God’s Love Is in us, too

Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost ● September 8, 2024

Rev. Jeff Wells © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/VKhGU9IxB-A

Scripture Readings: 

1 Corinthians 13:4-8, 13 & Ephesians 3:16-19

The reading text is provided at the end of this sermon.

Among many other parts of who I am, I claim to be an evangelist. It is unfortunate that the practice of “evangelism” has gotten a bad rap from its association with conservative evangelicalism. We need to reclaim evangelism – even if we use other words to label it – because what that word means, essentially, is spreading good news. 

In the Church of the Village, we have a lot of good news to share! We strive to put into practice and bring to other folks the good news that God loves everyone and nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it. We also try to live out and share the really good news that, in his life and ministry, Jesus embodied God’s love in extraordinarily powerful and persuasive ways. And, by extension, Jesus taught us how to live as loving, inclusive, non-violent, and justice-seeking human beings. Friends, that’s not just good news – that’s GREAT NEWS that is worth sharing!

Today, I want to share with you why the vision of God as essentially loving, self-giving, and uncontrolling has transformed my faith and life. And I want to explain why I believe this vision is so important for each of us and has the power to change the world. It has given me a much deeper and more robust understanding of the God I already sensed is present to us. 

For me, this is expressed best in Open and Relational Theology (ORT for short). God is love so love is at the core of Open and Relational Theology. Open and Relational Theology teaches that God is not all-powerful or, in classical theology, omnipotent. ORT argues that God cannot single-handedly make things happen or not happen. God cannot determine outcomes. Yet, God is all-loving – working through powerful, persuasive, and uncontrolling love to create the future in collaboration with every creature and every element in the universe. Our friend, Thomas Jay Oord, invented a new word to capture this vision of God. The word is amipotent (am-i´-potent), which is a combination of the Latin root word ami, signifying love, with potent from the Latin word potentum, meaning powerful. We can understand this word as “loving power” or “powerfully loving.” Tom describes it this way: 

“We best define the love in amipotence as acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. This definition applies to both divine and creaturely love. The love God and creatures express, in other words, acts with intention, relates with others, and aims to promote flourishing. And because love is inherently uncontrolling, neither divine nor creaturely love controls.”

I love that definition. This means “loving power” or “powerful love” is not only a part of God’s essential character. It is a part of our human character, too. The impulse and the capacity to love is infused and empowered in each of us through the love of God working in and through us. 

And it’s not just that love is infused from outside of us. God is, in truth, in us and we are in God. Alongside that relationship, we are all fundamentally connected with one another, as Ubuntu teaches, even though we often fail to recognize or act in light of that truth. I resonate so much with the meditation we often sing in worship that asserts: “I am in you and you are in me and we are in God.” Whether we experience it as Abba, Holy Spirit, Christ, Sophia/Wisdom, or something else, God seeks to inspire us to nurture and express – through our thoughts, words, and actions – the powerful, uncontrolling love that is already planted inside of us. No matter how much we struggle to manifest it, love is at the core of who we are. 

Yet, if it’s already there at our core, how do we explain the widespread expressions of hatred, racism, sexism, violence, war, homicide, and even genocide among human beings? It’s the difference between us and God. God’s love is universal, always present, all knowing, endlessly persistent, and everlasting. God is able to envision and call forth the greatest possible well-being for the entire universe. Our amipotent God is perfectly loving and cannot act except out of love.

We humans, on the other hand, are limited in our perspective, knowledge, and understanding. We each have in us the potential to love, but we also have the ability to choose (consciously or not) to act in ways that are not loving. We are free to reject God’s ever-present call to love. And we are limited in our vision of what the most loving action is in a given circumstance and cannot always easily discern how our actions will impact others. 

On top of that, the capacity to love that is in us often gets suppressed or subverted by the multiple ways we are taught to fear, condemn, or hate others or by the ways we are hated, harmed, abused, or traumatized by others. We see the results on all sides in our current social and political context in the U.S., which is tearing friends, families, and communities apart. So much works against love. This demands that we be very conscious and work very hard to keep the nastiness, selfishness, and animosity around us from affecting our own attitudes and behaviors. I certainly struggle every week to keep judgmentalism, resentments, and other unloving responses in check. It’s not easy. Practicing love is hard work. 

Fortunately, in the face of our shortcomings and distortions, we have a God who is already in us and God’s powerful, persuasive, uncontrolling love is always working to repair, restore, and revitalize our loving potential. God is not merely in us as individuals. God is in the midst of our relationships and communities, seeking to promote love. This is why it is so important for us to learn to remain as open as possible to sense God’s leading and inspiration. God’s persuasive loving influence comes to us directly and also works through our relationships, our spiritual practices, our social and political action, through the arts, our experiences of nature, and more.

All of this makes it imperative that we work to strengthen communal relational ways to learn and practice love together – through family, chosen family, friendships, social groups, and larger communities. One of the most effective ways to do this is participating in healthy faith communities. By healthy, I mean those that strive to be broadly inclusive, value and seek diversity, exhibit a generous openness to learn from one another, build deep interpersonal relationships, undermine hierarchy and work collaboratively, and promote mutual love, care, and compassion. Such spaces help us learn to promote, practice, and participate in powerful, uncontrolling love. The goal of all of this is that every aspect of our lives become “rooted and grounded in love,” as the Letter to the Ephesians says, so that we “may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

What grounds this pursuit for me are the most important teachings of Jesus: 1) love God and your neighbor as yourself and 2) love your (perceived) enemies. We put the good news into action when we work hard to build friendships. When we reach across walls and fences that separate us. When we practice being curious and getting to know those who we perceive as opponents or enemies. We practice being followers of Jesus when we build “love bridges,” with the person next door and the nation across the globe.

Think of it like going to the gym, doing yoga or tai chi, running, or any other discipline that increases our strength, stamina, flexibility, or focus. The practices I listed help build up our “love muscles” – our capacity to care, feel empathy, yield to others, and give ourselves for others. 

So, don’t be discouraged when you fall short in expressing the love that is at your core. Don’t give up when you fail to consistently follow Jesus’ teachings on loving your neighbors and enemies. As John Wesley taught us, life is a journey toward holiness, toward perfection in love. We can support one another in this journey together. And the best part is God never abandons us, never gives up on us. God is with all of us every step of the way, inspiring and encouraging us to live into the beautiful, love infused image of God that has been in us from the start. We swim together, immersed in the powerful, persuasive, uncontrolling love of God.

 1 See, for example, the following books by Thomas Jay Oord: The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (2015); God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019); Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas (2021); Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (2022).

2 Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence, Kindle edition, p. 126 (2023).

3  Meditation-song by Natalie Renee Perkins.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8, 13 (The Inclusive Bible)

Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs, and it is not snobbish; it is never rude or self-seeking; it is not prone to anger, nor does it brood over injuries. Love doesn’t rejoice in what is wrong, but rejoices in the truth. There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure. Love never fails….

There are, in the end, three things that last: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

* * * * * *

Ephesians 3:16-19 (The Inclusive Bible)

I pray that God, out of the riches of divine glory, will strengthen you inwardly with power through the working of the Spirit. May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, so that you, being rooted and grounded in love, will be able to grasp fully the breadth, length, height and depth of Christ’s love and, with all God’s holy ones, experience this love that surpasses all understanding, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.