When we love someone or love something precious and we commit to that love, there grows a passion to protect them, to care for them, to guard over them. This is part of what love means – it’s not everything, of course, but an important dimension to love. Just think of that deep in the bones drive to protect your child or your partner or parent or grandparent, your dear friend, a dear neighbor, or a place that is really important to you.
Okay, so this is a dimension to what it means to love.
Now, what does this mean when it comes to our love for God, and our love for the ways that we come to know God, to draw near to God, like our love for Jesus? Church is a school of love, a community where we grow in love for God and love for each other. So, what does it mean that part of love is this drive to protect?
What does it mean to protect or care for or guard over God?
How can that even make sense?
Because it’s not like the Sovereign of the Universe, the One True God Beyond All Name, the Holy Creator of All that Was and Is and Ever Shall Be, the Eternal Spirit, the Divine Power Who suffuses and transcends all existence, it’s not like God needs protection from anyone, let alone from puny little humans. All it takes is a tiny virus and we humans are brought to our knees. Meanwhile God creates supernovas and super massive black holes at the center of galaxies. God’s got this. God’s going to be okay no matter what. It’s us puny little humans who’ve got to deal with fragility and insecurity.
So, does it make any sense when it comes to our love for God for us to give some attention to this aspect of love that has to do with protecting and defending the ones we love?
There’s plenty else about love that’s very important to cultivate when it comes to our love for God: reverence, commitment, desire, yearning, gratitude, and so on. And the delusion that God somehow needs our protection and defense has fueled terrible things like holy wars and religious persecution. You see what I’m saying? I want to be clear about that.
But I think it is very important that as we try to grow in our love for God we give a strong a wise direction to our natural drive to guard and protect what we love. The focus shouldn’t be on somehow protecting God in Godself. Rather, the focus can be on protecting our relationship with God, guarding and caring for the ways that we know God, the means by which we draw nearer to God.
Because that does need protection. There are plenty of forces in our world and in ourselves that can threaten and sabotage our relationship with God and our ways of connecting with God as we need to keep our souls healthy and our humanity intact.
Another way to put this, for this Christmas season and the season of Epiphany:
How do we tend to the flame of the light of Christ in our lives?
How do we let our love drive us to commit to the care and attention that the flame needs?
How do we give it the space it needs? The air it needs? The fuel it needs? How do we ensure that it doesn’t get suffocated? That it doesn’t sputter out?
This is a good question especially as we begin the new year and set our intentions and resolutions, but also as we enter the stretch of winter that can get long and dark and it may be a challenge not to neglect what is most life-giving and soul sustaining.
How do we tend to the flame of the light of Christ in our lives?
This takes the commitment of love, which does involve the at times fierce drive to protect.
The story of Epiphany that we return to this second week after Christmas can be a story about how to protect in love our relationship with God, as embodied in Christ. The Magi were drawn by a tremendous yearning to the light of Christ. And they showed their love by going on a great journey to Jesus and offering him the gifts of their honor and blessing. These are moving aspects of love for our relationship with God.
At the same time, surrounding this Epiphany story is a terrible threat. King Herod, the Roman appointed half-Jewish King of the Jewish people, had a chilling track record of eliminating potential rivals to his power. At first, the magi are naïve to this threat to the precious newborn manifestation of God’s Love on earth. They assume that this avenue to God, that this flame of God’s presence on earth is not something that can be threatened. So the magi unthinkingly tip Herod off to the fact that within his kingdom someone had been born who was anointed by God to lead his people to liberation. Herod understood that this was a threat to him, so he started to plan how to eliminate this threat. Fortunately, the Magi quickly wised up. They received warnings in their dreams, and they heed those warnings. They slipped out of the country after vising Jesus and did not give Herod the information he wanted from them.
But as the story goes on, Herod’s paranoia and power madness became murderous. He ordered the death of every infant boy born in Bethlehem and the surrounding area. Joseph also received a warning in a dream, which he also heeded. He and Mary took Jesus and fled the country, and lived as refugees into Egypt.
So, in their great love for their precious child, out of the deep instinct to guard and protect what they love, the holy family became like all those who flee violence and despotism to protect what they love, like modern day refugees from Mexico and Central America and Haiti and Venezuela and Libya and Ethiopia and Yemen and Syria and Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Ukraine and on and on.
In Mary and Joseph’s case they were able to protect their precious Jesus because they received hospitality and care as refugees in Egypt. They couldn’t have done it alone to survive as strangers in a strange land as they did, and to be able to return to their homeland after Herod died. There clearly were people in Egypt who lived by the love of God who charges us to care for the suffering stranger, to love others as ourselves.
What this story makes clear is that what we’re talking about here is a matter of life or death. Protecting our relationship with God as embodied in Christ, is about the kind of love that serves and protects life in urgent situations of survival. Life or death.
When I ask this question:
How do we guard and protect our relationship with God? How do we tend to the flame of the light of Christ in our lives?
This really is a life or death question. This is about soul survival. This is about the survival of our very humanity living in the face of all that would destroy it.
Yes, this question is about things like making our prayer life a priority, making it a priority to study scripture and other inspired, worshipping together, serving together for the sake of a more just and compassionate world, growing in our capacity to love and be loved within a community of faith, committing to the practices that feed our souls and help us receive and share the light of Christ.
But too often in our culture treats these kinds of things as “wellness lifestyle choices” rather than the urgent matters of life and death that they are.
This is about soul survival, this is about the survival of our very humanity in the face of all that would destroy it.
A couple of days ago I saw graffiti under a bridge in Philly that said “I feel so f***ing dead inside.” And there are plenty of people here in the suburbs and exurbs who could say the same, to be honest. We see it play out in the epidemic of addiction, in the rising violence that has been plaguing every community, in the hardheartedness and neglect and cruelty in the face of the suffering of others, in the widespread loneliness and more quiet expressions of desperation. Many of us here can testify to experiencing the pull and tug of the devouring shadows.
We need to keep the Christ light going because it is our deliverance, it is our salvation, it is our soul survival, it is the survival of our very humanity.
Caring for the Christ light within us and among us is as elemental a need as eating and drinking and breathing – more so, in fact, because God is the very source of our very being.
So how are you going to tend to the flame of the light of Christ in our lives?
Does it work to keep it under a lid?
No. That’ll snuff it out.
Flames need air, and they need to be shared.
The Love of God grows in our lives when we share it with others.
So please, I invite you, I urge you, be loving and committed and fiercely protective of doing what you need to do to receive the light of God’s love as you need, and to share it with other as they need, for the sake of your soul survival and all of ours.
(Delivered Sunday, January 8th, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.)
The Dandelion Way 