It's all about love

I have been thinking about love a lot lately. God's love, married love, friend's love, romantic love, love of the colleague, companion and stranger.

This morning as I read from my Spiritual Direction magazine I read a quote from Thomas Merton:

"Love is our true destiny,

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone -

we find it with another.

We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study 

and calculation in our own isolated meditations.

The meaning of our life is a secret that is to be revealed

to us in love, by the one we love....

We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in

love...

Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning,

value and identity."

                                      

Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart; Mariner Books, 2002, pages 27 & 35.

This rings so true to me, but what hit home was "We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love..."

In our society we assume falling in love is a romantic thing, something that happens when we find a person we want to spend our life with. 

I have found that as I have begun to love myself I am in love with more and more people. Being in love for me is simply loving another, a state of loving, wanting the best for another, seeing past their hurts, wounds and not so good traits and behaviours to the real person that they are. It is not romantic or sexual. It is not wanting to be constantly with a particular person. It is enjoying their company, supporting them in the things that are going on in their lives.

I see God's love is the sort of love we need for each other, unconditional and accepting of the other just as they are, without expectation that they will change. This does not mean that if they treat us badly we are to stay around to be abused...I work with too many abused women and children to suggest that. It also means we don't keep trying to make them into what we want them to be, for to do that gives them the message they are not good enough and they are a constant disappointment. 

In our society we continue to believe the Cinderella story, all our movies have elements of it, even our churches proclaim it unwittingly. Both men and women are sucked in by the lie that one person will satisfy all their needs. However, to think that one other human being can meet all our needs, rescue us from our mundane drudgery or our deep pain is very unhealthy. It is also idolatry, for we make our husband, wife or partner into a saviour or we make ourselves into their saviour if we even partially believe that.

In marriage, whether that be the official kind or where we commit to living together as a couple, we have a particular relationship. It has some exclusivity; sexual exclusivity is the norm, and personally I think non-negotiable, but there are other things that are vital for the relationship to work. That is a commitment to go through the good and bad together, to keep trying, to be adaptable and to communicate at the deepest level. But neither the exclusivity nor the commitment means we exclude friends who meet some of our emotional, intellectual, spiritual and social needs. To be unwilling for another person or group of people to meet one, any or parts of all of those needs in either ourselves or our intimate partner speaks more of our own fear, insecurity and lack of having our needs met healthily.

God made us for community knowing we cannot be healthy without others; we cannot grow or survive without others. So we must let go of our Cinderella stories, our happy ever after myths and be willing to share our selves with others in love, willing to share those we love with others, share our intimate partner with others knowing that we benefit from this as they benefit from it. 

May God bless us with many people to love and be loved by.

What a difference a year makes. Time to come out!

I cannot believe it is over a year since I wrote on this blog!

I said in my last post I would say why it had been so long since I had written - & now it's even longer. The short version is our congregation voted to close the church. This was a painful decision and some of us are still feeling the effects. Without going into  detail, and certainly without blaming anyone we found we could no longer come under the denomination we had been under for some 15 years and we could not face going through what needs to be gone through to become an independent congregation. There were many factors and to cite any one of them would be unfair to all involved. I still work for the denomination in another role, I love the people I work with and love the pastors, leaders and all who are part of the denomination, all are delightful and gracious people. I understand where they come from and why; I spent most of my Christian life in that space. I appreciate their loyalty to God and each other and to me.

However, I came to the realization that to continue as a pastor within a denomination that states that homosexuality is a perversion meant that I would be called to speak and live without integrity. As a follower of Christ and a pastor (even if I no longer work officially in that role I still do this), I believe that my personal and public life must uphold the same values. I realized that my relationship with the the triune God showed me that God is far more gracious, far more loving, far more merciful and exceedingly more understanding that we think. I found due to my education doing a Masters of Divinity that the current interpretation of key scriptural verses used to 'gay bash' is a relatively recent interpretation. As theologians I find that we are expected to take a historical-critical exploration of scripture yet often we throw those findings out because they do not align with our current evangelical protestant theology, we disregard the phenomenological aspects of scripture when they don't align with our modern 'scientific' mentality and ignore scientific and sociological findings when they don't align with our limited ideas of God, humanity and creation. I am saddened by the way some Christians throw out critical thinking as they think it is a threat to faith and saddened by how many people throw out faith as they think it is a threat to critical thinking.

For me I found there is a threat if we employ critical thinking with our faith - we loose faith in our limited ways of doing church and find a deeper faith in God and discover ways to be church. It is a scary journey, for some deeply held beliefs have to go out the window because they are not based in relationship with God, not correct interpretation of scripture and have nothing to do with what Jesus actually said or did.

I know writing this will make some scream heretic if they read it. But that is what the Pharisees basically thought Jesus and his motley crew of disciples were, so I am in good company.

The Church has for the past 1700 years or so been preaching exclusivity - women, Jews, then black people, divorced people, and more recently gay, lesbian, transsexual people along with anyone who was otherwise unacceptable in their view; these were excluded from certain positions, told they were less than human, not acceptable to God unless they changed themselves. This was not what Jesus did, he said to excluded, the marginalized, the oppressed, as well as the ordinary men, women and children "come, follow me, be included in the abundant life of God". As for the religious people he constantly showed them how they missed the point, forgot the heart of the matter. That is part of what got him killed.

So I have come out!

I am an ally to my GLTB friends, family, children, and acquaintances. Christianity and sexuality are not at odds with each other - EVERY human being is made in the image of God whether we can see it or not. This means to treat anyone with disrespect is to disrespect God, to hate anyone is to hate God. Ironically it is also being disrespectful and hateful toward yourself.

May the Lord have mercy on us and may we begin to love each other unconditionally as God love us.

Are You Thirsty?

Hi, I know it is ages since I wrote anything - a full explanation will come soon...

But for now, here is the sermon I am about to preach tomorrow.

Are You Thirsty?

Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63

Good morning, I know you may have been expecting Leslie up here this morning, but she was so sick on Friday we decided I would be here instead. Maybe when she is feeling up to it she can write her sermon and email it out to us, because when I saw the texts she had for today I was really excited – what a perfect choice for Lent.

Isaiah starts with a question

Is anyone thirsty?

Have you ever been really thirsty? I mean dehydrated, mouth parched Thirsty?

Do you remember what it was like? Did you feel like the only thing that kept coming up was a need for a long cold glass of water, Ok maybe it was a beer or lemonade; maybe a tea or coffee? Something to quench that thirst.

That’s the thing when we are really thirsty our body & mind will do whatever it takes to get us to go & get a drink. It becomes an obsession if you are thirsty and there’s nowhere to get a drink!

The people around at the time of Isaiah and David knew this. David wrote this Psalm when he was out in the wilderness where there isn’t much fresh water to be found. Here he is describing his longing for God as being like his longing for a long cold drink of water in a dry and parched land.

Have you ever longed for God with such intensity?

It is a strange place to be in. Deeply uncomfortable, yet somehow it’s the best place because as you cry out, deep inside you know that God will come satisfy. But the waiting is excruciating. We feel like we will die.

Actually without satisfying our thirst we will die.

The odd thing is when we are dehydrated at first we long for water, for a nourishing drink; but if we go too long we begin to shut down, to not feel thirsty and that when the real danger is present.

Some years ago my friend Denise & I decided to go to Austria for a holiday and the cheapest way was to go on a bus. We had been on the ferry and then on the roads for hours. We were travelling over night & I kept drinking water and eating snacks between dozing. I would ask Denise if she wanted something but she didn’t. By about 5.30 am we were in Germany and she was acting very strange & I could see she was heading for comatose. We had to call an ambulance and she was admitted to hospital. I spent the next 4 or 5 days with her & slept in the corridor of the unit while she was hooked up to drips and having injections every 4 hours. We were flown back to England and she was admitted to hospital & she spent another 10 days there and then 3 weeks with me while she was in recovery. I found out later, she had not drunk much the day before we left, she was worried we would not stop when she needed a bathroom break, she had drunk almost nothing on the trip to the ferry, nothing on the ferry because she felt sea sick and then nothing on the overnight bus trip. Her dehydration nearly wrecked her kidneys, put her into a mental breakdown and almost killed her all because she stopped drinking & then stopped feeling thirsty.

Just as a body can exist without food for long periods of time so our soul can exist without many things, but a body without water will die and a soul without God will die.

So are you thirsty?

Slide 2

When we are out somewhere and we’re thirsty we go buy a bottle of water or go to a cafe; the same was true in Isaiah’s time, there were water vendors; guys with big clay jugs of water or skins filled with water slung over their donkeys backs. I have no idea what they charged for a cup of water, but you’d be willing to pay if you were out in the heat of the sun and knew the only other option was to go to the well and haul up the water yourself.

But Isaiah says this water, the drink he’s talking about is free! Come and drink even if you have no money. That means it’s available to anyone. That’s good news! But it gets better, he says there’s a choice including wine and milk and it’s free too!

Ok, so my imagination got going on this. Water – that is so we can live, it’s essential, because can’t live without it. The milk is nourishment – ok that’s a hard one for me as a vegan who’s allergic to milk – but I can still go with the concept of nourishment preferably from almond milk; but what about the wine? Well it certainly makes you happy & feel good if you don’t have too much, and these days they say red wine is full of antioxidants so sort of good for you too in small amounts & certainly in Isaiah’s time it was a drink that was not going to go off in the heat and was culturally acceptable as something to have with a meal. So water, milk and wine, all good! And whatever you choose it is free! Water, milk, wine – Come & get it!

So what I saw here is God offers us a drink for our soul that will give us life, will nourish us, make us happy and keep us healthy!

Wow! That’s worth being thirsty for.

What I also saw is that when God says in verses 8 & 9 of our Isaiah reading that his thoughts and ways are higher, way beyond ours, it means we so often limit our view of God, of what he can do, of who he is, what he will give us. We limit the possibilities he has for us.

I wonder have we longed for a glass of God given life water and made do with murky water from the creek?

Have we desired the wine of the Spirit to make our hearts glad and yet been too scared to take a sip in case we get drunk and lose control?

Have we needed the nourishment of God’s milk but been afraid to come and ask, embarrassed by being so needy, or fearful of such intimacy?

We are in a time of Lent, a time of reflection, of confessing our limits, a time of preparing ourselves for God to do something new, to reveal more of himself to us. This is a time of thirst, a time of recognising how dehydrated we have become, how much we need his living water.

We are fortunate that during Lent we have mini Easters every Sunday, where we can come and remember that our Messiah has already come. Where we can come to the table and be nourished by the bread of his body and the wine of his blood. Where our thirsty souls can be refreshed and our hearts uplifted and our bodies nourished.

We do not provide the drink, he does. We do not pay for it; it is his free gift. All we do is come and drink. We come and choose to drink our fill of what he offers.

We can say, today Lord I will have the living water, to refresh me, to give me life, abundant life.

Today I will have the wine of your Spirit to be made glad and filled with joy and have my inhibitions swept away so I may be my true self made in your image.

Today I come as a child, and drink of the nourishing milk of your comforting presence, so that your peace will fill me and I will grow.

Today I come to taste and see that the Lord is good.

I come weary, parched, dehydrated, but I know I will leave quenched and nourished; filled and satisfied.

Today, right now will you come and drink?

Are you thirsty?

Take a moment to bring that thirst to God

Let us come to the table with open mouths and glad hearts that there is food and drink here for us.