Love, Fear, and the Kingdom of God
Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom
25 March 2021
Before I begin my message proper, I want to say a little bit about language. I will be using the metaphor of the Kingdom of God. What I like about this metaphor is that it makes it explicitly clear that I’m not in charge. The problem I have with it is that it conjures up an image of God being a white man sitting up on a throne somewhere giving orders to every single person, plant, animal, mineral, element, molecule, atom, electron and quark in the universe. I experiment from time to time with other phrases like “The Commonwealth of God” but that usually makes me think of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and by the time I get from there to the Registry of Motor Vehicles I know I’m totally in the wrong place. The Realm of God or the Community of God come closer. But for whatever reason, the words of the King James Version have steeped into a deep place in me and they have a power for me that is not easily replaced, and so those are the words I will use. I invite you to hear whatever words work best for you. I invite you into the gift of Pentecost where everyone hears in their own native language.
Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” The other things in this context were food, drink and clothing. But how will we know when you’re getting near to the Kingdom of God in the divine game of Warmer/Colder that we play with God, when you are getting near to the Kingdom of God? How will we know? What does God’s “warmer, warmer” sound like to us? We will know we are getting near to the Kingdom of God by the experience of love. Because God is love, and not a judgmental old white guy with a long beard sitting on a throne up in the clouds somewhere; because God is love and not a voice in our heads saying we are not good enough; the signs of drawing near to the Kingdom of God are the stirrings, no matter how faint, of God's love in us. And from these stirrings spring gratitude, joy, and the spiritual food, drink, and clothing to sustain us for the journey ahead.
When I was younger I would have said that the opposite of love was hate. Then I heard it said that the opposite of love was apathy. As someone who grew up with parents that I experienced to be emotionally unavailable and apathetic, I had an intuitive understanding of what this meant. Now I have come to see that it is probably unreasonable to think that something as large, complicated and mysterious as love has a single opposite, as if it only can exist on a single axis. I am starting to see that another opposite of love is fear, because love draws us together and fear drives us apart.
When the angels have spoken to humans, at least when these encounters have been recorded, their first words are often, “Fear not.” John says in his first letter, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.” Because of our sense of shame and unworthiness, often born out of our own painful experiences, we can fear this love. Or we fear revisiting the pain we have already survived. Sometimes, as part of our healing, God shows us our past to us again, much like the Ghost of Christmas Past showed Ebeneezer Scrooge his past and how it had affected him.
A year and a half ago I was on a retreat as part of the Participating in God's Power program of the School of the Spirit. As part of that retreat I had the opportunity to recount to a small group, some of my experiences of emotional neglect and abandonment. My friends were able to reflect back to me the effect that my story had had on them. I felt that my experience and the pain it had caused was validated. I could begin to see how this had affected my entire life. This was a very profound experience for me and I spent the rest of the day in a very tender place. In the morning I woke up feeling a depth of joy I had never experienced before. I felt myself bathed in a sense of love which I really can’t describe. And in this state, I heard a voice saying, “You are not what happened to you and you are loved.” And in that, I felt so much love, and healing. And as I was sitting with that experience I felt rising up in me another voice saying, “I am not what I have done.” I have not been able to fully accept that second part. I am not sure whether that second part comes from God or is my own attempt at self-justification. But this is what I do know:
Sometimes it is clear and obvious when I am hearing the voice of God.
Sometimes it is not clear whose voice I am hearing and I need to sit with that unknowing.
That guilt and shame are very powerful forces in me.
And that it can be hard to accept the gift of forgiveness.
The good news is that there really is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing means nothing. People who have hurt us in the past do not have the power to separate us from the love of God. People who are hurting us now do not have the power to separate us from the love of God. We do not have the power to separate ourselves from the love of God, either by what we do or by what we do not do. Even if we were to continue on our current path and destroy the world, God will continue to love us. We can do nothing to earn God's love and we can do nothing to make God stop loving us. God loves us because God created us in God's image. God loves us because we are already an embodiment of God. I remember when I held my daughter for the first time. I was surprised by how much love I felt for her, my heart was so full. And at that point in the five minutes of her life, all she had done was to breathe.
Our work is not to build God's Kingdom on earth. God has already done it, that’s why it’s God’s Kingdom! Our job is to realize that we are already living in God's Kingdom. Our job is to embody that reality, to co-create with God that unique and infinitely valuable piece of God's Kingdom that is our life. The starting place for that work is God's love for us. The work continues with our love for ourselves, even those parts of ourselves we don't particularly like, that we are ashamed of, or that we reject.
One of the spiritual practices I have been using over the past year or so is that, when I feel something rising in me that I want to reject -- maybe it’s an emotion, maybe it’s a memory or a fantasy, something I am ashamed of, or afraid of, or maybe it is a desire to do something that I know is not good for me, or that I know will turn me away from God for the moment -- whatever it is, I notice it, I welcome it, I ask what it has to teach me, and I try to wrap it in my love. Whatever this broken part of me is, I need to love it. Not because it is broken, but because it is part of me. One of the unexpected results of this practice has been that I am sleeping much better. I used to wake up in the middle of the night, often several nights a week, and feel a dread or fear that had no specific cause that I could see, but now that happens much more rarely. By learning to love and accept the broken parts of me, I no longer fear them. What I am learning is that the thing I fear most is also the thing I most desire: and that is to be seen as I truly am, by myself, by my community, and by God. I desire this because I see it as the gateway to living in God's love. I fear it because it means being incredibly vulnerable. It means giving up the persona, the false self, that I present to the world instead of being who I truly am. I am also finding that as I have learned to have compassion for myself, I am able to have more compassion for others. I am finding a compassion, at least at times, that provides the ability to love both my neighbors and my enemies. And Friends, that, to me, is the Kingdom of God.
