I've been thinking a bit lately about what it means to love God. I think probably it means a lot of things. People have probably written whole encyclopedia-sized books on it. But I'm trying, for now, to keep a simple approach. And I keep coming back to the fact that Jesus seems to have said, "To love God, love people."
To love God, love people. True religion is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress.
I keep thinking of how when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, He gave two commandments, not one. It's as if the two could not be separated. Someone asked him, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment?" And Jesus responds ,"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." And then He continues with a second, "And love your neighbor as yourself. The rest of the Law hangs on these two commandments."
Interesting. It's as if Jesus is saying you can't love God fully unless you're also loving the people around you. Loving your neighbor.
And then Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, to further illustrate just what He means by "neighbor". Apparently, my neighbors don't stop with my group of friends, or even the acquaintances I can manage to get along with decently.
No, Jesus seems to be saying that if we are to truly love our neighbor, we are to love in an all-inclusive sort of way - something I'm not very good at, I've noticed recently. I have a particular circle of friends that I've grown incredibly close to over the last year, but lately that group has started to change. New people are coming in. The dynamics are changing. And I am NOT okay with this. I want those people to go back where they came from. I don't want to share my deep friendships with these "others". I don't want our group to change.
But, oddly enough, that is exactly who Jesus has called me to love. OTHERS. (And yes, I did just think about LOST, ha. But hey, I don't think it's a stretch to say that if, in fact, Jack and Kate and Sayid, etc. were real people, Jesus would want them to love the strangers they don't understand who co-habitate their island. Unfortunately, Jack and Kate and Sayid and the rest of the gang are not real people, nor is the island a real place. Sadly. Because if it was, I'd want to go there, I think. But anyway...) My point is, we are to love others. All sorts of others.
The strange. You know who those people are in your life. The different. The awkward ones who don't seem to have ever "gotten the memo". The ones that drive you bananas. The ones who are perfectly nice but you don't want them infringing on your perfectly wonderful status quo. The really mean ones, too. The manipulative ones. The "others" who tear you down and hurt you and make you cry.
Jesus says, "Love them. Love them all. For in loving them, you love Me."
I wish that wasn't the case. I wish I could just love God. And screw everybody else. Or at least, screw the people I don't like. (Is that too harsh? I'm just being honest.) But God has been gently showing me lately how much it means to Him for me to love those He has placed in my path, no matter who they are or what they're like. I don't get to choose who my neighbors are.
I think the whole thing is wrapped up in the idea of community. Because God is a community. (I know. I know. I've talked about the Trinitarian nature of God before, but I can't help it. It's just so central to everything, I keep having to come back to it.) God is tri-une. He is in some way a community of love and grace and peace who people are then enveloped by and embraced by and invited by. God is not isolated or detached. He has always had in His midst beauty, strength, and love - self-giving, self-sacrificial love. This is the fundamental nature of the universe. The universe is not static. At the center of it is the Trinity, with each member circling the others in perfect giving and receiving, harmonious, interconnected relationship.
And that, I'm convinced, is why sin is such a big deal. It's not that God gets mad that we're not following His rules for the sake of having rules, in some dominating sort of power hungry way on His part. It's more that what we call "sin" is, in fact, simply a term for describing a cracked relationship of community between me and God, me and others, and me and creation. It's just that sin gets in the way of that perfect communion of giving and receiving love between all of us and us and God, which we were created for. And that's why God hates it so much. And that's why He begs us, He exhorts us, to orient ourselves around the strange, the different, the unintelligible, the hateful, the overly happy, ha - to circle around them. For in our frustration and pain of trying to serve and love them well, we inevitably come face to face with what it's like for God to love us and to have grace for us.
To be restored to the people we were always meant to be, representations of the very image of God (or Eikons, as Scot McKnight calls us. [Read his stuff, by the way. It'll blow you out of the water. He has a bunch of good books out, and he blogs, too.]), we must be in community. We must be one, just as the Lord our God is One. This is the Shema, which is a Jewish term I learned in a college religion class and am proud to still remember so I thought I'd show my knowledge off now. Basically, from what I recall, it is a centerpiece of Jewish prayer, taken from Deutoronomy, a reminder that the Lord is One, and that he/she who recites this prayer should be intending to "die into God", to take part in His oneness. Which maybe sounds a little bit I'm realizing like Buddhist Nirvana. But not the same thing, I assure you.
What I'm saying is that God is a community in harmony with Himself, so to reflect His likeness, like the true "Eikons" He created us to be, we as humans must be a community in harmony with one another! We mirror His perfect union. We are created in the image of a generous, personal, communal God of Oneness. This is why we crave connection with one another, coffee with friends, a game of flag football, Christmas parties... It's why co-workers take smoke breaks together, why college kids take long walks around campus with a buddy, talking about life, why we get together to cook meals, or to see a play, or to go out dancing or to a bar. We are hard-wired for this connectedness.
And it isn't always easy, either. I just listened to an interview of a Rwandan man who lived through the horrific genocide there in 1994. The things that happened to him seem like accounts of nightmares, not real events, they were so terrible. And yet, what did this man choose to do in response? It seems impossible, but he loved. In this case, his neighbors were, in fact, his enemies. They tried to kill him, they stoned his young son. And what did he do in return? I kid you not, he went to his neighbors and begged their forgiveness for the awful things he'd said about them while they were stoning his son.
WHAT?!
I know. Such love seems absurd, unachievable. And on one hand, I suppose it is, on a purely human level. This Rwandan man, when asked how he was able to not only forgive his neighbors for what they had done to his son, but also go beyond that in reaching out to them in humility, he said quite simply, “It was God. God allowed me to love my neighbors in this way. When I realized God was not giving me a choice – this is a command from Him - I knew what I must do.”
That’s some kind of love. And I think I have it hard? I have to love perfectly nice people who are infringing upon the dynamics of my friend group. Gee, I’m not selfish.
And I suppose to my credit, I’m trying to get better about this. I would love to get to a place where I don’t even have to make myself love the people in my life. It just happens naturally. Wouldn’t that be awesome? To start loving people with such a drive, such a passion, that eventually it just becomes second-nature?
I have a friend like that. She is probably the most open-armed, welcoming, non-judgmental, all-inclusive people-lover I know. Her circle of friends has no walls. No criteria. No number limit. She just goes about living her life, and whomever she happens to interact with along the way, she loves. She listens to. She cooks for. She invites along on whatever adventure she’s currently in the middle of. There is no one unwelcome.
I wish I could be more like her.
The other night at the Andrew Peterson thing, I sat beside this friend. And she was telling me about another girl who she’s been trying to love lately, and how this girl has sort of latched onto my friend in a way, as if she’s really needed someone to talk to, needed someone who will love her. Jake was listening in on our conversation from the other seat beside me, and he remarked to my friend that she’s very much like a people-magnet.
I wholeheartedly agreed.
My friend smiled and thanked us for saying so. But then she said something that surprised me. She said she didn’t feel very much like a people-magnet.
This astounded me. Time after time in the history of our friendship, I’ve watched this friend servant-heartedly love people, expecting nothing in return from them. And time after time, sometimes many years into their relationship, I’ve watched as these same people have chosen to come to my friend with their spiritual questions, been vulnerable to her about the emptiness they feel, expressed to my friend their interest in going to church with her, deciding to take a look into this Christ who my friend claims as her ultimate reason. All these lives changed because of one girl’s patient, unobtrusive, self-giving love. I don’t know anyone else who loves their neighbor quite like she does. So I wondered, that night at the Andrew Peterson show, how in the world my friend could be blind to this fact? How could she not see that she’s the greatest people-magnet I personally know?
And then almost as soon as I’d wondered it, I knew why. Loving people has become so second-nature, so involuntary to my friend, she doesn’t even think about it anymore. It’s just what she does. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to her anymore.
It’s like driving a car. When you first learned to drive, everything about it was difficult and unnatural and required a lot of focused, purposeful thinking and a lot of energy. And it required a lot of practice. And (admit it), you got really excited when you started getting the hang of it.
But now, driving a car is no big deal. It’s just what you do. You’ve done it so much that sometimes your brain can switch to autopilot and you can think about all sorts of other things while your body keeps driving. No biggie.
I’m convinced this is how my friend has come to love people. Probably at first it was difficult and unnatural and required a lot of focused, purposeful thinking and a lot of energy. And she probably had to actively practice a lot at it, too. But now, loving people is just what she does. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to her. It’s no biggie. That’s why she kind of shrugs when others call her a people-magnet and why she says she doesn’t see it.
She’s gotten to the point where her left hand doesn’t even know what her right hand is doing. *
*Matthew 6:3
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