December 20th, 2009 Love – Advent ’09
For God so loved the world that …
So begins the King James Version of John 3:16, one of the best-known passages of the New Testament. I realize that many “traditional” Christians (to borrow a label used by Marcus Borg among others) place a lot of importance on the way that sentence ends, making it into a mantra of salvation reserved for those hold a limited set of beliefs.
But I’d rather, for this article at least, focus on these seven. It’s pregnant (an apt metaphor at this time of year I think) with the potential to change the way we look at our faith.
Theos agapé kosmos - the Divine, in inseverable relationship with all things.
The fourth Sunday of Advent asks us to consider the kind of “love” – agapé in the Greek – that God must have felt toward the world to embody the message of the Christ in Jesus.
Agapé (ah – gop – eh) is so much more than what we generally think of as love. Probably the closest we can come is the “til death do us part” pledge of a traditional marriage ceremony. But it’s more than that. Agapé, unlike human love, is inseverable; it never ends. God doesn’t sue for divorce. Ever. No matter how badly we treat the Creation that we’re part of. Agapé isn’t some warm and fuzzy thing that includes lingerie from Victoria’s Secret, or puppy dogs, or candle lit dinners by a fireplace. Or a “dear John” letter.
It is an unbreakable bond between each of us, the Creator, and all of Creation.
For God had such an unbreakable relationship with Creation that …
Being human, it’s sometimes hard to think of our fath in a way that doesn’t make God into some sort of “big-guy-in-the-sky” – just a human being writ large, with a white beard and a throne and lightning bolts. That’s what we’ve been told. That’s the imagery that we see in church, the movies, on television.
But God, to be GOD, must be more than that. God is the Source of All. God is the Alpha; the Omega. The Beginning; the End - and Everything-in-Between.
That’s not human. That’s incomprehensible.
To make the inconceivable understandable, Christian faith holds that God “incarnated”; made the abstract material - in the name we’ve come to call Jesus of Nazareth. As the former moderator of the United Church of Canada, Bill Phipps, said a few years ago, Jesus is all of God that we can understand.
At one extreme, some think that the agapé – the love – represented by Jesus is some sort of touchy-feelie hippie-style love-in. At the other, there are those who think that it’s a free pass to “heaven.” I suppose that it has elements of both. I don’t find either all that appealing.
What we call the “Gospel of John”, the first “teaching gospel”, or textbook, of the Christian faith, tells us that God loved kosmos – the world. Creation; not just people. We’re certainly part of Creation. But as we’ve come to realize over the past few years, perhaps more than at any time in our history, the world is more than us. We’re beginning to understand that to love the world carries both privilege and responsibility.
Even in human terms, we know that, after the romantic night by the fireplace, love means that we’re prepared to change diapers and drive kids to soccer practice for years to come; that when Victoria’s Secret gives way to sensible shoes we’re going to be just as appreciative of the latter as we were of the former.
Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Emmanuael, “God with us“, is not about whether or not Jesus was born in a manger. It’s not about shephards, or wise men, or little drummer boys. It’s not about trees, or boxes, or bows, or turkey. It’s not about whether or not some minor religious sect in a subjugated country beset by polical opportunism in a dusty corner of the world two millennia ago was given the keys to the Golden Arches of the Pearly Gates.
It’s about agapé.
It’s about the inseverable relationship that we, God, and all of Creation share. A relationship so far beyond “love” that when we truly embrace it, we’re transformed. The same way we’re transformed when we first look on the face of our newborn son or daughter.
Not just for a moment. Not just for the time between December 24 and January 1st.
We’re transformed forever.
Are you ready?
The time is nigh.
