Apr 10, 2016

God is Love (12)
1 John 4:8

Love is not easily angered (2)
1 Corinthians 13

Too often we hear about this person or that person stating that ‘the wrath of God will strike us all because we have lost our ability to punish—‘ then there is a diatribe about this issue or that, usually because we are becoming more inclusive with the children of God, rather than more exclusionary. That is, we are becoming more loving of all of God’s creations, rather that less. Most seem to find it extremely difficult to imagine a God who is Love, and only Love. Part of our problem, as a race, we have difficulty in loving, truly loving, another, especially another that has a different color of skin, different looks, talks differently, speaks another language as first language, or has a different sexual orientation, despite that each of those people were created as they are by God. We claim to love another, then when the other has a problem, we walk away. That is not love of another, that is love of self. Now, I am not talking about an abusive relationship, but a relationship where unless the other person fits a specific mold, and stays within that mold or does not change to fit a changing mold, than one feels justified in walking away. Just look at the divorce rate in our country and see the lack of love between parties.
But above all listen to the rhetoric of this election cycle. And one or the other of the most hateful speech will probably win the nomination doe one party.
It is a struggle to form a concept of God that does not reflect our own concept of ourselves, and since we cannot imagine absolute unconditional love for ourselves, we cannot image such love in another, let alone in God. Our improving concept of God has evolved partly because we are getting better at imagining a higher power on life, but mostly because humanity is slowly raising our sights on our own race and we can, on occasion, see a glimmer of hope that humanity as a whole may learn to be more compassionate, forgiving, and even loving to one another. That is, we are slowly growing up.
Why would God display anger, or even feel anger? Look who God is: the All in All, the Everything and Beyond, the Giver of Life, Life Itself; how many more can we name that does not even begin to express the infinite being we call God. How can the action of one person out of seven billion, or even one nation, which is sitting on a small planet circling one small star, which is sitting part way out on a galaxy of several hundred billion stars, which said galaxy is only one of over a hundred billion galaxies, in one universe out of perhaps an infinite number of universes, make an impact on that Being who is the container of it all. How much our pride comes forth: “Now look here God, I will show you that I can injure you in such a way that you will attack this poor land of ours with all you power.” We have such nerve to think we have such power, or that God could be injured in any way by anything we do. Quite frankly, a blink of the force of God and our star and all its surrounds would vanish without a ripple in the universe.
Now, God being God, and we are each that Being that is a face of God, a wavelet of the power of God (remember, Jesus said that “Greater things than this shall you do”, and Jesus said “The Kingdom of God lies within you,”) that we do have that power lying within us, and that power is infinite. Thus we, the face of God, portray the false image of ‘the wrath of god’ when we wage war, kill one another, keep one another in poverty, let millions starve to death, refuse to care for the victims of war (refugees), demeaning the infinite power of God that lies within each of us. Yes, the so-called ‘wrath of God’ is the negative side we give God, a side that illustrates the lack of the Love that is humanity’s parody of the love of God.
I suspect that reality of it is that God is being patient, and is waiting out the time when we stop being like children in ‘middle school’, who gleefully put one another down, as it makes us feel stronger. Thus I read in a commentary about the recent killing of a policeman in the rotunda of the capitol one comment after another expressing hatred at the President of our country because he did not rant about the killer, (who may have been black, even though I personally have not seen any mention of race) – never was one word spoken of the bravery of those who challenged the gunman, compassion for the families involved; only hatred for the President – for the only apparent reason being that I could see is that the President is Black, and is compassionate and in sympathy with the many innocent black men and women that are killed by those in authority, simply because that person is black.
Yes, God does not have to express anger, even if God could express anger, as we do very well on our own, as we find methods to destroy humanity and the ways to grind hatred into our world.
We are lucky indeed that God is not a wrathful being, as our world would have been long ago blasted into a smoking ball.
Yes, we are indeed blessed by the patience of God over many tens of thousands of years.
But we can expect patience from our God, for God is only love.

God does not deal with us according to our sins,
Nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
So great is God’s steadfast love towards those who love God;
As far as the east is from the west,
So far does God remove our transgressions from us.
As parents shows compassion to their children
So the Lord shows compassion.
                                       Psalm 103: 10-13

Meditation

My God, my Wisdom, my very Being, I am grateful for Your patience, Your ability to wait for humanity to mature into the Being that You designed from the very start. You gave us the ability to reason, to think the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable, some 70,000 years ago, and have watched us slowly, ever so slowly as we measure it, but in only a blink of an eye in Your framework of no-time, grow into a creature that is moving in the direction of paradise. I am grateful for the words of Jesus that opened up our thought process to the impossibility: “The Kingdom of God lies within.” That thought has exploded my imagination as to the possibilities that lie await for us in the future: truly paradise on earth, where the lion will be able to lie down with the lamb, where war will be no more, where Your central core, unconditional Love, where we will see Your presence in all of life, where we will see those different from us as wonderful windows into the breadth of Your very Being, and Love will hold sway over our small blue perfection we call Earth. I am grateful to be in this time and place, to be that part of the process in the Now that we see. I watch time flow by, never pausing but flowing on continuously, and give myself to You to provide what ever I may offer to further the process of growth in this time and place.

 

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