I’ve been getting emails from the Red Cross lately.
Emergency: You are needed now!
Blood bank shelves in hospitals are being depleted more quickly than they are being filled. Please show up and donate your blood! Someone’s life depends on your blood donation.
If Moses and Jesus had access to the internet, I can imagine getting emails from them as well.
Emergency! Love is in short supply on earth and your donation of love is needed now.
The good thing about donating love is that we don’t have to wait for a love drive to contribute, although we do tend to think in this way of making a periodic donation—we will be extra generous to our neighbors at Christmas, or we give thanks for a blessing we’ve received, or we donate love out of duty. These specific donations of love are fine, but these once in a while donations ultimately aren’t enough.
In God’s kingdom come to earth, our love donations are to be an ongoing part of the eternal flow of love that God set in motion in the beginning. God’s love flows out into creation, all of creation praises God because of its love for its creator, and then, sustained in God’s love, each part of creation becomes a sustaining piece of the intricate, ongoing web of interconnected life that keeps all of creation well. God’s love doesn’t come to us in fits and spurts. God’s love is constant. And so we seek to love God as consistently as God loves each one of us.
The two great commandments, to love God and to love neighbor, focus on love, because love is at the heart of life. The first great commandment begins by saying that we should love God with all our hearts.
Each one of us has a heart. When our hearts stop beating, we die.
As our physical hearts beat, the blood in our bodies is pulled into our hearts, and in the process gets filled with oxygen. Then the heart sends the blood out into the body, to renew the body with the oxygenated blood.
If adequate oxygenated blood cannot get to our brains because of clogged arteries, or a blood clot, we get foggy mentally. Mental tasks that were once easy become more difficult if not impossible. And without blood getting to the brain, we die.
Oxygenated blood, cycled through our hearts, keeps our bodies functioning. We need our healthy, oxygenated blood to have the strength to live.
But we need more than our physical hearts to live fully.
God’s love is at the heart of our lives as God’s people here on this earth. If we want to be fully alive, God’s heart of love must constantly beat in us.
When God’s heart of love beats in our bodies, God is constantly pulling our depleted reserves of love into God’s heart, oxygenating our imperfect love with God’s holy love, and then pumping our restored love back out into us so that we can share God’s love in the world, clear in our minds and strong in God’s love.
Keeping God’s heart of love healthy and beating in us requires care and tending.
Feeding our hearts with the words of wisdom from scripture is a major part of a healthy diet, which is why Moses reminds the Israelites that in order to observe the commandments that God has given them so that they can live in God’s love, then they must dwell on those words, to keep the words in their hearts, to recite them to their children, to talk about them at home and when they are away, to meditate on them when they lie down and when they get up, to bind the words to themselves physically.
Feeding our hearts with scripture, studying scripture with one another, reading, marking and inwardly digesting scripture, as one of our prayers in the prayer book says, is essential to a good diet when we are caring for God’s heart of love dwelling in us.
Jesus knew scripture intimately and living out his knowledge of the law constantly and consistently gave him the wisdom to take the two great commandments of loving God and loving neighbor and to put the two together as one. Jesus knew that to be completely fulfilled, both commandments have to be kept together. Jesus was the first to link these two commandments together so specifically, saying that “There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Exercise is also essential for a healthy heart. Exercise to keep God’s heart of love beating in us includes worship. When we come together to praise God and to thank God, we exercise our hearts of love by strengthening the flow of God’s love for us and our love for God flowing back to God. Worship helps us to grow strong in our love for God, and binds us to God in love.
Honest prayer is also great exercise to keep our hearts of love healthy. Each week near the beginning of our service, we pray the collect for purity, which reminds us that God already knows all that is in our hearts.
“Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy Name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Honest prayer helps us open our hearts to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit so that we can love and praise God more fully and love one another more perfectly.
Exercising to keep God’s heart of love healthy in us also involves practicing holy love for ourselves and for our neighbor.
Loving ourselves can be a challenge. We need to practice loving ourselves as God loves us. God is merciful, compassionate and forgiving.
Ask yourself—do you have mercy for yourself, or are you merciless in your self criticism, feeling that you will never ever measure up? The people who are hardest on themselves are often the ones who are the hardest on others. Are you compassionate with yourself? And do you forgive yourself for your shortcomings by turning over these shortcomings to God and asking God to help you correct them? Or do you just keep beating yourself up and not forgiving yourself?
Accepting God’s love for us and applying it to ourselves helps us to love God more fully and perfectly so that we can then love our neighbors as ourselves, loving them with God’s own holy love.
When we are divided from one another, and caught up in our disagreements, we have trouble remembering that God loves the one we’re divided from as much as God loves us. In any conversation, remembering that God’s love seeks to flow in us, around us and through us and between us helps us. We can tap into that flow of love in the ways that we are present to one another. When we exercise holy love for our neighbor, rather than giving hatred, distain or anger the upper hand, we strengthen God’s heart of love beating in us.
Along with all who have gone before us who let God’s heart of love beat in them and had God’s love flowing through them, we too can make an everlasting impact on this world, an impact of mercy, compassion, forgiveness and strengthening power that can come only from God’s heart of love beating in us.
Remember, God’s ongoing love flows out into creation. We praise God because we love our creator, and then, sustained in God’s love, each of us becomes a sustaining part of the intricate, ongoing web of interconnected life that keeps all of creation alive and thriving.
God invites each one of us to be part of this everlasting love. We are needed now.
Let’s stop waiting around for yet another reminder.
Accept God’s invitation to love.