Gifting Love

You never know with what gift God is going to grace us. Surprises come constantly and usually just when we need them. As His walk on earth came to an end, Jesus had been downloading information into the hearts and souls of his followers, those still hanging on, those still confused but anxious to be in his aura 24-7, those who were experiencing a love they never knew existed.

Jesus explained there are various kinds of love - love for family, love for best friends - those are the easy ones - but also the third and toughest love requires a love and compassion for those who don’t love us or who aren’t the type we love, such as the enemy, the criminal, those who don’t agree with us and try to damage or embarrass  or accuse or hate us.

Whaaat? I’m sure his followers thought. This was probably the toughest command Jesus issued.

Well at the end of the road Jesus had walked on this earth, He gathered his disciples together and told them, Don’t worry, I’ll help you cover that commandment. First, you have to love me, He said, and keep my commandments which are based on Love, loving God and our neighbors as ourselves. But I will grant you a greater gift, Jesus continued. A gift that will help  you  to know, to understand, to trust, to facilitate, to teach you about love. He declared, I’m asking my Father to send you an Advocate, a companero, a live spirit who will be in you and around you forever. He is someone no one has ever known, imagined, or encountered. In fact,  Jesus said, He is in Me and in you so I can be with you forever. You will never be orphaned.

What is an Advocate - maybe it’s a mix of lawyer, doctor, honest priest, best friend - someone you can lean on, as that song moans. “Just need a somebody to lean on.” It brings tears to my eyes when those words roll across the radio in my car. Well, folks, the good news is that we have that “somebody to lean on.” It may not be a physical person holding our hand. It may not be an angel who saves us from car wrecks, confronting a crime, or one who pull us out of a well, or re-starts our heart. Those kind of advocates, like best friends who tell you the truth, are there in the moment they are needed.  Yet they have their lives and jobs too, and can only be in the moment. Tweets, Facebook, Zoom,  You Tube, etc, have almost sucked up our lives and freedom of privacy. And it is frightening. But 2000 years ago,  the Advocate Jesus was talking about, was beyond, if not greater than,  belief itself.  I’m sure the regular realist fishermen and common workers did not have familiarity with such a concept.

When I’m gone, Jesus explained, I’m not really gone, I’m here with you always, in you, around you, guarding you, speaking to you in the silence of night. I will be your life. I will live in you and because of this Holy Spirit that I will share with you, and leave in you, you will be able to embrace in your heart and soul the Holy Trinity. You will be of God the Father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit. And as long as you love me and follow my commandments, you will know, feel, hear, see, be a part of me. You will do good. It is not just this group here who will know the Advocate, but anyone who will love me or already does. And because of this, My Father will embrace you with The Love we all need. Not just today, not just now, but forever, Jesus explained. And I bless you with these things now because I must leave and return to my Father. So This is the gift, the hope, the safe and generous and amazing grace which means God lives in all of us.

Peter, post Pentecost, proposed if one does good all his life, who will harm us? We might suffer from doing things good because people are envious, jealous, cruel, and selfish. But that should not bother us. God is in our pockets, in our hearts, in our souls.   If our conscience is clear, we have no worries.  If we have to suffer for doing good, so be it. We have God holding us up. And remember Christ suffered for all our sins once and for all, for both the righteous and the unrighteous  If we do right and end up in prison, fear not. Christ was in prison for doing the right thing.  Many of his disciples and saints spent time in prison because authority didn’t want to lose power, didn’t want truth, didn’t want competition in what they thought right or wrong.  So we must keep a good conscience for which Jesus has already paid the price. While we are here on earth, we need to carry that banner of goodness and honesty and above all love.

Our task, I believe, is we must change the world, something this virus seems to be achieving. We must eliminate greed, crime, jealousy,  envy, abuse, selfishness, nastiness, insults and hatred. Instead, we must dress our thoughts and hearts in love and go out into the streets with masks and social distancing and “corazon” because everyone else is important, not just me.

Dorothy Day, my she-ro,  has a great point. “We need to make it simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute - - the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words- we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw a pebble into the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

To me, what Ms Day declared is exactly what we can produce - that special perfect love to all whom we meet - because we carry the Advocate in our hearts and souls - and we know, or at least should know, this means that within us is that perfect love guided by both God and Christ who exists with this Holy Spirit that resides in us. Thank you Jesus.

 ~ Rev
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