like her neighborhood in New York. God
loves diversity, and those who love others have found God, because they are seeing with the eyes of God, and loving with the heart of God. Our tendency is to see our own kind; God sees mixed multitudes - a beautiful tapestry - and through the example of Jesus, asks us to love accordingly.

            A reporter told a little girl who was living with her family on the street that he was sorry she didn't have a home. And the little girl corrected him, "Oh no, we have a home; we just don't have a building to put it in yet." That little girl understood that love is what makes a family, a home, a world. It makes me think about what Jesus called the Kingdom or the reign of God. God has poured love into this world - it is a powerful force; it is God's Spirit itself; it is our home. But this world has not vet given God's love a house to live in. We have not yet learned to live with such a love, But God is working on that; the reign of God is coming; and more and more we are invited to realize the power of God's great truth - words we read today and are invited to take into our hearts with joy: "No one has ever seen God: (but) if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is perfected in us."