Intentional Love
The instruction came to me
Practice intentional Love
Not accidental, nor obligatory
Practice love with intent, on purpose.
Not mindlessly, nor solely from duty;
As Jesus loved, so shall we love.
His last instruction to all of us.
Leave your study this morning
With intent to show love with every action.
When love meets pain, it becomes compassion.
When love meets happiness, it becomes joy.
Joy is an expression of the awakened heart, a quality of enlightenment. When we live in the present, joy often arises for no reason.
When I came across these thoughts, I was compelled by the spirit to pause and consider. I love that thought of “when love meets…” What a powerful picture.
And I thought about how joy is a fruit of God’s Spirit according to the Apostle Paul.
Then I remembered this little folk song from the time when I sold my electric guitar and bought a nylon-stringed acoustic one and sang folk songs. Many from Catholics in the mid-to-late 60s. Like this one written by Sister Miriam Therese Winter, Joy Is Like The Rain.
I saw raindrops on the river, Joy is like the rain.
Bit by bit the river grows, till all at once it overflows.
Joy is like the rain.
Perhaps today I can rest in joy.
In our tradition, a candle in a wreath is lighted for each of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas when the fifth candle is lighted. The first, second, and fourth candles are traditionally purple. They denote Hope, Love, and Peace. The third is traditionally pink denoting Joy, sort deriving from another ancient tradition of a Joy Sunday celebration. Leading up to the commemoration of Jesus birth the lights grow brighter as Jesus was the Light of the World.
This Sunday we contemplated Love. John, Jesus’s friend and author of the fourth gospel, used light and dark as the theme of his story. He also is famous for making love the core idea. God is love. Jesus is love.
Love not so much as an emotion. Love is a way of acting toward yourself and others. Can you pray for others? Can you perform acts large and small for others? Can you treat others and yourself with kindness and compassion?
During this week of Advent we could hardly do better than contemplate how we love. And how our love appeared yesterday. And how we will respond with love today.
People of the world have lives so much better than ever before. In general, people are healthier. More people live under democracy despite movements to return to authoritarian rule. Most people have electricity, heat, mobile phones (those led to an increase in literacy among other things).
And yet, our 24-hour breathless news cycle leads people, especially in the USA but other places as well, to believe that they are worse off. Indeed, there remain too many places where anger and fear drive terrorist attacks, wars, killings.
Can peace exist without justice?
Justice without humility?
Humility without faith?
Reduction of anger and fear without living a with-God life. Recognizing others as God’s children?
We need fewer driven, successful entrepreneurs and politicians. We need more people practicing kindness, justice, and, yes, love.
I read the blog of a technology innovator. He is Jewish, but non-religious, from New York City.
That always reminds me of a sales rep I had in NYC in the 1980s. When I met her, she said hi, I’m a typical New York Jew. I said, great, I have no idea what that means. She also thought that since I was from Ohio that I was a hayseed farmer. After we went to work making sales calls, we just became the marketer and salesperson trying to make a living.
Back to the tech blogger. He recently asked on his blog, “Why do people hate Jews?”
I have thought about that often during the past week since he posted it in light of the fighting going on right now.
I have no answers from psychology or analysis.
I have no answers to other questions of why one group chooses to hate another. It’s happening all around the world. It’s happening in your neighborhood.
An answer easy to say and evidently impossible to live comes from a teaching by Jesus—Love your enemies.
Maybe, just maybe, we could go out today and show kindness, kindness from the heart, to a person of a different tribe or ethnic identity or sexual identity? Do it twice and it may become a practice—a true spiritual practice.
I sit in contemplation this morning with the full moon beaming in the sky in front of me. This full moon signifies the special calendar times for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All together. I feel connected somehow.
Andy Stanley once asked people to consider what breaks their heart. Many things break my heart—one of which is how much those three religions separate from each other and generate hatred while each professes love.
A couple of days ago we had heavy rains. The next morning earthworms flushed from their lairs in the ground were on the streets and sidewalks by the hundreds. Were the robins out there feasting? No. They were in their same hunting areas as usual hopping, looking, pecking.
They couldn’t see the big picture. They were fixated on the way they’ve always done it.
This full moon 1,990 years ago found Jesus’s friends and followers fixated on what they thought the Messiah would be and do. Jesus spent a huge amount of the day teaching them. They didn’t see the big picture.
Even on Sunday with the empty tomb and the resurrected appearance of Jesus they could not comprehend the big picture.
It must have been 40 days later when it all came together for them.
How about for us? How often do we miss the big picture? How long does it take for lessons to sink in for us? Have we even now grasped Jesus’s teachings of love and grace? Sit in stillness and let those thoughts sink in. And see the big picture.
Occam’s Razor guides us to seek explanations with the fewest possible set of elements. Often we paraphrase it as the simplest explanation is usually the best.
I went from one rabbit hole to another. First a discussion on LinkedIn where I thought the explanations missed the point. Which led me to a search for the meaning of Occam’s Razor. If you follow all the arguments by philosophers on the Wikipedia page I linked, you will find yourself in another massive rabbit hole. Funny that these philosophers take a maxim about simplicity or fewest elements and write paragraph after paragraph.
We do that when explaining Christianity, too. Or, too often.
When Jesus was pressed for an explanation, he cited his scriptures to love the Lord and he added from a different location to love your neighbor. At the end of his ministry he left one command for his followers–to love one another.
When the rich young man came to Jesus asking about eternal life, he said he’d followed all the commandments since he had been a child. Jesus saw still an impediment to his loving others and told him to give away all his wealth to the poor. He saw that this got in the way of the young man’s opening of his heart. Rule following and attachment to wealth weren’t enough.
I follow this line of reasoning simply to go to the argument with the fewest elements–Jesus clearly taught us to guide our lives by love. Why do we complicate things like the philosophers and theologians? Maybe because love is too hard.
Jesus began his ministry with this message–change the direction of your life (repent). Why? Because the kingdom of heaven is here (actually here, there, everywhere).
We just have one response–part of it is awareness that we are not on the right path, the one pleasing to God. The other part is to choose to follow the right path.
Later, Jesus added a bit to this. Or he clarified. He said our response it to love God completely and to love our neighbor. When asked about who the neighbor was, he told a story where the neighbor was the most despised person his audience would think of.
Think of the person you would most despise–someone of a different race, someone of a different gender identity, someone from another country speaking a different language. That person you must love.
Later, again, Jesus told a story about a camel going through an eye of the needle. I’m not going to delve into different explanations of what that physical image was. What he was trying to explain is that it is almost impossible to be part of the kingdom of heaven through your own effort.
Loving doesn’t come easy.
But, God’s grace helps us. By living each moment with-God, we will be helped into that state of being in the kingdom where we can love those that we think are beyond love. We change our attitude (which means direction) and start walking along God’s path alongside God.
Part of that repentance thing is to realize we can make a choice but we can’t earn entry through our own efforts. But when we let God be God then we get that extra boost into the kingdom.
Then we truly find that capacity to love even our enemies and those we despise.
You are on your way to the local coffee house. A brother or sister of the human family is along the way. Obviously hurting. You stop to chat. “I believe Jesus can heal you,” you say. “If you believe the way I believe, you’ll be OK.”
What if Jesus were passing that person?
He would stop whatever he was doing wherever he was going. Stop. Look at the person. Deeply. In the eyes. Into the soul. “What do you want?” he’d ask. Then he’d do it.
Reflect upon the people that he had this interaction with. Remember, he was a Jewish rabbi (teacher). He was culturally bound to interact with Jewish people primarily. Seldom or never with outsiders.
Yet, Jesus listened, acted for, and valued
He cared, loved, wept, was moved by all these people who were hurting.
Whom did he not care for? Pompous religious people who thought they had all the answers.
Looking back on the 60s, I thought this was radical for the time–and for many even today in the 20s it is radical.
You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own me
Don’t try to change me in any way
And don’t tell me what to do
And don’t tell me what to say
And please when I go out with you,
Don’t put me on display.
Written by John Medora, David White; Sung by Leslie Gore, 1963
Even in my nerdy teenage years, those words resonated.
And today even more so.
The non-technology part of my Twitter stream concerns women hurt by evangelical pastors and evangelical husbands. I’m sitting here not 15 miles from a guy who famously injured emotionally if not physically many women.
I know of many who hold to a theology ripped from part of the Apostle Paul’s writings to justify that behavior. They may make fun of how that disciple of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, famously cut phrases from the Bible that he couldn’t agree with (understand?), but this is the same in reverse. Let us just cut a few phrases out of Paul, paste them on our walls, and follow them.
Count the number of times Paul instructed mutual submission. Observe the way Jesus treated women. Follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbor (and no, not that way…).
The radio in my wife’s car is set to Sirius XM’s 60s Gold (for contrast, mine is on Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville). This Leslie Gore song pops up occasionally as a reminder of how to treat other people.
Try it.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 