Sermon for March 16, 2025
Sermon for March 16th
Have you ever offered your love to someone, only to have that offer rejected? Maybe it was someone you cared for and wanted to have a relationship with? Maybe you loved that person with every fibre of your being, but when you offered that love to that person, they did not reciprocate the same feelings for you. It hurts when such deep feelings are not shared. You know that you would do well by that person, that you would care for them and love them with all your heart, but it doesn’t matter in the end, because they don’t feel that way for you. Your love goes unrequited.
Or perhaps you offered help or support to a grown or adolescent child. As a parent or parent figure, you wanted to make sure they were loved and taken care of. You wanted them to know that they would always be loved and that they would always have a home, and their response was simply to turn away and turn their back on the love you offered. Maybe it was something minor, or maybe it involved a serious matter. Regardless, feeling rejected as you offer love to your child, or grandchild, or someone you have watched grow and have helped nurture, is an exquisitely painful feeling.
I’m not conjuring these images to dredge up old memories or re-traumatize anyone. Rather, I bring them up so that even as we dwell in those uncomfortable feelings, we can start to understand what it must feel like to be God. God, who is love, has never done anything but offer love to us. Love in our times of joy. Love in our times of sorrow. Love in our brokenness. Love in our times of success. Love when we feel worthy. Love when we don’t feel worthy of anything but disdain. None of that matter. God’s love is gifted to us all, without restraint and without conditions. It is simply given.
A medieval mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, saw God’s very nature as love and God’s very purpose was to offer love. No duality between righteous and unrighteous. No worthy and unworthy. Just God as love, who loved all with the absolute love that only God was capable of.
So, how must it feel for God, who is love, through whom we know, to be rejected by those that God loves so absolutely, namely, God’s own children? We know what it is like to experience the rejection of our love. How much worse must it feel for the one who is love?
It must feel awful. It must feel like all the rejections we have encountered, but far worse and far more of them, every day, from so many souls. God, who is love, rejected because so often, this world has forgotten how to love and value anything that God is about.
I think that this is reflected quite acutely in our readings for today.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
You can almost hear the anguish in Jesus’ voice. Why do you reject me, O My people, when all I have offered is love, when all I have wanted is to protect you? In this moment, the lament of Jesus seems to swallow up the rest of the narrative. For a moment, God’s own sorrow is on display. Divine sorrow for children who simply won’t accept the gift that is being offered to them. I don’t think there is anger on display here. Rather, this is sorrow, as we sorrow for a child who rejects our love, or for a person who does not reciprocate our love. It hurts and Jesus expresses that hurt in this moment.
Our Good Friday liturgy taps into this same idea with the Solemn Reproaches. For me, these reproaches are the most powerful part of the service. God offers us so much and it is all done out of love. And how do we respond? With the cross.
O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you?
Answer me.
I planted you as my fairest vineyard, but you brought forth bitter fruit;
I made you branches of the vine and never left your side,
but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.
This is one of many reproaches and they all point to the same thing. God stopped at nothing to give to God’s people love and life and the response for such action was….the cross. It was our rejection, our anger, our hate, our dismissal of everything that God was and is. God offered a love that was our life, a love that would help shape us and mold us into the people we were meant to be, so we could in turn share that same love with everyone around us. And we rejected it.
Maybe that is the reason why. God’s love, so important, is not a cheap love. It will shape us and send us out into the world to be agents of love. And that is scary and honestly, frustrating. How could God possibly want us to love all people? There are some people in this world that we shouldn’t love. They are bad people, people who deserve hell-fire and torment for all that they have done to the world. God’s way is too hard. It’s too unjust. It’s too radical. Perhaps we don’t feel worthy of it, but we know that John down the street certainly isn’t worth it. How can we accept God’s love if it means we also have to love John? No, that simply doesn’t make sense and so we walk away from all that God offers for things that make more sense. And the Solemn reproaches echo on.
O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you?
Answer me.
I poured out saving water from the rock,
but you gave me vinegar to drink;
I poured out my life and gave you the new covenant in my blood,
but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.
Amid this pain that we cause God in our arrogance, it would be easy enough for God to walk away and say “Enough! For countless generations, I have tried to give to these proud and stiff-necked people my very being and they have roundly rejected me again and again. Their world is ready to implode, and still they choose hate. Yet, the solution, my love, is right there in front of them. They just refuse to accept it and to allow it to change their hearts into hearts of flesh.”
God would be justified in thinking this. And God would be justified in walking away from us. But God never does. God’s love, made known in Christ, broke into the world and that moment in time echoes throughout time. That moment still impacts us now. God so loved the world…. God so loved the world……. This isn’t God’s surrender to our foolishness. God is not capable of giving up, despite the pain we cause God. Rather, through Christ and through the beauty of this world and in the moments of love we do share with one another, God’s love is shown to still be at work. It will never stop. It will never give up on us, on any of us, even as we reject that love, and by extension, reject one another. The good news, as it always is, is that God is love, now and always, and that love will never give up on us, even as it mourns as it looks upon us, wondering why we will not seek the safety of God’s outstretched arms.
Amen