God's unbounded and unboundable love -- text only, no images, easier to read

I don’t know who, but someone quipped, “I used to be an incurable optimist, but now I’m cured.” More and more, I resemble that remark; do you?

But a loss of optimism does not have to mean a loss of hope. Optimism, after all, is rooted in me and my abilities; it’s the expectation of a better future based on the reading of present circumstances. Hope, on the other hand, is the trustful anticipation of genuine newness, perhaps beyond our imagining, based on something much bigger than ourselves — for people of faith, it’s based on the divine.

One of my favorite verses is 1 John 4:16, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” It is, for me, not only a hopeful verse, but also a verse of hope.

After all, God’s love is given to all. Not all of a certain nation or race or religion. All. And not only all people. Surely we can tell that God’s love abides in other animals and the plants, the fauna and the flora.

An interesting note about God’s love and its connection to our hope is that God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates it. We are loved not because we have value, but we have value because we are loved. Our value, like God’s love, is a gift and not an achievement.

Maybe that’s the first reason that Jesus commands us to love our enemies: God loves them too. Notice that the very same sentence in which Jesus commands us to love our enemies goes on to say “for God makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.”

If you have stepped foot in a church very often you likely have sung about “a wideness in God mercy” and “one great fellowship divine throughout the whole wide earth.” If so, you have affirmed God’s impartial love for all people, with no special privileges only for some.

In other words, you have affirmed as have I that “God Bless America” means “God Bless North Korea” and Russia and Mexico and so on. The biblical truth is that there is no special providence for any nation at the expense of any others. Territorial discrimination is as evil as racial.

It's important to remember in this affirmation of God’s unboundable love, that God’s love does not mean God’s approval. I don’t know that God hates, but if God did I suspect the object of that hate would be hateful things. Carnage. Racism. Xenophobia. I suspect they turn God’s stomach, even make God mad. Certainly they must make God sad. 

That’s what makes freedom so tricky, it seems to me. If God’s love is real, then our freedom is real. We are not slaves or puppets but children of God, free to do good and free to sin. Unloving choices are sometimes made.

When in anguish over human violence we turn to God and ask, “How could you let that happen?”, I sometimes wonder if God asks us the same question.

Follow Wilson on Twitter: @nathandaywilson

God's unbounded and unboundable love

God's unbounded and unboundable love

Make Love Your Aim -- text, no images

‘Make love your aim’: Paul’s words matter

Nathan Day Wilson

I can remember the exact place and time when I realized that “cogito, ergo sum” — that is, “I think, therefore I am” — was less important than “amo, ergo sum” — that is, “I love, therefore I am.”

I was a student at the Ecumenical Graduate Institute at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. I was nominated by my 51 classmates from 32 different countries to preach at a worship we were to lead at the Ecumenical Centre.

The student selected to be the worship leader, with whom I was to plan all the non-musical components of the worship service, was a woman from Rwanda named Mary. Mary is a physician who was educated and trained by the Red Cross. Mary and I developed an important and close friendship working together on this worship, the focus of which was reconciliation.

I put considerable thought and study into the issue of reconciliation. I interrogated the Bible. I investigated the historic examples of times that restitution necessarily accompanied reconciliation. I inspected the nuances that led some to seek retribution and reject reconciliation.

In short, I gave this topic and this worship a lot of thought.

When Mary and I met one afternoon, I told Mary what I learned and she listened very politely. We engaged in conversation, found points of agreement and points of difference, and then Mary asked, quietly, if she could share something with me. I said, “sure.”

During the civil war in Rwanda, Mary was serving as a new physician with

the Red Cross. During the war, two of Mary’s children, her husband, both of her parents, and two siblings were killed by the opposing tribe. But since Mary was a physician sanctioned by the Red Cross, she had to provide care for any injured person, even when she knew that this person was from the tribe that murdered her family.

She said to me, “Nathan, I had to trust in God’s reconciling power. I had to give God’s love all the room in my heart, and save nothing for hate. I had to. Otherwise, I could not live with myself.”

That’s when I realized that it’s not thinking that gives us meaning, it is loving.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for sound thinking. In fact, I would argue that love allows for better thinking.

But as Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians, “If I can fathom all mysteries and have all knowledge but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

For those of us who profess to follow Christ, Paul suggests that our incorporation into the risen Christ is not merely a union of our person with his. Rather, it includes something much bigger: Union with Christ is necessarily becoming a participant in a newly created order where the old has gone and the new has come.

To be “in Christ” means that the new creation God effected in Christ is reenacted within us. He writes, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. “

Clearly being part of this new creation includes personal transformation. All our beings — our thoughts, our attitudes, our outlook, our priorities, our concerns, our actions — begin to be made over. Accustomed as we are tothinking that personal transformation resultsfrom our own capacity to improve ourselves,Paul issues the stern reminder that the newcreation is not our own doing! God is the primary mover.

And finally, this transformation allows us no longer to be alienated from one another — split by a wall of hostility — but thanks to God’s actions, to be reconciled to each other. We begin to experience ourselves as free and forgiven and then know others to be the same.

In a time like now, so divided by allegiance to false gods such as money and power, by acts of lovelessness and hatred, and by lines drawn between people according to worldly standards, the Christian witness to God’s intended wholeness is needed now more than ever!

“Make love your aim,” writes Paul. Indeed.

Wilson is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Follow him on Twitter: @nathandaywilson

Make Love Your Aim