June 06, 2010

At 10:42am on June 15, 1982, a nurse walked into a hospital room and laid a 7 lb. baby girl on the middle of a bed.  She told the woman standing nearby, “when you have the baby dressed, you can take her home.”  The woman pulled out “baby’s first onesie” and tried to gently wedge the tiny arms and legs into the right holes.  Sometime during the process she thought this is nothing like dressing my Betsy Wetsy.  Finally snapped in, the woman looked around the room for an owner’s manual or a warranty.  Finding none, she looked down on the sleeping, peaceful infant.  Did she love the child?  She wasn’t sure.  She certainly felt responsible for its care.  She certainly felt incredibly protective, but love, love is something more than that.  

The woman didn’t know enough about this new person.  She didn’t know her smell or her smile, her mind or her laugh.  She didn’t know her heart or her personality.  Nights later, walking the floor, room to room to room, patting the little back, yawning and walking, yawning and ssshhing, she thought she must love a great deal.  But, she had no idea what love could be.  A couple of years later, when the little girl squished close and said “Momma read me about Percival the Pig and his birthday, Momma read me about the wolf and the girl with the cookies and red coat, do the voices, the woman knew a new level of love.  Five years later when the girl came home with gigantic hair bows and a trophy “Business Girl of the Year” and a smile of dazzling wattage, the woman thought there could be no deeper love, but she was wrong.  

Every year her affection and devotion grew.  The more time they shared, the more she learned about her daughter, the more precious she became.  And then, one day the daughter was all grown up and she and the woman were having an adult conversation.  The mother was worried about a relationship with a friend and the daughter said, “I know you.  I know your heart.  You would never purposefully hurt someone.  You care about people and their feelings.  Your friend knows this, too.  Don’t worry.”  The woman thought her heart would burst apart with the love she felt.  She knew the truth of those statements.  She knew the truth of being so well known.  She knew the full joy of deep love. 

This is the human experience of love.  This quality is the essential standard of love between parents and children.  It is also present between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, partners and friends.  Love felt and expressed in all human relationships begins and grows with the knowledge of and the acceptance of each other.  We may respect, admire, acknowledge strangers and acquaintances, but we love folk we know well.  We love those with whom we’ve built connections; those with whom we’ve shared tears, trials and serious truth.

Love is the state of caring for another’s well-being, for another’s happiness, for another’s comfort even when it requires sacrifice.  Love is the feeling that urges us into setting aside our preference for the desires of the other.  Love pulls the switch in our brain and suddenly we hand over the larger slice of cake.  We let someone put their cold feet on our nice warm ones.  The deeper we love, the more we are willing, happily willing to give.  Therefore, along with the glow and security, the care and coziness, love also brings real risk into our lives.  When we give our hearts over to another, when we take on their care and their well-being.  We make ourselves vulnerable.  We risk inevitable loss.  One day, those well formed connections will be stretched tight.  One day, those carefully knitted bonds will fray and unravel.  Children grow up and begin their own lives and time becomes precious.  Easy afternoons enjoying each other’s company become rarer and rarer.  Family outings become planned events.  Children grow up and start families and now the holiday traditions are no longer guaranteed.  Those festive days are broken up and shared.  Friends we knew we’d have forever move far away and while cell service is expansive and email is instant, distance creates distance and our hearts miss the closeness.  Over time, expectations change and what we want for ourselves shifts.  Our unrest can cause unease in our partners.  They’ve come to rely on us being a certain way, providing for their needs in a specific manner.  To change our role, to change our priorities can threaten their sense of balance and security.  Our desire to become an artist or a missionary may stir our soul and create a sense of life-giving freedom within us, but that same declaration can sound like disaster to the ones we love best. 

Then of course, comes the greatest risk, the most severe loss.  In the human experience of love, one will always, inevitably leave first.  Through drift or death, one goes away and one is left behind.  The connection is broken, the access disappears.  The one we counted on to know us best, to carry our secrets, to hold our worries and rub our cold feet is no longer close by.  And we grieve.  And we grieve. 

But, love is such a powerful force, that even knowing the risk, the certain loss, we run after it.  We open our hearts, we embrace its effects with full knowledge that as it lifts us, it can betray us.  The mighty stirring and joy of love overshadows the risk.  Those who have loved deeply, who have spent a lift time with someone close and lost him or her in death will say, the loss is hard, so very hard, but never, never as hard as a life without knowing the love they once shared.  So, we know, of all the marvelous, wondrous gifts God gives humankind, a beautiful, bountiful creation, skills, talents, imagination, strength, reason, curiosity, opposable thumbs, humor, golf, the mountains, the beach, the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, surpassing all these graces is the quality and experience of love.  It is the Almighty’s crowning achievement.  It is the Lord’s most perfect work.  

Love calls out the best of the Creator’s most complex creation.  God knit the capacity of human love into our being so we would have a hands on, real time experience with the emotion he wants to share with us.  God built us with love for one another so that we would know how to be in relationship with God himself.  In our affection for our children and our parents, our siblings and friends, in our devotion and patience with our partners, God gave us a foretaste of the deep, abiding, never wavering love he has for us.  In the vulnerability we experience in our deepest connections, God reminds us that in love, by love, through love he will call us to places of risk, but only so that he can lead us to places of greater joy.  In love, by love, through love, God will guide us through scary, unnerving, new experiences to a place of deep satisfaction.  God will ask us in the name of love to trust his good intent.

We see God’s call to risk and trust in this morning’s passage from 1^st Kings.  God sends his prophet Elijah to Zarephath and puts him in the way of a desperate woman.  She is alone in the world, responsible for her own survival and the care of her son.  She has exhausted all available resources.  She’s done all the jobs she can find.  She’s borrowed from all her relatives.  She’s gone so far as to beg for assistance.  Now there’s nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to.  She has a bit of oil, a bit of meal, a bit of water to make a last supper for her precious son and herself before they starve to death and leave this world together.  Into this tragic scene, God sends his messenger.  Elijah does not bring a care package.  He does not bring a satchel full of Stop Hunger Now meals.  Instead, he stops the woman and asks her to use her last morsels to feed him.  For the love of God, Elijah asks the woman to take an unreasonable risk.  For the love of God, for the trust in God, Elijah asks the “impossible.”  Give up your life source, give up the one thing you hold most dear in this moment.  Love God enough.  Rely on God even in this dark time.  Trust God completely.  Make yourself vulnerable to his demand. 

Knowing love, having experienced love, understanding how one could care so completely for another, the woman considers what she knows about herself and her feelings for her son and she instantly understands how God cares for her and hers.  Just as she knows she would do everything, anything for the care and protection of her son, she immediately recognizes our loving God would do everything, anything and more for her care and security.  Without fear, with no trepidation, she trusts in the Lord.  She goes and prepares the meal for Elijah, confident that God who calls her into risk, calls her into no “risk” at all. 

For the mother with a few drops of oil and a few grains of meal, for the mother, ages later with the infant on the bed and no owner’s manual, God remains the same.  He gives the gift of human relationships, the gift of  human love so we will know the Father’s love.  He gives us the experience of human vulnerability and sense of risk so we will understand the emotion when he calls us to new ground, better ground. 

How many times have we heard, how many times have we heard, “God so loved the world?”  He so loved the world, he so loved us, he gave up his Son.  He gave us the Son, but first he gave us love.  So now we know what every other gift costs.  

The love we experience in our love for each other reminds us of God’s everlasting all enduring love for us.  May we be wise enough, just wise enough to recall that love and accept whatever “risk” he puts in our path.  For surely, for surely the risk is no risk at all, but pure blessing.

Amen.