Sermon for September 19, 2021 - The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B, The Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello
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Our parish mission statement is “To be a place in this world where all can experience the fullness of Christ's love and learn to follow the Two Great Commandments: to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.”
Most of us are clear on the love our neighbor as ourselves part. There are no shortage of opportunities at, and through, St. Paul’s to enact our love of our neighbors. Both within these walls and in the world, love of neighbor is a catalyzing energy of this shared community.
But what about loving God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength?
How do we love God, apart from the ways we love God by loving each other?
What does it even mean to love God? How do we show it? How do we teach it?
Expressing our love of and for God can be tricky terrain for many of us. Our relationship with God might, at best, be like a child to a parent. It’s there, in the air, assumed but rarely expressed.
There is a reason many cards for Mothers’ and Fathers’ day, but also for anniversaries contain the words, “I know I don’t say it enough, but…”
Those same words might be a fitting start to my prayers.
Maybe we don’t know what loving God is supposed to sound like. Or maybe, particularly in this part of the world, expressing our love of God makes us squeamish.
I don’t know if God is a jealous God, or a needy God, or that God needs me to articulate my love for God when I know that God knows the contents of my heart.
So maybe loving God isn’t for God. Maybe loving God intentionally is for us.
We want to control and manage our relationship with God, but God is seldom controlled or managed. So when we work to keep God in a box, we end up only knowing and seeing the parts of God that remain in the box where we try to keep God contained, and there’s seldom much of God in those kinds of places.
Today’s Gospel story reminds me of a poster many of us had up in our Sunday School rooms as children. Jesus, in the middle of a crowd, with a child on his lap.
It is a sweet image.
But Jesus’ action of taking a child from the crowd, putting them on his lap and saying “this is what it looks like to be the greatest, this is what it looks like to be in relationship with and to love God,” that was anything but sweet. It was downright subversive.
After an argument on the road about who among them is the greatest, Jesus uses a child to illustrate what greatness really looks like.
Jesus reaches past the faithful disciples. He reaches beyond the men and the women. He finds the one in the crowd that would have been at the very bottom of the social hierarchy.
So Jesus teaches them, and us, that if we want to see what God looks like, look for the least likely among us; the outcast, the downtrodden. There, in the “least among us,” we will see the face of Christ. And by welcoming and loving and serving them, we will welcome and love and serve God.
But Jesus also shows his disciples what it looks like to love God directly. Loving God is like holding a child on our laps.
Last week, we had lots of children back in the service, and it was glorious. They were adorable. And they were restless. They were curious, and they were verbal about it. They had to be nursed when they were hungry and taken to the bathroom when, well, they had to go to the bathroom.
And as much as the rest of the community sent over smiles of love and understanding, I couldn’t help but feel for those parents who were trying desperately to have an experience of church while dodging meltdowns and spit-up.
And I watched, as these same parents let the squirmy ones crawl up in their laps, as they picked the tired ones up and let them rest a head on their shoulders. I saw as they looked down at these children demanding every ounce of patience they had, smile, and say “I love you.”
And the child, looking at their parent, the center of their whole world, says “I love you too.”
And I thought, isn’t loving God a bit like that?
God is unpredictable; sometimes downright squirmy. God can ask things of us we feel completely unprepared to offer. God can bring us places we’d never thought we’d go. God can fight with us as we attempt to wrestle God into the childseat. (I’m just guessing here.) God can bring us to our knees, unsure of what it is God wants from us and just wishing God could use God’s words and tell us.
God looks at us, the center of God’s world and waits for the smile. God longs for the “yes, I’ll watch you do that thing for the hundredth time as if it were the first,” and then give us the sunrise. again.
God drags us to the hockey rink for a 7am practice, or the recorder recital. God wants one thing from us today and tomorrow demands something completely different.
The disciples and followers in the crowd had an image of God and of the Messiah, of the who the greatest would be that was based on power over. It was about control and order.
Jesus shows his followers how to love God, and what loving God is like. Jesus takes a child into his lap and says that to love God is to welcome the least among us.
But he also shows that loving God is like loving that same child.
Jesus invites us to transform our relationships with God; to let go of the idea of God that is confined to a predictable, rational, controllable box that needs nothing from us. And Jesus invites us to imagine God like a child on our lap. There will be squirming, there may be frustration, and there may even be a little spit up.
And at the end of the day, Jesus invites us to let God know how we feel. “Wow, Good job on that fall foliage God.” “Thanks for doing what I asked you to do, God, it really helped.” Jesus asks us to look God right in the eyes, and say “I love you, God. I hope you know that, even though I don’t say it enough.”
For what God wants more than anything is to look right back at you, the center of God’s world, with a smile and say, “I love you, too.”
AMEN.
© 2021 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello