God so loves the world…
I have seen the reference to John 3:16 on the side door of truck cabs and on the back of 18-wheelers. I’ve seen it on billboards along interstate highways, on bumper stickers and on flyers distributed by evangelical Christians. The focus of those materials, as well as the people I’ve listened to, has been on the word ‘believe.’ If you ‘believe’ in Jesus you will have eternal life; if you do not ‘believe’ you are judged already for not ‘believing’ in him (Jn 3:18).
Since we in the Western world put so much emphasis on what our MINDS do, rather than what our hearts do, many think these passages in John’s Gospel mean we must agree that Jesus is the Son of God and fully accept that it is only through him the world can be saved. Furthermore, many think ‘believing’ means that our minds must close around this thought in a posture of absolute CERTAINTY or risk God’s judgment & condemnation.
Left out of the discussion are verses 19 through 21. They provide the basis on which our actions (not our beliefs) are judged. What matters to God is not what we THINK or the ideas we hold. What matters to God is whether we are able to be compassionate and merciful toward ourselves and each other, or whether we are blindly or willfully acting out of an interior darkness. If we live by the truth of our being our actions will naturally express the love, compassion and mercy of God. What we do is done “in God”. If we do not live out of that truth, then our actions emerge from that inner darkness.
God so LOVED the world, the Gospels tell us, that God squeezed God-Self into a tiny human body and walked around in the world AS LOVE. And THAT LOVE asked others to join him in loving the world by serving its hungry and suffering people. God had already asked the people to do those things—through Moses on Mt. Sinai, through the Law and the Prophets. Now God was demonstrating what that Love looked like: it looked like Jesus—how he lived his life, how he healed broken spirits and touched broken bodies and broken lives.
It isn’t enough to say we believe, we are to come out of the darkness in which we hide and touch, with love, God’s broken world—God’s broken people. From everything Jesus said and did during his short life, we have learned this is what God cares about: God cares whether we live as people of love.
Yesterday Pope Francis announced that he is launching a Jubilee Year on Dec. 8, that will be called the Holy Year of Mercy. He said “I am convinced that the whole church will find in this jubilee the joy to rediscover and render fruitful the mercy of God, with which we are all called to give consolation to every man and woman of our time.” (Joshua McElwee ncronline.org, 3-13-15) “The call of Jesus,” he says, “pushes each of us to never stop at the surface of things, especially when we are dealing with a person. We are called to look beyond, to focus on the heart to see of how much generosity everyone is capable. No one can be excluded from the mercy of God…no one…!”
What might it mean for us to “give consolation to every man and woman of our time”? What might it require of us to not “stop at the surface…when dealing with a person”? What if we did “focus [always] on the heart”?
This week I’ve been reading a book called Daring Greatly that a client passed along to me. It is written by Brené Brown, a research professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Houston. In it she includes an op-ed piece she wrote for the Houston Chronicle a few years back. After witnessing several instances of people gesturing their needs and desires to service people while talking on their cell phones she pulled up to a fast-food window having ordered a soda just as her own phone rang. Thinking it might be her son’s school, she answered the phone. It wasn’t the school so she got off the phone as quickly as possible.
Brown writes, “In the short time it took me to say, ‘Yes, I’ll be at my appointment,’ the woman in the window and I had finished our soda-for-money transaction. I apologized to her the second I got off of the phone. I said, ‘I’m so sorry. The phone rang right when I was pulling up and I thought it was my son’s school.’ I must have surprised her because she got huge tears in her eyes and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. You have no idea how humiliating it is sometimes. They don’t even see us.’ “
Later Brown writes, “When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.
This is one area in which mercy and compassion are due. It is one way we can practice Pope Francis’ invitation to “give consolation to every woman and man of our time.” It takes us beyond the surface to the real person there in front of us, or on the phone at a call center, especially in those times we have difficulty understanding or being understood. It calls us to practice focusing on the heart, the place where God-in-them resides. This is one small way each of us can bring God’s Light and love into the world.
Beyond our individual actions, we also have an opportunity to “do the good things God created us to do” as a unified body—as the community of Sophia Christi. Hopefully you have read the last two newsletters and have not only seen the results of our November Social Justice survey but also know the Parish Council will be meeting next week to decide where, how often and what percentage of our monthly contributions we will donate to organizations ministering to the poor of our community.
This collective outpouring of resources for those in need of shelter, of healing, of the most basic human necessities is an act of communal love. As Church we reach out with compassion and consolation to those who are hungry, isolated and suffering. This is what we do and who we are. We live out of our truth as a people sent into the world to love who we see and what we meet.
God so loves the world that God sends US to love and console the suffering, to show kindness and endless mercy to God’s world and God’s people. God so loves the world that those who follow the Revealer of that truth are continually beckoned out of darkness and isolation into the light of eternal unconditional love.
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