Reconciling Ministries Network

Beyond the Hatred: First Love, First Loyalty

by Peter L. DeGroote

If any come to me and do not hate their own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—they cannot be my disciples.Luke:14;26 (SV).

1. About 50 pastors in a continuing education class were asked if they had ever preached on the above verse. Few hands went up. Nevertheless, Jesus appears to have said something very close to those words so we are obliged to look further.*    Two guidelines for biblical interpretation can help:

A. The first guideline: Variations in Jesus’ words from gospel to gospel often reflect the conditions in the communities out of which the various gospels came. 

• Many early Christian communities were racked with emotional turmoil over lost family relationships. Ancient peoples had no identity without family. Orphans often became beggars or bandits; some sold themselves into slavery in order to be part of a household, household often being a synonym for family.**

• Many early Christian converts were disowned by their families and persecuted by their communities. Some LGBT people have experienced similar rejection by family, friends, and congregation and we have struggled with the power or our emotional responses. 

• A harsh, even hateful reaction toward those who reject or persecute us is not uncommon, particularly when we have to go through the trauma of having to find new relationships and form new families. That is true for many LGBT folks, for many groups through history, and certainly for the early church.

B. The second guideline: Jesus' teachings are logically consistent, even if they challenge our understanding (or wishes). For this reason, use of the word "hate" raises a red flag.

• Recall Jesus’ prime directive, the rule of love . 

• Primary to the rule of love is the forgiveness of others. (Forgive us…as we forgive them…). Hatred forfeits forgiveness and contradicts the rule of love.

2, Any who have experienced rejection and persecution from families, friends, and congregations understand the emotional turmoil that can lead to the feelings of “hate” expressed in this verse. It is reasonable to conclude that this use of the word “hate” arises out of the emotional turmoil of broken relationships and subsequent persecution of those early community members. 

3. But something remains; a spiritual message at the heart of the verse. Where Old Testament prophets spoke of idolatry in the form of pagan religious images, Jesus spoke of idolatry in the form of human values and loyalties interfering with his Way of living in harmony with God and God’s creation. 

4. Today we are challenged by loyalties demanded by our employment, social class, neighborhood, political party, nation, and even our religious denomination or community. More often than not, these create divisions between people, even hatreds. (The daily news is sufficient evidence.) 

6. We are called to choose a Way of life that is often costly for our relationships, careers, and personal security. We can easily doubt that calling because living in harmony with God and God’s creation can seem unrealistic when many about us are doing otherwise. But we are called to learn to live in harmony even with those who would criticize, demean, and persecute us. That’s called reconciliation. It’s easier to write about than to do.   

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*   The saying appears in Luke and twice in Thomas (55 & 101. That suggests its source is in a lost collection of sayings that the authors of Mark, Matthew, and John were unaware of or chose not to use. However, there is a significant variation in Matthew (55:1): Those who love father and mother more than me are not worthy of me…  Perhaps Matthew’s authors knew the saying source but were also uncomfortable with the word “hate.” However, Matthew’s context is much different from Luke’s. 
There are, of course, other passages which call us to first loyalties but I find this one worth noting because so many LGBT folks can identify with the emotions involved.

**The ancient family could:
• Demand absolute loyalty and obedience in a patriarchal structure.
• Often aggressively competed with others as many businesses do today.
• Were often the source of hatred and violence directed toward other families in what we call clan warfare.

---

Peter is a second career pastor who has served in several churches in the Baltimore-Washington Conference. Prior to his ordination, he was a secondary-school teacher, a university lecturer in Government, an Associate in a government related professional association, CEO of a national financial institution. Peter was involved in Mid-Atlantic Affirmation, served on the National Council of Affirmation, and sat on the Board of the Reconciling Congregations Program, the predecessor name for RMN and has worked with BWARM (Baltimore-Washington Reconciling United Methodists).

Reconciling Tools: Prayer for Enemies

By Peter L. DeGroote

To you who are listening I say, love your enemies. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? After all, even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what merit is there is that? After all, even sinners do as much” (Gospel of Jesus 7:2-4)*

It is a bit troubling to discover that Jesus did not share the common view that God agrees with our opinion of others.  Instead, he invited us to pray about joining in God’s high expectations and hope for all humanity .

It remains a revolutionary idea. Our traditional social and political arrangements reflect tribal loyalties based on our instincts for self-preservation. They provide us with a safe “home base” to explore our world. Jesus called us to replace those tribal loyalties with a more universal loyalty that finds a “home base” in honoring and respecting (loving) all of God’s creation. (See Reconciliation and Love's Definition).  

Jesus’ call for this new loyalty offers a far more likely foundation for human self-preservation than the tribal loyalties we usually rely on. Unfortunately, both biblical tradition and history are full of examples that illustrate a broad unwillingness to respond to Jesus’ call. A few examples: Both Hebrew scripture and significant portions of the New Testament model hostility and even hatred toward enemies. When the church burned heretics it was identifying enemies while using fear to assure at least outward loyalty to its tribal ways. In 1961 Fidel Castro declared that continued loyalty to the Cuban revolution required an enemy. Contemporary political campaigns are often based on describing its opponents as enemies and targeting them with falsehoods and partial truths. Likewise, we can hear church leaders propagate an “us versus them” world view as a tool for creating loyalty to their group and personal leadership. Many LGBT people have experienced the negative consequences of that strategy.

The danger in being someone’s enemy is in returning the favor by accepting their enmity and labeling them as our own enemy. In a real world sense that dynamic is probably inescapable but the danger is in responding in kind. When that happens we give the enemy the power to define who we are and set the rules of our relationships. (More in a later posting.)

The instruction to pray for our enemies has often been understood as a prayer that somehow God would intervene in their values, world view, and behavior so that they would come to accept our perspectives and be more like us. The arrogance of that notion is the assumption that we have “the right way;” that we understand God’s views; or that we have the sole understanding of how creation is supposed to work—the implication being that all other views are wrong.

Over the years I have come to understand that praying for our enemies is less about them than it is about me. Jesus’ Prime Directive is to love or honor and respect all that God has created. To pray for an enemy is to seek insight and understanding sufficient to honor that person’s creation. (Perhaps meditation is a better contemporary word than prayer.)

Any increased insight or understanding does not compel me to agree with such a person, only that I come to understand.  Once understood, what do I do about it? Everyone will agree that it is a struggle. Likewise, we cannot focus only on understanding our enemy. We have biases, prejudices, and structures in our world view that have to be examined in relation to our own spiritual health and willingness to honor and respect others. Jesus’ teachings also include strategies to pursue those objectives.

Obviously, there is much more to live and talk out. This is not a solitary adventure. Your comments are welcome.

*The Gospel of Jesus. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. Santa Rosa, CA, Polebridge Press, 1999.

Reconciliation and Love's Definition

By Peter L. DeGroote

Jesus’ Prime Directive of loving God and others points us toward reconciliation. Standing in our way is the hopeless jumble of definitions for love that include emotional infatuation, pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

At the heart of the problem is our theological fracturing of love’s meaning by use of three of Greek philosophy’s several categories:  

• Agape: The self-sacrificing love of God or Jesus.
• Philios: Arising out of freindship of men, particularly through shared military and work experinece.
• Eros: Having to to with the sensual and sexual.

These categories often lead to wacky conclusions. Three of the more obvious examples:

• We can think love is central to romance and sex even when those relationships can be filled with aggression, manipulation, and a sense of conquest.
• We can think that our works of charity define us as loving people while we ignore the structure of human relationships that cause poverty, homelessness, and hunger.
• We can sing If We Only Had Love while meaning "if only everyone thought the way I am thinking."

As for the Bible:

• Hebrew Scripture defines God’s steadfast love largely in terms of God’s activity; human love has to do with either following the rules of God or in acts social justice and personal mercy.  
• The Apostle Paul provided some characteristics of the loving personality, such as patience and kindness and the lack of arrogance, boasting, and resentments. While pointing to underlying principles, they do not define love. Also, in one of his more mystical moments Paul observed that while everything else passes away, love never ends. Eternal dimensions are difficult to define and measure (See 1 Corinthians 3).
• Jesus’ conceived of love within a matrix of human motives and values that frame all relationships, a matrix that inextricably tied our relationship with God to our relationships with each other. (John Wesley said it this way: Don’t tell me you love God if I can’t see it in the way you treat others.)

Instead of an objective definition, Jesus told us to take action that would result in our discovery of what he was talking about. Not only did he build the front porch to a household of reconciliation, he handed us the keys to the front door, to a reconciling way of life.  

Those keys included forgiveness, turning the other cheek and praying for our enemies, to name only a few.

The prayer for enemies is particularly revealing when coupled with the instruction to love our enemies, a revelation that God does not share our feelings about our enemies. We are pushed along to grasp that loving God means to join God’s expectation and hope for all humanity. Living in harmony (love) with God seems to mean living in harmony with others, with all of God’s creation. This is called reconciliation.

As I explore Jesus’ instructions, the word “love” increasingly falls by the wayside. Its definitions are so broad as to become meaningless. Harmony with God and others, harmony with God and God’s creation becomes useful. Accepting the understanding that God has the same hope for others as God has for me, I increasingly say, honors God by honoring others and respects God by respecting others.

There is much to explore. 

 

From Ingoring to Illustrating

by Peter L. DeGroote

At first, I ignored a UM pastor’s blog raising questions about women in ministry. Then, I saw it as an illustration of some basic biblical understandings that reconciling people need to think about.

First, a summary of the posting:

• On the premise that controversy is the only way he can get dialogue on his blog, the pastor asks if women should be in ministry  (See August 6, 2009 posting on http://raymcd.blogspot.com/).

• He cites three passages of scripture: 1Corinthians 14:33-35, Galatians 3:26-29 and Matthew 28:26-29.

• He concludes: “These are three Scriptures used for either side of the debate. Are there others? What do you think? Is there a difference between being on a pastoral staff and being a lead pastor? Should there be any restrictions?”

• Comments are diverse. A common opinion is that women should not be lead pastors.

• The pastor’s response to comments includes a complaint that all but one commentator failed to give a reason for their opinion; the one asserting the position of the UM Church was found insufficient. He also notes that he has not yet shared his own opinion. 

Second, how does this posting illustrate important insights about biblical study that reconciling people need to think about?

• The presentation of three different quotes that represent divergent opinions clearly illustrates that we can usually find a proof text in scripture that supports our own views. 

• It also illustrates how reliance on scriptural lists reduces the Bible to a cookbook from which we can select a recipe of our own choosing. In the debate on ordaining women, people threw biblical passages at each other. Likewise, lists of biblical quotes were used to justify as well as oppose slavery. LGBT folks are well aware of the technique: we find lists of biblical passages thrown at us and we collect our own to throw back (other battles have been or are being fought with these lists). 

• Further, it brings to mind how very often we have to turn to other sources to resolve our conflicts in applying Jesus’ primary directive. An illustration of this was John Wesley’s turning to developments in 18th Century philosophy to oppose slavery. 

• In summary, we discover that we can make opposing lists only because the Bible reflects different points of view—that is why we can make the lists. 

Biblical analysis isn’t easy if we are to seek out spiritual insights and honor those who wrote and assembled the text. In particular, each book must be examined from the perspective of the community out of which it came, that community’s social context, the author's theological perspectives, the literary disciplines of the time, and other such considerations.  It is not an exercise in destroying truth, but in discovering truth in a particular time and place, honoring those discoveries, and determining how they might apply to us in our time and place, both personally and communally. It is a challenge.  

Many of us were raised with the idea that the Bible is the unquestioned and unquestionable Word of God. Recognizing its internal diversity leads us to discover the Bible as a spiritual sourcebook rather than a rulebook, one that invites us to enter into a diverse spiritual world of ideas and practices. We are drawn into discussions both ancient and current, helping us to find our way to meaning for both ourselves and our communities.

From "Open Hands" to "Open Doors"

By Peter L. DeGroote

It started well. The proposal for the publicity campaign was to be “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Hands.” Asserting that an openness to religious experience results in an openness in our thinking, which then leads to an openness in our behavior.

It was good, Wesleyan theology, and it was an organic metaphor equal to those of Paul. The clarity of its logic demonstrated the connections between the three stages while leaving us to meditate on how a change in one leads to changes in others.   

It may have started well, but as Wesley might have said, it ended in a shipwreck. The final result was “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” What happened?  Bureaucracies are the same everywhere. Church agencies are like government agencies: they leak. The leaked details were a little fuzzy, but it seems that someone in the UMC bureaucracy noticed the magazine Open Hands, published by the Reconciling Congregation Program, the previous name of RMN.

This won't do! We need a substitute for “open hands!” The openness of our feelings to the Presence of God cannot lead to opening our minds to the acceptance of LGBT people and then to our reaching out our hands to welcome them! 

The decision was to replace “open hands” with “open doors,” thereby sabotaging purpose, clarity, and effectiveness.  Church doors were already open; the question was (and is) how people were treated once they got inside. “Open hands” dealt with human community, “open doors” with public access to a building (the corrupting influence of mixed metaphors!). 

The original theme of "open hands" would have been a gentle but effective challenge to the way local congregations greet, meet, and incorporate new and different people into their community. Instead, by substituting “open doors,” the theme became an after-the-fact theology of why nearly anyone could walk through our church doors, even if they are ignored. No longer a stimulus for change, the theme became a self-justifying explanation of the way things were. 

The rejection of “open hands” was also a rejection of Wesleyan tradition. The metaphor's origins lie in a verse from 2 Kings 10:15: "Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours? .... If it is, give me your hand" (NRSV).  Taken from a context of warfare, we might not use it in the same way today. However, it was the scripture for John Wesley’s seminal sermon The Catholic Spirit (Catholic meaning universal). The first line of that sermon states, "It is allowed even by those who do not pay this great debt that love is due to all mankind, the royal law."

It had already been determined that love was not due to those LGBT people who had already been invoking the Wesleyan tradition through the name of their magazine.  It then became "necessary" for the church--who was supposed to represent the Wesleyan tradition--to depart from it and to ingore what Wesley called "the royal law."  The result?  A hollow theme; a sound bite changing little.

Reconciliation and the Prime Directive

By Peter L. DeGroote

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive, we lose sight of reconciliation. The prime directive is to love God and others. Its goal is our reconciliation with others and with all of God’s creation.  (Loving others requires honoring and respecting the creation into which all of us have been placed).

The prime directive can be easily overlooked for two major reasons.

First, Jesus inextricably tied the love of God and others together; we can’t have one without the other. We cannot claim to love God if we do not love others. Further, to love others is to love God, even if we are not even thinking about God and--perhaps--even if we are unaware of the idea of God. 

• In contrast, we commonly claim God as a personal or group possession rather than the common Creator of all humanity, indeed, of all creation. Sometimes we go so far as to say that God is on our side as we do battle with the rest of God’s creation.

The second major reason we can easily overlook the prime directive is that our definition of love is so hopelessly jumbled that it can be used to describe emotional infatuation, a pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

• In contrast, the very idea that love can mean honor and respect for God and God’s creation is regarded as an irrelevant, if not adolescent, idealism in the practical working of our world and its institutions.

Jesus’ teachings are not definitions but behavioral guides that set us on paths of discovery towards living in harmony with God and others. So often mistaken for something called a Kingdom of God, Jesus left us with a vision of a domain of God built into creation—a location for becoming who we are and are meant to be.

From our earliest primal memories we have sensed a great gap between us and other species. Early Genesis stories describe us as the culmination of God’s creation and/or beings that are given the gift of power over the earth and its other inhabitants. Today, science is steadily increasing our knowledge of how we are a part of the fabric of all life. Having emerged and evolved from other forms, we remain inextricably connected and dependent on other species and the physical structure we all share. We are also learning of the choices we face of either living in harmony with the rest of creation or damaging it, in some ways irreparably. 

In a time and place that knew nothing of our science, Jesus' prime directive refocused the Genesis lessons by asserting that we are meant to live in harmony with our Creator and all that God has created. In order to do that, he taught that we need to love, honor, and respect both God and all of God’s creation—the prime directive.

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive we lose sight of reconciliation.

A Good Question!

By Peter L. DeGroote

1. Some of Jesus’ followers were threatened by a man who was not of their group healing in Jesus’ name and asked if they should stop him. How might we answer the question today? 

When others who are not of our church, denomination, beliefs, or faith do as Jesus taught, should we denigrate their motives, try to stop them, or take pleasure in their activity?
The way we answer these kinds of questions affects our definition of reconciliation.

2. The earliest gospel, Mark, reports that Jesus said, "Don't stop him! Whoever is not against us is on our side" (9:40).  The other gospels reveal a difference of opinion in the early church:  

A. Matthew: "The one who isn't with me is against me, and the one who doesn't gather with me scatters" (12:30).

B. Luke uses both: 
(1) "Whoever is not against you is on your side” (9:50).
(2) “The one who isn't with me is against me, and the one who doesn't gather with me scatters" (11:23).

4. Did Jesus teach contradictory ideas? That seems unlikely.
So, what is happening here?

A. The inclusive version (if you're not against us, you're with us) reflects the earliest gospel tradition. Corresponding to Jesus’ efforts to tear down walls between people, it is in harmony with his prime directive of loving God and others, the path of reconciliation.

B. The exclusive version (if you’re not with us you're against us) reflects the suspicion, oppression, and even violence directed toward the early church. Needing to know who they could trust and where they could feel safe, they sought to clearly define their group in relation to others. The upshot was (and usually is) the erection of barriers around their (our) group.  Erecting barriers around groups is a survival skill from our early tribal history. Defining “we” often means defining “them” as a threat to our survival. They become our enemies.

5. Several strains in Christian history and tradition introduce several conundrums for a follower of Jesus, three of which follow: 

A. Christians have rejected, demonized, and even killed those who differ with them. In direct conflict with Jesus’ prime directive to honor and respect God and others, (love) it is difficult to understand how a claim of being followers of Jesus is possible.     

B. A preoccupation with our own salvation can result in self-centered, self-satisfied, and self-righteous attitudes, something Jesus warned us about in any number of ways.

C. We can be led down the path of thinking that confessing Jesus as our Lord and Savior is sufficient. Jesus taught a way of life, not a creed. How can we call him Master or Teacher if we do not do what he said? 

6. The task of Jesus’ followers is to apply his prime directive in their time and place. Our history reveals many steps and missteps. Each generation is faced with questions that require attention. In our time and place, such questions would include the following:

A. Are non-Christians who honor God and others (love) with or against Jesus; with or against us?

B. Do we demand that people accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior before we will honor and respect them?

C. How do we deal with others (creations of God) who think differently than we do?

C. Are we to demand that people believe what we believe or are we to be like leaven in the world?

D. Do we dare to say that God is with us, but not with others?

E. If Jesus is the way to God; do we insist that we are the way to Jesus?

Note: Scripture quotes are from Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels. NY: Macmillan (Polebridge), 1993.

Devotion: Rolling Away the Stone

by Peter L. DeGroote

Who shall roll away the stone? Mark 16:1-8

1. By the time Jesus’ body had been placed in the tomb it was the Sabbath (after sunset). No work could be done until the third day. So, early on that day three women walked to the tomb with spices and oil for the body, a common burial practice. Wondering who would roll away the stone that covered the entrance, they discovered it had already been done. Inside the tomb was a young man who told them Jesus was not there, he had risen.

2. In the Book of Acts is an understanding of the early church in the words of Peter: But God raised him up, having freed him from death… (2:24). In the resurrection God had taken a stand against the human hate and violence that had killed Jesus. God had taken a stand against death. (The Greek word anastasis, which is often translated as resurrection, means a stand against death.)

3. Who will roll away the stone to reveal to us God's stand against our death? What are the tools by which the stone blocking our spiritual insight, understanding, and growth is rolled away? We cannot avoid the importance of the Way of life Jesus lived and taught. His rejection of the values and procedures by which humans usually design their lives and societies was the reason for his crucifixion. Jesus taught a way of life that can seem almost like a parallel universe that we can step into. In the words of early Christians: There are two Ways, one of Life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two. Jesus taught the Way of Life.

4. The communal table became the central symbol of Jesus’ good news. It is a symbol of community, of the necessary reconciliation among people in order to find the individual and community harmony that leads to a harmony with God.

5. Just as important as the table, the empty cross is the symbol of God's stand against death. Better said, it is a symbol of God's stand for life-for the Way of Life Jesus taught. Validating the table, the empty cross is a constant reminder of two things. First, that we cannot defeat God's activity against hatred and intimidation, violence and killing.  Second, that being at the table is a way of joining in God's activity.

6. Living in Jesus way, in community, in the shadow of the empty cross is the Way to life as it was designed to be.

A Good Friday Meditation

by Peter L. DeGroote

On Good Friday I gain strength by meditating on Jesus’ integrity. By integrity I mean his wholeness, his consistency, the harmony between his words and his behavior.

His integrity resulted in his death. He taught values that were counter to the culture around him. He taught people to organize themselves into small communities to relieve their poverty and depression, thereby making them less vulnerable to the exploitative powers of their society. He taught a reconciling way of life using tools for living that included honor and respect for others, forgiveness, humility, and an understanding of the connections between all of us due to our common creation. All of that helped to define what we so easily call the love of God and others, 

Under threat, Jesus did not back down. The gospel descriptions of his "trial" always lead me to the thinking of how easy it would have been for Jesus to deny all of the charges by way of a few pithy words to Pilot. He didn’t. He lived his principles to the end. 

Jesus modeled a way of life that leads to harmony with God and God’s creation. In that harmony we are able to discover who we are and who we can be. He both taught it and lived it, to the end. It is not an invitation for us to pursue our own martyrdom. Rather, it is an invitation to accept the consequences of living in his Way, no matter what they might be.

Space for God's Activity

By Peter L. DeGroote

The Parable of the Prodigal Son has three characters: A father, representing God; a younger son, representing Jesus’ companions; and an older son, representing the religious and leaders. (Luke 15:11-32)

Among Jesus’ companions was Jason, a young gay man whose pastor had thrown him out of his childhood church while still a teenager. Agreeing with the pastor, Jason’s father had also thrown him out of his family home.

Being resourceful, Jason found a job and a place to live, but it was a struggle. Survival wasn’t enough for him. Longing for that childhood sense of peace when he went to church, he would sometimes try other churches but he remained deeply troubled by the judgments that his pastor, church, and family had leveled against him. As he listened to Jesus’ teachings, some of those troubled feelings had begun to lessen.  

One day some of the religious leaders complained to Jesus about the kind of people he hung around with. In response Jesus told a story about a discontented young man who had left his father’s household. He even had the nerve to ask his father for his share of the inheritance he would receive after his father died. Jason thought it was a cold thing to do but was surprised that the father agreed. He thought about his own father who he was sure would give him nothing.

Jesus described how the father had worried about his young son and constantly watched the road, hoping for his return. “This is a very different kind of father,” Jason said to one of his friends as they listened.

Jesus continued to describe how the young man had gone to another city, tried to get along, had lost all his money, and was reduced to day-laboring to survive. So, thinking about what things were like back at his family home, he decided to return and see what might happen. 

Jason stood up and told Jesus that he had tried that but it was a disaster. His father wasn’t happy to see him and the pastor at the church told people not to speak with him, that he was a sinner.

Jesus nodded and went on to tell of the younger son’s return. Seeing him coming on the road, the father ran to greet him, embracing him with joy. Then he called the whole neighborhood together for a party because “My son was dead to me and to all of us, but know he is alive!”

Jason said. “My father could never do that.” Jesus pointed out that he wasn’t talking about his father.

And then Jesus told of an older brother coming home from work and hearing about the party. He refused to go. Instead, he went down to the church and talked with the pastor. The father went to get him, to encourage him to celebrate his brother’s return.

The older brother refused. “Listen to me,” he said. “I have worked loyally for you and the church all of my life and no one has ever thrown a party for me! Now this son of yours who has been wasting your money on all sorts of abominable activity returns and you want to throw a party? Where is your sense of propriety, where is your righteousness?” 

Jason asked Jesus how the older brother knew what the younger brother had been doing. Jesus smiled and went on with the story.

Pleading with his older son, the father said, “I have been with you always, what is mine is yours. You are even going to inherit the house and business. But that is not the point. Your brother has returned. You may have differences but you are both my children. How can you love me if you cannot share my love for your brother? 

Jason spoke up: “What happened?"

Jesus said, “The pastor asked the father to leave."

“Is there any hope?” Jason asked.

“The father sought reconciliation,” Jesus said. “That is always God’s goal."

“What does that mean?” asked Jason.

Jesus said: “It means that if we are to discover what life is meant to be, we have to learn how to join God in God’s honor and respect for all creation. That’s what love means. Without a striving for love, there is no space for God’s activity, no room for grace to abound.