6/16/2020

(Written in a time of great division)

 

This girl had been taught a lesson by her community and she had learnt it well.  If God is for you than who is he against?  Welcome to the gods of our creation

                                                              Padraig O’Tuama (In the Shelter p.77)

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Jesus loves me, this I know

but I am not so sure Jesus loves you

 

we don’t say this out loud

perhaps we don’t even think it out loud

 

but I suspect we struggle to believe that the God we say is Love

really loves all

(as some of us so loudly proclaim)

 

at the very least we feel that God

if God loves them, must be royally pissed off

and somewhere in our hearts is that seed of retribution

that wants them to get what we feel they deserve

 

a little smiting

 

this is perhaps the one way God is really beyond my understanding

God’s capacity to Love

and keep loving

 

while we are busy categorizing people as

evil, or sinners, or bad, or

whatever word we choose to use

 

God is busy looking at those same people with love

 

That person with the confederate flag and his AR-15

That person coughing on another in a store in New York

That person shoving an old man to the ground

That right wing theologian who dehumanizes people who are LGBTQI

 

The list goes on

Of people I have trouble loving

Of people I tend to diminish, and minimize, and reject

While accusing them of diminishing, minimizing and excluding

 

Even as I write those words my brain screams

“but they are wrong”

“they are hurting others”

“THEY don’t love”

 

and I am left humbled

and saddened by my inability to love them (not necessarily like)

and to live that love out

 

I am left convicted, by my belief, unbidden and unwanted

that “my” god cannot love “them”

 

but fortunately

while my god may be not be able to love them

God can

 

and so on this day

as anger and resentment roil

and mix in with the love compassion that is in my soul

may I turn from my created god and turn to God

and ask for help

 

I pray for myself, and all of us, that

“being rooted and established in love, we may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge…”

 

and I pray that we might be, “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

And that what we cannot do, this One  “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,”   (Ephesians 3)

 

May do in us and through us