Sermon Library
“God is Love. A Lesson in Transformational Love”
Lexie Potamkin
February 13, 2011
Service Theme: Epiphany VI
We’ve all heard the expression “God is Love,” and Christians especially, can relate to that phrase. I think it’s safe to say that “love” is the word most strongly associated with Jesus, even though he used the word only about forty times in the four gospels. But if people remember nothing else about Jesus, they remember that he said to love thy neighbor as thyself.
Most people also remember that when Jesus was asked which of the commandments was the most important, he responded by saying in essence that the only thing that mattered was love. To be more specific, he said: “Thou shalt love the Lord they God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Quite a beautiful thought, and yet, one could argue that although the idea has been praised and remembered, it has hardly been practiced. Too many religions insist that they have the one and only true way and that all others are wrong. Too many people claim that they are proud to be living in a land where every person is free to pursue whatever religion they see fit, and yet are ready to march against the people who want to put up a mosque in their neighborhood.
Of course, living in contradiction is not anything unusual for any of us. A large number of those same people who wrote and signed the documents that said that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, were themselves, slave owners.
And at first glance, Jesus’ admonition to love your neighbor as your self is indeed a difficult request that flies in the face of human nature. It is only natural to love those who love us, but who among us can actually love those who hate us? It is the imperative of self-preservation, built into us by evolution, to fight back against our attackers – and yet – Jesus tells us to forgive and be compassionate.
Even organized religion has had a hard time living up to the dictates of Jesus. While Jesus preached love as a path of transformation, religions everywhere have sanctioned wars and intolerance.
And it does seem to go against common sense; how can you possibly love anyone and everyone as you love yourself? Sometimes we feel that we don’t even love the people we’re really supposed to love, like some of the members of our family or our friends.
But Jesus persisted. He did not command us to love only the people we find easy to love. He even listed love as the signature of his followers.
In John 13:35 he said: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love for one another.” So how is it that Jesus asked us something which sounds so clear and so simple, and yet seems impossible for us to actually attain?
I think the answer has something to do with levels of consciousness. As a student of spirituality, I’ve read many passages that are beautifully and poetically expressed throughout the spiritual literature, but when pressed to say exactly what it means, I can only stumble around verbally when trying to explain it.
You see, as you go to different levels of consciousness, words take on different meanings. It’s one thing for you and I to say that we should be one with nature; it’s a completely different thing for a Taoist priest to say it. It’s one thing for you and I to say that we should be one with the universe, and an entirely different thing for the Dalai Lama to utter the same phrase.
When we think, we think in words. We can only think with the words we already know, and we can only use those words in the way that we are used to defining them.
So when we speak of love, we are usually talking human love, which is all about relationships of one sort or another. The people closest to us get our love – those far away from us don’t. We expect love to take place in a relationship – where we both give and receive. In some sense, people have to earn our love – and if they don’t – they don’t get it. Or if they displease us – we withdraw it.
But Jesus was not talking about human love. He was talking about Divine love. He operated from a different level of consciousness. Jesus was at one with God. If he were a yogi, he would be what we call a Bhakti (bohk-tee) yogi. (Bodhisattva)
Jesus knew that we couldn’t love the way he wanted us to love as long as we remained the people we were. To achieve his version, we had to transform ourselves. And that was what he wanted – he wanted us to be one with God.
God’s love is different from human love. God does not love some people and not others. He does not love you only if you are good and withdraw his love if you are wicked. God’s love is not earned. To be loved by God, all you have to do is to exist. To be is to be loved by God.
So Jesus wanted us to love as he loved, not as we love. In fact he says so in John 13:34: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you. . . [Emphasis added]
The idea that we should love God was nothing new – we find it over and over again, starting right in the Old Testament, especially in the Song of Solomon. But there was something very special indeed about the way that Jesus loved. If we look at some of the earliest things that were written after Jesus was crucified, we find in the epostles of Paul, for example, constant reference to the love of God.
Until then, the God of the Old Testament seemed distant. But when Jesus arrived he put Divine love into the everyday lives of ordinary people. For Jesus, love was to be a radical, life-changing event.
Love would transform the world, make peace with our enemies, and bring God into our hearts. In Luke 17:21 Jesus says: “. . . for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” And when Jesus said the kingdom of God is within, he of course meant that it was within all of us. That was our first clue about Divine love and the injunction to love everyone: the same God is in all of us and to hate anyone or to kill anyone is tantamount to hating or killing a part of God. We are his creation – made in his image.
So to change our reality, we have to change our consciousness and seek what the yogis call God-consciousness. Ordinary love is human love. Humans are concerned, first, with the need to survive the multifarious threats to their existence. When we are only concerned with bare existence, it is hard to find a God who seems to care for us. First we have to change our consciousness; then we can change our lives. Divine love is not concerned with bare existence; in fact we are constantly reminded that the gift of God is eternal life. And this is another case of how ordinary words can seem so mystical to ordinary people.
When we look at the example of how Jesus loved, we see someone unaffected by greed and selfishness. We see sure signs of someone whose consciousness has been raised to the highest levels.
So, on the one hand, although love is instinctively inside of us, we don’t become love – we simply pick and choose who we will love and how much we will love them. In other words, even though love, God, and the kingdom of heaven are already inside of us, we must seek them out in order to transform ourselves. Finding that love, changes everything – transforming the person, transforming that person’s life, and transforming their entire being and even the world around them.
Jesus, of course, knew that we weren’t already there; after all if we were there would have been no need for his ministry. But he was the first advocate of “fake it until you make it.” All of his instructions tell us to live as if we are already there. He was well aware that we needed to rise from our present state of mind to a much higher one, and he was also well aware that it takes a great deal of time and effort to follow the spiritual path and that we could only change gradually.
Many have commented on the fact that Jesus did not discriminate. He was equally at home with the thief, the prostitute, the leper, or the poor person. I would argue that he sought them out because such people had no social status to lose and were more likely to give him their love. Jesus often said he wanted to help those who most needed love, which of course would have been those very same poor, weak, sick and wicked.
By embracing these types of people, he started them on the path of redemption. He gave them the one thing they couldn’t have in normal society: a sense of worth.
And that is our second clue: Jesus wants us to give the same gift – to find in others the worth that others don’t see in them.
But this is exactly the kind of love that is so difficult for humans.
Since institutions are the work of human beings, they have fared no better. We can all find examples of churches that think it is wrong to have ordained women, that gays are an abomination to the Lord, and that abortion is absolutely intolerable. We’ve all read stories of those who are so intolerable of such things that they actually bomb clinics or kill doctors to save lives!
But Jesus didn’t speak to organized religions, or spiritual leaders. He left us to solve these problems on our own – and the only weapon he gave us was love. And he intimated that the more we could love, the more we would grow spiritually.
This is such a difficult thing for humans. God is like the sun – he is the light that shines on everybody. But we still cling to the idea that we are special to God.
As our Chinese friends, the architects of the concepts of yin and yang will tell us, our minds operate in duality. We love to pair things – light and dark, night and day, good and evil, me and you, us and them. It’s almost inconceivable to us that nobody is special when it comes to God’s love. We just can’t face the idea that God’s love and light shines on both sinner and saint.
In the times we live in now, there is more than enough non-love. We don’t really forgive; we don’t really tolerate – we learn to wear masks and disguise our speech.
Of course it’s normal to do this as human beings, and that is exactly my point – the kind of love that Jesus wanted us to have for each other is not human love – it is Divine love.
And he gave us many clues as to how to achieve this Divine love. Principally he told us that we must become one with God – unity consciousness – God-consciousness.
We’re not supposed to imitate Jesus, we’re supposed to become part of him – or as he put it – we’re supposed to abide in him. In fact he warned us that unless we do so, we’ll never be successful in trying to follow him. In John 15:5 He says: “. . . He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.”
So he’s saying point blank that unity consciousness is imperative - without me you can do nothing.
And so we must keep walking on the path with as much courage as possible and most importantly, with as much compassion and love as possible.
Jesus wanted us to change entirely; to change as human beings and in the process to change the entire world.
He pointed us towards the mystical realm which we can only inhabit at the level of the soul. It is only when we are actually connected to the Divine that we have any hope of learning to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jesus wanted to bring heaven to earth – on earth as it is in heaven.
His teachings admonish us to look deeply inside of ourselves – not to our personalities and our so-called identities. Instead he wanted us to see ourselves as souls. He wanted us to see ourselves as “made in God’s image,” not as ordinary fallible individuals who are in constant conflict with each other.
Souls are all equal. There are no rich souls and poor souls. There are no male and female souls. There are no weak and powerful souls. As humans, true and total equality is beyond us – but as souls it is already a matter of fact.
So our only hope to love as Jesus wanted us to love is to find out what Divine love is.
The kingdom of God (which is inside you remember) is pure light and the source of all love. The journey within begins with a deep longing to experience love at its most intense and potent best. It is so powerful that some Christians refer to it as “being slain in the spirit.”
Look for a certain coherency in life which has an underlying purpose and meaning. Love from that place deep inside you, that is the Kingdom of God. All humanity – in the deepest and most real sense – is your own self. And you are one with God. And God is love.