Loving god in all things

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams on May 1, 2005, the Sixth Sunday of Easter

[We prayed in today's collect:] O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.

"Pour into our hearts such love toward you, that we may love you in all things." While that commendable prayer sounds sweet and harmless, be careful of praying it. It is a costly prayer. To want deeply to be filled with God's love and to love God in all things means that we have to be prepared to give up all that is not loving in us: all the resentment and bitterness, all the non-forgiveness, all the condemnation and judgment of others, all the pride and exaggerated sense of self-importance, all that keeps us from the love of God.

Do you want to give all that up? At my deepest level I know that I do, although with great fear and trembling. I know that that is what I am created for. I know that love is ultimately stronger and more life-giving than hate. I know that when confronted with injustice and hatred, either aimed at me or at others, that is when I most need to let the love of God pour through me and displace my resentment and my need to punish and my drive to return evil for evil. At my deepest level I want to be filled with God's love that I may love God in all things, but I do not often live there.

At a much shallower, daily life level, I find those instincts to refuse forgiveness or to punish those who have the gall or the bad sense or the stupidity to offend me (!) or to threaten back when I am threatened, very strong, a part of my identity that I cling to in relating to the world. But it is the part of the old self to which we are to die, beginning with our baptism. It is the sin in us that we are to let Jesus redeem. It is what we are to let God empty in us that we might be filled with divine love and love God in all things.

Peter exhorts us in today's epistle, "Do not return evil for evil or reviling for reviling; but on the contrary bless, for to this you have been called, that you may obtain a blessing.... Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence." Wonderful words for a Christian to live by, wonderful and yet very hard in the midst of conflict and disagreement.

This coming weekend an infamous so-called Christian group from Topeka, Kansas, will be in Durham to picket at Duke's East Campus, at the Durham School of the Arts, and at seven Durham churches, including St. Luke's Episcopal Parish, to publicize further their "God Hates Fags" campaign. It is hard to exaggerate the venom and hatred of this one-family-dominated group. I observed them at General Convention in Philadelphia in 1997. It was a sad and disturbing sight. Men, women, and children, held graphic signs both depicting and denouncing gay sex in words and pictures. Their Website not only totals up daily the amount of days that Matthew Shepard, murdered in Wyoming, has been burning in hell (now almost 2,400), but goes on to declare that Pope John Paul II has now been tortured there for over a month and that even Jerry Falwell will soon land in the eternal flames. Ironically, this group came to Chapel Hill to picket exactly six years ago, just after the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A, when the same readings and the same collect were used. I preached then out of these same propers about our response to them and how we should oppose such vicious bigotry, not out of our selfishness and need to punish, but out of our love of God and our love for others. Fortunately, six years later, their message seems old and tired and more ludicrous than genuinely threatening. It is not such lunatic fringe that truly test our Christian love and discipline, but those more close to us in faith and outlook, who disagree with us on moral perspectives or politics or other significant issues about which we feel strongly. How are we to respond to these others, often brothers and sisters in the faith, who seem a much more real threat to what we perceive as God's truth?

"Pour into our hearts such love towards you that we may love you in all things." If we are sincere about this prayer, we must let God slowly but steadily empty us of our need to be right, of our need to prevail, of our need to punish others for their short-sightedness. We are still to speak the truth in love as it has been given to us, of course, but "in love" is the operative phrase. Love involves humility about our own opinion. Love calls for respect for the integrity of the other person. Love urges us to strive to speak our truth in ways that others have the best chance to hear it. Love stretches us to pray that these others may receive and spread God's love in the way that God calls them to, not just in the way that we would have them do.

If God is to pour divine love into our hearts, to make room there must be a commensurate emptying out of us all that is not loving. That is a painful but life-giving process. Trust God to sustain you with the grace you need - but do be careful what you pray for.

I Peter 3:8-18

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