Agape – Blessings on the Journey

Abundant Life, Agape, Baggage, BE, Beloved, Chosen, Christ, God, God's image, God's love, Henri Nouwen, Isaiah, More, Mother Teresa, nature of God, psalm 139, Reckless Love, Woundings

God Created You from Dust

Posted on August 30, 2018 by narciejeter

Psalm 139

The Inescapable God

¹O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
²You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
³You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
⁴Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
⁵You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.

⁷Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
⁹If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
¹¹If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
¹²even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

¹³For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
¹⁷How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
I come to the end—I am still with you.

¹⁹O that you would kill the wicked, O God,
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—
²⁰those who speak of you maliciously,
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
²¹Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
²²I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.
²³Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
²⁴See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

This passage is titled “The Inescapable God.”

inəˈskāpəb(ə)l/

adjective

adjective: inescapable

unable to be avoided or denied.

synonyms:

unavoidable, inevitable, unpreventable, ineluctable, inexorable;

assured,sure, certain, guaranteed;

necessary, required, compulsory, mandatory;

rareineludible

“meeting the future in-laws is inescapable”

Do you find comfort in this or discomfort? It sort of depends on how you see God or the nature of God. If you see God as an all loving, omnipresent (all present), and omnipotent (all knowing) that’s our strength and our shield and a very present help in times of trouble, you are comforted by this Psalm. You realize that even though God knows all you’ve done and said and the things you’ve hidden away and the deepest recesses of your heart, God loves you anyway. Jesus scatters your sins from the east to the west and they’re not held against you anymore by grace alone. Christ is the victor over all evil and injustice in this world and we work with the Holy Spirit to bring God’s kingdom to earth.

On the other hand, if your view of God is a task-master, one that checks off like Santa if you do this naughty thing, or that, or if you simply don’t trust God because what you see God doing in the world seems so unfair, unjust, and unfathomable, then you have an entirely different picture of who God is. If you think of God as a vengeful God that causes all kinds of calamities in the world or in your life, then you indeed have an entirely different picture of who God is.

Scriptures abound painting with all kinds of different strokes about the nature of God, but if you take the full picture, the full painting, you begin to see that God is longing for us to return home. Just like the father in the familiar prodigal sermon. God’s longing for us to come home so that God can throw a party just as the father did in the story.

God created us from the dust of the earth. God breathed his ruach into us. God knitted us together in our mother’s wombs. This points to what United Methodists call prevenient grace. God woos us to God’s self, even before we knew, even before we are aware of it. God seeks each of us out to have a relationship with God. God calls us where we are, in all of the mire and muck of sin, and as Jeremiah 18:1-4 says, “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.” God, as the potter, has the power to make all things new. As Isaiah 64:8 says, “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” God creates each of us and calls us each by name. God cares about each of us. God seeks the heart of each of us. To give us hope and a future. God leaves the 99 and goes after us.

Some take theological issue with the song Reckless Love, can God’s love really be reckless? I would say that my love would appear reckless and it would go to extraordinary lengths for Enoch or Evy. We are God’s beloved children. Sons and daughters of the most high King.

We don’t have to define ourselves by what we do, how much we accomplish or how much stuff we have, we can claim we KNOW who we are and WHOSE we are – we are God’s Beloved Children. Our identity should be rooted in that truth.

8^th grade was a very difficult year for me. My dad was a United Methodist pastor so we moved the summer before my eighth grade year. The exact wrong time to move if you’re a 5 foot 11 ½ inch girl and none of the guys at your school had hit their growth spurt yet. I grew to this height in seventh grade, but we had been in the Hartsville schools for 7 years, but when we moved to Cheraw I was fresh meat. My nicknames abounded that year: giraffe, Olive Oil, stick. They made fun of me for my long fingers and after a dance where some people had gone through my purse, I went home crying and being oh so dramatic and yelling at the top of my lungs to my parents, “I hate this town and everyone in it!” I wanted to go “home” to Hartsville. I felt out of place and wanted my old friends, old church and the familiar status quo. As I was teaching at the United Methodist Women’s Missionu last week, I showed them this book that my cousin Lindsay made on one of my grandmother’s last Christmases. The study was all about the covenant with the land and it asked what land do you most relate to, When I was 17, I wrote this poem. “My “Ganny’s.”

This place has been my haven, through life’s many storms

A constant place of refuge, where things are close and warm

It’s seen my tears, it’s seen my smiles, and it’s picked me up each time

The one place that has never changed in the journey of my life

When I have felt lost – no real “home” – and confused

Or when I thought my heart was broken and my soul had been stripped bare

I go through life as a little child trying to keep on her disguise

But in these walls my face lights up for this is where my strength and hope lies

Things are brighter, life more precious, feelings really matter

Here I find my true self, amidst the family’s chatter

This place is not a castle, a mansion, or a dream

What makes it great is not itself but the things that are unseen

The simple words full of wisdom, lack of pretense, and genuine love for people and each other

Are the things I admire and respect about my grandfather and grandmother

Although I can’t say I have the pleasure of living here from day to day

This place is my strength and my rock and in my heart it will stay

A place given from God to me, to help me light my way

A place where I can dance and sing, a secret hiding place

Everyone needs a refuge, a place to feel free and loved

There’s always a light, open door, some chocolate cake and a hug

People need a “Ganny’s” to escape our stress-filled world

A home that shows the love and grace of Jesus Christ our Lord

Everyone should have a safe space, where they can simply be. Simply to take off the armor we sometimes carry around in our day to day lives. The Psalmist is letting us know that the great God of the Universe created us and calls us for a purpose. God created YOU. God created Me. With all of our persnicketies and peculiarities. God calls us BELOVED. And that was why Ganny’s was my home. Because it was there I felt most beloved. My grandmother said something I’ll never forget at my Gandaddy’s visitation, She looked at us grandchildren standing there trying to slouch into a corner and said y’all were not only the apples of your grandfather’s eyes, you were his very eye balls. That may sound gross to some of you, but it meant more than the world to us. Just thinking about how much our Heavenly Parent loves us is mind-blowing.

No kid in school, no co-worker, no coach, no supervisor, no professor, no parent or sibling nor anyone in all of creation can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can strip our belovedness. It’s time to lay your doubts, worries and fears down at the altar and be free to rest in the love of God.

I know what I’m saying is easier said than done. Some of us hold tight to our woundings like familiar, old security blankets. Ask God to work on that with you. God created your inmost thoughts, God knows everything about you, and God desires to give you abundant life in Christ. Not a half life. Abundant life. The next step is to share that belovedness with others.

We cannot love our neighbors with God’s agape love until we first love ourselves with God’s agape love. As Mother Teresa says, “When you know how much God is in love with you then you can live your life radiating that love.” I want us all to radiate the love of God. Radiating the love of God is what we’re here for.

I will tell you if you let go and let God in, God doesn’t promise to take the pain away, God doesn’t promise it will be easy, God doesn’t promise you will not be challenged and face all that the world throws at you, but God promises to be with you. In Psalm 139:18, “I come to the end – I am still with you.”

You are chosen. God created you in God’s image. God created all of us in the image of God and freely forgives us no matter the baggage, no matter the doubt, no matter what. You are loved. Claim that. Know that. Don’t let anyone or anything wrestle that fact away from you. You are a beloved child of God. And that should be a thing that we all say Amen to.

The below is a powerful testimony to living into and Being the Beloved.

Agape, Campus Ministry, Love, Love Campaign, Neighbor

Love

Posted on February 9, 2014 by narciejeter

Our epistle readings for today are, Galatians 5:22-24 and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

Galatians 5:22-24

“By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Today starts the Love Campaign where we seek to show the campuses of the University of Florida and Santa Fe College God’s love for them. The point of it is to show God’s unconditional love and point students and the entire Gainesville community to God’s grace. God draws you and I to God’s self even before we realize it. God longs to be gracious to us and to give us new and abundant life. God longs to be in relationship with each person and continues to search for the lost because God WANTS you and all of the world to believe in the words of Romans 8:38-39, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing can separate us. No sin is too big or too yuck or too devastating to lay at the foot of the cross and Jesus is faithful and true in his love and grace for us scattering our sins as far as the east to the west.

Aberjhani, in the work, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry says, “Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. had some things to say about agape love.

Start at 1:22 and End at 2:02.

I like his definition of agape. “It is understanding creative, redemptive goodwill for all [people]. It is an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. And when one rises to love on this level, he loves [people] not because he likes them, but he loves every [person] because God loves them.”
If you table this week at Santa Fe or the University of Florida you will be challenged in ways that we can’t prepare you. So is that a reason not to table (Evan and Amelia and the entire Love Campaign 2014 committee are holding their collective breaths.)? No. You’ll be challenged by questions, by misconceptions, by people that have “burned” by the church and some people will have very good reasons to keep their distance because not everything that is labeled “Christian” is about the love of God. Show them God’s love, respond in God’s love, and show them by your actions God’s love. You will be surprised how people answer the central question, “What is love?” Don’t be alarmed if several people throughout the week answer, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more.” I find myself humming along to that song repeatedly during Love Campaign week. But every answer, even the silly ones, are cutting to people’s core, because at the heart of each person THAT is one of the big questions. Am I loved? Am I heard? Am I seen as worthy? Do people want to hear about my day? Or care about me? Can I find a community that loves me for me? Where I can let them see me for my most true and authentic self? Does God love me? How could God love me and let these things happen? I may have messed up along the way, and I’m ashamed, and I retaliate in anger – at the world, at myself, at God. Because if you ask “What is Love?” it’s not easy to answer without calling all of YOU into question. You. Your core. Your deepest, most personal self.

We have to be ready and willing in arms wide open to receive people where they are. We have to walk the journey with them and come alongside them with the light and love and grace of Christ.

The scriptures say much about loving our neighbor.

1 John 3:11, 16-24
“For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.” Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

I’d like to tell you a story, “There was a young, intelligent university student named Bill. Bill was what some people call a “free spirit” or “hippie.” He had wild long hair, always wore the same old and torn T-shirt, jeans and no shoes. Across the street from the university campus was a church. The people there were rich, older and well-dressed. They wanted to help the university students nearby, but they did not know exactly how to do it.

Well, one day Bill decided to go visit this church by his university. As usual, he went wearing his only jeans, old, torn T-shirt and his dirty long hair. The church service had already started and was full, so Bill walked down the center aisle looking for a seat. People were getting more and more uncomfortable as they watched this unclean, wild-looking young man. Finally, Bill got to the front and saw there were no more empty seats, so he just sat down on the floor right in front of the preacher. No one had ever done that in this church before! By now, everyone was upset and distracted.

Then, a respected old church deacon got up and started toward the front. Everyone was thinking: “You can’t blame the deacon, he really should correct this disrespectful young man.” Everyone was watching. Even the preacher stopped his sermon when the old man finally got to the front. Then, they were all completely surprised to see the old deacon drop his walking stick and very slowly sit down on the floor next to this young hippie. He did not want this young man to sit alone and feel unaccepted. The people in the church were moved to tears. Finally, the preacher said: “What I am preaching about today you will probably never remember. But what you have just seen you will never forget!””

We have to as Christians and as followers of Christ get on the floor with people. Be willing to get dirty in other people’s lives. I don’t say the words during communion lightly when I pray that we may be the body and blood in the midst of the world, a light shining in the darkness. For some, you may be the only Jesus they ever see. Mother Teresa said a great deal about love in her lifetime and here’s two of my favorites. “I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.” I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world. Mother Teresa writes in A Simple Path these words, “When you know how much God is in love with you then you can only live your life radiating that love.” From the back of the card where we give Gator Wesley’s answers to the question, “What is Love?” We believe that God’s greatest act of love was when God sent God’s son, Jesus, to walk among us, to teach us, and to show us by his life and example what love is truly about. That he laid down his life in sacrificial agape love. Before we can tell all the world about God’s redemptive, saving love, we have to claim God’s offer of free, life-giving grace for ourselves.

As Tivoli talked about the Chronicles of Narnia on Wednesday night in our Wednesday Evensong worship at 8:30, as what most shaped her and her calling towards film and her passion to let her light shine even in Hollywood, I began thinking of how that film shaped me. Aslan, the Christ figure, is seen right before this to be sacrificing himself for the traitorous Edmund, who got there by loving Turkish Delight too much and not understanding what was at stake. Edmund’s sisters, Lucy and Susan, are seen in this clip in the film, huddled in the bushes. Aslan’s sacrifice is an epic and gnarly example of Christ’s love for us.

Start at 1:03 – 4:22, 5:03 – 7:11.

So we know Christ’s love for each of us today. May we trust in the knowledge of God’s grace, not deserved or dependent on gold stars on a giant sticker chart in the sky, but offered freely and unconditionally. So may we show the campuses our LOVE this week and may we too be touched as the Spirit blows over the campuses of UF and Santa Fe igniting a movement of LOVE – for us, for our neighbors, and all the world. Amen.