As I have loved you

I left church early today, frustrated by Sunday School's unwillingness to engage with the meaning of Jesus' teachings, and frustrated by my own frustration with church, the members of our congregation, and the "answers' and "certainty" that close off any meaning-making or action beyond doing what you are told and upholding the organization of the church. It is a church that I am experiencing right now as one animated by fear and the assertion of authority.

I came home and stood in my kitchen and prayed and started thinking about what to do.  I love religion, I feel spiritual things deeply and care greatly about helping to create some more just world shaped by a view of people as more than their material acquisitions. And I need spiritual strength; I miss it when it is absent.

 My daughter and wife are performing a hymn in the women's auxiliary meeting this afternoon--Love One Another--the lyrics to which repeat Jesus' teachings in John 13:34-35.

"As I have loved you love one another.  This new commandment, love one another.  By this shall men know, ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another."

So how did Jesus love?

He loved opportunistically, showing love to strangers and to friends at unexpected times.

He loved without regard for dogma or social standing--loving people who he ought not to have by the rules of the day.

He loved by employing the gifts he carried.  He healed because he could heal.  He modified nature to the ends of love because he was able to do that.

He taught love, but by aphorism, story, and action, not formal definition.  His actions sometimes contradicted each other.

He assumed that all people could love as well.

He directed particular love to those in need, but also taught again and again how those in need were perfectly placed to love others.

His love went in three directions--to the Father, to his neighbor, and to himself.  But it did so simultaneously, so that questions about loving God first, or the self first, are moot.  You just love.

I have no idea what my relationship to church will look like in the years to come.  But for a time in the kitchen I felt like I could at least take Jesus' injunction--to love as he loves (as best I can understand it)--as the center of my religious practice, and let the rest settle as it will.