Glory and Love

          The Book of Revelation offers a hopeful vision for where this is all headed… 

It describes the heartbeat of history:
God shall dwell among us, 
and God will make all things new.

Such hope is found in those words repeated again and again in today’s gospel “Gloryand Love.” Our hope is found in God’s Glory and God’s Love.

 

Prayer

         Glory and Love…

         Today’s Psalm is a magnificent song of praise, 
praise from every inch of creation, 
from heights to depths, young to old
—sung from below to our Glorious God above. 
It is a Song that focuses on God’s transcendence
—part of what makes God glorious is that God is close, but not too close, exalted, far away.

         But the Gospel of John has a different understanding of glory
—for him, the ultimate example of glory is the “Visible presence of God in the world hidden in flesh, revealed and exulted in Christ’s kneeling at his disciple’s feet.” 

God’s presence is fully felt when the callused hands of that humble Galilean carpenter washes his Disciple’s feet.

God comes from heaven down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ
—that is God’s Glory.

 

So what?

“We are restless until we rest in God.”
… so if God is only above 
and only far away, 
we will always seek ladders, 
like the Tower of Babel, 
always want to grasp at a God far off…

What does that look like?

You will cling to the “if onlys” in your life
—if only I was younger or stronger or better or richer, 
yet the if onlys will evaporate each time you think you’ve got hold them.

You will shackle yourself to your past, 
trying to tie down what you had and bottle those moments already gone.

You will fixate on your future, 
insisting on perfection, 
obsessed with every “must” and every “or else” that you anticipate is coming.

         But we’re already reconciled with the one to whom the Psalmist sing, ”Praise the Lord” 
He dwelt among us and we can rest in him.

We can rest in him who commanded, “Love one another.”

 

“Love one another.” 
If this command were only beautiful last words from a generous idealist to his friends
—a man betrayed, denied, and soon crushed, by an unloving world
—there would be something romantic in that, 
it might be enough to echo on through the ages
—a shout of defiance worth remembering… 
and for those disciples initially experiencing these words at the last supper, 
that was all it was, 
that side of the resurrection, 
before the resurrection
—Jesus saying “love” was simply a defiant stance against the likes of Pilate and other unloving powers of this world.

 

Defiant words issued to a world run by force and spite, a world where Putin and Javelin missiles, 
mass shootings and bullying 
seem to rule the day…

But, on the other side of the resurrection, 
after the resurrection of Jesus, 
“Love one another”
… it takes on a tone of triumph
—Love wins. 
Love stops cycles of violence, 
love redeems.
The one who called us to love
—loved to the end and beyond the end to a new beginning… 
we now live in an era where love not only defies hate, 
it overcomes it.

 

Love is the only way!

20 some years ago … I was volunteering at the Comea Shelter, a homeless men’s Shelter back in Cheyenne Wyoming.

Each day I filled the shelter’s old blue mini-van up with bedding and drove it down to the commercial launder mat, picked up donations from around town, 
picked up the clean bedding, 
and brought it all back.

Sometimes shelter residents would ride with me and help me load and unload things.

 

Now, there was one resident in particular who would often ride with me. 
He happened to have a Nazi swastika prominently tattooed on his forehead.

We worked together for several weeks—and during that time I did my best not to stare at that thing on his head

—I did my best not to ask questions about it.

Then one day, we were driving along and he said to me, “Chris. I know you look at it.”

“Look at what?” I asked.

“The swastika,” he replied.

I was –this close—to responding, “What Swastika,” but by that time I was staring at his forehead instead of the road, so I replied, “Yeah, I do.”

“I got it while I was in prison down in Denver,” he explained.

That was of course just the kind of comforting thing you want to hear while alone with a guy twice your size.

“Oh,” was all I could reply.

He then told me how much he had hated blacks and Latinos… 
though he used much stronger language for both.

“Oh,” I again replied.

He continued, “Then I got out. No landlord wanted someone like me as a renter… 
the only place that would take me was a housing co-operative for ex-convicts run by a black man. It took me a while, but I just couldn’t hate them anymore.”

Love is the only way!

 

Think of Peter, in Joppa… 
now, I’ve been to Jaffa, it’s squished right up against Tel Aviv
—they’re a strange contrast, there on the shore of the Mediterranean
—Tel Aviv is a glitzy modern city on par with a New York or a London, 
Jaffa is like Juarez, a run-down second-world kind of affair… a
 stark division, while sitting on top of one another. 

I bring up this unsettling difference
—because I imagine Peter is unsettled in a similar way, by the prospects of making no distinction between he and these men from Caesarea
—loving men he normally would consider profane and unclean, 
or at least far from the works of the Spirit, 
far from being God’s people too.

Yet love is the way
—Love lets Peter see these men with new eyes. 
Love lets him recognize God acting among them, 
recognize God’s gift and the life of the Spirit among them
—it looks different, 
it is uncomfortable, 
it is unsettling and strange
—but it is still of God! Still the love that leads to life!

 

 

 

The arch of history and the goal of God, is this:

-God shall dwell among us
—we have already witnessed that Glorious truth in his Son Jesus Christ who came that we might have life.

-God will make all things new
—the love that triumphed over the grave continues to transform the world.

Amen and Alleluia.