God's Absolute Love
Pentecost 14, Proper 19
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
It’s kind of fun when you look at someone and can tap into their absolute joy. I looked at this young dad, Alex, holding his brand new baby girl and a flood of empathy hit me.
I remember very well holding my newborn son for the first time. I had just one blaring thought in my mind, “Don’t drop him!” Every fiber of my being was intensely focus on protecting and preserving that precious little boy who had just shown up.
I remember very well seeing my daughter for the first time, equal in love as with my three boys, but also a white flag of surrender going up over my head and heart.
The thought of losing any of them was and is absolutely terrifying. That thought eased up a bit after the first week or so. But it never really goes away. That remains true with all of our children and our grandchildren. Each of them holds a unique, distinct joy in our lives, equal yet quite particular and sources of constant revelation. Parents who have lost children at any age speak of the deepest pain.
That’s the closest I can come to grasping how deeply God loves each one of us, particular as we are and yet changing over time. His love is perfect, so we know it’s greater than ours in both magnitude and intensity. And it is a fundamental truth of our faith. It is God’s love that brings life. It is God’s love that overcomes sin and death. Love begets faith. Love begets hope.
This is the fundamental error Jesus is trying to correct with the Pharisees. They were experts in the Law, but they asserted it as rules and regulations with compliance as the only means to God’s favor. They ignored the mercy and grace resident in the Law, the prophets and the wisdom of the psalms and proverbs.
There is danger here, subtle but nevertheless real danger. Paul is not kidding when he said in 1 Timothy 1:15, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.”
Before his encounter with the living Christ, Paul was the living embodiment of Jesus’s charge against the Pharisees in Matthew 23:15: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” Matthew 23:15
Paul was surely one of those proselytes. No doubt, some Pharisee heard of his brilliance and potential, then went and recruited him. Paul was wired for zeal and excellence, which became harnessed to Pharisaic legalism, and he would strive to excel, to be the best of them all, to out do his teachers and mentors with a finely tuned morality that hollowed out the blessings in the Law of Moses.
Then he gladly took on the mission to stamp out these followers of Jesus whose witness to him as Lord undermined the legalism - not the Law itself, but the legalism.
Sadly, we see that same dynamic at times today, when preachers preach morality as a condition of God’s grace, as though the lost sheep has somehow impaired the Shepherd’s desire to find it, or the lost coin has somehow lost its value. Of course, Jesus absolutely calls us to turn away from sin, to repent, to amend our lives. Of course, we suffer the consequences of sin, even as we seek forgiveness and reconciliation. Of course he calls us to strive to live according to his teaching and example.
Of course, we fail and fail again. That’s why he came. That’s why he died for us.
We hold that the bond established between Charlotte and the Lord in baptism is indissoluble. It’s not anything I do, it’s what God is doing. In that sense, Charlotte will never, ever actually become lost. His hand is on her. She may feel lost, but he will always have her, whether or not she cries out, whether or not she even realizes that she has become lost, whether or not she recognizes her infinite value.
God’s judgment is perfect. The Pharisees looked at the law and saw judgment, but stopped there to condemn and separate from sinners. Sin is sin. But sin and death do not have the last word. Jesus does. His love pursues until he recovers all that the Father has given him, including Charlotte, including you, and including me.
Our hope is she will grow up knowing Jesus her whole life, never turning away from him and never falling into a false legalism or losing Christ’s call to “love they neighbor” in the midst of the swirling controversies, disasters, accidents and tragedies that will surely come, as they always do.
Help her strive to be the best she can be, to excel in school and work, to excel in sports or music or the creative arts. Give her healthy expectations and boundaries. Teach her to follow the law - in her faith and in civil laws. Above all, help her to know Jesus, into whose body the Church she will join in baptism today. Help her to know the power of the Holy Spirit, in whom she will be sealed and marked as Christ's own forever. We will all promise to support her in this.
And as we all renew our baptismal covenant today, let us be refreshed in the absolute truth of God’s absolute, pursuing love that always calls us deeper and never lets us go.
AMEN