God is Not a One-Night Stand.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
Mother Teresa



Texts:

Psalm 150

Hosea 5:15—6:6

2 John 1-6

Today, we read in Hosea the impossibility of loving God in any sort of "right" manner; in 2 John, the author tenderly reminds his readers that the commandment to love one another is not some new commandment, some new idea introduced into the early Christian communities, but one that has its foundation in the beginning.  Created in love, the world seems to only know how to hate.  Having a God that is constantly turning toward us, we constantly turn away.    

"For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings," (Hosea 6:6).

Steadfast love is difficult to understand.  Love is often reduced to a feeling or an experience rather than an enduring quality of a relationship.  Perhaps this is why it is do difficult within our society to understand God.  We presume that if those who follow God act unlovingly, it implies that God is unloving.  We presume that if we encounter difficulty or strife, God has withdrawn her love.  Rather than seeing the ebb and flow of the narrative as constitutive of love, we gravitate toward specific instances or specific examples of love, reducing it to a singular point within the narrative.  

Hosea's words fade into the background as we hear the voice of God coming through his words: 

"What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?  What shall I do with you, O Judah?" 

2 John speaks with tenderness and mercy, exhorting the community to love one another.  The reminder comes again and again, to a community that remembers and forgets, remembers and forgets, what it is to love and what it is to be loved.  This is the love that cannot be earned.  It is the love that is never comfortable because it can only be received.  Sometimes, I think we want a one-night stand with God, a whirlwind romance that leaves us breathless, that we leave behind as a memory, as something that happened once upon a time, that we tell our grandchildren about in whispers and giggling.  It would be so much more fashionable than the enduring love that watches us as we fall, as our bodies (spiritual and physical) sag under the weight of the gravity of life and adversity, that sees the parts of us that a weekend romance would never see, that loves the reality of who we are rather than the projected idea of perfection.

Broken and scattered, we are loved.  We are not loved for the projections of perfection we bring to church and out in public; we are loved for the person who stares at her reflection, disgusted by what she sees.  It is the "I love you" that breaks our hearts because it sees beyond what we wish to have known and peers to the core of who we are.  This is the love that makes us real.