One time, when our daughter was two-years-old, I said, “I love you,” and she responded, “No! I love you!”

I wasn’t going to let her talk back to me like that. “Hey! Get it right.” I said, “I love you! And don’t you forget it.”

She just dug in, of course. “No! I love you.” But she cracked a smile and we burst out laughing.

Now, thank God love doesn’t work like that, right? Thank God love isn’t some kind of limited resource, the kind of thing that we tug-of-war over and the winner takes all.

I’ve heard from parents who are expecting a second child that they can be nervous because they’re so in love with their first kid that they think, “How can I possibly love anyone else this much? This one child has my whole heart. How can I give more? I don’t want our second child to feel deprived of love.” But then, when the new baby arrives the parents are just as lovestruck – their hearts grow, their love multiplies, the circle of their embrace opened passed the horizon of what they thought was possible.

That’s how love works, thank God.

The more we dare to love and to be loved, the more love can take on its own force in our lives, and the bigger and stronger our embrace of others can get.

That’s part of this sacred experiment of being church together, of being invited and challenged to live into the love of Christ for whomever is a part of this sweet and quirky group of human beings. The circle of our embrace grows … and then grows and grows as we celebrate together and mourn together, along with more and more of God’s creation.

We can’t do it without God.

When I say “The nature of love is to grow, thank God,” I do mean “Thank God.”
Love in our lives, however little or big it may be, however often or rarely it flows, however hard or easy it is for us to let it in or let it out, love is a current that can take us out to the great mother ocean of life that surrounds and rains down upon and flows through all being.

The most powerful thing we can do is to surrender to the current within our love and our yearning, the current that courses through the core of our being – surrender to its pull out toward the Source of all life – that Whom we call “God.”

“May we turn our hearts to God.” It’s an old, tried and true Call to Worship. Turn our hearts to God.

But what does that really mean?

Now, for some folks feeling love from God and feeling love for God comes naturally. There’s a spiritual gift to knowing as a matter-of-fact that God is real, and God is at work in their lives, and God is at work as a force of Love. This is a special gift.

But some of us are less naturally inclined this way. I’m speaking as myself someone who has always had a push and pull between skepticism and faith, as well as between being open to love and being guarded against its risks.

When we hear the ancient Hebrew Scriptures and we hear Jesus saying “Love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, and strength,” some of us may respond, “Okay, that sounds great. But, really, what does that actually mean?”

What does it mean to love God?

Now, Jesus goes on to say, “Love your neighbor as yourself” – that’s a good clue. But it may be more comfortable to focus on love of neighbor (as hard as it is). Really, first and foremost, what does this mean: “Love God”?

Who is God? Who is this God that preachers keep telling us we’re supposed to love?

Who is this Great Mystery, this Power Beyond All Understanding, this creative source and force of the universe – this universe with all of its beauty and all of its brutality? Who is this God who is infinite yet intimate, the Holy One in whom we live and breathe and have our being, the Holy One for whom any word or image in merely an echo?

“Who are You?” Capital “Y” You? The ultimate You?

This question itself is a lover’s question – who are you? The yearning in itself is a lover’s yearning. “Who are You?” I wish to know you. Help me know you. I wish for you to know me.
“Who are You?” Asking that question can be an act of prayer that is itself an act of love –

Especially if we don’t know what the answer will be.

Asking that question as an act of prayer and then letting answers emerge and draw us deeper in.

The nature of God can be confusing and even terrifying, as well as comforting…
Just like love itself.

Christianity makes the astonishing claim that God is love. Not only does God love, but God is love. Through love we come to know God. Apart from love we can’t know God. Dare we believe this to be true? Dare we live from the conviction that it is true?

Love takes trust – faith – because it takes tremendous risk. In love we are vulnerable, we risk great pain. We risk our own pain and we risk opening ourselves to the pain of those we love.
In love we must risk losing ourselves. And maybe even scarier: In love, we risk becoming ourselves. In love we risk losing the ones we dare to love. We risk losing everything.

But let me reassure you: we will all lose everything anyway, in the end.

If we risk love for God, the Source of all and everything, then this risk of losing everything is the risk of gaining everything, becoming full to overflowing.
If we dare to embrace the infinite, then our diminishment leads to our expansion, our fulfillment, bursting the bounds of who we are. If we are to be annihilated in the end, may it be annihilation into God’s Love Supreme.

In love, there will be loss, and there will be pain.

Again, we’re guaranteed that anyway.

In love, we choose to not be numb through it all, but rather awake to the reality of those we love, and the reality of God.

All the great lovers of God throughout history are great bearers of pain – their own pain and the pain from their wide embrace of God’s creatures.

But the great lovers of God throughout history are not only great bearers of pain but also beacons of great joy.
For they live and move and have their being in the spirit of a truth that can set us free.
So if you yearn for that, that yearning is a lover’s yearning. It is a gift. Use it.
In the words of the great lover of God, the 13th Century spiritual genius Mechthild of Madeburg, who was a leader within an extraordinary movement of lay communal religious life and thought and service in medieval Germany, called the Beguines:
“The soul is made of love,” Mechthild wrote, “The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love. Therefore, it can never find rest nor happiness in other things. It must lose itself in love. By its very nature it must seek God, who is love…

“Prayer drives the hungry soul up into the fullness of God, and draws the great God down into the little soul … God whispers God’s love in the narrow confines of the soul.”

In church we get to learn to do this together, get to help each other in our journeys with love, in prayer and study and service. Churches at our best are schools of Love. Church as a school, where we not only learn about love, but get shaped by and formed by love, we get schooled into love.

And not just any kind of love – Divine love, the kind of love that Jesus manifest. Unconditional love, universal love, the love of God the creator of all, in whose eternal spirit we all we live and move and have our being. Transformational love.

Agape love, as the early Jesus followers called it: the unconditional, universal love of our divine Creator that joins us in our human condition, in all our beauty, in all our brokenness, and embraces us as we are, so we may be shaped and changed by that love. Transformed beyond the bounds of our petty little senses of self, into vessels through which that Divine Love can flow, for as it is shared so it multiplies.

Our world needs it. We need it. There’s so much pain, violence, destruction, fear, trauma, anger, emptiness … this world needs to know God’s love. It starts with us knowing God’s love, being transformed by God’s love, helping to share God’s love with each other and the neighbors and strangers we encounter every day.  

Thank you all for being a part of this School of Love.  

May we all continue to grow together through the Love of God as manifest through Christ Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, January 28, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge