Urgent Love

And now I want to urgently remind you, dear friends,

of the old rule God gave us right from the beginning,

that Christians should love one another. 

If we love God, we will do whatever he tells us to.

And he has told us from the very first to love each other.

(2 John 1:5-6)

 Grace and peace to all through our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Like many of you over the last week and a half, I have been praying and pondering over the details of the stories emerging from Sutherland Springs, Texas where a man came into a church and shot and killed 26 people and wounded many others. So many lives changed instantly. So many questions that will probably remain unanswered.

I have been wondering about the state of our mental health facilities. I have been wondering about judicial accountability. I have been wondering about the local reality of violence against women and children. 

I have been wondering what to do with all of this chaos and destruction. Two weeks before it was New York, a man in a van killed eight people. Before that it was the mass shooting in Las Vegas. So much.

I have heard some say with such defeat in their voices, “Things have never been this bad before.” However, an honest and thorough look back into history reveals that things have always been bad. Perhaps what has changed is that we know about it so much quicker, it’s repeated over and over and over – day in and day out and everyone has an opinion about what it all means. So that it seems like things are worse than ever before. But it is not really true.

If we examine history, especially when it comes to the church, one of the predominant themes is a sense of urgency because of the turmoil.

• Urgency to hold fast to faith in Christ in the midst of persecution, including horrendous accounts of martyrdoms (i.e. Perpetua and Felicity in Africa, early third century).

• Urgency to distance oneself from the intermingling of Christianity and power (the fleeing of many to the deserts in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere following the Roman Emperor Constantine’s “acceptance” of Christianity).

• Urgency to set forth clear understandings for the life and worship in the church (Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon).

• Urgency for transformation from within the church (Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, John Calvin’s Institutes, Catholic Counter-Reformation).

All this urgency in the history of the church. Some of it was motivated by love of Christ and one another. Some was motivated by love of power or desire for legitimacy and authority. This mixture of urgent love, urgent faith, with a desperate clinging to power and control has been part of human existence for millennia. It is what has given birth to an imperfect church.

Today – there is still a sense of anxious urgency in the air. Part of our calling is to listen to the Voice urgently beckoning us toward love. We must listen to this Voice particularly in the midst of deep necessary lament. We must listen to this Voice urgently calling us to pay attention to the voices of the oppressed and marginalized, to stand with them, to comfort them.

Urgent love must have meat on its bones - it must be Word-Become-Flesh love. This love urgently calls us to come together to heal divisiveness, to forgive and let go of old wounds. To love deeply and urgently is to give life, to put others’ needs before your own, to keep your ego in check, to heal and be healed. As the days literally grow darker and the cold of winter comes upon us, let us answer the call to deep love with life or death urgency.