The hallmark of the kingdom

"Ooh, your love is a symphony, all around me, running through me.
Ooh, your love is a melody, underneath me, running to me.
Oh your love is a song..."
Your love is a song (Switchfoot)

If you were to ask anyone on the street what is the first word that comes into mind when they think of Christianity, I wonder what they would say? Somehow I doubt for many that the word woul be love. Yet in John's Gospel Jesus says love is the mark by which we will be known as his disciples. Our love for one another. It comes right after Jesus demonstrates his love for his disciples by washing their feet. It come not long before Jesus demonstrates his love for the whole world by sacrificing his life.

Practical love means not judging. Not excluding. Not obsessing over doctrine or theology. Practical love means getting our hands dirty and engaging with people where they are. Mind you, I'm not saying it is something I'm good at - but it is definately something to aspire to!

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing."

1 Corinthians 13: 1-4

Born to be me

"...we then picture God as a kind of employment committee whose business it is to find suitable careers for souls, square holes for square pegs. In fact, however, the value of the individual does not lie in him. He is capable of receiving value. He receives it by union with Christ. There is no question of finding for him a place in the living temple which will do justice to his inherent value and give him scope for his natural idiosyncrasy. The place was there first. The man was created for it. He will not be himself until he is there." Membership (C.S.Lewis)

There have been lots of profound thoughts running around my brain the last few months - but whenever I sit down to blog they evaporate. Either that or they reduce themselves to something I've written already. I'm steadily concluding the kingdom is easier than I have been making it. Easier as in less complex, although simplicity is often hard to attain.

In the gospels Jesus often says "he who has ears to hear let him hear". He talks about us needing faith like that of a child. He means that it is simple. It's us who make it complex. Like Naaman, we want a nobler cure. Theology often muddies the water. Our feelings of obligation grow. We lose our perspective of God's love. His sense of our worth. His grace. We start to struggle. And that precisely is where we lose contact with the kingdom. Jesus distills the commandments down to just two. Love God and love your neighbour. If you do these all the rest of the law falls into place.

That quotation from Lewis makes me wonder. God made me unique. Gave me skills and character. Molded me to be me. Put me in a family. Provided me a saviour. If I aim to be the best me that I can be; love God and love those around me maybe that is it. The Kingdom. And the things is, I don't even need to be worried about the things I can't do. Because Jesus took care of the most important one and then popped me into a family, a body, chock full of people who are good at things I'm not.

Love extravagantly

One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"

Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Matt 22: 33-40 (NIV)

I've been reflecting a lot on my statement about having run out of words. In the last few weeks it feels like I've spent more time with God and said less to him than in any comparable period in my life. Heading up the road at lunchtime for a stroll in the local cemetary I invite God to walk with me. The very thought brings a smile to my lips. I know he's with me even if I say nothing more beyond it. It seems that having nothing more to say is not such a bad place to be.

When I mentioned this to a friend at the weekend he referred me to a book by Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God. This simple work expounds the principle of doing everything for the love of God. It's deceptively simple. Love of God becomes Brother Lawrence's motivation, and his reward, for all tasks easy or hard, spiritual or secular. And as he works out this simple creed all things become holy, and all fears dispelled.

The most excellent method he had found for going to God was that of doing our common business without any view of pleasing men but purely for the love of God.

Brother Lawrence felt it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action, as by prayer in its time. His own prayer was simply a sense of the presence of God, his soul being at that time aware of nothing other than Divine Love. When the appointed times of prayer were past, he found no difference, because he still continued with God, praising and thanking Him with all his might. Thus his life was a continual joy.

Unconditional love

"We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him." Rom 5: 7-8 (The Message)

This weekend I was once again looking after my mother. There is very little now that she can do or wants to engage with. She cannot read, and does not want to be read to. She has very little conversation - and quickly loses the thread of anything that you tell her. About the only thing she enjoys is going for a walk. So, despite the cold, we did a lot of walking. Most of it in silence - because it becomes hard to hold a conversation with one who has so little to say. It's heart-breaking to see how much she has lost. I realised once again just how much I miss her. Yet despite all of that I still love her and treasure the time we spend together. Just to give her a hug, or hold her hand. To share a little silliness and raise a momentary smile.

It got me thinking a bit about the way that God loves us. Since finishing Finding Sanctuary I have been working my way through an Henri Nouwen reader, Seeds of Hope. It is a collection of snippets from his various writings. This morning I came to the following:

The great temptation is to use our many obvious failures and disappointments in our lives to convince ourselves that we are not worth being loved. Because what do we have to show for ourselves?

But for a person of faith the opposite is true. The many failures may open that place in us where we have nothing to brag about but everything to be loved for. It is becoming a child again, a child who is loved simply for being, simply for reaching out.

This is the way to spiritual maturity; to receive love as a pure free gift.

It made me stop short again. God's gift of love does not depend on what I achieve for him. It does not depend on my search for his kingdom. It is not reduced by the set-backs and failures I encounter. The fact I've hurt him or missed a few quiet times does not make him feel awkward or sullen in my presence.

I wonder, ultimately, if this is what the kingdom is. To be accepted for who I am not what I can do. Maybe the best I can ever do for anyone else is just that...

Hope

"We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love." 1 Cor 13: 12-13 (The Message)

At some stage soon I really ought to return to Matthew's gospel, and the search for the kingdom - but not right now. The last few weeks have been interesting. Madly busy moving house and a number of other things going on which have sapped my energy and taken my focus off God. This morning I had a bit of a rant at him, but through the day my attention has been directed to two scriptures. The first was the passage quoted above. The second is the refrain from Psalm 42 & 43. "Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God."

I'd been thinking a bit about hope in the last few days, after a friend gently chastised me for saying that I held out little hope. I'm not entirely sure how any of this relates. I'm tempted to conclude that maybe what hope I had was misplaced; but I feel that is perhaps too pat. But I'm grateful for the injunction to hope unswervingly and love extravagantly. It has lifted my eyes, and turned my thoughts to praise even if the fog still preses in...

But the greatest of these is love

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." 1 Cor 13: 4-7

A month ago I posed some questions to myself on the topic of Self Denial. Today, whilst looking for something else entirely I stumbled upon the following passage from The Weight of Glory by C S Lewis:

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.

I'm not certain that I agree with Lewis' opening statement - I'm sure most Christians I know would say "the greatest of these is love" - but the essence of what he is saying strikes a chord. While I might say the greatest virtue is love, I act and measure myself as if it were unselfishness and the narrowness of that definition is no substitute for the wide open spaces of real love.