Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 31, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
Compassion IV:
It’s All Love
“Hallelujah!
O my soul, praise God!
All my life long I’ll praise God,
singing songs to my God as long as I live.” (Psalm 146:1)
“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart..” (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)
“[These love commandment[s] that I give you [are] much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:28-34)
The Old Testament reading and the Gospel this morning are completely pertinent to the theme of our meditations this month, on the subject of compassion. Both testaments of our Bible proclaim the same thing, namely, that love is the name of the game of lifeand, in fact, supersedes everything else. Hence I have argued that we all have one need and one wish and that is to be loved and to love, and I have said further that to be loved and to love is all that we need and all that we want.
We have noticed some of the inherent barriers to this life of joy, freedom and peace. One is our reluctance to understand, to get to know someone more than superficially. Without understanding, our love remains behind a half-open curtain and we can proceed only hesitantly. Of course, love should be unconditionally given, but it is a challenge we often fail to meet when we do not adequately understand where someone is coming from.
And along with understanding, another vital component of compassion is honesty, for honesty opens the floodgates of both understanding and love. The more honest I am with you and you with me, the more we can meet one another on the same playing field. This playing field is necessarily a playing field of suffering. For compassion means suffering. Our Lord Jesus Christ meets our suffering with his suffering. Hence understanding. Hence love. No cross, no crown. And the crown of thorns is a crown of love.
Where compassion reigns, differences melt away. And the differences that remain often become enchantments, things we long to know and absorb into our own lives.
Let’s look at a third impediment to fully engaging in love, both receiving it (despite needing and wanting it) and giving it, because, as we have seen, we are blocked in fully loving others to the extent that we do not love ourselves or have been reluctant to receive love ourselves.
And that is the big, big “no” we throw out at God, either for an idea or ideas we may have about this God, or about experiences we have that seem to belie any evidence that God loves us.
I must agree with those who turn their back on God or religion or church because they have gotten the notion that God is a God of wrath and severe judgment. Where they get such ideas really doesn’t matter, but let’s admit that the Bible—both the Old and the New testaments—have some pretty harsh things to say about God and what God is.
Take this morning’s beautiful readings about commandments. The commandments to love God and our neighbor are beautiful all right, but the very word “commandment” can rankle in our sensitive ears. Why do we have to call these commanments by that name? Isn’t “loving suggestions,” “prescriptions for a happy and rich life,” or just about any way of calling them better than the word “commandment.” After all, we aren’t in the army. I can never recall either of my parents using the word “command” in any advice or warnings they gave me. Maybe it’s just me, but there is enough defiance left in me that I am inclined to turn a deaf ear when I hear talk of commands. On the other hand, perhaps this word points to the absolute essential nature of love. Without it, the world would fall apart, perhaps existence itself would cease to be. So, command does make us sit up straight: “get with the program of loving.” It’s the way of life itself.
And again, we can turn our back on the God thing when we hear a phrase like that of the Confession in Rite One of Communion in our Book of Common Prayer:
We confess together, in beautiful Elizabethan English, the following: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”
Now, wrath and indignation are pretty strong words, and to think that God is a God of wrath might be just what it takes for us to forsake this God. We might even recommend that such a God go and sign up for anger management classes. But as was wisely pointed out to me at coffee hour, when I was ranting about this phrase, this anger from God arises in the context of caring. God cares for us like a parent and has only our best interest in mind. And, as another friend suggested, God is hurt and angry but he doesn’t necessarily lash out in vengeance. He’s not like a child or an abusive parent. In fact, he more than likely doesn’t act from wrath at all. I just don’t know. Do you?
But the most interesting comment I heard as that the wrath of God is God’s wounded love. These are the same wounds that we see on the cross, where God identifies with our suffering.
The wrath of God is God’s wounded love.
So we draw near to the conclusion of our journey into God’s compassion. God’s compassion is about as deep as we limited human beings can go into God’s very being. I truly believe that this is the unique gift of Christian faith over all other religious ideas or creeds. That God suffers: he understands, he identifies and he continues to love.
God’s love is so deep because God understands us fully. Unlike the superficiality of much of our so-called compassion. A lot of this compassion is superficial sympathy, as when a horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks, “Why the long face?”
God is the father who greets us at the edge of the farm, welcoming us home. He is the God at the bedside of every dying COVID patient. She is the one who mourns as we mourn the injustices that millions of God’s children suffer.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love. And the beauty of love is that is freely given. You cannot force anyone to love you, nor can you force anyone to love the source of all love, God. It wouldn’t be love if coerced like that. Jesus is the great courtier. He woos us with gentleness, with mirth and gentle prodding. God wants our love as we want the love of those whom we love! Our love for him completes the gift of our life.
We live in a love world, and the only thing keeping all of us from loving one another is our blindness, refusal or ignorance in opening our eyes to the wonder of our existence on this fragile earth, our island home.
I ask you. I have said that our greatest, our only, need and desire is to be loved and to love. But isn’t our deepest love the desire for those we love to be happy?
Look for your neighbor in yourself. And look for you in your neighbor. Reach out, understand your neighbors as more than names, and you will see the glory of God and rejoice. What’s more you will love.
Amen.