Sermon: The Love of God

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The Love of God

By Charles Rush

December 21, 2003

is morning I want to lift up briefly a very simple but important story, that of Mary. We lift her up and celebrate her on many different levels. I want to take one of the more basic levels today. She is a young girl that has an experience of the Almighty. She senses that she is to do something. She doesn't entirely understand it, certainly not the implications of it, but she just does it. And when she does, she gets caught up in the conspiracy of God's goodness towards us all. In this season, more than anything else we remember that God loves us with a steadfast love, that God comes in search of us and reaches out to us, that before we even realized we needed help and support, God was there for us, beaming out the light of life towards us. In this season, we celebrate the many ways that we too get occasionally caught up in the conspiracy of God's goodness. Spreading the love is what it is all about.

At first blush, this is so obvious that even Grinch who stole Christmas gets it as the point of the season, but it shouldn't be taken for granted. A friend recently told me that she went to her job as usual teaching in one of our states worst school districts. She had a cold sore on her lip as she entered her kindergarten class and it was bleeding. Her children greeted her that morning and with a chorus of "Who hit you Miss Childress?" They proceeded to share stories of their Mothers being hit by boyfriends, of police visits to the house, of people being hauled away. Some of them told of sexual picadilloes uncovered and faithlessness revenged, and they told it with an animation born of too much familiarity, of far too much exposure for small children to see. And zoom out, no one should have to see these things.

But if you spend any time at all in our failing school districts in our greater metropolitan area, they do not merely suffer from undereducated parents. It is true, that there is a substantial educational gap as well. Educators estimate that children from middle class families are exposed to twice as many vocabulary words as students from our poorest families and that children from the upper middle class are exposed to over three times as many vocabulary words at home and in their total educational environment. That gap is very large to begin with.

But, our students from the poorest school districts face an intersection of social ills on top of that. There is the base level of poverty- the frustration and anger that it produces in families not being able to make ends meet. There is the introjection of anger from minorities and immigrants that absorb subtle and not so subtle messages that they are inferior. There is a background of crime that afflicts families who have family members in the big house- and that reality is far wider and deeper than elsewhere. There are self-destructive behaviors with drugs and alcohol, poor avenues of escape and coping. There are fractured families that lack economic and emotional support down the generations that has a rippling effect. Failing education is only a symptom of a much wider social illness and it has a spiritual dimension to it as well that often goes unspoken.

Cornell West, in one of his essays, once spoke of the lovelessness that pervades these communities. That is the malady in its spiritual dimension. And he did not mean to suggest that there weren't individual acts of love here and there, nor that there was some character deficit in poor people. Far from it. He merely pointed out that in all these social ills that I just mentioned, in their sum total, directly and indirectly, the sum effect on children is that they interiorize that they are not loveable in some fundamental way and that they are not confident in the love dimension of their life and do not live out of it as freely nor as widely as they could. They live out of tough. They live out of aloof. They live out of defiance. These are the spiritual dispositions they return to most regularly because this is the spiritual way that they have been formed.

We see the effects of this all around us. When one of our foster kids came to live with us, they had been living with parents addicted to heroin in an abandoned school bus in Elizabeth. Jessie was skinny. The first night she was at our house, she squatted in a corner when she got nervous and barked like a dog. She was a small child and we later put two and two together and figured that she must have spent significant time alone, or with a parent passed out, playing with the dog and was more comfortable for her than interacting with people.

I remember asking the social worker what you say when these kids come to your house. How do you strike up a conversation? I'm not real bright. She looked back at me and she said, "I always ask them, 'honey would you like something to eat?'" I can do that. Would you like some soup?

You give them a hot shower, put them in fresh jimmies, tuck them in clean sheets and they fall deep, deep asleep most of the time, at least in the very beginning. I forget Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Warm, dry, fed, clean, and safe- they work pretty good for almost all of us at first.

She stayed with us for a few years and was part of the family and her brother too. And so many of you all, and others in the community, really reached out to them, invited them in, tutored them, coached them, befriended them, did normal stuff that normal kids ought to do. They started interacting with other kids and they just grew slowly, steadily.

A couple years later they were adopted. They've had some great, innovative counseling. They are in a really solid family with a great environment. Love can't heal everything, but it does heal a lot. Her mother sent me a note the other day.

It was a small testimony that love heals. Jessie is bigger now and was asked to baby sit for the very first time, just her other brothers and sisters in a controlled setting, but it was a big step. She wrote her mother a note. This is what it said. "Mom, the kids were great! They listened the first time. I myself think I did good. Jacob spilled Twister upstairs don't worry! I took care of that! Gio's great! temperture: 99.8. Jacob kept saying "yes mame." Like (obedient!) Katie's been real good! She helped Gio. Even Jacob. Very nice. That counts as a Golden Star. Put money on counter." No longer just squatting on the floor, no more fear of other people. She is actually leading. She is getting more and more normal all the time.

So many of you are doing things to return the broken to normal. I know some of you are working in afterschool programs in Newark. Others are encouraging urban programs in the sciences. Some of you tutor. Some of you support outreach programs to the homeless through Bridges, others of you help with homework when the homeless are at our church. Some of you support a program locally that takes at risk kids and pairs them with a support network and follows them on through high school and helps to finance their college education. Others of you are shouldering the extra costs of education for children in your extended family. Some are physically helping to erect housing, others are working on affordable housing in our area. You may not be able to heal all things, but you are healing some thing right around you. You are spreading love.

Bill Coffin once said, "Make love your aim, not biblical inerrancy, nor purity nor obedience to holiness codes. Make love your aim, for as [St. Paul reminds us]

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels- musicians, poets, preachers, you are being addressed; 'and though I… understand all mysteries, and all knowledge"- professors [and intellectuals] your turn, and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor'- radicals take note; 'and though I give my body to be burned'- the very stuff of heroism' and have not love, it profiteth me nothing."[1]

Yesterday I had visceral reminder of the importance of love. I had funerals for two very accomplished men in our congregation. Both of them lived into their 80's and if you are lucky enough to live that long, you outlive many of your peers and your funeral tends to be attended mostly by your family. In both cases, yesterday, one of the most moving parts of the funeral, was listening to the grandchildren get up and talk about their grandfather, about being encouraged and loved into becoming who they were becoming. I ended the day with a wedding, a wonderful, joyous celebration of family and the power of love to build us up and launch the next generation. Frank and Penny Bolden's son Brian was married. What a delight to see Frank out on the dance floor, dancing with his 4 year old granddaughter who was wearing a formal white dress and smiling ear to ear. What a blessing to be part of that.

"Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined life but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Decartes too was mistaken; "Cogito Ergo Sum- I think therefore I am? Nonsense. Amo ergo sum- I love therefore I am. Or, as with unconscious eloquence St. Paul wrote, "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love."[2] Spread the love. Amen

[1] From Bill's new book, graciously given to me by Anne Debevoise; I hope you sell a few Bill. See Credo by William Sloane Coffin (Louisville: John Knox Westminster Press), p. 5-6.

[2] Ibid, p. 5.