Loving in Advance

​The Epistle and the Gospel reading for this morning both give us a picture of God’s love.
 
In our reading from Ephesians, Paul speaks with characteristic vigor. “You were dead through trespasses and sins,” Paul tells us. Then, this time including himself in the spiritually dead, Paul adds “we were by nature children of wrath.” Not a very upbeat beginning!
 
But that is Paul’s way of emphasizing the incredible generosity of God. Hear again the heart of Paul’s message to the Ephesians and also to us: “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…and raised us up with him and seated us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
 
That’s a complicated sentence, so I hope you will read it over a few times., But the gist is this: despite our sin, God loved us, healed us, forgave us, took delight in blessing us in every way. That’s Paul’s message.
 
Jesus says the same, in the single most famous verse in the entire New Testament. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God sends Christ into the lost and fallen world “in order that the world might be saved through him.”
 
We hear about God’s love a LOT. But it can be hard to really hear that message. It’s hard to absorb, all the way in, the good news of God’s love. So, we hear the message over and over again. And we try to come up with analogies from our own lives that never quite work but that can hopefully help us to take it in at least a bit more.
 
The most obvious human analogy to God’s love is parents’ love for their children. And what strikes me this time around is the way parents love their children in advance. What I mean is, parents love their children long before children can do anything to earn that love.
 
Carrie and I always hoped to have children, and we began trying a few years after we got married. We ended up with two very loveable sons. But we didn’t wait until our sons proved themselves loveable to actually start loving them.
 
Carrie was a faster and better lover than I. But both of us started loving our children before we even began trying to get pregnant, when they were nothing more than a gleam in my eye.
 
We were fortunate that everything went smoothly. As soon as Carrie got pregnant, we nicknamed the baby-to-be Bo, short for boll weevil. That was my idea, although I can’t remember now what inspired me. A little later, we learned that he would be a boy, so we started thinking about real names.
 
But we loved Bo from the beginning, before we knew anything about Bo beyond the fact that Bo was ours.
 
Eventually baby Bo, now called Benjamin, was born. Like virtually all babies, Benjamin was a little cutie, very loveable.
 
But little Benjamin was also a HUGE pain. Suddenly I couldn’t do what I wanted when I wanted. I was exhausted all the time. I found myself at the beck and call of a child we came to refer to as Tyrant Baby.
 
Every once in a while, during those first months, Benjamin would gurgle at us, or smile, or babble cutely, and we would melt. But considerably more often, Benjamin just kind of lay there, or else fussed.
 
As best I can tell, no purely rational person would put up with babies. During Benjamin’s infancy, Carrie and I spent a fair amount of time wondering how the human race has survived. I figure many a cave man father must have been tempted many a time to put their babies outside the cave for the saber tooth tigers, if only so that the exhausted cave man father could get a little sleep.
 
But, of course, Carrie and I weren’t purely rational, not when it came to our babies. No one is. Pains though they were, we kept loving our infant sons. Weirdly, we came to love them more, the more difficult they were.
 
Before they were born and continuing into those first months, we didn’t love our children for what they could offer us. Our children didn’t, and couldn’t, do anything to earn our love. All they could do was lie there. And still, imperfect though our love was, we loved them enough to turn our entire lives upside down in an effort to meet their needs.
 
God loves us like that, but perfectly. God loves us from the beginning, before we do anything to deserve God’s love, indeed when we do many things that would seem to undermine God’s love. God loves us, and cares for us, and meets our needs, not because we deserve it but because we are God’s children.
 
But there is more to love, God’s love and ours.
 
Carrie and I mostly loved our children just because they were ours. And even when they were being difficult, we loved our children just like they were. But when my children were babies, I also looked forward to them growing up a bit. I wanted to do things with them, not just look at them and serve them.
 
From before they were born, we loved our children not just for who they already were—in the earliest stages we had no idea about that—but for who we hoped they would become.
 
That’s what I mean by loving in advance: loving people who can’t yet deserve it, people who are still in process of becoming the people God created them to be.
 
That, too, is how God loves us. God loves us like we are: in Paul’s words, dead through trespasses and sins, by nature children of wrath. But God loves us not only as we are, but also as we are becoming. God loves us in Christ Jesus as we will be in the ages to come, thanks to the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness towards us. God loves us in advance of who we are.
 
The best response to that kind of love, to God’s advance love, is to grow to be more worthy of it.
 
My children did. Those demanding babies became little boys who were tons of fun. As young men, they remain very loveable, fully worthy of the love we gave them from the beginning.
 
That’s our task, too, as children of our heavenly Father. God invites us, and helps us, to grow up, to become a bit more worthy of the love God gives us from the beginning, to become a bit more loving over time. Not so that God will love us but because God already loves us.
 
As Paul says, we become “what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” Jesus, too, talks about those who learn to do what is true and come into God’s light.
 
And so, on this fourth Sunday of Lent, I give thanks to God for the love God gives us in Christ just as we are, and I pray that God will help us to grow at least a little more worthy of that love by learning to love better ourselves. In Christ’s name. Amen.