Called and Compelled by Love. That has been our diocesan theme this past year and we have focused on how we are called, to what are we called, and how love compels us to act. It is important in our age, in every age, to know what it is that is calling us to act. Are we called to act from envy of what others have? Are we called to act from a desire to get on top? Are we called to act from fear? Are we called to act from a desire to protect what is mine? As followers of Jesus, we are called to hear the voice of Jesus calling us to act in love. Love is not a sappy emotion; love is the work of being in relationship with the people who confront your worldview. Love is staying true to the vow to respect the dignity of every human being even when that person does something that you despise. Love recognizes that true community will have conflict and does not pretend otherwise but leans ways to work through them. Love feeds the poor, houses the homeless, visits the sick and those in prison, and not only that but seeks to change unjust structures that keep people poor, homeless, sick, and in prison. Love sometimes needs to let people go their own way but does not reject them as a child of God.
Love can and will challenge us, and there will be days we act not from love, but from fear, jealousy, anger, or even just from being tired. And when that happens, you and I can be really glad that in our baptism we promised that we would be part of a community of faith that supports one another in our life in Christ, and that community, the church, has ways of recognizing when we fall in to sin, and how to get back out of that. And so, we confess our individual and our corporate sin and we are assured of God’s forgiveness, and we try, with God’s help, to act in love over and over and over again.
The story of scripture is a story of the people of God being called by God to live as God’s people, sometimes getting it right, often getting it wrong, yet God never gives up on us. The story of Scripture is a love story. Someone asked me once how to read the Bible through in a year and I said whatever you do don’t start at the beginning! I always suggest start with a Gospel. Luke is my favorite; Mark is the shortest. And then read that gospel through ten times. If you do that to start, you will know the story of Jesus, and for us, as followers of Jesus, it helps to read the scripture story if we already know the Jesus story. Some folks might disagree with this approach, but I think we are going to actually know and follow Jesus, not just know “of” him, we need to spend a great deal of time embracing the gospels.
Our diocesan convention this month will have a strong focus on our scripture. I said to our program leader that my hope is that people will return home after convention having fallen in love with scripture again. Not for the sake of the scripture itself, but for the sake of our growing in our relationship to God, so that we may more deeply follow, and more clearly hear, and be even more compelled by love in all we do. This world deeply needs followers of Jesus who know and follow the Jesus of the gospels. This world deeply needs followers of Jesus who resist the call to violence and power, who reject the call of hate, who believe in compassion and mercy and love. This world needs followers of the Jesus of the gospels. As we continue to live in a time when people seek to divide us, let us stay focused on the main thing – living in love and following Jesus together.
Faithfully,
+ Gretchen