Church of the Holy City

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
August 22, 2010

Exodus 15:11-18 John 15:9-17 Psalm 33

This morning I thought I’d reflect on God’s infinite love. When we say “infinite love” it may be hard to grasp just what it means. Our minds cannot understand infinity. Therefore, I thought I’d say a few things about how God’s love interacts with us, and how tirelessly and lovingly God strives to bring us into a mutual relationship with Himself. And since all joy comes from what we love, when God brings us into His infinite love, He is bringing us into as much joy and happiness as we can bear.
Before we can understand how God unceasingly loves us, we need to do away with some false ideas about God. One false idea about God comes from too literal a reading of parts of the Old Testament. From some places, one can get the idea that God is a punishing God. That God takes revenge–even down to the 7th generation of those who offend Him. One can get the idea that God damns people to hell. Or that God sits on high making a list of all the offences that we mortals commit. But God is none of these things. When the Bible was written, long, long ago, people thought that way, so they saw God that way. Even so, there are other passages that talk about God’s unfailing love, as in the Psalm we read this morning. There, we find the words, “May your unfailing love rest upon us, O LORD, even as we put our hope in you” (Psalm 33:22). As our hopes rest in God, we will find His unfailing love. So God is not the damning, punishing God we can sometimes read about in the Old Testament. Swedenborg writes,
as [God] wills only what is good He can do nothing but what is good. . . . From these few statements it can be seen how deluded those are who think, still more, those who believe, and still more those who teach, that God can damn anyone, curse anyone, send anyone to hell, predestine any soul to eternal death, avenge wrongs, be angry or punish. he cannot even turn Himself away from a person, nor look upon him with a stern countenance (TCR 56).
On the contrary, God is nothing but love and mercy. God wants to give to the whole human race all that He has. He wants to give everyone happiness and peace. We can think about the love that parents have for their children when we think about God. Parents never cease to care for their children. Parents want always to help their children. Parents want to give to their children all they can to make their lives happy. This is an image of heavenly love, which angels extend to everyone, and which God extends to everyone.
Heavenly love is not to wish to be one’s own, but to belong to all; so that one wishes to give all the things which are one’s own to others; in this the essence of heavenly love consists. The Lord, because He is love itself, or the essence and life of the love of all in the heavens, wishes to give to the human race all things that are His (AC 1419).
And in order to make us happy, God gently lifts us out of our harmful behaviors and the evils that limit true joy. This is the nature of love, and God is love itself.
To love itself, no other attributes are competent than those which are of pure love; thus of pure mercy towards the universal human race; which is, that it wills to save all and make them happy to eternity, and to transfer into them all things of its own; thus from pure mercy to draw all who are willing to follow to heaven; that is, to itself, by the strong power of love (AC 1735).
It’s passages like this that cause me to reflect on my own life. A while back I was in a very unhappy place. In fact, I was miserable. But as is so often the case, I was in love with my misery. Not happy as I am now, but happy to be a miserable cuss. Several factors made me that way. First, there was the University system itself. In higher education, there is the idea that life is meaningless and bleak. I remember a friend of mine coming into the classroom, dropping her books on the table and exclaiming, “Do I really have to believe that everything is meaningless in order to maintain my academic credibility?” I mentioned this to a professor of mine later, and he said, “yes.” If I wrote a paper on how happy my life was and that I believed in a loving, caring God, it would have been rejected. So, in order to survive, I came to accept some of that outlook. But there was more. I had suffered what I thought were some personal betrayals and setbacks. My own dreams seemed crushed. This made me bitter, cynical, and angry at life. And I had no concern for the world around me. I said what I wanted, and made my own pain everyone else’s pain. I said uncaring things, and made everyone who came around me as miserable as I was. I was living most of my waking life in bars, when I wasn’t in the classroom. And a couple bar owners, who had come to like me, actually gave me a heart-to-heart. They told me that they knew that I had gone through some hard times, but could I please be nicer to their wait-staff, who had complained about how mean and harsh I was treating them. I didn’t care and I didn’t change. It was as if I was trying to be evil. I ended up being kicked out of my favorite bars. It came to the point where I was drinking alone and drowning my poor, wounded self in alcohol. (One bar remembered me two years later and still wouldn’t let me in.) But through all this, I still believed in God. It was just that my personal contact with God seemed very distant. I don’t know if I’m alone in this. And this isn’t the whole story. I did have some friends, and there were some moments of happiness. It’s just that these evils stand out from this period in my life. Perhaps others can see a point in their lives where the light of God’s love seemed distant.
But God didn’t leave me there. I look back on that miserable time, and I wonder. In fact, when I look back on that time in my life, I’m scared for how I could have ended up. I am now living such a more full, happy, and loving life, it’s almost hard for me to imagine my life back then. I am free of resentments and anger. I am no longer cynical or bitter. I see the good things God has given me, and I am grateful for the life I have. I try to be good to all the people I come in contact with, instead of spreading misery. This change was all God’s doing. As Swedenborg says, “the Divine love is to will the salvation of all and the happiness of all from inmosts and in fullness” (HH 397). And what I am talking about is genuine salvation. As I look back on it, I envision God smiling on me saying, “My dear David, trying so hard to be bad.” I can’t point to any one great saving event that changed me. Of course the program of AA was a big help. But beside that, I can point only to God’s ceaseless love washing over me, lifting me out of the hell I had made for myself. He surrounded me with good, loving, and I must add tolerant people. I think of a line from Saint Augustine, “O Lord, Thou pluckest me out.” God lifts him out of what he called the fleshpots of his life, even as God had lifted me out of the misery I had built up for myself.
This story shows the nature of God, as God really is. God was thinking how I was depriving myself of the joy and happiness that heaven consists in. And God wanted to bring me into a loving relationship with Himself and with my neighbors. And He wanted this, because He knows that all true joy and happiness come from love and from giving. So rather than judge the bad things in me, and condemn me to hell, God instead lifted me up to a place where I could begin to receive heaven into my heart. He lifted me up to a place where God’s very essence of love, joy, and happiness could fill my heart and fill me with the happiness I now know. We all have that capacity to receive God’s continually inflowing love and wisdom. Swedenboirg tells us,
By accepting love and wisdom from the Lord, we are then raised up and furnished with all the means for the acceptance of love and wisdom. Moreover, we are so created that we can accept them if we are only willing to (DLW 171).
I might dispute Swedenborg, here, because I don’t know exactly how willing I really was to receive God’s love and wisdom. But somehow God got through.
That’s the way God is. That is the God that I worship and adore. That’s the way God’s love for the whole human race operates. Swedenborg describes God as the source of everything joyous in heaven–which we can to some degree know now on earth.
Heavenly love is not to wish to be one’s own, but to belong to all; so that one wishes to give all the things which are one’s own to others; in this the essence of heavenly love consists. The Lord, because He is love itself, or the essence and life of the love of all in the heavens, wishes to give to the human race all things that are His (AC 1419).
I’m still a work in progress, as we all are. God’s love acts upon us throughout our lives and through eternity, drawing everyone upward into a deeper relationship with Himself and into greater happiness. We need only remain open to God, and it is His pleasure to give us the kingdom.