Love of a Different Order

 

Love of a Different Order

A meditation delivered electronically by Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer, Dec. 13, 2020

Isaiah 61:1-3; Matthew 5:43-48

The Christmas season, if it is anything, is the season of love.  It is that special season of the year when we celebrate God’s gift of love to humanity in the birth of a baby wrapped up in a manger that changed the world.  And it is the season when we celebrate our love for others.

You may be familiar with that Christmas poem by Christina Rosetti, “Love Came Down at Christmas,” that has also been set to music.  The first stanza goes,

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, Love Divine,

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and Angels gave the sign.

And so, in response to the love extended to us, we are encouraged to express our love for others.  And for the most part we do share our love with others – family members, friends, and perhaps a few people who are in need. 

But could it be that for most of us, our circle of love has its limits?  In other words, the circumference or parameter of our love reaches only so far.  Is it not a natural fact of life that the closer to home, to our center, the stronger our love-connection is?  And the further the distance of our acquaintances grows away from the center, the weaker our love becomes?

But here is the question I would pose for us to consider today: Could it be that the quality of our religion or spirituality and the testament to our spiritual maturity is the width or breadth or extent of our circle of love?  In other words, could it be that the broader or wider our circle of love, the purer our religious devotion and degree of maturity as a person of faith, indeed, as a human being in general, becomes?

One of my all-time favorite Christmas stories is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  You remember how that in the beginning, the character Scrooge cares for no one but himself.  His circle of love is very tiny; practically non-existent.  But after a Christmas miracle conversion experience of sorts, Scrooge’s circle of love expands dramatically. And he expresses that love by caring for and helping meet the needs of others.

There is a correlation, I think, between the width or breadth of our love-circle with a sense of connectedness with others, even people we don’t know.  Writer Mark Nepo observes, A “powerful way to realize our interconnectedness is to imagine the human family as a stand of aspens growing by a river.  Though each tree appears to be growing independently, not attached to the others, beneath the soil, out of view, the roots of all the trees exist as one enormous root. And so, like these trees, our soul’s growth, while appearing to be independent, is intimately connected to the health of those around us.”  And then Nepo contends, “in loving strangers, we love ourselves.”¹

Again, could it be that our spiritual maturity, our maturity as a human being, is in direct proportion to our sense of connectedness with others and the width or breadth of our love and concern for others, reaching even to strangers and those we don’t necessarily agree with?

I took note of a news story some weeks ago, during the heat of the protests in the streets and the contentious presidential campaign, about how an avid Trump supporter and a Black Lives Matter protestor ran into each other on the street and began talking with one another.  Before their encounter was over and they parted ways, they ended up hugging one another. That, I thought to myself, is an example of extending, widening your circle of love.

Jesus said, and I am paraphrasing, Don’t just show love to your friends.  Even sinners can do that!  Love your enemies.  Why should you think you are special for only loving those who love you?  If you want to be real children of God, love your enemies.  Widen the extent and the impact of your love. 

Some years ago, I saved a Family Circus cartoon in which the little boy is asking a parent the question, “Does ‘love thy neighbor’ mean the people on BOTH sides of our house?”  Jesus’ answer would be, “Yes; yes it does.”

Our Advent theme this year is “Beloved Community.”  We celebrate the love we share in the beloved community of this United Church.  But our aim, it seems to me, should be to continually expand and enlarge our beloved community to include the wider community and wider world around us.  The more we mature and grow in spiritual understanding and practice, the larger the circumference of our circle of love grows so as to include the stranger, the oppressed, the hungry and homeless, the minority, the disenfranchised, and so on.

Oh, back to that poem by Christina Rossetti; she concludes it by saying:

Love shall be our token,

Love be yours and love be mine,

Love to God and all men,

Love for plea and gift and sign.

Real love, God-like love, true Christmas love is a love that is ever growing and expanding and reaching out to bring more and more into our circle of love and connectedness.  As Jesus described it, it is a love of a different order.  May we have the grace to make it so.  Amen.

1Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.  Newburyport, MA: Red Wheel 2020.  P. 387.