“God is love. Love is from God. Love one another, for God loves us and love comes from God.”

This is the heart of what Jesus taught and embodied. This is the heart of the message and of the way of life that Jesus’ followers shared in the years and the generations after Jesus’ life. This is the heart of the accounts passed down in the Gospels not only of Jesus’ life and teachings also of his passion and death and the disciples’ experiences of Jesus’ return in resurrected form, and what that meant for them and can mean for us.

“God is love.”

What does this mean?

Well, what does love mean for you?

What has it been like for you to love? What has it been like for you to be loved? What has it been like for you to yearn for love, or to yearn out of love? What has it been like for you to be committed to love? What has it been like for love to lead you through all that life brings when one shares love with another, in sickness and health, plenty, and want, in joy and in sorrow?

What has it been like for you to love a community, to love a cause, to love even humanity itself? 

What has it been like for you to share love not only with other people, but also with something of the more-than-human world, a fellow creature, a landscape, a homeland, even perhaps love this world itself?

Then: What has it been like for you not to love? What has it been like not to be loved? What has it been like to fall short of the challenge of love, or to be let down by the absence of love?

Considering all this:

What’s God got to do with love?

And,

What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

With God, I mean.

How has love been a part of your relationship with God, and God’s relationship with you?

Or not?

We may know love imperfectly, but God is perfect love.

In a Christian culture we may hear it a lot – “God is love” – and it sounds nice, but really, it’s an astonishing claim.

In polytheistic worldviews, which hold there to be many gods, love is in the job description of just one or two gods or goddesses. All the other deities have responsibilities for all the kinds of other forces in the world: there are gods of the storms, gods of war, gods of the ocean, of the harvest, of music, of trade, and on and on. These gods are imagined to be like humans but amplified by their great power: fickle, flirty, funny, vain, vengeful, brilliant, beautiful, brutal, and all the rest of it. In all the stories about gods and goddesses in various mythologies, love is not even close to being the universal quality that ties it all together.

On the other hand, there are monotheistic worldviews, which believe in one God. That one God is either the sum total of all-and-everything, or is totally outside all-and-everything: infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, unchanging, and so on. For most monotheists who try to get their minds around the vast non-human scope of divine transcendence, a mushy, sentimental word like “love” is not the word they reach for when are more suitably grand and mighty and abstract words.

What I’m saying is that it is strange to claim that “God is love.”

And it is very challenging to sincerely believe that “God is love,” and to sincerely try to live it out. It’s so challenging that I suspect many Christians excuse ourselves from trying too hard, preferring to stay petty and selfish and judgmental and tribal and exclusionary. Just look at the whole “empathy is a sin” popular among some Christians these days, used to justify the cruel scapegoating of immigrants and trans folks. This is blasphemy.

The Christian testimony is a testimony of Divine pathos. It is a testimony of Emmanuel: God with us. God – the Holy Creator of all the cosmos – in all of God’s majesty and mystery and freedom, is incarnate, joining us in-the-flesh.

The Infinite becomes intimate. The Creator joins the created in our condition, through all the joy and the suffering, the beauty and bitterness we know as creatures of flesh and blood, breath and spirit.

The word for this is Love. The deepest and truest kind of love.

Through Christ, God embraces each of us and all of us as we are, out of love, to show us that the Creator crafts the cosmos out of love, and it is through love we may we may be restored, forgiven, freed to be who God originally intended us all to be: one in our belovedness as children of the living God. Even the most violent acts of hate, which God suffered through Christ’s passion, and which God suffers to this day through every violation of human dignity and sanctity – even this cannot overcome God’s love and life-giving power.

God is love. Love is from God.

This is the heart of the Christian testimony, the Good News, the faith and the way of Jesus Christ.   

Does your heart stir when you hear this? Does it burn? Does it yearn, even a little? Can you feel it call to your own love? If there’s even a flicker, then care for that spark, kindle it so it may grow, and let its light and warmth guide your prayers and guide your life of faith.

It was G.K. Chesterton who said, “Let your religion be less a theory and more a love affair.” “Let your religion be less a theory and more a love affair.” Hold on to that…

Let me take a moment to address some potential skepticism about this “God is love” business. Because, as I’ve said, even some Christians don’t want to take it too seriously, so they – we – can persist in having callous hearts towards the suffering of those our society scapegoats.

God is all-knowing, right? The fancy term is “omniscient.” This means total awareness of all and everything happening all the time everywhere in the universe. I’m talkin’ cosmic consciousness, man. Like, whoa.

We humans have a certain degree of consciousness. Which is pretty awesome, how much we can be aware of and figure out. But for how awesome our consciousness is, it’s very limited, if you consider the scope of the universe, or even what’s all happening right now in this room. Do we know each-other’s minds and hearts the way that God does? Each of us has a pretty limited understanding of what’s actually going on. As much as some people act like they know it all, the actual extent of true things that any of us actually know and are actually aware of is kind of pathetic. It should be very humbling how little we know and how wrong we can be.

Yet we do know what it is like to know, to some degree. We are aware of what it is like to be aware, to some degree. We are conscious of what consciousness can do, to some degree. These are hints, these are glimmers of a God-scope of things.

One of the amazing things that our human level consciousness has evolved to be able to do is to connect with the experiences of another person, another being, even if it is just a little. We are able to be aware – to some degree – of what it is like to be someone else.

It is love that allows us to do this most powerfully: to feel some of what another is feeling, to be aware somewhat of what another is thinking, and to care, to be able to join them to some degree in their joy and their suffering and delight and creativity and on and on.

The awareness that growth through love leads us to know a little more of what is true in the world, far greater truths than just deluded self-absorption will give us. Love can lead our consciousness to go a beyond the boundaries of ourselves and get a little bigger view of what’s real, what’s true. We can realize that other people, other beings, have just as much of a sense of “what it is like to be me,” as I do. It may be different from our own, it may be mysterious to us, but it is just as worthy of respect and dignity as I know I deserve.

Considering what love has taught you about another person, just let yourself try to imagine God’s awareness of them … and God’s awareness of each of us and all of us and all the beings in this world and through this universe.

Love can lead us to gimpse a bit of transcendence.

Jesus has given this world a tremendous revelation of the nature of God: that God is love. That God’s awareness joins us in all we experience and feel and live through, God even joins us in our suffering, and does so freely out of love. God is beyond it all, free from it all, so in loving us can help us to know some of that freedom from the limitations of how sin can imprison our lives.

I will end by quoting Thomas Merton, as I have the past two Sundays:

“The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy – or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth! In the true Christian vision of God’s love, the idea of worthiness loses its significance. Revelation of the mercy of God makes the whole problem of worthiness something almost laughable: the discovery that worthiness is of no special consequence (since no one could ever, by himself, be strictly worthy to be loved with such a love) is a true liberation of the spirit.”

The liberation is a liberation of our love, our capacity to love others as we know God has loved us.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, Sunday, May 11, 2025, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.