Today is the last Sunday of Advent, and as you noticed, the theme for the day is Love. The reason that Love is one of the themes of Advent is Love is because of what scripture tells us. From the Gospel of John: God so loved the world, that he sent his only son, which is the story we hear about during Advent. And, from the First Letter of John we hear that God is Love, and if you don’t love, you don’t know God.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta is known to have said “When you know how much God is in love with you, then you can only live your life radiating that love.” In other words, once you understand how much God loves you, then the only thing that you are capable of doing anymore, is being a beacon of that love.
But Mother Theresa is also known to have suffered from great bouts of depression and moments where she said she did not feel God’s love at all. She had doubts about God’s existence at times, and she had moments where she wondered how God could love at all with all the suffering that she saw. Nevertheless, she persisted in the work that she was given.
Mother Theresa received her call to work in the slums of India in 1946, and told the story of an intense moment of standing in the presence of God, where she felt joy, peace, and love beyond all imagination. And then, as mentioned above: nothing. For years, she continued her work with those living in the slums of Calcutta, despite not feeling the love of God, but it was the knowledge of that love that allowed her to continue radiating that love, despite her own feelings – or even, lack of feeling.
Throughout the entirety of Advent, I have been sharing with you the dual nature of Advent, and how Advent is a time when we prepare both for the coming of the Christ child, as well as preparing our hearts for the second coming of Christ. And, I have recounted the words of one of my former priests, who said that “the second coming of Christ is no so much something that happens to us, as much as it is something that happens through us.”
This story about Mother Theresa depicts her life as Christ being made evident to the rest of the world through her. And, it also emphasizes that the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, is in fact that: a commandment. It is not dependent upon a feeling, but a decision. Mother Theresa did not feel that Love that she had originally felt, but she continued to act upon that prior experience of feeling God’s love through a decisive force of will, rather than giving up when she no longer felt God’s love.
Erich Fromm, the psychologist, in his book, The Art Of Loving, states
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?1
So how do we do that? How do we love our neighbor as ourselves?
Our Collect for the Day asks that God would “Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself.” That is, that Christ might find in us a space that we are willing to share with him.
Imagine, for a moment, a home, filled with a multitude of rooms, and God has come to dwell with you. As you show God around the house, you point out the beautiful view from the balcony, overlooking the mountains across the valley from where you are. You show God all the beautifully decorated rooms and let God know that you are pleased to share your home.
And things go well. You wake up in the morning and spend time on the balcony, drinking your coffee and having deep and meaningful conversations with God. And you feel God’s love and closeness, as though you alone are God’s most beloved.
Imagine, however, one day, walking through the living room, and, turning, you see God sitting on the balcony with someone else. And God is laughing and joking, and talking with the other person just as God does with you.
Saint Augustine said that “God loves each one of us, as if there were only one of us.” And it is when we begin to realize that we are not the only objects of God’s love that we begin to struggle with the idea of our identity as Children of God. Unless we feel this love, internalize it, recognize it deeply, unless we come to recognize that God’s love is all encompassing beyond those who reflect our own values and priorities, that we will find ourselves in a state of jealousy. And jealousy is really just another form of judgmentalism, as we compare ourselves to those whom God also loves. Either we feel that love, and radiate it, or we become possessive, and jealous, and try everything in our power to keep this love for ourselves and those who share our values and priorities.
And so in this hypothetical house of ours, we see someone sitting on the balcony, enjoying coffee with God in the early morning, and we wonder, “How can this be?” And so we confront God, asking, “How can you love this other person and spend time with them? How can they possibly be worthy of your love? They really don’t fit this definition of what makes a person worthy of your love.”
Psychology tells us that we all suffer from something called Self-Serving Bias.2 In biblical terms, it can be summed up in Jesus’ words, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”3 This self-serving bias allows us to judge ourselves as worthy of all wonderful things, all successes, and all positive outcomes based solely on our own personal traits, skills, or actions, but attribute all negative outcomes to everyone else. It makes us judgmental, rather than using our judgment. Judgment is different from judgmentalism, because it requires us to seek out compassion, and compassion requires understanding. Good judgment is wisdom, and wisdom is realizing that none of us are worthy of God’s love, except through the work of Christ on the Cross.
Now, we may continue with God on the balcony, we may continue to show God around the house, and we may enjoy those times with God, but that question about how God can love those people who are not us, or not like us, who don’t share our values and priorities remains in our minds: How is this possible, we might ask?
Until one day, God says, “What’s behind this door here? You’ve never shown me what’s in this room.” And you respond, “You don’t need to see that room. Come, let’s go to the balcony and talk a bit. I’ve got a new bottle of wine I’d like us to try out.”
But God persists, and eventually you open up the room, pull back the curtains and reveal a room covered in cobwebs, filled to the ceiling with old boxes of junk: things you know you need to get rid of but somehow cannot bring yourself to let go of. But God brings the light to it, helps you throw out what needs throwing out, and with other items, God dusts them off, and helps you use them to decorate other parts of the house.
And this happens over and over again, with different rooms, as God shakes out those things we would rather keep hidden, and renews those things we may have forgotten.
This is transformation. This is growth. This is a refining of our lives so that we more closely reflect the image of God as the light of God’s love permeates our hearts and minds. And this is how we prepare our minds to be a mansion for our God. And how the light of God’s love shines through the windows and provides a blessing for all God’s Children.
This is how we prepare ourselves for God, by allowing God to clean out those cobwebs of our hearts, to remove the junk that hinders God’s light from shining through every window of every room of this mansion that Christ is looking for when he returns in glory. These cobwebs and dusty boxes symbolize our own self-judgment and lack of self love. They symbolize those things where we have not come to forgive ourselves, or learned to accept our shortcomings. They are those things we still want to fix, rather than let go. And the more we allow God to clean out those spaces, those forgotten rooms, those rooms we would rather keep hidden, the more we too come to feel God’s love and presence in our lives.
This is what it means to love ourselves, and it is how we keep the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. It is allowing ourselves to be purified by the Light of Christ, to not just understand logically that God loves us, but to feel God’s love so pervasively that this light can shine through us.
It is exchanging our self-serving bias for a Christ Serving bias. It is recognizing that no matter who we are, we do not deserve God’s love by any of our own personal traits, skills, nor that we have earned God’s love by what we have done, but that this is a gift that God has given to us, freely, and without condition. And when we have truly internalized how much God loves each of us, that is when we can live our lives, as Mother Theresa says, “radiating that love.”
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/self-serving-bias
- Matthew 7:3
[This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on December 22, 2024.]
