The Sixth Sunday of Easter

An Acquired Skill

John 14:23-29

Do you love God? I’m not asking for any actual response. But ask yourself, really, honestly, do you love God? Today, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you love God? Any of you have had any experience around hospitals know how the nurses incessantly ask: how’s your pain now? On a scale of 1 to 10, how is your pain today? So what is the level of your love for God?

We are taught that loving God is very important. In the summary of the law Jesus commands us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. This is the first and great commandment for us as Christians. The collect appointed for this morning, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, speaks of us as people who certainly hope to love the Lord.

So do you? Do you really love God?

Loving God is not something that comes naturally to us. For me, this is a very important statement to hang onto. Loving God is not something we are automatically able to do; it’s not something we are born able to do. It isn’t something that just happens or that we just fall into without trying. Being able to love God does not come naturally to us. It is an acquired skill.

This is an imperfect metaphor, but it’s a bit like being a major league shortstop or a concert pianist. No one is born with the skills of a shortstop. No one just discovers someday out of the blue that they can play Chopin. These are acquired skills.

Now it does seem to be true that some people are born with greater potential than others for athletic or musical excellence. No one is born fully skilled, but some people do seem to be born with greater potential. So is the same true of loving God? Are some people born with a greater potential to become skilled lovers of God? What do you think? Think of yourself and others. No matter what you consider your own potential, I’ll bet every one of you is thinking of someone else whom you imagine was born with a greater potential than you were to love God. But each of those people is thinking of someone else... It is NOT like baseball or music. All of us are born with the full potential to love God. We must learn and acquire the skill. But each of us has full and equal potential to become a person who loves God. Like baseball or piano playing, it takes time, focus, practice, desire, commitment, to become skilled. None of us is born automatically or naturally able to love God, but each and every one of us has the potential to acquire and grow in our love of God.

I think that’s good news. If I’m not as good at loving God as I would like to be... One, it does not mean I was born somehow spiritually flawed or lacking and, two, it does mean improvement is possible. Improvement is possible.

What does it mean to love God?

It’s always helpful to be reminded that loving God is not a feeling, it is not the romantic feeling we usually mean when we speak of loving one another. It is not like being in love, that indescribable feeling of warmth and affection.

Loving God is an action. It is giving ourselves to God. It is offering everything we do, everything we think or hope or care about to God, so that our lives are literally shared with God. To love God is be with God, to seek God in everything. To love God is to choose to share all that we are and all that we do with God.

I enjoy the comic strip Zits. I find a lot of parish life reflected in it. This image won’t work as well for those of you who don’t know the strip, but there is a character in Zits called Richandamy. One word. Richandamy. Theoretically, Rich and Amy are two people, but in the strip they are perpetually glued to one another, pressed together in a permanent embrace. They have but one thought, one opinion, on any subject. They breathe together. Their bodies are linked on a cellular level. This may not be a healthy model for human relationships, but maybe it is not a bad image for loving God, for a life lived shared with God.

Loving God is more than worshiping God. More than serving God. More than being a generous or self-giving person, although all of those are positive qualities of living faithfully. Loving God means being united with God, sharing our lives with God.

Why. Why should we seek to acquire the skill of loving God? God commands us to. That is reason enough. Or, in response not only to God’s command, but in response to God’s act of self-offering to us. We seek to love God, as the old hymns says, “because he first loved us.” Because God offered the fullness of his life and death to us through Jesus Christ, in response we offer the fullness of our lives. Because God shared his very life with us, we gratefully share our lives with him.

But there is also a tangible incentive to become skilled at loving God. Remember today’s collect. God has prepared good things that surpass our understanding for those who love God. To share our lives with God is to share in God’s own life. To share good. To experience good. The deep, true good that is God. To offer our lives to God in love is to be enabled to know good.

Over and over again in John’s Gospel, as in the portion we heard today, Jesus offers peace to his disciples. My own peace I leave with you, Jesus says. The peace of God which passes human understanding. Do not let your hearts be troubled, Jesus says. To love God, to share God’s own life in love, is to experience God’s own peace. The peace which stills anxiety and fear. The more deeply we share our lives with God, the more deeply we will know the peace of God in our hearts.

The ability to love God does not come naturally or automatically to us. It isn’t something we are born proficient at, although each and every one of us is born with the ability, the potential to learn how to love God. And we acquire that skill, we learn how to love God, by praying to God that God will teach us how to love him. It is only by God’s gift that we are able to love God. And we seek that gift in prayer.

Remember the collect of the day. Collects always start with a statement about God. “God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding.” That’s a given. That’s a statement of fact about God. God has prepared for those who love him good beyond human understanding. After this opening statement, the intercessory part of the collect begins. We pray. We pray that God will pour into our hearts love towards God. We pray that God will give us the ability to love him. We pray that God will help us grow in a life of love.

Those prayers will be answered. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that we (the Triune God) will come to those who love us make our home with them. That Greek word “home” or “dwelling place” occurs in another very familiar portion of John’s Gospel where Jesus says, In my Father’s house there are many mansions or dwelling places and I go to prepare a place for you. We read that passage at funerals and find great hope and comfort in the assurance that Jesus has prepared a dwelling place in heaven with God. A place to find peace and rest and joy. Not only are we promised a dwelling place, there, in heaven with God; God promises to make God’s own dwelling place, home, here, with us.

Loving God is an acquired skill. None of us is good at it on our own. But if we pray, pray that God will give us the ability to love him, those prayers will be answered and God will make his home with us.