God is Love – Quaker Worship Part 2
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
September 19, 2021
I John 4:7-8 (the New Revised Standard Version)
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
When I was a child, I attended a Lutheran Grade School and every day we would start the morning with devotions (except on Wednesdays when we all met in the church for all-school chapel). I remember one day during devotions my Third-grade teacher, Miss Heber, talking about God being Love.
At first this was a weird and new concept for my Third-grade mind. Just the phrase “God is Love” had me staring out the window and contemplating just what my teacher meant.
How can God be a feeling? Wasn’t love between two people?
Love must be more than what I had originally thought. But to jump to God being love was almost too big to wrap my head around (somedays it still is).
I can honestly say, I think that day, during the morning devotion, was the first time my mind began expanding on just how I see God and what it means that God is love.
It was clear Miss Heber struggled to help us understand, just as any teacher who tries to teach the expansiveness of the Divine to young minds. But in some aspect, she also narrowed things down greatly by defining God as simply love. In the coming years, I would add a lot more to my definition of God and complicate my understanding.
A few years later, I found myself in Confirmation Class, still with a lot of questions and still wrestling with the idea of God as love. In Confirmation, my pastor taught me about another word for God’s love – that word was agape.
We were told that agape was unconditional love – and this was the love we spoke of when we talked of God. My pastor also taught us there were three other types of love,
Storge or Affection
Philia or Friendship
Eros or Romantic
And finally
Agape or Charity
My pastor said that this Agape Love was what God gives us so that we can love our neighbors. Now, there was another new thought to add to my wondering mind.
Again, I had to ponder. So, God is love and God gives each of us his love so that we can share that of God with our neighbors. And when we love – then we are connecting with the Divine in a very personal way. As our scripture for today said, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”
C.S. Lewis expounded on these four loves, in a teaching by the same title, adding to agape love – sacrificial love. Being willing to lay down one’s life for another – some calling this the ultimate act of worship or grace. Thus, Jesus’ death by crucifixion at the hands of the religious and political authorities became the ultimate act of Divine love.
Also, during Confirmation, I was introduced to further attributes of God. God might be love, but God is also, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. This complicated things even further for me.
At first, I took it at face value – God is everywhere, all knowing, and all powerful. But as I tried to grasp this, I realized this made for a rather scary God – and love then takes a backseat to a God more like the ones we see in Greek Mythology.
But as I started to think about this, I realized if God is love then this breaks down when we start to apply these attributes to the Divine. James Burklo enlightened me on this matter when he explained this about God being Love.
“Love is the generative and creative force of the cosmos, so it is omnipresent. But it makes room for unpredictable possibilities, so it is not omniscient. Love is the essence of existence and of consciousness: it is powerfully attractive, but it is not omnipotent. Love is personal, so we use personal terms to express it. But we don’t ask love to solve our problems for us. Prayer is not about asking God to intervene on our behalf. Rather, it is our cultivation of cosmic consciousness, a discipline of paying compassionate attention to ourselves and others. It is the practice of de-centering our small- “s” selves and recognizing unconditional love – which is the Christ – at the core of our being. In prayer, we let divine love guide us into action to meet the needs of ourselves and others.”
When looking at God as Love in this manner, it begins to shape our understanding and give us a context for how this applies to what I am talking about in this sermon series about worship.
As Quakers we talk about expectantly waiting – and for some that often includes what we have universally come to know as prayer – what we may define as making a spiritual connection with the Divine.
Worship and Prayer go hand-and-hand because when we make this connection, we are raising our consciousness within ourselves and learning to embrace agape (unconditional love) first at the core of our being (our Inner Christ or Inner Light) and then learning to sacrifice our own wants and desires to let the divine love guide us into action in meeting the needs of those around us. This was illustrated beautifully in the life and ministry of Jesus.
Quaker worship then places us humbly before the Divine to be taught, transformed, and LOVED, SO THAT we can become a CONDUIT of God’s teaching, transformation, and love to our world.
Quaker Worship then is a full immersion into this Divine Love and holy compassion. (Let me repeat that phrase). Quaker Worship then is a full immersion into this Divine Love and holy compassion.
It becomes the core of our worship. Even Jesus when asked about what was most important spelled it out by focusing on LOVE.
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40)
The Apostle Paul also narrowed it down to LOVE when he wrote to the Corinthians and said, “13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
I encourage you this week to take your Bible off the shelf, crack it open, and spend some time reading through the New Testament. And when you come across the word God – replace it with the word “love.” And really look at those places where the writers of scripture spoke about love. I sense you will find a new perspective.
Since that devotion in third grade, I have continued to expand my understanding of God. That seed that was planted about God being love has continued to blossom and grow.
I find the authors of scripture continue to call us back to this Divine Love. If we are willing to place ourselves before this Love and take it seriously it results in a long list of significant consequences and possibilities.
These three words, “God is Love,” are not just a statement about God, but they sum up the meaning and purpose of our worship and even our human existence.
Embracing a God of Love opens us up as a conduit of a more compassionate, mindful, and in the true meaning of the word, progressive form of Christianity and Quakerism.
Again, James Burklo helped me begin to put words to this Divine dilemma that I have been wrestling with since I was a child.
· If God is love, then God is something we do, more than somebody or something we try to believe in.
· If God is love, then God is a relationship, and not with some Guy with a long beard somewhere up in the clouds, or some other kind of supernatural entity.
· If God is love, God is nothing to fear.
· If God is love, when we really love someone – even of another religion, or of no religion at all – God is in that relationship, blessing it.
So, these three words wipe away all the theological debates about science and common sense versus religion. These three words sweep away the problem of evil, the perennial conundrum of how an all-powerful God could love people while allowing horrible things to happen to them.
Don’t get me wrong, Love is extremely powerful, but it is not directive. Love does not force anybody to do anything, nor to force anything to do anything to anybody.
· If God is love, then God is omni-attractive, not omni-potent.
· If God is love, then prayer is not about asking God for favors.
· If God is love, then prayer becomes the contemplative experience of divine love. (That sounds extremely Quaker.)
· It is the practice of love through compassionate attention to all that is. And this is the purpose of human life. Through billions of years of cosmic unfolding and evolution, we frail creatures have come into being for the purpose of reflecting attentive awe and wonder back at the universe. That is the purpose of worship.
We’re here to let our jaws drop in amazement at each other’s existence (and that of God or Love in one another), and to be wonderstruck with loving attention toward all that exists.
When we are in this state of awe, we are doing God. We are practicing God. We are communing with God. We are worshipping the God that is LOVE.
I know many of you watched the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but one of the most controversial aspects of the wedding was actually the sermon (as a pastor I loved that so many people were talking about the sermon at such a high profile event). It may go down as one of the most talked about wedding sermon’s in history. Bishop Michael Curry opened his sermon with these words.
The late Dr Martin Luther King Jr once said, and I quote:
"We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world, for love is the only way."
There's power in love. Don't underestimate it. Don't even over-sentimentalize it. There's power, power in love.
If you don't believe me, think about a time when you first fell in love. The whole world seemed to center around you and your beloved.
Oh there's power, power in love. Not just in its romantic forms, but any form, any shape of love. There's a certain sense in which when you are loved, and you know it, when someone cares for you, and you know it, when you love and you show it - it actually feels right.
There is something right about it. And there's a reason for it. The reason has to do with the source. We were made by a power of love, and our lives were meant - and are meant - to be lived in that love. That's why we are here.
Ultimately, the source of love is God himself: the source of all of our lives. There's an old medieval poem that says: 'Where true love is found, God himself is there.
Love is in this place this morning if we are willing to place ourselves before it to be taught and transformed. And when we leave this place, we can take this worship of Love and become a conduit of it to our families, our neighbors, our workplaces, and to the greater world.
Now, as we continue this exploration of worship in the manner of Friends, let us again enter this time of expectant waiting in a humble manner – opening ourselves to Love for teaching and transformation. Here are three queries for you to ponder.
· What ideas or attributes of God have not been helpful in my faith journey?
· How might embracing God or the Divine as Love help me both worship and respond to my world?
· How will I pay compassionate attention to myself and others this week?
Opening Prayer:
God, whom we know to be Love, we humbly position ourselves before you in this Meeting for Worship. Teach, transform, and fill us with your love this morning. Speak to our condition, make your presence known to our Inner Lights, and help us to sense a desire to share Your Love with all we meet. May we be the conduit of your Love to our world. Amen.
Benediction:
In The Name of Love
In the Name of Love, we have come.
In the Name of Love, we are here.
And, in the Name of Love we will go.
Knowing in our Hearts and in our Souls
that what we have experienced is truly Divine.
- Dennis Yount (Died of AIDS in the early 1990s)