Beyond the Patio

COSTLY LOVE
John 3:16

In recent years it has become popular in the church and society to talk a lot about love. What I’ve noticed is the word “love ” is used to refer to a lot of warm feelings about people. When we feel close to a certain group of people we say that we “love them”. In the church I have seen a lot of “holy hugging ” going on. Personally I like hugs and I have appreciated getting hugs every Sunday in the Church. But I have also noticed that people often only hug the ones that they feel a certain affinity toward not necessarily the ones that might really need a hug. The word “love” gets bandied about with ease. “God loves you and so do I” has become a cliché among Christians. We also say things like, “I don’t like the things that you are doing but I love you”, or “I love you — I don’t have to like you —  but I love you”. There are of course a lot of truth to those sayings, but I wonder if the people who use the word “love” so glibly have really considered the cost of love.

Today we had a phrase in the Gospel. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16)

When you consider the Cross you realize just how costly that giving was. The only way that we would ever come to know the depth of God’s love was to experience God meeting us in the pain, the suffering, and the anguish of our human existence. How would we ever know that God loved us if we didn’t find God there?  How do others really know that we love them unless they find us there. It’s not in the words “God loves you and so do I”. It’s not in saying, “I don’t like what you do, but I love you” .  It’s not even in the hug when you feel warm towards another. It is not in those ways that they will know that we love them. It is in the willingness to enter into their suffering.

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A few years ago there was a book by Margaret Craven called I HEARD THE OWL CALL MY NAME. It was a heart warming novel about a young priest who went into the Native mission of Kingcome up the coast of the Canadian province of B.C. The people looked at this new priest with suspicion and didn’t really accept him at first. They always talked about building a new rectory but never did. But as time went on he became totally involved in their lives. He faced sickness with them. He faced tragedy with them. He faced death with them. He entered into their sadness. Eventually a group of people came to say that they were ready to build the rectory. The priest wrote the Bishop about this turn of events, and the Bishop wrote back,:

“You suffered with them, and now you are theirs, and nothing will ever be the same again.”

It was interesting that his commitment to the people was contrasted with a school teacher who was teaching there in order to save money. He really wanted to go to Greece to study and ancient civilization. So he never got involved in the people’s lives.  They were never his people.  He was never part of them. He remained an outsider.

Near the end of the story the priest died, and there is a very moving account of how much the people thought of him who had shared so much of their lives with them. There were many tears. Then they prepared for the funeral.

By late afternoon of the next day, all was ready. The path was cleared. The grave dug. The wreaths were made. The church was swept and cleaned. The beds in the vicarage were made up with fresh linen. The village was waiting and listening, and it was the children who heard first the canoes coming up the river, and they ran down the main path calling, “They come now. They bring him now.”

In his tiny house the teacher heard the running footsteps on the path to the river bank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and suffer.

The tribe waited on the bank, and when the canoes came around the bend of the river, the old people began to chant of sorrow in the ancient language which the young no longer knew. “Aie—Aie—Aie. He has left us. Aie—Aie—Aie,” until even the breeze seemed to whisper it, and the trees to sigh of it.

Then the men of the tribe waded into the icy water to meet the canoes, each man taking his turn carrying the body of the young vicar to the black sands of Kingcome, while the women sang an ancient hymn to the Supreme Being whose existence had been sensed before the white man had ever come to this land. And when the body had been prepared for burial, six men carried the box into the church, the tribe waiting there. They placed it on trestles before the altar, and T.P., the elder, took his place at the lectern which was the golden eagle and spoke the Lord s Prayer, the tribe joining him……

In the night the only light in the village was from the lantern which Jim had placed in the little church of Saint George. The village was quiet and at peace.

In her house old Marta lay awake in the dark, and she said softly, “Walk straight on, my son. Do not look back. Do not turn your head. You are going to the land of the Lord.”

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The story was about the love that this priest had for these people and in the end the love that they had for him. It was about caring. It was about involvement. It was about entering into the sadness of others. It is the kind of love that is spoken of in the Gospel when John says.

“For God so loved the world that HE GAVE…..”

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