1 John 5:1-6
The NIB commentary this week on this text makes the very novel point that, not only does God love us, but we are called to love God. It probably shouldn't sound like a novel point. But it does. The commentary then takes this point in not very interesting (at least, to me) directions, but I'd like to reflect here on this same idea. We are called to love God (because God loved us first, etc etc).
What does it mean "to love" God? Christian sermons often turn on the loose-goosey connotations of the word 'love' in English, Greek, Hebrew, or Esperanto, for that matter. Love is a fishy thing, squirming this way and that when taken out of its water. It's hard enough to know what we're talking about when we say "God" without throwing what is perhaps the only concept in human interaction that is more ambiguous. What is love? Is it the feeling of stomach dropping? Is it the careful humility of seeing something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves? Is it record-skipping lust, that tears our gaze to look backward down the street? Is it obedient devotion? Is it sibling friendship? Is it some cycle among these things? Is it a verb? A state of being? Is it a goal we work for? Do we fall into it, or does it grow up gradually?
1st John is not especially helpful on this point, either. It walks the obedience line--which is perfectly charming, and I understand why it sounds good. It has the ring of self-sacrifice, the connection to another being, and a sense of radical dependence. But it just doesn't sound like love. I suspect this is because of my upbringing. I had enough experiences with unhealthy adults as a child to know that disobeying them was sometimes the only way to love. To obey, sometimes, is more certainly not to love. If the situation is different with God--because God is always healthy, I suppose--then it is no less confusing, as at least unhealthy adults had the good care to say things to my face for my agreement or dis-. I'm always discerning God's will, never sure if I got it quite right. If obedience alone were love of God, I am inclined to think that surely God would have been more explicit in giving us commandments. "Eat more beef." "Don't throw rocks." That sort of thing.
No, loving God must somehow look a little different. The love of "sleeping beauty" doesn't seem likely to me, either. The feeling of adoration--which I think is most nearly akin to the feeling of being a junior high boy brought out to dance with a beautiful girl for the first time--also strikes me as somehow inadequate. I'm probably a piss poor contemplative for saying that, but it's true. Being lost in an Other in joy is perfectly delightful, and perhaps it is the end of all prayer and likely all art, but if God wanted this alone, God would have been better off making us all flowers. We could stand tall and pretty and praise God's name the whole of our lives, surrendering our anxiety of death and praising while we had strength. But we're not flowers, or at least, not only.
So, although I think obedience and adoration have something to do with loving God, I suppose I have a difference sense of that love. Perhaps it will seem more complicated. To me, it makes more sense.
I think that loving God looks most like this: If "Hope" means that we have a particular vision we desire, and "Faith" means trust in God to work things out for the best, then Hope and Faith are opposites. Hope means we want something to the exclusion of other things, and Faith means we'll accept whatever comes. Love, I think, which strangely mixes hope and faith together, believes Hope and Faith are not opposites, but the same. Love means that somehow both what we desire above all else, and our great willingness to accept whatever comes, are the same thing--even though that should be impossible. Without love, we are all frustrated visionaries or trusting complacents. Love alone connects our hopeful desires and trusting faith. To love means to reach beyond ourselves in desire without lying to ourselves about our finitude. "True love" is, I think, redundant. Love is necessarily true--combining the reality of our limited nature with its stretching beyond.
In other words, if you ask me, I think that to love God is to walk a mobius strip that is at moments obedience (the manifestation of hope), and at moments adoration (the manifestation of trust). Loving God is always one thing or another, but never is merely one thing or another. To love God is to enact that desire and obedience, vision and acceptance, are the same parts of one story.
I think this is why I have trouble preaching about how to love God. I find it to be a far more complicated conversation than most anyone will allow on a Sunday morning.
