17th Sunday after Pentecost 11.9.16 Loving the loveable
We are told we have to love God – the first and greatest commandment. It is a strange thing that we have to be commanded to love.
Normally we would think of love as something that happens spontaneously. We would not need to tell Romeo that he has to love Juliet! He loves automatically, without being told. The attraction of Juliet is enough to bring forth the love from him.
Yet Romeo, and the rest of us, do have to be told to love God.
By use of reason we can work out that God must be much superior to Juliet, or any part of His creation. The beauty we see around us is just a glimpse of the beauty of the One who makes all this possible.
Logically, we know we should love God more than anyone or anything else – and this is just what the commandment means. But given our human limitations we tend to cling to lesser objects to love, and fail to make the great leap to God Himself.
People search for love, but that usually means human love. They might find their ‘soulmate’, but they stop short of finding God.
It is really only God who can fill the soul; who can satisfy our deepest longings. Loving other people is a good thing, and that is also a command; but it is not the full story.
We are created by God to know, love, and serve Him. That is our destiny, our fulfilment; discovering which is like a bird learning to fly, or a fish to swim.
Yet we can find it hard to love God.
For one thing He can be difficult to perceive. We cannot see Him, hear Him, touch Him.
Then He can also be difficult to ‘read’, as in we do not always know His will, or His mind, on a particular subject. He does not always tell us either. Sometimes it seems He leaves us hanging in suspense.
Many people give up the hunt, and settle for whatever happiness they can find in this earthly domain.
That is a big mistake, though we understand the temptation.
If we hold on, hang in there, we will discover enough of God's goodness to enable us to make further progress.
We can learn to love Him. Like all difficult things it becomes possible with His own help.
He is a long way away from us, in the heavens; but He is also very close. In fact He is even inside us, helping us to think, to feel, to know, to decide various things.
With His help we set out on a path, a path that will take us all the way to eternity.
We learn to love Him whom we cannot see, and to trust Him whom we do not always understand.
He stirs up in us a desire for the infinite (that is why we feel so inspired by oceans and mountains, and the like).
And He steers us through this life, with all its disappointments and uncertainty, with a sense that we can feel He is close, even if there is a lot more we do not know than we do know.
By small steps it becomes achievable. We cannot explain every single thing that happens, like all the suffering in the world; but we can come back to this point: that if we would do things God's way, a lot less of those things would happen. The more people joining in, the less things would go wrong.
It is always better - no matter what questions we have - always better to go towards God than away; always better to obey than disobey; to pray than not to pray.
Doing this for a time, we will find it is as natural to love God as to love the people or the things He has created. We no longer need to be commanded to love; it will come naturally.
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